Sister

Outside, sound booms fill the space like triffids; lenses of obscene length are shoved up to the glass. I pull the curtains across, but their lights are still blinding through the flimsy material. As I did yesterday, I retreat to the kitchen, but there’s no sanctuary in there. Someone is hammering on the back door and the front doorbell is buzzing. The phone stops for a second at most, then rings again. My mobile joins in the cacophony. How did they get that number? The sounds are insistent and hectoring, demanding a response. I think back to the first evening I spent in your flat. I thought then that there was nothing as lonely as a phone that didn’t ring.

At 10:20 p.m. I watched the TV reconstruction on your sofa, pulling your Indian throw over me in a futile effort to keep warm. From a distance, I really was quite a convincing you. At the end there was an appeal for information and a number to ring.

At 11:30 p.m. I picked up the phone to check that it was working. Then I panicked that in that moment of checking, someone had been trying to ring: you, or the police to tell me you’d been found.

12:30 a.m. Nothing.

1:00 a.m. I felt the surrounding quietness suffocating me.

1:30 a.m. I heard myself shout your name. Or was your name buried in the silence?

2:00 a.m. I heard something by the door. I hurried to open it but it was just a cat, the stray you’d adopted months before. The milk in the fridge was more than a week old and sour. I had nothing to stop its cries.

At 4:30 a.m. I went into your bedroom, squeezing past your easel and stacks of canvases. I cut my foot and bent down to find shards of glass. I drew back the bedroom curtains and saw a sheet of polyethylene taped over the broken windowpane. No wonder it was freezing in the flat.

I got into your bed. The polyethylene was flapping in the icy wind, the irregular inhuman noise as disturbing as the cold. Under your pillow were your pajamas. They had the same smell as your dress. I hugged them, too cold and anxious to sleep. Somehow I must have.

I dreamed of the color red: Pantone numbers PMS 1788 to PMS 1807—the color of cardinals and harlots, of passion and pomp; cochineal dye from the crushed bodies of insects; crimson; scarlet; the color of life; the color of blood.

The doorbell woke me.

tuesday

I arrive at the CPS office where spring has officially arrived. The faint scent of freshly mown grass from the park wafts in with each turn of the revolving door; the receptionists on the front desk are in summer dresses with brown faces and limbs that must have been self-tanned last night. Despite the warm weather, I am in thick clothes, overdressed and pale, a winter leftover.

As I go toward Mr. Wright’s office, I want to confide in him about my imagined stalker of yesterday. I just need to hear, again, that he is locked away in prison and after the trial will stay there for life. But when I go in, the spring sunshine floods the room, the electric light glares down, and in their brightness my ghost of fear left over from yesterday is blanched into nothing.

Mr. Wright turns on the tape recorder and we begin.

“I’d like to start today with Tess’s pregnancy,” he says, and I feel subtly reprimanded. Yesterday he asked me to start when I first “realized something was wrong,” and I began with Mum’s phone call during our lunch party. But I know now that wasn’t the real beginning. And I also know that if I had taken more time to be with you, if I had been less preoccupied with myself and listened harder, I might have realized something was very wrong months earlier.

“Tess became pregnant six weeks into her affair with Emilio Codi,” I say, editing out all the emotion that went with that piece of news.

“How did she feel about that?” he asks.

“She said she’d discovered that her body was a miracle.”

I think back to our phone call.

“Almost seven billion miracles walking around on this earth, Bee, and we don’t even believe in them.”

“Did she tell Emilio Codi?” asks Mr. Wright.

“Yes.”

“How did he react?”

“He wanted her to have the pregnancy terminated. Tess told him the baby wasn’t a train.”

Mr. Wright smiles and quickly tries to hide it, but I like him for the smile.

“When she wouldn’t, he told her she’d have to leave the college before the pregnancy started to show.”

“And did she?”

“Yes. Emilio told the authorities she’d been offered a sabbatical somewhere. I think he even came up with an actual college.”

“So who knew about it?”

“Her close friends, including other art students. But Tess asked them not to tell the college.”

I just couldn’t understand why you protected Emilio. He hadn’t earned that from you. He’d done nothing to deserve it.

“Did he offer Tess any help?” asks Mr. Wright.

“No. He accused her of tricking him into pregnancy and said that he wouldn’t be pressured into helping her or the baby in any way.”

“Had she ‘tricked’ him?” asks Mr. Wright.