When the barman called my room later that night and asked would I accept a call, I said no problem. I said a few words to him before my sister came on the line. I had told her the city, but I hadn’t given her the name of the hotel, and I thought of the stream of numbers she must have punched to find me.

‘You’re worried I’m going to forget you.’

I didn’t reply.

‘No, not ever. Okay?’

‘Okay,’ I agreed.

She explained how she was forgetting our mother now. She remembered making our father’s lunch, our wooden back door divided in two, how, when you stood outside, for a second, you were a half-person. She remembered holding me in her arms. But she couldn’t see our mother, how she looked, or how her touch felt, or, towards the end of her life, what machines ran out of her body.

‘Don’t hang up tonight.’

I stayed on the line.

*

There is a moment when you get a call you don’t want to receive, when you look at your phone as if it’s to blame for the news it’s about to impart, as if it’s wholly responsible for this crime. Two separate films unspool in the dark. Then you answer it.

*

The news is never what you expect. My sister’s husband told me what hospital she was in. Early labour. It was the same hospital we were kept in as children. I came straight from the airport. I pushed a button and doors slid open. There were doubtless many things happening in that hospital, as there are in hospitals all over the world, but I didn’t notice any of them.

I walked those same hallways and everything I had done in my life up to that point felt absolutely worthless. I came to my sister’s room. I sat on the edge of her bed and said, ‘Hi.’ She held her baby in her arms. She looked up, looked at me like she’d never seen me before in her life, like I was the faint trace of a person. ‘Hey,’ she said, very politely and slowly. ‘Hey, how are you?’

Not the End Yet

Not the End Yet