“Really odd. He seems to get on really well with Dad, though. They’re always off somewhere together, drinking, playing golf. I swear he spends more time with Dad than he does with me.”
I went slowly, “Perhaps he feels he can’t say no. Your dad—look, stop me if I’m crossing a line—but the one time I met him, I got the impression that your dad can be a bit—I don’t know, maybe quite a strong character.”
“You mean he’s a bully.”
“I didn’t say that.”
Willa chewed on her thumb, looking away. She took a while to answer. Eventually she said, “He is.” A beat. “He’s less obvious about it these days. Less—physical.”
“What? I’d guessed he could be a bit domineering but—God, Willa—I never guessed that.”
“It stopped a long time ago. It wasn’t me. He never touched me, Robyn. Not once. It was—”
“Your mum.”
“Yes. And Laika.”
“Laika? Oh, God.”
“Never me.” She blinked, eyes brimming. “And I’ve always felt so awful about that. Guilty, I mean. Not somehow taking my turn, sharing the load.”
“Why didn’t you tell anyone? Why didn’t you tell me?”
She wiped away the tears, then looked me straight in the eye. “I was ashamed.”
I held her hand, and for a while we listened to the sounds of the museum: mothers calling to children, the voices of baristas, china cups meeting china saucers, the metallic clatter of a spoon dropping to the floor.
Finally I said, “Remember at school when I swore I could keep your secrets? That still applies you know. You can talk to me. You can trust me with anything.”
She gave me a half smile. “Anything?”
It was the exact same question she’d asked when I was sixteen and I gave her the exact same reply, “Anything. I swear.”
She squeezed my hand. “That means a lot.”
I paused, “How are you, Willa, really?”
“Okay. I’ve been grateful to have Mum around. At least I can talk to her about”—she took a deep breath—“the baby. I never really discuss it with Jamie.”
“You don’t?”
“Not really. It’s not been particularly easy between us lately, to be honest. And obviously it’s different for men.”
“Don’t forget, he wanted her too.”
“Yeah, I know. We all did.”
For a long time she seemed somewhere far off, lost in her thoughts. “It’s made me think so much about Mum, what she’s been through. At least I’ve had some sense of closure. That’s been the hardest thing for Mum, you know, not knowing what happened to Laika. She lives with it every single day, that awful, awful not knowing. Not having a body, not knowing if her child is dead or alive, not having any resolution. Not having a funeral. Not ever being able to say goodbye. We’re in a museum dedicated to the importance of all those milestones, loving other people properly, celebrating every point in their lives: birth, death, all of it. Mum can’t. She can’t heal. She’s living her entire life in suspended time.”
I stood up, moved around the table and Willa stood, and I held her.
“You’ve got to go,” she said.
“I don’t have to.”
“You do, I know. But I’ll see you tonight, okay? Eight, right?”
I hugged her close, “You okay?”
“I’m okay. Thank you. It’s meant a lot, today. Seeing you, seeing your dad’s work up there. It’s been—healing. And important. I feel like I get it now, just how much that matters. To mend things. To mend yourself. To allow yourself to heal, to move on.” She gave me a small smile. For a long moment we looked at each other. I hugged her again and she turned to go, walking away through the clean light of the museum concourse. Then, as if spun by a thought, she turned back. “You know, you’ve always been that for me: a sage or something. A catalyst. The person who changes everything.”
18 Supper with Friends Willa
I see her. She is sitting at the very same table as me. My sister.
***
My eyes are fixed on Nate’s girlfriend, Claudette. But she’s not Claudette. That’s Laika, my sister. But, of course, it can’t be. It’s impossible. I glance at Jamie, where he sits half-cut with one arm dangling over the back of Robyn’s chair. Lunatic, he called me, a fucking lunatic for believing that Laika could somehow still be alive. That I would find her. That we would meet.
But he’s right. It’s not possible. Because Claudette is French. She’s just someone who looks so much like my sister I want to cry. It can’t be. It can’t be. What would Laika even look like now, twenty-two years older than when I last saw her? Like Claudette, I think. She’d look exactly like Claudette.
It’s Laika. It’s her.
It can’t be.
It’s her.
Then she moves back in her seat and my view of her is obscured again by Liv, who is asking us to recall our early memories, and so we go around the table, each of us speaking in turn. My brain is short-circuiting. It’s her. A story. I need a story. One about me. One Laika would know, so I say I remember being tickled. And that I wet myself. I don’t tell them the details: my father’s fingers jabbing hard into the flesh of my stomach, my mother’s nervous high laugh, Laika’s fearful face, my begging him Stop as the hot thin yellow stream leaked out of me, over him, soaking into his shirt, seeping into the white sofa. I don’t tell them my age either, that I was far too old for something like that. My shame. No, none of that. I just tell them that I remember being tickled, and that I wet myself.
