And the same is true of you. The smell of lemons alone should have been enough to remind me that you look after me too. I held your hand at Leo’s funeral, but you held mine tightly back. And it’s you who’s got me through the night, Tess, thinking about you and talking to you—you who helped me to breathe.
I can hear a siren, wailing in the distance and getting closer. You’re right, it is the sound of a society taking care of its citizens.
As I wait to be rescued, I know that I am bereaved but not diminished by your death. Because you are my sister in every fiber of my being. And that fiber is visible—two strands of DNA twisted in a double helix in every cell of my body—proving, visibly, that we are sisters. But there are other strands that link us, that wouldn’t be seen by even the strongest of electron microscopes. I think of how we are connected by Leo dying and Dad leaving and lost homework five minutes after we should have left for school; by holidays to Skye and Christmas rituals (ten past five you’re allowed to open one present at the top of your stocking, ten to five you’re allowed to feel but before that only looking and before midnight not even peeking). We are conjoined by hundreds of thousands of memories that silt down into you and stop being memories and become a part of what you are. And inside me is the girl with caramel hair flying along on a bicycle, burying her rabbit, painting canvases with explosions of color and loving her friends and phoning me at awkward times and teasing me and fulfilling completely the sacrament of the present moment and showing me the joy in life, and because you are my sister, all those things are part of me too and I would do anything for it to be two months ago and for it to be me out there shouting your name, Tess.
It must have been so much colder for you. Did the snow muffle the sound of the trees? Was it freezing and silent? Did my coat help keep you warm? I hope that as you died you felt me loving you.
There are footsteps outside and the door is opening.
It’s taken hours of dark terror and countless thousands of words, but in the end it reduces down to so little.
I’m sorry.
I love you.
I always will.
Bee
Acknowledgments
I’m not sure if anyone reads the acknowledgments, but I hope so because without the following people, this novel would never have been written or published.
First, I want to thank my UK editor, the wonderful Emma Beswetherick, for her creativity, insight, and for not only having the courage of her convictions but inspiring other people to share them. I would also like to thank Sarah Knight and Christine Kopprasch at Crown for all their support and for getting this story across the Atlantic!
I would like to thank my agent, Felicity Blunt, at Curtis Brown, as well as Kate Cooper, Nick Marston, and Tally Garner, also at Curtis Brown.
I want to thank, hugely, Livia Firth, Michele Matthews, Kelly Martin, Sandra Leonard, Trixie Rawlinson, Alison Clements, and Amanda Jobbins, who helped in so many practical ways.
Thank you, Cosmo and Joe, for understanding when I needed to write and for being proud.
Last, but most of all, my thanks go to my younger sister, Tora Orde-Powlett—the inspiration for the book and a continued blessing.
AN EXCERPT FROM ROSAMUND LUPTON’S NEW BOOK
AFTERWARDS
Coming in June 2012
PROLOGUE
I couldn’t move, not even a little finger or a flicker of an eye. I couldn’t open my mouth to scream.
I struggled, as hard as I could, to move the huge hulk that my body had become, but I was trapped under the hull of a vast ship wrecked on the ocean floor and moving was impossible.
My eyelids were welded shut. My eardrums broken. My vocal cords snapped off.
Pitch dark and silent and so heavy in there; a mile of black water above me.
Only one thing for it, I said to myself, thinking of you, and I slipped out of the wrecked ship of my body into the black ocean.
I swam upward toward the daylight with all my strength.
Not a mile deep after all.
Because I was suddenly in a white room, brightly gleaming, smelling pungently of antiseptic. I heard voices and my name.
I saw the body part of “I” was in a hospital bed. I watched a doctor holding my eyelids open and shining a light into my eyes; another was tipping my bed back, another putting an IV into my arm.
You won’t be able to believe this. You’re a man who dams rivers and climbs mountains; a man who knows the laws of nature and physics. “Hogwash!” you’ve said to the TV, when anyone talks about anything paranormal. Although you’ll be kinder to your wife, not consigning my words to be fed to pigs, you’ll think it’s impossible. But out-of-body experiences do happen. You read about it in the papers; hear people talking about it on the radio.
But if this was real, what should I do? Push my way through the doctors and elbow out the nurse who was shaving my head? “Excuse me! Gangway! Sorry! My body, I think. I’m right here, actually!”
Thinking ridiculous things because I was afraid.
Sick, goose bumps, shivering afraid.
And as I felt afraid, I remembered.
Blistering heat and raging flames and suffocating smoke.
The school was on fire.
1
You were in your important BBC meeting this afternoon, so you wouldn’t have felt the strong, warm breeze—”A godsend for sports day,” parents were saying to each other. I thought that even if a God existed he’d be a little tied up with starving people in Africa or abandoned orphans in Eastern Europe to worry about providing free air-conditioning for Sidley House School’s sack race.
The sun shone on the white lines painted on the grass; the whistles hanging around the teachers’ necks glinted; the children’s hair was shiny-bright. Touchingly too-big feet on small legs bounced on the grass as they did the one-hundred-meter dash, the sack race, the obstacle course. You can’t really see the school from the playing field in summertime; those huge pollarded oaks hide it from view, but I knew a reception class of four-year-olds was still in there, and I thought it was a shame the youngest children couldn’t be out enjoying the afternoon too.
Adam was wearing his “I am 8!” badge from our card this morning—just this morning. He came hurrying up to me, that little face of his beaming, because he was off to get his cake from school right now! Rowena had to get the medals, so she was going with him; Rowena who was at Sidley House with Jenny all those moons ago.
As they left, I looked around to see if Jenny had arrived. I’d thought that after her A-level disaster she should immediately start revision for her retakes, but she still wanted to work at Sidley House to pay for her planned trip to Canada. Strange to think I minded so much.
I’d thought her being a temporary teaching assistant at seventeen was challenge enough—and now she was school nurse for the afternoon. We’d gently crossed swords at breakfast.
“It’s just a little young to have that much responsibility.”
“It’s a primary school sports day, Mum, not a motorway crash.”
But now her shift was almost over—with no accidents at all—and soon she’d be out to join us. I was sure she’d be itching to leave that small, stuffy medical room stuck at the top of the school.
I’d noticed at breakfast that she was wearing that red frou-frou skirt with a skimpy top and I’d told her it didn’t really look very professional, but when did Jenny ever listen to my advice on clothes?