The Winter Sister

by Megan Collins

  “The men I went out with were just distractions,” Mom said now, as if reading my mind. “They were few and far between—fewer and farther than I let you think. I hardly dated anyone but Will. Sometimes I did—here and there, just to make him jealous, or just to feel like I was calling the shots—but mostly, it was him.” Her eyes glazed over and her voice became brittle. “All him.”

  She slouched a little, her arms dropping to her sides, the knot of her body beginning to loosen. I watched her waver slightly, like a branch swaying with a breeze, before she placed her hand on the dresser to steady herself.

  “So you understand what he was doing to you, then,” I said.

  Mom squinted. “Doing to me?”

  “You just said you went out with other men to feel like you were calling the shots. Because you were completely powerless, right? Completely under Will’s control, at the whim of his desires. If he wanted to see you, he didn’t ask when you were available. He told you when and where, and you just—you just showed up!” I laughed—a dry, abbreviated chuckle. “I mean, didn’t you have any respect for yourself?”

  The silence she offered was enough of an answer, and as another thought pushed its way to the surface of my mind, gasping for attention, my stomach clenched.

  “Oh my God,” I said. “Is this still going on?”

  Mom shook her head so slightly it was as if she didn’t move it at all. “No,” she said, but her voice was distant.

  “You’re lying!” I screeched. “You’re still seeing him, aren’t you?”

  I thought of Ben’s scar, how Will had thrown a blade at his son and sliced the boy he was into two—one who had trusted his father and one who never would again. I raked my eyes over Mom’s body, searching for signs of Will’s damage on her skin. She was pale as milk and there were bruises on her arms—but that was because of her sickness, that was because of the chemo. Right?

  “No, I’m not still seeing him,” she hissed, and when her eyes connected with mine, there were tears in them. “The last time we met up, your sister was still alive, okay? The last time I even saw him was at her wake. Do you think I don’t wish I’d seen him since then? That we were together right now? But look at me. I’ve hardly left the house in the last sixteen years, and he’s never asked me to.”

  Her eyes fell to the floor again, a tear sliding down the sharp curve of her cheek. “He doesn’t love me anymore. He’s forgotten I even exist.”

  I was struck by how young she sounded—like a lovelorn teenager, or like Lauren when she got attached to someone who then began ignoring her texts. “He’s over me,” she’d always say, her tone nearly theatrical.

  I shook my head, glancing at Will’s letters on the bed. “I don’t get it,” I said. “These notes are clearly connected to your Dark Days—the dates prove that. But shouldn’t they have made you happy? I mean, he was sending you a letter once a month telling you how much he wanted to see you. Isn’t that what you wanted?”

  “Do you see two hundred and sixteen notes in there?” Mom snapped.

  I paused. “What?”

  “It wasn’t once a month. The notes weren’t, anyway. And that’s what broke me, if you really have to know. Eight, nine, ten times a year—I’d go to the mailbox, take out the envelope, and there’d be no note inside it at all. It was . . . Jesus, it was brutal. I’d wait for weeks for the fifteenth, for his middle-of-the-night courier or whoever the hell he sent, and then, most of the time—nothing. He’d completely shut me out.” She turned her head to look at the wall, crossing her arms once again. “You can’t possibly know how that feels.”

  Laughter burst through my lips. “I can’t possibly know how it feels to be shut out? Are you ser—” But then I stopped. “Wait.”

  I rewound the words she’d just said, playing them back in my mind.

  “Why would there be an envelope in the mailbox if there wasn’t a letter?” I asked.

  Mom stared at the wall, her mouth firmly closed.

  “What else was in the envelopes?” I tried.

  When she still didn’t answer, I riffled through the notes again, picking out envelopes in the box I hadn’t yet touched. I opened them up and shook them out, as if whatever else had been in them were still inside. But all that slipped out were the same strips of paper with the same handwriting I was already beginning to hate.

  “I still have dreams about us at the lake.”

  “I ate our favorite pizza last week. It wasn’t the same without you.”

  “I saw you outside the movie theater with another guy. I wanted to kiss you right in front of him.”

  “Couldn’t get to the bank in time to make the withdrawal. I’ll—”

  My pulse sped up. I tightened my grip on the note, crinkling it a little. Then I started over.

  “Couldn’t get to the bank in time to make the withdrawal. I’ll get it to you tonight. Wear the green dress.”

  I flipped the paper over. “Usual place. 8:30.”

  “He was giving you money?” I asked. “Why?”

  Mom drummed her fingers on her arm as if she were bored, but her eyes flicked nervously across the wall.

  “Was he buying your silence?” I pressed. “You got to have your affair with him but you couldn’t let anyone know?”

  She opened her mouth a little, but she didn’t respond.

  “It couldn’t have been very much,” I said. “We lived paycheck to paycheck.”

  Finally, she shrugged. “I saved it.”

  “For what?”

  She pinched her lips together, resuming her silence.

  “Is that how you’ve been paying for your treatment?” I asked.

  “My insurance pays for my treatment.”

  “Right,” I said. “But you told me you pay for your own insurance—and since you don’t have an income, that’s never made any sense to me. Is this how you’ve been able to afford it?”

  Her eyes crept toward me. “I’m tired of this conversation. Give me back my box.”

  “No.” I picked up the box and held it to my chest, protecting it as Mom took a few steps and reached out her hands. I was close to something—I could feel it. There were tremors of it in the air, beckoning me closer, or warning me to turn back.

  “Does he still send you money?” I asked.

  She dropped her arms. “What?” There was genuine surprise in her voice. “No.”

  “Yes, he does. He has to be. That’s how you keep affording everything.”

  “No, he doesn’t! I told you already, I saved everything he ever gave me. And anyway, why would he send me money now, huh? He’s had no reason to for a very long time.”

  “Why not? Because the affair’s been over since Persephone died?”

  There was a beat of silence before she responded. “Yes.”

  She was lying—or, at the very least, withholding. There was something I was still missing. I could almost make it out; it pulsed beneath her skin like a vein.

  “So he really hasn’t given you a single dime since . . .”

  The rest of the sentence crumbled in my mouth. I clamped my lips shut, holding the words tightly between my teeth. Then I swallowed them, sharp as a jagged crust of bread. I was struggling to put it all together, but every part of it was blurred. Will had sent my mother money for years, and had only stopped when Persephone died.

  “Oh my God.”

  I was forgetting how to breathe. I couldn’t get my chest to expand or contract.

  “Oh my God.”

  “Sylvie, please . . .”

  “He’s her father, isn’t he? Will Emory is Persephone’s father.”

  As I looked her in the eyes, I drank the air in shaky, uneven gulps. Silence spread through the space between us, and I watched as she walked toward Persephone’s bed, her steps like an old woman’s. Easing herself onto the blue quilt, she sat down without a squeak or groan from the decades-old mattress.

  Then, finally, in a voice as creaky as a coffin being pried open, she answered, “Yes.�
��

  26

  “Oh my God.”

  “Please stop saying that.”

  “You never told us!” I cried, shooting up from my bed. “How could you—why wouldn’t you—”

  “I promised Will I’d keep it a secret,” Mom cut in. “He was married when I got pregnant. Do you have any idea what a scandal like that would have done to him? It would have rocked his whole family, his whole career! He was already campaigning at that point. He was going to be the youngest mayor this town ever had. So he asked me to keep it quiet.”

  “And you agreed to that?” My voice was so shrill I barely recognized it. “You agreed to keep your daughter in the dark and accept his hush money?”

  “It wasn’t hush money! It was money for Persephone—child support, if you want to call it that. I was saving it up for her in a college fund, letting it accumulate interest. Really, Sylvie. Do you think so little of me that you honestly believe I’d blackmail him into giving me money to keep our secret? I loved him, and he needed this from me. I would have done it for free!”

  “Persephone wasn’t a secret, Mom. She was a human being. She was your fucking daughter.”

  “And she was his, too. He had a right to be part of that decision.”

  “No, he didn’t,” I spit out, shaking my head. “No, he did not have even an ounce of—”

  I stopped, my mind pummeling off the track it was on and hitching onto another. She was his, too, she’d just said. But Ben was also his. And Ben and Persephone had been each other’s. Ben had probably put his hand on her cheek when he kissed her, like he’d just done to me. He had probably run his fingers through her hair, grazed his teeth against the skin of her shoulder. And just as his tension and desire began to brim over, he must have pressed his hipbones against Persephone’s, then drained himself into her, gasping and grunting for breath.

  “Do you, do you have any idea what this means?” I sputtered. “Persephone—she—she dated Ben. She dated her—oh God, I can’t even say it—her brother.”

  “Half brother,” Mom corrected.

  “Oh, well never mind, then, I guess that—”

  I sucked in a breath. It hadn’t even been an hour since I’d left Ben’s house, since he’d brushed his lips against my cheek at the door, a gentle acknowledgment of what had passed between us—our bodies cresting and falling together on the bed, my legs clinging to his waist as I pulled him deeper and deeper inside me.

  My heart was pounding when I asked my next question. “Mom,” I started. “Is Will my father, too?”

  “No,” she said quickly.

  “Is he?”

  “No! Your father is a man named Eddie. I don’t even know his last name. I have no idea where he lives or who he is really.”

  I watched her for a while, looking for the slightest tremor in her expression. Nothing happened, though, not even when I focused on the pulse that ticked in her temple, the dry skin at the corners of her mouth. She was telling the truth, I conceded—the bland, unpretty truth—and relief flooded my veins like a drug. But then, in just a few seconds, my anger snapped back into place, boiling me up inside.

  “But Persephone is Will’s,” I said. “And so is Ben. And they were together. How could you let that happen?”

  “Obviously I didn’t know it was happening. I told her she wasn’t allowed to see him.”

  “But you never told her why!” I fired back. “So she had no idea when she saw him . . . when she went out with him . . . that she—she—”

  “I didn’t know she was still seeing him! That’s not my fault!”

  “Yes, it is. It absolutely is.”

  She shook her head, her eyes darting back and forth across the rug between the two beds. Her forehead wrinkled; her mouth sagged at the edges.

  “And you know it is,” I added. “I can see it all over your face. You’re not stupid, Mom. If she’d known he was her brother, then she never would have been sneaking out to see him. Which means she never would have been out the night that somebody killed her. You know that! You know it!”

  Mom covered her face with her hands, shielding herself from my words. “Stop it!” she cried. “I know! I know! Jesus, just—stop, okay? I know.”

  Then, for almost a minute, she wore her palms like a mask, her breath muffled and raspy. I watched her, noticed the knobs of her knuckles—even larger now, it seemed, than just a few days ago—and I waited for her to speak again, my throat and wrists quivering with pulse. Finally, Mom dropped her hands into her lap, and I saw there were tears in her eyes, tears on her cheeks and chin.

  “I never claimed to be perfect,” she said, her voice all gravel. “I know I’ve made mistakes. Why the hell do you think I drink?”

  I’d never heard her speak like this—acknowledging her faults, her addictions—and I grasped at the chance to flash a light down the endless cave of that subject. I wanted us to enter it together, even if it meant we’d never find our way out. I knew her question had been rhetorical, but I answered it anyway.

  “Because you couldn’t deal with losing Persephone,” I said.

  “Oh, I always knew I’d lose her,” she scoffed. “I just didn’t know how or when. But I couldn’t—I can’t—deal with the part I played in it.”

  She looked down into her hands, her fingers curling toward her palms like shriveling petals.

  “What do you mean you always knew you’d lose her?”

  She shrugged. “I lost her father. And even on nights when I had him, he was never really mine. It made sense that I’d lose her, too.”

  I narrowed my eyes. “How does that make sense?”

  Mom clenched her jaw so tightly I could almost hear her teeth grinding together. Then, wiping at the tears that lingered on her cheeks, she said, “You don’t know anything about the Emorys. About Will’s father. He was ruthless. He did everything he could to make sure that Will stayed away from me and married someone else. If he’d ever found out Persephone was an Emory, who knows what he would have done to get her in his grasp.”

  I shook my head. “That doesn’t make any sense. You said Will wanted Persephone to be kept a secret because she’d be a scandal to his family. And now you’re suggesting they would try to take her from you?”

  She let out a breath. “Both things were possible,” she said. “It was possible that if the town knew about Will having a daughter with me, they would turn on him in a second. You know how Spring Hill is—all holier-than-thou types. I’m sure they’d be able to overlook it if the affair were with one of their own—but me? South Side Annie O’Leary? No way. They’d eviscerate him. They’d send a strict message that those from the north side of town do not sully their reputations by fraternizing with diner waitresses.”

  She paused to breathe again, taking the air in sharply, as if stringing together so many words had exhausted her.

  “But it was also possible,” she continued, “that, regardless of the scandal, Richard Emory would want his granddaughter. That he wouldn’t be able to stand the idea of an Emory—someone from such a godly bloodline—slumming it with the likes of me. That he’d find some way to portray me as an unfit mother, bribe or blackmail the right people, and take her away from me. And obviously I couldn’t let that happen. I couldn’t let Persephone live with Richard. It would have been like sending her to the Underworld!”

  My mouth was open, ready to respond, but at the mention of the Underworld, I froze. She said he wasn’t good enough to be her child’s father, Jill had remembered Mom explaining about the man she’d met in her classics class. So she was rescuing Persephone from a life in the Underworld.

  “Did Jill know about this?” I demanded. “About Will being Persephone’s dad?”

  I braced myself for the possibility that Jill might have lied to me. It seemed so unfathomable; she’d always been honest with me about everything. Still, Jill was an O’Leary woman. She would know how to keep her sister’s secrets.

  “No,” Mom said. “Jill thought it was someone from coll
ege. I told you, I couldn’t tell anyone.”

  “Not even your sister?”

  “Especially not my sister! You know Jill. If I’d told her, she’d have barged right into the situation and tried to fix everything. But she’d only have done more harm than good. Just imagine if she told Richard to stay away from the baby! He’d have snatched Persephone up in an instant.”

  I crossed my arms over my chest. “Come on,” I said. “He wouldn’t have taken her.”

  “Yes, he would have!” she cried. “Will told me so himself!”

  I paused. “What?”

  “He told me that if his father ever found out, Richard would do anything he could to make sure I never saw Persephone again.”

  I felt my skin flush, my pulse quickening again. “He was lying to you,” I said. “Manipulating you. He would have told you just about anything to make sure you didn’t screw up his career. I mean—just—think about this, Mom!”

  “I have thought about it! I spent every day of Persephone’s childhood thinking about it. You have no idea what it was like—especially those first few years. Every time the doorbell rang, I was terrified it was Richard—that he’d found out somehow, and he’d be there on the front steps with some fancy court order in his hands. Every time a car slowed down in front of our house, I was sure it was one of Richard’s people spying on me. When Persephone was a baby, I couldn’t—I wouldn’t even take two steps from her in the grocery store for fear that Richard would pop up out of nowhere and snatch her from the cart!”

  “That’s ridiculous,” I said. “You were her mother. You had rights. This was just Will messing with your mind. You have to see that!”

  She whipped her head from side to side. “My rights meant nothing. You don’t know what Richard did—what he must have done—to get Will away from me. Will would never have picked that—that woman over me, not if he’d had a choice. Richard did something—blackmailed him in some way. He—”