The Sister Who Lived

The thing nobody tells you about coming back from the dead is how ordinary the mornings get afterward, and how much that costs.

I open the shop at half past eight, the way Mum did, the way Mara did the year she was keeping it going for both of us. The bell over the door says the same small bright thing it has said for thirty years. The buckets in the cold cabinet need topping up. The chrysanthemums have gone over at the edges and I pick the dead heads off one at a time, between finger and thumb, because throwing the whole bunch out feels like a thing I am not allowed to do. I have got very careful, since the river, about what I am allowed to throw away.

It is a Tuesday in the middle of November. The estuary is out. From the shop window I can see the mud going on forever, grey and shining, gulls walking on it like they own the place, and beyond that the thin silver line where the water is waiting to come back in. The tide in Wend takes its time. It is always either leaving or returning. There is a long flat hour in the middle when it is neither, when the river just sits there breathing, and that is the hour I like best, because nothing is happening to it. Nothing is being asked of it.

I sell three bunches of carnations to Mrs. Pryce, who is going to her husband's grave, and I know not to ask which husband, and I wrap them in the brown paper and tie the string the way Mara taught me, two loops and a tuck, and Mrs. Pryce says, "You're looking peaky, love," and I say, "I'm fine," because I have said it so many times now that my mouth does it without me.

The truth is I have not slept the night through in two years. The truth is I keep the shop open because my mother died in the back room of it and my sister kept it alive after, and if I let it close then one more thing has died on my watch, and I am the last Marlowe standing, and I do not understand how that happened.

I was crying too hard to drive. That is the whole reason I am alive. Mara took the keys out of my hand on the night of Mum's funeral and said, get in, I'll do it, you can be a mess, that's allowed tonight. So she drove. The road was wet and the barrier on the estuary bend was old, and the car went through it nose-first into the river, and the water came up through the floor faster than I could understand it was happening, and her hand found the back of my neck in the dark and pushed me up toward the gap where the air still was. She did not push herself. I have done the arithmetic of that ten thousand times. There was one breath of air left in that car and one hand free to reach for it, and she used the hand on me. The wrong sister walked out of the river. I have never been able to make the sum come right.

I do not say that out loud. There is no one to say it to who would not flinch. My cousin Reuben, who is nineteen and lives above the shop with me and eats everything in the flat and is the only family I have left, would flinch. Mrs. Eze up at the hospice would put her warm hand over mine and not flinch, but I cannot do that to her either, because she sits with dying people all day and she does not need to come home and sit with me.

So I pick the dead heads off the chrysanthemums one at a time and I say I'm fine, and at four o'clock the light comes in low and gold over the mud, the way it does in November for about twenty minutes before it gives up, and that is the part of the day I keep the shop open for. The four o'clock light. It makes the buckets glow. It makes the whole grey town look like it was worth saving.

That is when the cold comes in.

Not the door. The door does not open, the bell does not ring. The cold comes in the way a draught comes under a door that is shut, except there is no door for it to come under. It is in the shop with me all at once, a drop in the air so sudden my breath turns to fog in front of my face, in November, indoors, with the little electric heater going by my feet. The water in the buckets goes still. The four o'clock light, the gold light, the one good thing, drains out of the room like someone has pulled a plug, and what is left is grey. Not dark. Grey. The grey of about five minutes before the sun comes up, except it is four in the afternoon and the sun is on the other side of the day.

I have felt this cold before. I felt it in the river, in the instant before everything, when the water was at my chin and Mara's mouth was moving and I could not hear what she said over the roar of it coming in. I have felt it since, at the edges, in shop doorways and on the night bus and once standing over Mum's grave. A cold that arrives instead of travels, that is already in the room before you can ask it how it got there. I have always told myself it is the grief. Grief does strange things to a body. That is what the leaflet from the hospice said, and I have held onto the leaflet the way you hold onto any explanation that lets you keep being sane.

I turn around, and there is a man standing by the cold cabinet who was not there a moment ago and who did not come in through the door.

I want to be clear that I do not scream. I have wanted to scream for two years and it turns out that when the thing you have been dreading finally walks into your shop you just go very still and your heart does something complicated, and you notice, stupidly, that the carnations nearest him have stopped breathing. They were opening all day. Now they are held, the way the tide is held at the turn, neither one thing nor the other.

He is tall and he is dressed plainly, dark, like nothing, like the inside of a closed coat, and his face is the kind of face you forget while you are still looking at it. Not ugly. Not beautiful. Unfinished, almost, as if whoever was making it got called away to something more urgent. The only thing I can hold on to is his eyes, which are the grey of the light he brought with him, and which are not looking at me the way a person looks at a person. They are reading me. They move once, top to bottom, the way your eyes move down a column of figures, and they stop, and something in him goes wrong, the way a clock goes wrong, quietly, a second lost that you only notice later.

"You can see me," he says.

His voice is quiet and flat and it does not echo, which is wrong, because everything echoes in a shop full of cold tile. It is as if the words are happening directly inside the grey and not in the air.

I do not answer. I am counting the carnations. There are eleven in the bucket nearest him and I am counting them because if I am counting them then I am a person doing a normal thing and not a woman who has finally, completely, two years late, lost her mind.

"You can see me," he says again, and there is nothing cruel in it, nothing threatening, only that same wrongness being read off a page, and then, more quietly, almost to himself, "That is not possible." A pause, and his head tilts, and he says a thing that makes no sense to me yet and will not let go of me later: "I came here for someone else. Not you. Never you. And yet here you are, and you are looking back."

"There are a lot of things that aren't possible," I hear myself say, "and I'm tired, so if you're going to rob me, the till's open and there's about forty quid in it and you're welcome to it."

He looks at the till. He looks back at me. Something moves over the unfinished face, slow, the way a light comes up under a door in a house you thought was empty, and I realise with a lurch that he does not understand the joke, that he is taking the offer of the forty quid completely seriously and trying to work out what it has to do with anything.

"I am not here for the money," he says.

"No," I say, and my voice comes out small, because the grey is all the way into the corners of the room now and the four o'clock light is gone and I know, I have always known, in the place I put the things I am not allowed to throw away, what kind of cold this is and what it comes for. "No, I didn't think you were."

He takes a step toward me. The carnations between us do not so much as tremble. And he says, in the flat quiet voice that happens inside the grey instead of in the air, the way you might tell someone their bus is cancelled, the way you might read out a name from a list:

"My name is Aza. I have done this for ten thousand years." He stops, as if even he can hear how strange the next part is, as if he is checking it against something written down. "I was sent for a Marlowe. Two years ago, on the river road. For the other one. And I have stayed near you ever since, and I did not know why, the way you do not know why a draught comes back to the same gap in the same window, and I am only now beginning to understand that the gap is you."

For the other one. The words go in clean and do not bleed yet, the way the worst cuts don't.

He goes quiet then, and his lips move, and I realise he is counting. Not the flowers. Me. He is watching the pulse in my throat and counting it, the way a man might count to be sure a thing is still happening, and the cold in the room seems to be keeping time with it.

The cold cabinet hums. Somewhere upstairs Reuben's music is going, ordinary and alive, a whole world thick. And I stand in the grey in my mother's shop with my dead heads in my apron pocket and I ask the death-god the only question I have, the one I have been asking the ceiling for two years.

"Then why," I say, "am I still here, when she isn't?"

He stops counting. For the first time, Death does not have an answer, and I watch the not-having land on him like a weight he was not built to hold, and some small cruel part of me, the part that has hated itself for two years, is glad. Let him not know either. Let there be two of us in the dark of it.