“What on earth is this about?” Carla asked, but she received no reply.
“I bet some fucker’s broken into the car,” Theo said.
There were two police officers, a man and a woman. There had been an accident, they said, at Carla’s sister’s home. Ben had fallen from the balcony on the second floor of the house onto the garden steps below.
“But she keeps the study door shut,” Carla said dumbly. “The railings on the balcony are broken, so the door is always shut.”
The door hadn’t been shut, though, and little Ben had toddled out and slipped through the railings, falling onto the stone steps twenty feet below. His eight-year-old cousin, playing in the garden, found him; he’d called an ambulance right away.
“Is he going to be all right? Is he going to be all right?” Carla kept asking the same question over and over but Theo was already on his knees, howling like an animal. The police officer, the woman, had tears in her eyes and her hands were shaking. She shook her head and said that she was very sorry, that the paramedics had arrived within minutes but there was nothing they could do to save him. “But is he going to be okay?” Carla asked again.
* * *
After Carla and Angela’s mother died, too young, of breast cancer, their father stayed on in the rambling three-story family home on Lonsdale Square, although it was obvious it was too much for him, the climb from his study on the second floor to the bedrooms on the third taking longer and longer, becoming more and more precarious. The garden became wild and overgrown, the gutters went uncleared, the roof leaked, the window frames began to rot. And the wrought iron railings on the little Juliet balcony leading off his study rusted all the way through.
Their father moved into a care home six months before he died, and since Carla was already living with Theo by this time, Angela took the old place over. She had grand plans for it, she foresaw years of painstaking renovation, she designed murals she planned to paint in the hallways and above the staircase. First off, however, were the essential repair jobs, the top priority being the roof. That, of course, took all the money there was to spare, so everything else had to be put on hold.
The rusted railings were barely thought of until Daniel was born. Once he was old enough to crawl, Angela locked the study door and left it that way. The rule was the study door stayed shut. At all times, the study door stayed shut.
“Where was Angela?” Carla and Theo were sitting in the back of a police car, neither in a fit state to drive. “Where was she?” Carla’s voice barely more than a whisper, her eyes squeezed tightly shut. “I just . . . I don’t understand. Where was Angela?”
“She was in her bedroom,” the policewoman told her. “She was upstairs.”
“But . . . why did Daniel have to call the ambulance? What was my sister doing?”
“It seems she was sleeping when the accident happened,” the policewoman said.
“She wasn’t sleeping,” Theo said, “she was sleeping it off. Wasn’t she?”
“We don’t know that,” Carla said, reaching for his hand.
He snapped his hand from hers as though scalded. “Don’t we?”
* * *
The police drove them straight to Whittington Hospital. They were met by a family liaison officer who tried to persuade them not to see the body. “It would be far better,” she said, “to remember your little boy at his happiest. Running around, or riding his bike . . . ?” They didn’t listen to her. Neither of them could countenance never seeing him again; it was an absurd thing to ask.
In a cold and brightly lit room, they stayed for more than an hour, passing their son between them. They kissed his tiny fingers, the soles of his feet. They warmed his cold flesh with their hands and their tears.
Afterward, the police drove them back to their home on Noel Road, where Theo’s parents were waiting for them. “Where is she?” were Theo’s first words to his mother. She jerked her head toward the stairs.
“Up there,” she said, her face and voice tight as a drum. “She’s in the spare room.”
“Theo,” Carla said, “please.”
She heard him shouting. “You were fucking sleeping it off, weren’t you? You were hungover, weren’t you? You left him, you left him alone, you left the door open, you left him. You left him. You left him.” Angela was wailing, keening in agony, but Theo would not relent. “Get out of my house! Don’t you ever come back here. I don’t ever want to see you again.”