The Winter Sister

by Megan Collins

  Ben,

  I’m writing this in fifth period because Mrs. Keller is clueless and I’m never gonna get stoichiometry. I wish I were with you right now. I know I’m seeing you tonight, but that feels like years away.

  I’ve been thinking about what you said the other night, and I want you to know that I love you for worrying about me, but you don’t have to. I love our routine. I wouldn’t ask you to keep going or to hold me harder if I didn’t. I love that I can still see your fingers on my skin when I get home, and I love how much it helps me. Because it does. It really does. Sometimes I feel like I’m going to explode with all the anger and pain that’s thrashing around inside me, but then I have your hands.

  Some girls cut, you know. I’ve seen the scars on their thighs when we change for gym, and I’ve been to enough health classes to get the reasons why they do it. I know it’s kind of the same as what we do, but at least the bruises are temporary. Those ugly scars will be on those girls for life.

  Anyway, it’s like this: in the moment, I can concentrate on the physical pain of you holding me, and somehow, that allows me to forget the real pain, the deeper one. Then, later, I have your fingerprints on my skin. Even after I cover them up, I know that they’re there as a reminder of your love. They let me know that I’m actually not unloved, even though I am unloved by the person who’s supposed to love me most.

  She was at it again this morning. We were eating breakfast and I tried to tell her about the B+ on my English paper (thanks again for helping!), but she just ran her hands through my sister’s hair and said, “That’s nothing. Sylvie got a perfect score on her science test.” She was looking at my sister like she couldn’t believe her luck that she was the mother of the most perfect human being on earth and I swear I had to stop eating, it was that disgusting.

  I know I should just accept that this is how she is, but it really hurt me that she said that. You saw how much work I put into that paper. I actually read the book this time! But she told me “that’s nothing.” I mean, who says that to their daughter?? And my stupid sister just sat there smiling at my mom like that’s a totally normal thing to say. I get that she’s just a kid, but it makes me so mad how she just goes along with every cruel thing my mother says to me and she always defends her. It’s such a betrayal. I bet if I brought it up to her tonight, Sylvie would say, “She didn’t mean it like that.” But how else could she have meant it??

  Anyway, I’m rambling. My point is this: all that stuff with my shitty mother and my little sister, it all just . . . dissipates (damn straight that’s an SAT word!) whenever your arms are around me and you’re pressing my skin to the bone. Plus, it helps you too with everything you’re going through, that’s what you’ve said. And I want to help you. I want to be there for you the same way you’re there for me.

  I have to go now. The bell’s gonna ring soon. I can’t wait to see you tonight. (But I guess by the time you read this, I’ll have already seen you! Lucky me!)

  Loving you endlessly,

  Persephone

  I stared at the curves of her name, the way the end of the e looped back up and around to cross over the h. It was my sister’s signature, distinct as a fingerprint, and it was scrawled on a letter that had called me her betrayer.

  But what, exactly, was the betrayal? My love for my mother? My determination, as a young girl, to see only the best in her? If that was it, then what had she thought of the locked window? What was the word for something stronger than betrayal?

  And had she been that bad, our mother? I didn’t remember the moment she mentioned in the letter, but I trusted it was true. The flippancy in saying “That’s nothing” to a daughter offering her something—a chance to connect over an accomplishment that should be celebrated together—felt like the mother I knew now. Was it possible, then, that she’d always been so harsh and dismissive, and I simply hadn’t seen it?

  Sometimes, Persephone would say to me, it’s like you and I have two different mothers. But we didn’t. We had one mother, one woman who had birthed us both. Maybe it was just the two of us who’d been different—one who saw her clearly, and one who saw her impossibly, as a garden constantly in bloom.

  She didn’t mean it like that. Those were the words that Persephone had imagined I’d say, and they rang true to me, too. I was always thinking of Persephone as having a darkness inside her that kept her from absorbing Mom’s light. How ferociously she’d swiped her hand across the constellation I’d made of her, how thunderously her words could roar across our house as she and Mom shouted at each other. But what if it had always been Mom’s darkness, to begin with, that had slid like a cloud over Persephone, denying her a view of the sun and other stars, blacking out what she should have always been surest of—that she was worthy, that she was loved?

  And when I said those things—She didn’t mean it like that and a thousand other excuses—did she see that as me taking sides? When she tried to open the window that final night and found it wouldn’t budge, did it confirm for her a suspicion that I, too, didn’t love her? When she marched back to Ben’s car, was she not just furious with me, as I’d always thought, but also deeply wounded?

  It all just dissipated, she’d written—all that pain and rejection, from Mom, from me—when Ben’s arms were around her, when he pressed her skin to bone. I shook my head, standing in the room of the man who’d held her and hurt her, and I tried to will away the dizziness that was whirling right through me.

  “Are you okay?” I heard Ben ask.

  When I blinked my eyes away from the letter, I saw that he was still sitting on the edge of his bed, his face as blank as a clean sheet of paper.

  “I don’t understand,” I said.

  Ben closed his eyes and nodded. “I know,” he said. “That’s why I was having second thoughts about showing it to you. It wasn’t your fault, though. You know that, right?”

  I had a breath of hesitation, and then I squinted until my eyes were slits that I could barely see him through. “What wasn’t my fault?”

  “The whole situation,” he said. “The bruises and all that.”

  “Obviously it wasn’t my fault,” I snapped. “It was your fault.”

  Ben cocked his head to the side, his brow furrowing. “I know, but I just mean—did you read the whole thing?” he asked. “The part where she—”

  “Are you being serious?” I cut him off. “Let me get this straight. She had the impulse to self-harm, but instead of actually doing it herself, she wanted you to do it—and you did—and that’s supposed to prove that you’re innocent? That’s supposed to make it all okay? What happened exactly? Did she say, ‘I’m thinking of cutting,’ and then you said, ‘Wait, let me just give you all these bruises instead’?”

  “No,” Ben protested. “No, it wasn’t like that. It was an accident, at first.”

  “An accident,” I repeated. “You just accidentally held on to her so hard that she bruised?”

  “Well . . .” He flipped over his palms so they faced the ceiling and he stared into them. “Kind of,” he said. Then, rushing into the next sentence, he looked at me and added, “But it was complicated.”

  “I’m sure,” I said, crossing my arms.

  “No, really, it was. I don’t know where to start to try to explain it.”

  “The beginning usually works.”

  “Yeah, but the beginning,” he said. “I don’t even know where that is.” He shook his head. “Listen. Long story short, I was really messed up at the time. I was—”

  “Drunk?” I demanded. “On drugs?”

  “No,” he said. “Not that kind of messed up. I was emotionally messed up, I guess. Things had been happening, and I was crying one night. And not just crying, but, like, all-out uncontrollably sobbing. And Persephone was trying to comfort me. She pulled me into her arms and I held on to her, and I was gripping her so hard, just bawling into her neck, and . . . I didn’t even know about the bruises until I saw them on her the next day. I apologized a million t
imes, I felt so terrible, but she said no, she liked it. She said she wanted to do it again. She said we could help each other.”

  He looked at me, his eyes locking me into their magnetic darkness. “I was in so much pain,” he said, “that I actually agreed to it. And then it just became this ritual. Every time we saw each other, we’d—I don’t know—share our pain, I guess.”

  My throat contracted, my breath quickening. The shame in his eyes was so palpable I had to turn my gaze away. I even wondered how my own eyes looked, the word betrayal staring unblinkingly up at me from the letter still clutched in my hand.

  “I just,” he continued. “I loved the way it felt, you know? Holding on to something so tightly that you know it can’t leave you. I don’t know if you’ve ever felt that kind of desperation to keep something you love before, to make sure it will always stay with you, but it’s a powerful feeling, and it made it easier for me to convince myself that we really were just helping each other.”

  He cleared his throat, and when I glanced back at him, he was looking just past me, his eyes focused on the gathering darkness outside the window.

  “I know now,” he said, “that it was fucked up. I’ve known that for a long time. What we did back then, it was unhealthy. It was wrong. Even if we both thought we wanted it, thought it was healing us, it was actually damaging. But I didn’t get that then. I couldn’t see beyond my grief. I was just so grateful.”

  His fingers trembled, the tips of them flickering like flames.

  “I mean, here was a girl I loved,” he continued, “who was willing to bear my pain.” He scratched his cheek with his shaking fingers. “She shouldn’t have had to, though, no matter what she said. I know that. I know that.”

  Then he met my eyes again with a look so pained and penetrating it felt like a hand reaching between my ribs and grabbing onto my heart. “I know that, Sylvie. I know it now and I’ve known it for a while, but by the time I did it was too late. I—God, I fucking . . .”

  He stood up and walked toward the French doors, placing his hand on one of them before glancing back at me. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I need to—” His gaze darted around the room. “I’ll be right back.”

  He disappeared down the hallway, and in a few moments, I heard a door open and close. Then there was only silence.

  I looked at the letter, the words blurred together, and I let the confusion wash over me, disorienting as waves that crash and pull against a body at sea. Listening to Ben, watching the weight of memory drag him down, my anger toward him had quickly melted into—something else, though I had no idea what to call it. Pity? That didn’t seem right. Understanding? No, that wasn’t it either; there was still so much I didn’t understand. But that look in his eyes when he’d spoken of his pain, his regret—I knew it, I recognized it, I’d seen it countless times in mirrors, in pictures, in self-portraits I was assigned in college.

  “Your eyes seem so sad here,” my professor once said, evaluating my work. Then I’d looked at the painting and found what I’d just seen in Ben—the ache in him throbbing, as if the air he was breathing was something he didn’t believe he deserved.

  And then, standing alone in his bedroom, not even sure if he was coming back, I knew what I was feeling, what had swooped in so suddenly to replace my anger.

  It was belief. Simple, unguarded, lightweight belief.

  He had loved her and he had bruised her. He had stained her skin with his pain, and she had let him—encouraged him, even. He had believed her when she said he was helping her, that Persephone could exchange her own pain for another, and when he finally stopped believing it, it was too late. There was nobody to hear his apologies, nobody to forgive him, nobody to bear his grief or love.

  So strange to even think it, but I believed him. I did. I did. I believed that you could love someone so much, and still, you could hurt them. I believed that a heart could pound with pain and love at exactly the same time.

  23

  When Ben returned, he was holding a glass of whiskey.

  “Sorry,” he said once he swallowed. He nodded at the drink. “I just needed this. Memory Lane is a difficult road to walk.” He chuckled briefly, then shook his head, sobering. “Do you want some? I could go make another.”

  I thought of Mom—how quickly she’d turned to alcohol to dilute her difficult emotions, how cowardly I’d always felt that was—but then I imagined how the whiskey would feel on my tongue, warm and velvety.

  “Sure.”

  “Cool,” Ben said. “I hate drinking alone. Be right back.”

  I unbuttoned my coat and sloughed it off like a snake unpeeling from its skin. Then I placed it on the bed and sat down beside it, crossing my legs and uncrossing them, crossing and uncrossing again. I didn’t have the energy to keep standing, but my nerves felt too frayed to let me sit still.

  Ben held a glass out toward me as he walked back into the room. He took another sip from his own. As I accepted the whiskey from him, our fingers brushed together, and reflexively, I jerked away, the liquor sloshing against the sides of the glass. He looked at me, his eyebrows raised, but he didn’t say anything, just sipped and then sipped again.

  “Thanks,” I muttered.

  He nodded, and I drank, feeling the satisfying burn of the whiskey at the back of my throat as I swallowed. Silence settled like dust over the room, and I kept my eyes pointed down toward the whiskey, cupping the glass as if it contained tea leaves I knew how to read.

  “There’s something I don’t understand,” I finally said.

  As I glanced over at Persephone’s letter beside me on the bed, I kept my eyes unfocused just enough so that the edges of each word became imprecise, one after another blurring together.

  “You told me,” I started, “that you were messed up when it happened. Right? That’s how you put it? Messed up?”

  Ben nodded, the movement as slow and full of effort as if there were an anchor hanging from his neck.

  “And my sister wrote that she wanted to help you with what you were going through, so what was it, exactly? What made you hold on to her so hard in the first place?”

  He brought his glass to his lips, took a gulp that nearly emptied it, and then slid to the floor, his back against the dresser, his legs straightening out in front of him. Releasing a long, heavy breath, he set his whiskey down beside him on the carpet.

  “It was a lot of things,” he said. “But, for starters—I told you how my mom moved to Portugal, right?”

  I nodded.

  “Well, when she left,” he continued, “I had just graduated high school. And I had no plans. I wasn’t going to college or anything—because, you know . . .” His voice deepened, as if imitating someone else. “It was clearly my goal in life to be an utter disappointment to my father and bring shame to the family name.”

  He cleared his throat. “Anyway, my mom gave me the option to come with her. But Portugal? Europe? I didn’t know anyone there. And besides, my grandfather was here—right here, actually, living in this guesthouse—and he and I were really close. I didn’t want to leave him.”

  He paused, glancing down at the remains of his drink. “And thank God I didn’t.” His shoulders lifted and sagged with a barely audible sigh. “He died a little while later. He had a stroke, and—things deteriorated very quickly. It happened in October of that same year, a few months after I started dating Persephone.”

  Again, I nodded, the pieces of Ben’s past falling together for me like snow into piles—Richard Emory had died and Mom had gone to his funeral. He’d had a loss, Mom had said of Will. He’d had a loss, and I love him.

  “So, with my grandfather dying,” Ben said, “so soon after my mom left, it just—it felt like everyone I loved was leaving me.” He rubbed at the back of his neck. “And it really messed me up for a while. Like, it hurt some days just to get out of bed.”

  I remembered mornings like that—how the sun could feel like a wound bleeding into my bedroom, how my mother’s bed was no lon
ger a cocoon I could join her in, and how that made it even easier to stay buried for hours in my own.

  “So, that first time it happened,” Ben went on, “with Persephone and the bruises—I was holding on to her not just as a shoulder to cry on, but because I couldn’t bear the thought of not having her to hold on to.”

  He shook his head, swept his hand over his face as if trying to wipe the memories off. “I was floundering,” he said. “Lost. I wasn’t seeing things as clearly as I should have. I mean, all I had at home was my dad, and that was . . . not the best thing to have.”

  I tightened my fingers around my drink. “What do you mean?”

  Ben shrugged, his gaze falling onto the carpet. “We’ve never had a great relationship,” he said. Then he lifted his hand to his cheek and ran a finger along the curve of his scar. “He gave me this, you know.”

  My eyes widened. I realized that I’d never even wondered about the scar’s origin or tried to imagine his face without it. How blank it would seem. How normal and benign.

  “What happened?” I asked.

  Ben looked up at the ceiling. “It was stupid,” he said. “I was twelve and acting out. My mom had asked me to do the dishes but I wanted to play video games. We argued for a while until my dad just—snapped. I remember him yelling, ‘You’ll do as you’re fucking told,’ and then he threw a knife at me.”

  My mouth dropped open. “What?”

  “I was actually pretty lucky,” Ben said. “It could have been a lot worse.”

  “But—” I paused, fumbling for words. “But that’s insane!”

  Ben nodded, slowly and rhythmically, his gaze lingering in the air above us. “Yep.”

  I inched forward on the bed. “So what happened?” I asked. “Did your dad get arrested or anything?”

  Ben laughed, the sound startling me as it erupted from his mouth. “No,” he said. “My parents took me to the hospital and they told the nurses I’d had an accident while playing with a knife.”