We drag him out from under the tree, across the lawn. Harry is heavy, almost immovable, determined to stay there and damn us, a meaty lump on the lawn. Worse, he leaves a trail in the wet grass, his belt buckle catching, so we wordlessly agree to heave him up, his shirtsleeve ripping, making a terrible sound. A girl on each limb, we stagger through the trees, our faces stiff with shock. Dot loses her spectacles. There is no time to find them. I envy her inability to see the details—the way blood has started to curl around Harry’s ear, bead on its lobe like a gruesome jewel—that I know will be imprinted on my mind forever.
We let him sag to the paving beside the pool’s edge. Can we really do it? Who will do it? Which of us has the stomach? But the sun is rising higher. There’s no time to think. A stone goddess waits, her hand protruding just so, ready to crack a drunken falling head, something that might explain his injury. The water is strewn with rose petals, plucked off by the rain, that will tuck over his body like a thick pink blanket. We wait, hanging on to our old selves a little longer. Then Flora nods, and the nod travels from one of us to the other like a parcel of light, a binding acknowledgment of a sisterhood that is bigger than Harry, lust, love, or marriage, a loyalty that rides above all others.
In the end, it doesn’t matter who does it—Flora first, a firm hand in the small of his back, then Pam, a second later, harder, with her foot—since we all watch him sink beneath the surface, the back of his shirt bulging with air, like a lung holding on to its last breath. We lean forward, peering through a gap in the petals, to see him roll hideously, a necklace of bubbles stringing from his mouth. Time cat’s-cradles back, stretched between our fingers, Harry sinking as Audrey did, the blue shirt, the blue dress, the margins all blurred. There’s a heart-stopping moment when I think I see Harry’s hand move, grapple for the edge. But then it slips under the roof of petals. The pool stills. And I start to run, tripping, stumbling into the garden, fleeing from who we are, the terrible creatures we’ve become.
13
A black hole in the ice. On the edge of the pool, huddled, sodden, very still, Romy and Bella. Jessie hears herself scream and scream. A sequence of events, incomprehensible, unendurable: Joe thundering across the stone, Will grabbing Romy. Blue lights flashing over the yew hedge, a terrible noise, wind, a helicopter landing on the lawn. Paramedics. Jessie’s tongue so thick she cannot talk at all, a silver foil blanket put over her shoulders, hands pulling her up, this way, that’s it, the kindness of strangers, the whirr of the blades, a nauseous rise and lift, engine juddering, Romy’s little face covered by the oxygen mask, her tiny cold hand in Jessie’s. Bella, foil-wrapped too, like a Sunday roast, saying, over and over, it was my fault, my fault. She looks out of the window, sees Will running toward his car in the drive, the earth shrinking beneath them.
In Accident and Emergency, they take both girls away. Jessie tries not to unravel in the waiting room. Her mind flings itself into pitch-black corners. Seconds drag like days. Her parrot-print dress, so shockingly out of place, tightens like a corset. Where is Will? When will he arrive? She can’t do this on her own. She is not the person she thought she’d be in a crisis. She is scared. At last, a harried-looking doctor is leading her somewhere. Something is happening. The doctor is telling her things, important medical things, that Bella is fine, just shaken. But then the doctor’s voice changes and she says that they are concerned about Romy. Since they don’t know if she swallowed any water, they have to consider the risk of secondary drowning, water on the lungs, something that might not declare itself until hours after the incident, although most likely much sooner. Jessie’s stomach lurches. Her entire life constricts to this moment, the bright lights, the sharp inhalation of hospital air. At the observation ward’s nurses’ station, there is Bella, asking to see her little sister. From the end of another corridor, still a world away, the sound of Will’s voice.
Bella stares down at Romy sleeping, a pitifully small mound under white hospital sheets, one chubby foot poking out, tubes and suckers attached to her body. The monitor beeps. “You were right not to trust me.”
Jessie doesn’t know how to answer. She was. She wasn’t. She can’t make sense of any of it. A tear slides down her cheek. Wiping it away, she smells the wood smoke of the pub’s fire on her fingers, a lifetime ago already. What she would give for a chance to live this day again, or just the afternoon, to unpick the small decisions, the ordering of the chocolate tart, the musing over what dress to wear, all things that might have inched the time line minutely, catastrophically forward and left the girls alone too long.
“Bella,” Will says softly. Jessie hears his voice as if from under water. She looks up at him, the moist red rims of his eyes. He looks like he’s aged ten years. “Can you try and tell us what happened?” he asks Bella gently. “You weren’t making much sense earlier. Why did you say it was your fault?”
Jessie’s throat tightens.
“I took her outside to play in the snow,” Bella says quietly, gripping the bed’s metal rail.
Will nods, trying to be encouraging. But she sees his hand tremble as he rakes it through his hair. The air feels full of tiny electric shocks, like the stings of jellyfish.
“I put on Romy’s gloves, her coat, everything. I made sure she was warm, I really did. We made a snowman. It was fun, but then . . . then . . .” She glances at Jessie, away again, like she can’t bear to see the expression on Jessie’s face.
There’s an irregularity in the monitor’s beeps. Jessie cannot breathe. The wait for the next beep, a fraction of time, is far too long. Will puts a hand on Jessie’s back, trying to comfort her. But she cannot be comforted. She can barely be reached, nor he. Somehow they are both locked within the same nightmare, yet must suffer it on their own. Beep. Jessie exhales. Will nods to Bella to continue.
“My program was on, the baking one. I guess I didn’t . . . I didn’t think to lock the scullery door, Dad. I didn’t think at all.” Bella covers her face with her hands. “So it was my fault.”
“That doesn’t make it your fault,” says Will.
“I went to the bathroom, leaving her there on the sofa, Dad.” Bella’s voice breaks. “And . . . when I came back, she wasn’t there. Romy had gone.”
Jessie screws up her eyes like someone preparing for a punch. She can see it exactly, like a movie in her head.
Bella bites down on her lip. “I . . . I couldn’t find her.”
“So you ran outside,” prompts Will, his voice less steady now. “You followed her footprints?”
“She didn’t make a sound, Dad. She didn’t make a splash.”
Jessie pictures Romy’s perfect pink lungs, an inhaling choke of dirty icy water.
“I . . . I just jumped in,” Bella says.
Will draws Bella against him. She looks tiny in Will’s arms, a slip of a thing, too young to have managed any of this. Jessie stands beside them, not knowing what to say, at the edge of their embrace.
The nurse returns, checks Romy’s pulse, records it, then smiles kindly at Jessie. “You must be dead proud of your daughter for saving her wee sister like that.”