Chapter Thirty
Thirty
There was no grand finale. Not for Marcie anyway.
She died as she lived: all at once, and then not at all.
She didn’t shout out as her foot slipped on that wet shingle.
She was too surprised to scrabble for the seagrass that grew wild and unruly at the edge of the cliff.
I stared at the spot she disappeared from and I didn’t know how to feel.
There were no panicked shouts from below. No sirens. Just the whistling of the wind and the roar of the sea. I had to make sure. I had to see for myself. My own route to the beach was significantly slower than Marcie’s. I scrambled down the cliff path, slipping on flat rocks, disturbing pebbles.
The rain had begun in earnest, driving holidaymakers back indoors.
The beach was deserted. I saw her the minute I got to the bottom.
The blood was almost unnecessary; I knew she was dead.
Her eyes were open. A trickle of red ran from the corner of her mouth.
Her arm was twisted away from her body at an awkward angle.
I caught sight of the glint of silver at her wrist.
I dropped to my knees. Fumbled for it. The clasp was fiddly, and my hands were shaking.
It took me three tries to release it. Then it was in my hand.
I held it up to the light. She’d collected several new charms in the years since she’d received it.
A tiny pair of ballet pumps. A hairbrush.
A small makeup palette. It hit me then: She was gone.
She would never add another charm to this collection.
I clenched the bracelet hard in my hand and felt the tears come.
She and I had shared it all. A womb, a bedroom, a life.
I felt very alone in the world all of a sudden.
At the sound of a shout behind me, I stowed the bracelet in my pocket. I wanted to keep this part of her for myself. A reminder that I’d once had a sister.
The boys found me hunched over her body, tears streaming down my face. Josh put his arm round me, helped me to my feet, and, tucked under his arm, I allowed him to lead me away.
The next few hours passed in a blur. Josh, playing the hero, parked me in the hotel lobby and told the receptionist what had happened. I listened to her on the phone with the ambulance. She sounded terrified.
When a raw, primal scream cut through the quiet of the lobby, I understood that someone must have told Mum what had happened. Seconds later, she rushed past me, out the door. In the distance, the sound of sirens. Soon, paramedics and police were swarming the place like ants.
They asked to speak to me. They sat me on the edge of my bed and placed a cup of tea in my hand. Two sugars, for the shock.
“What happened, Iris? Your mum said you’d been arguing,” they asked.
I could barely breathe, unable to shake the terror on Marcie’s face as she realized she was falling.
“I don’t know. The argument was silly. About something silly.
She must have followed me when I left for the beach.
I didn’t realize what had happened until I saw her—” I broke off, took a deep, juddering breath. “Her body.”
They handed me a tissue, but I thought I caught a glimpse of disbelief. If it was there, they had nothing on me. The hotel, as it turned out, had had complaints about the path before. They’d been planning to erect a fence the very next week.
They questioned me a couple more times after that, but it was inconclusive. The story went that Marcie had been upset by our argument. That she was not as careful as she should have been when approaching the cliff. That the rocks were slippery from the rain.
The journey back was silent. Dad’s hands were white on the steering wheel.
Silent tears ran down Mum’s face. I looked out the window.
As we passed through the town, I caught sight of the boys piling into a car, a surfboard strapped to the top.
They looked shaken and white. Josh and I never spoke again.
—
The fallout was even worse than I could have imagined. Mum and Dad walked the house like shells of their former selves. They stopped speaking to each other. They stopped speaking to me. Mum had to choose Marcie’s clothes for her burial. She ripped Marcie’s side of the room apart.
“Where’s the bracelet? Where’s her bracelet? She wasn’t wearing it! Why wasn’t she wearing it?”
I slipped it between the slats of my bed and the mattress after that.
We had a funeral. Billy came. I cried all the way through, and at the end he put his arm round me. It didn’t feel like I’d imagined it would feel. He sent me a message afterward, but I didn’t reply.
I caught Mum looking at me during the funeral. She didn’t cry, but her hands were trembling. She was frowning at me like my grandparents did: like I was a puzzle she didn’t know how to solve. I stared at my feet and wished for it to be over.
Dad left three months later. It was the single most cowardly thing I’ve ever witnessed. He and mum had barely said three words to each other in that time, but suddenly their voices permeated the quiet mausoleum of our house.
“She had something to do with it. I know she did.”
“Listen to yourself. Do you know what you’re suggesting?”
“I know exactly what I’m suggesting, Richard. And you do, too.”
“Don’t be fucking ridiculous,” he snarled. “You can’t blame her for this. Do you know what that will do to her?”
“If they hadn’t been fighting…” she moaned.
“Marcie could be difficult. You know that.”
He left that evening with a small overnight bag. He never came back to collect the rest of his things. A year later, he was married. A year after that, he had another baby on the way.
I tried with Mum. God knows I tried. For the first time, it was just the two of us.
She’d started drinking heavily. Mostly, she barely seemed to notice I was there, but sometimes she’d look at me with something like fear in her eyes.
I wanted to make her feel better. I thought I might be able to fill the void that Marcie had left behind.
I was one half of her, after all. The only connection to her beloved daughter she had left.
One day, when the silence had stretched so tight it was stifling, I went to Marcie’s side of the room.
I opened her chest of drawers. I picked out the most Marcie-ish outfit I could find.
Something unique, something special. I cut my hair.
Colored it blond. I barely recognized myself when I looked in the mirror. I liked it. And then I went to her.
Her reaction was not what I’d expected. I wanted her to take me in her arms, like she used to with Marcie. To kiss me on the crown of my head. To smooth my new, golden hair. Instead, she sat up and blinked at me, and her expression was one of abject terror.
I tempered my clothes and behavior around the house after that.
But when I went out I noticed that people looked at me differently.
And with their silent admiration, I felt a change occur within me.
That confidence I’d always strived for seemed to flood my veins.
I squared my shoulders, pressed my tongue to the roof of my mouth, and smiled at them as they passed me by, just like Marcie used to.