The Winter Sister

by Megan Collins

  “Wow,” I said, “this is a pretty nice place, huh? For—a treatment center, I mean.”

  Mom shifted her eyes toward me. “Oh yeah. It’s a real five-star resort.”

  There was that acidic tone again.

  “Well,” I replied, “it just looks, and feels, a lot better here than I expected. It’s—actually—how are you able to afford this, Mom?”

  She shrugged. “I have health insurance. Jill nagged me to get it.”

  “So Jill’s paying for it?” This made sense. Jill had paid for everything else that had kept Mom alive and comfortable over the years—food, carbon monoxide detectors, a new furnace when the one that was original to the house broke down and Mom barked, “Leave it, Jill. I don’t mind the cold.”

  “No,” she said now. “I’m not her child, you know. I pay for it myself.”

  “But how?” I pressed. “I mean, growing up, we lived paycheck to paycheck, and now you’re just—”

  “It’s none of your goddamn business, okay?”

  Her eyes were cool as metal as she snapped them toward me. A couple of other patients turned their heads my way before quickly returning to their screens and magazines.

  “Okay,” I said, “I’m sorry.”

  But I couldn’t stop thinking about it. She’d done nothing in the last sixteen years but spend whatever money she’d had on alcohol. She shouldn’t have been able to afford the type of health insurance that would cover her treatment. I decided to let it go for the moment, though; it was clear I wasn’t going to get anywhere.

  “You look nice, Mom,” I said, changing tactics. “I like that wig on you.”

  She ran her hand over the unnaturally smooth hair on her head. “Jill picked it out,” she said.

  “It’s nice. Do you always wear it when you leave the house?”

  “Most of the time,” she said. “No need to go around looking like a bald eagle.” Her eyes were focused on her hands in her lap, her fingers rubbing at the knuckles that bulged beneath her skin. “I don’t want anyone I know to see me the way I am now.”

  It was an unusually vulnerable thing for her to say, and I tried to appreciate that, but there was a nagging, bitter part of me that reacted differently. You never cared how people saw you before, it whispered. You never cared that people at school always talked about how they’d seen “Annie O’Drunkie” walking to the liquor store in her nightgown, or how you showed up to my high school graduation with your hair a total mess and your stained clothes reeking. But, I tried to remind myself, that was back then. She wasn’t a drunk anymore; she was sober, and maybe sober, she’d regained her ability to feel exposed in the world.

  “Can I get you anything?” I asked. “A bottle of water?”

  Mom curled up her lip. “Ugh, no. Chemo makes water taste terrible. I could throw up just thinking about it.”

  “Okay,” I said, scanning the room for other things to offer her. “How about a magazine, then?”

  She shook her head. “I don’t care about celebrities.”

  “Do you want to watch your TV?”

  “I don’t care about celebrities,” she repeated. Then, cocking her head as if she’d just thought of something, she added, “But there was a book I was reading during my last chemo—whenever I could concentrate, anyway. Jill found it for me on the bookshelf over there.”

  She pointed to one of the pristine white shelves in the corner, and I stood up, eager to have a task to complete. “What book?” I asked.

  “Withering Heights,” she said.

  “Oh—you mean Wuthering Heights?”

  “That’s what I just said.”

  “Right,” I replied, smiling a little.

  I walked to the bookshelf and ran a finger along the titles. There was no rhyme or reason to the way the books had been shelved; Michael Crichton was next to a Spider-Man comic, and a volume of Walt Whitman poems was stuck between Dracula and a book with a bright pink spine. Unable to find Wuthering Heights, I moved on to the other bookshelf, which mostly held old issues of Time, National Geographic, and People.

  “I didn’t see it over there,” I said to Mom when I reached my seat again. “I’m sorry.”

  She looked at the other patients suspiciously, as if somebody were hiding the book from her. “But no one else in here is reading it,” she whined.

  “Do you want me to ask one of the nurses if they’ve seen it anywhere?” I asked, and I was surprised when she nodded her head vigorously.

  “Okay,” I said. “I’ll be right back.”

  As I walked out of the treatment room and tried to orient myself in the bright, spacious lobby where the elevator had dropped us off that morning, I felt instantly more at ease. This was good, having a job to do. I could get books, I could get blankets, I could even try to find liquids that didn’t taste as terrible as water. And, for all the stops and starts we’d been having, Mom and I had actually talked to each other for a few minutes. It hadn’t been the warmest conversation in the world, but it was still something, and it was infinitely better than her being—

  “Oof.”

  “Oh God, I’m so sorry.”

  I’d crashed right into a nurse, my forehead colliding with his chin.

  “That was totally my fault,” he said. “I wasn’t watching where I was going. Are you okay?”

  I kept my head down and my hand against my forehead, a wave of embarrassment flooding my cheeks.

  “I’m fine,” I said. “I wasn’t watching where I was going, either. I’m sorry.”

  “Here, let me just . . .” He raised his hands as if to touch my face and then lowered them. “Can I?” he asked.

  I nodded, then quickly winced as his cool fingers pressed against my forehead, targeting the exact point of pain.

  “Yeah, that’s gonna hurt for a bit,” he said. “But I think you’re gonna live.”

  “Oh, good.”

  I was about to apologize again, but suddenly, he jerked backward. That’s when I got my first clear look at him—short brown hair, dark eyes, midthirties. I saw the scar along his cheek, the way it swept across the side of his face like a large comma, and I remembered that face—I remembered it in windows, in nightmares.

  “Oh, shit,” he said.

  My skin went cold, my legs felt loose, and it was as if I were standing outside being blown about by the January wind. We stared at each other, and for the first time since it happened, we were face-to-face—the one who’d lost Persephone and the one who’d taken her away.

  9

  Persephone once told me that Ben’s eyes were like black holes.

  “In the most beautiful way possible,” she’d clarified. “They’re so dark and so deep, it’s easy to get lost in them.”

  Her voice had been soft when she told me this, and all I could do was focus on the umbrella I was painting on her forearm, my grip tightening on the brush.

  “And it’s not only that,” she continued. “His eyes are so dark they make everything else seem brighter. His skin. His hair. The air around you. And then, it’s like, among all that light, there’s just this pure, exquisite blackness. And it pulls you in.”

  She’d had her free hand latched onto her starfish pendant, sliding it back and forth across its chain as she waited for me to respond. But ever since she’d come home that night, climbing through the window and pushing up her sleeve, offering her bruised arm to me like a request, I’d been trying to tune her out. I’d had no desire to hear about Ben’s eyes or his love for his grandfather or the way he laughed when she surprised him. I’d known that whatever Persephone said had no bearing on the person Ben really was; she’d only wanted me to believe there was something about him that warranted her return to him each night. She’d only wanted me to keep concealing the secrets that blushed blue and insistent on her skin.

  As it turned out, though, she’d been right about Ben’s eyes. The longer we stared at each other there in the hospital, the more weightless I felt, my body seeming to pitch forward, floating towa
rd those two dark pools that kept pulling me in. Only it wasn’t beautiful or alluring, as Persephone had tried to claim; it was dangerous, terrifying.

  “You—you’re Persephone’s sister,” he said, and I felt as if I were hearing his voice from underwater.

  The walls were blotted out by darkness. The windows, too. I’d been wading into an ocean black as ink, and now I was drowning in it, unsure which way would lead me back to the surface.

  “Are you a patient here?” he asked.

  Here. Where was here? A woman named Kelly, a needle, Wuthering Heights. Then—Mom. Her wig and makeup. The bones of her fingers as easily broken as twigs.

  “No,” I said. “My mother.”

  The light was coming back into focus—slowly at first, and only around the edges. Then I heard voices, textures of conversation, people speaking to one another in some place other than darkness. There was a beeping sound, steady and measured, drifting toward me from one of the open rooms, and I forced myself to blink—once, twice, then again—my eyelids moving so rapidly they seemed to be forcing out tears.

  The blackness split into two separate circles, each becoming smaller and smaller until they were back in Ben’s eyes where they belonged. Finally, I could take in the rest of him again—the short hair, not long and ponytailed like it had been back then; the scar across his cheek; and the green scrubs with crisp sleeves.

  “You’re a—a nurse?” I asked, my voice rising. His fingers, which had touched my face just a minute before, were the same ones that had pushed into my sister’s flesh, bursting her blood vessels, bringing up thumbprints of stormy blue. They were the same ones that circled her neck the night she died, pressing against her throat, crushing the air inside her. Now, I felt a hand squeezing my own neck, but when I reached up to tear it away, there was nothing there.

  Ben nodded, but his eyes moved toward the windows to his right. He looked uncomfortable, guilty, as if he would claw through the glass just to have a way out. “Yeah,” he said. “I’m sorry about your mom. I had no idea she was a patient here—I’ve only been here since December. What kind of cancer is it?”

  “Esophageal,” I said, the word shooting out of my mouth like a cannonball, an attempt to convey how my mother’s sickness was entirely his fault. If you hadn’t taken Persephone from us, I tried to say with my narrowed eyes, then my mother would have never started to drink. If you hadn’t strangled my sister, my mother’s insides wouldn’t have curdled and turned against her. If you hadn’t given me something to keep secret, if I hadn’t locked the window that night . . .

  “Ben.” A voice cut through the monologue in my head, and I remembered that we weren’t alone; we were in a hospital—a hospital where he worked, where people trusted him to draw their blood, to put his fingers against the tender flesh of their wrists and count their pulse. I could feel my own blood simmering at the thought of it.

  A nurse stood with a manila folder tucked beneath her arm. She had an impatient expression on her face. “You’ve got Mr. Donaldson in Room 3,” she said.

  “Right,” Ben replied, and he slid his dark eyes carefully back to me. “I’m sorry, I’ve got to . . .” His voice trailed off as he gestured to a corner room. “It was . . . nice seeing you, Sylvie.”

  Nice seeing you? I clenched my fists as he turned around and headed for Room 3—the room adjacent to the one where Mom sat, accepting her treatment, accepting, for the first time in years, an opportunity at life.

  “Wait!” I called, nearly jogging to reach him in time. Ben turned around, his face almost pained, as if enduring a muscle spasm or migraine.

  What would Mom do if she saw him? Just the sound of his name a couple days before had sent her reeling. I could easily imagine, then, how her eyes would widen at the sight of him, her fingers fumbling to rip the IV from her arm, her mouth releasing a sound more animal than human as she fell to the floor.

  “Listen to me,” I hissed. “You need to stay away from my mother. You’ve done enough to our family as it is, and if I ever find out that you so much as enter a room she’s in, I will make it my mission to ruin your life as completely as you ruined ours. Do you understand me?”

  I could feel the adrenaline rising like waves. I’d never spoken to anyone like that before, but as angry and desperate as I felt, I still savored the slight look of shock on Ben’s face as he nodded.

  “Now,” I continued, “we’re going to be back on Wednesday, so you need to stay away from us if you’re here that day.”

  Ben cleared his throat, glancing over my shoulder. “I’m scheduled to work on Wednesday,” he said, “but I . . . I’ll make sure to stay out of your mom’s way.”

  “You better,” I said, and already I could feel the rock-solid strength in my voice crumbling. I had nothing else to say—no threats to make, no words that would come close to conveying what he’d done to us. All I had left was the ability to leave.

  My feet unsteady, I walked back to Mom’s treatment room and sat down in the chair beside her.

  “Where’s the book?” Mom asked.

  We both looked at my lap, where my empty hands rested.

  “They didn’t have it,” I said.

  Mom sighed but didn’t respond, and as the minutes went on, silence falling over us again like snow, I stayed rigid and alert, my eyes pointed toward the door.

  • • •

  They warned us about the anti-nausea medication. As we checked out, confirming Mom’s appointment on Wednesday, the woman behind the desk passed us a prescription.

  “Do you have any pills left over from your last cycle, Ms. O’Leary?” she asked.

  “No.”

  “Okay, well this is the same medication you were prescribed before. If you did have any pills left over, the doctor said you could just use those and then move on to the fresh bottle. But since you don’t, you’re good to go with this.”

  Mom watched me tuck the piece of paper into my wallet, hopefully not noticing the tremble in my hands, and then looked back at the woman defiantly.

  “I feel fine,” she said.

  “Oh, come on, Annie,” Kelly piped in. She was filing a folder in a long metal cabinet behind the receptionist. Hitting the drawer closed with her hip, she crossed her arms over the front of her scrubs. “Don’t be stubborn. You know how this works. There’s a reason you don’t have pills left over from last time.”

  Kelly turned her attention toward me and I tried my best to concentrate on what she was saying, even as my gaze kept bouncing around the room, searching every shadow and corner. “Your mom’s probably right about feeling fine,” she said. “A lot of patients actually feel great right after chemo because we’ve already administered an anti-nausea drug during the process. Don’t let this fool you, though. She should still take the medication she was just prescribed, because once she starts to actually feel the symptoms, it’s too late. She’d likely just throw up the pill if she took it, and then she’d be miserable.”

  She looked over at Mom, who was drumming her fingers in a slow, steady rhythm on the desk, staring off at a bland hospital-brand painting on the wall. “You remember all this from last time, right, Annie?” Kelly asked.

  “Hmm,” Mom said, her eyes still turned away from us. “Last time’s kind of fuzzy.”

  Kelly leaned over the desk to speak to me in a soft conspiratorial voice. “She seems tired,” she said, “which is also normal. Just let her rest while you go pick up the medication, and then give her a pill right when you get home. Sometimes it’s best for the caregiver to be in charge of administering drugs. Some patients just try to grin and bear it, but if you ask me, there’s no reason anyone should be in more discomfort than they have to be, right?”

  I nodded, trying to smile, but my lips felt tight and heavy. The skin on the back of my neck bristled each time someone walked behind us or exited a room.

  “If you have any questions,” Kelly said, “you can call us at any time. I promise you there’s no question too small. We’ve even had . .
.”

  I stopped hearing her. There he was, on the opposite end of the long reception area, walking beside a bald elderly man who was shuffling toward one of the treatment rooms. He had his hand on the man’s back, as if to steady him, and the old man laughed up at Ben. Then the two of them disappeared together into a room, the door closing behind them.

  My skin felt hot, as if the blood moving beneath it were made of lava. It was still impossible to comprehend—Ben Emory, the man who’d left a girl on the side of the road like a bag of trash, was a nurse now. He joked with patients, guiding them gently into rooms, and all the while, no one ever suspected what his hands could really do. Hadn’t the hospital done a background check? Hadn’t they seen that he was once a person of interest in a murder? The injustice of it made me shake, and I stared at the door he’d just closed, as if my gaze could burn a hole through it.

  Maybe that was why, when I took Mom home, got her settled in her recliner with a glass of ginger ale and a blanket (“I’m not an invalid,” she protested), I lied and said I’d be back in a few minutes. After picking up her prescription from the pharmacy, I drove past the turn that would have taken me home and headed instead for the Spring Hill police station, a place I hadn’t been since I was fourteen years old. I pulled into the parking lot and got out of my car, stepping over patches of ice to make my way toward the entrance.

  I’d believed, once, that justice was an infallible thing, that when I sat in an interview room and told the detectives about painting over Persephone’s bruises, they would show up at Ben’s door with an arrest warrant that very afternoon. But now, as I gripped the cold brass handles of the station’s double doors, my heart hammered against my ribs at what I knew: justice was as flawed as any human; it was easily dodged and fooled. Ben had escaped it once. And I would make sure that he did not escape it again.

  10

  “I need to speak to a detective,” I told the uniformed woman behind the glass window inside the station’s lobby, my voice booming with urgency.