Robin swings out of the bed, comes and sits at my end. She lifts a wiry arm and drapes it on my shoulders. It feels good. My sister. My twin.
“What I’d do is probably far crazier,” she says. “That’s why I’m not thinking about what I’d do, I’m thinking about what you should do. You haven’t hurt your daughter, but you’ve told Jim enough bullshit that he thinks you’re mental. And you’re pregnant with a baby he doesn’t even know about, and you’ve run off to Manchester to see your equally mental sister. Like, Sarah, this shit is not going to work. You need to stop. You need to just stop and tell the truth. We need to tell the truth about everything.”
Robin leans against the wall and crosses her legs. We could be six years old again. “Okay, then, let’s do this,” she says. “It’s my turn to tell you the truth.”
Robin tells me that she hasn’t left the house in years. Not months, years. Tells me how she spends her days. Tells me she’s weak now, doesn’t know how to get strong again.
“But you are strong, Robin. You faced Rez. You faced him today and you made things better.”
“Only because you were here. I’d have fallen apart by myself.”
“That’s not true. I just clung on to the wall and tried not to faint. You handled it, just like you always did.”
She’d stepped up to him because she’s strong and tough and slightly nuts, the Robin I’ve always known. But she seems to have forgotten that. I ask her what she wants now.
“Well, I’d like to meet Violet. And I do want to help you with all of that, but I can’t get out of my front door unless it’s literally life or death. Hell, I can’t even sleep in a bed most nights. Usually I’d be lying under it. So I need help too. And I’m so fucking embarrassed, Sarah.”
I ask her why this has happened, why she’s receded into this tiny shell, miles from home. She says she doesn’t know. But without needing to highlight the segue, she says, “I loved him, Sarah. But I hated him for what happened to you, and then before we all had a chance to start again or try to find a way forward together, we lost him.”
She’s still self-censoring the name. Callum. Just like she did after he died.
“I blamed him for what happened to you, and for what happened to him, to be honest. Then I blamed Rez for corrupting him, I blamed Hilary for not kicking his arse, and I even blamed you for distracting me from him.”
I look down at the small bump under my borrowed pajamas.
Robin squeezes my hand lightly without making eye contact in the dim light. “I just want to be honest. But most of all, Sarah, I blamed myself. I all but tied that rope. I should have saved him years before so he shouldn’t have needed someone like Rez.” She lowers her voice, picks her words more carefully than I’m used to.
“Callum was lonely and different, yeah? But I’d lost my twin, my other half, and I felt different too. Together we weren’t so lonely. It’s not that I didn’t miss you, but it helped having him there and we fit together. And you know the worst thing? I think it was because I was jealous when he got a boyfriend. That’s when we started to grow apart.”
“Rez?”
“No, not Rez. John. A boy at school who broke his heart before he met Rez. John was his first proper boyfriend. Callum was head over heels with him. And when they got separated by John’s parents and the school, I guess I didn’t see what a hole that had left, because I was excited to have him all to myself again.
“But he was never the same after that, Sarah.” She puffs all the air from her lungs and flops onto her side. “So there it is. I could have prevented all this if I’d been a better friend, a better sister, but I didn’t. And if I’d saved him, then what happened to you wouldn’t have happened, because he wouldn’t have been there with that shithead nicking his mum’s stuff. And you know what, maybe Rez wasn’t even that much of a shithead. Maybe C—” She swallows. “Maybe Callum could be a bit of a shithead too.”
I don’t know what to say. There are whole years of my sister’s life that I knew about only in postcard-sized bites. I never told her what was happening below the surface of my life in Atlanta, and she never told me what was really going on in Berkshire. A lot of empty letters.
Robin tells me that she’s been getting letters now, at this house. That she’s been struggling to cope with anything unexpected. That while she’s filed the unopened bills away, chucked junk mail in the recycling without thought, that these bright white letters have haunted her. She’d thought they might be connected to the knocks on the door. “But if they were, Rez would have admitted to them, right? Anyway, the postmark was from down south and he says he lives up here now.”
“Down south?”
“Yeah. It sounds ridiculous,” she adds, “but it’s how plain they are that bothers me. Someone’s typed my address on a plain white envelope and used a proper postage stamp, not one of those office franking machines. Like it’s a person sending them, one after the other. It’s just…odd. It spooks me.”
“A lot spooks you,” I want to say. And she was always so brave. When we watched Jaws as kids, I’d had to sleep in with Mum and Dad, while she made the boys at school play shark games in the swimming pool, before the council closed it because it was leaking and filled with slime.
“Go get the letters,” I say. “I’ll open them for you and we’ll handle it together.” I want a chance to be strong for her. How hard can it be? It’s just opening a few letters. But like pulling the wardrobe doors open to check for ghosts in a child’s bedroom, the moment just before the doors part, your adult heart still beats a bit faster.
Robin gets out of bed slowly and trudges downstairs to the spare bedroom she uses as an office. She returns with a small, neat stack. I open the top one carefully, using my finger briskly like a scissor. I pull the letter out. The light is bad but I scan it quickly. It looks official.
“It’s just an advert for a fashion-magazine subscription,” I say, being strong for her. “Weird how they’d bother to put it in an envelope.”
“Seriously?” she says, but she doesn’t reach for the letter, and I put them all on the floor before she can think to.
“Yeah,” I say, and I hop out of bed. “Just going to the loo.”
She laughs. Throws her head back and laughs. As I go out of the door, I cast a glance back and see my sister throw herself backward on the bed and take a long, deep breath. She looks just like she did when we were young, a tiny little scruffy thing making big gestures. I’ve discreetly brought the letters with me, down the stairs and into the kitchen. I find the key on a hook and open the back door slowly, like a safecracker. I step outside with my bare feet. The ground is gritty and cool. It’s a relief after the stuffy house. I ease the lid of the wheelie bin open, stuff the letters in as deep as I can, and snap it closed. I lock the kitchen up quickly, rush up to the loo and then back into bed.
“You okay?” says Robin. “I thought I heard the door.”