What She Was Like

People sent flowers again.

This time I asked them not to. Some sent them anyway, with messages about closure, as though we had been waiting for a door to be fitted rather than for a person to come home.

Evie’s old manager from the garden centre sent a photograph of her standing beside an enormous sack of compost. She was giving the camera two fingers. On the back he had written that she was a terrible timekeeper and very good with customers who didn’t know what they wanted.

It was the best thing anyone sent.

A woman called Robyn contacted me. She had worked Saturdays with Evie. They had planned to share a flat above a shop in town. There had been a deposit, a list of furniture and a disagreement about whether a kitchen needed curtains.

“Your mum said she couldn’t face talking to any of us,” Robyn told me. “After she went missing. She said it was best to leave you alone.”

So much solitude had been arranged on my behalf.

We met for coffee. Robyn brought a notebook in which Evie had written down the plants she wanted on their windowsill. Most were things nobody could eat or use. She had wanted them because she liked them.

“She said your dad thought houseplants were a waste of money,” Robyn said.

“He did.”

“Well. There you are.”

I began to gather things that had not been selected by our mother: a badly recorded video from a staff party; a recipe Evie had stolen from somebody’s aunt; a postcard she had sent to a friend while staying at a place only forty miles from home. She had written that she was enjoying the international travel.

None of it made a complete person. I stopped expecting that it would.

We buried her on a Tuesday in early spring. I chose a place away from our parents. The decision upset one of Mother’s cousins, who said a family ought to be together.

“We tried that,” I said.

I spoke at the funeral. Not well. I lost my place twice. I said that Evie had wanted her own flat and hated people touching her records, that she could make a small child laugh without making the adults perform appreciation, and that she had once eaten an orange very slowly during a family argument because our father had ordered her to finish whatever she was doing and pay attention.

I had laughed at that orange until I was sent to my room.

For eighteen years I had remembered the punishment better than the joke.

There was an investigation into the statement I had made at seventeen. I had a solicitor. I went back to the station. I answered questions that were not made gentler by the fact that I was telling the truth now.

In the end, I was not charged. The letter telling me so was brief. I put it with the other papers. It was not a certificate saying I had done nothing wrong.

I wrote separately to the people whose accounts Mother had discouraged and whose memories I had once refused to discuss. Some replied. Some didn’t. I did not send second letters asking them to make me feel better.

Ben pleaded guilty before a trial was due to begin. The details of the case occupied more than one hearing and less space in the newspapers than his photograph. I attended what I could. Louise attended separately. We sat together once, because there were only two seats left in the row.

After the sentence, Mother’s cousin rang to say our father had ruined three lives.

“Four,” I said.

Then I thought of Kit and stopped counting.