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“In the bedroom,” Conor whispered without looking up.
“You stay with Conor,” Nana said to me. “Be as kind to him as you would want someone to be to you if you felt broken.” Then she took her rolling pin out of her pink-and-purple patchwork bag, and the way she held it made me think it wasn’t so she could do some baking. I wanted to be kind to Conor, and I knew what it was like to feel broken, but I followed Nana, even though I knew I wasn’t meant to. Curiosity doesn’t only kill cats.
The bedroom was dark and smelled bad. There were piles of clothes all over the floor, and a filthy-looking man lying on the bed with his eyes closed. Empty bottles of pills were on the stained bedsheets beside him. Nana dropped the rolling pin and used the phone on the nightstand to call for an ambulance.
He wasn’t dead; he just wished that he were. Even though I was very young, the thought of anyone feeling that unhappy made me feel overwhelmingly sad. When the nice paramedics had takenConor’s dad to hospital, the three of us ate Nana’s birthday cake. It seems like a strange thing to have done, looking back. But then my childhood was rarely normal.
Mr. Kennedy lived to tell the tale, and Nana paid for him to go to rehab. “We all get broken sometimes, and if you can help fix someone, you should always try,” she said. I think Conor’s dad was a bit like me in that way. But he wasn’t born with a broken heart; his heart broke when his wife died. Conor said he rarely drank at all before then and that he used to be happy. They all were.
Conor stayed at Seaglass for a little while, and the three of us—him, Nana, and me—spent a week straightening out the cottage where he and his father lived. We cleared out all the rubbish and washed everything that could be cleaned. Nana pulled up the old carpet, sanded the floors, painted the walls—inside and out—and bought some new cushions and bed linens. Nana was always of the opinion that if you could help change a life, you could help change the person who leads it. She put fresh flowers in every room, and filled up the fridge and freezer with food before Conor’s dad returned. She even paid for us to take a taxi to collect him from rehab. He looked like a different man to me, so much so I thought we’d picked up the wrong person. He’d put on some weight, his clothes were clean, he’d shaved off his horrible beard, and he didn’t stink of booze or cigarettes.
“Are you sure you’re Conor’s dad?” I asked in the car, and everyone laughed even though I hadn’t been joking.
“Thank you,” he said when he stepped inside the bungalow and saw how much work we had done to make their house a home. “For everything. How can I ever repay you?”
“Just stay well,” Nana replied.
Then she shook hands with him, kissed Conor on the cheek, and we left them to try again.
“Everyone deserves a second chance,” Nana said when we were alone.
“Even bad people?” I asked.
“Everyone you know is both good and bad, it’s part of being human.”
I think I was too young to understand at the time.
“Can you bring some matches as well as logs?” Lily calls, sticking her head out of the lounge door, snapping me out of the past and back to a present that is no less upsetting.
“I think you should come and see this. All of you,” Conor replies.
Lily tuts—one of many bad habits she inherited from our mother—then tells Trixie to stay behind while the rest of the women in the family join us in the kitchen.
“Where’s Nana?” asks my mother, staring at the floor where Nana’s body used to be.
“Exactly,” says Conor, and we all look at one another. “Did somebody move her?”
Everyone shakes their heads.
“Well, someone left this VHS tape and this note on the kitchen table,” he says. “The words didn’t write themselves.”
Nancy picks up the scrap of paper and reads out loud.
“‘Trick-or-treat the children hear, before they scream and disappear.’ What does that mean?”
“WATCH ME?” says Lily, picking up the tape and reading the Scrabble letters stuck to its cover. She puts it straight back down, as though it might hurt her. “What is this? A sick version ofAlice in Wonderland?”
“Nana disappearing isn’t the only thing that’s changed in here,”says Rose, and we turn to see what she is staring at on the kitchen wall. The poem written in chalk is still there, but four of the lines have been crossed out.
Daisy Darker’s nana was the oldest but least wise.
The woman’s will made them all feel ill, which was why she had to die.
Daisy Darker’s father lived life dancing to his own tune.
His self-centered ways, and the pianos he played, danced him to his doom.
“What isthatsupposed to mean?” Lily says, looking at our mother.
