Chapter 20
THEN
Two days after my mother died, my father came to the hospital.
He wore brown slacks and a red-and-blue checked shirt. His trilby hat dangled from one hand, and his jacket was draped neatly over his arm. His shoes were polished. His shirt was ironed. His expression was neutral—not quite solemn, not quite blank. Just … emptied out.
“Your mother,” he said, “has passed away.”
For a moment, I thought he might be joking.
Or senile. Or had wandered into the wrong hospital room.
It had been two days since she went over the balcony of my seventh-floor room.
Two days since the nurse with the trembling hands and watery eyes told me she hadn’t made it.
Two days since Cess arrived, chalk-pale and crying so hard she couldn’t speak.
Now, here was my father, delivering the news as though I hadn’t been there. As though I hadn’t lived it.
“I’m aware,” I said.
Something flickered across his face. Barely. A twitch at the corner of his mouth. A lift of one eyebrow, so slight I wasn’t sure I’d seen it. The air between us grew tight, brittle. As if the room itself disapproved of my tone.
“Are you being clever, Mabel?”
I dropped my gaze to the white knitted blanket pulled over my knees. I’d been moved to a new room—mercifully. This one had a window, but no balcony. Fewer places to fall from.
“No,” I said. Quietly.
He stepped over to the window and leaned against the sill. For a long moment, he inspected his fingernails, turning his hands under the light like a man trying to remember what dirt looked like.
Then he looked up. “If you know,” he said, “why aren’t you more upset?”
He made no attempt to hide the accusation in his question. If anything, asking it gave him pleasure. Like he was a detective and this was the gotcha moment.
“I am upset,” I replied. It was true, I was. And yet I wasn’t crying. I hadn’t shed a tear in two days. It wasn’t that I wasn’t sad. To the contrary, my pain was too enormous for tears. “Are you?”
Hatred darkened his eyes. He pushed off the windowsill and moved to the end of my bed. “Who are you to ask me that?” he roared.
His raised voice had the desired effect of intimidating me into silence, so I didn’t answer.
“What were you two talking about, anyway, before she … she … jumped?” he asked after several seconds.
It took me by surprise, this question. Given the calculated way he was asking, I didn’t feel inclined to answer. So I shrugged.
But he wasn’t letting it go.
“Mabel?” His gaze burned into me. “What were you talking about?”
“I don’t remember.”
Of course I remembered. We were talking about Susan McGinty. Did he know that?
“You’re lying. Did you argue? Did you say something to upset her?”
I examined his face for guilt, or responsibility. Neither was present.
“Did she really jump from the balcony?” he asked.
I shouldn’t have been shocked. I knew he’d never take responsibility for the part his relationship with Susan McGinty had played in her death. I never expected he’d attribute responsibility to me. Silly of me, since isn’t that what he’d done with Kitty?
“Susan McGinty,” I said quietly.
Now he was the one to look shocked. “Pardon?”
“You asked what Mum and I were talking about. It was Susan McGinty.”
I didn’t expect guilt, or an admission. I certainly didn’t expect him to apologize for suggesting I had something to do with it. And so, I wasn’t sure why I said it. Maybe, as he’d suggested earlier, I was trying to be clever.
A nurse bustled into the room, saving us both from speaking.
“How’s the patient?” she said. “Ah, Dad’s here. Good.”
My father smiled and acted pleasant as the nurse did her checks, refilled my water, and completed her paperwork, but I could tell she sensed something was amiss.
“Is everything okay in here?” she asked finally.
“Fine,” my father said.
She nodded, glancing at me. “You’re okay, Mabel?”
I cleared my throat. “Fine.”
She dropped the chart into the pigeonhole at the end of the bed. “In that case, I’ll leave you to it.”
And she left.
“The funeral will be on Thursday at St. Mary’s,” my father said, once the nurse was gone.
“Obviously, you won’t be able to attend in your condition.
” He put on his trilby. “I’ve had to delay my trip for it, but I’ll be leaving on Friday for London.
I’m not sure when I’ll be back, but you’ll be in safe hands with your aunt. ”
He slid his arms into his jacket and, without so much as a goodbye, strode to the door.
“Who unlocked the door?”
He stopped mid-stride, but his gaze remained forward.
“To the porch?” I continued. “Mum said the door to the porch was locked the day Kitty came outside and started playing with me. She said she didn’t know how it became unlocked.”
Still he didn’t look at me, but from the side view I thought he might have smiled slightly.
“Dad?” This time my voice sounded pleading. I hated myself for that. But with my mother gone, he was the only one I could get an answer from. And I needed answers.
“Goodbye, Mabel,” he said. And just like that, the last person who could tell me the truth walked out the door.
I didn’t consider myself to be a particularly dramatic person. To the contrary, I’d always believed myself to be calm, unflappable. And yet, that day in the hospital, after my father left, I threw my copy of Anne of Green Gables against the wall hard enough that it left a dent in the plaster.
“Whoa,” someone said.
I froze. “Who said that?”
“I did.” A girl appeared in the doorway.
Like me, she was dressed in a hospital gown, but she wore a hot-pink, fluffy cardigan over the top and had matching hot pink slippers.
Unlike me, she was smiling. Her skin was so pale it was almost translucent.
She pulled an IV behind her, on a trolley.
“They told me there was another kid in this ward!”
She grinned to reveal small, bucked front teeth. Her face was long and oddly narrow, like someone had pressed it between two encyclopedias. Her hair, the color of milky tea, floated around her ears in wisps that gave her the overall effect of a mushroom. Her eyes were a pale, watery blue.
“I couldn’t believe it when I saw it was Mabel Waller.”
She came farther into the room, and I searched her face for recognition.
“No way!” I said.
“Way.”
“No way! Daphne Barton? The Daphne Barton from kindergarten?”
“The one and only.” She grinned.
“I thought you moved back to England.”
“You thought correct,” she said, perching herself in the visitor’s chair beside my bed. “I moved back a few weeks ago. Doc said I needed the warmer weather and the sea air. For my TB.”
“You have tuberculosis?”
She nodded with delight. “Top shelf case. Could barely inhale when I got here. But I’m on the mend. They say I’ll be starting school any day now. St. Mary’s.”
“You’re going to St. Mary’s Brighton?” I asked, stunned.
“Darn tootin’. I’m boarding. Is that where you go?”
I nodded slowly, trying to keep up.
“Talk about fate,” Daphne said. “Course, I’m not a bright spark. My dad says I’m thick as two planks. But if you can overlook that, I think we should be friends.”
I blinked at her.
“I mean, I know you probably have about fifty friends already,” she added quickly, “but I don’t. And being the new girl is rotten. So, I’m relying on the kindness of a good few. What do you say?”
There were many things I wanted to say. Too many.
So many that I found myself unable to speak at all.
Undeterred, Daphne plowed on. “You’re probably wondering what I bring to the table.
Good question. First, I’m loyal. Buried-the-body-without-asking loyal.
Okay, slight fib—I’d ask, but only once the body was good and buried and we were somewhere with thick curtains. Second—”
My mouth twitched.
“—I can talk my way out of anything. The key is to keep talking. Never stop. Just keep throwing words like spaghetti at a wall until they get tired and let you go.”
She wasn’t wrong. It was the same energy that had made me adore her in kindergarten. That oddball confidence. That whiff of chaos.
“Anyway, that’s just the trailer,” she said. “What do you think? Friends?”
She extended her pinkie toward me like a royal scepter. And without meaning to, I lifted mine to meet it.
“There. It’s done. You can’t break a pinkie swear. Not ever.”
I didn’t know that. But I liked the sound of it. So I nodded.
“Guess we’re stuck with each other now,” she said.
Oh, how I hoped so.
Daphne stayed the whole afternoon, parked beside my bed, chatting away like a radio show without an off switch.
I’m not sure I got a full sentence in. But I didn’t mind.
I’d had enough of my own thoughts to last a lifetime.
Her monologue was everything I didn’t know I needed.
When she finally rolled away, I was exhausted—in the best possible way.
And that night, as I drifted off to sleep in my balcony-less hospital room, the world felt a shade less gray.
I’d found my bosom friend.