Last We Spoke
The telephone rang.
She would recall later that the sound did in fact have a peculiar ring to it – she could not say what exactly had been different about it, an added harmony perhaps – but anyhow it did not occur to her to pay it any thought at the present moment. She picked up the receiver and answered in her mundanely shrill voice.
"Dursley residence."
A woman's voice answered.
"Hello Tuney," it said. "It's Lily."
Petunia froze. A shiver of dread creeped its way along the length of her spine, and she felt a tingling sensation in the hand that held the phone to her ear. She desperately wanted to shriek and let the receiver drop to the floor, or to slam it back down onto its cradle, or really to do anything at all, but it was as if her entire body had been petrified.
"Yes," she replied. It was all she dared to say.
"Well," Lily began. "I have good news."
There was a pause here, wherein any other person might offer some sort of acknowledgment of the preceding statement. However, there was nothing but silence on the line, so Lily continued on.
"So – we only just found out today, you see, and – we're just so excited, of course, and – well, Tuney, I'm... I'm pregnant."
Petunia could hear the glow in her sister's voice. She instinctively put her free hand over her own belly – a gesture not so much sympathetic as it was protective. An emotional bile rose in her throat, and the words she spoke next tumbled out before she could restrain herself.
"I suppose it'll turn out like you then. Destined for some carefree fantasy life."
"Tuney, it's not like that... not at all. James and I, we've had our share of... hardships... lately. Things are – well, we've lost some very dear friends, and... It's not all fun and games, you know. Not in the slightest."
"Oh, of course not," Petunia snapped. "Worrying about car payments and college funds, are you?" She gave a short, bitter laugh. "No, it's easy enough for you, just a wave of your hands and your life's pretty as a picture. Just have to put up with your little imp for a few years, and then you can cart him off to that wretched school, and—"
"Tuney, please," Lily begged. "I just... I had heard from Arabella that you found out for yourself only a month ago, and I thought... maybe we could work something out between us, and they could... they'd be able to grow up together, as cousins should..."
If the tears in her sister's voice had any effect on her, Petunia showed no outward indication.
"No," she replied firmly. "Absolutely not."
"But why, Tuney? Why can't—"
"Why? Why? You think I'd go and let you people corrupt the mind of my future son or daughter by telling them that make-believe is real and then slamming the door in their face and having a laugh?"
Lily tried to protest, but Petunia continued her tirade.
"No, Lily, no. I don't know what lies that Dumbledore crank told you and Mum and Dad, but I won't subject my child to a life of false realities and bitter disappointment."
"Please, Petunia," Lily implored meekly, "we're family. Our children deserve to know that they aren't alone."
"You left me alone, Lily. Every year, for seven years. And then you went and eloped with that Potter boy, with never a thought for your poor, ordinary little sister. And now here you are, begging for forgiveness, all for the sake 'of the children'. It's too late, Lily. You made your choice ages ago. You can't turn back time and wish everything right again."
Petunia could hear sobbing on the other end of the line.
"Maybe they should have taught you remorse at that school of yours."
"Petunia, please—"
"Goodbye, Lily."
The phone clanged coldly into the cradle. A single hot tear rolled down her cheek like a caress. Instead of relief, Petunia felt as though the weight on her heart had been replaced with an even heavier stone, and it was pulling her down, down, down, until she couldn't even hold herself up. Her boney bum sunk to the ground and she sat there, motionless, in the hallway.
Moments later, a wailing shriek filled the house.
"VERNON!"
His attention momentarily diverted from the television screen, Vernon Dursley went from ebullient and doting "Yes dear, what is it?" to ashen-faced and panic-stricken "Dear lord, what's happened?" in less than three seconds, upon finding his pregnant wife slumped on the floor of the hall. He knelt gently beside her (a difficult thing to do for a man so large) and took her weak hand in his own beefy mitts.
"What's wrong, Pet?"
Petunia stared at the paisley-patterned wallpaper as she spoke.
"I spoke to her just now."
The emphatic 'her' (also known by the subjective 'she') was the Dursleys' only permissible moniker for discussing Petunia's older sister. Vernon didn't entirely understand the nature of the animosity between the two women; from what he could make of it, she and her deadbeat husband were a couple of freeloading lazy good-for-nothings with no actual jobs and a deranged and fanciful notion of how the real world worked. This obviously caused his wife much distress; rotten, the lot of them.
"Her? But I thought – how did she get our telephone number?"
Petunia just continued to stare blankly at the wall in front of her.
"Right, love," he said, patting her hand and hoisting himself to his feet with considerable effort. "I'll just have a little chat with the utilities and get it all sorted. Now let's get you upstairs and have a lie down, shall we?"
Vernon dutifully pulled Petunia to her feet and escorted her up the stairs and into the bedroom, where he fluffed her pillows and propped up her feet and kissed her atop the head with the proper diligence of a father-to-be. He beamed at her as he gently closed the door, then stomped back down the stairs to give the telephone company a piece of his mind.
Soon one could hear the one-sided snippets of a customer service nightmare drifting up from the hallway below:
"Yes, hello. Dursley. No I don't have my bloody account number... Number Four, Privet Drive..."
Petunia waited until Vernon was fully engrossed in verbally eviscerating some poor underpaid service technician before shifting from her plush roost. She pulled a photo album from the bedside table and thumbed through it, back to front: their wedding day, picnics at the park, her mother and father's last anniversary, birthdays and holiday gatherings...
As the images elapsed further and further back in time (herself growing younger with each turn of the page), the photographs themselves became physically more mangled – here, the entire right side of a picture was missing, leaving only a disembodied arm wrapped around the photo's smiling subject; in another, a young girl with blonde hair was joyfully tossing a ball to a cut-out void; this one, a canoeing trip, little Petunia with one oar, a blank orb holding the other.
Petunia rested her hand for a moment on a picture of a doe they once happened upon during a camping trip in their youth, capturing its startled look only a split-second before it bounded off into the woods. She reached into the photo's plastic sleeve and slid out a second picture that had been hidden behind the doe. It was folded in half: the side that was showing depicted a young Petunia beaming happily, her arms reaching into the other side of the photograph. Petunia the actual gently unfolded the picture, smoothing the crease with delicate care.
The other half showed Lily, with her dark red hair and bright green eyes, grinning at the camera and her little sister's embrace. Taken only a month before Lily had been accepted to Hogwarts, it was the only picture of her sister that Petunia had never been able to bring herself to mutilate or throw away. She loved the way that the sunlight caught their hair and lit up their joy-filled eyes; it always looked (and more so through a veil of tears) as if their photographed selves were almost moving.
"Those bloody thieves," Vernon muttered as he wheezingly ascended the stairs. " 'No record of any phone calls to your residence at the time specified,' he says. Yes, well they'll bloody well find a way to charge me for it, won't they!" He paused for a breather about halfway up. " 'Please Mr. Dursley, enjoy a complimentary month of service free of cost!' Spineless germ."
He reached the bedroom door and pushed it open softly, so as not to disturb his recumbent wife. He took note of the multitude of tissues lying strewn about, but was relieved to discern no current sniffling or weepiness.
"Feeling better, are we, Pet?"
Petunia nodded into her pillow. "Did you get things sorted with the telephone?" she asked as he lowered his immense bulk onto the mattress beside her.
"Well, it's the queerest thing, but – ah, never you mind, love, old Verny's told them what's what."
"My big strong man," Petunia cooed with a fawning smile.
"Oh yes, quite," he said with a roguish wink.
And for that moment, all their troubles (whether real or imaginary) were ardently forgotten.
Several months later, an unnecessarily large stack of envelopes greeted the postman at Number Four, Privet Drive, weighing nearly as much as the child whose birth they were announcing: one Dudley Ulysses Dursley, tipping the scales at an inordinately healthy 5.1 kilos.
Tucked in among the laboriously hand-written names and addresses of acquaintances Petunia and Vernon would be hard-pressed to recognize if they met on the street was one envelope, bearing sufficient postage but no such destination or return address, inscribed simply to 'Lily Evans'.
Unwilling to ever truly admit that the envelope had existed at all, Petunia hoped it would simply vanish into postal service limbo, never to be seen by a certain pair of bright green eyes. Had she known, it would have been much to Petunia's consternation that the announcement was taken into the deliverable care of owl post and did in fact find itself upon a doorstep in Godric's Hollow, at the residence of a James and Lily Potter, only weeks before they too would tending an addition to the family.
Even at the moment that Harry James entered the world, he did not yet exist in the mundane reality in which the Dursleys thrived. He was a blessing of a boy that Petunia never could have dreamed that she would have to tolerate.
A green light flashed.
A woman screamed.
And a mother's love saved an infant from certain death.
Miles away, Petunia Durlsey glanced up at the clock as she hushed her sweet little Dudders to sleep; at that moment, a single tear rolled down her cheek, like a caress. She brushed it hurriedly away, without a thought as to its cause. The picture of the doe came to her mind, briefly. As yet, it was just another ordinary Tuesday evening.
She went to bed, and dreamt of broken vases.