The Pharmacist

Sunshine streamed through the window of Alice’s room, warming her cold flesh. She allowed her eyes to close, willing the time to pass swiftly, and her thoughts drifted back to long ago. Living in the present was difficult, but she’d experienced worse in the past.

Alice 1996/97

I closed Matlock Coffee & Cake immediately after the accident, unsure if I would ever be able to continue the venture without Karen. The physical act of opening the door and stepping inside the premises on that first occasion after the accident was even worse than I anticipated it would be. My sister’s ever-present laughter was gone, replaced by a heavy silence, an almost viscous atmosphere that had nothing to do with the hot weather and tightly shuttered windows. Karen’s apron and cap hung behind the door in the kitchen as if waiting for her to return to work and slip them on again. The sight of them stung the back of my eyes and weakened my already trembling legs.

Dust motes filled the silent void, their dance almost mocking. Every item in the room held a bitter-sweet memory. Karen’s jar of wooden utensils, the huge copper pans hanging from the ceiling rack, the blue and white pottery stacked neatly on the gleaming stainless-steel shelves. Everything so carefully chosen and loved by my sister.

Being in the place of our shared dream proved to be far too painful for me – the life and laughter had been sucked out of the place, and I could barely bring myself to look for the papers I’d gone there to pick up. It took only that one visit to know that I couldn’t carry on. I’d hoped that feeling Karen’s presence in that special place we’d worked so hard to create would bring comfort, but it held only raw memories, ones with which I couldn’t cope, and I knew it was the end of our dream.

A couple of months after the cafe closed, I received an offer to buy the business and snatched at the opportunity. My enthusiasm had waned so much and I could no longer cope with the daily reminder of my sister’s absence and everything we’d lost. The decision also gave me more time to devote to Rachel and my failing parents.

Tom and I couldn’t read our elder daughter at all. She hadn’t shed a single tear in the weeks since the accident, at least none that we knew of, and reverted to that small, lost child she’d been before Jenny’s birth. I longed to hold her close and comfort her, to stroke her hair and kiss away the hurt, but she shrugged off any physical contact we offered, resisting all attempts at consolation.

After a few weeks, we sought help from our doctor, who advised us to give Rachel more time and space, reminding us again that the counselling route was still available.

The first year is always the hardest. I heard it from so many well-wishers, and in many ways, it proved to be true. Anniversaries were to be faced, birthdays, Christmas, and so many other meaningful dates that the first year was an arduous one. Places we’d visited as a family became no-go areas; the memories they stirred too painful.

My mother’s health started to deteriorate, and almost before my eyes, she turned from being a strong, independent woman into an old lady, well before her time. The loss of her daughter, son-in-law and two grandchildren was almost too much for her to bear, and she developed illnesses, which, although not definitively connected to the grief, were undoubtedly compounded by the stress she’d suffered. Doctors diagnosed angina on top of depression and my mother declined rapidly, both physically and mentally. She lost weight at an alarming rate and became reclusive, refusing to leave the house despite our efforts.

Naturally, this profoundly affected my father, who assumed he was somehow failing his wife and couldn’t be persuaded otherwise. Dad took over caring for Mum, a woman who had always prided herself on being capable and in control, the one to cater for family celebrations with such ease and lightness of spirit. Tom and I could see the changes in them both but were incapable of reversing their decline, even though we tried everything which came to mind. During that first year, I pushed my grief aside to help my surviving family, but, like my father, I too felt powerless to alter the situation.

Rachel, however, remained our chief concern. While Tom found some escape at work, I stayed at home in an attempt to make a good life for my husband and daughter. I cleaned the house frantically, often unnecessarily, to fill the long empty hours and baked more cakes than we could possibly eat. We encouraged Rachel to take an interest in things outside of school, sports or dancing classes, riding lessons, perhaps? We offered her everything we could think of to enhance her life but found nothing for which she showed even the slightest enthusiasm. Of course, the one thing she wanted was to have her sister back. It was the same for us all – but it was never going to happen.

After school, Rachel would go to her room to do her homework without a word unless I addressed her directly with an open-ended question. I began to wonder if she blamed me for Jenny’s death, for letting her go with Karen and James that fateful day, or was it me blaming myself? If only I’d kept her at home with Rachel. How many times had I wished that was the case?

On the positive side, Rachel excelled at school, academically at least. She proved to be a very bright, capable student, and when the time came to move on to secondary education, she was easily at the top of her class, with her teachers singing her praises at every opportunity. Our daughter’s head was always in a book, whether homework or a novel, a good habit, but I often wondered if she was hiding between those pages, hiding from Tom and me, or even from herself.

A year after the first aborted attempt at counselling, we decided to pick up the sessions again for our daughter, yet once more without success. Rachel refused to engage with the counsellor and even going to the sessions became a contentious issue, so we finally abandoned it.

Was it even right to try to make Rachel talk about her feelings? Could she be dealing with the loss in her own silent way? There were so many questions and, quite simply, no answers. Yes, we still talked about Jenny, I couldn’t bear to erase her from our lives as if she’d never lived, but we tried to be sensitive and not overdo it, for Rachel’s sake, yet she rarely participated in any such conversations. Looking back, I can’t ever remember her speaking her sister’s name after the accident. She remained almost cold, aloof, and there appeared to be no way to reach her, no matter how hard we tried or how innovative the ideas we came up with.

Another problem presented itself for us as far as Rachel was concerned. We had not told our daughter that she was adopted. Somehow the time was never right, and now, when she was on the verge of going to senior school, we felt she had a right to know. But having lost her sister, we struggled to decide if this revelation would be another significant hurdle to overcome. Would it perhaps be too much for our daughter to bear, and possibly even the final straw?

Tom and I spent many evenings discussing this issue; should we, shouldn’t we? It was at times like this that I missed my sister, Karen. She was so wise in such matters and would have advised me what to do. I could no longer turn to my parents for advice, as they struggled daily with their own problems, and I didn’t want to add to their burdens. Eventually, we took the easiest route and procrastinated, yet again.

‘We’ll know when the time is right,’ we kidded ourselves. ‘Perhaps the opportunity will arise naturally and we’ll tell her then.’ Yes, it was cowardly, but our motives were pure, or at least that’s what I tried to convince myself.

The transition to her new senior school, Rockcliffe Academy, went smoothly for Rachel. Our daughter looked so grown up in her new uniform. She was turning into a lovely young woman. However, Rachel flatly refused to allow me to take her photo on the first day and insisted she walk to school alone. I was more nervous than she appeared to be, and when she left the house, I followed, keeping well back and praying she wouldn’t turn around and see me. The need to be sure that she arrived safely was overwhelming, even though it was only a fifteen-minute walk from our home, and several other students were heading in the same direction. My routine of following her continued each morning for a week until Tom insisted I stop.

‘We have to trust her, Alice, give her some independence, and who knows, she might make friends with other students who take the same route.’ He was right, I knew, but I always worried about Rachel and harboured a feeling of being a complete failure as a parent. I’d lost one daughter and couldn’t reach the other at all, no matter how hard I tried.

It was during Rachel’s first term that the adoption issue arose again. A homework assignment consisted of charting a family tree to reach as far back as possible. We could have ignored the fact that Rachel wasn’t our biological child and just assisted her with details of our own heritage. The thought was tempting, but it appeared to be the opportunity we’d been waiting for, and so we tried, as tactfully as we could, to tell our daughter the truth about her origins.

I always felt apprehensive when a serious conversation with Rachel was necessary, and this was no exception. Tom and I chose the moment carefully and nervously sat down with our daughter, determined to be honest and answer any questions she may ask as fully as we could. I started by showing her some of the very early photographs we took when she first came to us, hoping this would lead naturally to explaining why there was none of her as a tiny baby. Then, trying to make her origins a positive issue, we told her how much we’d wanted her to come and live with us and that she was our chosen daughter, therefore very special to us.

Rachel stared into the distance, quite unemotional, as if she either already knew or didn’t care. This reaction rather nonplussed us, but Rachel remained detached, her expression, as ever, betraying no emotion, and then she simply shrugged and announced, ‘Miss said that if we didn’t live with our real families, we should just write about the adults we do live with, so can I go upstairs now? I’ve lots of homework to do.’

We were stunned and somewhat wounded that we now seemed to fall into the category of not being her ‘real family’. I wondered if somehow she already knew, had my parents inadvertently let something slip, or Karen, perhaps? Tom and I talked about the issue without reaching any conclusion. Maybe something at school had made her realise. Teachers have to deal with so many variations of ‘families’ these days. The only positive we could take from this incident was that it appeared to Rachel not to be a big issue. Once more, our daughter surprised us, and in some ways, it was a relief to have it out in the open. Rachel certainly didn’t seem upset by the truth of her parentage or curious about her birth family.

During the days to come, the revelation that Rachel was adopted appeared not to affect her at all, for good or bad, and I was glad, relieved she’d taken it so well. I was also feeling quite optimistic that Rachel seemed to be taking the transition to Rockcliffe Academy in her stride, enjoying the challenge of the academic side of school life. She developed a particular love of sciences and excelled in these subjects. After the first year, Rachel received a prize for her grades in all subjects, an accolade she accepted without fuss and one which spurred her on to study even harder.

It seemed ironic that parents of other children her age worried that their offspring weren’t applying themselves to their studies, while my chief concern was that Rachel didn’t take time out to have fun. I somewhat perversely envied their problems, if only our daughter would argue with us over something, anything, but it never seemed to happen. She became like a twelve-year-old version of a character in the Ira Levin novel, The Stepford Wives, unemotional, almost robotic at times. I longed for her to show some real feelings, some joy of living. After all, it was nearly three years since Jenny died. When I talked to Tom about my concerns, he attempted to reassure me that I was overreacting, looking for problems where none existed.

‘We should be grateful that she doesn’t give us any trouble, and she’s never been one to show her emotions. Our Rachel’s a quiet girl by nature, a bit of a loner even.’ He smiled, dismissing the subject as usual. Tom was right though. We experienced very little trouble with our daughter in those days. I never so much as needed to ask her to tidy her bedroom, as she kept her own space in pristine order, so much so that it felt like walking into a stage set. Instead of pictures of current pop stars plastered on her wall, Rachel displayed posters of the periodic table of elements, a huge world map, and a mathematics flow chart that was beyond my understanding.

On her desk, pens and pencils were arranged symmetrically, and her bookshelves groaned with some weighty chemistry books (in alphabetical order, of course), which to me seemed way too dry for a girl not yet in her teens. Tom suggested her unusual interests might simply be due to her genes, we’d never really learned much about her birth family, and I couldn’t argue with that. But I did continue to worry and longed for the day when Rachel would take an interest in some aspect of popular culture or argue with me about staying out late at parties, wearing too much makeup and inappropriate clothes. Maybe if that time did come, I’d regret wishing for such problems. On the other hand, perhaps Tom was right, and I was simply an overanxious mother with too much time on my hands.

Eventually life became bearable once more. Grief never leaves you, but you learn to live with it, and our family functioned in the best way we could. There would always be that aching void, the space in my heart where our beautiful daughter should be, and the misery of my sister’s family so cruelly wiped out. Still, we made a determined effort to move on from those dark days of pain and loss, to rebuild a world for Rachel and ourselves. Often, the days, weeks and months stretched ahead like an endless tunnel, with shadows threatening to reach out and engulf us. But it was imperative that we attempted to move on, to make our lives count for something. Our grief couldn’t define us forever.

As time passed by, I tried to look at our loss differently. I told myself that Jenny had been gifted to us for seven precious years. My sister and her family were precious gifts too in the years we’d known them. I asked myself if I would have been happier for never having had these wonderful people in my life, and the answer came easily. No, absolutely not, for their presence here on earth enriched my life as well as the countless others they touched during those years.

Yes, their lives ended far too early, we wanted them for longer, expected them for longer, but I wouldn’t have missed knowing and loving them, even though their loss brings such pain. I sought to dwell on happy memories, the joy of past times spent with my family, to discipline my thoughts to the positive rather than the negative, in an effort to ease the pain. I was truly blessed to have known and loved them all.