THE FUNERAL
I met her the day of Johnny’s funeral. I shouldn’t say met, I should say saw. Observed. Was made aware of.
We flew back from France the day after he died. Damien wanted to keep things quiet, had fixed it with the Giverny authorities. Sylvia was drugged up on Valium and went where directed without resistance, like a balloon half-filled with helium, listless and fading.
It was incredibly freaky to know his little body was in the hold of the plane, housed in a temporary wooden casket. I asked to go down and sit with him but it was a commercial jet and they wouldn’t allow it. I screamed. I railed. I did all the things a good sister should.
Damien spanked me, told me to stop acting like a child, quit throwing a tantrum, so I subsided. A flight attendant brought me a cranberry juice and a magazine, L’Officiel. I could barely read it but I could look at the pictures, glorious, beautiful French women who seemed to live without care or proper sustenance, smoldering eyes looking vaguely into the cameras.
I wanted to be one of them. Very badly. Even at six, I was aware my life as I knew it was over, and a new one had begun.
We flew west, the flight short, and a hearse met us on the tarmac. I stood there in my little peacoat and waved as they pushed Johnny’s wood-encased body into the back of the long car. Damien saw me and slapped down my hand. Sylvia moaned. She was especially good at moaning.
We buried Johnny in the family graveyard, half a mile into the lands from the estate proper. Foxhunts used to start at the cemetery gates before they were outlawed. It was grouse season; far-off shotgun cracks bled through the thin air. Each one made me jump.
The priest intoned. His words meant nothing to me. Johnny was dead. My little brother, gone. I didn’t miss him, not yet. I drifted, searching the crowd for friendly faces: Cook, or the jolly man who came when we had parties and brought me sweets.
I spotted a strange girl. Her hair was blond, like mine, though long down her back, unlike mine, which was chopped in a ruthless bob at my chin. I suppose my mother didn’t want the bother of putting it up in a braid anymore; she’d cut it right after we came home, with scissors from her sewing kit. I was not used to the feeling of cold air on my neck.
The girl was standing behind the skirt of a woman who wore big sunglasses and wept into a handkerchief; not a sweet, lacy one like my mother’s, but a coarse one, like you’d buy in the shops. The girl looked terribly interested in the proceedings, but as I watched, she glanced up at the sky at a flock of geese flying overhead in a perfect V. She smiled at them, innocent and kind, and I wanted to be her friend.
When the priest was done, the body was put into the ground, gears grinding on the lowering device. The funeral was over.
Mother stood by the grave moaning, Father alongside her, grim-faced and stoic. The girl and her mother approached my parents. There was a brief exchange, then they left. My mother watched their retreat, and I was surprised at the anger on her face. I’d never seen her look at anyone but me that way.
There was a party at our house afterward. I assumed I would see her there, but the woman and her girl never showed.
Several months later, we bumped into them in the village near our house. We never went there, Mother liked the shops in north Oxfordshire better than the ones in downtown Oxford, but there was something she needed that couldn’t be found elsewhere, so we bundled off to Broad Street. I had been very good since the funeral, and Mother was in a fine mood. She secured her package and took me to the tea shop for a cocoa.
This generosity was the first of its kind since Johnny died, and I was careful with my cup so as not to spill and ruin my outfit, not to give her a reason to hate me more.
The woman from the funeral was there. I recognized her hair, piled up on her head. Without her sunglasses, she looked tired, gray, lined. She was older than Mother. It took me a moment to realize she worked at the tea shop. When Mother saw her, she threw a few quid on the table and hurried me away. I hadn’t finished my cocoa, so I cried and wailed, and the day was ruined.
The girl stood by the doors as Mother dragged me away by the arm. I knew she would be my friend. At least now I knew where to find her. Maybe Cook would take me with her to the shops and I could speak to her.
I loved her, though I didn’t even know her. Isn’t that strange?
It didn’t feel strange at the time. She was a silent compatriot, a kind eye. I imagined all the things we would do together: ride horses; play in the mill pond; trek across the estate by the stone fences; watch the strange, quiet falconer who came to the land every once in a while to let her bird hunt, her hawk’s jesses jangling in the chilled air.
It was this fantasy that kept me going into my teens until I met her for real. She was shy. She was quiet. She was studious.
She was everything I was not, and I thought, more than once, she was the daughter my mother should have had, a changeling child—me with the fairies, punished for my deeds—and this sweet, biddable girl who was worthy of their love in my place. She was my friend before we ever spoke, and once we did, we were inseparable. Our lives intertwined; where one of us left off, the other began, our very own Möbius strip. I wanted to be her. I would do anything for her. I would give anything for her.
Until I had no choice. I had to kill her. It was the only way.