“No! Christ, no. Not that she wanted him to die, no. Jesus. I’m not saying she did anything on purpose, I’m just wondering if on some subconscious level she—”
Carla collapsed back to her side, drawing the duvet up over her shoulders, over her head. “Leave me alone, Theo. Please leave me alone.”
* * *
It was a year before Carla redeveloped the habit of getting up every day, showering, dressing herself. It was eighteen months before she saw her sister again, in secret. She told Theo she had decided to join a yoga class. She dressed her weak, fleshy body in tracksuit bottoms and a T-shirt and walked over to her sister’s flat on Hayward’s Place. When Angela opened the door to her, Carla recoiled in shock: Her sister had aged not by a year but by decades. She was emaciated, her sallow skin stretched tight over her skull. She looked hollowed out, desiccated.
Angela’s hair went white overnight. That’s what she said, in any case. Both sisters went gray young, but Angela claimed that she’d gone to bed on Tuesday a brunette and woken up on Wednesday almost completely gray. Just like that. She kept it long and didn’t dye it. “I look like a witch in a fairy tale, don’t I?” she said. “I terrify children in the supermarket.” She was joking, but Carla didn’t find it funny. Carla didn’t dye her hair either; she chopped it all off when it started to go. “You’re lucky,” Angela told her, and Carla flinched. “You’ve got a nicely shaped head. If I cut all my hair off, I’d look like an alien.”
It was a compliment, but Carla was annoyed. She didn’t like the sound of the word lucky in her sister’s mouth, certainly didn’t appreciate it being applied to her. “You can’t go gray overnight,” she said crossly. “I looked it up. It’s a myth.” True, although it was also true that she had read about young women, much younger than she and her sister, Soviet women fighting for the motherland in the Second World War, who’d faced such unspeakable terror they had grayed overnight. She’d read about Cambodian women who witnessed such horror they lost their sight.
“It happened to me,” Angela said. “You can’t say I didn’t experience what I experienced. You wouldn’t know; you weren’t around.”
“Yoga classes” became a weekly thing, an exercise in determination on Carla’s part. She believed in hard work; in fact, she believed that the most worthwhile goals were often the hardest to realize. She believed that if you worked hard enough at something, most often, you would achieve it. Call it the ten thousand hours theory: If she spent ten thousand hours trying to forgive her sister, would she succeed? No way of telling, but it seemed a reasonable course of action—after all, her parents were gone, her son was gone. There was precious little left for her in the world: only Angela, and little Daniel, and Theo, of course, although she knew, in the saddest part of her heart, that she and Theo would not survive what had happened to them.
Once when Carla came to visit Angela, she heard noises as she approached the front door, voices raised. She had barely finished knocking when the door flew open, her sister yanking at it as though she were trying to pull it off its hinges. “Oh, Christ,” she said, when she saw Carla. “Forgot it was our day. Daniel’s off school. He’s—” She broke off, shrugged. “He’s just . . . off school.”
They sat in the living room as they always did, and after a while, Daniel came down to say hello. In their year and a half of separation, Angela had aged by a decade and Daniel not at all. At nine years old he was still small for his age, dark and uncertain. He had a habit of sneaking around, appearing suddenly and without warning, wringing his hands in front of his belly. “Like a little animal,” Carla commented with a smile.
“A little savage,” his mother said.
That day, when he appeared, as if from nowhere, in the doorway and said, “Hello, Aunt Carla,” he bared a mouth full of metal at her.
“Jesus, Daniel, don’t make that face!” Angela snapped. “It’s his fucking braces,” she said. “He can’t smile normally any longer. Most kids when they get them, they try to hide their teeth. Not him—he pulls that awful expression all the time.”
“Angela,” Carla hissed, as Daniel slunk away as quietly as he’d arrived, “he can hear you.”
Her heart, the bit of it that was left, broke for him.
The next time she came, she brought him a huge set of colored pencils, which she took up to his room. His eyes shone when he saw the gift. “Oh,” he breathed, delighted almost beyond words, “Aunt Carla!” He smiled his ghastly smile, wrapping his skinny arms around her waist.