Jess rubs her fingers over the bridge of her nose. There is too much new information fighting for space in her head and it is beginning to ache.
‘I don’t understand why the doctors can’t do more for her. It’s inhumane. For goodness’ sake, people do more for sick pets than they do for people. There must be something we can do. Please, Mum. Please, Dad. Please stop it. You have to. Please.’
Lily is still crying – loud, heaving sobs – and Jess imagines her mum folding Lily into her arms, stroking her hair, kissing her forehead.
‘I wish it could all be over.’
‘Don’t you dare say that, Lily. Don’t ever let me hear you say that again.’ Her dad’s voice is sharp, as though you might cut yourself on it if you dared say more. It is a voice he uses only rarely – not a voice Jess remembers him using at all before Zoe got ill – and the sound of it reduces Lily’s sobs to a gentle whimper. Jess does not know why but something in Lily’s voice has caused the muscles in her tummy to coil like snakes. She replays Lily’s lines over in her head but cannot make sense of her feelings: Jess also wants Zoe’s illness to be over, wishes more than anything that her sister could get better, yet something about the way Lily said it, and her dad’s furious reply, will not sit comfortably in her head.
And then Jess hears the click of the kitchen door. She jumps to her feet, skitters noiselessly across the hall to the sitting room and picks up a copy of Anne of Green Gables, ready to pretend she has been reading all along.
She does not yet know it but what she has just heard is a conversation she will remember verbatim for the rest of her life, the words replaying in her head on a never-ending loop.
It is eleven days since Jess overheard Lily crying with her mum and dad, wishing they could do something to stop Zoe’s suffering, wishing it could all be over.
She doesn’t know on this otherwise innocuous Thursday morning – unremarkable except that it is now exactly a fortnight since Zoe came home from the hospital – what compels her to walk up the stairs. There is no need for her to do anything except put on her shoes and wait for Lily to come down. She has already brushed her teeth, pulled her hair into some semblance of a ponytail, packed her schoolbag. And yet she continues putting one foot higher than the other, climbing towards a future she cannot possibly predict.
Many years later she will come to believe that somehow she knew, somehow she guessed what was about to happen – what had already happened, too late for an intervention – an inexplicable sisterly intuition compelling her to investigate.
As she reaches the top of the stairs, Lily is coming out of Zoe’s bedroom. Her back is turned to Jess and she closes the door quietly, reverentially almost, her hands clasped around the handle. Jess watches her take in a long, deep breath that she seems to keep in her chest for an impossible length of time, as though perhaps if her lungs hold on to it for long enough, eventually she will be elevated like a balloon and fly away to some happier place.
‘What are you doing?’
Lily jumps round, her face flushed, eyes darting from left to right as if scrabbling to get her bearings. ‘Why are you creeping up on me like that?’ she hisses at Jess in an angry whisper that does not sound like her usual voice.
‘We’re not supposed to go in there this morning. We were told not to.’
It is true. Less than forty minutes earlier, over breakfast, Jess had asked if she could say goodbye to Zoe before she left for school, but her dad’s response had been one of those sighs that had gone on so long it had made Jess wish she’d never asked the question.
No, Zoe’s resting this morning. You had a lovely time reading to her last night, didn’t you? Just leave her be this morning, OK?
The way her dad had said it, Jess had known that, in spite of the upward inflection at the end of his sentence, he wasn’t really asking a question at all.
It was true that the previous evening Jess had spent a lovely time with Zoe. She had curled up in the double bed in the spare room where Zoe now slept, and read aloud the collections of poems they used to recite as little children – When We Were Very Young, Now We Are Six – poems about beetles and bears and buttercup days that seemed to belong to a different, kinder world. Zoe had drifted in and out of sleep – she had done that a lot since she’d come home from the hospital – so Jess hadn’t been sure how much she’d actually heard, but that hadn’t mattered. She didn’t mind that Zoe’s room smelt a bit strange: a thick, sticky, sweet smell that clung to the hairs inside Jess’s nose and refused to be sniffed away. She just liked being close to her twin, cuddling up in bed together, just as they’d done every night before Zoe got ill.
‘Do not tell Mum I was in there. I mean it, Jess. You don’t want to be a telltale.’
Lily’s voice is quiet but firm, full of anger and warning, and there is a look in her eyes that Jess recognises from all the times she has caught Lily using the telephone when their mum has told her not to, or the afternoons she has seen Lily smoking with her friends behind the children’s playground in the park.
There is a moment of uncertainty, neither of them knowing what Jess’s next move will be. Until her left foot joins her right on the top stair, Jess isn’t sure what she’s going to do next either.
‘I want to go in too.’
The two sisters glare at one another and Jess feels something pass between them: something unknowable yet frightening that she can’t, or daren’t, articulate.
‘You are not to go in there, Jess. Do you hear me?’
Lily’s body blocks the door, her arm stretched behind her as if in the process of being arrested. Around the corner of Lily’s body, Jess can see her sister’s hand gripping the handle, a final barrier should Jess get that far.
‘But I want to. If you’ve been in there, why shouldn’t I?’ Jess edges along the landing, emboldened by what she senses to be Lily’s fragile hold over the situation.
‘Stop it. I mean it, Jess. You must not go in.’
The expression on Lily’s face sends a cold draught tiptoeing along Jess’s spine: her sister’s flushed cheeks, narrowed eyes, pinched eyebrows. The panic trying to disguise itself as authority. It is unclear whether Lily is about to defend herself or launch an attack. Jess knows there is only one emotion that pulls her sister’s face into that expression: guilt. Except this guilt is unlike anything Jess has seen before. It is so powerful that it saturates the empty space on the landing until Jess can feel it filling her lungs.
Fragments of Lily’s telephone conversation from two weeks before begin to repeat in Jess’s head like a musical refrain she is unable to silence. Sometimes it just feels like they’ve forgotten they’ve still got two other children. It’s like we don’t exist any more. And then the memory of Lily sobbing to their mum and dad a few days later: No one should have to be in that much pain. For goodness’ sake, people do more for sick pets than they do for people. There must be something we can do. I wish it could all be over. She remembers the strange voice with which Lily had spoken, and their dad’s angry reply, a response Jess hadn’t understood at the time. But now, all of a sudden, Jess feels as though she understands everything, all those conversations she was never meant to hear. And now that she does understand, she wishes with all her heart that she didn’t.