The Winter Sister

by Megan Collins

  I straightened up, wiping at each of my cheeks, and I looked him in the eyes. “I locked her out,” I confessed again. “She couldn’t come back that night because I locked her out.”

  Ben pulled his hand away from me and placed it on his lap. For a while, he just sucked on the inside of his cheek, the one that was scarless and smooth, and I watched his pulse as it throbbed against his neck.

  “I locked her out,” I repeated.

  Now that I’d finally come clean, now that—for the first time in my life—I’d spoken the words out loud, I couldn’t stop saying them. It was as if my tongue were a diving board, and they kept lining up, one after another, to jump right off.

  “I locked Perseph—”

  “So what?” Ben snapped his head to look at me.

  I blinked, tears catching in my eyelashes. “So what?” I said back. “So everything.”

  Ben shook his head. “No. It doesn’t matter. You locked her out, okay, but what about Persephone?”

  I stared at him, watching how the light in the room pooled and swirled in his eyes. “What about her?”

  “It was her decision to come back to my car. She could have rung the bell, like you said, gotten in trouble and that would’ve been it. But she didn’t. She got in my car instead. And we fought. She said she hadn’t been able to get back in, and I told her we should just tell her mom so this wasn’t such an issue in the future, but she said no. She got angry. She demanded I let her out.”

  I narrowed my eyes, my tears stalling on my cheeks. “Are you saying this was her fault?”

  “No. Not at all. Because the next thing that happened was that I did let her out. And if I could redo anything in my life, that’s the one thing I’d take back. But even if I did take it back—even if I’d found a way to calm her down and then drove her home again and she’d figured out how to sneak inside—would it matter? Would she still be alive today?”

  “Yes,” I said, and Ben tilted his head to the side.

  “I’m not so sure about that. Because, just like she made the decision to get out of my car, and I made the decision to let her, someone else made the decision to kill her. And if it was Tommy, then he could have done it another time, too. He was stalking her, Sylvie. He was biding his time. He—”

  He stopped himself, taking a deep breath before continuing.

  “What I’m saying is—Persephone made a decision to sneak out, to come back to my car, to demand to be let out, and I made a decision to let her go, and you made a decision to lock the window because you were tired of covering up a dangerous situation. But only one person made a decision that night to hurt her. To kill her. You were—God, Sylvie—you were only trying to help her. You were trying to keep her from getting hurt. Why the hell would you blame yourself—let alone punish yourself—for that?”

  My lips parted to say something, and then closed, parted and closed, parted and closed. I was stunned into stillness, my hands half open, half fisted in my lap. I was stunned by the reflections of light I could see in those obsidian eyes, the ones my sister had called black holes, the ones that seemed to make their own gravity as they pulled me toward their gaze.

  He was right.

  I actually laughed when I realized it, my breath gushing out of me as if it were water that had filled my lungs to bursting. In an instant, I felt lighter, pounds and years lighter, and I was about to press my hand to my mouth, dam up the laughter that was coming and coming in an otherwise somber room, but then I changed my mind, let the sound spill from my body until nearly all of it had been drained.

  “Uh . . .” I heard Ben say. “What’s so funny?”

  All this time, I’d remembered locking the window as something I’d done to Persephone. But Ben was right—God, he was so right, it felt wonderful and terrible at once—I’d locked the window for her. I’d locked it because I’d loved her, deeply, and I’d wanted to save her from herself, wanted to protect her from boyfriends and bruises and misinterpretations of love.

  But still—and here, the laughter dried up, quick as the stopping of a faucet—I had lost her.

  The tears flowed again as I collapsed against Ben, boneless as a pile of laundry. For whole moments, whole minutes maybe, I continued to cry, crumpled up in his arms.

  That loss—the absence of Persephone—had always been an ache so fierce that, at times, it was difficult to breathe. I felt it now, again, my lungs gasping to keep up with the pace of my tears, and I missed her. I missed how she scrunched up her nose when looking in the mirror, how she hummed whenever she brushed her hair. I missed the pinches and Indian burns we’d given each other, just kids with no understanding yet of bruises, of what it would take to want them, of what it would take to cover them up. I missed movie nights and buttered popcorn, missed rewinding again and again to rehear the lines we loved. I missed kicking each other under the table at breakfast, both of us stifling smiles that threatened to give us away. There were so many things—millions of tiny, essential things—that I’d been too busy living my life to appreciate and cherish. How many times had I crawled into bed with my mother, when my sister, alive and just as warm, had a bed to crawl into, too? She might have pushed me away, grumbled her annoyance into her pillow, but when she placed her hands on my arms or my shoulders or my back, they would have had blood coursing through them, round and round again.

  I straightened up, and Ben’s arms loosened as I wiped a hand across my nose. When I met his eyes—eyes that Persephone had gazed into each night, eyes that she’d said she could get lost in—I saw that our faces were very close. I could feel his breath on my lips.

  “I know,” he whispered, and his voice was so fragile it sounded like my own. “I miss her, too. I miss her all the time.”

  I kissed him then. Without thinking, without understanding, I pressed my mouth against his. I cupped his face and felt the ridge of his scar beneath my fingers. He’d been wounded there, hurt by a parent who was supposed to only love him, and I kissed him harder for that. I could feel his surprise in the shape of his mouth, the initial stiffness of his lips, but then he kissed me back, lifting his hand to cradle my neck, and my nerves became electrified. Something in my body roared back to life.

  I gripped him closer, pulling him down with me to the bed. I felt the weight of him, his chest rising and falling in tempo with my own, and I wrapped my legs around him, fastening his body to mine.

  His lips were softer than I would have expected, and as our mouths moved together, breathy and slick, I slipped my hands under the back of his sweater, felt the heat of his skin against my palms as I pulled him even closer.

  His thumb stroked my cheek as he kissed me and kissed me again, and I struggled with his belt, trying to unbuckle it without unthreading my lips from his. He leaned back then, his breathing heavy and rhythmic, and he peeled off his sweater, undid his belt, and slid out of his pants. I tugged my shirt over my head and pulled my jeans and underwear down together. When he came back to me, his skin already beading with sweat, he wrapped his fingers around the straps of my bra and slipped them down over my shoulders, kissing each inch of my body he revealed.

  I didn’t want his mouth that far from mine. I put my hands on the sides of his face and guided him back to my lips. We kissed each other again—and again and again and again—until he finally entered me, and I gasped, his mouth trailing down to my neck, where he breathed hot and hard against my skin.

  As I pressed my fingers into his shoulder blades, as I turned my head to run my lips along his scar, I didn’t stop to wonder why tears still dampened my cheeks. I only thought of all the parts of my sister that Ben alone had known—parts secret and mysterious, parts I’d never been able to reach. Then I felt the rhythm of him inside me for the miracle that it was; with every gentle but insistent thrust, he was pushing Persephone back, back, back into me.

  25

  The lights were still on when I got home. I wiped my feet on the mat and paused at the front door, pressing my back against the wood as the im
print of Ben’s body continued to hum inside me. The air felt taut, as if stretched over too small a space, and I closed my eyes to the accusations I could imagine Mom hurling at me: Where the hell were you? I’ve been here alone for hours, wasting away. I guess it means nothing to you that I’m sick.

  But when I walked through the entryway into the living room, wincing in anticipation, I was surprised to find that she wasn’t in her chair. All the lamps were on, casting a buttery glow on the furniture and walls. Even the Persephone constellation, usually shadowed by the nearby TV, was perfectly spotlighted. I stared at it—that angry, silver swipe of my sister’s hand—and quickly looked away.

  When I saw the time on the microwave in the kitchen, I knew why Mom wasn’t there. It was eleven thirty-two. I’d stayed with Ben even longer than I’d thought, and Mom was asleep. Of course she was—she had chemo in the morning—and if I had even a chance of enduring her eye rolls and complaints, her acidic comments bookended by silence, then I needed to get some sleep myself.

  I switched off the lamps, each of the bulbs lingering a dull orange before snuffing out completely, but the darkness didn’t take. There was still another light, coming from somewhere down the hall. As I got closer, I saw that Mom’s door was open, the light spilling out. Tiptoeing into the doorway and resting my shoulder against its frame, I found her asleep on top of the bed, bald as a baby and curled up like one, too.

  I watched the flicker of a vein on her head, how it forked across her skull like pale blue roots. Then, her arm twitched, responding to something from deep within the folds of sleep, and I noticed her fist, tightly balled and clutching something. Taking a couple steps into the room, I saw that it was a tissue—that, in fact, the bed was littered with tissues crumpled up around her, fist-like themselves.

  At the foot of the bed was a lidless shoebox stuffed with what appeared to be small white envelopes. I glanced back at Mom’s face, noted her pink, swollen eyelids, the hints of dried tears on her cheeks, and I looked at the box again. My heart sputtered, seeming to understand something before my mind could catch up, and I reached for the box, my movements as slow and soundless as dust floating through air. Palms flat against the cardboard, I lifted it up and snuck back into my room, where I switched on the light and carried the box to my bed. For a few moments, I could only stare at all those envelopes lined up like entries in a card catalogue.

  I picked out one at random. “Annie – January 15,” it said, and then a year. I did the math quickly—I would have been four years old when Mom received this; Persephone would have been eight. I plucked out another envelope (“Annie – October 15,” it said, with the same year as the first) and then another (“Annie – May 15,” dated two years later). Flipping through more and more, I saw that there were ones with years that predated the first one I’d picked up, and ones with years when I hadn’t even been alive yet. But every single one arrived on the fifteenth of the month—Mom’s Dark Day.

  Envelopes scattered around me, I pulled out another from the box (I’d been seven for this one, Persephone eleven), and I looked inside. A strip of paper no bigger than a credit card said, “I can’t stop thinking about you.” For a second, I let my eyes trace the bulky handwriting, and then I reached for another (I’d been two, Persephone six) and read the note inside: “I took my son blueberry picking yesterday and remembered that stain on your lips.” I fingered the top edges of the envelopes until I stopped on one that was closer to the end of the box (I’d been thirteen, Persephone seventeen), and when I opened it, I read his words: “In my dream last night I was kissing you.”

  Will’s words, of course. So now I knew. On the fifteenth of each month, he’d sent my mother a letter—no stamp, no address, hand-delivered apparently. “I miss your face,” one said. Then Mom would glide through the hallway like a ghost, turn into her room, shut the door. “The other day, a song came on the radio that reminded me of you and I had to pull over on the side of the road for ten minutes.” We’d press our ears to her door, pancake batter dripping from the wooden spoon that Persephone held up in the air, and we’d hear nothing but the sound of our own breathing. “I love you. I’ll always love you. Only you.” Darkness would swallow the house as we’d wait in the living room, still in our pajamas, the rumble of our stomachs reminding us to turn on the light, heat up the leftover pancakes, have breakfast for dinner. “It’s not enough to just remember you.” The next morning, she’d emerge from her room, the creak of her door a sound that pulled us from dreams, and her eyes would be puffy. Then she’d kiss us on the tops of our heads—Persephone just a peck, me a kiss of hard I’ve-come-back-to-you lips, her palm lingering under my chin, Persephone’s eyes lingering on Mom’s hand.

  “Those are mine.”

  Her voice made me jump—not because Mom was there, in my doorway, and who knew for how long, but because of the anger trembling in each word. I looked at her, her arms crossed, a gnarled twig of a woman.

  “These notes,” I said. “They’re why you had your Dark Days.”

  “My what?”

  “Every fifteenth, you’d slink off to your room and not come out until the next day.”

  She was silent then, her lips pinched so tightly together they almost disappeared.

  “So this was why,” I continued. “Because Will would write you these notes. And then you’d miss him, I guess. You’d miss him so much you’d abandon us.”

  She unsealed her mouth to scoff. “Abandon you? Please. You girls could take care of yourselves.”

  “Because we had to,” I said. “You can do nearly anything when you have to.”

  Mom rolled her eyes.

  “He was toying with you,” I said. “You know that, right?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Sending you these notes—with no intention of actually seeing you. He just wanted to know you were still under his thumb. He was manipulating you.”

  “And what makes you think he had no intention of actually seeing me?”

  I hesitated, the answer so obvious. “Because you never saw him.”

  “Like hell I didn’t.”

  Her eyes blazed, practically scorching my skin with the heat of their conviction, even from across the room.

  “What?” I asked.

  “You think you have it all figured out, but you don’t know anything.”

  “When would you have seen him? The only time I ever saw the two of you together was at Persephone’s wake.”

  She shrugged. “I saw him now and then.”

  “When?” I asked. “Where?”

  “We made arrangements.”

  “You made arrangements. How? Through these?” I picked up a couple of envelopes, then loosened my grip, letting them slip back onto the bed like leaves floating to the ground.

  She shrugged again. “Guess you didn’t pay close enough attention when invading my privacy.”

  I stared at her—her nearly translucent skin thin as an onion’s, her eyebrows all bone, her gray eyes like clouds holding in their rain—and I saw her look at the notes that were scattered all around me. Her lips twitched, as if she wanted to say more.

  Running my fingers over the letters still in the box, I grabbed a few at a time. “My new secretary is named Annie,” one said. “I find all sorts of reasons to say her name.” Without bothering to return it to its envelope, I dropped that note and went on to the next: “I saw you with your kids last week. You were checking out at the grocery store when I walked in. I had to stop myself from whisking you away.” I dropped that note and went on to the next: “I’m aching to see you.” I dropped that note, and as it fluttered on to the bed, it turned itself upside down, revealing another message, the handwriting cramped and small in the corner. “This Thursday,” it said. “2 p.m., usual place.”

  I glanced up at Mom. Even as her mouth held on to a tiny, satisfied smile, her eyes brimmed with anxiety. I dug back into the notes I’d already read, flipping them over to see the words on the opposite side of each
one. “Saturday night, 9:30 p.m., usual place.” “Next Wednesday, 3:30 p.m., usual place.” “Tomorrow, 8 a.m., usual place.”

  “You were having an affair with him?” I blurted. “All that time?”

  “Oh, don’t look so scandalized,” Mom said, but she wasn’t even looking at me; her eyes were stapled to the wall behind my head. “It was just a few times a year.”

  “Just a few times a year? He was married.”

  “And that was his business, not mine. If his wife couldn’t make him happy, then that was her problem.”

  My mouth fell open. “Her problem? Oh my God, Mom—who are you?”

  “I’m the woman who loves him.”

  She tightened her crossed arms, her body rigid, as if she were solid as a deeply rooted tree—not the hollow stalk, easily snapped by the wind, that we both knew she really was. I held myself back from responding right away. I wanted the words she’d just said to reverberate in the air, mock her with their absurdity.

  I looked down at the notes again. “What’s the usual place?” I asked.

  “Does it matter?”

  I pictured them in the back seat of a car, like two teenagers with no better options. I pictured them in Will’s office, his wife unknowingly on her way with the bagged lunch he’d forgotten at home that morning.

  “No,” I said. “But—when were you even meeting up with him? I feel like I’d remember that.”

  And then, all at once, I did. I remembered those nights she’d come into my bedroom after one of her dates, tucking me deeper into sleep, her skin bringing the scent of peonies into the air. I remembered mumbling questions about the men she’d had dinner with, and I remembered her shushing me as if I were a baby beginning to fuss.

  All those nights, she’d been going out with Will? I shook my head at the thought. She couldn’t have been. I’d seen some of the men she dated. There was that one who pulled into our driveway in a red Ferrari and Mom rolled her eyes as the three of us peeked at him through the curtains. We watched him check his reflection in the side-view mirror and nod his approval before heading toward the door.