Going home. I thought of Lizzie in her sheet-white bedroom, lying on her bed twisting ostrich feathers between her fork-long fingers, the feathers hanging from the headboard like overripe fruit. She would be clicking her tongue and sucking her cheeks, the way she did, and I clenched my fist, thought of beating my thighs, that old frustration, my patchwork of bruised skin. Instead, I kept burning letters.
I was slow to adjust to living away from the family. In those first days, I looked over my shoulder, prepared for confrontation anytime Helen and I happened to knock elbows or spoke at the same time. Staying at Helen’s house had been a release. I forgot the awkwardness of Abby lumbering through our house, Father’s curled arthritic fingers on his left hand, the constant thud of the fall and rise of foot traffic out the front of the house, the putrid smell of trapped breath each morning before the house was aired, Lizzie’s night-time sighing.
To ease the way into accepting a life without my family, I went into town and sketched scruffy cats, floral arrangements on restaurant tables, mothers and their children, those pleasant things. The way fingers knitted around fingers. I buried myself in strangers. On the way back to Helen’s I would stop to pick purple and yellow wildflowers. The smell of them: afternoon sun on petals, tall grass that had rubbed against stems, dried dirt. The things that came to me:
Raspberry jelly only needs a hint of sugar if you use apple juice.
Leaning over Mother in bed. ‘I promise to always look after Lizzie.’ A kiss on her cracked lips.
Mother handing me baby Alice to hold for the first time. ‘She smells like icky icky poo.’ Then when Mother gave me baby Alice to hold for the last time after she had convulsed herself to death, Alice didn’t smell like anything at all.
The time I was meant to be watching Lizzie and locked myself in my room instead, drew geometric shapes until my wrist ached. Lizzie broke her arm sliding down the front stairs banister. Father broke my pencils.
One day I will see Jacob’s coat of many colours at the Ashmolean Museum.
I wish Father had died instead of Mother.
Lizzie clinging to Abby’s legs. How could she love her so easily?
How quickly does the body forget its history?
The sun settled on my fingers. I was reminded of the last time I saw Father cry. Mother had died. He covered all the forgotten places of her body, the inside of an ankle, the underside of an eyebrow, the spaces in between fingers, with kisses. It had frightened me to watch.
One afternoon when I came back from town, I opened Helen’s front door, went to the sitting room, filled a vase with the flowers. Helen came behind me, said, ‘Were you expecting a visitor?’
‘No.’ Please do not say that Lizzie had visited.
‘A man came looking for you. He claimed he was your uncle.’
My jaw tightened. ‘Did he have slightly enlarged front teeth?’
Helen nodded. ‘That’s him. Your favourite is he?’ She smiled.
‘No. That’s John. He’s my mother’s brother. Why in the world would he be coming here to see me?’ I pulled at my throat. How had he known I was here? Lizzie? Surely she would not send him to make me come home? She knew I wouldn’t listen to him, that I had come to hate his visits: hated the way John spoke to Father, like he wanted things; the way Lizzie fawned then asked for pocket money and got it; the way he seemed to always be up to something; how he kept telling me I looked like Mother, made me miss her all the more.
‘Did he say whether he was coming back?’
‘I didn’t get a chance to ask. He looked angry, almost slammed my own front door on me. He really wanted to talk to you.’
I shook my head. ‘I’m sorry he did that.’ Always apologising for family.
‘You know you can stay for as long as you like.’ Helen came close, took my hand. The warmth. Helen, the good friend. I held tight. The possibility of not going home. I would take that. What a new life would mean.
‘Would that be a burden for you?’ I said.
Helen shooed her free hand towards me. ‘Don’t be ridiculous. You could live here a hundred years as long as Lizzie doesn’t move in.’
A century of me. Finally doing what I wanted. I could not wait to tell Lizzie I was staying longer.
I wrote my own letter to Lizzie. Then I took a long route to the post office, walked until paved streets became dirt roads, houses turned into fields. I held wildflowers and leaves to my lips before pulling them apart and studying the structure of nature. Rebirth. Trees welcomed me with birdsong, encouraged me to keep walking, not to turn back. My ankles loosened. The sun hit grass, warmed the dirt underneath and I sat, ran my fingers over blades of green and yellow.
I pushed away from the windowpane, slowly began to dress, rubbed my hand over my body to loosen muscle. It was as if I was home alone at Second Street, as if I were reliving a morning from over twenty years ago, as if Father was out on business, as if Abby had taken a chattering Lizzie out for ice-cream sodas. Abby had asked me if I would like to join them.
‘No.’ I was blunt, had already made plans for myself.
‘You’re being rude! You shouldn’t talk to Mother like that,’ Lizzie said, waggled her ink-stained finger.
‘Again, no, thank you.’ Then I was left alone in the house. I waited a few moments before shrieking, before filling the house with my voice and body until the glass tumblers chinked inside the dining room cabinet. Father would have severely disapproved of this childish outburst. But there was no one to tell me to act my age and so I did what felt best. I stood in the sitting room and listened to the house, to the way it swayed ever so slightly with the wind, made cooing noises in the walls. The house made me feel as if I were standing inside a giant, inside a pyramid, inside an ocean-deep well: like I would be swallowed up. I smiled. What a thing to want.
I walked around the house as if I owned it. I went to my bedroom, stood in the little doorway that led to Lizzie’s nun-sized room. If things were fair in life, I would make Lizzie move to the guestroom, make the tiny space my studio. I would not have to worry about Lizzie running off to Father and telling him everything I said or did. Father could never understand the problem with sisters living on top of each other.
‘It’s a room within a room. Doesn’t it make you feel like you’ve always got her near?’ Father and his salt-and-pepper chin-length hair, the way it moved when he was trying to be helpful.
‘That room is supposed to be a closet!’
‘Rooms are rooms.’
‘And she talks in her sleep. It’s distracting.’