The Perfect Girl

MONDAY MORNING
SAM

I have to wake her, because I have to tell her about Maria and Zoe, yet no part of me wants to.

‘Tessa,’ I say. ‘Tess.’ There’s a thin sheet covering her, and its sculptural white folds describe the lines of her body so closely, it’s as if somebody had carefully laid it there, like the first damp bandages of a plaster cast.

She’s alert quickly, eyes wide open; she’s heard something in my voice.

‘What?’ she says, and it’s a whisper; she hasn’t moved yet.

I want to swallow the reason I’ve woken her up, never speak of it. I don’t want to do this to her.

‘I’m so sorry,’ I say, and the words make me feel terribly, throat-clearingly formal. They steal an intimacy from us.

And in the moment after I tell Tessa that her sister is dead, and she sits up, her eyes searching mine for confirmation of the truth of what I’ve said, I have the strange realisation that she resembles Maria more closely than I’d ever noticed before.

And after a time where I hold her tight while shock takes hold of her, and I experience what I can only describe as an ache in my heart, in spite of the clichéd awfulness of that phrase, I have to let her go.

And that heartache, that hard pinch of a feeling, is not something I can indulge. It’s a shallow, oil-slicked puddle of self-indulgent emotion compared to the oceans of grief that Tess’s family have been through, and will now go through again. Just to totally overkill the metaphor: their grief could fill the Mariana Trench.

I gather up Tess’s clothes for her and she dresses silently. When she’s finished, I ask: ‘Do you want to come with me? To see Zoe? And Richard?’

His name seems to me to hover bulkily in the air between us, but it’s the least of her worries at this moment.

‘I should go to the house first,’ Tess says. ‘I need to see… and the baby…’

She can’t finish her sentence; her words are choked with shock and incomprehension. We have very little information, just that Maria died at the house, but we don’t know how. I understand that it’s up to me to look after Zoe for now, whoever she’s with.

‘Shall I drop you there?’ I ask. I’m worried about her driving.

We’re standing on the communal landing in my building now. It’s a small, bright space, with floor-to-ceiling windows over the busy commuter road below, no lift, just a functional metal staircase that winds its way down to the ground floor and the car park, and it’s airless and stifling.

‘No,’ Tess says. ‘You need to go to Zoe. I’ll come later.’ And then she’s gone, sandals clattering on the steps.