The Things We Say for Family

Mum was waiting in the kitchen when I got home. Sam wasn't with her.

There were three new light bulbs on the table, still in their box. She must have stopped at the hardware shop on the way back. I found that detail more alarming than if she'd been crying. Whatever else had happened, she had remembered the landing light.

“Sit down,” she said.

I put my bag on the floor.

“Where's Sam?”

“He's still speaking to someone. We arranged for him to get advice before he answers more questions about the camera.”

“Is he—”

“Bea. Sit.”

I sat.

Mum kept her hands flat on the table. There was a faint red line across the base of one thumb where the shopping-bag handle had pressed into it.

“The inspector told me you need to correct your account of Friday.”

“Yes.”

“Tell me.”

I looked at the bulbs.

“Look at me, please.”

I did.

The story sounded worse in our kitchen than it had inside my head. In my head, each decision came with an explanation attached: the label, Sam's silence, the officer's pen waiting, the fear that saying one wrong thing would make a mess I couldn't put right. Spoken aloud, it became a much shorter sequence. She asked. I knew. I lied.

Mum listened without interrupting. Once, when I said I thought I was helping, she shut her eyes. That was all.

When I finished, she took a breath and let it out carefully.

“Did Sam ask you to say that to the police?”

“No.”

“Did anyone?”

“No.”

“Then don't tell me it was something you had to do.”

“I didn't say I had to.”

“You're explaining it as if there wasn't another choice.”

I looked down. “I know there was.”

“Denise doesn't know where her son is.”

“I know.”

“And the people trying to find him have spent time working from something that wasn't true.”

“I know.”

“Do you?”

The question hurt because I could not answer it without sounding either stupid or cruel.

“Yes,” I said. “That's why I rang this morning.”

“This morning. After he told you he'd give his own account.”

I felt my face heat.

“I was going to tell you last night.”

“But you didn't.”

“No.”

The kitchen window was open an inch. Somewhere outside, a child was arguing that it wasn't their turn to be in goal. The ordinary, indignant voice made me want to cry.

Mum took one hand off the table and rubbed her forehead.

“I keep thinking about all the times I've said you were the sensible one.”

I looked up.

“I never meant that as a job description,” she said.

“It wasn't just you.”

“I know.”

“Everyone does it. Sam forgets something, so I remember it. Sam needs a number, so I find it. Sam says he'll be somewhere, and then someone rings me.”

“That doesn't mean you have to make his mistakes disappear.”

“I know that now.”

“You knew it before.”

I wanted to argue. I wanted there to be a version in which being frightened had made me temporarily unable to understand right and wrong. But I'd known exactly enough to feel relief when the inspector wrote down what I said. Relief required me to know what I'd avoided.

“Yes,” I said.

Mum nodded, once, as if we had finally reached a surface solid enough to stand on.

“I am angry with you.”

“I can tell.”

“And frightened for you.”

I hadn't expected that part.

“You're seventeen. You think because you can explain something clearly, you can control what happens after you've said it. You can't.”

“I don't think that.”

She looked at me.

I thought of Rowan's face on the screen at the November screening. I had believed the music would make everyone see him in a sympathetic light. I had believed the film's ending would make the part before it acceptable. I had been wrong in ways that no amount of careful editing afterwards could undo.

“Maybe a bit,” I said.

Mum reached for the box of bulbs, then left it alone.

“We'll go and speak to them properly when they've arranged it. You will tell them everything you actually remember. You will say when you're unsure. And you will stop trying to protect me from finding things out.”

“I wasn't protecting you.”

“You've been doing it since you were twelve.”

I stared at her.

She didn't elaborate. She didn't need to. There had been the year Dad stopped sending money regularly, the year Mum worked Christmas Eve and Boxing Day, the year Sam's school trip had been refunded because he said he didn't want to go. I had learned to say I didn't need things before she asked. It had become a habit, then a source of pride, then something I could mistake for love itself.

“You weren't supposed to notice,” I said.

Mum made a small sound, almost a laugh.

“I'm your mother, Bea. Not a person who happens to live here and enjoy washing towels.”

I cried then, abruptly and with no dignity. She moved her chair beside mine. She didn't say it was all right. She put an arm around me and let it be wrong while I cried.

After a while, she handed me a piece of kitchen roll.

“Don't use your sleeve.”

I laughed into it, which made everything worse for a moment.

She stayed until I could breathe normally. Then she stood and filled the kettle.

“I need to go back to work for a couple of hours,” she said. “Lena's covering me, but she has a child to collect. Sam will ring when he's finished. Will you be here?”

“Yes.”

“No interviews with your friends. No detective work on your phone.”

“I wasn't—”

She raised an eyebrow.

“Okay.”

Before she left, she changed the landing bulb. I held the chair steady while she reached up, though she told me the chair wasn't going anywhere. The new light came on cleanly, showing the mark on the wall where Sam had dragged his bag upstairs and a cobweb neither of us had noticed in the dark.

“That's better,” Mum said.

It was such a small, exact improvement that I nearly started crying again.

I spent the next hour trying to do my English homework. We were supposed to analyse how a speaker established credibility in an interview. I read the question three times, closed the document and went downstairs.

There was a message from Lou, my supervisor at the supermarket, asking whether I wanted her to keep me off the rota for Monday as well. I called her instead of replying.

“You don't need to decide now,” she said. “I can cover it.”

“I'd rather work.”

“Are you sure?”

“I need something to do.”

“That's different from being sure.”

I sat on the bottom stair. The new landing light was still on above me.

“Maybe a shorter shift?” I said.

“We can do that.”

She asked whether we'd heard anything. I said no. Then there was a pause long enough for me to hear the store announcement in the background.

“Bea,” she said, “someone was in earlier saying things about your brother. I told them the shop wasn't the place for it. I wanted you to hear that from me, not walk in and get blindsided.”

“What things?”

“About equipment going missing. I'm not asking you to explain.”

“It isn't anything to do with Rowan.”

“I hope not. But you don't have to prove anything to me over the phone.”

After we hung up, I opened the sixth-form group chat.

There it was, already several screens back: somebody had heard Sam Carter stole a camera from the centre. Somebody else said the police had interviewed him. A third person had joined those facts together with a question mark, which apparently made it different from an accusation.

I began typing.

I wrote that nobody knew what they were talking about. I wrote that Sam had been nowhere near Rowan. Then I stopped with my thumb above the send button.

I didn't know that second thing. I knew what Sam had told me. I knew he had reasons to lie and reasons not to. I knew that my certainty had already done enough damage.

I deleted the message.

Imani sent me a private one almost immediately.

Don't read all of it.

Too late, I wrote.

Then stop now.

I stared at her words. There was no heart after them, no softening joke. I found that oddly comforting. She was not trying to turn advice into a performance of closeness.

I called her.

“Sorry,” I said when she answered. “Is this a bad time?”

“I'm helping my dad work out why the printer says it has no paper while visibly containing paper. So, yes, but not because of you.”

I smiled despite myself.

“I need to tell you something.”

“All right.”

“I told the police Sam was with me during the break. He wasn't.”

There was no sound at the other end for a moment.

Then she said, “Have you told them that?”

“I've sent a correction. I'm speaking to them properly with Mum.”

“Okay.”

“I didn't want you to hear it in the group chat.”

“Thank you.”

I waited for another question. She didn't ask one.

“That's it?” I said.

“What would you like me to say?”

“I don't know.”

“I don't either.”

Her honesty landed harder than comfort would have.

“Are you angry?”

“Yes,” she said. “A bit. I showed you all those pictures, and you asked whether I'd given yours to the police. I thought you were worried about how you looked.”

“I was.”

“You know what I mean.”

“I do.”

In the background, her dad said something about a paper tray. Imani covered the phone briefly, answered him, then came back.

“I have to go.”

“Right.”

“I'm glad you've told them.”

“Me too.”

It wasn't quite true yet, but it was something I could imagine becoming true without hurting anyone.

We hung up.

Sam came home twenty minutes later. He let himself in quietly, saw me on the stairs and stopped.

“Does Mum know?” he asked.

“Yes.”

He sat on the step below mine, leaving his shoes on.

For a while we listened to a car alarm somewhere down the street. Then he said he had given the police Dex's details and the name of the shop. He hadn't been arrested. That didn't mean the theft would disappear. Someone would be in touch.

“Did they ask about Rowan?” I said.

“Yes.”

“What did you—”

I stopped.

Sam looked back at me.

“We probably shouldn't do that,” I said. “Work out each other's answers.”

He nodded slowly.

“Yeah.”

The alarm stopped. The silence afterwards was almost physical.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

I looked at the back of his head. His hair needed cutting. There was a little pale patch near the crown where he'd fallen off a wall when we were children and Mum had held a tea towel against his scalp while I cried more loudly than he did.

“For which part?” I asked.

He considered it.

“Starting with the camera.”

“Okay.”

“And asking you to cover.”

“Okay.”

“And being the sort of person you thought you had to cover for.”

I swallowed.

“That part's partly me.”

“Not all of it.”

“No.”

He leaned back carefully, resting one shoulder against the wall.

We did not hug. We were not suddenly better at being brother and sister. After a few minutes he got up to make something to eat, and I reminded him there was pasta in the fridge. He asked whether I wanted some. I said yes.

It was the first useful thing we had managed together all day.