The Alphabet Sisters (48 page)

T
hey all took turns sitting with her, watching her sleep, the sound of her breathing more ragged each day, the effort of getting air into her lungs racking her body. She spoke rarely, but her eyes were bright, her smile still her own.

F
our weeks after Anna had come home from the hospital, Bett was woken by a knocking at her door. She hadn’t been in bed long. All of them had been around Anna’s bed until after midnight, talking a little, praying a little, mostly just quiet in their own thoughts. They were now keeping a vigil at her bedside. Bett was due to be back with her in just three hours’ time.

At first she confused the sound of the knocking with the sound of the rain that had been pelting down on the roof when she had gone to bed. It had been wet for five days running. Then she heard a voice and was out of bed before Lola opened her door. She knew by the expression on her grandmother’s face before Lola had a chance to tell her.

Anna was dead.

Chapter Thirty-one

A
nna’s funeral took place on a perfect autumn day. The sky was blue. The air was crisp and clear. The rows of vines around the church and the cemetery were vivid reds, browns, and oranges.

They all dressed up. Lola, Carrie, Geraldine, and Bett put on makeup, did their hair, getting ready quietly and calmly, moving from room to room at the motel. The men shaved carefully, polished their shoes, wore good suits. Ellen wore her favorite clothes, the pink dress and matching hat she had worn the night of Lola’s party.

They took up the entire front pew of the church. Lola. Jim. Geraldine. Bett. Daniel. Carrie. Matthew. Glenn. Ellen. Richard. There wasn’t quite enough room, but they couldn’t be separated, needing the touch of another each time they sat down. Ellen had hardly let go of her father’s hand since Anna had died.

Several feet away from them, in the middle of the aisle, was Anna’s coffin.

The church was crowded. The service was simple, the readings and music beautiful. Lola had produced a sheet of paper the day after Anna died. It was a list of the songs she wanted played, the readings she loved. She had dictated it to her grandmother several weeks before.

They had all been sitting around the kitchen table in the motel when Lola had shown it to them. Numb with shock, Carrie and Bett had found it irrationally funny, nearly falling into each other’s arms in hysterics, a raw mixture of laughter and tears. “She’s still telling us what to do? Even now?”

After the funeral mass, after the time in the cemetery, everyone came back to the motel.

“I’m so sorry.” “We’re so sorry for you all.” “Please accept our sympathies.”

The mood was dull, subdued. There was talk, but not a great deal. Cups of tea. Sandwiches. Bett felt removed from everything. She kept expecting to turn and see Anna in a corner of the room. The old Anna, not sick Anna. She kept expecting to see that glossy dark hair, that tall, straight back. She wanted to hear her voice.

She saw her father in the corner. He was pouring tea, his head bent low to hear what an elderly lady was saying to him. He looked ten years older. Her mother was on the other side of the room. Her face was like a mask. Carrie was standing with Matthew. He had his arm tightly across her back. Richard was in a corner, in conversation with the local priest. He seemed dazed, as though he wasn’t taking any of it in. Glenn was holding Ellen, so tightly it was as if he never wanted to let her go.

“Bett?”

She turned. It was Daniel. “Is there anything I can do?”

In that moment it seemed to hit her. There was nothing he could do. There was nothing anyone could do. He opened his arms and she moved soundlessly into them.

G
lenn and Ellen left a week later. The departure was heartbreaking for all of them. Ellen kept going to Anna’s room, as if expecting her to be there. An hour before they were due to leave, she disappeared. It took them nearly thirty minutes to find her. Bett reached her first. Ellen was tucked up behind the shed at the back of the motel, holding tightly to Bumper by his lead.

“Ellie, you need to go, sweetheart. Daddy’s nearly ready.”

Ellen wouldn’t look at her. “I don’t want to. I want to stay here.”

“You can come back here whenever you like.”

“I want to be here now.”

Glenn came up behind her and took in the situation. He got down to Ellen’s level. “Ellie, I promise you can come back very soon. I want you to come home with me for a while first, though. I need your help.”

She shook her head.

Bett realized this was a moment for father and daughter. She silently slipped away, back to where Lola and her parents and Carrie and Matthew were waiting. There was still the jolt at Anna’s absence. The gap where she should be. The terrible reality of all of them gathered without her.

Ten minutes later Glenn and Ellen came toward them, hand in hand. Ellen was subdued. She said good-bye to each of them very solemnly, hugging them around the neck. Each one of them had the same farewell message. “See you soon.” “We’ll see you soon, Ellie.”

Then each of them hugged Glenn good-bye as well.

R
ichard left three days later. Bett had gone for a drink with him the evening before. He was as sad these days as they were.

He was going back to London again. For a few months anyway. He’d been offered work at his old newspaper. “I’ll be back, I hope. In a while. I just can’t seem to finish anything here at the moment.”

“Will you keep in touch with us?”

“If you’d like me to.”

“We’d like it very much.”

They all hugged him good-bye as well.

C
arrie and Matthew came for dinner at the motel most nights. They were trying to fix up one of the rooms of their house as a nursery, but Carrie was finding it very difficult. “I’m so scared that something will happen to the baby, that it’s bad luck. I keep thinking about everyone dying. We’ll have to go through this again and again, with Lola, with Mum and Dad, with you, with …” She was crying. “I want her back, Bett.

“I want her here so she can tell me off. I wouldn’t even mind if she yelled at me for a week.”

There was a kind of laughter those nights, but it was fragile, like glass.

T
wo weeks after Anna died, a videotape arrived addressed to Lola from Richard’s friend Charlie Wentworth. It was the complete version of the program he had been making, as well as all the rough footage he had shot the day he was in the Clare Valley with them.

He had enclosed a note. Richard had told him about Anna. He explained that the program had gone to air in the United Kingdom and Ireland a fortnight before, but that he thought they might like the extra footage just as much. “I am thinking of you all at this time of great sadness,” he’d signed.

They watched it together, on the video in Lola’s room, in virtual silence. Another time the scenes would have caused much hilarity. They would have set the video up on the bar TV, ordered drinks for everyone, watched the tape over and over, laughing at everyone’s expressions. Not this time.

The segment about General MacArthur’s visit to Terowie took up just a few minutes of the program. There were shots of the MacArthur plaque at Terowie Railway Station, then a shot of the Valley View Motel, followed by Lola sweeping in and pretending to work at her desk. The voice-over explained she had emigrated from Ireland sixty years previously and considered this musical her life’s work. There were several scenes from the musical itself. It was fun, snappy.

The extra footage Charlie mentioned contained image after image of Anna, up onstage with Carrie and Bett, attempting to sing “Sisters,” first accompanied onstage by Matthew, then on their own. There was a kind of joyousness, laughter, a lightness between the three of them. It had taken four attempts, but they had finally gotten their harmonies right, standing in a row with their arms around one another, singing and laughing. The camera kept rolling afterward, long enough to capture Anna first hugging Bett and then Carrie, giving them flamboyant two-cheek kisses, actor-style.

It was like watching something from another century.

B
ett went back to work at the newspaper three weeks after Anna’s death. At first it was as if she was sick. People kept a distance from her, wary, in case she burst into tears. Only Rebecca was normal, and Daniel.

She went to his house for dinner the weekend after that. It was the first time she’d been out at night in the weeks since Anna died. She hadn’t been able to go too far from any of her family. He made a simple meal of pasta and salad, opened a bottle of wine for her. Afterward, she sat in his arms on the sofa, watching TV.

She tried to concentrate on the program, but the dialogue didn’t make any sense and the people looked ridiculous, all made-up, wearing glamorous clothes. As if any of that really mattered in the end.

She felt Daniel kiss the top of her head. Another kiss on the side of her face. She turned, met his lips, a soft, gentle kiss. His hand went lower, skimmed her arm, touched the side of her breast. She felt the stirring of feeling, a slow melting feeling begin and then the sadness roared in at her again. She couldn’t do this. Not with Anna dead.

She sat up abruptly, and moved away from him. “I’m sorry, Daniel, but I can’t.”

“It’s okay, Bett.”

It wasn’t okay. “I’m sorry. It’s not you, I promise. It’s me.”

“Bett, it’s fine. I understand.”

It suddenly seemed urgent to explain it to him. To tell him exactly how she felt. “I need you to know that I love it with you. I love being with you.” She meant every word. She did love him. “It’s just—” she was struggling now, “something is different at the moment. Lola keeps telling me it will get better eventually, that it won’t always hurt as much as this. But I’ll understand if you can’t wait. If you want to stop seeing me.”

“Bett, please, come here. Come closer to me.” She moved and he met her halfway, holding her tightly in his arms. “I’m not going anywhere. And I don’t want you to go anywhere either.”

O
ne night in the motel bar, Jim, Geraldine, and Bett were shocked into silence by the sound of Anna’s voice. It took them a moment to realize it was coming from the TV.

They sat staring at it, hearing her voice warmly extolling the virtues of a new range of baking products.

Geraldine started crying. Jim turned off the TV.

B
ett went to Lola’s room each night to say good night, to check that she was okay, to make sure she had everything she needed. Lola had changed, too. She seemed older. When Bett hugged her now or when she curled up beside her on the bed like now, she felt that the spirit that had driven Lola had dimmed somehow. Nothing felt quite the same.

“It hurts so much, doesn’t it, Lola?”

“It does, darling.”

“Was it as bad as this for you when Edward died?”

There was a long pause. “It was different.”

“Does it really get better?”

“You get used to it, Bett. It becomes a part of you, like everything that happens to you in life becomes a part of you.”

Lola stopped talking then, just stroked the head on the pillow beside her until Bett fell asleep.

Chapter Thirty-two

E
njoy your stay, won’t you?”

It was six weeks after Anna’s death. Bett was at reception, checking in some late-night guests. Carrie had gone home for the night. Bett had handed them their room key, explained how to order breakfast, where the dining room was, and the opening hours for the bar. She’d felt like a liar, a fake, the entire time, as she smiled and tried to talk normally to them. She wondered if any of the guests noticed that there was something not quite right with the family in charge of this motel. Could they see that their smiles weren’t real? That they seemed to move more slowly than usual? That the life had gone out of all of them?

She had never expected it to hurt this much. She’d never expected to feel grief like a physical pain. But it was. She would be walking along and she’d feel the reminder of Anna’s death like a punch, a blow from nowhere. She felt exposed to the world, oversensitive, anxious, as if she had lost several layers of protective skin. She wanted to stop complete strangers, tell them that her sister was dead. That her beautiful thirty-four-year-old sister had died and that they had been given only weeks to say good-bye to her. Her heart ached for anyone who had lost someone suddenly, in a car accident or from a heart attack. She at least had had some time to say good-bye, to tell Anna how much she loved her. How much worse would it be if they hadn’t had that chance?

She hadn’t ever thought it was possible to have so many tears. To wake up every day with the same feeling in her chest. But she was a different person now, Bett realized. They all were. Her parents had changed, too. They worked as hard and the motel kept running, but there was a different rhythm to their movements. The same heaviness that Bett felt in herself.

Bett closed the registration book and found the day’s mail lying underneath it on the desk. She started opening it: bills, circulars, and several cards in pale cream envelopes. Word of Anna’s death had filtered through to her acting friends, advertisers she’d worked for in Sydney, clients, neighbors, and mothers of Ellen’s friends. The cards had come in a rush the first few weeks. Even now, weeks after, they were still arriving in twos and threes each day, some addressed simply to the Quinlan Family, some to her parents, some to Lola, or Carrie, or her. She opened them automatically, reading the messages, simple and heartfelt. “We are thinking of you in your great sorrow.” “She was a beautiful woman; we loved her and will miss her very much.”

Bett noticed the airmail sticker on the final envelope as she slit it open. There had been quite a few cards from Anna’s overseas friends, actors working in Los Angeles or New York, or in different parts of Europe. This one had an Irish postmark. She opened the card and read the message. Then she sat down and read it one more time, trying to make sense of it.

Dear Lola,