the back door was a courtyard area and the mirror image of the adjoining cottage next door. I assumed the two homes had originally been one big house. There was a low hedge dividing the two properties, topped with snow. I was about to scoop up a handful of the fluffy frosting when Jadie put her finger to her lips and led me round the side of the ancient Cotswold-stone house to where a smooth white lawn stretched away towards a snow-covered boundary hedge.
We stood side by side on the white path and gazed at the virgin snow; a temptingly blank canvas awaiting the first brushstrokes of our boots. The thought flicked through my mind that that was how my life felt at present: every movement, every word a first, untainted by a past, just the clean slate of my existence stretching enticingly ahead of me.
‘You first,’ I whispered, suddenly unnerved by the enormity of my thoughts. Jadie didn’t need telling twice: she danced across the lawn, making tracks with her boots. She turned, giggling, and I followed her, planting my feet in the squeaky coldness, following her tiny prints with my own size fives.
‘Do you know how to make a snow angel?’ Jadie asked when we had circumnavigated the lawn twice over.
I shook my head, wondering if my eyes were as bright as hers; cheeks pink and glowing.
Throwing herself down on her back in an area of untouched snow, Jadie stretched out her limbs and made a waving motion with her arms, opening and closing her pink leggings-clad legs so that when she got up she left the outline of an angel.
‘I saw it on TV,’ she beamed. ‘But I’ve never made one before. You do it now!’
Jadie squealed with glee as I threw myself into the snow next to her, waving my arms and legs before jumping up to admire our handiwork.
‘We made angels,’ she whispered, her face aglow. ‘That’s what Amber looks like…she’s an angel too.’
I hesitated only a moment. ‘Shall we build Amber that snowman?’ I asked, unsure whether I should encourage her to talk about her dead sister as if she was still here, but feeling that it was what Jadie wanted. ‘A big snowman with a hat and scarf?’
‘Ooh, yes!’
But Jadie was already rolling a snowball round the lawn and as the fluffy snow stuck to it like a magnet it grew bigger and bigger, leaving a trail of ice-speckled grass in its wake. The ball grew even larger and Jadie giggled as I hurried over to help push it. We rolled it to a halt and scooped up more snow from around the base, patting it down with icy fingers to make a nice smooth coat of white. Jadie made a second, smaller ball for the snowman’s head and then I took off my scarf and wound it round his neck.
Laughing, Jadie took her own hat from her head and reached up to place it on the snowman’s head. The sun bounced off her blonde hair, burnishing it with a sheen of gold, giving the impression of a golden halo surrounding her head. As she laughed, I glanced up at the house to see a figure watching us from one of the upstairs windows. It was Vincent and I could have sworn he was smiling wistfully down on his daughter. I smiled up at him and then Jadie tilted her head to see where I was looking. Her face fell and her eyes grew round and fearful. In the same instant I heard the sound of the back door being flung open with a crash and Tara came hurrying round the corner of the house, clutching a flapping cardigan to her chest.
‘What do you think you are doing?’ she shouted at me, grabbing Jadie by her arm and dragging her back towards the house. ‘Are you trying to kill her?’
‘We were just…making a snowman,’ I called to her retreating back. ‘She’s fine.’ I jogged after Tara, who was towing a silent Jadie in her wake. ‘She’s well wrapped up. We were just having fun.’
Tara almost threw the child in through the back door before pulling off her wet coat and gloves. Jadie began to cry, big silent tears coursing down her cheeks and dripping off the end of her chin.
Tara looked up at me, her face contorted with anger. ‘Jadie can’t go in the snow. She’s sick.’
‘Sick?’ I echoed.
As if to prove a point, Jadie began to cough: deep bubbling coughs, which escalated into heaving gasps until they threatened to tear her body apart. Tara whisked her into the living room and lay her face down on the couch, handing her a pile of tissues. And then she began to beat the child firmly up and down her back, hammering and pounding until Jadie was spitting great gobs of mucus into the tissues.
I watched, horrified, wondering what terrible harm I had done to this innocent child. Vincent had come to stand at the bottom of the stairs. He was resting one hand on the banister, watching his young daughter with a resigned stare. Then, as if realising someone was observing him, he tore his gaze away from Jadie and our eyes met in a moment of shared helplessness.
‘Is there anything I can do?’ I asked him.
Before he could answer, Tara whipped her head round. ‘You’ve done quite enough,’ she snapped.
Vincent approached and for a moment I thought he was coming to offer comfort to Jadie, but he gave Tara and his spluttering daughter a wide berth. He circumnavigated the couch and kneeled instead at the fireplace, where he piled kindling on the fire, lit it and sat back on his heels to watch as the first small flames licked upwards. I went and crouched down near Jadie’s pale tear-streaked face with my back to the fire, and reached out to push a tendril of damp hair behind her ear. When I looked up, Vincent had slipped away.
I took several more tissues from the box and handed them to Jadie. ‘I’m so sorry,’ I whispered. ‘I wouldn’t have hurt you for anything.’ I looked up at Tara, who was still slapping and kneading. ‘What is it?’
‘Cystic fibrosis,’ Tara replied through gritted teeth. ‘It’s what her sister had as well. Jadie could get pneumonia as easily as you or I could get a slight sniffle, just like Amber did, and then, well…’
Suddenly everything became clear. Everyone Jadie loved, including the child herself, was living in fear that she was going to die, just as her sister had before her. I remembered Jadie’s anxious face when I’d coughed on waking from my hypothermic state and the earnest question that must already have been forming in her mind when she had broken her self-imposed almost two-year silence: Are you going to die?
I thought perhaps my honest answer had been the first time anyone had spoken about such things aloud. If Amber’s name hadn’t been mentioned since her death, then the natural grieving process must have been severely hampered. I was no psychiatrist but it seemed to me that if the adults surrounding Jadie hadn’t been willing to talk about their loss, she might not have felt able to talk about it herself, and had squirrelled away all her questions, doubts and fears into her secret silent world. It occurred to me that she was a child trapped not so much by the physical constraints of her body, but the anxieties and poor expectations of everyone who made up her world. I wondered who was more broken, Vincent or his child. My heart went out to them.
As I stroked Jadie’s face, I let my mind wander. Maybe the worm-hole that had tossed me out into this small universe had not been quite so haphazard after all. I didn’t know why, but still I couldn’t shift the thought that I had arrived exactly where I was supposed to be.
After a while Jadie stopped coughing and spitting, and Tara paused in her back-slapping. She pulled Jadie upright and gave her a hug.
‘All right now?’ she asked gently.
Jadie nodded, wiping her mouth on a tissue and Tara planted a kiss on the child’s
