Free One Step Closer to You by Alice Peterson

my steps light, before I raced up to my bedroom, saying ‘Yes!’ when Dad called out, ‘Polly, is that you?’
    The telephone rings from the kitchen. Bugger. That’ll be Mum again. I hear the answer machine beep but it’s a voice I don’t recognise.
    When I enter the kitchen to make myself another sandwich I’m strangely drawn to the red light flashing on the answer machine. I press the button before opening the fridge.
    ‘Georgina, it’s me, Vivienne.’ No one calls mum Georgina. Yet her voice sounds familiar somehow.
Vivienne
. I shut the fridge, forgetting what I was looking for. ‘I’m back. Dad gave me your number. I hope we can meet. I know it’s been many years, but …’ She trails off. ‘How is Polly? I often think of you all,’ she continues. ‘You didn’t respond to my letters.Oh listen to me, I promised I wouldn’t rant on the answer-machine, that I’d only say hello. Please call me.’
    *
    Mum arrives home at lunchtime, laden with shopping bags. She stands at the sitting room door, asks me how I am.
    ‘Someone called earlier.’ I follow her into the kitchen. ‘She left a message.’
    ‘Who was it? Did you get some sleep, darling?’ Mum begins to unpack the groceries, asking me to give her a hand.
    ‘Vivienne?’
    She stops unpacking. Sits down.
    ‘Mum? Who is she?’
    ‘My sister,’ she replies in a small voice, staring ahead.
    ‘I didn’t know you had a sister?’
    Silence.
    ‘Mum?’ I sit down next to her.
    ‘She …’ Mum presses her head into her hands. ‘She killed someone.’
    ‘What! Who?’
    ‘Stop! Polly, please, stop!’
    I hand Mum a piece of kitchen roll. She blows her nose, wipes her tears.
    ‘Mum, I’m scared.’ I don’t like seeing her so upset. ‘Why didn’t you tell Hugo and me you have a sister? What happened?’
    To my surprise Mum takes my hand firmly in hers.‘She was drunk behind the wheel and killed her baby, my nephew,’ she says, as if it were only yesterday. I wait, sensing there is even more. ‘And she killed my brother, he was sitting in the front …
She
was the one that survived.’
    *
    It’s been ten days since Mum told me about her sister, and Vivienne is visiting us today. She’s coming for tea. It’s a Saturday and Hugo is back at home. Mum wanted us all to be together. ‘What do we call her?’ Hugo says to me quietly in the kitchen as he helps me lay the table for lunch. Dad is outside mowing the lawn. Mum is frantically tidying the house. All morning she’s been nagging us to tidy our bedrooms and put away our things.
    ‘It feels odd calling her Aunt Vivienne when we don’t know her,’ Hugo adds, placing a knife the wrong way round.
    ‘Don’t call her anything,’ I suggest. ‘Say hello, that’s all.’
    ‘Is she a bad person, Polly?’ he asks, as if she could be a murdering monster.
    ‘I don’t know.’
    ‘Why is she visiting us now?’
    ‘I don’t know, Hugo.’
    ‘I wonder what prison was like? Do you think she’ll talk about it? I still can’t believe Mum didn’t tell us.’
    I nod. ‘Makes you wonder if she’s hiding any more secrets from us.’
    Mum’s explanation for keeping Vivienne a secret was that Hugo and I were too young to understand the damageshe had caused to the family, and then the older we became the harder it was to stir up painful memories. ‘Sometimes it’s too painful to dredge up the past,’ Mum reasoned, Dad backing her up. ‘You need to let things be.’
    Part of me wanted to argue and say that Hugo and I had at least deserved to know we had an aunt; the other part of me could see how much Vivienne’s forthcoming visit was upsetting Mum. I tried to imagine if someone had killed Hugo recklessly in a car crash, drunk behind the wheel. I wouldn’t be able to forgive them. But things are beginning to make sense now. Granddad Arthur at Christmas saying ‘She should be here.’ Mum not touching alcohol. ‘Gina, you’re not Vivienne,’ my father had said.
    Dad has been able