Chapter 21 Hazel #4
Her sister set down a cup of Earl Grey tea on the table between the deckchairs.
She always took Mum’s chair, so Hazel was in Dad’s.
They had to get rid of most of the furniture when they downsized, but the deckchairs just squeezed onto the balcony.
The swindling life insurers didn’t pay out because the crash was technically their parents’ fault, but it was an excuse.
It had been raining and the three of them were laughing so hard—it was just an accident.
The scent of burning rubber and stab of broken glass, a scream …
There should’ve been some compensation for that kind of trauma.
A hot breeze blew, laced with the scent of tarmac, as her sister put a plate of pills next to the tea.
‘Did you arrange them like a flower?’ Hazel’s voice was hoarse, wrecked from the vocal cord paresis.
‘Does it make them easier to take that way?’
Hazel nodded as well as she could in her neck brace.
‘Yeah, I guess.’ She swallowed the painkillers, then hugged the mug of tea to her chest, waiting for them to kick in.
Her sister looked after her so well, taking care of the funeral, the paperwork, moving, cooking …
She’d flown back from her archaeological fieldwork in Greece the day after the crash, finding Hazel crying in the hospital, having just identified their parents’ bodies.
Her sister’s PhD had been on hold ever since, just like Hazel’s work at the startup.
Trouble was, neither of them knew how to get going again.
‘What were you telling me before medication time?’ Hazel asked.
Her sister fished her ciggies out of her back pocket, mouth twitching into a smile. ‘OK. So, I’m thinking of getting a tattoo.’
‘A tattoo?’
‘Yeah.’ Her sister flicked her lighter, speaking around the cigarette. ‘You know, I think it would help me.’
‘What would you get?’ Hazel asked.
Her sister took a deep first drag, exhaling from the corner of her mouth so the smoke didn’t go all over Hazel.
‘I’d like to get the Ancient Greek for “echo.” Don’t take this the wrong way, but it’s like this thing happened that’s defined my whole life, and I wasn’t there.
I feel … left out? Just an echo of the crash.
But if I got a tattoo, then a part of me would be solid again. ’
‘I kind of get it,’ Hazel replied, ‘but feeling left out is the stupidest thing I ever heard. At least you haven’t half lost your voice. And even if you had been there, you couldn’t have made a difference—I was in the car, and I didn’t, did I?’
‘Alright, you don’t have to be a bitch about it.’ Her sister burned through a centimetre of cigarette in one breath. ‘Anyway, I didn’t mean it like that. It wasn’t your fault.’
‘I mean, damn it do you want to swap places with me or something?’ Hazel gripped her mug so tight her knuckles turned white. ‘You can have all the night terrors, and I can take up smoking?’
‘Put the mug down, you’re shaking,’ her sister said.
‘I’m fine,’ Hazel replied, chest constricting.
Her sister stubbed out her cigarette. ‘You’re not, you’re going to have another panic attack. Put the mug down and breathe. Come on, in to four, hold for two—’
Hazel tried to follow but it was impossible when all she could smell was burning rubber and all she could hear was a scream that only existed in her head. ‘I miss them so much.’
‘I know, I do too,’ her sister said, always a still pool in the face of Hazel’s typhoons. ‘I’d do anything to bring them back—’
Hazel tumbles through the dreamscape, limbs flailing.
Her home present yanks the back of her neck, but it isn’t yet the moment to return.
There’s more work to do. A figure falls in tandem with her, both of them dropping through the thick current towards the memory seed forest. The other woman is thin as a sapling, with twig arms and silver birch skin, mottled purple and blue from blood poisoning.
Only her short red hair gives away that it’s the Backward Traveller.
It’s too late. Hazel shouts across the river of time, ‘I’m here, I found you, I have your keystone,’ but the Backward Traveller doesn’t respond.
As if hitting a body of water, Hazel impacts the knotted roots of the memory seed forest, scrabbling up and staggering through the pain of anamnesis towards her sister.
Hazel finds her, body cocooned in branches, roots and vines growing over and through her.
She tears at the undergrowth, but the creepers cling tighter, soothing her sister’s fevered shakes.
Maggots and fungi blossom over her glazed eyes and thin skin, guiding her back to the earth.
No. Hazel’s not losing her as well. Every moment of her recovery, her sister was there, with a story, or a listening ear, or the right medication. This is not how her sister dies.
Hazel leans towards her sister’s ear, disturbing worms and flies with her whisper. ‘You are my twin, and your name is Anna.’
Anna sighs, though whether it’s the sigh of a rising sleeper or the mechanism of a body releasing its inhabitant, Hazel can’t tell.
The tree boughs and vine tendrils continue wrapping Anna in vegetal arms, until they obscure even her purpling fingers and toes under their weave.
Spreading from the cocooned body, an autumnal gust surges through the memory seed grove.
The flowers wither, birthing fat berries and hips in bloody shades.
The leaves turn yellow, then brown, then fall to the ground like shed skin, gathering in drifts at Hazel’s feet, leaving the trees’ bare fingers pointing into the current.
She looks back to the cocoon around Anna’s body.
Between the chinks in the weave of branches, there is nothing but dried leaves. No body, no bones, no Anna.
Hazel straightens, spine on fire, anamnesis pulling her homeward, but she still isn’t done.
She’ll never be done. Screwing up her eyes, she summons memories of Anna without restraint.
I’d do anything to bring them back. That memory of the balcony didn’t just unlock Hazel’s anamnesis, it also gave her the secret to making Anna build the catopthura: lie.
The memory calls up a vision of Anna—the Backward Traveller As Was—clearer than she’s ever seen in the dreamscape.
Her sister as she was after their parents’ death: wan, growing her first wrinkles from crying.
She used to cry at night when Hazel was asleep.
Hazel listened in the dark, vocal cords too weak to call out in support, and too fuzzy from painkillers to get out of bed.
She grieved too, but differently, perhaps because she had been in the car, or because of the prescriptions the doctors loaded on her for months, or, most likely, because she had Anna looking after her.
It was the wedge of difference that made Hazel agree to build the catopthura with Anna, and it’s the reason Hazel’s lie is going to work on her now.
‘If you build that catopthura,’ she says to the Backward Traveller As Was, slow and clear and hating herself, ‘you can change the past. Your own past. You can bring our parents back.’
Hazel’s spine feels like it’s in a vise and spots dance in her vision.
‘You promise?’ asks the Backward Traveller As Was.
The pain in Hazel’s back reaches round her ribs and across her torso, bleeding into her arms and legs, until every inch of her writhes with it. ‘I promise.’
She can’t breathe. She can’t think. She can’t hear Anna’s reply, but she knows her lie works because it did, and it has, and it always will.
And because just when things seem most impossible, that is so often when they happen.
Fragments of mirror jab Hazel’s belly and cheek. She opens her eyes on Dad’s watch, ticking behind a cracked face. It’s still late-afternoon in summer, golden sunlight streaking the carpet. Fairy light cables tangle one of her arms.
She’s back.
‘Anna?’ She calls, her voice raspy and hoarse. ‘You here?’
For a second, the only sound is traffic beyond the window. Then, from behind her, come the mewling, curdling cries of a newborn child.
‘Anna?’ Hazel calls again, less certainly this time.
She pushes herself up from the floor, dislodging debris from her hair.
Just as when she arrived at Station C, she’s stark naked, standing in the living room in broad daylight, and she wraps herself in a blanket from the couch, which their mother crocheted years ago.
The crying continues, and she approaches its source, until she’s staring down at a naked baby in amongst the debris.
Instinctively, Hazel picks it up, wrapping it in a loose corner of her blanket, cradling its lolling head.
She makes shushing noises, swaying her body like a cradle.
Her memories haven’t gone the way they did when she travelled to Station C, instead there has been an influx of thousands, all out of place and confused, like a hard drive that needs defragmenting, or drunk partygoers spilling into a nightclub, or the Tinys diving in Tree and CHARL1E’s electric sea …
But even disjointed, her memories don’t contain a baby.
Neither she nor Anna were pregnant when they travelled into time, or back to this present, and neither of them ever had been.
Where is Anna? Hazel calls her name, startling the baby and renewing its squeals.
Hazel cradles it closer and walks through the flat, her calls of ‘Anna?’ diminishing as each room reveals itself to be empty.
A pith of dread grows in her chest until, returning to the sitting room, Hazel is forced to accept she and the baby are the only two people in the flat. She sinks onto the couch, adjusting the baby to get a proper look at her.
The blanket corner doesn’t quite fully cover the baby’s chest, and just under one clavicle are a series of blemishes, newborn things that will fade in time.
The dread in her chest blossoms, fruits, and ripens in seconds.
Hazel knows those marks, from an older body in the past, on which ink sat under the skin.
?χ?. She can’t translate it, but Anna told her what it meant.
‘Anna?’ Hazel whispers. ‘Is that you?’ Though she is already certain of the answer.
The baby—Little Anna—keeps crying. Her squeals are whole and loud, untainted by social propriety or desensitisation to the world’s enormity.
Hazel stares into the baby’s vast, unfocussed eyes. ‘How much will you remember, Little Anna?’ Then, with a sinking heart. ‘Gosh. How much do you already know?’
Little Anna’s cries continue, her wincingly clean voice dug from a fresh generation, ready for its own excursions and projects, but perhaps, terribly, somewhere deep down still containing the memories and pain of all the preceding lives that made it.
‘Shush now, shush,’ Hazel says, rocking the baby gently on her knees. ‘I know, I can only agree, it’s such a big world. And so frightening. Yes, it is.’
Little Anna second-guesses her own tears and hiccoughs twice.
‘Yes, you’re very wise to be afraid. You’re very small; you need to make that big, big noise, don’t you? But it’s OK, I found you, and I’m here now. I’m in it all with you. I’m listening.’
Quiet now, Little Anna kicks experimentally, and Hazel catches her feet under the blanket with one hand, the other still supporting the baby’s neck. Little Anna’s impossibly tiny toes wiggle under Hazel’s loose grip, and even though her eyes are brimming, she finds herself smiling.
There are going to be so many lies in the weeks ahead, so many visitors and medical appointments and welfare checks.
Questions about where her sister is, and where Hazel was when she disappeared; questions that will takes months to fade away, and whose untrue answers will leave a taste like battery acid in Hazel’s mouth.
Of course, she was very sad after our parents died—yes, officer, I suppose she could have—the river’s not so far away, no—left all her possessions behind, even her purse—
But today, it’s just Hazel and Little Anna, a tangle of family in a family blanket, future and past collapsed into one all-consuming moment, in which Hazel becomes a mother.
In an abstract, far-off way, Hazel had always expected that motherhood, if it happened to her, would come with joy and fear.
But she could never have imagined that the elation would be so incredibly light, or the responsibility so intolerably heavy.