Page 5 of The Good Sister

I appreciate Rose’s choice of words. Most people ask ‘how was your day?’, which is so frustratingly intangible. Telling someonesomethingabout your day, on the other hand, is specific. I contemplate telling Rose about my interaction with the possible vagrant at the library, but as there is a high possibility that this would lead to a flurry of questions, I select a different item to report instead. ‘I found out who’d been crossing out the swear words in the books,’ I say.

Rose tosses the salad. ‘Oh, yeah? Who?’

‘Mrs Millard,’ I say. ‘From the retirement community. She’s the one with the mole on her cheek with the hairs growing out of it. She returned a book through the slot after their book club meeting and I happened to be standing there. I saw the crosses and confronted her. She didn’t deny it. I told her she had to pay to replace that copy and if I saw any more copies that had been scribbled on, she’d have her library card suspended!’

‘Good job, Officer Castle.’

Technically, she should have said ‘Constable’, but I understand what she means. ‘No-one defaces library property on my watch,’ I say.

Rose smiles. Rose is very pretty. Petite with a round face, huge eyes and nut-brown hair. We don’t look like twins (lots of people tell us that). I am tall with a narrow face and blonde hair. In fact, the only physical thing the two of us have in common is the colour of our eyes. A very pale blue, like seawater in the shallows of a white sandy beach (an old boyfriend of Rose’s said that once, and I thought it the best description I’d heard for the colour).

‘It’s nearly ready,’ Rose says, getting out her lancet device and blood glucose strip.

Rose has type 1 diabetes, which means her pancreas produces little or no insulin, which the body needs to function. To compensate for her lack of insulin, Rose has to give herself twice-daily insulin injections, test her blood sugar up to ten times a day, and strictly control the type of food she eats as well as the time of day she eats it. It’s a lot of work but she never complains. Now, as she prepares to prick her finger to test her blood sugar, she looks up to warn me and, as always, I set off on a lap of the house (blood makes me queasy).

The house feels empty without Owen, even after all these months. I am fond of him, despite his many disagreeable qualities, such as his penchant for throwing an arm around my shoulder at unexpected times, and his refusal to call me by my given name, preferring instead to use uninspired versions of it: ‘Fernie’, ‘Fernster’, ‘The Ferminator’. It’s always strikes me as one of the great mysteries of life, who you are fond of. As I wander back toward the kitchen, I nearly stumble on the open suitcase on the floor, partially filled with shoes and a folded garment bag. At the sight of it, my stomach clenches slightly.

Rose is going to London on Friday for four weeks to visit Owen. One full lunar cycle. I know Rose is excited about it so I’m trying to be excited too, but Rose and I haven’t been apart for four weeks before – not even when Rose and Owen got married, because they had a destination wedding in Thailand followed by a ‘group honeymoon’ that all the guests (including me) attended. I try not to think about what could go wrong while she’s away, and that, of course, makes me think about what happenedthat nightand then, suddenly, I can’t think of anything else. I don’t want her to go.

‘Dinner’s ready!’

I tuck the edge of the garment bag back inside the case. That’s when I notice the bottle. A white pill bottle with a pink label, showing the midsection of a woman, with full breasts and a curved abdomen. I pick up the bottle and read the label:ELEVIT. TO SUPPORT YOU THROUGH THE DIFFERENT STAGES OF PREGNANCY.

‘Fern? Dinner!’

I stand. ‘Are you pregnant, Rose?’

It wouldn’t be ridiculous, I suppose. Rose is twenty-eight, which is an appropriate age, more or less. I have watched television programs about the way fertility dwindles after the age of thirty. Apparently, doctors were recommending that partnered women who wanted children should start as early as possible. Once the surprise of it fades, I feel something akin to excitement hit my system. Achild. I’ve always been partial to children. Their lack of complexity, their proclivity for speaking directly without subtext or agenda. Of course, I’d long accepted that I couldn’t have a child of my own, but Rose having a child would be the next best thing.

I return to the kitchen and give Rose the once-over. She doesn’t appear to have gained any weight. Then again, if common wisdom is to be believed, morning sickness could ward off weight gain in the early months. Perhaps she’d been feeling off-colour these past few weeks, having aversions to food she’d previously enjoyed, but keeping it secret, waiting for a special moment to announce it? But Owen had been gone for months. What would it mean as far as he was concerned?

‘I guess you found the Elevit,’ Rose says after a beat. ‘My doctor advised that if I was going to try to get pregnant, I should start taking them. Unfortunately,’ she says, ‘it hasn’t happened yet.’

‘So . . . you’retryingto have a baby?’ I ask.

Rose picks up the plates and carries them to the table. ‘I didn’t want to tell you until, well . . . I hoped I’d be able to tell you when we had something to announce. Turns out, getting pregnant isn’t as easy as I’d hoped.’

‘Oh.’ I sit at the table. ‘Because of your diabetes?’

‘Actually, no. It turns out I have a condition called POA. Premature Ovarian Ageing.’

She offers me some dressing. I shake my head.

‘Premature Ovarian Ageing,’ I repeat. In my mind’s eye, I see a row of eggs with grey hair and wrinkles and tiny walking sticks. ‘What is Premature Ovarian Ageing?’

‘Basically it means I have the eggs of a fifty-year-old woman,’ Rose says. ‘The quality isn’t great and there aren’t many of them. We could try IVF, but that relies on me having a good egg to harvest. At the moment, they’re not sure that the eggs will survive the process.’

Now I picture the eggs in a row of hospital beds, their deathbeds. A row of my potential little nieces and nephews. ‘That’s sad.’

Rose puts her fork down. ‘Yes,’ she says. ‘Yes, it is, isn’t it?’

‘So . . . if you have this . . .condition, does that mean I have it too? Because we’re twins?’

‘No,’ Rose says. ‘I mean, it’s possible, but not likely. You could get tested if you were worried.’

But of course I’m not worried. I am in excellent health, something I take very seriously. My personal maintenance routine encompasses an annual check-up with my GP, twice yearly check-ups with the dentist, biennial cervical screening tests and breast checks. My exercise routine entails walking to work and back each day, a five-kilometre round trip. I also do karate twice-weekly. In addition to karate, I do Vinyasa yoga for thirty minutes each morning – for its many benefits, which include muscle stretching and a calm mind. So Premature Ovarian Ageing wasn’t something I needed to feel concerned about at all. Besides, I have no plans to get pregnant; I’ve never been pregnant. I’ve only ever had sex three and a half times (the half was the first time, and half is more than generous). All three and a half times were with the same guy – a medical student named Albert whom I’d dated for four months a decade ago, and only if ‘dated’ meant spending our weekends studying together, playing the odd game of sudoku and, of course, sex. I will admit I’d been curious about sex before I’d met Albert, but I was disappointed to find it strange and not particularly pleasant. Albert seemed to enjoy it slightly more than I did, but neither of us had reached anything like the euphoria I’d read about in romance novels. Still, I’d enjoyed our games of sudoku and he appeared to enjoy them too, so I’d been confused when four months in, Albert abruptly stopped returning my calls, and started keeping his head down when I saw him in the library. When I talked to Rose about it, Rose counselled me that men could be fickle, and if American teen television programs were anything to go by, that seemed to be the truth, so I let it go. I stopped bothering with men after that and I certainly never worried aboutbabies.

I’m not capable of raising a baby and that’s that. I’ve made peace with it. But suddenly my interest in babies is piqued. If my eggsdoturn out to be youthful . . . maybe there could be a use for them after all? This could be my chance to pay Rose back for everything she’s always done for me.