We always told the twins not to go near them; the iron railings were too low, whether you were adult or child. Yet they were so tempting. Because they all had those blissful views of the river. Mum liked to sit on her balcony, reading Swedish thrillers, drinking supermarket Chardonnay.
So, as I ran up the stairs, it was the balconies that ripped me open with terrible anticipation, and when I stepped into the bedroom I saw the silhouetted figure of one of my daughters, dressed in white, standing on the balcony, shouting.
The irony is that she looked so pretty at that moment. Her hair was caught by the setting sun: she was coronaed, gloried, flamingly haloed—she looked like a child of Jesus in a Victorian picture book, even as she was shouting, in icy and curdling terror.
“Mummy Mummy Mummy Lydie-lo, it’s Lydie-lo, she’s falling off, Mummy, help her, MUMMY!”
For a second I was paralyzed. Staring at her.
Then, choking on my panic, I looked over the railing.
And, yes, there was my daughter—broken, down there on the decking, blood spooling from her mouth, like a filled-in speech bubble, red and glossy. She looked like an icon of a fallen human, like a swastika shape with her arms and legs splayed. A symbol.
I knew Lydia was doomed as soon as I saw her body shaped that way, but I rushed downstairs, and cradled her still-warm shoulders, and felt for her slivery pulse. And at that precise moment my mum and dad came back from the pub, walking up the path: walking straight into this appalling tableau. They stopped, and gazed, quite stricken—and then my mum screamed and my dad frantically called for an ambulance, and we argued about moving Lydia or not moving Lydia, and my mum screamed again.
And then we all went tearfully to the hospital and spoke to absurdly young doctors, to young men and women in white coats with that flicker of tired shame in their eyes. Murmuring their prayers.
Acute subdural hematoma, severe and stellate lacerations, evidence of retinal hemorrhage…
At one point, awfully, Lydia came to consciousness. Angus had arrived to be engulfed by the same horror, so we were all in the room—me and Angus, my father, all the doctors and nurses—and my daughter faintly stirred and her eyes slurred open, and she had tubes in her mouth, and she looked at us, regretfully, melancholically, as if she was saying goodbye, then she went under again. And she never came back.
I hate these memories. I remember how one doctor blatantly stifled a yawn as she was talking to us, after Lydia was pronounced dead. Presumably she’d done a long shift. Another doctor said we were “unlucky.”
And monstrous as it was, he was, technically, right, as I discovered many weeks later—when I regained the mental capability to type words into a search engine. Most young children survive a fall of less than thirty feet, even forty feet. Lydia was unlucky. We were unlucky. Her fall was awkward. And this discovery made it all worse; it made my guilt even more unbearable. Lydia died because we were unlucky, and because I wasn’t looking after her properly.
I want to close my eyes, now, to block the world. But I can’t, because I’m driving. And so I drive on. Questioning the world. Questioning my memory. Questioning reality.
Who was the girl that fell? Is it possible I got it wrong?
The original and significant reason I thought that it was Lydia down there, dead, was because the twin who survived told me that.
Mummy Mummy come quickly, Lydie-lo has fallen.
And naturally, when she said that, I took her at her word. Because there was no other immediate way of telling them apart. Because the girls were dressed so sweetly yet identically that day. In white dresses. With no blue or yellow.
This wasn’t my doing. It was the twins themselves. For a few months prior to that holiday they’d asked—they had demanded—that we dress them the same, cut their hair the same, make them look the same. Mummy, sit here between me and read to us. It was as if they wanted to be re-absorbed into each other. As if they’d had enough of being individuals for a while. Indeed, sometimes the twins would wake up, in those final months, and tell us they’d had exactly the same dream. I didn’t know whether to believe them. I still don’t know now. Is that possible? For twins to have the same dream?
Is it?
Touching the pedal, I race around a corner; urging myself on, as if the answer can be found on the coast. But the answer, if anywhere, is in my mind.
Angus and I had acceded to the twins’ impulsive wish—to be dressed exactly alike—because we thought it was just a phase, like tantrums or teething; and, besides, it was easy enough, by that time, to tell them apart by personality. By the different ways they bickered with each other.
But when I ran up the stairs and I saw one of my daughters, in her white dress, barefoot and totally distraught, there was no personality. Not at that moment. There was just one of the twins, shouting. And she was shouting Lydie-lo has fallen. And that’s what gave me her identity. Kirstie.
Could we have got it wrong?
I do not know. I am lost in the hall of mirrored souls. And again that terrible sentence pierces me.
Mummy Mummy come quickly, Lydie-lo has fallen.
That’s when my life cracked open. That’s when I lost my daughter. That’s when everything went black.
As it does now. I am shuddering with grief. The memory is so powerful it is disabling. Tears are not far away; my hands are trembling on the steering wheel.
Enough. I need to stop, I need to get out, I need to breathe air. Where am I? Where are we? Outskirts of Fort William?
Oh God. Oh God. Just STOP.
With a yank of the wheel I veer the car, fast and hard and straight into the forecourt of a BP garage, squirting grit with the wheels, almost smashing into a fuel pump.
The car gently steams. The silence is shocked.
“Mummy?”
I look up at the rearview mirror. Kirstie is staring at me in the mirror as I smudge the tears from my eyes with the heel of my hand. I stare at her reflection, as she must have stared so many times into mirrors, seeing her own reflection. Yet seeing her dead sister as well.
And now Kirstie smiles at me.
Why? Why is she smiling? She is mute and barely blinking—and yet smiling? As if she is trying to freak me out.
A sudden fear ripples through me. Absurd and ridiculous, yet undeniable.
I have to get out of the car. Now.
“Mummy’s just going to get a coffee, OK? I just—just need a coffee. Do you want anything?”
Kirstie says nothing. Clutching Leopardy with her two fisted hands. Her smile is cold, and blank, and yet somehow, knowing. It is the kind of smile Lydia would sometimes do, Lydia, the quiet one, the soulful one, the more eccentric of the twins. My favorite.
Fleeing my own child, and my own doubts, I rush into the little BP shop.
“No petrol, thanks. Just the coffee.”
It’s too hot to drink. I stumble out into the raw, sea-scented air, trying to stay in control. Calm down, Sarah, calm down.
A hot cup of Americano in hand, I climb back in the car. I take deep, therapeutic breaths. Slowing my heartbeat. And then I gaze in the mirror. Kirstie remains quiet. She has also stopped smiling, and turned away. As she scratches Beany behind the ear, she is staring out the window at the suburban houses that straggle the road, to and from the garage. They look foolish, and English, and incongruous, with their polite windows and twee little porches, set against the grandeur and immensity of the Highlands.
On, on, on.
I turn the key, and pull away. We take the long road toward Fort Augustus; to Loch Lochy, Loch Garry, Loch Cluanie. It is so long, we have come so far. I think about life before the accident, the happiness, so easily shattered. Our life was made of brittle ice.