Alison Fraser - Her Sister's Baby

‘It doesn’t matter!’ Cass shook her head before he could retract it. Pointless, anyway. What he’d said was undeniably Pen, a throwaway remark that hurt less than the echoes of her sister’s voice, suddenly destroying her composure.

Tears gathered at the back of her eyes, tore at her throat, threatened to spill too soon, as it finally got through to her, past barriers of self-preservation and years of professional training. Pen was dead. Not just missing for a while. She was never going to sail back into her life, maddening one moment, charming the next, reckless and lovable and, to Cass’s eyes only, so very vulnerable.

‘I have to—’ Cass couldn’t get the words out but she made to retreat.

He caught hold of her arm again. ‘Listen to me, Cass. I was lying,’ he insisted, ‘and you’re right—I am a louse.’

Just not a total one, Cass realised, unnerved by his turnaround.

‘It d-doesn’t m-matter.’ She couldn’t explain. ‘N-none of it matters. I—I…’ She shut tight her eyes but the tears leaked from them, anyway.

A low, ‘Damn,’ came from Drayton Carlisle, but, if it was exasperation, he wouldn’t let her turn away.

She tried, only he held her too tightly. She pushed at his shoulders, then actually struck him, when she could no longer stifle her sobs. He let her, offering her something, somebody to rage against in her grief, but she didn’t seem to have the strength. She struck him once more before she suddenly turned into a sobbing pathetic mess in his arms.

She cried for what seemed like an age, her head buried in his shoulder, her hands twisted into the folds of his jacket, and he held her in his arms; for a while their closeness was as natural as breathing. But when there were no more tears left to cry and she sobered up, it was as awkward as a first clinch with a boy.

More so, perhaps, because this wasn’t her first clinch with him.

‘I’m okay now.’ She lifted her head away.

‘Good.’ He was looking down at her, but she refused to look up.

She spoke to his shoulder. ‘Please go. I have some calls to make, people to tell.’

‘I could do it,’ he offered surprisingly.

‘No! No, thank you,’ she tempered her rejection.

‘All right.’ He didn’t insist but gently pressed her arm as he said, ‘Look, I really am sorry—’

‘It’s okay, honestly,’ she stopped him before he could go on. ‘Pen says—said worse to my face. It just sounded so like her, that was all… About the funeral—’

‘If Tom agrees, we’ll make it public.’

‘You’re right, of course. It’s up to him. But what I was about to say is: I can’t go.’

‘What?’ He was clearly shocked.

‘I can’t go,’ she repeated as the hand on her arm finally dropped away.

She couldn’t stand at a graveside and bury her sister. It was too hard. No matter that things hadn’t always been right between them.

‘I’m on duty all week,’ she claimed as an excuse.

Drayton Carlisle stared at her as if she were mad. ‘The supermarket could surely spare you for a day.’

Cass stared back, questioning his sanity in turn. Then she realised. Pen hadn’t told them of her career change. Why was that?

‘All right, I won’t go,’ she said with blunt honesty. ‘Satisfied?’

Drayton Carlisle shook his head. It was hard to reconcile this Cass Barker with the one who had been crying in his arms just a few minutes ago.

‘I don’t understand you, but then I never did.’

‘Did you try?’

It slipped out before Cass could stop it. She heard her own bitterness and was scared of giving more away.

She turned from him and opened the door. She held it wide, waiting for him to leave.

He took the hint, putting on his coat and walking towards the door, but said as he drew level, ‘We haven’t resolved this yet. I’ll call tomorrow.’

Cass shrugged, as if to say, Do what you like. Tomorrow she might be up to the fight. Tonight she just wanted him to go before she broke down again.

His eyes rested on her a moment longer, intense, searing blue eyes, then he was gone. Thank God.

She closed the door and leaned heavily against it, drained of strength and anger.

Another death to face. It felt like familiar territory. Perhaps because it was. Father. Mother. Sister. Hard not to take personally. Why me? Why us? Why Pen?

She went back through to the sideboard and took out the family photograph album. It contained a record of their lives before their father’s death from cancer when Cass was fifteen and Pen nine. Here were the memories of happy holidays and birthday parties and dressing up for school plays.

These photographs had always made Cass a little mournful. Now, as she turned page after page, and saw Pen, a blonde-haired angel, smiling into cameras, sitting on knees, pulling faces, she felt utterly bereft. This time, when she cried, her grief was for all of them, for her beloved little sister and her strong, clever father and her pretty, laughing mother, and even for herself, the once carefree child she’d been.

The guilt came stealing in later, and, with it, that familiar question: what should I have done? It seemed she’d been asking it for ever. It seemed she’d always got it wrong.

She’d gone away to study medicine at university, imagining that one day she would provide her widowed mother with a better life. When her mother had died in a road accident, how she’d wished she’d never gone away!

The only thing that had kept her from folding then had been her sister. In those first hours and days she had held Pen and comforted her and they had been so close it was hard to imagine they would ever be anything else.

Reality, however, had come to call on the afternoon they had buried their mother. It had been in the shape of a boy, more Cass’s age than Pen’s. Cass had taken in the earring and tattoo and the sullen manner, and stood, aghast, while Pen had grabbed a coat and disappeared before she’d been able to do anything. It had seemed that, in Cass’s absence, Pen had grown up fast—too fast.

When Pen had finally reappeared at two in the morning, Cass’s mind had been made up. She wouldn’t abandon Pen to a life of no-hope boyfriends and, for want of any willing relatives, a year in care. Surely she could do better?

She had fully believed so and had transplanted what had been left of the family to this tiny terraced house in London. Pen had protested loudly and had managed to sulk continuously for a fortnight in between tearful phone calls to the boyfriend. Then gradually she had made friends at her new school and had stopped pining for Pontefract, and Cass had breathed a sigh of relief.

That relief had been short-lived. Within a couple of months, Pen had been going up West—to nightclubs and bars where looks had counted more than birth dates—and Cass had been left to wonder how she could possibly control her.

All those years gone by and Cass still didn’t know the right answer. She just felt if she’d done it, Pen might still be alive.

WORK was Cass’s salvation. Having finally fallen asleep in the small hours, she was woken at seven a.m. by her pager bleeping. It was the hospital. One of the A and E doctors was himself sick. Would Cass cover for him? She agreed readily. Anything rather than spend a day brooding on her sister’s death.

She told no one and no one would have guessed the serious-faced Dr Barker had cried herself to sleep. She stitched cuts, pumped stomachs, jump-started a heart, all with her normal cool efficiency.

Of course, grief didn’t go away. She put it on hold while she worked the accident unit and coped with other people’s pain, but it returned the moment she was home.