Sister

It started to sleet again, the iced water hammering down onto the pavement. A policeman told me to keep going; although it was snowing the day you disappeared, sleet was near enough. I glanced at the queue outside the Natural History Museum. The buggies and prams had sprouted plastic carapaces. Hoods and umbrellas were covering the parents. The sleet forced them into myopia. No one was looking at me. No one would have been watching you. No one would have noticed anything.

The sleet soaked the wig of long hair and ran in a rivulet down my back. Beneath my open jacket your fine cotton dress, heavy with icy water, clung to my body. Every curve showed. You would have found this funny, a police reconstruction turning into a soft porn movie. A car slowed as it passed me. The middle-aged male driver, warm and dry, looked at me through the windshield. I wondered if someone had stopped and offered you a lift—was that what happened? But I couldn’t allow myself to think about what had happened to you. Wondering would lead me into a maze of horrific scenarios where I would lose my mind, and I had to stay sane or I would be of no help to you.

Back at the police station, Mum met me in the changing room. I was soaked through, shivering uncontrollably from cold and exhaustion. I hadn’t slept for more than twenty-four hours. I started to take off your dress. “Did you know that smell is made up of minute fragments that have broken away?” I asked her. “We learned about it at school once.” Mum, uninterested, shook her head. But as I’d walked in the sleet I’d remembered and realized that the smell of your dress was because tiny particles of you were trapped in the fine cotton fibers. It hadn’t been irrational to think you close to me after all. Okay, yes, in a macabre sort of way.

I handed Mum your dress and started putting on my designer suit.

“Did you have to make her look so shabby?” she asked.

“It’s what she looks like, Mum. It’s no good if nobody recognizes her.”

Mum used to neaten us up whenever our photo was taken. Even during other children’s birthday parties she’d do a quick wipe of a chocolaty mouth, a painful tug with a handbag-sized brush over our hair as soon as she spotted a camera. Even then she told you how much better you would look if “you made an effort like Beatrice.” But I was shamefully glad, because if you did “make an effort” the glaring difference between us would be clear for everyone to see, and because Mum’s criticism of you was a backhanded compliment to me—and her compliments were always sparse on the ground.

Mum handed me back my engagement ring and I slipped it on. I found the weight of it around my finger comforting, as if Todd were holding my hand.

PC Vernon came in, her skin damp with sleet and her pink cheeks even pinker.

“Thank you, Beatrice. You did a fantastic job.” I felt oddly flattered. “It’s going to be broadcast tonight on the local London news,” she continued. “DS Finborough will let you know immediately if there’s any information.”

I was worried a friend of Dad’s would see it on TV and phone him. PC Vernon, emotionally astute, suggested the police in France could tell Dad “face-to-face” that you were missing, as if that was better than us phoning, and I accepted her offer.

Mr. Wright loosens his polyester tie, the first spring sunshine taking centrally heated offices unawares. But I’m grateful for the warmth.

“Did you speak anymore to DS Finborough that day?” he asks.

“Just to confirm the number he could reach me on.”

“What time did you leave the police station?”

“Six-thirty. Mum had left an hour earlier.”

No one at the police station had realized that Mum can’t drive, let alone owns a car. PC Vernon apologized to me, saying that she’d have driven her home herself if she’d known. Looking back on it, I think PC Vernon had the compassion to see the fragile person under the shell of navy pleated skirt and middle-class outrage.

The police station doors swung shut behind me. The dark, ice-hardened air slapped my face. Headlights and streetlights were disorientating, the crowded pavement intimidating. For a moment, among the crowd, I saw you. I’ve since found out it’s common for people separated from someone they love to keep seeing that loved one among strangers—something to do with recognition units in our brain being too heated and too easily triggered. This cruel trick of the mind lasted only a few moments, but was long enough to feel with physical force how much I needed you.

I parked by the top of the steps to your flat. Alongside its tall pristine neighbors your building looked like a poor relative that hadn’t been able to afford a new coat of white paint for years. Carrying the case of your clothes, I went down the steep icy steps to the basement. An orange streetlamp gave barely enough light to see by. How did you manage not to break an ankle in the last three years?