She coughed for a second, and I stopped pacing, watching my toes dig into the rug. When she continued, my feet resumed their steady march between the beds.
“Anyway,” she said, “maybe a year or so later, he ended up getting married to some girl he’d met at school. Your mom was devastated. I think she thought they’d eventually get back together, once he graduated and came back to Spring Hill. Instead, he came home with a wife. She used to call me up back then and just cry into the phone about it.”
I tried to picture it—Mom crying over a boy. All my life, she’d been the one to leave men feeling jilted and disappointed. There was one who’d shown up at our door once, a couple days after they’d been on a date, and he’d had a look on his face like he wasn’t sure how he’d ended up there. “Send him away,” Mom had told us from the couch with a dismissive wave of her hand, and Persephone and I had had to stand in the doorway and explain that it was nothing personal—our mom just didn’t do second dates.
“Did she . . . lock herself up in her room?” I asked. Her closed door was the only way I knew how to measure my mother’s grief.
“I don’t know,” Jill said. “As I said, I wasn’t really around. But you know, to me, it was a good thing—Will getting married—because she finally stopped waiting around for him. She sent out some more applications, transferred to a four-year college, finally started—”
“Mom went to college?”
As far as I knew, she’d always been a waitress, drawing flowers on people’s checks, maintaining eye contact even with those who looked down on her for her faded green uniform, her sauce-splattered shoes.
“Well,” Jill said, “briefly. You know what I mean. Just that one semester before she got pregnant.”
I froze midstep, my legs locking into place. “Wait, what?” I asked. “Mom went to college . . . and met Persephone’s dad there?”
Jill was silent for a moment. “Well—yeah,” she said. “Annie never told you any of this?”
“She always said he was a one-night stand. She said both of our fathers were one-night stands.”
“She actually used those words?” Jill asked. “When you were a kid?”
“Yeah.”
“Oh, Annie,” Jill said, as if Mom were on the line with us and could hear the disappointment in her sister’s voice.
I remembered knowing that phrase—one-night stand—before I was even old enough to fully grasp its meaning. I remembered how literally I took it, imagining my parents in an open field beneath a sky dusted with stars, standing together until morning came and they went their separate ways. I couldn’t expect Aunt Jill to understand how, as a child, that phrase had been a comfort to me. How could she know that, for me, being with Mom had been like sitting in the sun on a cloudless spring morning? Never mind the Dark Days. Never mind the shifts she had at the diner, the dates she had with men whose names we never knew. When she was with me, she was all that I needed. I was warm and safe and loved, and a father—someone more than a one-night stand—would only distract her from me, only pull the sun from my sky.
“Well, sure, she had some of those over the years,” Jill said, as if unwilling to use the phrase that Mom had taught me without a second thought. “Your dad, for example. Definitely a quick fling. He wasn’t from town. He was in and out, and Annie didn’t seem to mind. But Persephone’s father—I don’t really know how long that lasted. Less than a semester, I guess. They met in her classical mythology course, which I only remember because that’s why she named Persephone the way she did.”
“That’s why she named her Persephone?”
I’d grown up knowing the myth, of course. Mom had told it to us one day when Persephone marched into the house, complaining how the kids at school were teasing her about her “stupid, weirdo” name. “It’s not weird,” Mom had said. “It’s ancient. Here, I’ll tell you the story.” But I didn’t know that she’d chosen the name as some kind of homage to Persephone’s father.
“Well, yeah,” Jill said. “Why? What did you think was the reason?”
“I never really thought about it.”
I’d always just accepted that the name was like Persephone herself—beautiful and uncommon.
“So wait—what happened with Persephone’s father, then?” I asked. “If Mom actually had a relationship with him, then why wasn’t he a part of Persephone’s life?”
How strange that, before now, I’d never even considered him—the man whose blood had been in Persephone’s veins. When I covered her bruises at night, I never once thought of him, never wondered if his skin, when wounded, blushed the same shade of blue.
“He didn’t know about her,” Jill said. “Annie never even told him she was pregnant. She just moved her stuff back into the house and went back to waitressing. Our parents begged her to tell him, but she was adamant. Actually, that’s why she decided on the name Persephone in particular. She said he wasn’t good enough to be her child’s father, so she was rescuing Persephone from a life in the Underworld.” She paused, as if hearing the words for the first time. “Gosh, she could be so dramatic.”
“So she never even gave him a chance?” I asked. “Why would she do that? Why wasn’t he ‘good enough’ in her eyes?”
Jill sighed, and I stepped outside of the rug’s perimeter, my feet more prepared for the coolness of the floor. “It’s simple,” she said. “He wasn’t good enough because he wasn’t Will.”
“But that’s stupid,” I protested. “You said yourself that, after Will got married, she got over him.” I walked by the closet, the dresser, the light switch, my hand skimming along the surface of things as I went.
“No,” Jill said. “I said she stopped waiting around for him. Stopped loving him, though? I don’t know. I’m pretty sure she only, uh . . . got with . . . Persephone’s father to try to get over Will.”
So was that it, then? Was that why Mom had only allowed herself those brief flings? Because her heart had long ago been given to Will Emory? Because all she could do after that was lend it out like a library book, something to be borrowed for a short period of time and then safely returned? That would mean, then, that she’d loved him so much longer than she should have. I hated to think of her like that, pining away for Ben’s father—of all people—wasting any chance she’d had on finding someone else to love. Now, it was too late. She was a different person—no longer the sun, as she’d once seemed, but a cloud, one that always held the threat of a storm, and I knew very well how much it hurt to love somebody like that.
“Sylvie?” Jill said.
“Yeah?”
“Where is this coming from? Why are you asking about all this ancient history?”
“Oh, um, I don’t know, I guess I just—ow.”
My hip bumped against the post of Persephone’s footboard. I hadn’t been paying attention to where I was going—I’d been speaking slowly, stalling as I scurried around my brain, wondering if I should tell Aunt Jill about running into Ben—and I’d jostled the bed out of place.
“Ow?” Jill said. “What happened?”
“Nothing,” I said. “I was . . .”
The end of the bed had only moved about an inch, but it was enough to reveal the edge of something—a box, it looked like, peeking out from underneath Persephone’s long blue quilt. I knelt to the ground and slid the rest of it out, pulling it onto the rug. As soon as it was free of the low frame of the bed, the two sides of the box’s unsealed top popped open.
“You were what?” Jill asked.
I saw Persephone’s green afghan before I registered anything else in the box. It was the one that had always been draped along the foot of her bed, the one she reached for in the middle of the night whenever she got too cold. I pulled it out and brought it to my nose, inhaling its scent, feeling its threads tickle my face in a way that felt profoundly familiar. It didn’t smell like her, but it made me feel closer to her, just the same.
“Uh, Jill?” I said. “Can I call you back later?”
“What? What’s going on?”
“Everything’s fine,” I said quickly. “Love you.”
I set the afghan aside and dropped the phone on top of it. When I reached into the shallow box again, I pulled out a necklace—some old chunky thing—and a bottle of lotion that looked thinned and yellowed with age.
“What the hell?” I whispered to the room, as if Persephone herself were watching and would answer me.
I closed the box’s flaps, looking for a sticker or label, something to explain why these three very disparate items had been packed away together and shoved under Persephone’s bed. Besides her blue quilt, these were the only things I’d seen of hers since I’d been home.
In the upper left-hand corner of the box’s top, Mom had written our address. I noticed that first because of how thick the letters looked, as if she’d traced over them with her pen several times, wanting to make sure that, if the package didn’t make it to its intended recipient, it would at least make it back to her. Then, in the middle of the right flap, there was another address, and when I read it, my breath caught in the back of my throat.
“Tom Dent,” it said, followed by a house number and street in Hanover.
17
Grabbing the empty box, I marched across the room and pulled the door open with so much force that it banged against my dresser.
“Jesus,” Mom barked at the noise, her voice guiding me to the living room.
Her chair was in a reclining position, and she held the copy of Wuthering Heights I’d given her the day before.
“Well,” Mom said, not bothering to lift her eyes from the page, “it’s about time you got up. Or is taking care of me in my time of need a vacation for you?”
“What the hell have you been doing?”
She actually jumped at the question.
“Jesus,” she said again, covering her ears. “I was only kidding, Sylvie. Sleep as late as you want.”
“I’m talking about this,” I said, and I held up the box, facing the side with Tommy’s name on it toward her. She squinted as she read it, then returned her eyes to the book.
“Oh,” she said. “I told you I gave him your sister’s things.”
“No.” I shook my head so hard that a bone in my neck cracked. “You said you gave them to ‘that neighbor boy.’ You were talking about him? Tommy Dent?”
“He goes by Tom now, Sylvie.”
I laughed, a quick indignant sputter, and I paced around the living room.
“Okay,” I said, “we’ll get to how you know that in a second. But first—why would you give him Persephone’s stuff? He didn’t even—he was—I don’t understand what would possess you to do that.”
“Would you calm down for half a second?” She pulled the lever on the recliner and the back of her chair shot forward. “It’s not the end of the world, all right? It was just part of a deal we had.”
I stopped moving, glanced down at Tommy’s name on the box, and then set my eyes on Mom. “A deal? What kind of deal?”
Straightening the scarf she wore around her head, Mom sighed. “He started coming over a couple years after your sister . . .” She let the sentence hang in the air, heavy as wet clothes drying on a line. I glared at her until she continued.
“He used to mow the lawn for me. Clean the house. And in exchange, I’d—”
“You’d give him her stuff?” My voice was so shrill I could imagine the neighbors’ dogs howling in response.
“Yes, well, they were friends. And I hadn’t known that. I’d always thought he was a bad seed, but it turns out he really cared for her. So he’d come over and we’d talk.”
“You’d talk?” As far as I knew, she’d always been too drunk to carry a conversation. Couldn’t even handle the words happy birthday each October. “Talk about what?”
Talk to the mother, Tommy had told the detectives. Now, the sentence drummed in my head as I waited for her answer.
“About her,” she said, as if it should have been obvious. “He wanted to know every memory I could think of. Didn’t matter how small. It was very sweet, actually.”
“Oh, I’m sure!” I scoffed. “But that doesn’t explain why you’d give him Persephone’s stuff.”
“I just told you,” she said. “I gave it to him in exchange for his time.”
“Why wouldn’t you just pay him?”
“He didn’t want money. He just wanted to be able to choose a few of your sister’s things each time. So I let him.” She shrugged. “Two birds, one stone. It—her stuff—I needed it gone.”
The hair on my arms rose. He had been in our house, our bedroom. He had fondled Persephone’s things. I could picture him pressing the nozzle of her cheap drugstore perfume, spraying it into the air as he closed his eyes, inhaling. And Mom had let him do this—over and over. But even as that realization gathered in my mind, there was something else Mom had been saying that made my chest feel tight.
“Say her name, Mom.”
I took a step closer to her, and she blinked up at me.
“What?” she asked.
“You keep saying ‘your sister’ or just referring to her as her, but she had a name and I need you to say it. I don’t think I’ve heard you say it once since she died.”
“That’s not—” She tried an unconvincing, paper-thin chuckle. “You’re being ridiculous.”
“I’m not,” I said. “Say her name.”
The name she’d chosen, just a young woman inspired by her classics course in college. The name she’d picked because she, like the goddess Demeter, had wanted to rescue her daughter from a life in the Underworld—which, apparently for Mom, was any life with a man who wasn’t Will.
She stared at me for what felt like minutes.
“Persephone,” she finally said, and it was barely more than a whisper.
I set the box on the coffee table and crossed my arms. “Good,” I said coolly. “Now—back to Tommy. I know you’re lying.”
“What? No, I’m not. I gave it all to him.”
I shook my head. “Not about that. About him mowing the lawn and cleaning the house. I know for a fact that Jill paid a landscaping service and cleaned the house herself. So what was the real deal? What did you get in exchange for your dead daughter’s possessions?”
She shrank into her chair, pulling her book toward her chest as if to defend herself.
“If you must know,” she said, her voice creaky and low, “he gave me pills.”
I hesitated. “Pills? What kind of pills?”
“Oh, I don’t know the fancy names,” she said, sounding annoyed. “They were painkillers mostly. The good stuff.”
Even though it probably shouldn’t have, this actually surprised me.
“You used pills?” I asked. “Did—did Jill know?”
Mom lowered her book onto her lap, her finger still pressed like a dried flower between its pages. “Not at first,” she said. “But later, after Tom stopped coming around, she . . . found me. Withdrawals were a bitch.”
The living room clock counted the seconds of my silence. “I can’t believe she never told me,” I said, more to myself than to Mom.
“I asked her not to.”
And we O’Leary women—we keep our promises to our sisters.
Something hot flickered in my chest. “This is so . . .” I started—but then I stopped. I didn’t know what this was. I could barely keep up with all the things I’d learned so far that day, let alone find the words to define them.
Talk to the mother. I heard it again, that absurd suggestion that Mom knew something about Persephone’s murder. Was this why he’d urged the detectives to talk to her? Because he’d been talking to her himself, dropping pills like coins into her palm each week? Did she say something to him once, the drugs just beginning to blunt her edges, that made him think she was worth investigating?
No. I shook the thought from my head. Mom said Tommy didn’t start coming around until a couple years after Persephone died. There was no reaso
n, then, for him to have thought of her when talking to the police.
“You know it was all bullshit, right?” I said. “Everything Tommy said? For one thing, he and Persephone weren’t friends. He barely even knew her. He just left all these creepy notes in her locker. He—”
“That’s not true,” Mom said. “They were good friends. He told me they used to hang out all the time after school. I just never knew about it because I was always working.”
“They never hung out,” I insisted. “That last year? When we were all in the same school? She came home with me on the bus and then she’d do her homework or watch TV until—”
Until Ben came to pick her up, I was going to say, but Mom, as if sensing the dark, choppy waves I was wading into, quickly cut me off.
“And why would Tom lie?” she asked. “Why would he want mementos of her if he hardly knew her?” Mom reached for a bookmark on the end table, slid it between the pages she’d been marking with her finger, and snapped the book shut. “That doesn’t make any sense. You’re just mad I gave those things to him and not you.”
“Damn right I’m mad,” I agreed. “I’m mad you gave him her stuff, and I’m mad you gave him her stuff for pills. God, did you really have no—” I stopped, another thought overlapping the others. “Also, even if they were friends, why would you give her stuff to him, and not to me?”
Mom shrugged and rested her head against the back of the chair. Closing her eyes, she said, “I didn’t think you wanted it. You were out of here the first chance you got, weren’t you? You never asked for any of it.”
“I didn’t think you’d just give it away!”
Her arms hung limply at her sides, her palms turned toward the ceiling. She was clearly exhausted. Still, I couldn’t stop myself from charging forward.
The Winter Sister Page 15