After that flight, Katie had taken two further plane journeys – and with each her fear grew into something living that would begin hissing at her weeks before takeoff. She’d discovered that the only way to silence the fear was to avoid it: when there was a university ski trip, she signed up after learning they would be travelling by coach; when their mother received a small windfall and offered to take the girls away, Katie said what she’d like to do most was a cruise; when Ed talked of visiting Barcelona, she persuaded him to go to Paris via the Channel Tunnel.
Now, as she twisted the sleeve of her cardigan, turning it tightly between her fingers and then unwinding it and starting again, it wasn’t the fear of the plane’s engine failing, or the capability of the pilot, that concerned her. What made her throat tighten and her heart clamber against her chest was the boxed-in enclosure of the plane, the small seat with its fixed armrests, the two passengers – one asleep, one reading – blocking her exit to the aisle, the seat belt pinned across her lap, the eleven-hour journey that couldn’t be paused. She would be quietly trapped here, hour after hour, with nothing to distract her, so that for the first time since the news broke, she was sitting entirely still. Her mind seized the opportunity to focus on the one word she had been trying to avoid: ‘suicide’.
Suicide was something she associated with the mentally ill, or people suffering from a dreadful, incurable illness – not able-bodied, able-minded 24-year-olds halfway through a world adventure with their best friend. There was no logic to it. But it had happened. There were witness statements, an autopsy report and a police account that said it had.
She had obsessively looked up the word ‘suicide’ on the Internet and was shocked to learn that it was the tenth leading cause of death – above murder, liver disease and Parkinson’s. She had read that one million people committed suicide each year and, staggeringly, that one in seven people would seriously consider committing suicide at some point in their lives. She discovered that drugs and alcohol misuse played a role in 70 per cent of adolescent suicides.
But what the Internet, the witnesses and the Balinese police didn’t know was her sister. Mia would never have jumped. Yes, she could be unpredictable, swinging from energetic reckless highs to crushingly troubled lows, and sometimes it did seem that she felt things so deeply it was as if her heart lay too close to her skin, but she was also fiercely brave. She was a fighter – and fighters don’t jump.
Katie believed this wholeheartedly. She had to, otherwise she was left with the agonizing knowledge that her sister had chosen to leave her.
*
San Francisco International Airport seemed the size of a town. Katie lost herself in the crowd, letting them lead her up escalators, along advert-lined corridors, and down brightly lit stairways, before eventually arriving at the baggage-claim area. She picked a spot at carousel 3, standing several paces back to allow eager travellers space to reach their belongings and disappear on new journeys.
As she waited for Mia’s backpack to pass beneath the heavy plastic teeth of the carousel, she played a game with herself, trying to match pieces of luggage to their owners. The first couple were easy; she knew that the padded black ice-hockey bag belonged to the broad teenager with a lightning bolt shaved into the back of his sandy hair, and that the pair of ladybird-print cases would be passed to twin girls in identical blue coats. It was a small surprise, however, when the gentleman in a tired panama hat reached not for the tan leather suitcase she had predicted, but a sleek silver case with the sheen of a bullet. But then, neither would she have matched the smartly dressed blonde woman in charcoal ankle boots and a fitted blazer to the tattered backpack that she reached for.
Grabbing a worn strap, Katie hauled it from the carousel using both hands. She struggled to put it on, bending her arms in awkward contortions to force them through the straps, and then jumping a little to shift it into position. She felt compressed by the weight of it, and bent forward at the waist to balance out the load.
She trudged through the arrivals gate where a crowd watched eagerly for their loved ones, their eyes moving quickly beyond her to see who followed. A heavyset man in a Giants sweater ducked beneath the barrier and ran forward, throwing thick arms around the boy with the hockey stick. Katie didn’t rush to leave the airport, excited to see San Francisco, as Mia and Finn might have; instead, she joined the crowd on the other side of the arrivals barrier, set down her backpack, perched on top of it and watched.
Time ran away as Katie sat perfectly still, hands placed together in her lap. She began to understand the rhythm of arrivals, anticipating the empty space alongside the barriers between flights, which filled in correlation to the overhead screen announcing the next set of arrivals. If a flight was delayed or there had been a hold-up, then two groups of passengers could arrive at the same time, and the barrier would be pressed taut.
There were fathers collecting daughters, girlfriends being met by boyfriends, husbands waiting for wives, grandparents beaming at grandchildren – but the reunions she searched out were always those between sisters. Sometimes it was difficult to tell which women were friends and which were siblings, but more often Katie knew instinctively. It was in the casualness of how they embraced, the way their smiles were completed when they saw each other, or how a joke quickly passed from one pair of lips to a smile on the other. It was in the same angle of their noses, a gesture they both displayed, or how they walked arm in arm, as they left together.
A woman with fox-red hair spilling over the shoulders of her kaftan placed a hand to her mouth when she saw her sister. A purple silk scarf partly concealed the sister’s bald head, but the strain of illness showed in her sallow skin and gaunt cheeks. The redhead reached out and squeezed her sister’s fingers, then lightly touched her empty hairline and then, finally letting go of whatever composure she’d privately been battling to maintain, embraced her in a long clasp, sobbing over her shoulder.
If someone had watched Katie and Mia, she wondered whether they’d have guessed they were sisters. Katie’s fair features were distinct from Mia’s strikingly dark looks, but someone paying attention might have noticed that their lips shared an equal fullness, or that their eyebrows followed the exact same arch. If they had listened closely they would catch crisply articulated word endings from years of good schooling, but might have noticed that they still mispronounced the word ‘irritable’, both placing the emphasis on the second syllable, not the first.
Vivid memories of Mia flew into her thoughts, details from their childhood she hadn’t thought of in years: lying together in the sun-warmed rock pools that smelt like cooked seaweed; doing handstands in the sea with salt water filling their noses; their first bike, cherry red, which Katie would pedal while Mia perched on the white handlebars; fighting like pirates on winter-emptied beaches with seagull feathers tucked behind their ears.
Katie had loved being an older sister, wearing the role like a badge of honour. At what point, she wondered, did our closeness begin to fade? Was it triggered by our feud when Mum was dying? Or maybe it had begun long before. Perhaps it wasn’t one incident, rather a series of smaller incidents, an unravelling, like a favourite dress that over time becomes worn: first a thinning at the neckline, then a loss of shape around the waist, and finally a loose thread opens into a tear.
‘Ma’am?’ A porter in a navy uniform, with dreadlocks tucked beneath his cap, stood beside her. ‘You’ve been here since I came on shift.’
She glanced at the time displayed on the bottom of the arrivals board. Two hours had slipped away from her.
‘Somethin’ I can help you with?’
She stood suddenly, her knees stiff from holding the same position. ‘I’m fine, thank you.’
‘You hopin’ to find someone?’
She glanced to where two young women were embracing. The taller one stepped back and took the other’s hand, raising it to her lips and kissing it.
‘Yes,’ she answered. ‘My