‘Mum?’ Habit put a question mark after her name, even though my phone had already identified her. I had no idea why she was calling, but there was already a hint of a tremor in my voice.
The peculiar sound at the other end of the line had nothing to do with cell phone reception or distorted sound waves. It took me several seconds to process it, because in all my thirty-one years, I’d only heard it a couple of times before. She was crying.
‘Mum, what is it? What’s wrong?’
More tears and then a garbled phrase that was impossible to decipher.
I’d gravitated to the ancient radiator in the hallway, the one that held its heat long after the other pipes had cooled, but an icy terror had crept into my veins. It was almost as though I alreadyknew.
‘Has something happened? Are you sick?’
Built like an emaciated sparrow, my seventy-three-year-old mother actually had the constitution of a fairly robust ox.
‘It’s not me. It’s Amelia,’ she said on a wail.
My knees liquefied and I slid slowly down the wall beside the radiator.
‘Mimi?’ I asked, the childish nickname emerging from the vaults of my memory. I hadn’t called her that since I was about six years old, when my tongue had finally mastered its way around my older sister’s name.
‘She’s been taken to hospital. That’s where I’m calling you from,’ Mum replied, and for the first time I noticed the echoey quality of the call and an unfamiliar soundtrack in the background.
‘Is she ill? Has she been in an accident?’ I fired off my worst fears, as though they were bullets in a gun.
‘Yes… and… well, no, it wasn’t an accident, exactly. You see, she got lost, or so they think.’
‘While she was driving?’ I asked, frantically trying to piece together a story I could make sense of.
‘No. While she was walking along the beach. During the night.’
There were too many confusing facts to assimilate in that single sentence. ‘I don’t understand, Mum. What was she doing wandering on the beach in the middle of the night in January? It must have been freezing. And how on earth did she get lost? She knows the coastline by her cottage like the back of her hand.’
‘I don’t know, Lexi. None of it makes any sense.She’s not making any sense. They had to sedate her at the hospital because she was getting so distressed.’
Out of all the terrifying things Mum had said so far during our call, that was the one that scared me the most. Amelia was the sensible one. The ‘wise head on young shoulders’, that’s what everyone had called her when, at just sixteen, she’d become the rock both Mum and I had leant on after losing Dad in that tragic and inexplicable accident. My sister had always been the one I turned to first. It was Amelia who’d taught me how to use tampons, how to solve quadratic equations and even master a three-point turn, which my driving instructor had despaired of me ever grasping. I’d always been the dreamer of the family, the one with her head buried in the pages of a book. But Amelia had practically come out of the womb a fully fledged adult.
The idea of my capable older sister wandering lost on a wintry beach – one she walked on every single day of the year – was nothing short of inconceivable.
‘They’re worried she might have hypothermia,’ Mum continued. ‘She was so very cold when they brought her in, you see.’
I looked out through the hallway window where New York was already under six inches of snow. The last time Amelia had visited me in winter, I’d teased her for kitting up like an Arctic explorer whenever she walked even a block from the apartment.
‘She was found just before dawn on the mudflats,’ Mum said, her voice wobbling as she painted an incomprehensible picture. ‘It was minus one outside, but she was wearing nothing except a nightie, and her feet were bare.’
*
‘What the fuck?’ Jeff said, blinking dazedly as I snapped on the overhead light. ‘What’s going on?’ he asked, reaching for his phone on the nightstand. ‘Jesus, Lexi, it’s half past two in the morning.’
‘I have to pack,’ I said, my voice tight as I hauled my suitcase down from the top of the wardrobe. It bounced on the mattress, connecting with Jeff’s foot, which had admittedly encroached on to my half of the bed.
‘Is this about that phone call?’ Jeff asked. He was still middle-of-the-night slow, whereas I was running on high-octane adrenaline.
‘It was my mum on the phone,’ I said, pulling a random handful of clothes from the dresser and throwing them haphazardly into the case. ‘Amelia’s been taken to hospital. They think she’s got hypothermia.’
Jeff ran a hand through his thick sandy hair, which was already awry from the pillows. ‘Shit. That’s rough. I thought England was more wet than cold?’
I pulled an armful of jumpers from a drawer and lobbed them in the direction of the case. Most of them found their target. Sensing this wasn’t the moment to discuss the climate of my homeland, Jeff grappled for his discarded boxers and swung out of my bed.
‘Can I do something? he asked, reaching once again for his phone. ‘Do you want me to check for available flights?’
