The Girl in the Mirror(58)

Anytime I trip up and do something un-Summer-like, I can blame Iris. I wanted to learn the piano, despite not having been interested before, “as a tribute to my sister.” For the same reason, I swim each morning at Wakefield Beach, as Iris did when she lived in Wakefield. Not only does everyone accept this, but they honor me for it.

“It’s so touching, the way you’ve found to remember your sister,” Letitia Buckingham gushed when we caught up for coffee after one of my swims. Letitia was as lissome and lovely at twenty-four as she had been at fourteen, and just as daft. “You never used to like the sea.”

“Iris had a lot to teach me,” I replied. “I don’t think anyone realized how wise she was until we lost her.”

“But remember her creepy obsession with copying you?” she said. “Ever since you won that pageant, and she was humil—”

“I was having you on,” I said. “Iris and I used to dream up nonsense to tell you, to see how much you would believe. The truth is we loved to dress alike.”

There were no more coffees with Letitia after that.

Inch by inch, I’ve turned Summer’s life into my own. I’ve taught Adam how to please me in bed, ascribing the change in my sexual tastes to pregnancy hormones. I’ve trained him to eat out more and to cook dinner for me sometimes because pregnancy is so exhausting. I’ve replaced our super-soft mattress with a futon, and the photo of Summer holding newborn Tarquin has been relegated to the guest bedroom. I don’t look my best in nurse’s scrubs.

Even Tarq is not the nightmare he used to be. He’s older, and he uses the toilet at last, thank God. And now that I’m not stuck with him all day, I don’t feel so desperate for space. I’ve long given up on Summer’s regimen of gourmet toddler meals. He’s thriving on baked beans and ham sammies.

The thing that used to annoy me most about Tarquin, his silence, I’ve come to appreciate. There’s something relaxing about being with someone who can never open his mouth and criticize you, who adores you. And everyone thinks I’m mother of the year because I’m not panicking about his delayed speech. He says the occasional word now. “Mummy” or “Daddy,” that sort of thing. Everybody thinks he’s damaged by his premature birth, but the more time I spend with him, the more I’ve come to see that he’s quite smart.

So this is my life now. I drop Tarquin at day care each morning on my way to the beach. I eat lunch in one of the Asian cafés in the back streets of Wakefield, blowing off Summer’s dull friends when they seek me out for coffee dates. Adam and I joined a prenatal class but dropped out after two sessions, sick of the judgy comments about my choice not to have any ultrasound scans. I agreed with the comments, of course. Playing the hippie birth cultist is a drag, and my midwife, chosen for her dislike of medical interventions and her enthusiasm for home birth, is the human equivalent of nails on a blackboard. The fact that she changed her name from Colleen to Skybird says it all.

I haven’t seen hide nor hair of Francine or her daughters since they found out they were beaten, even though the beach house is not far from Seacliff Crescent and only minutes from Wakefield Beach. So much for Francine’s concern for me at the airport. I’ve checked up on Virginia a few times via Adam’s Facebook account, and I’m pleased to see that the kiddie wedding hasn’t gone ahead. Virginia is blossoming. She’s always posting selfies in her gym gear or a sexy crop top and cut-offs, hanging off the arm of a new boyfriend each month. Every day she looks prettier.

In the afternoons I play the piano for hours at a time or hang out by the pool, stuffing myself with cake. My belly is satisfyingly round, but no matter how much I eat, people still comment that I “don’t look eight months pregnant.”

Summer’s due date is looming.

My daily swim is my penance, my way of honoring Summer, of grieving for the girl whose death otherwise goes unmourned. Each day, I dive under the water into Summer’s world. No matter how many people are on the beach, under the water you’re always alone.

I did love her so much. I know what I’ve done is wrong, but I think she would understand. I saved her mother, her son, and her husband from having to grieve her death, and who wouldn’t want that? Wouldn’t it be the worst part of dying, to know that your loved ones would suffer bitter grief? I wouldn’t know; I didn’t have anyone to mourn me. Even my brother has never suggested coming home to commiserate with me about Iris’s death. In fact, I barely hear from my surviving sibling at all. I feel like an only child.

I swim early, when the sun has just sprung free of the horizon. I dive deep and turn, as I once did under Bathsheba in the middle of the ocean, and I look up through the water at the living world above. I don’t understand the physics—I guess it’s something to do with light refracting through different media—but although the sun is small and low in the east at that time of day, when I look up from the ocean floor, it seems to be overhead, great and golden. The water shimmers blue above me, and the sun seems to swell and blur into the whole sky. It’s perfect, round and joyous. And in this moment, I can imagine that things are as they should be. I, Iris, am buried at sea, and my sister, beautiful Summer, is the noon sunshine that lights up the world.

But this morning the sky is thick and gray, and the ocean is moody. I wade into the water and dive down as always, but I can’t see the sun from under the waves. I pause on the white seabed, waiting for the underwater silence to grant me peace. Instead, last night’s dream flashes back into my head, a nightmare. I dreamed that the sea surface was solid, a solid black thing, like lacquered wood. In my dream, I dived deep, but when I came back to the surface, I couldn’t break through. At first I thought the blackness that I pressed against was Bathsheba’s hull, but however far I swam, I couldn’t get away from it. The water was hard as lead. I was trapped.