I live at the thin edge of madness for the next three days.
I tie knots in my memories, make a rope out of them to keep me sane. When I wake up there are these precious pockets of time when I forget what happened. Sleep transports me to a better world. Kira recovered. A Kira who didn’t fall. When I’m awake, it’s the slackness of her jaw, blue eyes, blue veins, so much blue. I want to see it reversed. Mended. The world as it should be.
When I remember it’s like losing her all over again. The scene plays over and over. Her gurney is here. She has a thermal blanket pulled over her to keep her warm. I tell her everything will be okay and I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, I’m sorry I ever let her get hurt in the first place.
She says to me: “It’s okay, Soff. I’m fine now, see? I’m not hurt at all.” It doesn’t feel like a hallucination. It’s more like I’ve gained a special form of vision.
So I read to myself, anything I can find. Sing songs under my breath. I pinch my arm when I start to nod off.
And life goes on. On the first day, Aunt Irene tells me they don’t know when we’ll be able to get Kira’s ashes. The hospital is holding Kira’s body in the morgue for the examination. They don’t know how long they’ll take.
“What do they think they’ll see?” The subject is off limits but I try anyway.
“That’s just the procedure right now,” Aunt Irene tells me. “But we’ve decided to go ahead with the funeral. Or a memorial. I don’t really know what you call it.” She presses her fingers to her temples. “They say it will help. With closure. That we shouldn’t wait. Your mother needs that, Feef. I think we all do.”
I don’t look at Mom. I know she took the car out last night. She spent all night in the hospital parking lot. I heard her downstairs telling my aunt how she wanted to be close to Kira. Maybe Aunt Irene’s right. Maybe a funeral will help stop the pain.
On the second day I learn that Dad isn’t coming because overseas flights are all grounded.
“What do you mean, grounded?” Mom whispers into the phone while Aunt Irene fishes from the oven a cottage pie the College staff brought over. We only seem to eat in the kitchen. Congregating, Aunt Irene calls it. It has that feeling of ritual, standing against the counter with cooling plates. Bland grief food.
The storm that drowned Kira has swept out to sea where it’s gathering new strength. Something about this feels right, the sense of all that energy massing on the horizon. An unstoppable force that could sweep everything away.
Mom has put Dad on hold and is speaking to Aunt Irene, ignoring me. “He says it’s out of his control. But he’ll send money. Whatever we need right now.” I wish I could hug her but I can’t. “He wants us back in Toronto after. With Kira gone, there’s no reason to stay in England.” Aunt Irene reaches over and squeezes her hand. Mom hasn’t touched her cottage pie. Has she eaten anything today? I can’t remember.
“You can stay as long as you like,” Aunt Irene says.
“He wants us to bring the ashes. So we can all scatter them together. As a family.”
“He wants us to go home?” I ask, clocking what she’s been saying too slowly.
Aunt Irene looks hurt. A moment later the phone is in my hands.
Dad says: “Sophie, baby, how are you doing?”
I stare at my plate dumbly. “Okay.”
“I love you, sweetheart,” he’s saying. “I want you and your mother to come home. We’ll be able to get you back into school. You’ll be with your friends again, and, and—god, I never should have let you go but your mother said—”
“Don’t, Dad. I don’t care.” And then, without thinking: “I don’t want to go home.”
Aunt Irene jerks her head up but it’s Mom I want to look at me. I want her to know she made the right decision. That this wasn’t her fault. It was mine. I should have looked after Kira. I should’ve held on to her.
“You don’t have to decide right now. It’s too early. You’re still hurting.”
I remind myself tomorrow will be worse than this. I’m glad he won’t be there for the funeral. He would only make it harder for Mom. All at once I feel exhausted, utterly drained. I don’t care about his feelings right now. I don’t want to try to help him through this.
“I just keep remembering you as a little girl. How open to the world you were. I know how much you loved your sister but you mustn’t let this change you.” It’s not your fault, he doesn’t say. You weren’t responsible.
I make my silence into a wall, a cloud, a thick, vanquishing force.
Grammy Josephine used to bounce me on her knee when I was little and feed me round toffees from her purse. I was twelve when she died. We were all at the breakfast table when Dad got the news. “Fried eggs for Soff!” Kira kept shouting, banging a metal mixing bowl with her spoon.
Throughout the call Dad was perfectly calm. He kept turning the eggs so the whites would harden, just like Kira liked them. “I see,” he said, and “okay, that’s fine, I’ll take care of it.” But then he turned to us. There was sweat on his upper lip. He wiped at it, his eyes glazed. “My mother just died.” His voice rose at the end like it was a question.
Everyone came out for the funeral. Cousins and half-cousins, old family friends, Dad’s six older brothers and Aunt Sally with her kisses, her faux French. Kira was five then. She spent most of the wake hidden under a table covered in wineglasses. I found her there, tugging at her black dress. She kept saying how much it itched and couldn’t she just go home now? I sat with her and tried to explain to her. We had to stay for Dad. He needed us.
“Because Grammy died?” she asked me.
“Yeah.”
Kira spotted his shiny shoes from beneath the table and I poked his ankle. “Do you want to go home now?” I asked when he bent down. “You could take me home if you want. I could be sick.”
Dad could always tell when I was being sneaky. Back then he seemed like a different person: kinder, less obsessed by all the parts of the world that weren’t us. He crawled under the table to sit with us, breath heavy with whisky, that harsh peaty tang. He was too big to fit but he squeezed his arms around his knees.
“Dad?” I asked. It was the first time I had seen an adult like this. Weak. It scared me.
His eyes wandered over both of us and then he pulled us into an awkward half-hug. His jacket smelled of mothballs but I snuggled in close anyway. “It’s all right, Fee-fi-fo-fum,” he told me. “It’s a bad day. But it’s good to know how much she was loved.”
Sometimes memory is a noose. It loops back on itself, pulling tight round your throat.
And now Kira’s funeral.
The church has gravitas: the smell of ancient stone and mouldering earth. It’s a nice service. Nice flowers. But the church is mostly empty. Just me, Aunt Irene and Mom in the front pew and a few of Aunt Irene’s work colleagues behind us. Dr. Varghese isn’t here. I guess if she went to every patient’s funeral she’d have no time for her work.
I want to touch Kira and take her hand. Brush the soft curls around her face. But there’s no body to touch because Kira is still under observation at the morgue.
The light filters through a gorgeous stained-glass window, reflecting blue, rose, red, pale yellow. The rented casket gleams like an expensive old car. A showpiece, a display model. Adult-sized, so big it would’ve dwarfed her.
“For the things which are seen are temporary,” says the celebrant in a soft voice. “But the things which are not seen are eternal.”
Eternal things? He means her spirit, her soul. Some part of her will live on after. The idea is supposed to comfort me, but it doesn’t. It makes me faintly sick, the thought of some part of her trapped inside her body, a witness to everything.
“Everything born passes away.”
The rose window shows the Annunciation, an angel in a white robe come to tell Mary how she’s destined to give birth to our Lord and Saviour. Mary’s face is happy, a picture of delight. But the angel? The angel doesn’t look happy. The angel looks bored rigid by the whole mess, the angel has seen it all: the culling of firstborns, the slaughter of the innocents.
The angel doesn’t care. Mortality isn’t his bag.