Between Sisters (14 page)

‘Martha loves French but she worries a bit,’ Mrs Boyne was saying. ‘I don’t want her to worry; I just want her to be happy.’

Jo beamed at Mrs Boyne: a woman after her own heart. Who cared what Fiona did in school as long as she was happy? Children were gifts, not puppets whereby parents got to correct all their own mistakes and make their kids do what
they’d
always wanted to do.

She thought of her parents and the rigid upbringing she and her siblings had undergone. It wasn’t the prayers that had been hard, but the fierce moralising, the hypocritical denouncing of everyone who didn’t follow their creed; and finally the screeching that her brother Xavier was wicked and needed to be saved, because ‘God couldn’t stand the very thought of homosexuality’. They’d actually tried to have him visit a retreat where his gayness could be ‘cured’. Devastated, poor Xav had eventually left the country and settled in Paris. Jo doubted if he’d ever come home. He was happy now, with a partner called Thomas and with friends who loved him for himself.

‘Ms Kinsella, are you all right?’

Jo was conscious of Mrs Boyne suddenly staring at her. The headache coalesced from dull and aching into something more – something sharper and intense. In an instant, Jo was conscious that her arms had slumped down to her lap and that her head was lolling to one side. Very strange. Her face felt funny, the left side – was that the right word? Left …? Yes, the left part felt odd and … and …
darkness.

Jo knew no more. She didn’t hear Mrs Boyne scream or grab her, she didn’t hear someone shouting for the school nurse, or another person yell for an ambulance. She was gone, into another world …

The margarita pizzas went down a treat and by half seven, Beth, Lily and Fiona were all dressed up in Coco’s clothes, having consumed the entire container of chocolate biscuit cake. All homework had been done, Beth promised.

Coco, having been styled by Fiona, now sat in a white flouncy 1970s dress from the shop, wearing Fiona-applied lipstick (heavy pink gloss) and with a diamanté necklace attached to her head like a headpiece, with the help of many painful hair clips. Her eyebrows were Frida Kahlo dark and all she needed was a striped shawl, a few necklaces and some major art talent to complete the look.

Beth’s phone was playing her favourite Taylor Swift album as Beth herself, clad in tight black, tried on every pair of Coco’s high heels. Lily was experimenting with a 1940s dress with a fitted bodice and huge cartwheel skirt with acres of tulle underneath. She kept twirling to enjoy the effect of the underskirts of tulle.

‘Fashion show time,’ announced Fiona, done up like a little queen in a far-too-big red spotty dress with perilous heels, a giant black hat, and wearing black suede gloves that Coco had never been able to sell in the shop because of a big orange mark on one of them.

‘You have to fix the room afterwards,’ Coco said weakly, because she knew she’d be doing it all herself later. Clothes were flung all over the place, her en suite bathroom looked like the chorus line of Le Crazy Horse Saloon had just got made up in there, and the scent of perfume and pizza mingled in the air.

Cassie hadn’t phoned yet but Coco hoped she’d laugh when she did turn up. Whatever disaster had gone on at work, nobody could fail to laugh when they arrived at the door to see Coco’s normally pristine apartment in such hilarious disarray.

Taylor was just singing about how the game was played when the doorbell rang.

Cassie must have forgotten her key,
Coco thought, relieved that the noise level was going to go down once her nieces went home.

She opened the door, not caring that Cassie would see her looking ridiculous. But it wasn’t Cassie at the door: it was a tall, older woman, accompanied by a young woman Coco was vaguely aware of knowing.

Then it came to her: the younger woman was a friend of Jo’s from school. They looked grim and instantly, her stomach lurched. Why would Jo’s colleagues turn up at her door unless they had bad news to impart.

Stepping into the hall and shielding everyone inside from the sight of the visitors, she leaned against the doorjamb and said: ‘What’s happened? Is it Cassie?’

Please, no, please not Cassie.
And the girls … How would she tell her nieces something had happened to their mother?
Lord, please let it not be serious …

‘Coco, we met once,’ said the young woman. ‘I teach at St Fintan’s too. It’s Josephine …’ The woman bit her lip as if she couldn’t speak.

‘I’m Ellen Barrett, headmistress of St Fintan’s,’ said the older woman, reaching out for Coco’s hand. ‘I am so sorry to come here with such bad news, Coco, but Josephine has been rushed to hospital—’

‘Has she had an accident?’ interrupted Coco, trying to make sense of it all.

The younger woman found her voice. ‘She just went unconscious at the parent/teacher meeting. Nobody knows why …’

‘You’re listed as her next of kin on her personal details,’ the headmistress said. ‘Does she have no other family?’

Coco thought of the long answer, the one that encapsulated the strange religious fervour of Jo’s parents, the fervour that had made all their three children distance themselves from them. Jo had long since made peace with the fact that her parents were locked in their own harsh, judgemental world.

Jo had gone through several legal hoops to have Coco listed as her next of kin and make Coco Fiona’s legal guardian.

‘Me, a guardian?’ Coco had said at the time, honoured. ‘Can you trust me?’ she’d joked.

‘You have to think of these things when you have kids,’ Jo had said, ‘and yes, I do trust you. Better than those poor God freaks who would have Fiona in a hair shirt, confessing all sorts of insane sins, and on her knees saying the rosary ten times a day. They’ve got worse as they’ve got older, Coco. It’s just not normal, honestly. It breaks my heart to do it but no way my daughter is having anything to do with them. It’s like they’re in a cult that makes them wild-eyed and unhappy. I do not want that for my daughter.’

‘She has family but she’s estranged from her parents,’ Coco said to Ellen Barrett. ‘I’m her next of kin and her daughter’s guardian.’ Mentally she ran through how she was going to tell Fiona what had happened.

Your mum is sick in hospital
. No, how could she do it?

She said goodbye to the two women, said she’d rush to the hospital, but first she needed to sort out the children, including Jo’s daughter, who were inside.

The headmistress clasped Coco’s hand again. ‘Tell us if there is anything we can do,’ she urged.

Back in the apartment, great giggling was going on. Coco closed her eyes at the notion of interrupting it all with what seemed like tragedy.

She looked around for Beth. At fifteen, she was the oldest person present other than Coco, and for a second Coco had a vision of what it must have been like for Cassie and herself when their mother had left home. Cassie had been just seven, a kid, and yet she’d taken care of Coco in her own way all their lives. Whenever she could, Cassie had fought Coco’s battles.

Jo was unconscious, had been when the ambulance had taken her to the hospital, and Fiona had no older sister to take care of her. Instead she had Coco.

‘Beth,’ she said quietly, ‘can I talk to you for a moment?’

Briefly she filled Beth in on what was going on.

‘I don’t think I can take Fiona with me to the hospital,’ Coco said anxiously. ‘But what if Jo wakes up and wants her. Or what –’ she could barely think of it – ‘if Jo doesn’t wake up?’

‘Mum will know,’ said Beth confidently. ‘She always knows what to do.’

In the meeting, Cassie heard her phone buzz discreetly under the table in her handbag. Carefully, she reached down to see who was phoning her, thinking it might possibly be Shay phoning to apologise. But it wasn’t, it was Coco. Normally she might not have bothered answering, assuming it wasn’t anything important, but the girls were with Coco and some strange instinct made her answer it, get out of her seat and leave the room in one swift movement. She was aware of Loren looking at her angrily but she ignored it.

‘Yes, Coco,’ she said. ‘What’s wrong?’

‘Oh Cassie,’ breathed Coco, and Cassie felt her heartbeat shoot up. ‘It’s not the girls; they’re fine. It’s Jo. She’s … I don’t know how to say this but she collapsed at the parent/teacher meeting. She’s unconscious and an ambulance is taking her to hospital.’

‘Unconscious, for no reason?’

Cassie was momentarily rendered dumb. She thought rapidly of all the terrible things that could strike younger people. Sudden cardiac death came to mind, and her own heart lurched.

‘I’m here with the girls, but I need to get to the hospital quickly and I don’t know what to do. I’ve told Beth and she’s been absolutely brilliant, she’s amusing Fiona because I don’t think I can look at Fiona right now, to be honest—’

‘Calm down, honey,’ said Cassie. ‘It’s OK. We’ll figure this out.’

Her mind was still processing this shocking information. Right now, though, she had to think of a plan. She had to be the big sister in charge.

‘OK, this is what you’re going to do. Ring Pearl and ask her to come over to sit with the girls until I can get back, OK? You can’t leave them there on their own. Beth is brilliant but she’s too young to handle this, and Fiona will want to know where you’ve gone when you’re supposed to be minding her, so get Pearl over. Better still, I’ll phone Pearl—’

‘Yes,’ interrupted Coco, sounding panicked, ‘but where do I tell Fiona I’m going?’

There was a pause while Cassie ran over the options in her mind.

‘If she was older we could tell her that her mum’s sick and they’ve taken her to hospital, but she’s too young—’

‘I couldn’t do that,’ said Coco, interrupting again. ‘She’ll want to come and the other teacher from the school said it was bad. Who knows what’s happened. I can’t bring her to casualty. I need to know what’s happening before I can tell her.’

‘Right,’ said Cassie, ‘just lie then. I hate lying to the children but perhaps it’s the right thing to do in this case. Say … say you’ve got to come and see me, and that Pearl’s going to drop in and stay with them for a few minutes. Oh, yes!’ Inspiration struck. Small girls loved sleepovers. ‘Say that we had this brilliant idea that she comes over to my house with the girls; we’ll say it’s a special sleepover. She idolises Beth and Lily.’

‘That sounds better,’ Coco said. ‘The thing is, Cassie, Jo is all she has. I mean, she has me too, but I’m just a part of her life; Jo is
everything
to her. I just wouldn’t be able to tell her something had happened to Jo. I’m not qualified for that.’

Cassie breathed out slowly.

‘I don’t think anyone’s ready for that, ever,’ she said. ‘I’ll leave the meeting now and I’ll come and meet you in the hospital, OK?’

‘No, it’s probably best if you’re there when the girls come home to your place,’ Coco said. ‘That seems more normal. We can tell her in the morning.’

‘Are you sure you don’t need me there for moral support?’

‘I’m fine,’ said Coco. ‘I can do it. Love you.’

‘Love you back,’ said Cassie and hung up.

She stuck her phone into her pocket and walked back into the room, where Loren stopped speaking and looked up at her enquiringly.

‘Family business?’ said Loren, investing the words with sarcasm. Loren thought all family business involved children – small creatures she actively disliked because she saw them as a serious threat to productivity.

‘Yes, family business,’ said Cassie, an edge to her voice. Suddenly she wasn’t in the mood to pander to her boss’s moods anymore. ‘A family emergency, actually, Loren. I’m afraid I have to go.’

She collected her things.

‘Everything OK?’ whispered Belinda.

‘No, my sister’s best friend’s just collapsed and went unconscious at a parent/teacher meeting. She’s a teacher and she’s only thirty, thirty-one max.’

Belinda blanched. ‘You hear about that but you never think it’s going to happen to someone you know.’

Cassie nodded. She’d felt like that a lot as a teenager – weird stuff happened to some families, and hers just happened to be one of them. But she and Coco had managed. The Keneally sisters had battled through. They’d make it through this, too. Whatever Coco had to deal with, Cassie would be behind her.

Ten

It was 12.45 on Monday night – no, it was now Tuesday morning, Coco thought wearily, as she tapped on the door of Cassie’s house.

Cassie let her sister in quietly.

‘Well?’ she said, knowing that things couldn’t be good from the white, shattered look on Coco’s face.

‘The consultant neurologist said it’s a haemorrhagic stroke,’ Coco said, looking as tired as a person would after spending several hours in accident and emergency. ‘Which apparently means an artery leaked in the brain. A nurse told me it’s lucky he was there because it’s so easy for medical staff to first think of options like drug reactions instead of diagnosing a stroke. I’ve heard that type of thing before. For example, if you’re young and you go to A and E with a heart issue, everyone assumes it’s a cocaine problem until the toxicology results come back. So we were lucky that guy was there.

‘They did CT scans and neurological tests, you name it, and they’re pretty sure. They gave her anti-clotting meds and the doctor said that if patients get these within forty-five minutes to an hour, it hugely improves their chances of recovery. The golden hour, they call it. What nobody’s telling me is how somebody of Jo’s age can have a stroke. They say it happens, but why? How? It makes no sense.’

Coco walked into Cassie’s kitchen and went automatically to the kettle to boil it.

‘The good news is that they don’t think she needs surgery, but we will have to wait and see. I got to sit with her during some of it and she’s so out of it, and when she talks, it’s like she’s drunk because her words are so slurred. One junior doctor came in and told me she’d probably be brain-damaged for life. Luckily another, older, doctor heard him and said they know nothing of the sort. How do they let people say those sort of things to you?’ she asked. ‘And then, before I left, she started crying. The nurse says stroke victims do that but I felt so helpless …’

Coco started to cry herself. Fluffikins jumped silently on to a countertop, shocking them both. To Cassie’s complete surprise, the cat made his way surefootedly over to Coco and rubbed his head against her arm.

‘You have the four-leaf clover,’ Cassie told her sister. ‘He actually hates people.’

‘He might hate happy people,’ said Coco, ‘but obviously feels at home with devastated, confused people.’ She bent her head to croon at the cat, letting tears drop on to the countertop as she did so. She hadn’t cried once in the hospital, not even when she’d seen darling Jo for the first time, all wired up, seemingly asleep, face drooped on one side, looking like a victim instead of the survivor she was. Tears were wrong in the hospital, even when the young doctor had blandly said Jo was going to be damaged forever, but here in Cassie’s presence, Coco could finally cry.

‘He could be a healing cat, for all you know,’ she said, snuffling.

‘First I’ve seen of it,’ said Cassie, knowing that Coco needed a little bit of peace to cry. She’d been the same as a teenager: hated to be looked at when she was upset. ‘He’s normally a grumpy, leave-me-alone cat. Sit, honey, I’ll make the tea.’

Coco gathered the cat up in her arms and sat on the old, worn, fake suede couch, which was shoved up against the wall. Behind it was a huge photomontage of the family, including Coco, in all sorts of happy poses and places. Beth and Lily used to do their homework there but now they worked upstairs in their rooms, while Cassie roared up occasionally about loud music and how could anybody work with that noise?

Coco had spent many happy evenings in this room while babysitting, her nieces snuggled up against her as they watched family movies on the small kitchen TV. The couch felt homely and comforting.

Fluffikins sat patiently on her as if waiting to be helpful: a warm, soft bundle of love.

Making a pot of tea, Cassie kept looking over at this vision. It added to the strangeness of the night. Upstairs in the spare bedroom, little Fiona lay fast asleep on a ‘sleepover’, while her mother – her thirty-one-year-old mother – was in hospital after suffering from a stroke. In the midst of these happenings, Cassie’s cat behaving oddly was probably not that odd after all.

‘They told me to go home. Said they’d phone if there was any change. That there was nothing I could do.’

‘Was there hassle over you being her next of kin?’

‘Not really. At first everyone assumed I was her sister, but someone from the school emailed in the details the school had about me being first of kin and Fiona’s guardian, so that sort of nailed it. Now they think I’m her girlfriend. I phoned Attracta in Australia and she couldn’t believe it. Kept saying, “Are you sure?” and then said to call her again later when I knew more. Didn’t sound like she’s coming home, though. Xavier’s phone went to voicemail. I hated saying it was an emergency with Jo to a stupid voicemail, but I had to say something. I feel strange, though, as I should phone her parents …’

‘Well, I suppose you have to,’ Cassie said reluctantly. ‘They’re her mum and dad, after all. It’s the right thing to do. But as long as they don’t upset Fiona.’

Cassie had known Jo as long as her sister had, and had seen how Jo’s parents had gone from devout to over-the-edge religious hysteria. It was not beyond reason that the Kinsellas would march in and declare that their daughter’s illness was divine retribution for some transgression.

She brought the tea and some biscuits, which Coco tried not to eat, over to the small table in front of the couch. Now was no time to worry about calories.

Both sisters sat together and suddenly Fluffikins leapt off Coco’s lap, as if the sense of anxiety and fear emanating from both of them had frightened him. Separately he could manage their anxieties; together, the scent of sheer stress coming from the sisters was too much.

‘Not a healing cat, then,’ commented Coco, polishing off her first biscuit.

‘Never has been before. So, what’s next?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Coco. ‘If she hadn’t lost consciousness where she did, who knows? It could have happened in her sleep and she could be dead. Or really badly affected. Remember Pearl’s friend who had a stroke and ended up in a nursing home, in a wheelchair, not able to communicate? Pearl used to take us to talk to her and we hated it, remember?’

The sisters sat and hugged silently while the cat watched them.

‘That’s got to be the extreme version, doesn’t it?’ Cassie said, trying to find hope. ‘She was an old lady then and I’m sure there are different levels of stroke. Plus, they saw Jo early and gave her the magic meds, which probably weren’t around all those years ago with Pearl’s friend. And if it’s a brain injury, she can have rehab and recover …’

‘Maybe,’ said Coco. ‘I don’t know.’ She gazed off into the middle distance.

‘So, how are we going to tell Fiona?’ Cassie asked, and Coco sighed inside with relief.

It was the use of the word ‘we’. With her sister on her side, Coco would try anything, but taking care of a frightened young girl, mothering her … How could she ever do that? And yet it was what she’d signed up for.

How easy it had been to say she’d be there in case anything happened to her best friend, but how hard it would be in practice. What did she really know about taking care of a child? But there was nobody else and she wouldn’t want Fiona going to anyone else. She loved Fiona like a daughter.

‘I kept thinking, as I looked at Jo, that I was going to have to tell Fiona what’s happened, yet how do I do that? She’s a child. How is she going to understand that her mother can’t speak properly right now, that she doesn’t even look like her mother normally looks? That she’ll need rehabilitation, that she might never speak properly again, that she might use a wheelchair and be silent, just like Pearl’s friend.’

Even the words seemed strange:
Jo
and
rehabilitation
together.

‘I have no idea how to tell her,’ Coco said sadly. ‘No idea at all.’

She’d said as much to one of the casualty doctors, who’d looked at her blankly and then sighed. ‘I don’t know,’ the doctor said, her face weary and pale from night shifts. ‘How do you tell anyone this? It’s not my area of expertise. I don’t have kids.’

‘Neither do I!’ Coco wanted to say frantically, but for now, she sort of did have kids. One kid. With Jo in a hospital bed seriously ill, Coco was technically acting as Fiona’s mother.

She simply wasn’t equipped to impart this sort of information.

‘If I sleep on the floor and maybe try to tell her in the morning …’ Coco broke off.

All through the terrible time in hospital, she’d thought of Fiona’s little face when she would finally see her mother. Jo was surrounded by monitors, clamped to a narrow hospital bed, and with the paralysis of her face and her inability to speak except in a weird slurred voice, she didn’t look or sound anything like herself, and when Coco had left, she’d been crying for the past half an hour. How exactly could Coco explain
this
to a nine-year-old?

‘We have to tell her that her mum’s going to get better, that she still loves Fiona even though she’s in hospital, that you and I are going to take care of her, and we’ll all be there when her mum gets out. Children need to know they’re loved, that none of this is their fault, and that the adults are taking care of it all,’ Cassie explained.

Coco stopped drinking her tea. ‘Is that what you used to tell me when I was small? That it wasn’t my fault Mum had left?’

Cassie felt the breath leave her body as fully as if she’d been punched in the stomach. It was like having something she’d been avoiding thinking about for years suddenly emerge in front of her like a giant stone wall.

‘It wasn’t your fault she left,’ she said, inhaling shakily. ‘It was mine.’ She corrected herself. ‘I
thought
it was mine. Kids do, you see. They think they made their parents split up or they made everyone upset.’

Saying ‘kids’ think that made it sound as if Cassie hadn’t felt that it was entirely her fault that their mother had left. Although she had. Totally.

Somewhere inside, she still did.

If she’d been different, better, maybe her mum might not have gone. And even if she had gone, maybe if Cassie had been the sort of child she’d wanted, maybe her mother would have come back. It all came down to those simple details. Simple and devastating enough to last a lifetime.

‘I thought my being born had made her want to go because I wasn’t right or something,’ Coco said slowly. ‘I know, silly when you’re a grown-up and look back at it, but I thought it was me. She’d loved you, she didn’t go when
you
were a baby, but she went when I came along. It had to be me, you see.’

‘Nobody wanted to talk about it, did they?’ Cassie said slowly, trying very hard to hide her own shock and devastation. Her heartbeat was racing now. Was this a panic attack? She had to cover it up; Coco had enough going on without Cassie going into a meltdown about their personal thirty-year-old tragedy.

What was
wrong
with her? She should have gotten over this by now. It had been thirty years ago, for heaven’s sake!

‘I always felt Pearl could have told us more but didn’t want to hurt us,’ Coco went on, in between drinking her tea.

‘Yes,’ said her sister absently.

Shay. She needed Shay. They’d barely spoken since he’d come home that evening – she’d been so irritated that he’d been busy with his mother when she’d needed him. He’d gone to bed without hugging her. Was that her fault or his mother’s? Was Antoinette trying to drag him back to the family home …? Was he going to leave too?

The sisters sat in silence for a while, watching the cat stalking around the room until he found where he wanted to sit.

Coco reflected that their mother’s absence was the elephant in the room for so much of their childhood. Nobody else talked about it, and quickly the subject had became clouded with the patina of silence. Sometimes, late at night in the room they shared in Delaney Gardens, the sisters could speak of it, in the moonlight, and with nobody else around. It had an ephemeral quality, talking about the mother who’d gone; outside that room, they never discussed her.

‘She left Dad too,’ said Coco. ‘Looking back, I think that killed him. Do you ever think that? That he fell apart and never got fixed?’

It was that thought that finally broke Cassie’s calm self-control. Watching a happy, entirely unaware nine-year-old going to sleep had brought it all back to her: what would happen to Fiona in the morning when she learned the truth? The way Cassie had learned the truth. In her case, that people left and never came back.

And it was the ones left behind who fell apart.

Mothers could leave. Mothers left. Wives left. People left. Everything was precarious.

Coco touched her sister’s hand with the lightest of touches, as if she was reading her thoughts.

Coco had never known Dad any other way but sad. She could see him now: the bald head with the tonsure of grey, and the sad eyes that could perk up into a smile but never really went into full-blown happiness. Pearl had made up for it. Pearl had had enough
joie de vivre
for three people – she’d had to.

‘We don’t know why she went, Cassie,’ said Coco. ‘We still don’t know why. We know it’s not us, whatever really sent her off. We were kids. If you left Lily and Beth now, would it be their fault? No, it wouldn’t.’

But Cassie wasn’t really listening anymore. It was as if she had gone to some other place in the past. ‘I can sort of remember her perfume,’ she said mistily, ‘but it eludes me whenever I’m in a department store and I sniff at the older perfumes. Some of them sort of smell right, but are not quite hers. Her hair was long, like yours more than mine – richer, darker, all tumbling curls. She had your sense of style: different, cooler than everyone else. She used to come to pick me up from school in this fun fur coat, golden and shaggy, like a lioness’s, and she looked more glamorous than all the other mothers.’

Cassie turned brimming eyes to her sister, who was staring at her sadly because Coco had seen none of this. ‘I loved her so much and she left me. She left us. It still makes me scared that other people will leave.’