Fullepub 
Chapter Twenty-One
TWENTY-ONE
Carla moved through her house, room to room, checking and rechecking wardrobes, cupboards, the backs of doors, anywhere she might have hung the bag with the Saint Christopher in it. Light-headed with exhaustion, she moved slowly and carefully, as if through mud. Every now and again, her phone rang. Every time it did, she looked at the screen and she saw that it was Theo and sometimes she hovered her finger over the green button, she willed herself to accept the call, but every time she wavered at the last minute, either replacing the phone in her pocket or pressing red instead.
What would she say to him if she answered now? Would she ask him the question straight out? What were you doing with my sister? What were you doing at her home? Those weren’t the questions she really wanted to ask, though. She hadn’t formulated the real question yet; she hadn’t allowed herself to do so.
She opened the storage cupboard in the upstairs hallway. Why would the tote bag be here? She never opened this cupboard, hadn’t opened it in months. It was filled with clothes she never wore, silk dresses and tailored suits, clothes that belonged to a woman she hadn’t been in years. She stared stupidly at it all, took none of it in. Closed the cupboard door.
In her bedroom, she lay down on the bed. She pulled a wool blanket over her legs. She was desperate to sleep, but every time she closed her eyes, she pictured it, she saw Theo with Angela, arguing outside her house. Then there was a cut, and they were inside the house, shouting at each other. In her mind they had gone back in time. Carla saw them the way they were the day Ben died, Theo raging, wild-eyed, Angela cowering, her delicate hands raised above her head, pale wrists exposed. She heard Theo’s voice asking, Was she jealous, do you think, of the way Ben was? You said she had a temper. Bloodthirsty, his voice said. You said she was bloodthirsty. That wasn’t what she’d said, was it? A bloodthirsty imagination, maybe? Carla’s own imagination took her elsewhere, to Angela’s house on Hayward’s Place, where now Theo appeared as he is today, his comfortable bulk pressing against Angela’s frailty, grappling at the top of the stairs. Carla saw him walking down the stairs, stepping over her sister’s broken body. She saw him out in the lane, lighting a cigarette.
She opened her eyes. What would it have done to him, Carla wondered, to see Angela again, after all this time? Had it been all this time? Or had there been other meetings that she didn’t know about? It hurt her to think about it, the two of them together, keeping things from her; she simply couldn’t fathom why. All this, on top of Daniel, it was too much. She was becoming numb, her mind fogged with misery.
She rolled herself off the bed. The Saint Christopher her son had never worn, she needed to find it. It must be in this house somewhere, since it wasn’t in Angela’s. She started again, moving room to room, black spots moving in front of her eyes, a slow buzz in her ears, her limbs liquid. She tramped downstairs and back up again, back to the cupboard in the hallway, to the silk dresses, to the well-cut suits. The shelf at the bottom of the wardrobe was lined with a row of pale blue shoeboxes. She opened them one by one, revealing gray suede boots, red-soled stilettos, bright green sandals with black heels, and in the last one, no shoes but a plastic bag full of ash. Carla sat back on her haunches, breath leaving her lungs in a stuttering sigh.
There you are.She’d never made up her mind what to do with her. With Angela.
After the funeral, she and Daniel had come back here, to Carla’s home. They sat side by side on the sofa, drinking tea in virtual silence, the plastic bag in front of them on the coffee table. The air in the house felt heavy, the atmosphere thick with shame. Daniel was pale, thin, hollowed out, drowning in a dark suit that smelled of smoke.
“Where was she happy?” Carla asked him, staring at the bag in front of them. “It should be somewhere she was happy.”
Next to her, she felt Daniel’s shoulders rise and fall. “I don’t remember her happy,” he said.
“That isn’t true.”
He sniffed. “No, you’re right. I remember her happy at Lonsdale Square. But we can’t very well scatter them there, can we?” His head bent, his mouth opened, shoulders heaved. “She was alone for days,” he said.
“Daniel.” Carla put her hand on the back of his neck, leaning closer to him, her lips almost against his cheek. “You couldn’t watch her all the time.”
She meant it, but she also meant: I couldn’t watch her all the time. “You have to live your own life, Dan. You have to. We cannot all be ruined.”
He turned his face to hers then, buried it in her neck. “You’re not ruined,” he whispered.
Carla leaned forward, carefully lifting the bag of ashes from the shoebox, weighing it in her hands.
I am now.
