The Winter Sister

by Megan Collins

  “He was a suspect, Mom. In Persephone’s murder.”

  She opened one eye and looked at me before closing it again.

  “That’s insane,” she said. “I would have heard about that if it were true.”

  “When?” I demanded. “When you were locked in your bedroom? When you were passed out drunk? When you were on drugs?”

  “Sylvie,” Mom said, touching her forehead, “you’re being very loud. And I wasn’t on drugs. I was just taking painkillers.”

  “He raped a girl,” I told her, remembering the details I’d collected during my research the night before. “Twelve years ago. He was at a party and he found some girl passed out in one of the bedrooms, and he raped her.”

  Mom shook her head, her eyes still closed.

  “That doesn’t sound like Tom,” she said.

  “No? That doesn’t sound like your drug-dealing friend, Tom?” I couldn’t keep the condescension out of my voice. It dripped over every word, thick and sticky. “He spent the next eleven years in prison, so clearly he did it. He—”

  My pulse seemed to pause. Turning back to look at the box on the coffee table, I read the address again.

  “Wait,” I said. “This is a Hanover address. He’s only lived there since he got out of prison last year. But you said—you said you had your little deal with him a couple years after Persephone died, when he would have still lived down the street, right? So how did you know where to send this?”

  Mom opened her eyes, looked at her fingernails, and slid one beneath the other as if cleaning it of dirt. “He called me, all right?” she said. “He told me his new address. Not a big deal.”

  “When?” I asked. “When did he call you?”

  “I don’t know, sometime early last fall. I hadn’t heard from him in years.”

  “Eleven years, to be exact?” I pressed. “Because he was in prison?”

  She took a deep breath, rubbed the arms of the chair with her hands, and then gripped the edges. “I don’t know how long it had been,” she said, her voice pinched. “I wasn’t keeping track. All I know is he called me up and said he wanted to resume our deal. He told me it was going to be harder this time around to get my pills, so he wanted a gesture of good faith that I was ready to start things up again.”

  She put a finger in the air as if to stop me from speaking. “And before you get all high and mighty,” she said, “I wasn’t even sure that I wanted those pills again, but I figured it would be good to have some options. So . . .” She exhaled loudly. “I told him I’d send him a package. But as I’m sure you saw, there wasn’t much left. I’d already given him most of it.”

  I pushed my toes into the carpet, my fingers into my arms. “That didn’t strike you as strange?” I asked. “He’s supposedly this great, honest guy in your book, but he demands this—‘gesture of good faith,’ as you called it?”

  Mom waved away my question. “Oh, he was always a little strange,” she said. “Sweet. But strange.”

  “So why didn’t you send it to him?” I asked. “Why was the package just sitting under Persephone’s bed, with his address already on it?”

  “I was going to send it,” she said. “I had it ready to go, obviously. But then the doctor called and told me I had to come in, and then I got my CV, and—”

  “CV?”

  “Cancer verdict. Anyway, you know your aunt—she steamrolled over the whole situation. Moved right in, whether I wanted her to or not. Started watching my every move. So I hid it—I didn’t want her asking all her damn questions—” She flashed her eyes toward me and narrowed them. “And then I just forgot about it. Tom never called me again. So there—are you happy? I’ve told you everything. Now leave me alone so I can take a nap.”

  As I dug my fingernails deeper into my arms, my throat burned with betrayal. She had let Tommy into our house, ushered him into our living room, but me—me she’d closed her door on. No matter how long I’d waited in the hallway, begging her to open up, she’d kept herself locked away from me. Now, she settled farther into her chair and closed her eyes, sealing me from her sight the same way she’d always sealed me from her room, and I took a step forward, unwilling to be shut out anymore.

  “Why didn’t you ever tell me you dated Will Emory?”

  The change in her body was instantaneous. Her limbs stiffened for a moment, her eyes shooting open like a person shaken from a dream. Then her fingers dug into the arms of her chair, and her face became gnarled with agony.

  “What are you—” She looked at me as though I had punched her, as though my fist were still raised in the air, ready to strike again. “Why would you say that name?”

  I went rigid then. “What do you mean?”

  “That name! Why would you say it?”

  It was the same thing she’d cried on my first day back, when I’d asked if Ben Emory was the “neighbor boy” she’d given Persephone’s things to. The look she’d given me then had been similar, too—the same cornered-animal eyes, same quiver in her chin—and it occurred to me, only now, that the name she’d been objecting to that day hadn’t been Ben at all—but Emory.

  “I just want to know why you never mentioned that you dated him.”

  She stood up from her chair, her arms shaking with the effort of pushing herself up, and before I could leap forward to stop her or help her, she stumbled toward the hallway, reaching for the walls like someone without sight.

  “Mom,” I called after her, but she disappeared around the corner. “Mom, we’re not doing this again.”

  With a few quick steps, I caught up to her, just as her hand stretched toward her doorknob. Grabbing her arm gently, I had to swallow my surprise at how little there was to grasp; her arms felt thin as broom handles.

  “Come on,” I said, but she pulled and pulled and pulled, and I loosened my grip for fear that she’d hurt herself.

  “I don’t want to talk about it!” she cried, and she pushed her door open, threw herself into her dark, shrouded room, and shoved her body back against the door to close it again.

  “Mom—no.”

  I twisted the knob just in time, heard her groan as she held her place, and then felt the pressure lessen as she backed away. The door swung open easily, and as the light from the hallway gushed into her room, she crawled onto her bed, then clutched her legs to her chest like a child.

  “Mom,” I said. “What’s going on?”

  She rocked back and forth, her cheek pressed against her knee. “I don’t want to talk about him,” she said. “How do you—how did you even know?”

  I took a couple steps toward the bed. Reaching out slowly, I put my hand on her back, trying to be as tender as I could manage, but her spine arched away from my touch.

  “I asked you a question,” she snapped. “How the hell did you know?”

  For a few seconds, I watched the tears gather in her eyes. I was struck by how fragile and beautiful they looked, their delicate sheen seeming to turn her eyes to glass.

  “I ran into Ben,” I started. “Will’s son. Persephone’s . . . yeah. And he showed me an old picture of you and his dad. It was clear something went on between you guys, so I asked Jill about it and she confirmed that you used to date him.”

  Mom blinked up at me, tears spilling onto her cheeks. “You ran into Will’s—you ran into his son?”

  I nodded and then swallowed, hoping she wouldn’t ask me where I’d seen him, hoping that, if she did, I’d be able to offer a convincing lie. She didn’t need to know, I reminded myself. It would only make her chemo even more difficult each week. I didn’t know if she’d react the same to Ben being at the hospital as she had just now to the mere mention of Will’s name, but looking at the hollow of her collarbones, how scooped-out they seemed, I knew it was a risk I wasn’t willing to take.

  “Why didn’t you ever mention him?” I asked her softly.

  She leaned her forehead toward her knees, and when she spoke, her words fell into the space between them. “I don’t like
to talk about it,” she said. “It hurts just to . . . just to hear his name.”

  With slow, careful movements, I sat down in front of her on the bed. “What happened between you guys?” I asked.

  She shrugged, shaking her head. “We were in love,” she said. “We were in love, and . . .” She sniffled, wiping her nose. “He broke my heart. What more do you need to know?”

  Everything, I wanted to say—Tell me everything about loving a man so hard that, even decades later, it brings you to tears—but instead, I moved a little closer and kept my voice gentle.

  “How did he break your heart?” I asked. “What did he do?”

  She lifted her head and met my eyes, her gaze so intense that I felt it on my skin. From all the way down the hall, I could hear the clock ticking, counting time as if it were endless.

  “Stop sniffing into my life,” she finally hissed. “There’s nothing there. Nothing.”

  Pushing back with her hands and feet, she moved toward the headboard. She crossed her arms over her chest and turned her head to look at the windows. I looked, too, for just a second, as if there was anything to see there but curtained darkness.

  “I’m not sniffing,” I objected. “I just want to—God, Mom, I just want to feel like I actually know you. I don’t think that’s too much to ask. So, come on, what happened? Jill said he married another woman.”

  The air blew out of Mom’s lips in a quick scoff. “He only married her because he got her pregnant,” she said. “It should have been me. He loved me.”

  “Okay,” I said, “but you guys were broken up. Right? I mean, he was at college, and he met someone else, and—”

  “We weren’t together,” she spit out. “But we still belonged to each other.”

  I paused. My mother—the woman who left men with their mouths watering at our front door, who said second dates were for people who lacked independence—was talking about Will as if they had a lifelong commitment.

  “I’m sure that was . . . hard for you, then,” I said, my words like feet tiptoeing across a cold floor. “You thought you’d be together forever, but he chose someone else.”

  “Oh, please,” she said. “He didn’t choose her. That was all Richard, I’m sure of it.”

  “Richard?”

  “His father,” she reminded me, and I remembered his name on lawn signs, back when I was a kid and he was running for reelection to Congress.

  “He chose her for his son,” she continued, “because she was of perfect breeding with perfect hair and perfect behavior. Just like a show dog.”

  She gave a quick, bitter chuckle before continuing. “It wouldn’t do,” she went on, “for him to be with me. Diner waitress. Student at the community college. How embarrassing for the family. How embarrassing to the legacy of Emory Builders, if the boy being groomed to take over ended up with someone like me. No, no. Richard wouldn’t have that. So he found Susie Perfect, planted her at his son’s school—probably paid her damn tuition—and welcomed her into the clan with open arms. A baby? Oh, how wonderful! A daughter-in-law who irons her underwear? What man would settle for anything less!”

  Something thick and constricting coiled around my stomach. The more she finally spoke about it all, the more she sounded—paranoid. Delusional, even.

  “But, Mom,” I said. “That doesn’t really make sense, right? I mean, it couldn’t have all been his dad, because, well, he still got her pregnant, didn’t he? He still chose to marry her after that. Don’t you think that if he really wanted to be with you, he could have figured something out? He could have been a father to Ben and . . . I don’t know—eventually married you, I guess?”

  Her eyes widened, and in the span of a few seconds, moved through a spectrum of emotions—first disbelief, then surprise, then anger—before finally brimming with a simple, broken sadness.

  “Like I said,” she whispered, “he broke my heart.”

  She stared past me, her eyes landing somewhere on the wall, and I wondered what scenes from her life with Will were playing out in front of her there. Inching closer to her again and taking a deep breath, I prepared myself for my final question—the sole reason her past with Will Emory mattered to me at all.

  “So is this why you didn’t want Persephone to be with Ben? Not because of your dating rule, but because—because of who Ben’s father was? And how he’d hurt you?”

  Her eyes flicked away from the wall, and when they found mine, the ache inside them was as visible as the leaden gray of her irises.

  “Yes,” she said.

  Yes. The air became heavy, making it difficult to reel in my breath. Yes, Ben had been right—again. Yes, Mom could have just told us about Will from the start. Yes—what I said to Persephone when she asked me to paint her bruises. Yes when it was her wrist, yes when it was her arm, yes when it was her rib.

  “Do you realize,” I said shakily, “what you did by not telling us? You turned them into fucking Romeo and Juliet, Mom, when maybe, if you’d just told her that you’d dated Ben’s father and he’d hurt you and you didn’t want the same thing to happen to her, then maybe—”

  “Stop.”

  “—things would have been different. Maybe she would have told Ben that things were—I don’t know—too complicated for them to be together. Or maybe you guys would have talked about it like normal human beings and you’d realize that she was allowed to learn her own lessons, make her own—”

  “I told you to stop it!” she cried, and the look in her eyes was no longer one of remembered misery. Instead, there was a knifelike sharpness to her stare that made me swallow the rest of my words.

  “You have no idea,” she said, “what it would have taken for me to talk about it. What it still takes, now. So don’t tell me what I should have done, or how things would have been different if I’d just been honest, because . . . well . . . you should know, huh?”

  She glared at me but didn’t continue.

  “What are you talking about?” I asked, and seeing the piercing accusation in her eyes, I felt my throat tighten.

  “You weren’t so honest, either.”

  Come on, Sylvie, it’s just one tonight. Yes when it was her hip. Yes when it was her shoulder. Yes when I was tired and cold and wanted nothing more than to stay wrapped in the cocoon of my bed. Don’t ever tell Mom, okay? You have to promise me, Sylvie—and I kept my promises to my sister, every one until that final night. Now, my breath started coming in shallow little gasps.

  “Isn’t that right, Sylvie?” Mom pressed.

  You have to leave the window cracked, just a little. You’ll be the best sister ever if you do it. But Mom didn’t know how I’d broken that particular promise—she couldn’t. She must have only meant how Persephone snuck out to see Ben, how I kept that from her until it was too late. Because nobody knew how I held the latch in my fingers on that final night, then clicked it into place. No one had seen me jump into bed when I saw Persephone coming; no one knew how long she tapped at the glass, certain, at first, that I’d just made a mistake. Now, my eyes were so blurred that I could barely see Mom in front of me anymore.

  I’m your only sister, Sylvie. I could still hear her say it. You have to do this for me, and you can’t ever tell. The tears fell hot and fast down my cheeks as Mom watched me, knowing how I’d betrayed her. Yes when it was her arm. Yes when it was her leg. Yes when I still thought we had a thousand more nights, and in one of them, I’d finally say no.

  As the first sob wrenched its way out of my body, I pitched forward, dropping my head into my hands.

  “You’re right,” I said, gulping for air between words. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I don’t know why I—I didn’t know she’d . . .”

  My chest heaved and sank as I collapsed under the weight of such old, lingering grief. I fell against Mom, my head landing in her lap, but I couldn’t move, couldn’t adjust my position; I could only curl into myself like I’d once curled up in her womb.

  “I’m sorry,” I whispered, tasting the t
ears on my lips. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”

  “Shhh,” Mom said, and I felt her hand, light as a petal, on the top of my head. She ran her fingers through my hair, slowly and gently, and then placed them on my forehead and started all over, stroke after stroke after stroke.

  “It’s okay,” she said as I cried against her stomach. “We all played our part, Sylvie. We all played our part.”

  18

  Somehow, living in Providence, I’d found myself in a place of ease. Strange, now, to think of it, now that I was so far from that world, sucked instead back into the one I’d thought I’d peeled off of me like a sunburn. It had only been a few weeks since my last shift at Steve’s, but already, I could barely remember how to load the ink into the gun. I could remember wiping beads of blood from flesh, but when I pictured those moments, wearing those blue latex gloves, it was someone else’s hand I saw.

  I texted with Lauren on Sunday, trying to get back to that place. Mom and I were barely speaking. After spitting and sobbing more words to each other on Thursday than we had in sixteen years, we’d spent most of the next few days in the living room—together, watching TV, but silent. Now, while Mom flipped through channels, I huddled up with my phone on the couch, texting Lauren about Wolf Bro, the nickname we’d given to one of her clients. He was a guy in his midthirties who always boasted about the women he’d “beasted” over the weekend, and he’d been scheduled to come back that week for session three of his wolf tattoo.

  “Ugh,” Lauren wrote. “Wolf Bro now wants a full moon done over his entire right pec, because—exact quote—‘a true wolf needs something to howl at.’ ”

  “Genius,” I replied.

  “I know, right? Because how else will the chicks at the gym know what an animal he is in the sheets?”

  “Haha.”

  “I swear, it took everything I had not to scream at him that no self-respecting woman would ever fuck a guy with a wolf tattoo.”

  “Haha,” I typed again, but I didn’t even smile.

  I tried to be engaged in the conversation. I tried to picture us in our apartment, handing a bag of Doritos back and forth as we laughed about Wolf Bro. I even saw us swiping orange crumbs onto the floor and joking that Claude, our fictional French housekeeper, would vacuum them up later. But every time I went to type a response to Lauren, to embed myself deeper into the comfort of that fantasy, I found myself nearly writing what was really on my mind instead, all the unanswered questions I’d collected over the last week: What had Tommy Dent wanted with Persephone’s things, and what had happened to them after all this time?