“And your mom just went along with that?” My chest was heating up.
“She didn’t want to, of course,” he said, “but my dad convinced her that the scandal would be damaging for all of us.” He chuckled. “I still remember him using that exact word—damaging. He was in the front seat on the way to the hospital, and he was yammering on and on to my mom about what would happen if she were to say anything—the damage to Emory Builders, the damage to our reputation, the damage to my legacy and inheritance that he’d supposedly spent his whole life building. Meanwhile, I was just sitting there in the back seat with a bloody rag to my face. Talk about damage.”
“Well, why didn’t you say anything?” I asked. “To a doctor, or a nurse.”
Ben shook his head. “You don’t know my father. He can be incredibly manipulative. And he can turn on the charm like that.” He snapped his fingers. “By the time we got to the hospital, he’d twisted things around so much that I started apologizing profusely. He made me believe it was all my fault, for refusing to do what I was told.”
I stared at Ben’s scar. If Will had done that to his own son, how easily might he have done something like that to Mom, someone who had no ties to him but the tenuous ones of the heart? I felt grateful in that moment that he’d chosen Ben’s mother over mine, that he’d committed to his family in the house on the hill and laid his destruction on them instead. Mom was lucky, I thought now, to have escaped Will Emory with only an aching void inside her.
But then I looked at Ben’s eyes, how they winced with remembered pain, and I felt guilt as sharp as a blade across my face. It wasn’t my mother that the worst of Will had happened to—but it was still Ben’s mother, a woman who had known enough to flee him when she could, and it was Ben himself, the person sitting in front of me, the person who, I was beginning to concede, was maybe as human as anyone else.
“Anyway,” Ben said, “it was years later and everything, but when my mom left and my grandfather passed, it was hard for me to be alone with him.” He touched the scar again. “Since this happened, he’s never been violent with me like that—not physically anyway—but I’ve seen bursts of that same rage, usually when he’s not getting what he wants, with business, with the town, with me. He’s like a child in that way.”
“Then why do you still live with him?” I asked. “Or on his property at least.”
Ben picked up his drink, swirled it around, and then sucked the rest of it down. He set the glass heavily onto the carpet.
“After Persephone died,” he said, “my life kind of went off the rails. Or, I don’t know, maybe it was already off the rails. Like I said, I wasn’t going to college or anything. I hadn’t taken high school very seriously, and there wasn’t a single university that would take me—not the ones deemed fit for an Emory anyway. So my father wanted pretty much nothing to do with me, and for years, I lived in this dingy little apartment I could barely afford—working at a gas station during the day, delivering pizzas at night. At some point, I finally realized I was in a really dark place. I got promoted to assistant manager at the gas station, and it was like a wake-up call. I knew I didn’t want that life. Nothing against people who work at gas stations—retail, customer service, that’s hard, honest work—I just knew I wanted something different.”
His eyes latched onto Persephone’s letter beside me on the bed. “But the good thing about the promotion,” he continued, “was that it came with health insurance. So I started seeing a therapist—which was probably long overdue—and he actually helped me out a lot. I told him about Persephone and everything that happened. Loving her, bruising her, letting her out of the car that night instead of just insisting I drive her back home.”
His voice became sharp, edged with a regret I could almost taste on the tip of my tongue.
“Anyway,” he went on, “I finally realized I wanted to do something with my life that would—in some way, at least—make up for the horrible mistakes I’d made. I knew I’d been trying to help her, to heal her in the way she said she needed, but I’d been hurting her, too. So I wanted to help people for real this time, and eventually that led to me wanting to become a nurse. The only problem was—I couldn’t afford to pay for school. My father had cut me off the second I moved out of the house, and all the money I earned went into my living expenses. I couldn’t get any loans, either, because I didn’t have the best credit. So, when I finally admitted to myself that I had no other option, I returned to my dad—tail between my legs, the whole thing—and I asked him for a loan. And he surprised me by saying that a loan would not be necessary; he’d pay for my education himself.”
He smiled a little before continuing, but it was a wry and wavering smile. “Only, there was a catch, because with my dad, there’s always a catch. He said he would pay for my education if I moved back to the house.”
Ben paused, his shoulders sinking so noticeably it was as if his father’s hands, heavy with ultimatum, were pushing them down.
“Why?” I jumped in. “Why would it matter to him where you lived?”
“Well,” Ben said slowly, seeming to take his time choosing his words, “an Emory male is not a true Emory unless he’s under the thumb of his father. It’s like my family is one big revolving door of power. And at a certain point, it becomes the elder Emory’s job to ensure that the younger Emory—the Emory heir—will continue on in a manner befitting the family name. Take my dad and my grandfather. I’ve never seen a tenser relationship in my life. My grandfather was great with me—kind and funny and we always got along—but with my dad, he was different. He was critical, demanding. He was disappointed in him because, in terms of his political aspirations, my dad only ever wanted to be mayor. Unlike my grandfather, who was a congressman for years, my dad just wasn’t interested in anything that took him away from this town.”
Ben sighed, as if talking about his family history were the most tedious thing he could imagine. “It turned out okay, though, because my dad did what he always does. He manipulated the right people, pulled the right strings, made some significant changes to the town. Profits soared at Emory Builders, too. It was brilliant, actually. As mayor, he could bully his way into getting whatever the business needed—permits, land, et cetera. So, in the end, he accomplished what my grandfather wanted the most—his name being stamped into the Spring Hill history books just like all the other Emorys before him. But still, like I said, there was always this tension between them.”
He traced his scar with his finger again—only, this time, it seemed more like a force of habit. “Runs in the family, I guess. I’m an extension of my father, see, and he’s not a successful Emory male if he doesn’t have an heir to mold into someone just like him—a political figure, or the next great leader of Emory Builders, or both. And right now, he’s playing the long game. He knows I have no interest in any of that, but this way, he’s letting me indulge in my ‘childish whim,’ as he says, while still keeping me under his thumb. I’m sure he thinks that, living in the guesthouse, getting all the perks of our family lifestyle day after day, eventually I’ll come around and decide to do something more honorable.”
I cocked my head to the side. “More honorable than working with cancer patients?”
“Something more public,” Ben clarified. “Something with a better salary. Something at the family company. It’s my destiny, don’t you know?”
Despite the space between us—me on the bed, him on the floor, separated by at least a few feet—I saw his eyelids twitch, the skin there, thin as a moth’s wing, kicking with spasms. As his words lingered in the air, his gaze drilled deeper and deeper into the carpet.
“But, actually,” he said, “it hasn’t been all that bad living here. I thought I’d hate it. My father was manipulating me, and I knew it. But school was expensive, and I didn’t really have another option. I still plan to pay him back—I don’t want to owe my father a thing—but it’s been okay. Plus, I don’t see him too much. Every now and then, we pass each other in the
driveway, and we wave, and we roll our windows down, and he guilts me into having dinner with him, where he’ll talk about how I’m not living up to my potential—but mostly, I just work a lot.”
I nodded in acknowledgment and took a sip of my drink. I felt its warmth course through me, lighting me up from inside.
“So anyway,” Ben said, letting out a long, abundant breath, “that’s my life story.”
He laughed then, briefly but heartily, the sound welling from somewhere deep in his body. I looked at him, surprised—the bellow of his laughter seemed disproportionate to the comment he’d made—but then I heard myself laugh a little, too, cracking a tension I hadn’t realized was still hovering over the room.
When our laughter subsided, there were a few beats of silence, during which I wondered where to look, what to say. Then my stomach let out a low, rumbling grunt that swiftly crescendoed into a growl. The flush in my face was immediate, and I raised my glass to my lips again, trying to cover the pink I felt burning in my cheeks.
“Oh thank God,” Ben said. “I’m so hungry, too.” He put a hand against the dresser to steady himself as he stood. “I think I have a frozen pizza in the kitchen. You interested?”
I looked back at the clock on Ben’s nightstand. It had been hours since I’d wolfed down half a sandwich before heading off to Tommy’s. And it might have been the alcohol radiating through my veins, or even just the hunger I was suddenly aware of like a gaping hole in my gut, but as I stood up from the bed, I didn’t think of Persephone or bruises. I thought only of dough and sauce and cheese—how that seemed like all I needed in that moment—and I found myself nodding, my mouth actually watering in response.
“Sure,” I said. “Pizza sounds good.”
24
We didn’t speak much as we ate. Sitting at the white marble counter of Ben’s breakfast bar, we inhaled slice after slice of mediocre—yet wholly delicious—pizza, taking breaks only to drink long, thirsty gulps of the beers we’d opened while waiting for the oven to preheat.
“Okay,” Ben said after a while, a single slice remaining on the pan between us. “I think I’m ready to come up for air.”
He wiped his hands on a napkin and tossed it onto the counter. Shifting his weight on the tall, low-backed chair, he looked at me and crossed his arms. “So,” he said, “your turn. I want to know about you.”
I swallowed the bite I’d been chewing and set my crust on my plate. “What about me?” I asked, reaching for my beer.
“Well,” he said, “I feel like I told you everything there is to know about me, but I don’t know much about you. I don’t even know what you do for a living.”
“Oh,” I said. “Well, I’m sort of between jobs right now—that’s the fancy way of saying ‘unemployed,’ right? I was a tattoo artist until I got laid off.”
“Oh, that’s awesome!” Ben said. Then he shook his head. “Not the getting laid off part. I mean being a tattoo artist. That must be so cool. Do you like it?”
I thought about it, and then I answered him honestly. “No. I mean, I don’t hate it. But I don’t enjoy it, either. My roommate, Lauren—we worked at the same place, and she’s in love with it.”
I pictured the sticky notes she’d place around the apartment—a phoenix in transition from ash to bird, a woman’s eye with thin, barren trees for lashes. I pictured her face as she worked on someone’s arm or calf or shoulder blade, the way her eyes would smile even as her lips pursed in concentration.
“She would marry tattooing if she could,” I added, and then I cleared my throat, my voice too loud as it bounced off all the gleaming white surfaces in the kitchen. “I think that maybe I’ve always been a little jealous of that. I just can’t imagine being that passionate about a job.”
I slid my finger up and down my beer bottle, watching clear, glistening tracks of condensation emerge. “It’s only been a few weeks since I was laid off,” I said, “but it feels like a lifetime ago that I ever did that. It seems like it was someone else entirely.”
Ben tilted his head and knitted his brows together. “So how’d you get into tattooing in the first place, then? Is it something you have to go to school for?”
“You have to do an apprenticeship, get certified,” I said, shrugging. “But I originally went to art school. And then after that, I basically hopped on board my best friend’s plans because I didn’t have any of my own.”
“Art school,” Ben said. “That’s cool. What kind of art do you do?”
“I don’t do any art,” I said quickly.
“Oh. Sorry, I just thought—”
“Yeah, it would make sense,” I cut in, “for someone with a degree in fine arts to actually make art, but I don’t know.” I continued to trace the condensation on my beer, my fingertip wet and cold. “The truth is, I have no idea what I want to do with my life.”
I was buzzed by now, clearly—I was making admissions to Ben that I’d barely even articulated to myself. As I pushed my half-empty bottle a couple inches away, the beer and lingering whiskey kept unthreading thoughts that, up until now, had been knotted up inside me.
“My life is totally directionless,” I said. “In high school, I painted every day so I could get into RISD. At RISD, I painted every day so I could get a degree. And for years now since then, I’ve just been . . .” I searched for the correct word, thumbing through my brain until I landed on the one that Aunt Jill had often ascribed to me. “Floating.”
Ben shrugged. “That’s okay,” he said. “You’re—what? Thirty? That’s about the age I was when I figured things out. Before that, I never cared about a job, but now that I’m a nurse, I love going to work. It’s hard, but I love it.”
Looking at him then, I saw that, even with all their darkness, his eyes seemed earnest and encouraging, as if he truly believed that I, too, had a calling, and that mine was a path that would reveal itself in time. After a couple seconds, I had to look away from him.
“Yeah,” I said, “well, what you said before—about becoming a nurse to make up for your mistakes with Persephone? I think that, for me, doing tattoos is similar—only, in the opposite way.”
His eyes squinted in confusion. “What do you mean?”
I took a deep breath. “I think I only stuck with tattooing to remember my mistakes. Because if I remembered them, then I could keep punishing myself. Because I should be. I should be punished.”
Ben shook his head. “I don’t under—”
“You know I painted over Persephone’s bruises, right?”
He hesitated, looking away from me to stare at his drink, but then he nodded.
“I shouldn’t have done that,” I rushed on. “I shouldn’t have kept it a secret. But she asked me to, and so I did. And I always thought that covering her bruises, keeping her secret—I thought it led to what happened that night, because, as you know, I believed it was you who killed her. So tattooing—inking pictures onto people’s skin—it reminds me of what I did. Which is good. I don’t want to be able to forget. I don’t deserve to.”
A crease of concern spread across Ben’s forehead. “You were a kid,” he said. “You can’t carry that. You didn’t do anything wrong, Sylvie.”
I shook my head so hard that my hair flew across my face. “You don’t understand,” I said, brushing it back behind my ear. “You don’t know what I did.”
Standing up, I pushed my chair away from the counter and took a step back. My heart was a clenched fist knocking against my ribs; the air felt too thick, my throat too small. I could feel a film of sweat, sudden and slick, on my forehead, and I could see her in her red coat, the snow just beginning to dust her shoulders as she trudged back toward Ben, as she got in his car and never looked back. It’s such a betrayal, she’d written.
“Sylvie,” I heard Ben say, but my eyes were blurring and I was already walking away from him, stumbling down the hallway and toward the front door. I could see the handle, could almost reach out and grasp it. I could see the dead bolt, the latc
h that wasn’t locked.
“I have to go,” I mumbled, vaguely looking around for my coat but then deciding, somewhere in the fog beginning to envelop me, that I didn’t need it. It wasn’t as cold outside as it had been that night. My body wouldn’t freeze; my body would not be buried in snow.
“Sylvie,” Ben said again, and I felt his hands on my shoulders. When he turned me around to face him, his eyes looked into mine so deeply I wondered if he could see her, too—her blonde hair tinted almost pink by his taillights, her boots leaving ghosts of herself on the ground.
“Talk to me,” Ben said. “It’s okay. It’s okay.”
He guided me into his bedroom and flicked on the light switch, a yellow glow flooding the carpet, the walls, the air. Sitting me down on the bed and taking the space beside me, he kept his hand on my back, rubbing it up and down. “Shh,” he soothed. “It’s okay. It’s okay.”
It wasn’t until a tear, fat yet weightless, splashed onto my hand that I realized why he kept saying that. My cheeks were wet, I registered now; my shoulders were shaking and my lungs kept sucking in air.
“Whatever it is,” he said, “it can’t be that bad. You were a kid, Sylvie. Just a kid.”
“It doesn’t matter how old I was,” I spat. “She’s dead because of me. Because I—” A burning sob raged through me. “I locked her out!”
Ben was silent, watching me.
“I was—I was always supposed to keep the window open. Just a crack. That’s all she needed to get back in, but I—I was sick of it. I didn’t want to cover for her anymore. I wanted our mom to know what was happening to her. Only I didn’t—I didn’t think that—I only locked it because I thought she’d come to the front door. I thought she’d have to ring the doorbell and wake up my mom and they’d have a fight but then everything would be out in the open. I didn’t know she’d—I had no idea . . . oh God.”
I slumped forward, my face falling into my hands. Tears slipped between my fingers, and as I endured the sobs that spasmed through my stomach, my throat, my lungs, I felt Ben’s body tense up beside me. Even his hand on my back went stiff.
The Winter Sister Page 23