Chapter 39
iris
‘We had a deal,’ Amy says.
‘You think I’d be here at three-thirty in the morning if I had a choice?’ I say.
She hesitates, and I can see her weighing her options, deciding whether it’s safer to let me in or to slam the door in my face.
She turns without a word.
It’s invitation enough.
I follow her into the mean little room straight off the street.
It smells of mildew and sweat, and the brown-and-orange carpet is grimly sticky underfoot.
A pull-out sofa with rumpled, stained bedding takes up most of the floor space; what little remains is occupied by a sagging wingback armchair and a small, rabbit-ear television propped on a cheap side table.
It’s freezing in here: when I exhale, I can see my breath in the air.
I don’t feel sorry for her.
She brought this on herself.
It’s the first time I’ve been here; the first time I’ve even spoken to my sister since the accident.
We’ve faced each other in a courtroom, of course; I’ve seen her in the street.
But we haven’t spoken. We’ve avoided being together, even in the company of others; if I enter a store she’s in, she leaves.
I think we’re both afraid of what I might say if I had the chance.
What I might do.
Amy perches on the edge of the pull-out, and reaches for a Welcome to Stowebury! souvenir mug on the floor beside her. The smell of cheap whisky fills the air. Amy never used to drink hard liquor.
Neither of us are who we were before.
She looks old. It’s not just the new lines bracketing her mouth, or the grey threading her hair, which has long since grown out of its neat brown bob into a greasy mid-length tangle. It’s the weariness in eyes that have borne witness to the death of her soul.
It’s a look I’ve seen before.
Every time I look in the mirror.
‘What do you want from me?’ she asks.
I want you to turn back the clock, I think.
I want my son alive, sleeping safely in his bed at home where I can sit on the floor beside him and watch the rise and fall of his chest as he breathes.
I want to be able to smooth his hair and kiss his forehead and feel the warmth of his living skin beneath my lips.
I don’t want to close my eyes and picture my child in his coffin, his flesh as cold and hard as marble.
Suddenly my chest is tight. My vision blurs.
And without warning, I’m back on the Lady, trapped in the oily lake water beneath the overturned boat, gasping for breath.
Amy is gripping my shoulders, shaking me out of my panic, forcing me to focus, to slow my breathing to preserve our air for as long as possible, to stay calm, to survive.
‘Iris,’ she says. ‘Iris.’
My head whipsaws on my shoulders. Her fingers dig into my arms.
‘Iris.’
And then I’m back in Amy’s damp living room in my pyjamas and coat.
She’s grasping my shoulders, just as she did that night, and I can smell the stale whisky on her breath.
But I’m still there, too; I can smell the fuel in the water all around me.
I can hear the grind of metal settling, the sound of fists beating against the door.
The two images superimpose themselves on one another, like a double negative.
I’m shivering violently, but it’s not from the cold.
‘It’ll pass,’ Amy says. ‘Just breathe. In through the nose, out through the mouth. That’s it. In through the nose, out through the mouth.’
She pushes me down into the wingback chair and tucks a blanket from her pull-out couch around me. I’m shaking uncontrollably.
‘We should go back for them,’ I say.
‘Focus,’ Amy says. ‘Iris, look at me.’
She’s crouched on the floor in front of me. I can see the greying part in her hair. The chipped tiled fireplace over her shoulder. The ugly burgundy velour cushions from the pull-out heaped behind the sofa.
My breathing slows as I find myself grounded back in the here and now.
‘I was there,’ I say. ‘It was so real.’
‘It’s PTSD,’ she says.
‘It’s never been like that before—’
‘It’s because you’re here,’ she says. ‘With me. It’s because you’re with me.’
I push the blanket off my knees. Amy backs away as I stand up, as if she’s regretting our brief moment of contact.
‘I shouldn’t have come,’ I say.
Her expression suddenly hardens.
‘You went to the hospital,’ she says.
For a fleeting second, I feel guilty. We agreed; I’d promised on my daughter’s life. A blood oath, sworn in whispers as the rescue boat bore us to shore.
And then I remember Amy lost any right to be the elder sister calling the shots, to be any kind of sister at all, when she made her choice that night.
As abruptly as it came, the fight suddenly seems to go out of her. She sags onto the pull-out, and picks up her Stowebury mug. It’s empty, and I watch her poke around the sides of the pull-out, looking for the whisky bottle, and realise that even if I wanted her back, the sister I knew has gone.
She unearths the bottle and fills the mug to the brim, knocking back a deep slug without embarrassment.
‘For fuck’s sake, Amy,’ I say. ‘Get your shit together. That journalist, Quinn, knows Ashley’s awake. The minute that girl can string a sentence together, she’s going to spill her guts.’
‘We can’t stop her,’ Amy says. ‘Maybe it’s better if the truth comes out. Aren’t you tired of waiting?’
‘Rose is just starting to put herself back together,’ I say. ‘You know what it’d do to her if she finds out what we did.’
We stare at each other. I can see in my sister’s eyes that she hears them, too: the frantic, terrified cries of children who know they’re about to die.
The screams that echo in my head when I try to sleep, when I kiss my daughter goodnight, when I pick up a paintbrush and put it down again, no longer able to escape into my art.
I will never be free of the ghosts.
‘We didn’t have a choice,’ Amy says.
‘We had a choice.’
‘We agreed,’ Amy says. ‘We don’t look back.’
The breath rushes out of me. In that moment, I hate my sister so viscerally I want to dig my thumbs into her eyes and gouge them from their sockets. I want to smash her teeth with my fists. I want to break every bone in her body and grind her into dust.
She is the reason my son is dead.
And she made me complicit.
I don’t need to look back to find the past. I’m there. It’s where I live.
Every hour of every day.
Amy takes a half-step towards me. ‘I’m so sorry,’ she says haltingly. ‘So many times I’ve wanted to say that to you. I understand the pain you’re in. We both lost our sons—’
‘Except you didn’t, did you?’ I say.
Amy stops dead in her tracks.
‘Nicky is missing, not dead,’ I say. ‘Unlike the rest of us, you still have hope. Because your son could still be alive.’