My Sister's Bones(97)

Epilogue


The little boy squeals as the plane begins its descent and I lean across the seat and take his hand.

‘This is exciting, isn’t it, David?’

He nods his head and smiles a beautiful, beaming smile. When Sally was a child we used to say that her smile was like the sun coming out and as I sit holding her little grandson’s hand I feel something of her spirit around us. She will live on through this little boy.

Hannah opens the blind and looks out.

‘Just a few moments and we’ll see it,’ she says.

David lets go of my hand and presses his face to the window, waiting for the clouds to part so he can get his first glimpse of our new life.

A woman in the seat across the aisle looks at us and smiles and a deep sense of contentment stirs in my bones. Here we are, a little family, broken at the edges but slowly piecing ourselves back together.

We spent the last few months in London living in a rented house while I finalized the sale of my Soho flat. A safe house you could call it, though Hannah blanched when the family liaison officer used that name to describe it, as that was how Paul had referred to the shed: their ‘safe house’. So I suggested we call it our holiday home; a place to stay for a while until we were ready to face the world again.

It wasn’t easy. Hannah and David had to attend twice-weekly counselling sessions where the horrors of what they had endured were dredged up, sifted through and analysed. There were some days when I thought we wouldn’t make it and I worried that I’d made a terrible mistake in agreeing to look after them. But then light began to break through the darkness, slowly, tentatively, like snowdrops through hard frost. David still wakes up screaming some nights but I’m learning how to help him. I’m learning how to be a mother; to dispense hugs and kisses liberally and check for monsters under the bed.

As for my nightmares, they still come. I guess they always will. The hallucinations have lessened though there are still times when I have to ask myself if what I’m seeing is real life or just a strange trick of the eye. But I’m talking to someone – a counsellor who specializes in PTSD – and things are starting, slowly, to get better. Instead of running from my memories and trying to blot them out with sleeping pills and booze, I now face them head on. And like most monsters, once you stand up to them you find that they are not as powerful as you thought.

The real monster, Cheverell, is in prison now. I don’t know which one and I don’t want to know. After the trial we found out that he had been in prison before for raping and beating his first wife. He had just been released when he returned to Herne Bay to claim his parents’ house. According to the psychiatric reports, he saw himself as a messiah figure, preying on any vulnerable woman who crossed his path. I think of Sally waving to him across the garden fence that day and how her fragility must have reeled him in. She always saw the good in people and it was her downfall.

But I made a vow as I saw him being sentenced to life imprisonment that I would rebuild what he had tried to destroy. Bit by bit, Hannah and David are recovering and I am determined that we will live without fear.

‘Will we see her soon?’ cries David, his face still pressed against the glass.

‘Very soon,’ I tell him as the city skyline looms on the edge of the horizon.

Harry thought the change of scene would do me good and I think he might be right. There was a time when the thought of a desk job would have signalled the end of the world for me but I have a family to think about now and, anyway, ‘New York correspondent’ has a nice ring to it.

‘Now, David,’ I say. ‘Get ready to say hello to your new home.’

We huddle around the window then Hannah jumps back.

‘Mum needs to be part of this too,’ she says.

I watch as she lifts the porcelain container out of her hand luggage. We have planned to scatter Sally’s ashes when we get there and I know that it’s almost time to say goodbye.

‘I see her, I see her,’ David shouts. And suddenly there she is, rising up into the sky, a beacon of hope and freedom.

‘She’s huge,’ he exclaims. ‘Like an angel.’

I lean back in my seat, letting Hannah and David take in the Statue of Liberty while I close my eyes. He is there as always, holding up his book of smiles.

‘Tusbih ‘alá khayr, Kate.’

I wrote one last article before I left. I wrote about a small Syrian boy who loved football and dreamt of a better life. I wrote about my sister, Sally, who just wanted to feel safe. I wrote about Layla, Hassan and Khaled, all the people who gave me something of their lives and who will stay with me always.

I think about my final words, the words I’d hurriedly typed as I prepared to leave the newsroom for the last time.

‘It’s a peculiar way to earn a living,’ I’d written. ‘Hurling yourself time and time again into the eye of the storm. People think we’re fearless because we go towards the battle rather than run away, but I could never call myself brave. For me, being a journalist is about giving a voice to those who have been silenced; to tell their stories and show the world the true human cost of war.’

And as Nidal’s face begins to fade I think of the inscription on the statue: Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free. The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me. I lift my lamp beside the golden door. And I weep for the man he would have become; the life he could have had.