When we first met during orientation our freshman year at RISD, I was eager to detach myself from the person I’d been in high school. For those years at Spring Hill High after Persephone died, I stopped being Sylvie O’Leary. I was known instead, through whispers in the halls, as “Persephone’s sister.” Even as a senior, three years after everyone in my sister’s grade had graduated, I still heard that phrase. It hissed from the crowd when I won Outstanding Achievement in Visual Arts at awards night, and it followed me, weeks later, as I crossed the stage to get my diploma. Some days, “Persephone’s sister” was a comfort, a reminder that, no matter what had happened, I’d always be tethered to her. But most days, when I heard those words, it took everything I had not to buckle, not to see my fingers locking the bedroom window over and over, the click of the latch echoing in my head.
So in the early days of our friendship, when Lauren asked me about my family (first telling me all about her two “spoiled, obnoxious” brothers and her “embarrassingly boy-crazy” sister), I found myself giving her only the faintest sketch of my life: I had an alcoholic mother, I’d lived for several years with my aunt and cousin, and I had an older sister who’d died.
“Whoa,” Lauren said back then, “I’m so sorry. How did she die?”
For a moment, my stomach tightened and my skin felt instantly cold. But then, as if my voice belonged to someone else, I heard myself reply.
“Car accident.”
I thought of my grandparents’ fatal crash—the crumpled Honda, the faulty airbags that hadn’t deployed when they spun out on a patch of black ice and slammed into a tree. Persephone could have easily been in the car with them that night. They could have been taking her to get a hot chocolate at Spring Hill Commons. She’d have been seven at the time, and I, only three years old, might have stayed home with Mom, already blinking toward sleep at seven o’clock.
“But I was really young when it happened,” I added. “I barely even remember her.”
I held my breath for a moment, waiting to see if Lauren could sense the lies that hovered in the air, but she only frowned a little, said “I’m sorry” again, and that had been it. End of conversation. End of “Persephone’s sister.” As I exhaled, reveling in my revised history, my lungs felt lighter than they had in years.
After that, Lauren and I lived a thrifty but comfortable life together. We became roommates at RISD our sophomore year. “More like Rhode Island School of Detours,” she quipped, but I, having scrambled for my scholarship, having painted some nights until the tips of my fingers bled, didn’t view it the same way. She’d wanted to be a tattoo artist from the start (going to RISD was her parents’ dream, paid for by their six-figure salaries), and when she got the job at Steve’s she came alive in ways I’d never seen before. She designed new tattoos feverishly, leaving them on sticky notes around the apartment—on the toilet lid, an elephant with a trombone for a trunk; on the refrigerator, a light bulb with a ship inside; on the peephole of our door, a stained glass anatomical heart. Then she made me rate them, using a simple rubric of “Would you get this, yes or no?” It didn’t matter that she knew I would never get any tattoo (a brief point of concern when she later convinced Steve to hire me, saving me from the monotony of art supply stores); she just wanted a chance to talk about what she was doing, because she loved it with a pure, uncomplicated passion—and I envied her that.
When I started my apprenticeship at Steve’s, I came to understand what she liked about the job. It was creative, it required thought and skill, and it generated a considerable feeling of power; the tattoo artist, I soon learned, was not only the inflictor of pain, the drawer of blood, but also, on a good day, the fulfiller of dreams. None of that was why I kept up with the apprenticeship, though, or why I accepted the full-time job when I got my license.
After Persephone died, I kept on painting. At first, I wasn’t sure why, given how the chemicals had begun to smell like bruises to me, but it became something I loved and loathed in equal measure. I loved it because of how easily you could hide your mistakes—one wrong shade of red, and you could just cover it with another; one leaf that didn’t fall into place on a tree, and you could simply paint right over it, start all over. But still, there was always a catch. Even though no one would ever see your error, you never forgot it existed—a thing that haunted, a thing that whispered and gnawed at you beneath the paint. Tattooing was different, of course, but in the ways that mattered—bruise-scented chemicals, the masking of something old with something new—it was the same.
Now, outside my bedroom, the living room TV clicked on. I heard it surge to life and then quiet down as Lauren lowered the volume. But something stopped me from getting up and joining her, kept me staring instead at the moonlit cracks in my ceiling as my birthday slipped by. Somehow, it had happened again; another year had passed in which I’d grown older than my sister.
4
“Sylvie, I need you to come take care of your mother.”
A few months after my thirtieth birthday, everything had taken a turn for the worse. I’d been laid off at work unexpectedly, winter had settled over Providence like an icy steel dome, and now, on a particularly brutal January night, Aunt Jill had no patience left for me. I hadn’t been down to Spring Hill even once to visit my mother. In fact, I’d only been kept apprised of her treatments and condition because Jill had taken to calling me every Thursday night. Even for Thanksgiving and Christmas, which I usually spent in Hanover with Jill, Missy, and Missy’s husband, Carl, I had made flimsy excuses. Lauren’s family invited me to Virginia or I can’t get enough time off of work. Swallowing down acidic guilt was safer, I felt, than seeing my mother. I imagined her attached to an IV bag, her eyes widening with an unspoken fear, and each time, the tenderness I felt for her scared me. It was risky—thinking of her in a way that made her easier to love.
Jill never called me out on my lies or excuses; she’d just sigh into the phone and say things like, “You can’t stay away forever,” or “She’s your only parent, Sylvie.”
I’m your only sister, Sylvie.
Back when I was living with Aunt Jill and Missy, I used to get jealous whenever Missy went to her dad’s house for the weekend. I’d watch her pack a duffel bag with T-shirts and jeans and makeup, and I’d feel a tug at my heart that I didn’t yet know was envy. It wasn’t that I didn’t love Aunt Jill, or didn’t feel grateful that she’d swooped in to save me from my mother’s darkness; it was just—having a father would have been nice, too. Useful, even.
All my life, it had been just Persephone, Mom, and me, and I had never felt the need for another parent. Still, when I watched Missy’s dad pull up to the curb and honk his horn, when I saw Missy’s ponytail bounce in the air behind her as she ran to the passenger side of his car, I wondered if things would have been different if one of our fathers—Persephone’s or mine—had stayed in the picture. Maybe, I often thought, Mom had lost herself so easily because she had so few people who loved her; in that way, losing just one of us meant losing nearly everything.
Now, the phone pressed to my ear, and Aunt Jill waiting for my response on the other end, I had another, more selfish reason for wishing for a father. If there’d been someone else living in my mother’s house, then the task of taking care of her wouldn’t have fallen to me.
“I—can’t,” I said to Jill. “I meant to tell you, actually. I just got laid off at the tattoo parlor, so now isn’t really the best time. I have to stay here to look for a new job, send out my résumé, hopefully go on inter—”
“No,” Jill cut in, quick to refute the excuse I’d been crafting ever since Steve called me into his office the Friday before. “I’m sorry you were laid off—I really am, and I want to hear more about that later—but if you don’t have a job, then this is actually the perfect time for you to come home.”
“Yeah, but—”
“Sylvie, there’s no ‘but’ about it. You know that Carl was deployed last month, and that the baby is due next week. I h
ave other responsibilities, okay? Missy needs me, so I’m heading up to Boston to be with her. If you hadn’t been dodging my calls, then we would have had more time to discuss this and it wouldn’t have seemed so sudden. Now, I’ll drive down to your mother’s whenever I can get away, but in the meantime, she needs someone to stay with her. Someone to drive her to her appointments. Someone to help her when she feels sick.”
Her voice wavered, and I closed my eyes as she cleared her throat. “As you know, she finished up her first chemo cycle back in November, but things haven’t progressed the way the doctors were hoping. They’re starting her chemo again next week, and she can’t drive herself to the hospital. You have to do this, Sylvie. I know it’s hard, but you have to stop thinking only of yourself and just step up.”
I’d never heard Aunt Jill speak to me that way before. I knew she was exhausted and stressed and overwhelmed, but besides all that, I could tell she was profoundly disappointed in me. In a way, the realization of that fact hit me even harder than hearing about my mother’s diagnosis had.
“You’re right,” I said. “I just—I don’t know how to talk to her.”
“So don’t talk. Just drive. And cook. And clean. And help.”
I hadn’t been back to Spring Hill since I’d graduated high school. On the few occasions I’d seen my mother since then, it was always at Aunt Jill’s, mere miles from the house I grew up in, but miles I was, nevertheless, unwilling to travel. During those times, our tense barbecues and forced family dinners, Mom pushed around the food on her plate and said only the shortest sentences to me (“Fine.” “That’s interesting.” “Huh.”), and I was always uncomfortable, always aching, my mind churning to conjure reasons for an early return to Providence.
“I just don’t think Mom’s gonna be happy to see me,” I finally said.
“So what?” Jill shot back. “You think she’s ever happy to see me? Hell, the way she is—the way she’s been to you and to all of us for all these years—I’m never that happy to see her, either. But this is bigger than that, Sylvie. You have to know that. And if you’re not going to do it for your mother, then could you please—please—just do it for me?”
Can you please just do this for me? I’m your only sister, Sylvie.
I squeezed my eyes shut, willing Persephone’s voice out of my head. Because it wasn’t Persephone asking. It was, with a tone that was both defeated and desperate, Aunt Jill, who had signed my high school permission slips and gone to parent-teacher conferences, who had made my favorite meatballs when I got into RISD and sent me peanut butter cookies all through college. She was right, of course. Someone had to take care of my mother, and the only person left was me.
Lauren saw things differently, though.
“I don’t get it,” she said the next night as I packed. Her lips were set in a pout, and every time I folded another shirt and put it in the suitcase, she plucked it out and threw it on the floor. “Why can’t your mom just hire one of those home-care nurses?”
I folded a pair of jeans, placed them on top of a stack of sweaters, and put my hand over the pile to keep Lauren’s off of it. “My mom hasn’t worked in years. I don’t even know how she’s managed to afford her vodka all this time—let alone her treatment.”
Lauren groaned, throwing her body back on my bed and swinging her feet up onto the mound of shirts I had yet to fold. “Maybe your aunt can pay for home care, then.”
“No,” I said quickly. “I can’t ask her to do that. She’s been supporting my mother financially for years. She’d never admit it, but I know things are tight for her.”
“Okay, fine,” Lauren conceded, “but let’s just think this through for a second. First of all, your mom randomly became a catatonic drunk when you were a teenager, and then she . . .” She stopped then, squinting at me. “What? What’s that look about? Is it because I said your mom’s an alcoholic? Because I’m sorry, but—”
“No,” I cut her off. “It’s not that.”
It had been the word randomly. I’d winced when she said it. But, of course, that word was consistent with the story I’d told her of my life. In the version she knew, there was more than a decade between the time Persephone supposedly died in a car accident and the time Mom started drinking. How could I expect her to connect those dots and understand that, painful as it had always been, there was a reason my mother drank?
I thought about what it would be like to tell her the truth—that Mom was an alcoholic because the worst thing had happened to us, not a tragic but common death like a car accident, but the void of an unpunished murder. I pictured myself confessing that Mom was only half of what haunted me in Spring Hill, that I did remember my sister and it was the remembering that, all these years later, kept me awake some nights. But I knew how much it would hurt to speak the truth, to answer the questions that would definitely follow, to be pushed into explaining the whole story—the bruises, the paint, the window.
No one knew how I’d locked Persephone out that night—not Mom or Aunt Jill or the detectives. According to the official police report, Ben told them that he’d dropped her off around ten thirty, but then she’d quickly come back to his car and they’d driven off again. He never told them why she came back; the report had him stating that “she changed her mind.”
Now, my throat ached at the thought of telling Lauren any of that. Still, she had seen me wince, and she stared at me now, waiting for me to explain.
“It just wasn’t that random,” I said, as casually as I could manage. “My mom’s drinking, I mean. She was really messed up about what happened to Persephone, and she used alcohol to cope.” Lauren’s eyes widened and I quickly added, “Even though it had been years since her death.”
“Wow,” Lauren said, propping herself up on her elbow and looking at me with focused, earnest eyes. “You never bring up your sister.” She paused for a few moments. “Do you want to talk about her?”
I forced a chuckle as I stared at the shirt I had folded. “No, I’m fine,” I said.
I could feel Lauren’s eyes lingering on my face, but I kept on placing clothes into my suitcase. Finally, she said, “Okay. But I’m just saying—reasons or no reasons, your mother has hardly been a mother at all to you for half your life. But now, when things get tough for her, you’re expected to go play faithful daughter? How is that fair?”
I sighed, pushing the suitcase aside to lie down next to her. “You’re right,” I said. “It’s not fair. But what choice do I have? Jill has to go be with Missy, and my mom’s alone. I’m the only option she has left.”
“Or . . .” Lauren said, “I could try to talk to Steve again. Maybe if you had your job back—”
“No. I don’t want him to feel worse than he already does.”
She rolled her eyes. “You’re too nice for your own good, you know. You’re giving up everything to go nurse your horrible mother, and you’re worried about making the guy who fired you—after you gave years of your life to his business—feel just a little bit bad.”
“You didn’t see him when he was letting me go,” I said. “He was close to tears. He kept saying that when business picks up again, he’d love to have me back, but he just couldn’t afford it right now. He has a daughter going to college next year. How can you argue with that?”
I certainly hadn’t been able to. I’d sat on the metal folding chair in Steve’s office and nodded along to his reasons. I’d stared at the faded clock tattoo on his wrist and languidly wondered where I’d go from there. I knew of two other tattoo parlors in a four-block radius, but the idea of sending out résumés, of putting together a portfolio, exhausted me to the point where I’d gone home, crawled right back into bed, and didn’t get up again until Lauren came home hours later demanding we talk about it.
“It’s still bullshit,” she said now. “You know the only reason he fired you instead of me is because I look the part, right?” She pushed up the sleeve of her sweatshirt, exposing her right arm, which was tattooed with a scene she�
��d designed based off The Secret Garden, her favorite book from when she was a kid. “I’ve got the tattoos, the dyed hair, the nose ring, and you’re over here all ‘My skin’s never even seen the sun, let alone a needle and ink.’ It’s discrimination.”
Lauren loved to claim discrimination. She did it at pizza restaurants when our order took a long time coming out, and she screamed it at female bartenders when they batted their lashes at men while pouring our drinks.
“It doesn’t matter,” I said. “What’s done is done. Even if I still had a job, I don’t know that it would change much. My mom’s still dying.”
The words came out louder than I’d anticipated. They bounced off the ceiling and walls. I hadn’t said it like that before. I’d said, “My mom is sick,” and “My mom has cancer,” but I hadn’t yet said what even the hopeful doctors probably knew: she was dying.
Lauren sat up, pulling her knees close to her chest. Then, after staring in silence at my suitcase, she grabbed a shirt from the pile on the bed and folded. “I’m sorry,” she said, and then, quietly, “You’re doing the right thing.”
• • •
It was painful to remember, of course, but the truth was—I had once loved my mother so deeply that I couldn’t imagine there being anything in the world that could complicate that feeling. Sometimes—it could be anytime, really; when I was just eating cereal, or loading ink into a tattoo gun—a memory of my mother, the way she’d been during the first half of my life, sharpened into focus. When that happened, I often had to brace myself, close my eyes until the familiar pangs in my chest subsided.
That night in particular, as I continued to pack after Lauren had gone to bed, one of my earliest memories suddenly swept through me, rushing into my mind like cold air through an open window.
The Winter Sister Page 4