Rose pulled off her clothes, dumped them on the sand, and ran into the ocean wearing a red swimsuit. She was only ten, and she knowingly risked her own life to save mine that day. Things were different after that. Once Rose knew I was broken, I became something she wanted to fix. An injured bird in her imaginary cage. She dragged me back to shore, then performed the CPR that cracked two of my ribs. And Lily filmed the whole thing.
It feels like an out-of-body experience as I watch myself coughing up water, and see Nana and my mother running onto the beach. The film stops then, but I remember the paramedics doing their best to cross the causeway, and I remember seeing Conor and Rose holding hands as I was carried away from them all. He wrote a story about her for his school newspaper after that, the headline read: Local Hero Saves Her Sister’s Life. It was the first time that I understood that friendships can change a person. True best friends bring out the best in you.
I was in hospital for two weeks while the doctors prodded and poked me. Routine tests revealed my broken heart, and things were never the same again. The first night, when my family had all left and I was alone on a scary ward, I was grateful that my bed was next to the window. The moon was bright that evening, and it meant that I could see cloud creatures, even though the sky was black. They danced across the shy moon, but the shapes they made no longer resembled ponies or dragons. Only monsters. Monsters don’t always hide in the dark. Some walk around in broad daylight, happy to be seen by anyone foolish enough to look in their direction.
My mother blamed herself for my broken heart. I have always known that deep down, but never quite understood why. Something she did while pregnant with me perhaps? The doctors said my condition was so rare they still didn’t know what caused it. Nancy spent days sitting by my bedside or in waiting rooms. She tutted and sighed and flicked through the free magazines, looking for competitions to enter. Nancy rarely read anything except a TV guide.
I remember when the doctors said that I was well enough for the whole family to visit. My sisters gave me home-made get-well cards, Nana brought me a bottle of Lucozade, and a box of Quality Street filled with only toffee pennies because they were my favourites. Dad sent ‘all his love’ from a concert hall in Vienna. Apparently there were no flights back to the UK that week. Lily wore a new dress and her very best smile for the occasion. She was the last one to leave my hospital bed, and rushed back over when they were all about to go. Everyone waited in the entrance to the ward while she whispered something in my ear before kissing me on the cheek.
‘Good girl,’ said Nancy, happy that her favourite daughter was trying to make up for what had happened. She has always been a firm believer in fraudulent feelings. She presumed Lily had apologized and didn’t hear what my sister had really said. None of them did, but I’ve never forgotten it:
‘I wish you had drowned.’
Seventeen
31 October 1:45 a.m.
less than five hours until low tide
I was never allowed to go to school once my hidden heart problem was exposed, and life was never allowed to return to normal. For any of us. My parents divorced less than a year later. Some marriages are held hostage by memories of happier times, others are imprisoned by the idea that parenthood can only be performed well in pairs. A dying child seemed to set my parents free from each other. My two older sisters were sent to boarding school; I was more than enough for my mother to look after and they were too much. A groundless guilt consumed her and she wrapped the rest of my childhood in cotton wool, which in turn led to me wrapping myself inside books. Hundreds of them. Reading was one of the few things I was still allowed to do.
Books saved me, and I ran away inside the stories I read as a child. They were the only place where I could run, and swim, and dance without fear of falling and not being able to get back up. Books were full of friends and adventures, whereas my real childhood was cold, and dark, and horribly lonely. I’ve never spoken honestly about it with anybody. Until now. And the only place that felt like home when I was a child was Seaglass. I think that’s why the idea of never coming back here hurts too much. Nana’s little library was my Disneyland, and the books inside it were the paper-shaped rides that let me live, while everyone else was waiting for me to die.
Sometimes people get impatient when they have to wait too long for something.
‘I’ve always felt terrible about what happened that day on the beach, and all the other days when I wasn’t as kind as I could have been,’ says Lily, back in the present, where she can no longer bully me the way she used to. She doesn’t look me in the eye when she says it. I don’t think she can, and I don’t really believe that Lily is sorry at all.