The Rose Garden

CHAPTER ONE

I lost my only sister in the last days of November.

It’s rotten time to lose someone, when all the world is dying too and darkness comes on earlier, and when the chill rains fall it seems the very sky is weeping. Not that there’s ever a good time to lose your best friend, but it seemed somehow harder to sit there and watch in that hospital room with the white-coated specialists coming and going and see only grey clouds beyond the hard windows that offered no warmth, and no hope.

When my sister had first fallen ill, we would sometimes go out to the garden and sit side by side on the bench by the butterfly bush. We would sit a long time, saying nothing, just feeling the sun on our faces and watching the butterflies dance.

And the illness had seemed very small, then – a thing she could conquer, the way she had overcome everything else fate had flung in her path. She was famous for that, for her spirit. Directors would cast her in roles that were more often given to men than to women, the rogue hero roles, and she’d carry them off with her usual flair and the audience loved it. They loved her. The tabloids were camped round the house through the summer, and when she went into the hospital they came there too, standing vigil around the main entrance.

But just at the end there were only the three of us there in the room: me, my sister Katrina, and her husband, Bill.

We were holding her hands, Bill and I, with our eyes on her face because neither of us could have looked at the other. And after a time there were only the two of us left, but I couldn’t let go of her hand because part of me couldn’t believe she was actually gone, so I sat there in dull, hollow silence until Bill stood slowly and took the hand he was still holding and laid it with care on Katrina’s heart. Gently he pressed his own hand on hers one final time, then he slipped something small off her finger and passed it to me: a gold ring, a Claddagh ring, that had belonged to our mother.

Wordlessly he held it out and wordlessly I took it, and still we couldn’t meet each other’s eyes. And then I saw him feel his pocket for his cigarettes and turning, he went out, and I was left alone. Entirely alone.

And at the window of the room the cold November rains slid down the glass and cast their shifting shadows in a room that could no longer hold the light.

I didn’t go to her memorial service. I helped arrange it, and made sure her favourite songs were sung, her favourite verses read, but when the crowds of fans and friends turned up to pay their last respects, I wasn’t there to shake their hands and listen to their well-meant words of sympathy. I know there were people who thought me a coward for that, but I couldn’t. My grief was a private one, too deep for sharing. And anyway, I knew it didn’t matter whether I was at the church, because Katrina wasn’t there.

She wasn’t anywhere.

It seemed to me incredible a light as strong as hers could be extinguished so completely without leaving some small glow behind, the way a lamp that’s been switched off will sometimes dimly shine against the darkness. I’d felt certain I would feel her presence somewhere … but I hadn’t.

There were only dead leaves round the butterfly bush in the garden, and flowerless shrubs round the porch with its empty swing, and when I started to pack up her closets there wasn’t so much as a movement of air in the hallway behind me to let me believe that my sister, in some way, was there with me still.

So I went through the motions. I dealt with the small things that needed attention, and tried to get on with my life in the way everybody was saying I should, while a great hollow loneliness grew deep inside me. Then spring came, and Bill came – turned up on my doorstep one Saturday morning without calling first, looking awkward. And holding her ashes.

I hadn’t seen him since November, not in person, though because he had a film just out I’d seen him fairly often on the entertainment news.

He didn’t want to come inside. He cleared his throat, a bit uncomfortably. ‘I thought …’ He paused, and held more tightly to the plain oak box that held Katrina’s ashes. ‘She wanted me to scatter these.’

‘I know.’ My sister’s wishes hadn’t been a secret.

‘I don’t know where to do it. Don’t know where to take them. I thought maybe you …’ His pause this time was more a moment of decision, and he held the box toward me. ‘I thought you could do a better job.’

I looked at him, and for the first time since her death our eyes met and I saw the pain in his. He coughed. ‘I don’t need to be there when you do it, I’ve said my goodbyes. I just thought you’d know better than I would where she was the happiest. Where she belongs.’

And then he pushed the box into my hands and bent to kiss my forehead before quickly turning from my door and walking off. I wouldn’t see him after that, I knew. We moved in different circles, and the bond we’d had between us was reduced now to the simple box he’d handed me.

Inside, I set it on the narrow table by my window, thinking.

Where she’d been the happiest, he’d said. There were so many places, really. I tried narrowing the choices in my mind, recalling images: The morning we had stood and watched the sun rise from the brink of the Grand Canyon, and Katrina’s face had radiated wonderment as she had pointed out a small white aeroplane flying far below us, and she’d said she’d never seen a place so beautiful; the time she’d made a movie in Mumbai and the director had rewarded her for days of gruelling action with a weekend in Kerala on the southern coast of India, and I had flown over to join her and we’d spent our evenings walking on the black sand beach while gorgeous sunsets flamed the sky above the blue Arabian sea, and Katrina had splashed through the waves like a child, and been happy.