But because she hadn’t “met her fate,” as the saying goes, nobody knew what to do with her, with the idea of her—“a troubled girl,” Mildred Bell murmured sorrowfully behind her counter, the best of them—and after a few baffled, rousing weeks of nonsense, they simply turned away.
At school, mostly within days, people moved on to other things: Sierra Franto’s three broken ribs from falling out of the tree outside her bedroom window; Alex Paul’s dad, the undertaker, getting in trouble for mixing up two dead grannies at the funeral home. Mostly it was like Instagram: we’d scrolled on; Cassie was just gone from the screen.
BEFORE THEY LEFT, Cassie categorically refused to see me. I emailed and texted her but she didn’t reply. I was too wary to call her house, for all sorts of reasons, so finally, in the middle of May, after Cassie had been home from the hospital for a couple of weeks, my mother did. Bev picked up the phone.
“It’s so nice of you to call,” she told my mother—in a formal voice, my mother said, as though the two women barely knew each other. “And we are so incredibly grateful to Julia for her help in finding Cassie.” (“You would have thought,” my father observed, “that the woman could have picked up the phone herself to call and thank you, wouldn’t you? For saving her daughter’s life? Just a little thing, after all.”) And then Bev went on, “It’s been a tough time, as you can imagine, but especially for Cassie, who has been quite distressed.” My mother noticed this word and repeated it to me, because she was expecting the word “depressed,” which seemed obvious; but got instead “distressed,” which, while also true, didn’t seem somehow strong enough for the circumstances. “So,” Bev continued, “We’re trying to look forward, to the future—”
“Of course,” my mother said she said, trying to reassure.
“And that means, in some important ways, closing the door on the past.”
“Of course,” my mother said she said again, although somewhat more uncertainly.
“We’re moving away from Royston,” Bev said. “A fresh start is important.”
“Of course. But when?”
“At the end of next week.”
“My goodness.” My mother couldn’t hide her surprise. “But how will that work? Your whole lives—”
“I’ve informed the hospice. They understand, these are special circumstances. We can’t stay in Royston now.”
My mother was surprised by this too: she wanted to ask Why not?, but Bev’s manner was so strained, so strange, that she didn’t dare. “Where are you moving to?” she asked instead, as polite as can be.
“I’d rather not say. Don’t worry, the good thing about my profession is that there’s always work available for someone with my skills.” (“Her profession is death,” my father observed. “She’s not wrong there.”)
“But what about Anders?” my mother enquired. “Surely for a doctor at his level, it takes some time—”
Bev interrupted with a click of the tongue. My mother said she could see in her mind’s eye the disapproval on Bev’s face, the narrowing of her nostrils and the flattening of her lips. A look with which we were all familiar. “Anders Shute will not be moving with us,” Bev said. Plain and simple, that sentence only.
“Just you and Cassie?”
“Correct.”
“Oh dear. I see. If it’s all so quick—I know how busy you must be—but it would mean so much to Julia, to see Cassie,” my mother said. “Before you leave—to be able to reassure herself that Cassie really is okay. Because, you know, it was quite traumatic for Julia, the last time she saw Cassie—”
But already, my mother said afterward, she knew from her own entreating tone that she did not expect Bev to say yes.
“That’s the thing,” Bev said. “My Cassie’s had a very traumatic time, and anything that might bring it back is, well . . . I’m sorry, but I have to say no. I know you’ll understand.”
“Of course,” my mother said again, although she said to me that she didn’t understand for a second. “What about your trauma?” my mother said to me. “It’s miraculous that you found her. And dreadful that you had to see her in that state.” She shook her head.
I could tell when we had this conversation—in the kitchen, making dinner, like so many of our conversations, me washing lettuce at the sink, she browning cubed beef for a stew—that my mother was shaken. You could see it in the mad energy with which she poked at the meat.
“I can’t fathom it,” she said. “None of it makes any sense to me.”
My mother didn’t know, then, everything that had happened, or at least that Cassie had told Peter had happened, in Bangor, and afterward. I tore at the lettuce leaves as I dropped them into the spinner, turning my back to her. I didn’t know whether it would be a betrayal to tell her what I knew. “What doesn’t make sense?” I asked instead.
“It makes you wonder,” she said. “What you don’t know. What’s happening all around you, that you can’t see.”
We were both quiet a minute, at our tasks.
“I ask myself, Julia, my precious daughter, do I not have any idea what your life is like? Or who you are?”
“Don’t be silly, Mom.” But she wasn’t entirely wrong. I too was newly aware of the aloneness of each of us, of how little of our selves and lives was shared, even as we shared rooms and hours and conversation. I had known Cassie all my life, knew her gestures and expressions and the timbre of her voice, knew the way her mind worked and her sense of humor and the ways we were alike and the ways we were not. Weren’t we secret sisters, umbilically linked? But I had taken my attention from her, and so quickly, it seemed in retrospect, she had changed, things had changed. Days had unfolded, one after the other, months in which I had remained, or considered that I had remained, the same Julia—although who knew, really?—and in those days, while I moved in familiar paths, Cassie’s life had altered beyond recognition, behind a scrim, behind the doors of the little house in the cul-de-sac, until what I thought I knew I did not know, and the person I thought I recognized, grew, behind her skin, alien to me. I was oblivious Goya at the Spanish court, and she the French Revolution.