My eyes are starting to close; the darkness is coming.
“I mean,” Artemis continues, audibly slurring, “I don’t feel like we talked enough about how terrible they were at driving, clearly, but time and place, right?”
Art’s eyes intensify, and as I lift mine to meet them, pain shoots through me like a single flying arrow.
Sleep cascades in another wave.
“But for a show about their death,” Artemis says, leaning forward on the pulpit with her elbows propped and her chin in her hands as if she’s a tiny child posing for a picture, “nobody yet has brought up the cause of it. I mean, it feels like a key part of the narrative is missing, is it not? Don’t bury the lede before you bury the leads, so to speak.”
Art laughs wildly and takes another huge swig of wine.
My head is starting to bob, my chin drifting toward my chest; everything feels distant and muffled, as if it’s being slowly tugged away.
“Wake up, Cassandra,” my sister snaps. “Don’t worry. This bit is about you.”
Desperately, I try to lift my chin, but I’m slipping into unconsciousness as if it’s a big empty hole and there’s nothing around the edges left to grab on to.
“My sister, ladies and gentlemen.” From a few meters away, I feel Artemis gesture toward me. “Cassandra Penelope Dankworth. Let me tell you about Cassie. She’s not what you call a People Person. No, Cassandra is allll about Cassandra. You want to go play outside with her? Nope, it’s dirty. Keen on a birthday party? You can’t, because Cassie won’t be able to handle the noise or mess. Would love a dog? Or a cat, or even a sodding gerbil? No, sorry, Cassie doesn’t like animal hair or being licked or climbed on. Want to go to a new restaurant as a family? Bad luck, Cassie can only go to the same bloody restaurant and eat the same bloody meal, so that’s where we’re going. Again. And school? Let me tell you about school.”
My eyes close briefly; the church is slipping away.
“You try to make friends, but everyone is like oh, is that your big sister, hiding in bushes again? Rocking and clawing at her legs? What the hell is wrong with her, anyway? So you say nothing is wrong with her and punch someone in the stomach, and next thing you know, you’re the one with ‘behavioral problems.’”
I try to sit up, but time is shifting away like sand in an egg timer.
“But there is something wrong with her,” Artemis slurs fiercely, and suddenly her voice is choked, blocked, a sink full of debris. “Cassandra is broken and it’s ruined my goddamn life. Her rules, her restrictions, her schedules, her rigidity. Everything has been about her, and now she’s the reason our parents are dead.”
Somehow, I get to my feet and stand, frozen.
“You are, Cassandra.” She’s started crying loudly. “You’re the reason they’re gone. They were five minutes late for your graduation ceremony, but you couldn’t handle it, so you rang them. And rang them. And rang them. And rang them. You told me you rang them fifteen times, and somewhere in all that obsessive, relentless, batshit crazy ringing, they got distracted and crashed the bloody car.”
Her sobs are filling the church, bouncing off the stained-glass windows.
“I hate you, Cassandra. If I could choose, I would pick somebody else for a sister. I just wanted a normal life, like everyone else, and I couldn’t have one because of you.”
She takes a large step off the podium and stumbles into the aisle.
“And you don’t care.” Hiccups, makes herself vertical again. “It’s our parents’ funeral and you haven’t even cried. Look at you, standing there, dry-eyed and sleepy, like you’re bored already. Like it doesn’t matter. Like you’re somewhere else. You’re a monster.” Hiccups. “Why can’t you just be normal.” Hiccups. “Be human for, like, one minute.” Hiccups. “This bottle is empty,” she concludes, holding it upside down. “Vicar, do your water-into-wine thing for me, pronto. Or is that Jesus. Or Moses. Who the hell cares anymore, I am here to party.”
Slowly, I lift my chin and turn around.
Everything is still and everything is calm, and as everything I have ever known and loved crumbles around me, I stand in the wreckage with my face still and my eyes still dry and rubble in my hair.
“Thank you for coming,” I say quietly to the hushed congregation. “There are cucumber sandwiches back at the house. And more wine, although you may want to get there before Artemis does.”
Shoulders straight, I walk slowly down the aisle like a bride.
I open the church door.
I hold my hand up against the light and feel the scaffolding inside me dismantle, fall inward like a building that can’t stand up anymore.
Then I close the door gently behind me.
38
Now
“I couldn’t go home,” Artemis says.
“Yes.” I sit down on the step next to her. “I can see that.”
“I got all the way back to our house and all I could see was you, everywhere. The house is full of you. So I needed to come back.” My little sister stares at me with wet eyes like a pavement after it’s been raining. “Your flatmate told me where you were. The girl one. Not the dick one. She seems really nice.”
“Sal,” I say. “She is.”
“And I know you don’t want to talk about it, Cass, but I think we need to.”
I nod. “Yes.”
There’s a long silence as we both listen to the laughter pouring out of the thick door behind us. I do not think the Tudors had much noise insulation; they should think about putting that in.
“I didn’t mean it,” Artemis says eventually. “Any of it. I was crazy with grief. I was in so much pain, and I just needed you to hurt like I was hurting. Also, I was very, very drunk. Like, so drunk that I think I puked on a member of the choir.”
“Yes.” I nod. “That sounds likely.”
“I think I lost my mind that day. You’ve always been able to control your emotions, contain them somehow, but mine just get so...big. Too big to fit me. And it’s not an excuse—there isn’t an excuse—but I didn’t know where to put them. You were all I had left in the world. So I put them on you.”
I nod, looking at my hands.
“And I’ve spent the last ten years hating myself for it.” Artemis is crying again. “I am so sorry, Cass. I am so, so sorry. It wasn’t even your fault—you know that? I found out afterward. I mean, even if it had been your phone calls that... It still wouldn’t have been your fault. But it really wasn’t your fault. They found Mum’s phone on silent in her handbag, at the back of the car, where she always put it. It was just an accident. A horrible, tragic accident, and you had nothing to do with it.”
“I know,” I say. “I checked.”
It was the first thing I did when I got to London: just before I went into a meltdown that obliterated half a year and all of my memories. Perhaps it shouldn’t be that surprising that I’m not very keen on sharing after a heartbroken confession was used to destroy me in front of everyone I’ve ever met.
“And I don’t know how to fix it.” Artemis rubs her jumper sleeve across her face. “I thought time would help, but that just came between us too. I sent letters, I sent gifts. I tried to call you, and you kept changing your number. Every time I found you, you disappeared again. You kept avoiding me, so I kept running away. I feel like somehow I wrecked both of us.”
“You didn’t,” I say quietly. “I’ve always known that—”
My face crumples, so I wait until I can speak again.
“In early Greek mythology, Zeus fell in love with Metis, the goddess of prudence. When she was pregnant with his child, Metis outwitted him. She turned herself into a fly, so Zeus turned himself into a lizard and swallowed her, whole.”
Artemis frowns and opens her mouth. “I’m not sure what—”
“Eventually Zeus got a massive headache, and in agony he demanded that Hephaestus cut open his head, which he did. Out popped a fully formed Athena, the goddess of wisdom. But Metis stayed inside his head, and she whispered words to him. It tempered everything Zeus did and everything he thought from that point on, for the rest of time. Metis became a part of him.”
I look at the step I’m sitting on and wonder when it was last scrubbed.
“I have my own Metis, Artemis. Ever since I was tiny, I have been surrounded by words. Adjectives. Observations, about me. At first it was discussions over my head, as if I couldn’t hear them, but the older I got, the more they were simply directed at me. Until I absorbed them and they turned into a kind of...Greek chorus. A constant voice, inside my head. Other people’s words about me became how I saw me too. But home. That was where that voice was gone. Because there were three people in the world who didn’t see me as a list of adjectives. They saw me as me.”
Artemis opens her mouth. “But I do—”
“I’m talking,” I sigh sharply. “You wanted to talk, Artemis, so now we’re talking. Don’t bloody interrupt me.”