The Alphabet Sisters (47 page)

“He’s great. It’s apparently not even the size of a clothes peg yet, but he keeps telling me he can feel the baby moving.”

“Oh, that’s sweet.” She shut her eyes.

Bett moved closer to her. “Anna? Are you in pain?” They had given her morphine an hour before, but they could give her more if she needed it.

Anna opened her eyes. “No, I was just remembering when I was pregnant with Ellen. It’s a wonderful time, Carrie. Write it all down, so you’ll remember it. You’ll tell yourself there’s plenty of time to do that, because there’s no way you’ll forget something like this, it’s so amazing. But then an even more amazing thing will happen, and then another, layer on layer of them. When you first see them, and when they look at you, and when you’re feeding.”

It was the most she had spoken in some days. “Ellen used to go cross-eyed when she was feeding sometimes, just from the concentration. We used to laugh and laugh at her. And when she first started walking, one of her feet would turn in a little, like a rolling gait. And do you remember, when she first started talking, she’d always repeat the last two words you said to her? I remember Glenn saying it was like having a performing parrot in the house.”

She looked from one to the other. “You’ll make sure Ellen gets to see her cousin a lot, won’t you? You’ll go up to Sydney or ask Glenn to fly Ellen down here?”

Carrie hadn’t dared ask. “She’ll stay with Glenn after …”

“After I’m not here.” The smile again. “I’m lucky in a way. He loves her so dearly, and she loves him just as much. It will be hard at first, I know. I’ve asked him to make sure Ellen spends as much time as she likes here with all of you.”

“She can live with us if she wants to. I’ll adopt her.”

“I will, too,” Bett said.

Anna gave another gentle laugh. “Glenn loves her, and she loves him. But will you both help him look after her for me?”

Carrie’s eyes filled with tears. Anna was talking about Ellen more and more. “We will, Anna, we promise. She’ll come here to us as often as she wants, and we’ll go and see her in Sydney or Singapore or wherever she is. We’ll do everything we can for her.”

Bett reached for their hands and held them tightly. “I’m so sorry. I’m sorry for taking three years away from all of us. For taking so long to tell the truth about Matthew. If I had done it earlier—”

“It wasn’t just you, Bett. It was just as much my fault.” Carrie was as upset. “I should have rung, should have tried to—”

“Stop it.” Anna sat up a little, her voice surprisingly strong. “Don’t. Don’t do this. Don’t waste all this time wishing that you’d done this or done that. Please. It’s not worth it. It’s what happened. And maybe we’re better with one another now, because of that.”

“But I’m sorry—”

“Stop it. I mean it, Bett. I don’t want to waste time talking about it.”

Carrie managed a smile. “You were always so bossy, you know that.”

Anna’s head was back on her pillow. “I’m the oldest. I’m allowed to be. And soon Bett will be the oldest so you have to let her boss you.”

She didn’t get any further. Bett and Carrie were crying too hard.

B
ett was bringing a new jug of water into Anna’s room the next day when she heard voices inside. Anna and Ellen together. She stopped, not wanting to interrupt and also needing to hear.

“Ellie, do you know how much I love you?”

Ellen’s voice was as melodic as her mother’s. “One hundred times?”

“More.”

“One thousand times?”

“More.”

“A million times?”

“Even more than that.”

Ellen started to giggle. “A million billion trillion hundred thousand times.”

“Not even close.”

“More than that? Is there a number bigger than that?”

“Well, there’d better be. Because that’s how much I love you.”

Bett walked away as silently as she could. She couldn’t bear to hear any more.

A
ll right, everyone, smile!” It was Richard who had suggested they take some photos. It hadn’t occurred to any of them, too busy caring for Anna day to day.

“I have a decent camera with me,” he had said to Bett that morning. “It just might be good for Ellen, especially …”

She had been too overcome to speak for a moment. “We hadn’t even thought. Thank you.”

It became a joyous afternoon. Lola brought in all her scarves and beads. Geraldine filled vases with flowers and autumn leaves. They took turns, sitting on the bed beside Anna, in different combinations. Anna’s voice was stronger than it had been for some time, directing them.

“If she makes us start singing, I’m out of here,” Matthew said. “She’s very bossy, isn’t she?”

“Always has been,” Bett and Carrie said at the same time.

They took photo after photo. Anna with Lola. No one commented that it was Anna who somehow looked older. Yet her eyes were still bright.

Anna with Bett. She gently got on the bed beside her sister and held her hand. Ellen was put in charge of decorations and darted forward with a flower for Anna’s hair.

Jim and Geraldine sat on either side of Anna. Geraldine’s eyes were overbright. Bett saw that she was holding Anna’s hand as tightly as she was holding Jim’s.

Carrie and Matthew stood on one side of the bed. Anna reached up and put her hand on Carrie’s stomach.

The next one was Bett, Carrie, and Anna together. “Give us a song, Alphabet Sisters,” Matthew called, trying to be cheery. They shook their heads, without needing to even look at one another. They couldn’t have done it.

Richard took about ten shots of Anna and Ellen together, pulling faces at each other, hugging each other. He took one of the two of them with their faces pressed cheek to cheek, looking directly at the camera, solemn-faced. Everyone in the room held their breath, until Ellen moved, and the moment passed.

Then Ellen became overexcited, insisting on being in every photograph from then on, bursting into tears and having to be soothed. “She’s my mummy who’s sick in bed, so I have to be in every photo.”

“Of course, Ellie.” Anna patted the bed beside her. She was exhausted from the activity, her eyelids starting to flutter. “Hop up here, sweetheart. Shall we have one big family one to finish? All of us together?”

“I’ll take it,” Matthew and Richard said as one.

Carrie looked over at Matthew, beckoning him over. He shook his head. She understood. This one was for immediate family only. They moved in around Anna’s bed, surrounding her. Lola on a chair beside her, Ellen tucked in next to her, Jim and Geraldine on either side. Bett and Carrie sat where they could.

Bett was struck with a memory of people at airports, crowding around the person who was heading away on a long journey, wishing them well, sending them love.

“Smile, everyone.”

They did their best.

A
week later, Bett and Daniel walked down the tree-lined road behind the motel. There were vineyards on one side and paddocks of grazing sheep on the other. Sunlight flickered through the trees, sending shadows, then flashes of light in front of them. Since Anna had come home Daniel had called by every few days, dropping in just for a few minutes with flowers for Anna or a bottle of wine for the rest of them. Each time he had invited Bett to go for a walk or a drive with him, or for a meal in one of the local restaurants. The first few times she had said no.

“Go, Bett,” Lola had finally insisted. “You have to have some time for yourself. Otherwise you’ll have nothing left to give her.”

“But what if …”

“Take the mobile and I will ring you if there is any change. But there won’t be. You heard the doctor as clearly as I did. He said weeks not days.”

As if that made a difference, Bett thought. Oh, we’ve got weeks with her and there was me thinking it was only days, silly old me. She was so angry and so sad, all at once, and it was massing in her, settling inside her.

From then on she started walking with Daniel several times a week, out on the quiet back roads behind the motel, or along the walking track that followed the path of the old railway line through the Valley. The walks began to mean a great deal to her, brief breaks from the slow heartbreak of seeing Anna fade away a little more each day, seeing the weight disappearing from her, the alertness dulling bit by bit, as she ate less, slept more. Daniel visited Anna briefly and was able to nod in understanding when Bett spoke of the light in Anna’s eyes, the warmth of her smile. They spoke about his mother, too, both of them painfully conscious of the difference in their situations. Mrs. Hilder was physically healthy but fading mentally, already long gone from Daniel and Christine. Anna was still herself, the personality still strong in the failing body.

That morning had been particularly bad for Anna. She hadn’t been able to eat anything at all and they’d managed to get her to sip only tiny amounts of water. The morning dose of morphine had finally eased her. She had been sleeping, with Geraldine and Lola by her bedside, when Daniel had come to collect Bett.

They walked for some distance before Bett was able to talk, to find the words for what she was thinking. “I always thought it was good to know lots of things, Daniel. To experience lots of things. But I don’t know if that’s true anymore.” She stopped and looked up at him. “I know words I don’t want to know. Like palliative care. Metastases. I know how to give Anna morphine. I know that when her breathing changes it’s because the tumor is pressing on her lungs. I know that oxygen comes in tanks not just in the air. And I don’t want to know any of those things.”

As they started walking again he put his arm tighter around her.

“She’s not even dead yet, and I miss her, Dan. And sometimes I go into the room and she’s asleep and I think, oh she’s died, as if it will be some simple thing like that. But I know it won’t be. And I can’t bear that she’s suffering. But the thing is I just don’t want her to leave us.”

Her tears came in a flood. He took her in his arms and held her close for a long time.

G
lenn came to stay at the motel full-time. He and Richard circled each other for a day or two, before there was a silent acceptance of each other. They took their turns at Anna’s bedside.

Walking past the kitchen one afternoon, Bett heard Glenn’s low tones, followed by her parents’. She walked in. It looked like a legal meeting. She excused herself and was about to walk away, when Glenn beckoned her in.

“Bett, please, it’s all right. We’re talking about Ellen.”

Bett waited.

“I was just explaining to your parents that Ellen’s going to come to Singapore with me to begin with, after …” his voice seemed to catch. “Afterward. But you’ll always be her family as well. I want you to know that. I want her to come here as often as she can, I want you to feel you can all come and see her as much as possible. No matter what the situation might be, or where we are.”

Bett needed to bring everything out into the open. This was no time for secrets. “Will your girlfriend be all right with her?”

She saw her parents’ heads shoot up. She would have to explain it to them later.

“She and Ellen get on very well,” he said simply. “And she knows Ellen will always come first to me.”

Bett knew he meant it. He was trying as hard as he could. “Thank you, Glenn.”

Then Geraldine spoke, her voice very soft. “Ellen needs to know that it’s not going to be long now. We need to tell her. Prepare her.”

There was a pause before Glenn spoke again. “Anna and I talked about it last night. She’s asked me not to tell Ellen in front of her. She said that it would—” that break in his voice again. “It would be too hard for them both.”

Bett had never seen Glenn look so vulnerable. “Can I help, Glenn? Do you want me to be with her when you tell her?”

He nodded. She could see he was now fighting tears, too. “Yes please.”

She knew he was thinking what she was thinking. How on earth did they do it?

T
he moment came the following afternoon. Ellen had spent the morning lying on the bed beside Anna, chatting away as normal. When the palliative care nurses arrived, she’d only gone a little way away, sitting outside Anna’s room, drawing with chalk on the footpath. She was still there when Glenn and Bett went to find her.

Hand in hand, the three of them walked over to Lola’s seat overlooking the vineyards. Ellen clambered up onto her father’s knee, waiting, as if she knew something important was happening. Glenn cleared his throat. “Ellie, we have to tell you something very sad about your mum.”

“I already know.”

“You know?”

“She’s not going to get better, is she?” Her voice was very matter-of-fact.

Glenn and Bett exchanged glances. “How did you know that?”

“I heard the ladies talking about her. They said they thought she might not have more than a few weeks to live.”

Bett took her niece’s hand then. “Ellie, do you know what that means?”

Ellen nodded. “It means she’s going to die.”

Another shared glance. Bett could see Glenn was struggling.

“And do you know what that means?”

Ellen shook her head.

Bett tried to find the right words. “It means that this time we have with her now is very special, Ellie, because after your mum dies—” She lost her way for a moment. “Ellie, after she dies that means we won’t be able to see her anymore.”

Ellen looked puzzled. “But she doesn’t go anywhere, does she? Doesn’t she just stay in the bed even after she dies? And we keep on visiting her?”

“No, Ellie. It means she’s going to go away from us.”

“But where is she going to go? Why can’t I keep seeing her?”

Bett couldn’t speak any more. It was left to Glenn to try to answer. He held Ellen tight against him, pressed his face against her hair, tried to hide his tears. “I don’t know, Ellie. I don’t know.”

A
nna started sleeping most of the time, so thin now there seemed almost nothing of her beneath the cotton sheet. The days revolved around the visits from the doctor and the nurses, or coaxing her to eat a spoonful or take a sip of water.

Somehow, around all this, the motel kept running. Geraldine and Jim worked like automatons, spending every spare moment with Anna. Guests were dealt with efficiently, briskly, checked in and checked out in record time. Lola spent hours in Anna’s room, reading snatches of poetry, arranging tiny bouquets of autumn leaves, late flowers, or colored pieces of silk for Anna to look at. Richard read to her, or just sat with her. Glenn kept close to Ellen. Carrie started to show her pregnancy but didn’t mention the nausea, or the tiredness, her own discomfort nothing compared to Anna’s. Ellen moved from confusion to understanding, then back to confusion. Bett cleaned the motel rooms in the morning, spent all afternoon with Anna, then waitressed in the evening, a forced smile fixed on her face. Daniel called by every day, but they had stopped going for their walks. She needed to stay close to her sister.