“Nate’s running late,” Cat says. “Sorry everyone.”
“Oh, don’t worry,” Liv says. “It’s not like he’s vanished off the face of the earth.”
Everyone looks toward me. Individually, their movements are so small, so underplayed, that they could easily be missed. It’s just that they do it en masse, and Liv looks around, aware, of something. Eyes move from her to me, and in that beat of silence I feel for her. I know what it’s like, that feeling, to be the outsider, the one person left out.
“My little sister disappeared,” I tell her, “twenty-two years ago. She was thirteen. Abducted, probably. Someone took her, we think.” My breath catches in my throat, and my words come out sounding strangely low and hoarse. “They never found her body.”
Suddenly I feel as if I want to cry. It’s hard, this story, even now, even after all these years, and I swallow as something awful moves through me, something deadly swimming up from the past. Because now I’m remembering the very last time I ever saw Laika, standing in front of me in the furred early hours with blood on her hands. That’s what I always remember: her hands. I never remember her face. That’s something nobody ever tells you, that the face of a person you once loved can fade like an unfixed photograph. The awful truth is this: I have no real idea what she’d look like now. When I try to imagine her as a grown woman, an adult in her mid thirties, I can’t. The only mental images I have of Laika are as a blurry thirteen-year-old, fuzzy and featureless, as if even then she was already fading from my memory somehow, becoming unrecognizable, slipping away to the point where I could unknowingly walk past her any day of the week.
Jamie’s finger drums the table.
“She could be anyone,” I say to Liv. “She could be you.”
There is a moment of silence in which I think I could have explained myself better. After all, Laika could conceivably still be out there, somewhere, maybe, perhaps. I’d like to think she is. I should have told Liv that there was a time when I used to run up to people, total strangers, accosting anyone about the right age and height, girls with scruffy dark hair. Tell her, I think, and I’m about to elaborate when the doorbell chimes and Cat leaps to her feet. Nate and his girlfriend arrive in the kitchen, and then, as everyone leaps up to meet them, Jamie takes hold of my arm. “Here,” he says, pulling me toward the back door, “a word.”
He barricades me tightly into his arms and puts his mouth next to my ear, “Willa, darling,” he says, “are you completely off your fucking trolly? I mean, Christ almighty, what was that? You can’t just walk up to random women and accuse them of being your sister. It makes you look like a lunatic.”
A lunatic? Wow.
“Screw you, Jamie,” I hiss. “Don’t even think about telling me how to behave.”
Jamie releases me from his grip and stalks back to the other end of the table, sits himself down and throws back a glass of red. I stay where I am, pretty much as far away from him as I can get. A fucking lunatic? I glance at Robyn. Then Liv. Then I shut my eyes, weighted by a certain truth, one I’ve spent the last few months ignoring: whatever I once felt about Jamie has gone. I don’t want to be with him anymore. In fact, perhaps I never really did. Perhaps Jamie never really wanted to be with me either. Perhaps the two of us just fell down some sort of rabbit hole together, both of us chasing a belated dream of having kids. And a child, a daughter, is something I have wanted so badly. Him too, I know that. He told me he wanted children just as soon as we met. If I’m honest, that was part of the appeal. Was the appeal. And we’ve tried. In fact, that description pretty much sums up the history of our entire sex life: we tried. We tried to connect somehow, through lukewarm touches, tense bodies and distant minds. We tried to conjure up desire. We tried for a baby. It’s been the one thing that’s kept us together, really, that trying. I probably should have ended things a while back, but the truth is, time’s not on my side. If I have to start all over again, trying to meet someone who wants kids as badly as me, then I won’t have a child of my own, not ever. That would be the cost.
But that’s not a good enough reason to stay with anyone, and definitely not Jamie. It wouldn’t be fair on either of us. Oh, God, he and I need to talk. Not here, obviously, bang in the middle of a supper party, not tonight, but we do.
I am so far into the warren of my thoughts that I’ve barely followed the conversation going on at the table. I should be making more of an effort, I know. Everyone is tucking into the food. I’m seated opposite Cat’s brother, Nate, a musician who’s been busy entertaining the rest of the party with stories of his life in Paris. He’s clearly besotted with his girlfriend, Claudette, his eyes dancing down the table to where she sits diagonally across from him at the other end, on the same side of the table as me. Cat said she didn’t speak English, but clearly she does, and I catch an occasional oblique glimpse of her as she joins in with the conversation. Everything she says sounds wise and calm and softly spoken. That beautiful French accent.
Over dessert, Liv tells us about her research into memory and now I really start to listen. We all do. It’s riveting stuff—everything depends on it. To my amazement, she tells us how fallible our memories can be, how our minds rework things, how key things we remember from our childhoods may not even be true. Wow, I think, that’s a strange thought. No, worse, it’s a horrifying thought. I think back to all the things I remember happening as a child, things about which I’ve always felt so sure. Now I think, But what if those memories are wrong? What if there’s another story, buried somehow, underneath the one I think I know?
Yet again I think back to that very last night: Laika, waking me in the middle of the night from deep sleep, bright lines of blood drawn along her palms. She thrusts a pair of scissors at me. Do it, she says, her thirteen-year-old face wavering like a mirage at sea.
But what if that’s not true?
I have to break in. “But how can we know?” I say. “What factors are involved?”
“Good question,” Liv says, smiling at me.
I drag my chair to face down the table so that I can concentrate on her answer. Cat, Robyn and Nate lean in too, and Michael hangs on Liv’s every word. Then Michael edges his chair back a little and finally—finally—I have a direct view of Claudette. She has cropped hair and glasses and, behind those, a face so familiar that the breath is knocked from my lungs.
My God, I think, it’s Laika.
12 London Robyn
I first met Cat when I was twenty-two, and I was attracted to her straight off. The first time we talked, she told me she was gay. I instantly thought that was wonderful, her being so open about her sexuality. Plus, she was sexy, beautiful, with a long skinny body, little breasts and an amazing smile. I remember thinking how self-assured she appeared, how well she’d nailed that tricky veneer of outward confidence. Then, as I got to know her better, I realized it wasn’t an act. Cat was, quite simply, comfortable in her own skin.
She was two years older than me, accomplished, hardworking and brilliant. I liked her fast intelligence and the way she spoke her mind. Also her voice, her accent, the elegant lines of her legs. She was straightforward and decent. She was also, as I gradually came to understand, incredibly perceptive. Cat saw everything.
At the time I was a few months into my first graduate job, working long hours and living in a shared house with friends I’d met at uni, whereas Cat rented a tiny studio flat, most of which was taken up by an enormous drawing table. Her place was barely big enough for one fully grown adult, let alone two, but it had a good feel: I liked the narrow stairs to the fourth floor, Cat’s clean architectural drawings on the white-painted walls, her moss-green bedsheets, the faded colors of her vintage throw. Sure, the kitchen overlooked railway tracks and a dump, but it was still quite special compared with the shared house I was in: far less frantic and relatively quiet.
As the months passed I began spending more time there. Cat was easy company: talkative and astute, plus if I stayed over it meant we could make the most of our precious days off. If they fell on the same day, we’d get up early and head off to the gym or get out of the city altogether, but my shift work meant that didn’t always work out. If my day off fell on a weekday, I’d go for a run after she left for work and then hang out at her flat for a bit before heading home. And, as much as I loved the buzz of the hospital and the constant horseplay of close friends at the house, I secretly enjoyed those occasional moments of borrowed solitude. They were a gift.
***
It was a Friday in April, and we’d woken up to a clear, bright day. Cat was heading off for an early-morning meeting on site, and after a run of nights I had the day off. I was thinking I might even head back to bed for a bit, take a mug of tea with me, read a chapter of my book. I’m sure that’s what I was thinking. Almost certain, anyway. Meanwhile I hung by the bedroom door, watching Cat pull on her boots.
She looked up. “What’s with the goofy smile?”
“What goofy smile?”
“Whenever you’re nervous, you kinda pull this really goofy expression.”
“Do I?” I made my best attempt at looking normal.
“So what are you up to today?” Cat bent over to check the contents of the messenger bag she used for work.
“Seeing an old friend. She’s invited me out for coffee.”
“Who’s that, then?”
“Just someone I used to know at school.”
“Does she have a name?”
“Willa.”
Cat straightened up. “Is this the Willa whose sister went missing?”
“Uh-huh.”
