Page 47

I feel weightless. As I run upstairs it’s like I’m a balloon floating quietly away from the crack in the door, down through the laundry, up, up, up, my hair bouncing on my shoulders.

I notice things I didn’t when showing Bevan and Croft around earlier. A thread has snagged loose from the green stair carpet, leaving a line of bare beige. The scuff mark from carrying up a suitcase is still on the wall right before the top landing.

How is it possible to both know and not know something? It doesn’t seem plausible but I do it all the time. There must be a point at which I make a conscious decision not to see, not to understand: to forget.

I do it to make my life easier, don’t I? To avoid confrontation. But in the long run, what is the cost? And who will have to pay?

Our attic ladder is still down and I pause, my hand on a worn rung.

This is the moment of choice. If I go up, my life will go one way. If I don’t, it will go another. But this time what’s at stake might be my daughter’s life.

Maybe it always has been.

I step up and up, the ladder bowing slightly with each step.

I know what I’m looking for, what Jenna might have had and Rose took from her. And if I can’t find it – what will that mean?

I pull the ladder up after me then knock over the cut-out of Shorthorn Lodge. It wafts down without a sound. I see immediately that the blanket on top of my old Disney TV isn’t the green blanket I put over it when I last sorted things out up here. In its place is an old woollen rug – red and brown.

Why hadn’t I noticed this earlier?

I run over, kneel before the shelves and search the spines of the VHS tapes: Cinderella, Aladdin, Winnie the Pooh, Matilda, then Edward Scissorhands, Sister Act, Clueless.

I’ve been holding my breath. I force myself to breathe.

But then here it is: Pocahontas.

The top of my head seems to fizz. Thank God – oh, thank God! I grab the case.

But it’s too light to have anything in it.

I feel the contents of my stomach rising.

I pry it open and stare into its empty carcass. I snap it shut again and whip the blanket off the TV. The red standby light is on, which means someone has been using it. I press eject and it whines. But the tape that comes out is The Craft.

Who’s been watching my old tapes? Jenna and Rose. I see them lying on beanbags, submerging themselves in my teen nostalgia.

I rip all the tapes from the shelf, pulling them open one after the other, but the tape is gone. The pink tape with the yellow happy face sticker that I’d stored in the Pocahontas box.

Anybody watching it, expecting Disney, would be in for a shock when the tape started rolling.

Jenna found that tape. Rose took it from her. And now Jenna is gone.