The Winter Sister

by Megan Collins

  And why had he told the police to talk to the mo—

  “So how’s it going with your mom?” Lauren texted, and I was grateful to be yanked away from the skipping record of those questions. “Is it weird between you guys?”

  “Yeah,” I responded quickly. “It’s really weird.”

  “Is she acting like you’re her personal bartender instead of her nurse?”

  “No, she’s actually sober. Apparently it hurts when she drinks now, because . . . cancer.”

  “Oh, that makes sense,” Lauren replied. “So then have you guys talked about it? How she drank herself into oblivion for half your life?”

  “There’s nothing to talk about really,” I said. “I already know why she did it.”

  “So?? That doesn’t make it right! Yes, she lost a daughter, and that’s really tragic, but so many parents have lost children, and they don’t just shut down forever. They mourn, of course, but they eventually move on. It was so selfish that she didn’t find a way to do that—for YOUR sake at least!”

  Even through text, Lauren’s tone was sharp and unforgiving, same as it always was when she talked about Mom. I knew she spoke that way out of fierce loyalty to me, but as I read her message again, I couldn’t help but feel that it was a little unfair. And that wasn’t Lauren’s fault. It was mine.

  “It was hard for her to move on,” I wrote. “She never got any closure.”

  “Don’t make excuses for her,” Lauren replied. “No one ever gets closure when they lose someone they love.”

  “Yeah . . . but it was the way she lost her . . .”

  I felt my heart thumping then. It was picking up speed as I snuck closer to the truth—truth I’d hidden since the beginning of our friendship, truth I’d painted over as if it were a bruise.

  “I’m not saying it wasn’t awful,” Lauren said. “A car accident is so unexpected. But it doesn’t give her a free pass out of living.”

  “It wasn’t a car accident.”

  I’d typed it so quickly that I barely realized what I was doing. But now I had said it. I’d scratched off the paint of that lie. I could almost see it under my fingernails as I gripped the phone in my hand.

  Taking a deep breath, I typed out the rest. “She was murdered. And they never solved the case.”

  The second I pressed Send, I felt dizzy, and I leaned my head against the back of the couch to steady myself. When I looked at my phone a few moments later, the space where Lauren’s response would be was empty. There wasn’t even a typing icon, and I stared at the screen until one finally appeared.

  “What??” she wrote after a minute.

  “I’m so sorry I lied to you,” I rushed forward. “I just couldn’t bring myself to talk about it before. The lie was so much easier. I know that sounds stupid, but . . . ugh. I’m so sorry.”

  “Murdered how?” she replied, much faster this time.

  “Strangled.”

  The temperature in the room seemed to drop by twenty degrees. I imagined I could look up at the ceiling and see snow beginning to fall.

  “Holy shit,” Lauren said.

  “Yeah . . .”

  “And they don’t know who did it?”

  I brought my fingers to my lips and breathed against them, trying to warm myself. But soon, I shivered anyway, and my hands began to shake.

  “Nope,” I responded.

  “Wow,” Lauren said. “This is . . . I don’t even know. That’s a really huge thing to never tell me.”

  I didn’t respond. Instead, I kept my eyes on the phone, where the typing icon flashed and disappeared, flashed and disappeared, over and over again. I slouched down on the couch, huddling deeper into myself as I waited for her to hit Send, and I tucked my icy hands into the sleeves of my sweatshirt.

  “But I GUESS I can understand why you never talked about it,” Lauren finally wrote, and I released a breath I hadn’t realized I’d been holding. “That’s some heavy shit for a toddler to go through.”

  For a moment, I blinked at her text in confusion. Then I recalled the rest of the lie I’d told her, the paint that still remained. And right away, I knew I could fix that. I could tell her I’d been fourteen years old when I lost Persephone—old enough to know and love her, old enough to be baffled by her, too.

  “Do you want me to call you right now?” Lauren asked. “I have so many questions but it seems weird to talk about it over text. I don’t want to overwhelm you or anything, but I’m just over here like OMG where did it happen, where were YOU when it happened, etc. etc.”

  I remembered Persephone hissing at me through the window that night. I remembered holding the blanket tighter over my head, ignoring her so hard that she walked away. And then I remembered what I’d always known; paint is stubborn. It clings instead of chips, and even after more than a decade, it has to be scraped and scraped and scraped. But right then, my hands were stiff with cold, and my entire body was trembling.

  “I’m so sorry,” I managed to type, “but I have to help my mom with something. Can we talk about this later? Tomorrow maybe?”

  “Uhhh sure . . .” she replied after a moment, and I looked over at Mom, asleep in her chair.

  • • •

  The next morning, Mom brought Wuthering Heights to chemo. I watched her as she read, trying to distract myself from my conversations with Lauren—both the one I’d stumbled through the night before, and the one I still needed to have. Each of them filled me with a light-headed anxiety that made the words in Mom’s book seem to blur.

  Clearing my throat, I forced my eyes to focus, and I saw that the corners of several pages were folded down. It seemed so unlike her—flagging a passage with the intention of returning to it later—and for a moment, I had to resist the urge to rip the book from her hands, comb through those pages, and see what had moved her so much that she felt the need to mark them.

  “You know,” I said, “I had to do a paper on that book in high school, but I barely remember it. Is it good?”

  She didn’t look at me when she responded.

  “It’s not that it’s good,” she said distractedly. “It’s just true.” The page she’d been reading made a whispery sound as she turned it. “Be quiet, though, okay? I can’t concentrate if you’re talking to me.”

  “Sorry,” I said, and I turned my attention toward the entrance of the room. I jolted then, seeing Ben walk by. He glanced in casually, but as soon as he noticed me, he hurried away down the hall.

  I looked at Mom, who held the book so close that it blocked her face entirely, and then I stood up and followed him into the reception area.

  “Ben,” I whispered, and when he turned around, there was a twinge of pain—or guilt—in his eyes, as if it hurt him just to look at me.

  “Hey,” he said, coming to an abrupt stop. “I wasn’t trying to get in your way or anything. I forgot this was your mom’s chemo time.”

  “That’s not—”

  “But while you’re here, can we talk for a second? I want to apologize.”

  I paused. “About what?”

  Cupping my elbow gently with his palm, he led me toward a window in front of some chairs. “I’m sorry about what I said to you last week,” he said.

  “Um,” I started, “you’re going to have to be more specific.”

  “About Tommy Dent,” he said, shaking his head, as if disappointed with himself. “I was a jerk about it. It’s obviously a sensitive subject, and I sort of threw him in your face.”

  I rubbed the toe of my shoe into the carpet, keeping my eyes on my feet as I responded.

  “Actually,” I said, “you might be right about Tommy.”

  When I looked back up at him, his brow was furrowed, his dark eyes slightly squinted. “You’re going to have to be more specific,” he echoed.

  “I think he—” I stopped, knowing that once I said it, I wouldn’t be able to take it back. “I think he might have killed my sister.”

  The words thudded against the air, louder than I’d in
tended, as I finally said the thing I’d only been able to imagine in sporadic flashes so far. My breath became sharp yet shallow, my skin suddenly hot. I lifted my hand to my forehead, and then my body loosened, my arms flopping to my sides.

  “Here. Come with me,” Ben insisted. He put his hand on my back and I allowed myself to be led away from the windows and down a hall. We walked until we reached a door marked “Staff Only,” and then Ben nudged me inside.

  At first, it was dark, but I could sense that the room was small, and when Ben flicked on a light switch and my eyes recovered from the shock of brightness, I saw that we were standing in a tiny bathroom. Ben slid the silver lock into place, and I had to blink away the image of my bedroom window, the old white latch so easy to turn that it made betraying my sister seem almost natural.

  Ben pumped some brown paper from the towel dispenser and held it under the running faucet. “Here,” he said. “This will help.” Pushing my hair to one side, he held the cool, wet paper to the back of my neck.

  For a moment, the dampness soothed me; it eased the prickling darkness that was swarming my vision. But then, registering the slight pressure of Ben’s palm as he cupped the base of my skull, I saw Persephone in my mind, pulling back her shirt to expose a fresh purple bruise just beginning to burn beneath her skin.

  I jerked away from him, and the wet paper towel slapped onto the tile. I took in the door with its silver lock, and I reached forward to snap the lever backward. “What are you doing?” I demanded.

  Ben bent over to pick up the towel and tossed it into the trash can. “Nothing,” he said. “You just got so pale all of a sudden, I thought you were going to faint.” He gestured toward the door. “Sorry—I locked that out of habit, I guess.”

  When I didn’t respond, he put his hand on the door handle and opened it a little. “Do you want to go back out there?” he asked. “It’s just—you got kind of loud, and . . . the cancer center isn’t really the place for phrases like ‘killed my sister.’ ”

  He laughed then, quickly and uncomfortably, but it was still a kick to my stomach.

  “So which is it?” I shot at him. “I looked like I was going to faint, or I was too loud?”

  He blinked at me—once, twice—and then he returned his hand to his side, letting the bathroom door fall closed. “Both,” he said. His eyes roved over my face. “How are you feeling now? Do you want to sit down for a second?”

  He reached behind me and closed the lid on the toilet seat. Feeling ridiculous and stupid, but also a little unsteady, I sat down on top of it and put my elbows on my knees, my head in my hands.

  “Did you have breakfast this morning?” he asked.

  I pictured Mom’s plate, the food only pushed around instead of eaten, and how my stomach had growled as I scraped the cold, dry leftovers into the trash just before we left for the hospital.

  “We only had two eggs left,” I muttered. “I need to go shopping.”

  “Oh man,” Ben said, “I hate grocery shopping. Such a pain in the ass.”

  I lifted my head just long enough to give him a look, and he took a small step back in response, leaning against the counter. “Sorry,” he said. “Not important. But, look, now that we’re on the same page about Tommy, I’m just curious—what made you come around? It was just last week that you were accusing me of killing her.”

  I stared at the floor and mumbled toward the tiles, “A lot has changed since last week.”

  “Okay,” Ben said, his feet shifting. “Like what?”

  I hesitated, unsure of how much to tell him, how much to admit. He was Ben Emory—all I had to do was think his name and my pulse would quicken—but there was so much swimming in my head right then, so much lapping at my brain and ready to overflow.

  “Well,” I said, “that picture you showed me. You were right about it. You were right about my mom and your dad.”

  “About how they dated?”

  “Yes, that. But also how he hurt her. How they were together and it ended badly and that’s why my mom never wanted Persephone to be with you.”

  I heard Ben take a breath. “Shit.” My gaze was still focused on the grout between the tiles—it wasn’t safe, in such a small space, to look him in the eye—but I knew that his body had stiffened.

  “Sorry,” he said after a moment. “That’s not a very articulate response. It’s just—” He ran his hand over his face, his features sagging as he dragged his fingers against them. “I wish she’d told us that back then. I’m not my father.”

  There was a sudden edge, cool but sharp, that slid into his voice, and it was enough to remind me of where I was, who I was with. In that tiny space stood a man who, murderer or not, had once hurt my sister. I picked my head up to glance at the door. It was only a few feet away from me. I could reach it in less than a second if I had to.

  “Why didn’t she just explain that to Persephone?” he asked, his tone softening. “I don’t—I don’t understand.”

  My eyes coasted back toward the floor, though my body remained alert. “She said it hurt too much to talk about it.”

  Ben didn’t say anything to that, and even I couldn’t blame him.

  “I don’t know,” I continued, more to myself than to him. “Maybe I should have done more—back then. Maybe I should have questioned things. I mean, Persephone was almost eighteen when my mom saw you guys together—how much longer could the dating rule really apply to her? I should have found that odd, but instead I just accepted it. I just trusted that my mom knew what was best.”

  “You were a kid,” Ben said. “That’s what you were supposed to do.”

  I shrugged. “I guess,” I said. Then I straightened a little. “I’m just surprised I never figured this out. I mean, even after she died, there were signs.”

  “Signs? What kind of signs?”

  I flicked my eyes toward his face, then quickly looked at the trash can. “You weren’t at Persephone’s wake, were you?” I asked, though I already knew the answer. I’d spent those brutal hours with my fists clenched, my eyes narrowed, scanning the crowd to see if he dared to show up.

  Ben shifted his feet. “No,” he said. “I didn’t want to upset anyone. I figured you guys would have heard that I left Persephone on the road that night, and . . .” He cleared his throat. “No, I didn’t go.”

  “Well your dad did,” I said. “And I hated that, because he was your dad. But it made sense, I guess, because the other council members were there, too—except my mom only shook hands with them. But when she saw your dad, she just . . . collapsed against him, and he sort of . . .” I gestured with my hand to demonstrate. “Gently patted her hair. I didn’t think about it back then, but now, it’s like—it was the kind of thing you’d see between people who have history.”

  I paused, remembering the way she’d gripped his arms, how her tears had seemed swift and endless. “I don’t know,” I added. “I just think that if I’d actually thought about it, then maybe I would have put things together. It would have been too late, obviously—but still.”

  Ben was silent for a moment. “Well, if we’re going by that logic,” he said, “then I should have figured it out a long time ago, too—even before Persephone died.”

  I tilted my head to look up at him, but he was staring at the wall. “Why?” I asked.

  He crossed his arms, squinting a little. “Your mom came to my grandfather’s funeral,” he said. “My dad’s dad.”

  Richard Emory? But Mom had just spoken about him with such venom in her voice.

  “It was soon after Persephone and I started dating,” Ben continued. “Soon after your mom said that we couldn’t. And when I saw her there, I thought maybe things had changed. Maybe she was coming around to the idea of the two of us. Maybe Persephone had mentioned that my grandfather had died and how—how close he and I were, and maybe your mom was trying to, I don’t know, offer her support to our family? I mean, she didn’t actually speak to me that day, but still. I asked Persephone about it, but s
he said nope, nothing had changed, your mom still didn’t know we were together. She couldn’t even believe your mom had been at the funeral in the first place, so it was just this weird, inexplicable thing. But now . . .”

  I watched his face, saw the realization of something gather in his features, and I waited for him to continue. When seconds passed and he still hadn’t spoken, I rolled my eyes.

  “But now what?” I prompted.

  He shook his head slightly. “My mom had just left my dad, not that long before my grandfather died. So maybe . . . maybe your mom came to the funeral to see my dad, and to see if—now that he wasn’t married—if there was . . .” He trailed off.

  “There was what?”

  “Space for her again?”

  He framed the words as a question, but when I snapped my head up to look at him, I could tell that, already, he believed them as fact.

  “Are you serious?” I asked. “You think your father’s so great that my mom came crawling right back to him the second he became available again? Do you really think that anyone could be that pathetic?”

  Ben scratched at his cheek, the one with the scar that cut across his skin. “I don’t think my father is so great,” he said.

  “But you think my mother is pathetic?”

  “What? No, I—”

  “Then what are we talking about here?”

  I stood up, latching my eyes onto his, and I waited to see who would last the longest, who would be the one to see the other look away. Even though the darkness of his irises, so close in color to his pupils, made my neck prickle, I knew that it had to be me. I crossed my arms and shifted my weight, and in a few more seconds, his gaze dropped to the floor.