5
Sylvie
Would it help to talk about what happened?” I ask gently, edging closer to Annie on the big white sofa. I’ve still got a niggling hunch she’s not told me everything about Mum’s accident, that something’s building inside.
Annie shakes her head and chews on a rope of her long red hair, mashing it flat as a ribbon. I loop my arm around her shoulders. Under her sweat top, she feels young and frightened and shuddery. I notice that she’s gripping her phone and hope the new boyfriend has called to offer some moral support. Maybe he can reach her.
A boat chugs past on the canal. Even this sounds different from normal. The world has shifted. Darkened. The rippling shadows on the wall look like people falling.
“Granny’s in the very best place she could be now, Annie.” A brilliant specialist unit in London—the local unit she needed was full. Thank God, I think, for the umpteenth time, clinging to every scrap of good news. “I’m going back in an hour. Come with?”
Annie nods and tries to smile. But her face is stiff with shock. Her eyes are wet green glass. She’s been crying on and off since it happened three days ago. We both have. But we’re crying for different people: Annie for Gran-Gran, as she used to call her; me for Mum, not just the woman I call most days to chat to about nothing much or squabble with, but the unspoken thing that exists in the space between us, deep and rippling like a sea, so gigantic and elemental and complicated I can’t put it into words.
“Or I can drive you to Dad’s, if you’d rather be there,” I bluster on guiltily, clumsily trying to normalize the fact that Annie’s now got two homes, two bedrooms, all that to deal with too. I don’t want her to go anywhere. She’s been staying in this apartment for the last couple of nights, and it’s been such a comfort to have her close again. In the early hours, I’ve sat on the edge of her bed and watched her sleep, like Mum used to watch me. Or my big sister Caroline did, swinging down from the upper bunk bed, her caramel-colored hair dangling, hissing, “Sylv, you awake?” until I was.
Caroline will be here in four days. But America feels even farther away this morning, and I’m terrified Mum will have taken a turn for the worse by the time my sister flies in from Missouri.
“Can I get you something to eat? A nice biscuit?” I think how Mum always says a nice biscuit when just a biscuit would do, and grief thunders through me again. I have to remind myself she’s in a coma. Her heart still beats. She’s not brain dead.
So where is she? I imagine her pinioned inside her own skull, incredulous and frustrated, demanding to be let out. This isn’t my time! She has a calendar full of busyness. Decades of life still waiting. Stuff to do.
“No thanks,” I hear Annie say, through the white noise in my head. “I can’t face food. I feel kind of sick.” She buries her face in my neck, like she used to as a little girl, her cheeks sticky with tears, eyelashes butterfly fluttering against my skin.
I hold her tight. My eyes slowly close. I haven’t slept for more than a couple of hours at a time since it happened, endlessly jolting awake, slippery with sweat, my heart scrabbling in my chest.
The accident keeps flashing in staccato bursts. I can picture it all: the spray of blood up the cliff wall; the ocean boiling under the churn of the helicopter’s propeller as Mum was lifted from the rocky ledge; Annie running along the cliff path, frantically trying to catch a signal to call me.
Then there are the photographs on Annie’s phone. Taken a moment apart, the split second that separates a casual cliff stroll from catastrophe. One shows my mother smiling for the camera in her green North Face anorak; the next, just sea and sky, my mother extracted in an instant, like someone sucked out of an airplane window.
“Granny’s going to be all right, isn’t she, Mum?” Annie mumbles from under my unwashed curls.
“She . . .” I hesitate. Mum told white lies too. She sugarcoated the darkest of truths for me and Caroline. Rubbed the edges off them in the hope that they wouldn’t hurt so much. I can’t help myself. I do the same. “Granny will be just fine, hon.”
After Annie’s left for Steve’s—home, as she calls it, inevitably: it’ll always be the family house—I stand beside Mum’s hospital bed, adjusting to her not being at all fine. When a doctor gently suggests that, given the uncertainty, I may want to get her affairs in order, I try not to scream like someone who’s googled “head injury” and “coma” late at night and scared themselves witless. Also, Mum’s affairs? It’d be easier to hack into the Kremlin, frankly. “Okay,” I say, trying to hold it together, like Mum would.
When he’s gone, I hold her warm, slack hand—the hand that once patted plasters onto my scuffed knee, that still writes random one-line postcards sent from home: “Glorious weather! You should see the lupins”—and my tears fall and bloom on the white hospital sheet. I can’t help but feel she’s secretly conscious, saying, “Buttercup, hang in there.” And I mumble it back to her, “And you, Mum,” only my voice goes raspy, all the things I can’t say, haven’t said, sticking in my throat.
Lying flat, her swirl of bandages like a turban, she looks younger. This cheers me because I know she’d love that, even if she’d pretend not to. (“Better old than dead!” she likes to say, then slaps on the retinol cream every night.) Her shaken brain might be bleeding, the left side of her face swollen, but her bone structure stands out, revealing the face that was scouted by a modeling agent decades ago. Who she was before Caroline and I came along and she and Dad left London for the rural good life—chickens and beaches and Argyle cardigans—and she basically turned into Linda McCartney. I smile, thinking how she’s never quite lost her fashiony tics. Like muscle memory. I’ll see it in the way she’ll swing on a coat, with a small flourish, or lift her chin for a family snap. She’s always had a model’s protean ability to inhabit different versions of herself. Overwriting. Shape-shifting.
I touch her cheek with the back of my hand. Papery and dry. In need of rose face oil, massaged in under my warm palms. Or some moisture-boosting hyaluronic acid, finger-patted into her pores. If I had my makeup kit with me, I’d get to work and dust her cheekbones with blush too, salve her chapped lips and varnish her bare toenails, all the little things we do to keep life’s darkness at bay. That’s what I do. What I’ve always done. Toss handfuls of glitter into the deepest, dirtiest shadows.
As I sit watching her for almost an hour, something new and unsettling begins to dawn. Mum’s not indomitable. I’m childishly staggered by this. She may die. She may not come back as herself, memory intact. So what will be lost exactly? She’s the keeper of all our family secrets. What if there were things she still wanted to tell me? Questions she was waiting for me to ask? But I can’t ask them now. Maybe I’ll never get the chance. The truth about what really happened in a remote forest in the fading sun-bleached summer days of 1971 has been brutally, unexpectedly yanked out of reach.