In the amber light of the sunset, Bryan helps me to rig up a tarpaulin to keep the rain off Kira. I still feel terrible about leaving her here but it’s late and I have to get home.
“Good night, Kiki,” I whisper. She has curled herself up, knees tucked awkwardly beneath her body. A slow susurration of tremors steals across her muscles. “Stay safe. I’ll be back as soon as I can.”
After I come outside, Bryan fastens a chain around the door of the chimney, and snaps a sturdy-looking lock on it.
“It’s the best we can do for now.” Rather than pocketing the key, he buries it in the damp soil beneath a loose brick. “That way you can find it if you need to get in.” The anxious energy I sensed in him earlier has dissipated, replaced by a friendly reserve. We’re on the same side, yes, but the same side of what exactly?
A wave of wooziness hits me. Phantom lights flash in the corner of my field of vision and the ground seems to tilt. Suddenly I’m staring up at the winter twilight.
“Hey.” Bryan kneels down beside me.
My stomach heaves. I turn away from him, coughing up a sick, syrupy froth.
“We need to get you home.”
He grabs hold of my arm, and gently helps me to my feet. Then he half-walks, half-carries me toward his truck.
The drive home is a monotony of dusky field and hills, and the sound of Bryan’s breathing. Twenty minutes, half an hour, we drive.
I ask him to drop me off near the railway station so at least I don’t have another thing to explain to Mom. “Take care of yourself,” he says, “and have someone look at your arm again.” It’s only then I notice the blood I’ve left on his shirt where he held me against him.
I make my way carefully along East Street, which is eerily dark. Another power outage, I guess. The line of terrace houses is quiet. There are vacant properties, more than you’d expect in a good area. The town is emptying out, as if some mass migration is already underway. All I can hear is the low murmur of the swollen Thames moving beside me.
A light winks at me from the downstairs window of Aunt Irene’s house.
“Sophie?” Mom calls when I slip inside. There are two candles lit in the hallway, which flicker wildly as I open the door. I kick off my mud-caked shoes.
She is sitting at the kitchen table between a hurricane lantern and the bouquet of lilies. One of the flowers has been stripped down to a pale green stem. Shredded white petals litter the table top, her lap, the floor. Beyond them sits a sealed cardboard box with a small, print-out label of the kind I’m used to seeing in the school office: KIRA PERELLA.
Another wave of nausea hits me at seeing that. Those are the ashes of a stranger.
“I’m sorry I’m…” I begin, but she has spotted the bloodstains on my clothes. The petals fall from her lap as she stands suddenly, moving toward me, a hand half-raised toward my arm. “Thank god you’re home,” she says and she hugs me so tightly I can feel her bones through the unhealthy looseness of her skin.
“You didn’t have to worry, Mom. I’m fine, really.” I gently extract myself.
I expect the interrogation to begin but instead Mom clutches at my hand. “Help me to bed, will you, Feef?”
The words slur together. A shudder runs through me when she touches me again, seeing her like this. There are dark, clay-coloured smudges under her eyes. Her hair hangs limply around her face, unwashed. I lead her with my good arm, holding the wounded one away from her. We must look like two drunks, both of us swaying on our feet as I blow out the candles in the hall, as the stairs creak beneath us.
Inside her bedroom, she slips off her dressing gown and climbs under the sheets. As she pulls the covers up around her neck, she whispers, “You shouldn’t have to do this. I should be able to do it on my own.” And then after a long sigh: “Shut off the light. I can’t sleep with the light on.”
I do and close the door gently behind me.
Then I stumble toward the bathroom where I vomit into the toilet bowl. I sink to the floor and the tiles are cool beneath me, comforting, the door to the hallway still open. A noise in the hallway stirs me and I rinse my mouth out from the tap, then I peel off my jacket, roll up my sleeve, and rinse away the blood that has leaked out from the bandage and smeared across my skin. The soft sting of heat is pleasant and pink-tinged water swirls down the drain.
“You’re back then, are you?” Aunt Irene rounds the door frame, looking tired. “Has your mum gone to bed? She was waiting up for you. She took something but she wouldn’t tell me what.” She runs her hand through the tangle of her hair. She doesn’t say anything when she sees my jacket on the floor, just reaches for it and then pulls her hand away when she sees the blood. “I thought you might be getting hungry,” she says but her eyes are lingering on the stain. She bends over again, this time taking the jacket and hanging it over the side of the bathtub. “Can I make you dinner? We don’t have anything much in the house, I’m afraid, but I could fry some potatoes.” Suddenly I’m starving.
Downstairs, she relights the lamp then sets about peeling and chopping. Since the power still hasn’t returned, she has to start the gas stove with a match. “How are you?” she asks. “Are you okay?”
I glance at her. “I don’t think I know how to tell if I’m okay anymore. I don’t know what that means. Is that weird?”
“I just meant, is there anything I can do for you?”
For a moment I want to tell her everything. Sink back into being a child again, when I could trust the grown-ups around me to look out for me. “The potatoes are all I need,” I say instead.
She smiles, looking pleased to be able to do something. Soon the aroma of fresh rosemary and grease fills the kitchen. I tuck my feet beneath the kitchen chair, fidget with flower petals that dot the tablecloth like snowfall.
“So will you tell me where you went today? Your mum didn’t know.” She lays a plate heaped with oily, crisp-edged potatoes in front of me.
“I just needed to get out of the house. All of Kira’s stuff is still in the room. I hated seeing it, having it there around me.”
She purses her lips. “You need to tell your mother or me where you’re going. Especially now.”
“I didn’t want to disturb her.”
Aunt Irene gives me a look but I keep my head down, shovel the potatoes into my mouth. Eventually she nods very slightly, relenting. “We’ll need to do something about her things, I suppose. You should take my room in the meantime.”
“I can handle it. I mean, I feel better.”
She watches me push the potatoes around the plate with my fork. As hungry as I am, there is a faint sourness to them that puts me off. Then after a moment she makes a move to leave me to it.
“You don’t have to go,” I say, surprisingly myself. But when she sinks down beside me, I find I still can’t look at her.
Instead I look at the box carrying the ashes of a girl I never knew. Have they told the family what happened or have they covered their tracks? Maybe it’s just that there’s enough bone ash to go around.
“Do you believe in heaven?” I ask Aunt Irene suddenly.
She picks up the container as if she’s only just become aware of it, then sets it down again. “I don’t,” she says. “You know—I once was pregnant. The baby was a girl but she died in hospital a few days after she was born. It was a terrible time for me. My daughter would have been close to Kira’s age now if she had lived. A year older.”
Aunt Irene goes quiet. I don’t know what to say.
“When your sister came into the world, she looked exactly how I imagined my daughter would have been. I visited for the summer. Your mum was so happy—and I was happy for her. I loved you and your sister so much. But sometimes that happiness felt like a mirage, something I was holding onto so I didn’t have to deal with what had happened. Kira wasn’t my little girl. Sometimes it would feel like she was, but then I’d remember. It would hurt all over again. I needed time by myself. Time to put things to rest. For a while I tried to lose myself in my work. I got promotions, I became a professor here.”
I look at her carefully, her face a harder version of Mom’s. But younger too. I forget that.
“Maybe it is a bit grisly,” she says, “studying the dead the way that I do. But I’ve always had a sense that disaster should be understandable. That it must mean something—or else it’s all such a waste, isn’t it? As a student, I spent a summer travelling around Italy and Greece. I visited Pompeii, Akrotiri, and Delos. All the ancient sites, or what remains of them. I remember seeing a collection of burial stelae in Athens. Fascinating things, these great carved slabs of stone, each thousands of years old but perfectly preserved. I was drawn to those images. One showed a girl standing in profile with her head bowed. And she was young, very young, you could tell, but her face was strong and serene. And she was holding two doves, one nestled in the crook of her arm, the other perched on her hand. There were others like it. Each of the carvings had a similar image, a young girl clutching a bird, or offering it. Daughters to their mothers. Sisters to one another. Doves were symbols of Aphrodite. It was believed they could journey to the underworld and back. The archaeologists discovered bird bones in the graves.” She shakes her head as if she has lost her train of thought.
“I suppose what I’m trying to say is that there are things we do when we’re mourning the deaths of people we love. There are things we come to believe to try to help us deal with the pain. The ancient Greeks did it, we still do it now. But loss is loss. The only way through grief is through it. And you have to find your own way. So, no. I don’t believe in heaven. But I don’t believe the universe is senseless either.”
The way she has opened up to me makes me want to do the same. Trust her the way she has trusted me. But the words lodge in my throat. Is what I’m doing just a way of trying to ward off the pain of Kira dying? Is that how she’d see it?
Eventually Aunt Irene stands up, the soft fabric of her skirt rustling. “I should let you sleep, honey. You look exhausted.”
“Yeah.” Sleep feels terribly distant. “I just don’t really know how to do this.”
“Anything worth doing is worth doing badly until you know how to do it well. That goes for living, too.” She wipes her eyes. “You’re strong, Sophie, and you’re smart. But I should’ve been there for you. When you were growing up—and last night. But I’m worried about your mum. How fragile she is right now.” She shakes her head. “You shouldn’t have to be this strong. She relies on you so much.”
I think about her going back to her office. How she has surrounded herself with the dead there, countless records of them.
“It’s okay,” I tell her, touched by this display of tenderness. “I’ll survive.”