The Water Cure(37)

I just cry harder. He sits and waits, and eventually, despite myself, I manage to say, ‘My sisters.’

‘What about them? Have you fallen out?’ he asks, very gently. I wipe my eyes.

‘Oh, Lia,’ he says. ‘I’m sorry to hear that.’ He pauses. ‘But you’re old enough to be your own person. It’s not healthy to be so dependent on your sisters, at your age.’

I am ashamed.

‘I used to hate my brother,’ he says, thoughtfully. ‘I wanted to kill him sometimes.’ I am silent suddenly, thirsty for knowledge, for anything about Llew. ‘And then he got sick. Very sick. We were still children. I thought he was going to die.’

I try to think about Llew ill, small and vulnerable, but I cannot imagine him as a child. Instead my mind recalls the fluctuations in Grace’s body through the years, always less hardy than mine. Two fevers, one severe enough for fasting diets, for salt in a line at the door frame of her room. A ballooning ankle, wasp-stung, the poison far from the heart. None of it preparation for the final change in her body.

‘It made me realize what being brothers meant,’ James continues, watching me. ‘I never lost that, even when he recovered. You can’t disregard blood, can you?’ He pauses. ‘So this will pass, whatever it is. I know it.’

You don’t know anything, I want to tell him. My blood is disregardable, despite what he thinks, and yet everything I am belongs to them, if they want it. I want to laugh. I want to gesture at the world around me, the house, the forest, the garden falling away behind us. There are no parallels, I want to tell him. Some things will never pass.

He gives me a small and satisfied smile, gets to his feet, brushes the grass and dirt from his trousers. ‘Why don’t you come with me, back inside? You’ll get too hot out here.’

‘Mother,’ I say. ‘I have to watch for Mother.’

He sighs again, but nods. ‘If you insist.’

Sky has a nightmare. Dozing on the terrace in the long afternoon light, we watch her arms jerk and twitch. Her mouth open in an O of pain, her newly shorn hair. I do not say I told you so to Grace, despite the temptation. My sister lies with her knees bent, sunglasses on, rubbing Mother’s forbidden oil thoughtfully on to her legs and arms.

‘I’m afraid,’ Sky tells us when she wakes, sweating and alert, to see us staring at her. ‘But I don’t know of what.’ There is a long silence.

‘I think you should do a therapy,’ Grace says. ‘It’s been a long time.’

Sky shakes her head.

‘I think it will help,’ Grace continues. She looks at me. ‘Lia?’

I do not want to hurt my sister again. I feel the sweat gathering at my sides, under my dress.

‘Please,’ Sky says. ‘I don’t want to.’ She twists the fabric of her towel between her hands and screams, a sharp, child’s noise, a too-young noise, until we move to put our hands over her mouth. Grace holds the back of her hand against her forehead. Sky rolls dramatically on to the ground, looks up at us from there to gauge our reaction.

‘I’m sorry,’ Grace says. ‘I think it’s the best option.’ She moves to her knees and holds both Sky’s trembling hands in her own.

When we were younger, Mother encouraged me to have a favourite toy, a thing carved by King from driftwood. One day she gave it to Grace while I was watching and said, ‘This belongs to her now.’ Later there was a period when they would give me more at mealtimes, systematically, keeping it up for days. Grace watched my plate, unblinking, and I defended it from her with my body.

We reacted each time, slapping each other hard around the face or pulling out whole locks of hair or gripping each other tight until our nails burst small red moons against the skin. Those parental interventions, strange experiments with our hearts, stopped at some point, like a childhood game might have, not long before Sky came along. I don’t know who stopped them, but I know that sometimes when I wheeled around mid-fury, locked together with my despised and beloved sister, I caught King and Mother looking at us like we were unrecognizable, like we were no longer their children. It hurt us very much to see that look but we soon forgot about it, absorbed again in how it felt to hate and love and hurt each other, the new things, the old things.

We gather glass after glass from the kitchen, making several trips, and lay them out on the floor of Mother’s bathroom. Passing through her empty bedroom, it still feels like she is just downstairs; there is only the hint of staleness in the air if you breathe closely. The last photograph of our family is still on the mantelpiece, an accusation, missing King like a portent, although he has never been in the photographs; he was always the photographer. When I open her bottom drawer, looking for a bolt of muslin we can use if needed, I find the other group portraits. Mother’s hair expands, falls past her waist, recedes to her ears. My sisters and I grow tall suddenly, like trees. In my favourite, Grace is sitting on Mother’s lap. She is staring right into the camera on its tripod. I cover the photos in Mother’s underwear, the lace with the holes in and shimmering, flesh-coloured elastic. I would like to crawl under her bed and stay there for a minute or two, in the dark and the dirt, but there is no room for me.

One row of glasses contains salt water, the other row fresh water, as cold as the tap will run. Grace counts out the measures. We step around them, careful not to spill anything. Sky sits keening next to the toilet, her knees up to her chest. Grace massages her temples with the tips of her fingers.