He cocked his head to the side. “Are you sure about that?”
“Yes,” I said, but even as I sat there, my arms crossed, there was a part of me that wondered. All those years ago, when Mom came home to find Ben with Persephone, she kicked him out and began yelling. I’d always attributed that to Mom’s anger that her dating rule had been broken, but thinking of it now, it was as if she’d known for a fact that Ben would only hurt Persephone, as if she could see right through to the very core of him—and maybe what she saw was Will. A man who—what? Had driven her crazy? Had left her beaten and bruised as her daughter would be?
It was so difficult to fathom, even with the evidence gaping up at me. The only time I’d ever seen them interact was at Persephone’s wake. Beyond that, she’d never mentioned him. Then again, she’d never talked about any of the men she’d been with, not even the ones she went out with sporadically when Persephone and I were kids. On those occasions, she’d have Aunt Jill come over to watch us, be gone for several hours, and then return to tuck us in, the smell of garlic overpowering her flowery perfume. If I asked her anything about how the date had gone, she’d just smile, skim her fingers over my face, and kiss me on the forehead. She had a history of silence, I realized, even before Persephone had died. She’d had so many secrets stored inside her, it was a wonder I’d ever felt close to her at all.
“And the other thing,” Ben said, “is that . . .” He was speaking more slowly, and he was shifting around, the plastic chair creaking each time he moved. “Well, it has to do with the night Persephone died.”
My eyes widened before I had a chance to stop them. “Yeah?” I prompted.
“Well, we had this fight. It—she’d—okay. Let me start over.” He took a deep breath, rolling his shoulders back and forth as if preparing for a workout. “I dropped her off like I always did, but something was wrong. She couldn’t get back into her room.”
He paused to look at me, his black-hole eyes lingering on my face just long enough to suggest he knew what I’d done. I stared back at him, biting down on the inside of my cheek.
“So she came back to the car,” he said. “And she got in, explained what had happened, and told me to drive. So I did, and . . . I told her that I thought we should try to talk to her mom. I said if we were just upfront with her about our relationship and told her how much we meant to each other, then everything would be out in the open, and she wouldn’t have to keep sneaking in and out.”
He shook his head, closing his eyes for a second. “But she didn’t want to do that. She was like, ‘It’s a waste of time, my mom’s horrible, she’ll never listen.’ So I asked her why she wasn’t willing to fight for us, and things—escalated from there. I should have known they would. She was already pissed when she got in the car.” He slid the photograph in circles on the table, his eyes avoiding mine. “Eventually, she demanded I let her out. It was snowing, though, and she was a mile from her house. I told her no, and I was going to start heading back to her street, but then she just—went wild. She was kicking the dashboard, unbuckling her seat belt, yelling at me to stop the car. I’d—I’d never seen her like that, so I did what she said. I let her out.”
His Adam’s apple bobbed up and down inside his neck as he swallowed. He scratched his shoulder, looked out the window, squinting at the sun as it emerged from behind a cloud, and then, for the briefest of moments, his eyes flicked back toward me. “And then I was pissed off, I guess,” he said. “So I drove away.” He stared at the table, his voice worn down to a whisper. “I fucking drove away.”
I didn’t know how long the tears had been in my eyes, but when he finished speaking, I felt them spill over my lashes and onto my cheeks. The girl he was describing was, without a doubt, Persephone—my Persephone—who could swoon over a white rose, but could just as easily scream at our mother and pummel pillows in our room. I could picture her raging against the inside of Ben’s car, slamming her fists against the window until he did what she demanded. She was like that, always needing to get her way. But where was that rage, that fight, whenever he hurt her? Why had she returned to him at all?
I swiped a hand across my cheek, wiping the tears onto my jeans. “Why are you telling me this?” I asked.
He flipped the photo back over so that the side with Mom and Will was facing up. He tapped her face three times. “Ever since I found this picture,” he said, “I just keep thinking how—if your mom had just come out with it, if she’d just been honest with Persephone about why she didn’t want her to see me, then maybe we could have talked through it. I could have told her that I wasn’t like my dad, and then—we wouldn’t have been fighting that night, and then—”
“So you’re saying this is all my mom’s fault?”
Just like that, my eyes were dry and my chest flared hot with anger. I dug my fingernails into my palms.
“No,” Ben said, shaking his head. “I’m just looking for some way to feel—less guilty, I guess. I think of Persephone every single day, you know.”
“Good! You should! You should never stop thinking about how you hurt her. You should be so filled with guilt that it’s impossible to get out of bed every day.”
I thought of Saturday mornings when I lived at Aunt Jill’s house, where I burrowed beneath the blankets, curled like a baby in a womb. I thought of mornings at RISD, where I’d make last-minute decisions to skip class, choosing instead to sleep until dinner. Even living with Lauren, there were days when she had to bang on my bedroom door to get me up for work. On those days, I wouldn’t even be asleep; I’d just be staring at the ceiling, holding the sheets to my chin, my heart beating so fast I thought she’d be able to hear it from the hallway.
Ben narrowed his eyes. “You still think I did it?” he asked. “Even after I just explained what happened?”
It was true I’d been drawn in by his story, seduced by the ways I recognized my sister in it, by the way his voice chipped like old paint as he told it. But this was Ben—the same guy who somehow convinced the police not to press any charges. It was strange how surprised he seemed that I didn’t believe him, but then again, he was used to getting away with what he’d done.
“I believe you about the fight,” I said. “But I know you didn’t just drop her off on the side of the street. Come on. It escalated, just like you said, and then . . .”
Even now, I couldn’t just say, You strangled her. I still had such a hard time grappling with that image—Persephone’s eyes going frantic, her hands clawing at the fingers on her neck. I couldn’t see the moment when she went limp as a rag doll in the car; I could only see her body thrown onto the snow, her throat already purpling.
“I have to go,” I told him, pushing back my chair. “I need to get back to my mom.”
As I stood up, Ben shook his head. “And so, what?” he said. “The fact that she was being stalked means nothing to you? You blame me, her boyfriend, over—fucking Tommy Dent?”
My hand froze over the strap of my purse. “What?”
I hadn’t heard the name Tommy Dent in a long time. He was a boy who’d lived a few houses down from us, and I knew very little about him, just that he was two years ahead of me in school and he was always getting into trouble for something—shoplifting, smoking weed in the woods, lighting rats on fire. Mom always told us to keep away from him, but she’d done so in a dismissive way—“Tommy Dent is a bad seed; steer clear of him”—which was nothing at all like the intense, fiery way she’d yelled at Persephone when she saw her with Ben.
“Sorry,” Ben said, “I didn’t mean to sound so—aggressive or whatever. I just don’t understand it. I mean, they questioned Tommy, too, you know. And he’s the one who was always stalking Persephone, so I just, I don’t understand why you’re so convinced it was me. I loved her, Sylvie.”
His eyes were wide as he stared up at me. I blinked, my lips parting, but for some reason, I couldn’t form the words I needed to say. Picking up my purse, I backed away, bumping into the chair as I did. “I
have to go,” I reminded him.
“But—” He stood up, too, and I hated how I had to look up to meet his gaze. “You knew he was stalking her, right? That he was always watching her, always leaving her all these crazy little notes?”
“I have to go,” I repeated.
As I walked toward the exit, my legs felt weak and wobbly. Because I hadn’t known; she’d never told me. Persephone, who’d pointed out her bruises, who’d shown off the rose that had to be kept a secret from Mom, who’d made me agree to a pact as her one and only sister—Just keep the window open. Just a crack, okay?—had never told me that someone else was a threat to her, that someone else meant to do her harm.
13
That afternoon, I tried to remember everything I could about Tommy Dent.
I pictured his messy blonde hair, and I remembered how he’d sometimes toss rocks at cars as they drove down our street. There’d been a rumor that his mother chased him around their house with a baseball bat whenever he got in trouble, and his father had supposedly overdosed on heroin when Tommy was a baby. But beyond that, I didn’t know much, and the only clear memory I had of Tommy wasn’t even really about him.
“I just saw Tommy Dent hacking at the Townsends’ flowers with an axe,” Mom had said to us, unloading groceries in the kitchen. “He’s a bad kid. I better never see you girls hanging out with him.”
I was twelve years old at the time, still in middle school. Tommy went to Spring Hill High, and we’d never really interacted with each other, not even to wait at the bus stop, since the high school started thirty minutes before the middle school did. Everything I’d ever heard about him seemed to corroborate Mom’s statement, though, so I just nodded in agreement, certain that she knew what was best for us. But Persephone, who rode the bus with Tommy every day, rolled her eyes and stomped off to our room.
“What’s the matter?” I asked, following her in before she had a chance to slam the door, as she so often did in those days.
“Mom, obviously,” she said. “Mom’s the matter.” She pulled a scrunchie out of her hair, her eyes set fiercely on the mirror above her dresser, and reset her ponytail, smoothing back each blonde strand until they were all firmly pushed into place.
“What do you mean?” I asked. “Are you friends with Tommy Dent or something?”
“What?” Persephone looked at me in the mirror, her eyes sharp and narrowed. “Of course not. Tommy Dent is weird.”
“Then I don’t get it.”
Spinning around to face me, she sighed. “No, I don’t think you would,” she said. Then she sat down on her bed, leaning her back against the headboard and crossing her arms over her knees. “It’s just how Mom is, and I’m sick of it. She’s always making these proclamations, like ‘Oh, Tommy Dent is a bad person,’ or ‘Your teenage years are for friendship, not love,’ or, today at the store, when I picked up a box of hair dye, just because I’ve been considering adding some highlights, she was like ‘Hair dye is for people with low self-esteem, Persephone.’ She acts like she knows everything about everything, and that what she says is the ultimate truth. And if you even try to convince her that something might not be exactly the way she thinks it is, then watch out. Because then you’re just being disrespectful and hurtful and the worst daughter on earth.”
I sat down at the foot of her bed and picked at some lint on my T-shirt. Without looking at her, I said, “I don’t really think she’s like that.”
“Of course you don’t,” Persephone scoffed. “Because you’re her perfect child who gets perfect grades and still snuggles in bed with her like a five-year-old.”
I could feel myself blushing. I knew I was too old to be climbing into my mother’s bed, pressing my back against her body so she’d wrap her arm around me, but it was a childhood comfort I hadn’t been willing to let go of yet. I loved the faint floral scent of her sheets, the way she hummed sometimes instead of snored, and I loved how her thick curtains kept out the moonlight, making the darkness rich and enveloping. Still, I hated when Persephone thought of me as a child. At sixteen, she was wearing makeup and buying her own bras and taking driver’s ed, and I sometimes felt as if the older she got, the more the years between us widened.
“Sorry,” Persephone said, stretching her leg out to nudge me with her foot. “I didn’t mean that. It’s just—I swear, Sylvie. Sometimes it’s like you and I have two different mothers.”
I never knew what she meant by that. I knew that Persephone fought with Mom in ways that I never did; I knew that Persephone believed that Mom loved me more—but that was just misplaced jealousy, remnants of whatever she’d felt when Mom first told her that she was going to have a sister.
“But anyway,” Persephone said, “it’s not fair for Mom to go around saying who we can and can’t hang out with. I’m not running down the street to be Tommy’s friend or anything, but if I were friends with him, she’d just have to deal with it. I mean, she doesn’t even know him. Like, yeah, he does stupid things, but one, he doesn’t have a dad, and two, everyone’s heard the stories about Mrs. Dent chasing him with a bat. But Mom doesn’t care. To her, he’s just a bad kid, and that’s it. End of story.”
End of the memory, too. That day in our bedroom was the only time I could recall Persephone even mentioning Tommy. Detective Parker had said there’d been other suspects, but could our neighbor, who’d barely factored into our lives, really have been one of them? If he’d been sending her threatening notes or following her around at school, wouldn’t I have known about it? If she could talk to me about Ben, the guy who was abusing her, why would she never once tell me about a boy who was supposedly stalking her? It was highly possible that Ben had lied about Tommy, that he’d just been trying to shift the focus away from himself. But there was an itch—a pulsing, persistent itch right beneath my skin—that made me keep trying to remember.
“That neighbor boy.” Mom’s phrase snapped into my brain like a puzzle piece clicking into place. She’d said it so casually, as if I wouldn’t question why she’d given Persephone’s things to “that neighbor boy, her friend from down the street.” My stomach soured at the thought that she might have been talking about Tommy. But Tommy and Persephone weren’t friends and Mom had never liked him. Sure, she’d done a lot of out-of-character things since Persephone died, but I couldn’t imagine that giving away her daughter’s possessions to a virtual stranger could be one of them.
Then, of course, there was the other thing gnawing at me—Mom and Will Emory. I hadn’t asked about the photograph on the way home from the hospital. I couldn’t figure out how to bring it up without revealing that I’d been talking to Ben—and anyway, Mom had seemed reluctant to speak to me in the first place. She’d had her arms crossed over her seat belt and her chin kept drooping toward her collarbone. When I asked her if she was feeling okay, she only nodded softly before mumbling, “I’m just tired, all right? Keep driving.” Her voice sounded muted and far away, and her words seemed brittle as dried leaves. Watching out of the corner of my eye as she leaned her head against the window, I decided that I would just ask Aunt Jill about Will. After all, she was Mom’s sister, and sisters were supposed to know everything.
Now, with Mom in the living room napping in her recliner, I sat down on my bed and picked up my phone, where there was a new text from Lauren on the screen.
“Work is stupid without you,” she’d written. “Someone asked for the Chinese symbol for clarity and I had no one to roll my eyes with. Home is stupid too. Watching Friends dubbed in German isn’t as funny when you’re not there.”
My eyes lingered on her message. On a normal Wednesday, Lauren and I would be leaving work in a few hours and then we’d park ourselves on the couch for some TV and takeout. I ached a little, remembering it—the comfort of it all, the simplicity of that routine.
“I miss you too,” I wrote. Then I pulled up Jill’s number and pressed the button to connect the call.
After the fourth ring, I heard the click of her voicemail.
I waited for the familiar and clipped “Hi, it’s Jill, leave me a message,” but her outgoing message was one I’d never heard before.
“Hi there—Jill here! Sorry I can’t answer the phone right now, but I’m busy waiting to become a grandmother! That’s right—it could be any day now, so I’m either out shopping for the baby or helping Missy prep for the baby or—God, if I’m lucky—holding the baby! You can leave me a message, but I don’t know how good the reception is on cloud nine!”
There was a quick girlish laugh just before the beep, and I immediately hung up. The energy in her voice was dizzying. It felt like, wherever she was, folding tiny clothes into drawers in a nursery or driving Missy to a doctor in Boston, the sky was a soothing unbroken blue, completely empty of the plump gray clouds that hovered over the houses on our street. I hadn’t heard her voice sound that way—so chipper and buoyant—in a long time, and hearing it bounce so easily against my ear, I knew that my questions about Will and Mom would have to wait. She was only one state away, but even still, she was in a whole different world, one of cheerful excitement and trips to the doctor that ended in smiles instead of dread. After taking care of Mom for months—for years, really—Aunt Jill deserved that joy. She deserved to remain in her blissful, hopeful present—not to be dragged back into her exhausting sister’s past.
I reached for my purse and dug around for the piece of paper that Detective Parker had given me on Monday. He’d told me that I should contact Detective Falley if I was unsatisfied by his answers to my questions, and now, with Aunt Jill a temporary dead end, I realized that unsatisfied was the perfect word to describe how I’d been feeling—not just that afternoon, but for days. Ever since I’d come back to Spring Hill, it seemed that our past—Persephone’s, Mom’s, and mine—had been circling around me while remaining tauntingly out of reach, and after my conversation with Ben in the hospital, I could feel it slipping even further away. I got up and paced around the room, the slip of paper with Falley’s number gripped between my fingers, and decided that if I wasn’t going to find out about Will that afternoon, then I at least needed to know about Tommy.
The Winter Sister Page 12