Tess

Tess, the younger sister of Scarlet O’Bannon, is a deceased character whose drowning continues to govern her sister’s inner life. The loss is not confined to backstory: it returns through remembered gestures, Scarlet’s response to people who resemble Tess, and her persistent conviction that she should have saved her. Tess’s presence in the narrative is therefore both familial and structural, a past tragedy that keeps interrupting Scarlet’s attempts to move forward.

Identity and the loss

Scarlet remembers Tess as her little sister and describes her death by drowning as the moment when the world seemed to split open into pain. Afterward, Scarlet disciplined herself to control her emotions. Her account presents that restraint not as an absence of feeling but as a defense built around a particular catastrophe: the knowledge that Tess died and Scarlet could not bring her back.

The memories retain ordinary childhood details alongside the loss. Scarlet recalls reading A Christmas Carol to Tess, a shared routine that survives as one of the few plainly affectionate scenes she names. She also remembers Tess falling and scuffing her knee, and Scarlet squeezing her shoulder afterward. That small act of comfort later becomes entangled with the far more consequential memory of trying to help when Tess was dying. The contrast between a childhood mishap that could be soothed and a death that could not be reversed gives the gesture a lasting weight.

How Tess returns in memory

Tess reappears through Scarlet’s attention to resemblance. When Scarlet meets Moira, she notices that Moira is short and curvy, with freckles, a crooked nose, and a quick smile; Moira’s appearance and manner recall Tess as Scarlet remembers her at twelve. Scarlet sees in that resemblance a figure poised between childhood and adulthood, much as Tess had seemed to combine a grown appearance with a child’s playfulness. The likeness affects Scarlet before she has fully made sense of it: she grips a pillar, and her free hand opens and closes as it had when Tess was falling. The physical reaction makes the remembered loss present in the room, even though Moira is a separate person.

The resemblance also draws Scarlet toward caretaking. When Moira cries over the danger surrounding her and Cormac MacKay, Scarlet goes to her, kneels, and puts a hand on her shoulder. She recognizes the gesture as one she had used with Tess, first after the childhood fall and then in the desperate effort to help after the drowning. Scarlet promises Moira and her brother that she will keep them safe. Her promise is prompted by the immediate threat, but its emotional force also comes from the older failure she cannot undo: protecting someone now becomes a way of answering, imperfectly, the memory of Tess.

Grief in Scarlet’s relationships

Tess’s death helps explain why Scarlet finds emotional openness difficult. Scarlet is surprised by the strength of her attraction to Cormac, yet quickly tries to suppress it. She describes having trained herself to control her emotions since Tess died, while recognizing that Cormac can get past those defenses. Her reaction does not erase the grief; it shows how the same guardedness affects the possibility of new attachment.

That tension becomes acute when Scarlet is alone with Cormac in an intimate moment. She sees Tess appear to her, arms folded and legs muddy, as if reproaching her for failing to save her and for becoming involved with a man Scarlet considers dangerous. Scarlet abruptly tells Cormac to move away and points a gun at him. The scene presents Tess not as an independent participant in the present action but as the form Scarlet’s guilt takes when desire and self-protection collide. Her sister’s remembered judgment cuts through the immediate situation, turning attraction into a reminder of unresolved responsibility.

Tess’s memory also surfaces in quieter exchanges with Moira. A conversation about books leads Scarlet to mention that she used to read Dickens to her sister. The reference opens a path into grief that Scarlet had not intended to take. She begins telling the story of Tess’s death, then breaks down, weeping for a long time while Moira comforts her. Scarlet experiences the comfort as strangely close to receiving it from Tess herself. The reversal matters: the person Scarlet has tried to protect becomes the person who can offer care, allowing Scarlet to speak about a loss she usually keeps contained.

Guilt and narrative significance

Scarlet’s memories of Tess are marked by repetition. She returns to the movement of her hand on Tess’s shoulder, to the effort to help when the sirens were still far away, and to the conviction that she tried to save her. Later, speaking with her father, Scarlet insists that she did try. The repeated assertion does not settle the question of responsibility; it reveals how urgently she needs her effort to be recognized. Tess’s death is an event in the past, but Scarlet’s account of it remains unfinished.

Tess also complicates the story’s movement toward intimacy and alliance. Scarlet can joke with Cormac, respond to Moira, and make plans amid danger, yet grief repeatedly interrupts those actions. Her first response to Tess’s death, she recalls, was not tears but running to the garden swing set and rocking back and forth while giggling, as she and Tess had done together. Tears came later. The recollection resists a simple picture of grief as a single, immediate response; Scarlet remembers an initial return to a shared childhood ritual before sorrow became expressible.

Although Tess appears in these passages only through memory and Scarlet’s vision, she remains a decisive presence. Her death explains Scarlet’s emotional discipline, gives her protective impulses a painful history, and exposes the guilt beneath her self-control. The story does not resolve that guilt by establishing that Scarlet could have changed the outcome. Instead, Tess’s continuing influence is shown in what Scarlet repeats, what she struggles to say, and the care she offers others while still trying to reconcile herself with the sister she could not save.