The Winter Sister

by Megan Collins

  “I just think,” he said, “that it’s possible to love someone for a really long time, even if you can’t be with them. I mean, I still love—”

  He stopped himself before he said her name. I narrowed my eyes to slits.

  “Let me start again,” he said. “I don’t think your mom would be pathetic if she still loved him. Love is love. You can’t just kick it to the curb, even if sometimes you wished like hell you could.”

  But it had been nearly two decades from the time Mom and Will had been together to the time Mom went to his father’s funeral. I couldn’t imagine loving someone that long—not when they were just a memory, a wound, a thing that was already gone. How could a love like that remain so constant, dependable as the change of seasons or the months in a year? I pictured the pages of a calendar turning, the squares of days that my mother might have wasted holding out for a ghost. I envisioned her marking each date with a small, carefully drawn heart—the third, the twelfth, the twenty-first, all days she might have loved him—and then I felt my breath catch in my throat.

  “Did your dad ever have Dark Days?” I asked.

  Ben tilted his head. “Dark what?”

  “The fifteenth of every month—does it mean anything to you? Did you ever notice your dad acting strange on those days?”

  He bit his lip, seeming to consider it, and then slowly shook his head. “No,” he said. “I don’t think so. Not that I can remember anyway. Why? What’s the significance of the fifteenth?”

  I sighed. “I have no idea. Just this weird thing with my mom. Guess I’ll add it to the list of all the other mysteries about her, right after why the hell she loved your dad and why she trusted Tommy Dent.”

  I felt him watching me through the beat of silence that followed. “What do you mean she trusted Tommy?” he asked. “Trusted him about what?”

  I rolled my eyes. “It’s so stupid,” I scoffed, “but apparently he told her that he and Persephone—”

  My shoulder bumped against the paper towel dispenser, and I stumbled a little, startled at how close I’d been to it.

  Ben’s nearness in that small room made the space even tighter. Still, I couldn’t risk taking the conversation into the hallway where Mom might hear us. Her chair was close to the door; she might recognize my voice down the hall—or worse, recognize one that reminded her of a man she once knew.

  “Apparently,” I tried again, “he told her that he and Persephone had been really good friends.”

  Ben looked at me as if I’d just insulted him. “That’s insane,” he said. “I told you the other day—he was stalking her. He’d, like, wait outside his house for me to drop her off at night. He left her all these notes that were just—” He shook his head, as if trying to shake away the memory. “They were not friends.”

  “I know that,” I said. “But my mom believed him for some reason.”

  “That’s insane,” Ben repeated, rubbing the back of his neck. “But I don’t get it, why would he tell her that—besides the fact that he’s crazy.”

  I shrugged wearily. “He wanted Persephone’s things.”

  Ben stared at me blankly. “I’m sorry, I’m not following.”

  “Me either,” I said. “All I know is that after Persephone died, Tommy visited my mom a bunch and fed her a story about how the two of them had been such good friends. He said he wanted to have some mementos of her—and somehow that worked, because my mom ended up giving him basically all of Persephone’s stuff.”

  Ben paused. “She what?”

  “Well,” I said, “technically she traded it.”

  His eyes clouded, as if a fog had rolled in front of them. “Traded it for what?”

  I tried to picture Mom’s body succumbing to the pills. Was it different from how she’d slump against the headboard after too many drinks? Did her nerve endings start to feel like beginnings, like she could float away from her skin and hover near the ceiling, watching, with only mild curiosity, the sad hollow woman below?

  “She—had him do stuff around the house,” I said. “Cleaning, mowing, et cetera.”

  Ben took his time absorbing my answer. “Tommy did chores for your mother. And in return, she gave him her daughter’s things? That can’t be it. There’s got to be more to it than that. Did you try asking her—”

  “Look,” I interrupted. “My mom hasn’t been well for a really long time. After Persephone died, she fell apart. She wasn’t thinking clearly. But yeah, she gave him all of Persephone’s stuff. And I don’t know why he wanted it or what he planned to do with it, or if he even still has it, but that’s what happened.”

  Ben was quiet for a while, staring at something just to the right of my head. When he finally spoke again, his voice sounded deeper than before. “Well,” he said, “we should find out.”

  I waited for him to clarify, but he just kept staring into space.

  “Find out what?” I asked.

  He looked at me, briefly, as if he’d almost forgotten I was there, and then he returned his gaze to the wall. “Find out why he wanted her stuff,” he said. “Find out what he planned to do.”

  “Oh yeah? And how do you expect to do that? You can’t exactly go back in time and spy on him.”

  His brows knitted together. “No, not spy. Talk. I think we need to talk to Tommy Dent.”

  A sound—not quite laughter, not quite breath—squeezed through my lips. “You mean, like, visit him? Go to his house?”

  Ben nodded in a slow, unhurried way. “Yes.”

  “No way,” I said. “I’m not going anywhere near Tommy Dent. Do you have any idea what kind of—how he—he raped a girl! He was in jail for eleven years.”

  “I know,” Ben said coolly.

  “He doesn’t even live on my street anymore.”

  “I know. He lives in Hanover.”

  I narrowed my eyes again. “How do you know that?”

  He looked right at me, and beneath the fluorescent bathroom lighting, his irises seemed as dark and solid as coal. “It may be news to you, Sylvie—that he killed Persephone. But I’ve believed it was him from day one.”

  The light above us flickered. I glanced at the sink, the door, the toilet, anywhere but his face. “Okay,” I said, “but—”

  “And it’s weird, right? That he wanted Persephone’s things? I mean, it’s suspicious as hell. I could maybe see him wanting some kind of keepsake, given how obsessed he was with her, but all of it? No. I don’t think so. There’s something not right there.”

  “There’s something not right with Tommy,” I said, and Ben nodded.

  “I know. Which is why we should go see him. Maybe after all these years he’s got his guard down. He thinks he got away with it, that he’s untouchable. We can ask him about it and see if he slips up. Maybe he’ll tell us something we can take to the police.”

  I allowed myself to imagine it—sneaking off down a hallway while Ben distracted Tommy, finding his bedroom, rummaging through drawers until my fingers latched onto a box. It would be small, no bigger than a cell phone, no thicker than a couple of inches. I saw myself open it, saw the lid lift away, and inside, coiled on a piece of cloth, I saw a gold chain, a pendant shaped like a star.

  “I don’t know,” I said quietly. “I don’t—”

  “I have the day off tomorrow,” Ben cut in. “We could go then. Early afternoon, maybe? I could pick you up and we could drive there together.”

  “Pick me up?” I heard myself ask, my voice distant and soft.

  His car on the street, still running. A plume of exhaust in the air. My sister going back to him, and back to him, opening the door and slinking inside.

  “No,” I said, snapping to attention.

  “But we could—”

  “There’s no we! I’m not going with you to Tommy’s!”

  He’d been using that word—we—as if we were teammates or partners or even on the same side. I glared at him, trying to make my eyes as sharp as possible, and the flicker of determination on his face
slowly dimmed to embers.

  “Okay,” he said after a moment, and he put up his hands in a gesture of surrender. “Sorry.”

  “I need to go.”

  I stepped forward and yanked open the door, Ben dodging to the side so it didn’t hit his feet. I blinked as I entered the hallway, trying to orient myself.

  “Sylvie, wait,” Ben said.

  When I turned around, he was stepping into the hall and pulling a pen from his pocket. “Here, let me just . . .” He looked around and tore off a strip of paper from a nearby bulletin board. Using his palm as a writing surface, he scribbled something down.

  “Here. Take this.”

  He held the paper out to me, and I could see, as it dangled from his fingers, that he’d written a series of numbers on it.

  “You’re giving me your phone number?” I asked. “Seriously?”

  “In case you change your mind,” he said.

  I thought about refusing to take it, just walking away and letting him stand there, stupidly watching me go, but something about that felt childish. It was just a piece of paper; I could put it in my pocket and throw it away when I got home.

  “I’m not going to change my mind,” I promised, and when I reached out to take it, my fingers grazed against his. I pulled back quickly, as if recoiling from an electric shock, and he smiled at me—kindly, one might think, a little sheepishly even. If he had been anyone else, I might have smiled back as a measure of habit.

  As he headed off down the hall, I watched him get farther away. Then I saw him round the corner and finally disappear. I had to get back to Mom—I knew that I did—but my feet wouldn’t move. The feeling of his skin was still singeing mine. Ben’s fingers—I knew what they could do, the colors they coaxed from blood. Stuffing his number into my pocket, I made myself remember. I made myself think of what they’d done.

  19

  Missy went into labor that afternoon, though I didn’t hear about it until well after dinner when Jill sent me an alarming text. “Baby’s coming. Complications. Prepping for emergency C.” I imagined the panic in Missy’s eyes, her hand reaching for Jill’s as the nurses wheeled her toward an operating room.

  “Oh my god,” I wrote back. “I hope everything’s okay. Let me know when you can.”

  Mom and I were in the living room again, me scrolling through my phone, her gently rocking in her chair. I didn’t want to tell her about Missy. I didn’t know what the word complications might trigger in her—if she’d think of the baby being motionless and blue as it was lifted from Missy’s body, then think of Persephone’s lips, motionless and blue under layers of snow. Still, she needed to know. Her sister and niece were enduring something terrifying together, and if there was anyone who knew about the ways a person’s body could betray them, it was Mom.

  “The baby’s coming,” I told her. “There were complications, though, so they have to do a C-section.”

  Her eyes didn’t move from the TV; the rhythm of her rocking didn’t stutter.

  “Mom? Did you hear me?”

  “Hmm?”

  “The baby. Something’s wrong. They have to do a C-section.”

  She still didn’t look at me, but after a moment, she said, “What baby,” her inflection as flat and nonchalant as if she were asking me to clarify a detail in the show we were watching.

  I paused, studying her face. “Missy’s baby,” I said.

  “Oh,” Mom said. “Her.”

  She put her heels on the floor and the chair stopped moving.

  “Yeah . . .” I said. “Do you want me to send Jill a message for you? You can just tell me what to say and I’ll text it to her.”

  “No, that’s okay,” Mom said, and the rocking resumed.

  “I don’t mind,” I insisted. “It doesn’t have to be long. Just something to let her know that you’re thinking about her and hoping everything goes well.”

  “No,” Mom said again. “I don’t think so.”

  I leaned forward, trying to get her to turn her head and look at me. “Why not?” I asked.

  She shrugged. “I have nothing to say.”

  “What do you mean you—” I stopped, my chest tightening. “You can literally just say ‘Hey—I’m thinking of you guys. Hope Missy and the baby are okay.’ ”

  “Why don’t you say that, then?” she asked. “From you.”

  “I already did say that from me.”

  “Then why do I need to say it, too?”

  The question shoved me backward. I hadn’t known my mother could still surprise me. I hadn’t thought that, after all the ways that Jill had been there for her, Mom could deny her sister the smallest of gestures in return. Her apathy was a door slammed shut, her refusal a lock she clicked into place. My skin felt warm, flushing with familiar bitterness, and I swung my eyes toward the wall. I didn’t want to look at her, didn’t want to see the show that interested her more than the anxiety her family was experiencing.

  That wall, though—it, too, made something churn inside me, the Persephone constellation still studding it like silver thumbtacks. That constellation had been my own creation, but when I looked at it now, all I could see was Persephone, how her hand reached out in a spurt of anger, how she growled when she wrecked it, more animal than sister. I’d painted the constellation myself, but after that moment, it had never been mine again. Whenever I saw it, it only reminded me of the darkness that swirled inside Persephone, how something as harmless as painted stars, and Mom’s appreciation of them, could turn her smile into a snarl. For decades now, that constellation had belonged to my sister, and as I stared at it, imagining I could still see her fingerprints in the paint, it almost surprised me that Mom hadn’t carved it right out of the wall, hadn’t given it to Tommy Dent in exchange for a few hours of fog.

  All at once, the TV seemed to blare from the speakers. I fumbled for the remote and then shoved my finger onto the mute button.

  “Hey!” Mom protested. “I’m watching that!”

  “Mom,” I said sharply.

  She looked at me, her eyes wide with the injustice of her show being silenced, and my nerves sizzled, ready to ignite.

  “Do you have any idea how selfish it is,” I started, “that you can’t even offer your sister a single encouraging word right now?”

  She sighed, reaching down to scratch her ankle. I looked away when it seemed that all she scratched was bone. “Come on,” she said. “It’s not as serious as you’re making it out to be. Millions of women have had C-sections, Sylvie.”

  “Well, this is Missy’s first. And Jill’s probably out of her mind. You know how she worries. You know that she—”

  “Oh, I know how she worries, all right.”

  My fingers curled into fists.

  “Exactly,” I said. “You know better than anyone, don’t you? Because for half of her life, she’s been worrying about you—an alcoholic who goes catatonic at the slightest mention of anything hard.”

  It felt good to finally say it—and terrible, too. Terrible that it was true, terrible that we’d once been so gentle with each other, curling up in bed together, singing and giggling as if both of us were children, and now—we were here, a place where all the edges were sharp.

  “I don’t want to fight with you, Sylvie,” Mom said, but there was something about her voice—too even, too contained—that made me think she did.

  “Jill has done everything for you,” I pressed on. “She did your grocery shopping, your laundry, she made sure your house was taken care of, she took you to your doctor’s appointments, your chemo. And that’s only in the past few months. She also took care of me when you were too drunk to be my mother, helped me get into RISD, helped me—”

  “Oh, right,” Mom interrupted. “RISD. Are you sure it was art you studied and not theater? You’re being incredibly dramatic.”

  “She stepped in the second you fell apart.”

  “I lost my daughter, Sylvie.”

  “And I lost my sister. You don’t think that
was hard? I needed you, and you weren’t even there. You were ten feet away but there might as well have been an ocean between us.”

  The corners of my eyes burned, but I blinked the sensation away. “Jill took care of everything. She dealt with the police and the reporters and the TV stations. She cooked me dinner, talked to my school, planned the entire funeral. And oh! Speaking of funerals, what the hell were you doing at Richard Emory’s?”

  It caught us both off guard—how quickly my track had changed. Mom jumped a little in her chair, and even I felt a jolt as my muscles tensed. I hadn’t meant to bring it up—not right then, at least—but now that it was out, the question remained, humming with expectation.

  “How do you even know about that?” Mom asked, her eyes so narrowed it was as if she’d caught me in her bedroom snooping through her things.

  “I ran into Ben again,” I said. “He was at . . .”

  But I didn’t have to finish, didn’t have to decide between the truth and the same old lie; Mom’s eyes flashed with fury, and she plowed through my hesitation.

  “Seriously, Sylvie? You haven’t been able to find a man on your own, so you move onto your sister’s boyfriend?”

  The words stung like a slap across the face, the kind that keeps vibrating on the skin. My mouth dropped open, but there was nothing to pass through the space where my breath had tumbled out.

  “You don’t know what men like that can do to you,” Mom continued. “They suck the blood right out of your heart until all you’re left with is a heap of raw meat. No—not even meat. More like a raisin. A twitching, shriveled raisin where your heart’s supposed to be.”

  I struggled for a response. “Ben and me—we’re—it’s not like that.”

  “Oh, of course it’s like that,” she stormed ahead. “Listen to you—‘Ben and me.’ Well, let me tell you, little girl. The apple doesn’t fall far from the Emory tree. It never does. Don’t be such a fool as to think he might be different.”

  Our eyes locked like the antlers of two panting animals, and I felt like the weaker one. Mom was all bone and tendon and spine, but in that moment, I believed she could snap me in half if she wanted to. She was fueled by something—anger or resentment or pain—and it was so potent I could feel it radiating from her body. My only weapon, I was sure, was to keep on digging at the thing that had set her off.