The Winter Sister

by Megan Collins

“This isn’t a joke, Mom. I promise you. I was there when he confessed.”

  “You’re lying.”

  “I’m not. I saw the police take him away.”

  Her eyes narrowed, confusion spreading all over her face. “Well—it has to be some mistake, then. He’s her father, Sylvie. Why the hell would he do such a thing?”

  “Because he’s the man that he is,” I answered. “And I know you don’t want to hear it, I know you might not be able to hear it, but he’s not a good man, Mom. He’s bad. He’s really, really bad.”

  She shook her head, the wisps of her hair swishing through the air. “Stop it,” she said. “Stop.”

  But I couldn’t. I had to explain it to her. I had to tell her what he’d admitted—how he’d tried to reason with Persephone, and when that failed, he killed her. How it was as simple as that. And as I relayed his words, trying to remain as faithful to them as possible, I watched Mom’s eyes, waiting for the tears that needed to fill them up.

  “No,” she kept saying as I poisoned the air with words that made it hard for us to breathe. But still, she didn’t cry, her lips didn’t tremble, her shoulders didn’t shake.

  When I finally finished, my throat was raw. I watched as Mom pinched her eyes shut and shook her head slightly, back and forth, back and forth. I waited for her to speak, but she just kept it up—back and forth, back and forth—until moments, or maybe minutes later, she went completely still.

  I listened to the clock count away the seconds. I searched for any flicker of movement on her face, but she was immobile as a gravestone. Then, just when I thought she’d shut me out so completely that she’d managed to erase everything I’d just told her, her mouth opened.

  “It was a mistake,” she said quietly.

  “What?” I blurted. “Mom, no, I just explained it all to you. He admitted it himself. He said—”

  Her eyes opened, a soft but insistent plea fogging her irises.

  “You said he hadn’t planned to kill her,” she said, “so that means he did it by mistake.”

  I was paralyzed, my wide eyes locked in place, my muscles completely unresponsive, but then, in a sudden rush, my breath spilled out of me, and I began to sputter.

  “That—that’s your response? You’re fine with him killing your daughter as long as he didn’t—didn’t mean to?”

  Her face didn’t falter. Her expression was set in stone.

  “Listen to me, Mom. Whether he meant to do it or not, he still covered it up for sixteen years. He lied to you.”

  “It isn’t lying if I never asked him about it.”

  Her words shoved me backward. My throat creaked with attempts to speak, but only air came out.

  “How,” I finally managed, “how can you be defending him?”

  “I love him,” she said, as plainly as if she were stating her name or address.

  “He killed Persephone,” I said through clenched teeth.

  She put her hand in the air like a shield. “I love him,” she repeated, but her voice wobbled this time. “I love him.”

  She began to stand, her arms shaking with the effort of pushing against the chair. I felt no instinct to help her, to leap toward her and steady her. Instead, I watched her struggle, watched her rickety knees try to carry her weight, watched her nearly fall over as she reached for the bucket on the floor.

  “I love him,” she insisted, straightening back up, and I couldn’t be sure if the sheen I saw across her eyes was a film of tears or a flash of light. “I love him, I love him.”

  Clutching the bucket to her chest, she turned away from me, and I watched her go, listening for the increasing rasp of her voice as it echoed those words: “I love him. I love him. I love him.” Even as she disappeared down the hall, even as her bedroom door closed and the lock clicked into place, I could still hear her mumbling.

  “I love him.”

  The words were becoming deeper and deeper—“I love him, I love him”—until they sounded like nothing more than a prolonged and agonized moan.

  Then, finally, I heard a sob—low and cavernous, as if it welled up from the most buried part of her. And then it was two sobs, three sobs, four, one right after the other until it was too many to count.

  I loosened with relief. Even as her pain thundered in my ears, I felt myself grow lighter, more buoyant, as if gravity were relaxing its grasp on me for the first time in years.

  For a long while that afternoon, I sat on the couch, listening to my mother cry. At times, I even smiled, not at her sorrow or anguish, not at the fists I could hear beating against her bed. I listened to her sob so hard, so feverishly, that I imagined, the corners of my lips lifting, that the sobs might split her open, like a stem breaking through layers of darkness and soil into light.

  30

  That night, I called Aunt Jill to tell her everything I’d learned. I explained how Mom had been locked in her room since I told her, how she hadn’t responded to my knocks at dinnertime, hadn’t even come out for the plate of food I’d left in the hallway. When I finished speaking, Jill immediately started planning a trip to see us in a few days.

  “No,” I told her. “You should stay with Missy. She needs you.”

  “Carl’s parents fly in on Tuesday. Missy and the baby will be fine until then.”

  “Yeah, but—”

  “No buts. Nothing you say will stop me from showing up, okay? That’s what family does, Sylvie. In times of crisis—or times of . . . unbelievable news—we show up.”

  I imagined it then—Jill at the front door, gathering me into a hug. The smell of her—cinnamon cookies and coconut lotion—would feel more like home than the house I’d been living in for the past couple weeks.

  “How do you do it?” I asked, a tear wetting my cheek.

  “Do what?”

  “Bounce from person to person who needs you. You took care of me in high school, and spent years after that taking care of Mom. And now you’re taking care of Missy and the baby and Mom and me, all at once. It’s so much, Jill. I’d hate to think that you’re sacrificing your own needs.”

  Jill sighed impatiently. “Oh, what do I need,” she asked, “other than the people I love?”

  I wiped at my cheek with my sleeve. “Well thank you,” I said. “Seriously, thank you so much, Jill. I don’t know how I ever would have—”

  “Stop,” she interrupted. “It’s nothing. Now, let’s hang up so I can text you a picture of the baby. She’s sure to make you feel a little better.”

  And she was right. The picture that came in a few minutes later showed the baby wrapped tightly in a knitted blanket, her face poking out the top with wide, curious eyes. “Mallory Joy, our little potato,” Jill had captioned it, and I laughed then, as effortlessly as breathing.

  I stared at the picture for a little while longer, running my pinky finger over the baby’s cheek. Then I took a deep breath, pulled up my list of contacts, and finally called Lauren back.

  “You’re lucky I’m even picking up at this point,” she said by way of greeting. “And literally the only reason I am is because I have some news.”

  I was startled by the tone of her voice. Along with the impatience and frustration I’d been expecting, there was a note of excitement, too.

  “Okay . . .” I said.

  “And obviously we have a lot to talk about, but I’ve been dying to tell you this all day. Only—I promised myself that I wasn’t gonna call you again until you called me. And yes, that sounds like something I’d say about a guy, but you’re basically my wife at this point, so shut up.”

  “I wasn’t gonna say anything.”

  “Okay, so . . . when I got into work this morning, Steve told me that some woman he knows is looking to hire a new tattoo artist at her parlor.”

  “Oh. And you’re thinking of applying?”

  “What? No, dummy. I already have a job. You’re going to apply. Steve said he’d give you a glowing recommendation. Isn’t that amazing?”

  For a few moments, I
didn’t know what to say. The snap of the latex gloves against my wrists, the buzzing of the tattoo machine—they seemed like details from a movie I’d seen, not something I’d lived every day for the past several years. It was as if someone else had been in control of my life, telling my body what to do, my mouth what to say, and all that time, I’d just been hunched somewhere deep inside of myself, letting it all happen because it was easier and less exhausting than trying to live on my own.

  Lauren barreled through my silence. “It’s in East Providence,” she added. “So, you know, gross—but at least you’ll be doing what you love again, right?”

  “Yeah,” I said reflexively. “Right.”

  “What’s wrong? Why aren’t you more excited about this?”

  “No, I am. But . . .”

  “But what?”

  “I’m not sure it’s the right job for me anymore.”

  Actually, I knew that it wasn’t.

  “What are you talking about?” Lauren challenged. “Of course it’s the right job for you. You’re so good at it.”

  “Yeah, but I don’t think I need it anymore.”

  “You don’t need it anymore? What’s going on? Did you win the lottery or something? Tap into some trust fund I don’t know about?”

  There was so much I would tell her, finally—and once I did, she would know what I meant. I no longer needed to watch a needle sink pigment into flesh, no longer needed to punish myself by reenacting what I’d done to Persephone, always seeing her arm instead of the client’s, always seeing Ben’s dark fingerprints instead of the blank canvas of the stranger’s skin. Because I knew now that it wasn’t me who deserved to be tortured by guilt and memory. I’d been fourteen years old—just a kid, as Ben had said—and none of what Will did to her that night had been my fault. Never mind the painted bruises, never mind the window I’d locked up tight. There’d still been a man—not a kid, but a full-grown man—who had used his hands as a noose around his daughter’s neck, who had squeezed and squeezed until she—

  My throat burned as I pictured it.

  But still, I had to keep remembering; it had been his hands, not mine.

  “The truth is,” I said to Lauren, “I’ve just been going through the motions with that job for a long time now, and I don’t want to anymore. I don’t know what I’m going to do next, and I’m not really sure what I love doing or what kind of job is right for me. But I feel free for the first time to figure out what it is.”

  There was a pause on Lauren’s end. “Wow,” she said. “You’re being really serious.”

  “Yeah, well, it’s been a serious couple of weeks. And I’m really sorry I took so long to return your messages.”

  “Oh yeah,” Lauren said dryly. “That.”

  “But you know what?” I continued. “I’m actually glad I didn’t talk to you about it before now. Because I didn’t know the whole story then. And you’re my best friend, Lauren. You deserve to know the whole story.”

  She was quiet for a few moments, and I could hear her breathing against the phone. “You’re talking about your sister now,” she said.

  “Yes,” I replied. “Persephone. And if it’s all right with you, I’d like to tell you all about her.”

  • • •

  The next morning, I stood outside Mom’s room holding my phone. I put my ear to the door, listening for a sound to confirm she was awake, and even though I heard none, I knocked.

  “Come in,” Mom said after a moment.

  When I tried the doorknob, it turned easily, and though the curtains were still closed, Mom’s light was on. She was sitting up in bed, a box of tissues in her lap.

  “Hi,” I breathed.

  “Hi.”

  She was wigless and scarfless, her head all skin and skull, but she was up. She was speaking. She’d let me inside.

  “Aunt Jill sent a new picture of the baby,” I said, stepping toward her. “Can I show you?”

  Mom hesitated, her eyes swollen and uncertain, but then she shrugged. “Okay.”

  I approached the side of her bed and held the picture up. She surprised me then by moving over a few inches so there was room for me to sit beside her. As the mattress creaked beneath our shared weight, she took the phone from my hand.

  “Look at the caption,” I said.

  She didn’t laugh or even smile as she read it, but her eyes softened a little. She used her fingers to zoom in on the baby’s face, and then, quietly, she gasped.

  “She’s so pink,” she said. “Just like Persephone when she was born.”

  I looked at the side of her face. “Really?” I said.

  Mom nodded. “You were always so pale.” She spoke without moving her eyes from the picture. “Like a sheet of paper held up to the light. And that was pretty, too. But Persephone . . .”

  Her lips lifted slightly, the promise of a smile budding on her face. “She was the most beautiful pink I’ve ever seen.”

  • • •

  I spent some time that afternoon tending to the driveway and front steps. A coating of snow had fallen overnight, and when I came back inside from clearing it, I saw I had a voicemail from an unfamiliar number.

  “Hi, Sylvie,” the caller said, a wary tinge to her voice. “It’s Hannah Falley. I’m sorry to just call you like this, but I saw the news, and I spoke to Detective Parker, and now, I don’t know, really. I just wanted to say . . .” She cleared her throat. “I’m sorry we never figured it out. We just didn’t know to look at him. We should have. I want you to know we never dismissed what you said back then. But he just didn’t seem connected in any way, other than being Ben Emory’s father, so we missed it. And that’s on us.”

  She made a soft chuckling sound, one without any humor in it at all.

  “I mean, Tommy Dent pointed us right there, didn’t he? ‘Talk to the mother, talk to the mother.’ And now that I finally know what he meant, I keep thinking: maybe if we’d just hit harder when we asked your mom about Persephone’s father—who he was, how long since he’d been in the picture, all that—she would have told us the truth about your sister’s paternity. And then we would have had reason to look closer at Will. And then . . .”

  She sighed. “Anyway, I just called to say I’m so sorry I didn’t catch it. But I’m glad you finally know. I hope this can be the start of some healing for you and your family. So take care, Sylvie, okay?”

  For a while, I listened to the silence that followed Falley’s message. I stood in the middle of my room, staring at the wall, and when I finally pulled the phone away from my face, its screen was black. Pressing the home button, I watched it light up with my new lock screen photo, the one of a bundled-up Mallory Joy, and I savored the sight of her—how new she was, how beautifully unwounded—until a tap on my bedroom window startled me into dropping the phone. It thudded against the rug as I whipped toward the glass.

  Ben’s face peered in at me.

  “Jesus!” I breathed. And for just an instant, I saw him the way I used to, nights when he’d creep toward our window, waiting for Persephone to finish getting ready. I saw the scar on his cheek and felt that same old instinct to shudder.

  But then I took a deep breath, unlocked the latch, and thrust the window open.

  “What are you doing here?” I whispered, careful to keep my voice from reaching Mom in the living room.

  “Sorry,” Ben whispered back. “I’m sorry. I needed to see you, but I still don’t have your number, and I didn’t want to go to the door, just in case your mom . . . And so I went to the window to see if you were in your room, but then I saw you were on the phone, so I waited, and now I’m just beginning to realize how stalkerish I’m being. Shit. I’m sorry.”

  His cheeks reddened, and though I didn’t know if it was with embarrassment or cold, my hesitation was brief. Waving him inside, I put a finger to my lips in warning as he hoisted himself through the window. I crossed the room to lock the door, and when I turned back around, he was already standing on the rug between the b
eds.

  “That’s a lot harder than it looks,” he whispered, gesturing toward the window. “Persephone made it seem so easy.”

  “Persephone was an eighteen-year-old girl,” I reminded him, walking back across the room to close the window and shut out the cold. “Now what are you doing here?”

  “Right,” he said, and he reached into his pocket. Pulling out his hand, he revealed Persephone’s necklace in his palm. For a moment, the starfish caught the sun and winked.

  “With everything that happened the other night,” he said, “you never actually ended up taking this. But I still want you to have it.” He stared down into his hand. “I think Persephone would want that, too.”

  Letting the chain dangle from his fingers, he held the necklace toward me, the same way he’d offered it at his house on Wednesday.

  “I’ve been thinking about it,” Ben whispered, “and I think it must have been in my dad’s car that night, not mine. I think when he . . .” He pressed his lips together and shook his head. “Maybe it fell off in the struggle. Maybe it was caught in his sleeve or something and it fell into the driveway when he got out of the car. So you might end up wanting to give it to the police as evidence, I don’t know, but I wanted that to be your—”

  “Ben, I’m sorry,” I cut in.

  Meeting my eyes, he cocked his head to the side. “For what?”

  I sat down on the edge of my bed, gesturing for him to do the same.

  “For accusing you the other night,” I said as he settled down beside me. “For freaking out and running away before you had a chance to explain. I feel really stupid about that, especially given what happened after.”

  Ben reached for my hand, and for a second, I thought he was going to hold it. Instead, he flattened my palm, dropping the necklace onto it. The gold shimmered against my skin, and I marveled at how light it felt. All these years, I’d imagined it so much heavier.

  “Don’t worry about that,” Ben said. “I get why you freaked out. But now we know.” Even though he was already whispering, his voice grew quieter then. “We know for sure what happened.”

  I nodded. Closing my fingers into a fist, I felt the points of Persephone’s starfish press into my palm. I looked at Ben, and the scar on his cheek was like the line of a mountain range on a map.