Panic skitters across Lily’s face like marbles across cobblestones. ‘What do you mean, what happened? You know what happened.’
There is such force in Lily’s response that Jess’s confidence begins to falter. But the look on Lily’s face – the same expression she’d worn as she’d barricaded herself in front of Zoe’s bedroom door – gives her the courage to continue. ‘No, I don’t. And I want to know.’
In the few hesitant seconds of silence, something more than fear or panic flares in Lily’s eyes. There is guilt. And it is all the confirmation Jess needs.
Lily gets up from the sofa and storms towards the door, her voice trailing behind her. ‘You’re being completely impossible, Jess. You’re making everything harder for everyone. Just stop asking questions, OK? Just stop it.’
Lily charges out of the room and there is a part of Jess that wants to run after her, challenge her, finish a conversation that has only just begun. But when she thinks about following Lily, when she thinks about saying what is really on her mind, her determination flounders. The accusation is so big and frightening, Jess can still not imagine saying it out loud. To say it aloud would be to give it a permanence she is not yet ready to accept.
Instead, she turns back to Blue Peter, to stories of a Russian world far enough away from her own to distract her from truths she does not know how to manage.
Almost exactly three months later, with the secret still burning in her chest, Jess’s netball practice is cancelled and she decides – on a whim she will never fully understand – to take herself home to an empty house. She plans to retrieve the spare front door key from the flowerpot in the garden shed and let herself in, to spend the next hour at home alone with a hot chocolate, a Wagon Wheel and Grange Hill. And it is there that she discovers her dad swinging from a beam at the top of the stairs, the cord of her mum’s navy blue dressing gown knotted unambiguously around his neck.
What creeps across every inch of her skin – before the shock hits her brain, before the adrenaline floods her bloodstream, before the first screams erupt from her throat – is a white-hot fury like nothing she has ever experienced before. As she stands in the hallway of the only home she has ever known, looking up at her dad’s body suspended from a makeshift noose, Jess experiences a febrile certainty that this is all Lily’s fault.
As her first screams emerge, a single thought pounds inside Jess’s head: Lily now has blood on her hands for the death of not one person but two.
For the next twenty-eight years, people will assume that the worst fate ever to befall Jess is to have discovered her father’s body at the top of the stairs. Jess will choose never to contradict them. She will tell no one the truth. She will never confess that in fact the worst thing that has ever happened to her is not her father taking his own life, but Lily taking Zoe’s. She will never explain to anyone that, over the course of a single summer, she lost her entire family: the deaths of her twin sister and her dad; her older sister never to be trusted again; her mum for ever at arm’s length, Jess’s determination to shield her from the truth creating an impenetrable barrier of tension and mistrust between them.
Zoe’s death becomes, over the years, an all-consuming absence. It is an absence that leaves Jess feeling as though someone has sliced away a piece of her heart that she knows will never be returned and can never be replaced. And beyond Zoe’s absence are the concentric circles of loss that ripple out from that kernel of grief: the adults Jess no longer trusts for their failure to prevent so heinous a crime; the friends and boyfriends she rejects for fear that intimacy may lead to disclosure; the family from whom she is estranged. It is knowledge that isolates Jess from the rest of the world, like a patient in quarantine who fears infecting others with the truth.
At times the loneliness devours her. There are moments when she has a burning need to confide in someone – therapists, telephone helplines, the police – but each time her courage fails her. She is too fearful of the evil spirits that may emerge if she opens that Pandora’s box. Every time she imagines it, all she can picture is the horror on her mum’s face: the shock, the pain and the renewed grief.
Instead, Jess remains silent, conscious of her own impotence, the secret slowly strangling her every day of her life.
Chapter 47
Jess
A waiter brushed past Jess and she looked around the restaurant, the white noise of diners’ conversations slowly filtering into her ears as though someone was turning up the volume and pulling her back into the present.
‘Please sit down, both of you. Just for five minutes, that’s all I’m asking.’
There was desperation in her mum’s voice and Jess didn’t know whether to resent it or give in to it.
She watched Lily sit, sensed her mum silently urging her to do the same. Seconds passed, then half a minute, Jess’s body tensing, urging her to leave. But then she thought about her mum singing on stage less than two hours before, the triumph on her face as she’d taken her fourth and final bow, and suddenly she found herself stepping forward, pulling out a chair at the end of the table and sitting down.
Allowing her eyes to flick briefly to where Mia and Phoebe were sandwiching their grandmother, Jess fixed her gaze firmly forward as her mum took in a deep breath.
‘I don’t want to get maudlin but sometimes I can’t help feeling that in the year Zoe and your dad died, someone pressed the emergency stop button on my life and I just stopped moving. It’s as though I’ve spent the past thirty years treading water and it’s taken me all this time to see how static my life has been.’
‘Don’t be silly, Mum, your life hasn’t been static. You’ve done a brilliant, important job all these years – think of all those thousands of children you’ve encouraged to read. That’s no small achievement. And what about us? You’re an amazing mum, a wonderful grandmother. Your life hasn’t been that bad, has it?’
Something familiar in Lily’s voice – the need to be the first to dive in with proof that she was the kinder of the two sisters – caused Jess’s back teeth to grind together.
‘Of course it hasn’t. I know I’ve been lucky in lots of different ways. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t other things I’d like to have done. Take tonight. Would I ever have joined a choir if I hadn’t known I was dying? It’s silly, really. We all know it’s going to happen to us eventually and yet it’s as though we don’t want to accept that our time is limited until we’re issued with a specific sell-by date.’
There was a pause in which Jess sensed her mum biding her time.
‘So that’s why I’ve booked three first-class tickets to New York and five nights at the Plaza Hotel. It’s over a weekend, so you’ll only have to miss a couple of days’ work. All I’m asking is that the two of you come away with me – together – to New York. Can you do that? Can you put your differences aside, just for five days?’