Sister Page 4

  I try to take a shortcut toward the park, but my hoped-for cut-through is a dead end. I retrace my footsteps and hear footsteps behind me, not the reassuring click-clack of high heels but the quietly threatening tread of a man. Even as I feel afraid, I am aware of the cliché of the woman being stalked by evil and try to banish it, but the footsteps continue, closer now, their heavy tread louder. Surely he will overtake me, walking on the other side, showing he means no harm. Instead, he comes closer. I can feel the chill of his breath on the back of my neck. I run, my movements jerky with fear. I reach the end of the cul-de-sac and see people walking along a crowded pavement. I join them and head for the tube, not looking round.

  I tell myself that it is just not possible. He’s on remand, locked up in prison, refused bail. After the trial he’s going to go to prison for the rest of his life. I must have imagined it.

  I get into a tube and risk a look around the carriage. Immediately I see a photo of you. It’s on the front page of the Evening Standard, it’s the one I took in Vermont when you visited two summers ago, the wind whirling your hair out behind you like a shining sail, your face glowing. You are arrestingly beautiful. No wonder they chose it for their front page. Inside there’s the one I took when you were six, hugging Leo. I know you had just been crying, but there’s no sign of it. Your face had pinged back to normal as soon as you smiled for me. Next to your picture is one of me that they took yesterday. My face doesn’t ping back. Fortunately, I no longer mind what I look like in photographs.

  I get out at Ladbroke Grove tube station, noticing how deftly Londoners move—up stairways and through ticket barriers—without touching another person. As I reach the exit, I again feel someone too close behind me, his cold breath on my neck, the prickle of menace. I hurry away, bumping into other people in my haste, trying to tell myself that it was a draft made by the trains below.

  Maybe terror and dread, once experienced, embed themselves into you even when the cause has gone, leaving behind a sleeping horror, which is too easily awakened.

  I reach Chepstow Road, and am stunned by the mass of people and vehicles. There are news crews from every UK station and, from the looks of it, from most of the ones abroad too. Yesterday’s collection of press now seems a village fete that’s morphed into a frenetic theme park.

  I am ten doors away from your flat when the chrysanthemums technician spots me. I brace myself, but he turns away; again his kindness takes me aback. Two doors later a reporter sees me. He starts to come toward me and then they all do. I run down the steps, make it inside, and slam the door.

  Outside, sound booms fill the space like triffids; lenses of obscene length are shoved up to the glass. I pull the curtains across, but their lights are still blinding through the flimsy material. As I did yesterday, I retreat to the kitchen, but there’s no sanctuary in there. Someone is hammering on the back door and the front doorbell is buzzing. The phone stops for a second at most, then rings again. My mobile joins in the cacophony. How did they get that number? The sounds are insistent and hectoring, demanding a response. I think back to the first evening I spent in your flat. I thought then that there was nothing as lonely as a phone that didn’t ring.

  At 10:20 p.m. I watched the TV reconstruction on your sofa, pulling your Indian throw over me in a futile effort to keep warm. From a distance, I really was quite a convincing you. At the end there was an appeal for information and a number to ring.

  At 11:30 p.m. I picked up the phone to check that it was working. Then I panicked that in that moment of checking, someone had been trying to ring: you, or the police to tell me you’d been found.

  12:30 a.m. Nothing.

  1:00 a.m. I felt the surrounding quietness suffocating me.

  1:30 a.m. I heard myself shout your name. Or was your name buried in the silence?

  2:00 a.m. I heard something by the door. I hurried to open it but it was just a cat, the stray you’d adopted months before. The milk in the fridge was more than a week old and sour. I had nothing to stop its cries.

  At 4:30 a.m. I went into your bedroom, squeezing past your easel and stacks of canvases. I cut my foot and bent down to find shards of glass. I drew back the bedroom curtains and saw a sheet of polyethylene taped over the broken windowpane. No wonder it was freezing in the flat.

  I got into your bed. The polyethylene was flapping in the icy wind, the irregular inhuman noise as disturbing as the cold. Under your pillow were your pajamas. They had the same smell as your dress. I hugged them, too cold and anxious to sleep. Somehow I must have.

  I dreamed of the color red: Pantone numbers PMS 1788 to PMS 1807—the color of cardinals and harlots, of passion and pomp; cochineal dye from the crushed bodies of insects; crimson; scarlet; the color of life; the color of blood.

  The doorbell woke me.

  Tuesday

  I arrive at the CPS office where spring has officially arrived. The faint scent of freshly mown grass from the park wafts in with each turn of the revolving door; the receptionists on the front desk are in summer dresses with brown faces and limbs that must have been self-tanned last night. Despite the warm weather, I am in thick clothes, overdressed and pale, a winter leftover.

  As I go toward Mr. Wright’s office, I want to confide in him about my imagined stalker of yesterday. I just need to hear, again, that he is locked away in prison and after the trial will stay there for life. But when I go in, the spring sunshine floods the room, the electric light glares down, and in their brightness my ghost of fear left over from yesterday is blanched into nothing.

  Mr. Wright turns on the tape recorder and we begin.

  “I’d like to start today with Tess’s pregnancy,” he says, and I feel subtly reprimanded. Yesterday he asked me to start when I first “realized something was wrong,” and I began with Mum’s phone call during our lunch party. But I know now that wasn’t the real beginning. And I also know that if I had taken more time to be with you, if I had been less preoccupied with myself and listened harder, I might have realized something was very wrong months earlier.

  “Tess became pregnant six weeks into her affair with Emilio Codi,” I say, editing out all the emotion that went with that piece of news.

  “How did she feel about that?” he asks.

  “She said she’d discovered that her body was a miracle.”

  I think back to our phone call.

  “Almost seven billion miracles walking around on this earth, Bee, and we don’t even believe in them.”

  “Did she tell Emilio Codi?” asks Mr. Wright.

  “Yes.”

  “How did he react?”

  “He wanted her to have the pregnancy terminated. Tess told him the baby wasn’t a train.”

  Mr. Wright smiles and quickly tries to hide it, but I like him for the smile.

  “When she wouldn’t, he told her she’d have to leave the college before the pregnancy started to show.”

  “And did she?”

  “Yes. Emilio told the authorities she’d been offered a sabbatical somewhere. I think he even came up with an actual college.”

  “So who knew about it?”

  “Her close friends, including other art students. But Tess asked them not to tell the college.”

  I just couldn’t understand why you protected Emilio. He hadn’t earned that from you. He’d done nothing to deserve it.

  “Did he offer Tess any help?” asks Mr. Wright.

  “No. He accused her of tricking him into pregnancy and said that he wouldn’t be pressured into helping her or the baby in any way.”

  “Had she ‘tricked’ him?” asks Mr. Wright.

  I’m surprised at the amount of detail he wants from me, but then remember that he wants me to tell him everything and let him decide later what is relevant.

  “No. The pregnancy wasn’t intentional.”

  I remember the rest of our phone call. I was in my office overseeing a new corporate identity for a restaurant chain, multitasking with my job as older sister.

>   “But how can it possibly be an accident, Tess?”

  The design team had chosen Bernard MT condensed typeface, which looked old-fashioned rather than the retro look I’d briefed.

  “Accident sounds a little negative, Bee. Surprise is better.”

  “Okay, how can you get a ‘surprise’ when there’s a drugstore in every high street selling condoms?”

  You laughed affectionately, teasing me as I chastised you. “Some people just get carried away in the moment.”

  I felt the implied criticism. “But what are you going to do?”

  “Get larger and larger and then have a baby.”

  You sounded so childish; you were acting so childishly, how could you possibly become a mother?

  “It’s happy news; don’t be cross.”

  “Did she ever consider an abortion?” Mr. Wright asks.

  “No.”

  “You were brought up as Catholics?”

  “Yes, but that wasn’t why she wouldn’t have an abortion. The only Catholic sacrament Tess ever believed in is the sacrament of the present moment.”

  “I’m sorry, I’m afraid I don’t know…”

  I know that it’s of no use to the trial, but I’d like him to know more about you than hard-edged facts in black three-ring binders.

  “It means living in the here and now,” I explain. “Experiencing the present without worrying about the future or cluttering it with the past.”

  I’ve never bought that sacrament; it’s too irresponsible, too hedonistic. It was probably tacked on by the Greeks—Dionysus gate-crashing Catholicism to make sure they at least had a party.

  There’s something else I want him to know. “Even at the beginning, when the baby was little more than a collection of cells, she loved him. That’s why she thought her body was a miracle. That’s why she would never have had an abortion.”

  He nods, and gives your love for your baby a decently respectful pause.

  “When was the baby diagnosed with cystic fibrosis?” he asks.

  I am glad he called him a baby and not a fetus. You and your baby are starting to become more human to him now.

  “At twelve weeks,” I reply. “Because of our family history of CF, she had a genetic screen.”

  “It’s me.” I could tell that at the other end of the phone you were struggling not to cry. “He’s a boy.” I knew what was coming. “He has cystic fibrosis.” You sounded so young. I didn’t know what to say to you. You and I knew too much about CF for me to offer platitudes. “He’s going to go through all of that, Bee, just like Leo.”

  “So that was in August?” asks Mr. Wright.

  “Yes. The tenth. Four weeks later she phoned to tell me that she’d been offered a new genetic therapy for her baby.”

  “What did she know about it?” asks Mr. Wright.

  “She said that the baby would be injected with a healthy gene to replace the cystic fibrosis gene. And it would be done while he was still in the womb. As he developed and grew, the new gene would continue to replace the faulty cystic fibrosis gene.”

  “What was your reaction?”

  “I was frightened of the risks she’d be taking. First, with the vector and—”

  Mr. Wright interrupts. “Vector? I’m sorry I don’t…”

  “It’s the way a new gene gets into the body. A taxi, if you like. Viruses are often used as vectors because they are good at infecting cells in the body, and so they carry in the new gene at the same time.”

  “You’re quite an expert.”

  “In our family we’re all amateur experts in the genetics field, because of Leo.”

  “But people have died in these gene therapy trials, Tess. All their organs failing.”

  “Just let me finish, please? They’re not using a virus as a vector. That’s the brilliant thing about it. Someone’s managed to make an artificial chromosome to get the gene into the baby’s cells. So there’s no risk to the baby. It’s incredible, isn’t it?”

  It was incredible. But it didn’t stop me from worrying. I remember the rest of our phone call. I was wearing my full older-sister uniform.

  “Okay, so there won’t be a problem with the vector. But what about the modified gene itself? What if it doesn’t just cure the CF but does something else that hasn’t been predicted?”

  “Could you please stop worrying?”

  “It might have some appalling side effect. It might mess up something else in the body that isn’t even known about.”

  “Bee—”

  “Okay, so it might seem like a small risk—”

  You interrupted, elbowing me off my soapbox. “Without this therapy, he has cystic fibrosis. A big fat one-hundred-percent definite on that. So a small risk is something I have to take.”

  “You said they’re going to inject it into your tummy?”

  I could hear the smile in your voice. “How else will it get into the baby?”

  “So this gene therapy could well affect you too.”

  You sighed. It was your “please get off my back” sigh, the sigh of a younger sister to an older one.

  “I’m your sister. I have a right to be concerned about you.”

  “And I’m my baby’s mother.”

  Your response took me aback.

  “I’ll write to you, Bee.”

  You hung up.

  “Did she often write to you?” asks Mr. Wright.

  I wonder if he’s interested or if there’s a point to the question.

  “Yes. Usually when she knew I’d disapprove of something. Sometimes when she just needed to sort out her thoughts and wanted me as a silent sounding board.”

  I’m not sure if you know this, but I’ve always enjoyed your one-way conversations. Although they often exasperate me, it’s liberating to be freed from my role as critic.

  “The police gave me a copy of her letter,” says Mr. Wright.

  I’m sorry. I had to hand all your letters to the police.

  He smiles. “The human angels letter.”

  I’m glad that he’s highlighted what mattered to you, not what’s important for his investigation. And I don’t need the letter to remember that part of it:

  “All these people—people I don’t know, didn’t even know about—have been working hour after hour, day after day for years and years to find a cure. To start with, the research was funded by charitable donations. There really are angels, human angels in white lab coats and tweed skirts, organizing fun runs and bake sales and shaking buckets so that one day someone they’ve never even met has her baby cured.”

  “Was it her letter that allayed your fears about the therapy?” asks Mr. Wright.

  “No. The day before I got it, the gene therapy trial hit the U.S. press. Chrom-Med’s genetic cure for cystic fibrosis was all over the papers and wall to wall on TV. But there were just endless pictures of cured babies and very little science. Even the broadsheets used the words ‘miracle baby’ far more than ‘genetic cure.’”

  Mr. Wright nods. “Yes. It was the same here.”

  “But it was also all over the Net, which meant I could research it thoroughly. I found out that the trial had met all the statutory checks, more than the statutory checks, actually. Twenty babies in the UK had so far been born free of CF and were perfectly healthy. The mothers had suffered no ill effects. Pregnant women in America who had fetuses with cystic fibrosis were begging for the treatment. I realized how lucky Tess was to be offered it.”

  “What did you know about Chrom-Med?”

  “That they were well established and had been doing genetic research for years. And that they had paid Professor Rosen for his chromosome and then employed him to continue his research.”

  Allowing your ladies in tweed skirts to stop shaking buckets.

  “I’d also watched half a dozen or so TV interviews with Professor Rosen, the man who’d invented the new cure.”

  I know it shouldn’t have made a difference, but it was Professor Rosen who changed my mind about the t
herapy, or at least opened it. I remember the first time I saw him on TV.

  The morning TV presenter purred her question at him. “So how does it feel, Professor Rosen, to be the ‘man behind the miracle,’ as some people are dubbing you?”

  Opposite her, Professor Rosen looked absurdly clichéd with his wire glasses and narrow shoulders and furrowed brow, a white coat no doubt hanging up somewhere off camera. “It’s hardly a miracle. It’s taken decades of research and—”

  She interrupted. “Really.”

  It was a full stop, but he misinterpreted her and took it as an invitation to carry on. “The CF gene is on chromosome seven. It makes a protein called the cystic fibrosis transmembrane conductance regulator, CFTR for short.”

  She smoothed her tight pencil skirt over her streamlined legs, smiling at him. “If we could have the simple version, Professor Rosen.”

  “This is the simple version. I created an artificial microchromosome—”

  “I really don’t think our viewers…” she said, waving her hands as if this were beyond mortal understanding. I was irritated by her and was glad when Professor Rosen was too.

  “Your viewers are blessed with brains, are they not? My artificial chromosome can safely transport a new healthy gene into the cells with no risks.”

  I thought that someone probably had had to coach him in how to present his science in noddy language. It was as if Professor Rosen himself were dismayed by it and could do it no longer. “The human artificial chromosome not only introduces but also stably maintains therapeutic genes. Synthetic centromeres were—”

  She hurriedly interrupted him. “I’m afraid we’ll have to skip our science lesson today, Professor, because I’ve got someone who wants to say a special thank you.”

  She turned to a large TV screen, which had a live feed from a hospital. A teary-eyed mother and proud new father, cuddling their healthy newborn, thanked Professor Rosen for curing their beautiful baby boy. Professor Rosen clearly found it distasteful and was embarrassed by it. He wasn’t reveling in his success and I liked him for it.