And all the time I was refusing to believe it could really be happening. This place was soft-cheeked children and fidgeting on the stairs and washing lines strung up across classrooms with flying pennants of children’s drawings. It was reading books and chapter books and beanbags and fruit cut up into slices at snack time.
It was safe.
Another step.
All around me I heard and felt chunks of Jenny’s and Adam’s childhoods crashing down.
Another step.
I felt dizzy, poisoned by something in the smoke.
Another step.
It was a battle. Me against this living, breathing fire that wanted to kill my child.
Another step.
I knew I’d never get to the third floor; that it would kill me before I could reach her.
I felt her at the top of the stairs. She had managed to get down one flight.
She was my little girl and I was here and everything was going to be all right. All all right now.
“Jenny?”
She didn’t speak or move, and the fire’s roar was getting closer and I couldn’t breathe much longer.
I tried to pick her up as if she was still tiny, but she was too heavy.
I dragged her down the stairs, trying to use my body to shield her from the heat and smoke. I wouldn’t think how badly hurt she was. Not yet. Not until the bottom of the stairs. Not until she was safe.
I cried to you, silently, as if by telepathy I could summon you to help us.
And as I dragged her, step by step, down the stairs, trying to get away from burning heat and raging flames and smoke, I thought of love. I held onto it. And it was cool and clear and quiet.
Maybe there was telepathy between us, because at that moment you must have been in your meeting with the BBC commissioning editors about the follow-up to your “Hostile Environments” series. You’d done hot, steamy jungles and blazing, arid deserts, and you want the next series to be in the contrasting frozen wilds of Antarctica. So maybe it was you who helped me envisage a silent, white acreage of love as I dragged Jenny down the stairs.
But before I reached the bottom, something hit me, throwing me forward, and everything went dark.
As I lost consciousness, I talked to you.
I said, “An unborn baby doesn’t need air at all, did you know that?” I thought you probably didn’t. When I was pregnant with Jenny, I found out everything I could, but you were too impatient for her to arrive to bother with her prologue. So you don’t know that an unborn baby, swimming around in amniotic fluid, can’t take a breath or she would drown. There aren’t any temporary gills so that she can swim, fishlike, until birth. No, the baby gets her oxygen from the umbilical cord attached to her mother. I felt like an oxygen supply attached to a tiny, intrepid diver.
But the moment she was born, the oxygen supply was cut off and she entered the new element of air. There was a moment of silence, a precipitous second, as if she stood on the edge of life, deciding. In the old days, they used to slap the baby to hear the reassuring yell of lungs filled with air. Nowadays, they look closely to see the minute rise of a baby-soft chest and listen to the whispering—in and out—to know that life in the new medium of air has begun.
And then I cried and you cheered—actually cheered!—and the baby equipment trolley was wheeled out, no need for that now. A normal delivery. A healthy infant. To join all the billions of others on the planet who breathe, in and out, without thinking about it.
The next day your sister sent me a bouquet of roses with gypsophila, known as “baby’s breath,” sprays of pretty white flowers. But a newborn baby’s breath is finer than a single parachute from a blown dandelion clock.
You told me once that when you lose consciousness, the last of the senses to go is hearing. In the darkness I thought I heard Jenny take a dandelion-clock breath.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
ROSAMUND LUPTON has worked for many years as a scriptwriter. She lives with her husband and two sons in London. This is her first novel.
Copyright
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2010 by Rosamund Lupton
Excerpt from Afterwards copyright © 2011 by Rosamund Lipton.
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Crown Publishers, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
CROWN is a trademark and the Crown colophon is a registered trademark of Random House, Inc.
Originally published in paperback in Great Britain by Piatkus Books, an imprint of Little, Brown Book Group, a Hachette UK Company, London, in 2010. Published by arrangement with Piatkus, an imprint of Little, Brown Book Group UK.
The verse on this page is from “In the Bleak Midwinter” by Christina Rossetti (1830–1894). The verse on this page is from “Sleep, Baby Sleep” (traditional).
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Lupton, Rosamund.
Sister : a novel / Rosamund Lupton. — 1st American ed.
p. cm.
1. Sisters—Fiction. 2. Sisters—Death—Fiction. 3. Murder—Investigation—Fiction. I. Title.
PR6112.U77S57 2011
823′.92—dc22 2010025327
eISBN: 978-0-307-71653-8
Jacket design by Laura Duffy
Jacket photography by ML Harris/Getty Images
This book contains an excerpt from the forthcoming Afterwards by Rosamund Lupton. This excerpt has been set for this edition only and may not reflect the final content of the forthcoming edition.
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