Chapter 33
amy
My phone jumps around on the table beside my bed as I let it ring out.
For reasons I can’t explain, I haven’t changed the caller ID photo: freckled and sun-kissed, Iris still smiles up at me from beneath the Panama hat she’d borrowed from Finn that morning two summers ago, her left hand raised to shade her eyes from the sun.
I remember the day it was taken with painful clarity.
It was the last week of August; the kids were down at the beach with friends, so Iris and I borrowed a sailboat from the marina and took it out on the lake, just the two of us, making the most of our last day of freedom before school started again the following week.
Iris was relaxed and happy, leaning over the front of the sailboat and trailing her fingers in the warm water as I sailed us away from the lakeshore.
In the dog days of summer she’d finally picked up some colour, and her long, brown legs were curled up beneath her on the sailboat platform.
I remember warning her not to burn as she slid the straps of her bikini top down her shoulders to avoid tan lines.
She laughed, yes, Mom, and told me to stop helicoptering.
The phone stops dancing, and the screen goes black.
We haven’t spoken in fifteen months: not since the morning of Finn’s funeral. Iris gazed at me with ice in her eyes and told me to leave after the service, because she couldn’t stand to look at me. And I didn’t argue, because I felt exactly the same way about her.
Since then, we’ve kept out of each other’s way.
It’s easier than you’d think, even in a town this small; we no longer work together, of course, and I live at the wrong end of town, and shop at thrift shops and discount grocery stores.
Iris is still hiding behind her fancy gates in her McMansion with Jesse, only venturing out in her Lululemon outfits for a private session with her personal trainer or whatever it is she fills her days with now.
I wouldn’t know – I literally haven’t set eyes on her since the court case Kate and David Walker brought against us six months ago.
We’ve both lost our sons. We know each other’s pain with visceral understanding. If you’d asked me fifteen months ago, I’d have said my sister was the one person in the world who would always have my back.
My phone buzzes again, and this time I flip it over, so I don’t have to see her face.
When I look at Iris, I see Nicky and Finn. I see our boys leaping from the dock onto the Lady that June evening, heedless of the risk to their rented tuxedo pants, filled with energy and youth and promise and laughter.
I see Finn tumbling back into the pitch-black water, his handsome face a mask of shock.
I see Nicky hammering desperately on the porthole as the corridor fills with water, trying and failing to pull back the bolt and open the door.
I don’t want to see my sister any more than she wants to see me. I can’t bear to be in the same room as her. I can’t look at her without remembering what happened that night.
Sometimes there’s no way back, no matter how much you love someone.
Some choices are unforgivable.
I know why Iris is calling me at three in the morning. She knows I won’t be able to sleep, either. Ashley Lincoln is awake. Quinn Wilde is back in town, scavenging amid the wreckage of our lives for her story. The dead are beginning to stir.
It’s almost a relief.
These past fifteen months have been an interlude, the unquiet calm in the eye of the storm. But the wind is whipping up again now. It’s going to tear through this town, ripping us out by the roots, cutting a terrible swathe of destruction through our lives. And this time, no one will be spared.
You’d think, after everything my sister and I have been through, after all we’ve endured, that the worst would be over. The most terrible thing that can befall a mother has already happened to us.
But the worst isn’t over.
What comes after, the guilt, that’s the worst part.
And it never ends.
I roll over onto my back, wincing as the bar in the centre of the pull-out couch digs into my back. Orange light from the street lamp outside my window seeps through the sagging blinds. I haven’t slept more than three hours at a stretch since before the accident. I doubt my sister has, either.
As bone-weary as I am, every night I struggle to fall asleep until exhaustion takes me and I sink into a fitful, haunted slumber.
And then in the small hours of the night, I’m snapped into wakefulness by a surge of adrenaline and panic, and suddenly I’m gasping for breath, back in the cold, pitch-black water, not knowing which way is up, my lungs bursting, desperate, so desperate, I’ll do anything – anything – for air.
But those aren’t the bad nights.
The bad nights, the really bad nights, are the ones when I’m wakened by the sound of Nicky shouting my name.
Mom!
Mommy!
It’s bleakly ironic; the last night I had my son under the same roof as me, I couldn’t sleep because I was so distraught over my husband’s affair.
If only I’d known.
If only I could go back and slip into bed beside my overwrought self and whisper into her ear: you think this is bad? You don’t know how lucky you are.
A faithless husband is nothing to cry about.
Not set against the loss of a child.
I boarded the Lady that night thinking my world was crashing about me, when it was the last day of banal, inconsequential unhappiness I would ever know.
I don’t care that my husband kissed another woman.
I just want him back.
I swing my legs to the side of the pull-out couch now and get up, grabbing the scratchy woollen blanket from the sagging armchair favoured by Helen and wrapping it around my shoulders for warmth.
I can’t afford to put the heating on for another two months, not until it’s cold enough for my breath to ice the windows.
With one finger, I press down on a slat in the blinds, creating a space to peer into the street.
Iris is there, as I knew she would be.
She’s sitting in her expensive electric Range Rover, a car worth more than most of the mean little houses in this part of town. It’s parked in the same space Kate often uses to taunt me, directly outside my front door, so close I could open the front door and reach out and touch her.
I know why she’s here.
I know why she’s so afraid of what Ashley has to say.
She sees me standing at the window, and we watch each other for moments that stretch into minutes.
Finally she gets out of the car. She’s wearing a long trench coat over pale green pyjamas; her thick red hair is caught in a single untidy braid over her left shoulder. My vision blurs, and she’s five years old again, sneaking into my room after lights out, begging me to tell her a story.
She’s forty years old, and she’s going to destroy my life all over again.
I open the door.