Page 23 of Mad Mabel

The harness jerked, tilted—then spun. I picked up speed at an alarming rate, swinging sideways, then upside down. My hips slid out of the loose straps and for a moment I hung from my knees, gripping wildly at the air.

I heard the collective gasp from below. My knees started to slide out of the harness.

A second before I hit the ground, I recalled Anne’s fate the day she walked on the Barrys’ roof. A great tumble into the garden bed.

“Oof,” I heard someone say, and then pain exploded like a bomb.

In movies, the injured person always blacks out and wakes up in the hospital, unsure where they are. I didn’t black out. I didn’t wake up in the hospital feeling confused. There are a few hazy patches where I might have lost consciousness for a few seconds, but on the whole, I was aware of it all. I still remember it with breathtaking clarity.

The pain was otherworldly. Untouched (or barely touched) by the narcotics they injected and dripped into me (“An adult’s dose,” I heard the paramedic say, “look at the size of her”). It was in my arms, my collarbones, my chest, my pelvis. How I would have welcomed blacking out of this pain!

My mother appeared at my side in the hospital, as I was lying on a stretcher, awaiting surgery. She was dressed in a pale yellow organza dress with a full skirt, delicate white gloves, and a matching hat perched on her carefully set hair. She must have come straight from a garden party.

She looked more distressed than I felt. “I’m sorry, darling,” she said. “I’m so, so sorry.”

It felt like such an odd thing to say. It wasn’t as if she’d built the flying fox or forced me into the ill-fitting harness. She gripped my hand so hard it hurt.

“What can I do?” she asked me. Her breath smelled of wine. “How can I make it up to you?”

“Nothing,” I told her. Because the truth was, she was already doing it. Not just being there, though that might have been enough. But the way she was looking at me. As if she cared. As if she… loved me.

“So you’re okay?”

I was in the sort of pain that makes death seem like a kind option. Surgery was minutes away. I had never been less okay. And I’ll tell you something—it changes a person, this sort of pain. It changed me irrevocably. After I experienced it, I became blacker inside. Living up to my father’s impression of me, perhaps: not quite right.

“Yes, Mum,” I said to her. “I’m okay.”

“Mum?”

My left arm was broken in two places, and three ribs were cracked clean through—injuries that required two surgeries and enough metal hardware to set off airport alarms for life. Mercifully, I was knocked out cold for all of it.

When I finally came to, I was in the ward, stitched and bandaged, floating somewhere between pain and morphine. My mother was sitting beside the bed. At first, I felt a warm, blurry kind of relief—until I noticed she was crying.

My mother sniffed, shaking her head. “Hello, darling.” She retrieved a tissue from her sleeve and wiped her nose.

“Why are you crying?” I asked.

“It’s nothing, darling,” she said in that tone of voice that meant something entirely different. “I’m just glad you’re okay. I don’t know what I would have done if… if I’d lost you.”

She crumpled under another round of tears. I watched her closely, understanding somehow that these tears weren’t for me.

“Are you thinking about Kitty?”

It was out of the blue and it wasn’t. I’d thought about that name from time to time, ever since I’d first heard my father utter it—and more since I’d heard Cess say it. But I wasn’t fixated on her. I thinkI had a sense that one day, I would find out more, and this felt like that day.

Mum broke out of her tear-filled trance and stared at me. “Mabel… you know about Kitty?”

I didn’t know about Kitty, of course. But one could make assumptions, and I felt more sure than ever that my parents had had another child at some point.

“I’ve… heard some things.”

“Okay. Well… I’m sorry about that. We didn’t think you remembered her. And it’s not the kind of thing you want to remind a child of.”

“What isn’t?”

Mum exhaled as if she were blowing out a candle. “Kitty—Katharine—was your sister.”

My sister. It felt impossible—and yet oddly familiar, like something I’d always known. Even while hearing of her for the first time, little memories rose unbidden: a cream-knitted blanket in my mother’s arms; the whisper of baby hair (blond, not red) against my cheek; chubby wrists screwed on like doll parts; a single, razor-sharp bottom tooth.