***
Mr. Bowman left the bricks where they were, on the kitchen table. My mother slid into the passenger seat of his car and Mr. Bowman closed the door behind her with a soft thunk. Moments later the Lexus slid back down the drive, gravel crunching under its tires.
Laika instantly made to leave the kitchen. My father caught her by the arm. “What do you know about those bricks?”
Laika’s mouth dropped open. “Me?”
“Yes, you.”
“How should I know anything about that?”
“Don’t answer back.”
“I thought you were asking me.”
“Don’t take me for a fool, Laika.”
“You think it was me? That I broke their windows?” Her face was the picture of wide-eyed astonishment.
“That’s exactly what I think. You’ve made your half-wit opinions perfectly clear.”
“Dad,” I said, “that’s not fair. Lai wouldn’t do that.”
“Laika, look at me when I’m talking to you.”
Laika looked up. Her hair hung over her eyes. She said, “It wasn’t me.”
“I said look at me. Take that hair out of your eyes.” His voice became low, dangerous. “And if your mother says you need a haircut, then you’ll get a haircut.”
My father jerked my sister toward the knife rack. He grabbed the kitchen scissors, then dragged her over to the stairs. Twisting round, Laika started hitting him with her free arm, landing blows on his chest and legs. I heard her shout, “Get off.”
“Dad,” I said, breathing fast, “stop. Don’t do that.”
Laika said, “Help me.”
I did the only thing I could think of. In bare feet I ran to the front door, hurtled down the steps and took off down the long curve of the drive, stumbling as sharp pieces of tiny gravel jabbed into my feet. I turned on to the road. The black car was already out of sight. I stopped dead. By the time I caught up with my mother it would be too late. I had to go back. I turned, breathing hard. I had to save her myself.
I ran back to a house that was strangely quiet. I found them upstairs. Laika was sitting on the closed lid of the loo in our bathroom, and our father was cutting off her hair. Her fringe had already gone, cut high along her hairline, revealing giant brown eyes like those of a deer, and now he was beginning on the rest, shearing chunks of long hair off in great sheets, making a hard uneven line above the level of her jaw. Dark locks of hair fell about her, into her lap. On to the floor.
Without even looking at me, my father said, “If you want a trim, Willa, then stay. If not, then I suggest you leave, right now.”
Laika was sitting quietly, her face empty of emotion. She wasn’t fighting anymore. Like an animal before slaughter, she closed her eyes. I could barely recognize her. And I don’t just mean how different she looked without her hair. I mean it was as if some essential part of her—her spirit, her soul, that part of her that truly mattered—had simply gone.
I couldn’t bear to see her like that. And, anyway, I could only make things worse. That’s why I left, I told myself, why I obeyed his instruction to leave; why, yet again, I did what I was told. I went to my room and shut the door. A few minutes later I saw my father through the window, dragging Laika across the lawn toward the airless bunker we called the pool house. I stood at my window, my hands pushed flat against the glass, knowing I’d let both of them down: not just my sister but my mother too. I knew what her reaction would be. She’d throw herself at him. She’d cry, she’d plead. She’d beg. And none of it would change a thing; the outcome was always the same. He’d punish her too. And then she would hit the bottle.
My father shoved Laika inside the pool house and locked the door, pocketing the key. Only then my sister seemed to regain her fire. Even from all the way across the garden, even from inside the house, I could hear her slamming her entire body against the solid door, her distant voice bellowing You fuck.
That was the Saturday morning. On the Sunday morning, he let her back out. She was withdrawn and hardly speaking that day, but at some point in the gray early hours of that night she turned up in my room, shaking me awake from a deep sleep and shushing me urgently when I nearly cried out. It wasn’t just that she was pale and bloody, it was that I hadn’t instantly recognized her. That awful haircut my father had given her—best described as a severe bob—made her look like a stranger. She needed me that night. Then the next day she was gone, vanished on her way to school.
So I did see her again that weekend. But when I think about the last time I saw my sister, really saw her, I always think about the quiet emptiness of her being as she sat on the seat of the toilet, with her hair falling on to the floor. The moment she closed her eyes.
That’s when she went. That’s when she really disappeared.
10 Driving Lessons Willa
A year to the day that Laika vanished, Robyn and I began our final year at school, putting in our university applications and cranking up the work to make sure that both of us would achieve our first choices. We’d aimed high: medicine at Imperial for Robyn and English at UCL for me. That way we’d both be studying in London: Robyn’s idea.
***
I knew what Robyn felt. She was always watching me, then smiling, her lips curving upward. I knew from the way she touched me, the way we kissed.
I knew she loved me. She told me all the time.
It was me that started it. And me who sabotaged it, me who pretended I didn’t know what I was doing. And I chose my moment too, just a couple of days after her eighteenth birthday. A couple of weeks before our final exams.
It was a spring morning. Back from a run, Robyn was getting dressed, miming to “Tiny Dancer” in her knickers, arms above her head as she swayed in the blue light of early May, her unbrushed hair falling about her face, turning, smiling, turning, smiling. The window was open and a perfect day filled our room. There was birdsong outside. Robyn went to the window, leaned on the sill and stuck her head out, taking big lungfuls of clean bright air.
“Listen,” she said, “can you hear that one? That’s a mistle thrush.”
“How d’you even know something like that?” I said. “I wouldn’t know a blackbird from a robin.”
“That one’s easy,” she said. “Want to know the difference?” She turned round and coyly presented her breasts. “Blackbirds don’t have these.”
She turned back, laughing, gazing out of the window. I looked at her back, the nubs of her shoulder blades like little wings, her little boyish hips, the lace edge of her pants.
And, out of nowhere, a voice, mine, said: “You know, this doesn’t make us gay.”
She didn’t turn. I thought, perhaps, she hadn’t heard me. I said it again. I elaborated.
