I was four years old, and I was inventing constellations with Mom on our living room wall. Persephone watched us from the couch, her eyes peering over the third-grade science textbook propped against her knees. As I faced the wall, assessing my canvas, Mom passed me a thin paintbrush, then placed her palm on my shoulder. Even at such a young age, I handled that tool with reverence, with care; I understood that we were working together, the brush and I, to tell a story with stars.
“It’s Persephone,” I said, touching silver paint to our wall. Three slow, patient dots, then two more, then three again. I dipped the brush back onto the palette that Mom held out for me, then continued to constellate.
“This is your face,” I explained, looking back at Persephone on the couch and pointing with the brush. “These are your legs, and this is your dust.”
“What dust?” she asked.
“The disappearance dust.”
My sister screwed up her nose the way she did whenever she heard an answer that didn’t satisfy her. She chewed on the open tip of a Pixy Stix and waited for me to continue. The blue sugar on her lips made her mouth look cold.
“Go on, Sylvie,” Mom coaxed. “What’s disappearance dust?”
“It’s magic,” I said. “Now she’s here, now she’s not.”
“What makes you think I have disappearance dust?” Persephone asked.
“You don’t in real life,” I said, “but in the stars, you’re magic.”
Mom knelt down so she could look into my eyes. “That’s a beautiful idea, Sylvie,” she said. She turned her head to look at my sister, who squinted at us, at Mom’s hand on my arm in particular. “Don’t you think so, Persephone?”
“No,” my sister said, her tone sharp but still casual enough. “It doesn’t make any sense. There’s no such thing as disappearance dust.”
Mom looked at the constellation on the wall, the scattered stars near the points that would be Persephone’s hands, and smiled. “It’s something your sister invented,” she said, “and that makes it very special.”
Persephone stood up off the couch, her textbook thumping to the floor. “It doesn’t make any sense!” she insisted. “It’s just stupid! Ooooh, look, I’m going to disappear.” She spun around, shaking the remaining sugar from her Pixy Stix onto the carpet, and for a moment, it looked like it was snowing blue flurries in the living room.
As much as she tried to hide it, I could see the promise of a smile on my sister’s lips. She meant to be biting, and sarcastic, and perhaps even hurtful, but she was only eight years old, and there is something about spinning freely in a room that just dissolves a child’s anger. Persephone twirled and twirled until a single giggle escaped her lips, and then, just like that, she tripped. She fell to the floor, hands first, knees next, her science book caught between her feet.
I couldn’t help it; I laughed. I laughed the way we did when we played in the snow together and made facedown angels, our cheeks stinging with the cold and the widths of our smiles.
“Shut up,” Persephone snapped, her back arching like an animal as she struggled to get up.
“Hey—language,” Mom warned. “Are you okay?” She reached for one of my sister’s hands to try to help her up, but Persephone pulled away. Then, as if reconsidering, Persephone crawled back toward my mother and the two became mirror images of each other—the same blonde hair, same slender figure—kneeling together on the floor.
“Looks like a rug burn,” Mom said, rubbing a finger against the textured red spot on Persephone’s knee.
Persephone looked down and winced. “It hurts,” she said. Then her icy eyes sparkled. “Can you kiss it and make it better, Mom?”
Mom sighed and stood up, brushing Pixy Stix sugar from her legs, still holding on to the paint palette. “You’re too old for that,” she said. “Come on, get up.”
But Persephone made no effort to move.
“Please?” Persephone asked, and I was surprised to see that the sparkle in her eyes was just glittering tears. My sister was usually so much stronger than rug burns.
Mom turned away from the human Persephone on the floor to look at the one made of stars on the wall. “What do you think, Sylvie?” she asked. “Is it done, or does it need any finishing touches?”
“Maybe just . . .” I began, but I was cut off by what sounded like a growl coming from deep within my sister’s body. I looked over at her just in time to see her spring from the floor and leap toward the wall, palm outstretched. She swiped her hand across the fresh paint, slashing silver through the constellation. For a moment, no one said anything. Then, Persephone made a sound—half sob, half grunt—and she stomped down the hallway. A moment later, I heard our bedroom door slam.
Mom’s eyes were closed, the skin of her lids pinched together at the edges. “Why did she do that?” I asked, feeling hot tears gather in my lashes.
When she opened her eyes again, there was a smile in them. “Don’t worry about it, okay?” she said. “It’s just Persephone being Persephone. Now, look, come down here for a second.”
She took the paintbrush from my hand and placed it on the end table. Then she swiped her finger across the tears that had spilled onto my cheek and she lay down on the beige carpet, waving at me to come join her. As I crawled beside her, I noticed that her hair mingled with the blue sugar on the floor, and that those specks looked like tiny jewels.
“Now, look up at the wall,” she said, and pointed her finger toward the constellation we’d just made. There was something strangely beautiful about the way it had been ruined. Persephone’s hand had made the disappearance dust streak across the stars meant to be her body, and it looked as if she was in motion, twirling in the sky like she’d done in the room minutes before.
“It’s like we’re looking up at the stars, and we’re seeing Persephone,” she said, “and just look at all the disappearance dust. I can still see it, can’t you?”
I nodded my head but didn’t respond, her words like a spell.
“My love for you, Sylvie,” she continued, “is exactly like those stars. It’s as eternal as each and every one of them. It goes on and on and on.”
I smiled, growing drowsy on the floor as Mom spoke, and I nestled my head against her shoulder. We were safe right then, and happy, with blue sugar in our hair and a silver constellation on the wall. And because I wasn’t Persephone’s age yet, and I wasn’t learning science in school, I didn’t know that stars don’t last forever. I had no idea that the light we see is just an echo of an old burn, or that, most of the time, it’s the absence of a glow, instead of the glow itself, that goes on and on and on.
5
We lived on the side of Spring Hill without any highway access, so to get to the yellow ranch where Aunt Jill waited to “hand over the reins” (when she said those words on the phone, I couldn’t help but imagine my mother as some leashed wild animal), I had to drive through the north side of town. Past Spring Hill Commons, where middle-aged women peered into shop windows, despite the flurries that dusted their heads. Past the churchlike Town Hall with its white columns and wide doors, its steeple that boasted stained glass windows and a large ticking clock. The benches on the town green were covered in snow so pristine it looked as if someone had laid thick white blankets over them. Even still, an older man had cleared a spot for himself to sit and, as if in prayer, he stared ahead at the gray life-size statue of George Emory, Spring Hill’s Revolutionary War hero—and Ben Emory’s great-great-great-etc.-grandfather.
Ben had been protected from the start—by his last name, his family’s money, by the Emory estate that loomed on the highest hill in town. Spring Hill’s own residents had even protected him. As soon as word got out that Ben was a “person of interest” in Persephone’s murder, the news stories filled with people classifying the killer as an “out-of-towner.”
Even the detectives, Falley and Parker, seemed to do little with the damning information I’d given them. A couple days after Persephone had been found, I worked
up the courage to ask Aunt Jill for a ride to the police station, and she steered her car through a sprinkle of snow, swearing under her breath each time we slid on a patch of black ice. Then she sat with me inside the interview room, holding my hand as she, Falley, and Parker heard the secret I’d been hiding.
“I’ve been painting my sister’s bruises,” I started.
Parker and Falley exchanged a glance before Parker leaned forward. “Come again?” he asked.
I took a deep breath and looked at Aunt Jill, who, with wary eyes, nodded. “I lied to you guys the other day when you asked me if Ben ever hurt Persephone,” I said. “After she comes—came—home from seeing him, she’d have bruises on her.”
Parker wrote something on a yellow legal pad. “And you’ve been painting pictures of them?” he asked.
Falley put her hand on his, stopping him mid-scribble. When he looked at her, she shook her head, tucking loose strands of chin-length brown hair behind her ears. “I think she means she’s been painting over them,” she said.
They held each other’s gaze until Parker cleared his throat and drew a line through something on the pad. “Right,” he said.
“We saw the paint,” Falley explained, folding her hands together over the table. “But just to clarify—do you remember what part of her body had bruises on it the night you last saw her?”
I swallowed—hard. It hadn’t occurred to me that they’d already know about it, but of course her body would have been examined. She would have been naked on some long metallic table, her eyes closed, her blonde hair the only cushion for her head. Deft gloved fingers would have pressed against whatever was left of the paint, and the bruises beneath would have been exposed—ugly, menacing things.
“Sylvie?” Aunt Jill squeezed my hand. I looked at her, and she nodded toward the detectives, who waited for me to respond.
“Oh,” I said. “Sorry. What was the question?”
“The bruises,” Falley began again, her voice gentle and patient. “Do you remember what part of her body they were on?”
I tried to remember. All the daisies and seascapes and storm clouds and ladybugs were blending together. The bruises were usually on her arms, but sometimes it was her shoulder or hip bone or thigh. That final time, though—I closed my eyes, saw her leaning over me, her hair tickling my face, her starfish necklace nearly in my mouth—there’d been a bruise just beneath her rib cage, and two more on—
“Her wrist,” I said.
Parker went back to making notes. “And why did you put paint on those bruises?” he asked.
I slipped my hand out of Aunt Jill’s and scratched my wrist. “Because Persephone asked me to,” I said. “She didn’t want our mom to see.”
“So this happened more than once?” Falley asked. “You painting over her bruises?”
Jill’s eyes were on me, her gaze hot and unrelenting.
“That’s what I’m trying to tell you,” I said, keeping my eyes locked on Falley’s youthful, encouraging face. “This happened all the time. Ben hurt her for months. He did this to her. I know he did. You have to arrest him.”
My voice rose in pitch, but I didn’t care. As much as my confession made me look bad, it made Ben look far worse—and that was all that mattered. He wouldn’t get away with what he’d done to Persephone. He wouldn’t be able to hurt some other girl and call it love.
“So I understand you’re saying that your sister asked you to do this for her,” Parker said. “But how come you never—”
“I don’t know,” I said, before he could finish what I’d already been asking myself for days. “I just—I don’t even know anymore.”
I turned to Aunt Jill, and the look in her eyes—not anger, not frustration; just bald, profound weariness—made something in me collapse. “I’m so sorry,” I said to her. “I was so stupid. I should have told Mom about it the first time it happened. I can’t believe I . . . I’m . . .”
She pulled me into a sideways hug between our chairs. My throat felt thick, my saliva viscous, but the warmth of her embrace was an immediate comfort, like burrowing under blankets on a cold night. As tears slipped from my eyes, the fabric of her sweater soaked them up.
“It’s okay, Sylvie,” she said. “You’re doing the right thing now.”
“That’s true,” Parker added. “We’re glad you came to us with this information. We knew the bruises on her wrist and side had happened prior to the strangulation.” I felt Jill’s body tense up, in sync with my own. “But we didn’t know if the two events were connected.”
I narrowed my eyes at the sterile way he’d worded it—“the two events.” Pulling away from Aunt Jill, I sat up straight in my chair. “They’re connected,” I said.
Parker nodded once. “We will follow up with this information, for sure.”
It’s not “information,” I wanted to say. It’s the answer. The smoking gun.
“Sylvie.” Falley leaned forward. “Did Persephone ever give any explanation for what Ben did to her? Did she ever say how it happened, or why she stayed with him?”
I shrugged. “Just that they loved each other. And that it wasn’t what I thought. She was always saying that—‘It’s not what you think.’ ” I shook my head as I realized for the millionth time how foolish I’d been. “But it was what I thought. Him killing her proves that.”
I said these words into my lap, and when I looked up at the detectives, Parker was staring at me in a lingering, expectant way, as if he felt I was holding something back. But I wasn’t—and that was the problem. The truth was just that simple. My sister, according to her own twisted definition of the word, had allowed a man to love her to death.
The detectives launched into a list of questions then. When did she first come home with bruises? How many bruises did she usually have at a time? Where were these bruises? Here, look at this body I’ve drawn right here—please forgive me; I’m not an artist—and place an X anywhere you can remember her having been hurt. Did your sister ever say, or give any indication, that her boyfriend had been (a small pause here, a couple taps of a pen) sexually abusing her?
“Why do you ask?” Aunt Jill cut in sharply. “Was she sexually abused on the night she . . .” She glanced at me before adding the final word. “Died?”
Falley was quick to shake her head. “There’s no evidence to suggest that,” she said. “We just have to cover all our bases. It’s standard procedure.”
I had a hard time understanding how anything related to what had happened to Persephone could be considered “standard,” but I answered the question anyway. “She never said anything like that.”
“Okay,” Parker said. “But their relationship was sexual in nature. Correct?”
“Detective,” Jill said, her pronunciation reminding me of when lawyers yelled “Objection!” on TV. “Sylvie is fourteen years old.”
Parker looked at Falley, who gave a quick, nearly imperceptible nod, and then turned back to Jill. “That’s old enough, I think.” He swung his eyes toward me. “But you don’t have to answer the question, Sylvie, if it makes you uncomfortable.”
It did make me uncomfortable—not because he was asking about sex, exactly, but because he was asking about Persephone and sex. It seemed like my sister’s privacy had been violated so much already, and now, here was another layer being grabbed at and stripped away.
“I don’t know,” I said. But then I remembered the glow of her cheeks on nights when she’d stumble back through the window and, to my relief, wouldn’t ask me to paint. She’d be smiling in a drowsy, contented way as she got ready for bed, and sometimes, I’d even hear her humming.
“I mean, she never talked about it,” I continued, “but . . . yeah, probably.”
Jill shifted in her seat as Parker nodded and scribbled onto his pad. “Okay,” he said. “Thank you.”
For a few moments, neither detective said anything. One of the light fixtures above us buzzed, sounding louder and louder to me until Falley finally spoke.
“Thank you, Sylvie,” she said. “Unless there’s anything else you think we should know, then that’s all the information we need from you right now.”
When I didn’t say anything, still distracted by the sound of the light (it was kind of like the chorus of bugs Persephone and I always listened to through our open window on summer nights, laughing in our separate beds as we tried to harmonize with them), Aunt Jill slid back her chair. “Thank you for your time, Detectives,” she said. The three of them stood, getting ready to shake hands.
“Wait.” The word punched out of my mouth, reminding me that there was something else. “I—I just have a question.”
Falley sat back down, folding her hands on the table. Then Parker and Jill sat, too. “Sure,” Falley said. “Ask away.”
“Well,” I started, “I know you probably need all her clothes—you know, the clothes she was . . . found in—for evidence and stuff, but I—”
“Actually,” Parker said, sharing a glance with Falley, “that’s something we should talk to you about.”
His tone made me feel uneasy, and I saw Jill’s hands clasp tighter on her pocketbook. “What is it?” she asked.
“Well,” he said, “it’s just that, as you know, Persephone’s body was covered in over a foot of snow. Because of all that moisture, much of the evidence that might have been on her clothes has been compromised. Hair follicles. Fibers. Things of that nature.”
“Compromised,” Aunt Jill repeated. “What does that mean exactly?”
“It means,” Falley interjected, “destroyed. It’s the same with the area surrounding the body. Tire tracks were covered up, and then plowed over. Any footsteps were buried. But—” She leaned forward, setting her earnest eyes on mine. “That doesn’t mean it’s hopeless. There are a lot of other angles we’re investigating this from, and we’ll still be keeping her clothes, just in case. Which means—to answer the question I think you were about to ask—we can’t give any of that back to you. I’m sorry.”
“Does that include her necklace?” I asked. “Or can we have that back?”
The Winter Sister Page 5