Chapter 10

10

October 31, 12:15 a.m.

less than six hours until low tide

“Who found her?” Rose asks, looking at everyone until her eyes come to rest on Trixie. “Was it you?” Rose is better with animals than she is with children, and Trixie starts to cry again. She looks so small and vulnerable in her pink pajamas. I have an overwhelming urge to hug her when she takes off her glasses with one hand and uses the other to wipe away her tears. Rose adjusts her tone. “Can you tell us what happened?” Trixie does her best to answer between sobs.

“I just came down to get a glass of water. Nana was … on the floor. When I touched her … she was cold. When I said her name … she didn’t answer.” She starts to cry again.

“We need to call the police,” says Conor.

“What on earth for?” asks Lily. “It’s obvious what happened here.”

“Is it?” he asks.

“Yes. A chair is turned on its side. Nana was obviously using it to stand on while writing one of her bonkers poems on the chalk wall, and she must have slipped.”

“I don’t think we can know that for sure,” Conor replies.

“Well, what I know is that you’re a crime reporter, not a detective, and nobody asked your opinion anyway,” says Lily. “This is a family matter. You are not family, and I don’t even understand what you’re doing here.” Even for Lily, this is rude.

“What I’m doing right now is wondering why an elderly woman I cared very much about is lying on the floor, looking as though someone has bashed her head in with a blunt instrument.” He turns to Rose. “What do you think happened?”

She stares down at the kitchen tiles, as if she can’t look him in the eye. “I think Nana just died and I’m very upset. I’m sure we all are. Like Lily said, I’m a vet, not a doctor.” She glares at him, and I’m glad I’m not Conor. “This is not the time for any of your conspiracy theories or wild accusations. Nana was never anything but kind to you, welcoming you into her home and our family. Try to show a little respect and compassion if you haven’t completely forgotten how.”

Rose turns away from him and hugs Lily and Trixie, both of whom are now crying. I go to stand next to them, as though silently choosing sides.

“I’m going to miss her so much,” I say, unable to imagine life without Nana in it.

“I just can’t believe she’s gone,” says Lily.

Rose holds her closer. “I know. Neither can I, but she lived a long and happy life and we will get through this. Someone needs to tell Dad what has happened.” Rose has always looked at the rest of the family as a problem with no obvious solution, a problem she doesn’t quite know how to solve. When nobody else replies or makes a move, she sighs. “I guess that’ll be me then.”

We all watch as she leaves the kitchen and pauses in the hallway, outside the door to the music room, where our father chose to sleep. Rose’s head is as tightly tucked in as her shirt. She stares down at the floor, and I can almost hear her mind whirring. The music room was one of the few places we were never allowed to play in when we were young. Rose hesitates before knocking, like the little girl she used to be, the one who was afraid of getting shouted at for interrupting her father’s work.

She knocks and we all wait, but there is no answer.

Rose knocks again, before gently turning the handle and pushing the door open.

“The room is empty,” she says, looking back at us all. “The camp bed hasn’t been slept in. Dad isn’t here, and neither are his things.”

Lily rushes forward and grabs Rose’s hand, just like she did when we were children. “I know he was upset about Nana and the will, but you don’t think that—”

“Let’s try not to jump to conclusions,” says Rose, even though I’m sure we’ve all hurdled over several. “I’m going to find a sheet to cover Nana’s body. I’d rather remember her the way she was. Can someone else go upstairs and wake Nancy?”

I volunteer and Conor comes with me. I expect he just doesn’t want to be left alone with my sisters, but I’m glad of the company. The house doesn’t feel the same to me now, as though it too is grieving. Seaglass is stiller, and colder, and quieter than before. All I can hear is the sound of ticking clocks in the hallway, and the gentle lapping of waves against the rocks outside. When I was a little girl, I used to imagine the sea coming in through the cracks in the walls, and the doors, and the windows, and rushing down the chimney while we slept in our beds, until Seaglass was full to the ceiling with seawater, and we were all floating and trapped inside. I used to imagine a lot of bad things happening to my family in this house, but only at night. I might not be a child anymore, but I am still afraid of the dark. Conor stops on the landing, and I notice that there is some chalk on his jeans. He sees it too and tries to brush it away. I don’t say anything.

The door to my mother’s bedroom at the other end of the hall is slightly ajar. I freeze, and realize that I simply don’t have the right words for this situation. Conor, as though sensing my apprehension, steps forward and clears his throat. He knocks ever so gently, but the door swings open a little further, and despite the gloom, we can both see the shape of someone in bed. I don’t understand how anyone could have slept through Trixie’s screaming, but my mother has always been a deep sleeper. Never less than eight hours a night, or she thinks it will be bad for her skin. A good night’s sleep is something pills and alcohol have often helped her to achieve.

“Nancy? I’m sorry to disturb you…” Conor says.

“What? Who is that?” says a voice in the darkness. But it isn’t my mother sitting up in the bed. It’s my father, and he looks just as surprised as we are to find him there. Nancy sits up seconds later, lifting her eye mask and removing her earplugs before squinting in our direction. When she sees Dad in the bed next to her, she practically leaps out of it.

“This isn’t what it looks like,” she whispers in our direction.

“Yes, it is,” Dad says with a sigh, before holding his head in his hands.

The idea of my divorced parents sharing a bed leaves me speechless.

Conor clears his throat again. “There’s been an incident … and I think it might be best if you both come downstairs to the kitchen when you are…” I fear he is about to say decent. “Ready” is the word he settles on, and we leave them to it.

Back downstairs in the kitchen, the mood has changed from disbelief to fear. Nana has been covered with what looks like a red-and-white tablecloth, and my sisters are staring up at the chalk poem about our family.

“The chalk was in her hand,” Rose says.

Nana’s handwriting is beautiful and very distinctive—the poems in her children’s storybooks were all handwritten with ink. I used to try and write the same way, with sloping joined-up letters, but it never looked as good. Nana had an explanation for that, just like she did for everything else: “Of course we all have different handwriting. Just like fingerprints or DNA, it’s to remind us that we are individual beings. Our thoughts and feelings are there to be expressed and they are our own: unique. I don’t feel the same way as you about the world, and that’s fine. We’re not designed to always think and feel the same. We are not sheep. Agreeing with someone about something is a choice, try to remember that. Don’t waste your life wishing to be like someone else, decide who you are and be you.”

“I’m not convinced that the poem was written by Nana…” I say. “I don’t think this looks like her handwriting. Maybe someone just wanted it to look like—”

“It’s impossible to know who wrote this for sure,” Rose interrupts.

“But why would Nana write that?” asks Lily. “And if she hated us all so much, why invite us here?”

“I’m not precocious,” says Trixie, my precocious but wonderful niece, staring up at the words written about her. It’s almost a relief when my parents enter the room, looking like a couple of teenagers who’ve been caught behind the bike shed.

“Oh no,” Dad says, rushing to Nana and pulling back the cloth that was covering her. His reaction seems staged, and I notice that the dog starts to growl again.

“It’s going to be okay, Frank,” says my mother, coming to stand by his side, still wearing her black silk pajamas. Her matching black eye mask that she can’t sleep without is still on her head too. “We’ll get through this, together.” It feels like an odd thing for her to say, given they’ve spent most of the last twenty years apart. I wonder whether she might still be drunk.

We watch as my parents embrace in front of us for the first time since 1988. People hold on tighter when they think they are losing their grip. The moment is punctuated by a full stop in the shape of a crying teenager.

“I want to go home,” Trixie sobs.

“Why don’t you go and watch TV in the lounge?” Lily suggests. Television has always been a surrogate parent in my sister’s house, but she looks cross when Trixie turns to me for reassurance.

“Everything is going to be okay, I promise,” I say, wondering if it’s a lie. “It’s very sad that Nana has passed away and we’re all going to miss her. You go and turn the TV on, and I’ll come and join you in a minute.” People tend to see what they need to see and hear what they want to hear, in my experience. Trixie nods, wiping away yet more tears with the sleeve of her pink pajamas before leaving the room.

As soon as she is gone, the discussion about the chalk poem on the wall continues. I listen while they all bicker about what it means and what we should do, unsurprised that nobody asks my opinion. As the youngest in the family I’m quite used to nobody really caring what I think. I zone out a little, and notice the eight jack-o’-lanterns still sitting on the kitchen table. They all have such scary faces, which Nana must have spent a long time carving. There are pumpkins, squashes, and turnips because, like always, Nana liked the tradition and folklore of Halloween more than the commercial version of her favorite day.

Every year when we were children, she would help us carve jack-o’-lanterns of our own, while telling us the story of their origin, and the myth of Stingy Jack. The Irish legend claims that a man called Stingy invited the devil for a drink, but then refused to pay for it. It was a trick, one of many that Jack played on the devil until the day he died. But then God wouldn’t let Jack into heaven, and the devil—rather tired of a lifetime of tricks—refused to let him into hell either. So Jack was doomed to purgatory, with nothing but a burning coal inside an old turnip to light his way in the darkness. I guess turnips morphed into pumpkins at some point in history, but then all stories told often enough bend and twist out of shape over time. Stingy Jack is the reason why we carve pumpkins and put candles inside them to make lanterns at Halloween. One of my greatest gifts is knowing a little about a lot of things, and Nana taught me about most of them. She said the lesson of the legend was to pay your way in life, or be doomed to be forever lost and lonely in the dark.

“She was obviously very upset with us all,” says my mother, snapping me out of my trance. “I think that was clear last night too. I’ve been wondering for a while whether Nana might have been suffering from some form of dementia. This”—she points at the chalk poem without looking at it—“unpleasantness is completely out of character. Perhaps she just worked herself up and then…”

“What? Worked herself up, wrote a poem, and died?” asks Lily.

“This might turn out to be a blessing in disguise,” says Nancy.

“How can you say that?” I ask, trembling with anger.

My mother ignores me. “And this display of … dementia, along with her odd behavior last night … might mean that her will simply can’t be taken seriously. If she was out of her mind when she wrote it…”

“She wasn’t out of her mind, she was just speaking it,” says Rose.

Nancy glares in her direction.

Before they can start to argue, we all freeze when we hear the sound of Nana’s voice in the distance.

“It’s time for you to meet the rest of the Darker family, my darling girl.”