Free Goodnight, Beautiful: A Novel by Dorothy Koomson

wouldn’t see Mum, Dad or Cordy. It would be like waking up to find the sun had forgotten to rise. We didn’t have much that was stable or predictable in our lives except the six of us always being together. This was not going to happen. “You can’t send them away. What about me and Cordelia? How can you split us up?”
    Mum’s shoulders fell as she lowered her head. She was going to start crying for real.
    “Nova, this isn’t what we want to do, but we have to,” Dad said reasonably. I may have looked like my mum, but I usually took after my dad. I was of the same temperament, Mum was always saying. Always trying to be reasonable. Until now, of course, when I was faced with losing my family. “With Malvolio and Victoria being looked after, we can look after your Aunt Meredith.”
    She was coming out of the hospital, then. I wondered for a moment if they knew when. If they were going to move Mal and Victoria before she came back or after. It was May now; they would have to start school in September. Would Aunt Mer be back by then?
    She had promised, promised, promised Mal when he last saw her that she hadn’t been trying to kill herself. Not this time. She just needed some sleep. She had taken the sleeping pills becauseshe had been awake for so long that she needed sleep. Nothing she did would make her tired. Her body would sometimes feel tired and she’d be too exhausted to get out of bed, but she couldn’t stop her mind from racing. She’d tried writing down her thoughts to get them out of her head, she said, but her hand wouldn’t keep up with them. She had tried speaking her thoughts into a tape recorder but the sound of the tape whirring had driven her to distraction. She had tried reading but she couldn’t take in the words. She had tried cleaning the house from top to bottom but she still had energy. She had tried running around and around the garden to make herself tired but it didn’t work. Nothing worked. She knew that if she didn’t get some sleep soon, she would go crazy. That’s why she went to the doctor and got some sleeping tablets. Just in case it carried on for too long. The doctor was new to the surgery and didn’t know her, and had been very sympathetic and had given her the tablets. (He was an idiot, I had raged inside as Mal told me. Simply glancing at her notes would have told him that you didn’t give someone with Aunt Mer’s history sleeping tablets; you didn’t make it easy for her to end it all.)
    Aunt Mer had promised, promised, promised Mal that she had only meant to take a couple, like it said on the side of the bottle. She thought taking them with a little vodka instead of water would make them work faster. She’d been so long without sleep, she decided to take a couple more to make sure they worked. And then she’d forgotten how many she’d taken, so she took another one to make sure she’d taken enough. And then another.
    She’d been able to sleep then. The first she knew that she’d taken too many and used too much vodka to help them down was when she woke up in the hospital to find she was back onsuicide watch. And even then it’d taken a while to understand what was going on because she was so fuzzy from not having slept.
    I understood perfectly why my parents thought this was the best way to handle this. I’d heard them talking about it one night: Mal and Victoria shouldn’t have to suffer because their mother was ill, they’d said. I hadn’t realized separating us was their solution.
    “It’s not fair,” I said. “We all have to stay together. It’s not fair if they have to go away. We won’t see them anymore and that’s not fair. We haven’t done anything wrong.”
    “No one has done anything wrong,” Dad said. “This is just the best way.”
    I opened my mouth to disagree, when Mal moved in his seat beside me and then pressed his hand onto my forearm, telling me to stop. I glanced at him to ask him why, and saw he was watching Victoria. She