Isabella’s mother hanged herself when she was six months pregnant with Isabella’s sister. Isabella was nine years old and her brother Cosmo was two.
She discovered her mother’s body hanging from the single beam in the garden shed, a pine kitchen chair on its side as though averting its face and a damp patch on the beaten earth floor a spotlight on a vacated stage. A butterfly, a male brimstone, had alighted on her mother’s lips and flexed his yellow wings like a bellows, as though attempting mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. Moving closer, she could observe the brimstone’s proboscis inserted in a corner of her mother’s open mouth.
Actually, her mother wasn’t there, Isabella said. Her body was, but her mother wasn’t: a body that went from being her sister’s source of life and sustenance to her coffin in two heartbeats. A doll within a doll, matryoshkas made of flesh. She felt her mother’s absence, in the musky warmth of the shed, with all the intensity of a presence. She said she thinks that that was why she wasn’t immediately upset – that, and the butterfly. That and the kernel of resentment that took seed within her immediately, tenacious like a foetus, ugly like a grey, knobbly puss moth chrysalis for its evident unfairness.
She would come to feel more alone in the world for the loss of a sister she had never met than of a mother who, she couldn’t help but believe, had abandoned Cosmo and her. In her sister, had she been born and lived, she would have had an ally, a same-sex sibling whom she could have shielded from the worst of things and in whom she could have saved herself by proxy. She had anticipated her sister’s birth with such longing that she felt cheated of the role she had prepared herself for and that her mother hadn’t had the courage to assume.
Her mother, her dear hand-wringing, self-deluding mother, had believed that neither seeing nor hearing evil might guarantee its absence, that the world could be a better place by the power of hope alone. Isabella would come to think that her mother had died long before the day of the brimstone’s embrace, at around the time she was pregnant with Cosmo, when life’s baton had been passed from her mother to him. Then, when Cosmo and she had needed their mother most, she had left for good.
She could see her mother’s logic: having failed Cosmo and her, she would save her baby. She could see her mother’s desperate hope, too: having taken her own and her baby’s lives, she would draw attention to her children’s plight, raise questions about the probable cause of her action and, so, rescue them.
The deaths were in vain: it would be left to Isabella to raise a flag, and so she would begrudge her mother her unnatural death despite herself, old enough both to despise herself for doing so and to understand what only she, with the possible exception of her father, could guess to be her mother’s motivation.
‘You see,’ she said, ‘who I hated, resented, bore grudges against and forgave, who I loved, loved carnally, these were the things I would have control over. Sebastian, you wouldn’t be here in bed with me otherwise.’