I take a step closer to the fridge, where she stuck the Polaroid photo of us all. Everyone is there: Dad, Nancy, Rose, Lily and Nana. But where I was sitting, all I can see is an empty chair. Nana continues, and I try my best to keep up.
‘Yesterday, my agent said that the night you died, you told him that you wanted to tell your own story. Do you remember that? He said that you wanted to write a novel about the real Daisy Darker and asked if he would read it. That’s what I think you need to do.’ She stares around the room for a moment, as though waiting for an answer. ‘Did she say anything?’
Trixie shakes her head.
Nana drains her cup of tea, then looks straight at me as though she really can see me. ‘Daisy?’
‘Nana?’
‘Oh my goodness! My darling girl, look at you! Just the same as you were before, with your plaits and your denim dungaree dress. Oh, how I’ve missed you!’
‘You can see me?’ I whisper, wondering how and why now.
Nana starts to weep. ‘Yes! I can see you and I can hear you, and this proves I was right to do what I did because here you are and now we can say goodbye. Properly this time.’ She puts her cup down with trembling hands. ‘That last book I wanted to write, the one about a dysfunctional family not unlike ours, I’ve realized it is not my story to tell. It’s yours. You have to write your own story, that is the answer to everything.’
‘I can’t write a book—’
‘You can and you must. I believe that telling your own story, the truth about what happened, might set you free. I wish I could be here to help you, but that palm reader in Land’s End was right.’
‘I don’t understand—’
‘Your mother was always the only one to take sugar in her tea; the poison I used to kill her was in the bowl. It seems to have worked more quickly on me. I just had to see you again, and I knew this was the only way to do it. I’m so sorry I didn’t do more to protect you from this awful family when you were a child. I know I let you down. But everything I did tonight, I did for you. Forgive me, and take care of each other, my darling girls. You are the only good future this family ever had.’
‘Don’t go,’ I say, holding her hand. ‘Don’t leave me again. Not yet.’
It feels like I’m falling once more.
‘I’ll always be here,’ she says, gently putting her other hand over my heart. ‘The people who truly love us never leave us. And you were never broken. In my eyes, you were always perfect. I love you from here to the moon and back three times and once for luck.’
‘I love you too,’ I whisper, new tears streaming down my face.
Nana smiles at me one last time before resting her head on the kitchen table. She closes her eyes, and I know she has gone. Poppins starts to whimper, and the ocean continues to serenade every unsettled thought inside my mind, as though trying to silence them with the relentless shh of the sea.
Fifty
31 October 6:55 a.m.
low tide
The tap of grief never turns off completely. It allows a person’s sorrow to slowly drip inside them until they are so unbearably full of sadness, they have no choice but to let it flow freely and pour out. Drowning every other thought and feeling.
‘She’s dead,’ says Trixie with tears in her eyes. ‘Why would she do this?’
The eighty clocks out in the hallway seem to tick more loudly than ever before.
‘Because it was her time,’ I say. ‘I think she always planned to take her own life when it was over. She could never live with what she had done. I understand why she did what she did now, but I still don’t know why you went along with it.’
Trixie sits down at the table, on her little chair covered in stars, and she looks so small to me again. Like the child she used to be, not the woman she is growing into.
‘Do you remember what it was like when they all realized that you were broken?’ Trixie asks in a quiet voice. ‘The way they treated you? Well, it was the same for me. My mother stopped letting me go out with my friends, wrapped me up in cotton wool, and every time she looked at me, all I could see in her eyes was pity and resentment. Not love. My mother and Nancy didn’t think anyone else should know about my heart condition – as though it were a dirty secret, something to be ashamed of. They didn’t even want the rest of the family to know. Let’s be honest, they really were horrible people. All of them. Look what they did to you.’
‘They all thought I wouldn’t live beyond fifteen.’