Miss Keegan, the art teacher at Spring Hill High, had thought of me as her star student. “She’s got it!” she said to my mother at the freshman art show, just one month before Persephone died. “I show her a new technique and she picks it up right away! I can’t wait to see what she does in the next few years, once she really finds her voice.” Mom had smiled at me, wrapping her arm around my shoulder, and Persephone had stood in the school gymnasium with her arms crossed, a freshly painted bruise hiding beneath the sleeve of her sweater. I’d believed, back then, that Miss Keegan was right; I would develop my own style, and someday I’d have gallery openings and pieces that sold for thousands of dollars. But when Persephone died, I couldn’t bring myself to care about finding my voice as an artist any more than I could muster the motivation to study for tests and quizzes. All I knew was that if I did the work that Miss Keegan assigned, and made it seem as if it came from deep inside me (angry slashes of red on an otherwise soothing blue; a clay bust of my mother and sister, both heads supported by the same neck), then I could continue to fool her into thinking I “had it,” that indefinable quality that makes someone an artist, instead of just good at art.
When I lived with Aunt Jill during high school, I spent my Friday and Saturday nights painting. While other girls my age went to the mall or had sleepovers, I was determined to create at least one new piece to show Miss Keegan the following week. Every Friday, she sent me home with a blank canvas (which I often suspected she paid for herself), and every Monday, I returned to school with a completed painting. “Motivated and highly skilled,” I pictured Miss Keegan writing in a letter of recommendation, “Sylvie is the most prolific young artist I’ve ever known.” On the nights I painted, Jill would often come into the guest room, watch me sweep my brush across the canvas, and she’d put her hand on my shoulder as if she was concerned about something she didn’t know how to articulate. I continued painting even when she stood behind me like that. I couldn’t rest until I knew the piece looked as if it meant something profound. Miss Keegan wasn’t always convinced; sometimes, she would hold the canvas out in front of her, pushing her lips to one side. “Go deeper,” she’d say. “What is this window supposed to show us exactly? What do you want us to feel?” Then, I’d take the painting back to Aunt Jill’s, ignore my Algebra II homework, leave the assigned chapters of The Things They Carried unread, and paint Persephone into the picture, her body visible through the window, dressed in a red coat, walking away. When I did things like that, I had to ignore the pounding of my heart. I had to convince myself that it wasn’t Persephone I was painting; it was my ticket away from home.
And in the end, it was worth it. I won the art awards, I won the RISD scholarship, I won a life without my mother. Only now, here I was again—a jobless tattoo artist, back at the very same place I’d made it my mission to leave.
“Looks like you haven’t gotten too far.”
The canvas I was holding slipped from my hand at the sound of Mom’s voice.
“With what?” I asked, standing up and turning to face her in the doorway.
“Unpacking,” she answered.
“I was just—looking at my stuff,” I said. “Haven’t seen any of this in a while.”
“Hmm. Well.”
She stared out the window as if something fascinating were happening out on our street. For a moment, I was jealous; when she looked through the glass, she saw the usual houses and snowy lawns dotting the road. She didn’t spot Persephone lurking out there, unable to come inside, her icicle-thin fingers pressed against the panes.
“Mom, what did you do with Persephone’s things?”
I held my breath as I waited for her to answer. Was she going to ignore me, pretend I hadn’t spoken, the same way she had when I’d asked about Persephone’s constellation in the living room?
“Oh,” she finally said, her eyes still focused out the window. “I gave them to that boy.”
Something heavy dropped into my stomach. That boy? The only boy with any connection to Persephone was Ben.
“What boy?” I asked, an edge to my voice I hadn’t intended.
She waved her hand dismissively. “That neighbor boy,” she said. “Her friend from down the street.”
But the only friend Persephone had ever had on our street was Faith Dunhill, a girl who’d moved away at the end of eighth grade.
“Who are you talking about?” I tried again. “Ben Emory? He didn’t live down the street.”
Mom’s head snapped toward me, and in a single second, the expression that passed over her face went from surprise to horror.
“Why—” she sputtered. “Why would you say that name?”
I studied the tears that had so suddenly sprung to her eyes.
“So, it wasn’t him?” I asked.
“No!” She let out a quick sob of a sound, and she backed away from the door, her feet falling out of her slippers as she stumbled into the hallway.
Before I had the chance to stop her, she spun into her bedroom and slammed the door. I hesitated for a moment, then followed, twisting her doorknob several times, but each time, the brass handle clicked.
For some reason—despite what history should have told me, despite how desperately she’d run away—I was certain the door would open. And just like that, I was fourteen again. I slumped to the floor outside my mother’s room, my skin prickling from a new charge in the air, as if, on the other side of that door, a dark and desperate storm cloud brewed.
“Mom,” I called, my hand slipping from the doorknob and landing in my lap. “Mom, just let me in.”
There was the creak of her mattress as she climbed into bed, then a rustle of blankets, and then nothing.
“Mom,” I called again, even though I knew she wouldn’t answer me.
For the next few minutes, I sat with my back against her door, my knees pulled up to my chest. My heart was a heavy, throbbing thing, and when I looked at my hands, I was surprised to find they were shaking.
8
The next morning, I woke to a call from Aunt Jill.
“Hey,” I answered, my voice deeper than normal. I pulled the phone away from my ear to check the time. It was eleven thirty-two—the latest I’d managed to sleep since college—and I sat up sharply.
“Hey yourself,” Jill said. “I’m just calling to see how things went yesterday and to make sure you’re all set for tomorrow.”
I grabbed a sweatshirt from the foot of my bed, struggling to respond as I pulled it on. “Things didn’t go so well,” I started to say, but the words stopped dead in my mouth as soon as I saw Persephone’s bed. All through the night, I’d been careful to keep my body turned to the wall. I hadn’t wanted to risk glimpsing what used to be the space where she slept. Stripped of all the belongings that once surrounded it, it looked so impersonal, so unhaunted, but I knew that if I squinted, I could still make out her ghost.
“Hello?” Jill prompted, but she sounded so far away.
I twisted to face the wall again, sinking down under my blankets as if going back to sleep. “Mom locked herself up,” I said quietly.
“Oh Lord.” I could almost hear Jill rolling her eyes. “What happened now?”
“I brought up Ben Emory.”
There was a beat of silence as Jill hesitated. “Why?”
“Because when I asked her where all of Persephone’s things were, she said she gave them to ‘that boy.’ I didn’t know what other boy it could have been, so I asked if she meant Ben. Then she freaked out, and she’s been in her room ever since. She didn’t even come out for dinner.”
The more I spoke, the wearier I felt. Instead of being refreshed from sleep, my body felt drained, weightless.
“It was crazy,” I went on. “It was just like . . .”
Mom’s Dark Days, I was going to say. But Jill didn’t know about those. Persephone and I had never told her how on the fifteenth of each month, Mom would begin the day normally—sometimes even giddily—and then, just a little while later, t
he atmosphere in the house would change, and Mom would slink off to her bedroom, where she’d lock herself away for the rest of the day.
Persephone would tighten her lips then, watching Mom disappear down the hall. She’d help me pack my schoolbag and walk me to the bus stop. And we lived like that, month after month, until Persephone died and then all of Mom’s days became dark.
“Just like what?” Jill asked.
“Just like after Persephone died,” I said. “I told you I’d be terrible at this, Jill. It hasn’t even been a full day yet, and I’ve already upset her so much that she’s right back where she was. I’m sorry, I just don’t—”
“All right, stop it.” The firmness in Jill’s voice made me flinch. “Do you think I expected you to walk right in, snap your fingers, and have everything be perfect?”
“No . . .”
“Do you think she never once locked herself away while I was taking care of her?”
“I don’t know . . .”
“Sylvie, this is your mother we’re talking about. She’s not drinking anymore, so she’s much more alert, yes, but she’s still Annie. And I love my sister, I swear I do, but that woman has been a mystery to me for a very long time. So buck up. She’s bound to backslide now and then. And just remember—when she gets like this: let the child pass out.”
“Let the what?”
“It’s something Grandma used to tell me, a million years ago, when I started babysitting. I was so nervous that they wouldn’t listen to me and they’d threaten to hold their breath or something until I—I don’t know—gave them cookies, or let them tie me to a chair and set the house on fire. So Grandma told me, ‘Let the child pass out,’ meaning—let them have their tantrum. Let them hold their breath all they want, because they’ll only pass out and then wake up again a few seconds later.”
I smiled a little. Jill always found a way to comfort me.
“Let the child pass out,” I repeated. “Okay, I’ll keep that in mind. But, Jill—do you know what boy she was talking about?”
Jill chuckled. “The boy she supposedly gave your sister’s things to? No. In fact, you got a much more specific answer than I ever did. All she told me was that she’d gotten rid of it all. Like I said, she’s a mystery to me.”
“Okay, but—”
A creak from across the hall—the sound of Mom’s door opening—forced me to stop. I jumped out of bed, like a soldier snapping to attention.
“She just came out,” I whispered. “I should go.”
With the phone still pressed to my ear, I cracked my door just wide enough to see Mom head into the living room, carrying a bowl with a spoon in it. She wore the same sweater and head wrap as the day before, but still, the smallness of her, the acuteness of her frame, was just as shocking as the first moment I’d seen her.
She’d had her tantrum, though—I’d let the child pass out—and now, at the sight of a cereal bowl in her hands, I felt a whisper of hope. She must have already come out that morning, or even late last night, and sick and skeletal as she looked, she had eaten something. This was a good sign.
“Okay,” Jill said in my ear, and I realized with a jolt that she was still on the line. “Listen—just keep me in the loop about how things are going, all right?”
“I will,” I said. “I’ll talk to you soon. Love you.”
Following Mom to the kitchen, I watched her place her bowl into the sink.
“Did you have some breakfast?” I asked.
Her only response was to turn the faucet on, watch the water as it collected in her bowl, and then turn it off. Walking closer to her, my bare feet winced against the cold kitchen tiles.
“Mom?”
The knuckles of her left hand were white from gripping the counter. As she stood there, staring into the sink, I thought I could smell something familiar rising off her skin—not a perfume, exactly, but a scent that was naturally, uniquely, hers. It reminded me of those nights she’d return home late from her shift at the restaurant and I’d already be in bed. She’d creep into our room so quietly I almost didn’t hear her, and then she’d kiss my forehead, run her long, cool fingers down the side of my face. “Good night, my sweet girl,” she’d say, and as I stood behind her now, my eyes closing as I breathed her in, I remembered how she would pull my blankets up toward my chin, tucking me in and making me safe.
“Mom,” I said again. “Are you okay? Can I get you anything?”
She swayed a little, like a thin tree in a breeze, and just as I was about to put my hands out to steady her, she turned around. Her face was so close to me then, so significantly changed from those childhood nights I remembered, that I almost stopped breathing again. Her eyes were two moons, gray and opaque.
“I’m fine,” she said abruptly, and then she moved to step around me.
As she walked back toward the cave of her bedroom, the ridge of her spine stabbed through her sweater. Soon she disappeared around the corner, and it was only a few moments before I heard her door close, heard the lock click from inside.
• • •
She didn’t speak to me again until the next day, when the nurse at Brighton Memorial’s cancer center hooked an IV into her arm. We hadn’t spoken in the car, where the only sounds between us were that of a morning radio show, and we hadn’t spoken when I checked her in at the hospital or when her blood was drawn and vitals were taken.
She’d replaced the head wrap she’d been wearing for the past two days with a shoulder-length blonde wig. She was wearing makeup, too—just some eyeliner and blush, maybe a hint of color on her lips, but it softened her features. She seemed less angular and washed out, and though the clothes she wore sagged against the edges of her body, she looked more like the woman I’d known before Persephone died. More like Mom.
Still, it was only when they led us into the chemotherapy room, sat Mom down in what looked like a dentist’s chair with a small TV attached to it, and threaded the needle into her vein that she finally said a word to me.
“That person you were talking to on the phone yesterday,” she said. “Was that your boyfriend?”
I snapped my eyes to the few other patients in the room, as if they would share my surprise at Mom’s bizarre question. No one even glanced my way, though, and the nurse making adjustments to Mom’s IV bag only smiled at me and offered a look that said, “Oh moms.”
“No,” I said. “It was Aunt Jill.”
Mom nodded. “I see,” she said, holding her arm out as the nurse strapped another piece of tape over the IV. “Have you spoken to your boyfriend yet?”
I opened my mouth to answer and then closed it again. Had Aunt Jill, for some inexplicable reason, told her I had a boyfriend? Or was she working off old information? Maybe she was thinking of Robbie Silano from a couple years back. Maybe Jill had mentioned that she met him one time when she came to visit me, and Mom just assumed we were still together.
“I don’t have a boyfriend,” I told her.
“Oh.” Mom folded her hands together in her lap. “Well, you better hurry up, then,” she said. “You’re almost thirty.”
The nurse—Kelly, she’d told me when she’d introduced herself—gave a quick, throaty chuckle, but I was too taken aback to respond myself. Almost thirty—even though I’d been thirty for four months. It shouldn’t have bothered me—I hadn’t received so much as a birthday card from her in years—but still, something heavy gathered in my chest.
“Oh, Annie, don’t give her such a hard time,” Kelly said, gently flicking Mom’s shoulder with her hand. “She has plenty of time to find someone.”
Kelly winked at me and I managed a smile.
“Easy for you to say,” Mom replied. “Your wedding’s in March, right?”
“March twentieth,” Kelly said, nodding. “Good memory! I haven’t even seen you since—when was it? November?”
“Good memory yourself.”
Kelly smiled, leaning forward to press some buttons on Mom’s TV screen. “Just don’t be exp
ecting an invitation to my wedding. I don’t want Owen to take one look at your pretty face and then leave me at the altar.”
“That’s probably wise,” Mom said. “I’ve been cultivating a new look lately that will be sure to drive men wild. I call it cancer chic.”
I stared at the two of them in disbelief. As they joked together, Mom seemed so normal. With just a couple of sentences and a wave of authentic laughter, it was as if she hadn’t spent most of the last sixteen years in self-imposed isolation, as if she hadn’t just lost track of her daughter’s age, and hadn’t shut herself in her room at the mention of Ben Emory two days before.
“So I’m sure you remember the drill,” Kelly said, “but since it’s been a little while, I’ll give you a quick refresher. This is your TV, and you can press these buttons on the side to change the channel. I’ll be in and out to check on you, but you can press this other button over here if you need me at any time. We’ve got bottled waters in the little fridge over there—you’re welcome to one as well, Sylvie—and there are some books and magazines on the bookshelves in the corner. Just have Sylvie get them for you if you want anything. Your job now is just to sit and relax.”
Mom leaned her head against the back of the chair and closed her eyes as if she were going to sleep. “Ahhh,” she said, “a regular day at the beach. Just bring me a piña colada and I’ll be all set.”
Kelly laughed, met my gaze, and pointed at Mom. “I love her,” she mouthed, and then she turned around and left us there, Mom stretched out in her modified dentist’s chair, hooked up to a bag and a machine, and me sitting down slowly, uncertainly, in the seat beside her.
As I glanced around the room, I realized that it looked nothing like I’d anticipated. I’d been picturing a small, dim space with a smell like a damp basement and a feeling of dread pushing down from the ceiling. This wasn’t like that, though. It was bright and modern and clean, smelling faintly of citrus, and there were vases of fresh flowers throughout the room.
The Winter Sister Page 8