Footprints in Your Heart

Kai: Sister

'What for?' I ask over the sound of the tap. I reach a hand into the space between the door and the doorframe. 'I can take care of your old clothes. If you've washed them.'

'Just... being here for me,' my sister says. I cringe internally a little, remembering the last time I heard someone say those words. She sighs. It's long and drawn out and sounds as if there are years of pent-up emotion behind it yearning to be released into the void. 'I know Dad's staying over at the hotel tonight because of the conference. But it's not only tonight, you know? It's the other times, all added up together.'

I stay silent for a long moment, tracing the shiny metal of the doorknob as Isla hands me her wrung-out clothes. My reflection looks tired even through the warping. 'I know,' I say finally. 'But you were right when you said what you did at Remy's place yesterday.'

'That they don't know us?'

'No.' My voice comes out softer than I'd expected it to be. I clear my throat and force down my uncertainty. 'That Dad tries his best. He does.'

'If you really believe that... I will too.' The door swings slowly open. Isla and I are left looking at each other. She shifts a little on her feet, and all of a sudden I feel an unexplainable rush of affection for my sister, this small and fiercely lovable human who has no one else in the world to protect her except me.

'Come on.' I take her arm gently and guide her to the air mattress. Through the shuttered blinds, the faintest hint of bluish light is starting to surface. 'We can still get a couple hours' sleep before school.'

'I don't think I can sleep,' she murmurs, but still lies down beside me. I feel the mattress shift as she turns over onto her back. 'Kai?'

'Yes?'

'Sometimes I have this melody stuck in my head. I only catch fragments of it, but...' She pauses for a moment, and I watch her unblinking eyes fixated on the ceiling as if searching for a distant moment in the past. 'When I do, I can hear her voice.'

I don't need to ask if Isla means our mother's voice, because I know she does. 'How does it go?'

She hums a few low, long notes as I listen carefully. It's a tune that I recognise, but didn't know I'd stopped remembering. It transports me hauntingly to a time somewhere close to the rails of forgetting – flashes of a warm red blanket, a soothing hand, a duck-shaped hair clip. I have to let go of the breath I'm holding because suddenly it's hard to reconcile the past with the present.

Isla stops humming. 'That's all I know,' she says. 'Will you – do you remember it?' Even though I can't see her eyes, I sense that her face radiates quiet hope in the dark.

I strain my memory as far as it will go, something I haven't done in a long time. I try to picture my mother's face, how she tucked us in when I was six or seven and Isla was a bumbling toddler tired from her day at preschool. What was the meaning behind that melody? What were the words?

'No,' I say finally after the silence has stretched to its limit and still my mind draws a blank. 'I wish I did.'

'That's okay.' She turns her head to face me and reaches to tug at my earlobe like our dad says she did when she was a newborn. 'Don't worry about it.'

I smile, but Isla's glow of quiet hope has faded to a mute disappointment and I can't shake the feeling that I've let her down, that I should remember. It's the swooping feeling of finding a hole in the ground right by your feet and realising that you've walked by them all along. Why can't I remember?

'Do you... ' I begin, but then register her closed eyes, the stillness of her face, the slow rise and drop of her chest. 'Oh.'

No matter what my sister says, she'll always possess the ability to fall asleep in the space between one breath and the next. Her mind seems to be free of the echoes and spiralling thoughts of the night. Every night for seven years. I pull the blanket a little higher up over her shoulders and stroke her forehead with the back of my hand.