Free Bringing the Summer by Julia Green

She wipes her hair back from her hot face and sits back for a moment. ‘Don’t ever have twins!’ she says, but laughing at the same time, and I know she doesn’t really mean it. She loves those babies to bits.
    She stands up, stretches out her back. ‘Watch them for me, while I get their pyjamas?’
    I take her place on the floor. Phoebe’s pouring water from one plastic beaker to another, while Erin pushes a blue and yellow plastic whale to make it go under the bath water. Each time it pops back up she laughs. It’s unsinkable, that little toy whale. I take a small blue boat from the basket of toys and float it. It tips sideways. Not an unsinkable boat, then. The brief, painful thought of my brother, Joe, catches me unawares.
    Beth hangs the pyjamas over the warm towel rail; one pink and white pair, one blue and yellow. ‘Thanks, Freya. You OK?’
    I nod.
    â€˜Gabes isn’t his normal self. It’s his foot, it’s nothing to do with you.’
    â€˜I know.’
    She smiles.
    Â 
    I find Gabes stretched out on his bed, listening to music.
    I sit next to him for a while, but he seems so remote, listening to music on headphones, making no effort to talk to me, that in the end I get up and go back downstairs. He hardly seems to notice.
    Piano music is drifting from the sitting room. I follow the sound. Theo’s playing something haunting and rather lovely. I read the name from the music book on the piano stand: Trois Gnossiennes , by Erik Satie. Nick and Kit are engrossed in a game of chess, and Maddie’s sitting in the window seat, reading. Family life, I think. This is what it’s supposed to be like.
    I pick up a book from the pile on the side table, and start to read the beginning. It’s called The Behaviour of Moths , but it’s a novel, about two crazy sisters. Every so often I look up at Theo, and one time, he’s looking straight back at me, and that feeling comes again, something running between us, a little bit dark, and edgy, and exciting.
    Maddie turns on more lamps as it gets dark outside. She goes over to the bookshelves and pulls out a big hardback art book for me to look at. ‘You might like this, Freya. Do you know her work? I think she’s a wonderful painter. Very underrated. You know St Ives, I expect, in Cornwall. She lived there for a while.’
    Winifred Nicholson . I leaf through the pages. I’ve seen some of the paintings before: Gate to the Isles is pretty famous, but there are others I haven’t seen, and yes, Maddie’s right, I do love them. The colours, and the emotion that they evoke. How, exactly? I’m not sure. I stare for ages at one called Dawn Chorus .
    Theo stops playing, and stretches out on the rug, reading too. It’s quiet except for the sound of wooden chess pieces on the board, and heavy sighs from Kit as Nick steadily and inexorably defeats him. The almost-silence of people in a room, all happily absorbed in something: I love it.
    At last, Maddie looks up from her book. ‘Time for bed, for me. Shall I show you Laura’s room, Freya?’
    I nod. I take the art book with me upstairs, and pad behind Maddie, past the rows of doors, where Beth and the twins are already sleeping. We go past Gabes’ room, and Maddie pauses there, listens, opens the door and closes it again very quietly.
    â€˜Fast asleep. Good. That’s when the healing happens: while you’re sleeping. Like growing does, when you’re a child.’
    We take another step down, turn a corner. I’ve not been this far before, or seen the narrow wooden steps leading up to an attic bedroom.
    â€˜There you go. I put a towel on the bed. Help yourself to anything you need.’ She hugs me briefly, as if she were my own mother. ‘Sleep well, Freya.’
    I step carefully up to the attic, with its sloping walls and narrow single bed, cream covers, cream rug, a single wooden chair. A green-covered book