The Winter Sister

by Megan Collins

  I hadn’t prepared myself for her deterioration. Every time I’d imagined seeing her again, I’d pictured her looking the same way she had when we were last at Jill’s together—curveless as a cigarette, heavy bags beneath her eyes, but still, even through her bitterness, familiar. I never once considered that the bones of her wrists would stick so closely to her skin, or that the shape of her head would seem so alien. I hadn’t thought to equate her illness with something that would vacuum her up inside.

  “So.” Mom’s voice halted my thoughts, and I wasn’t sure how long or how noticeably I’d been staring at her. “What do you think? Will I be gracing the cover of Elle magazine soon?”

  My eyes widened. My mother had just made a joke. A dark, mirthless joke, its tone laced with acidity, but a joke nonetheless. What’s more—she was speaking to me, and without Aunt Jill’s prompting.

  “Um . . .” I struggled for an appropriate response. “Not Elle, no. But maybe Marie Claire. And only if all the regular models are busy that month.”

  I winced, pulling the coat I was still holding even closer. Mom chuckled, though, and while it was a deeply cynical sound, it was the first time I’d heard any kind of laughter from her since before Persephone died. She rocked lightly in the recliner, her slippered feet pushing gently against the floor, and she was looking at me like she was performing an evaluation. I regretted then not having cut my hair like Lauren always urged me to do. It hung shapelessly down to my shoulders and, according to Lauren, gave me a look of “pathetic self-negligence—like a cat that’s given up licking itself.”

  “Let me take your things,” Jill said, reaching for my coat and scarf. As she padded out of the living room, I crossed my arms and looked around, pretending to be interested in whatever changes had been made to the house’s decor over the years. But there were none. The couch was the same dusty brown it had always been, and the bookshelves of paperbacks and photo albums appeared unchanged. Even the TV had never been upgraded; it was small and boxy—nothing like the 48-inch flat screen that Lauren and I had in Providence—and on the wall beside that TV, Persephone’s constellation. It was twenty-six years old, but somehow, the painted stars still held their shine; the slash of silver where Persephone’s hand had angrily swiped was as vivid as the day it had happened. In smaller dots, like metallic snowflakes, the disappearance dust was scattered around the astral points of Persephone’s body.

  “You kept this,” I said to Mom.

  She’d been picking at the sleeve of her sweater. “Hmm?”

  “Persephone’s constellation.”

  Her lips tightened as she continued to look at her sleeve. She was plucking at something I couldn’t see, and as the seconds passed by, heavy and slow, I realized she wasn’t going to respond.

  “So,” Jill said, entering the room again, “should we go over everything? I need to get going in a little bit. I told Missy I’d be in Boston by dinnertime.”

  My heart quickened at the thought of Jill leaving, but I nodded and followed her into the kitchen. The small space, barely big enough for the table and chairs that were stuffed into it, was open to the living room, and I kept my eyes on Mom as Jill ticked off instructions.

  “I’ve written everything down over here,” Jill said. She spread out a few pieces of paper on the counter, and I watched as Mom continued her light rocking. “This is Missy’s cell phone number, which I know you already have, but that’s okay. This is the number for the cancer center at Brighton Memorial, just in case you have any questions. They’re really great over there. During the first cycle of chemo, I was calling them up every other day, and they never got annoyed. This is the number for the pharmacy—try to talk to Fran if you can; she’s the nicest of the three—and this is . . .”

  The litany of numbers, the orderly way in which she’d prepared me for almost any kind of emergency—it felt like I was babysitting. Still, I was grateful. I didn’t know the first thing about taking care of a sick person, and Mom was no child that I’d be watching for just a few hours.

  “. . . But they’ll give it to you if you ask.” Jill clicked the top of her pen. “Now, her appointments each week are on Monday and Wednesday. Her chemo always starts at ten a.m., but they draw blood first and take her vitals and everything, so you have to get there at nine on Monday, okay?”

  But today was only Saturday, which meant I had nothing to do on Sunday but be alone in the house with my mother.

  I looked at her, still rocking gently in the living room, her eyes focused on nothing. She seemed so fragile, as if by pushing her feet too forcefully against the floor, her bones would shatter. So why did I feel so afraid of her? What could she do to me now, in her weakened, skeletal form, that she hadn’t ever done before?

  “She should have a light meal before you leave on Monday morning,” Jill said. “I usually make her scrambled eggs, but cereal would be fine, too. Whatever you want.”

  “And what about what I want?” We both looked over at Mom, who had turned her head toward us, the first indication she’d given that she’d even been listening.

  “Well, okay,” Jill said. “What do you want, Annie?”

  Mom made a quick scoffing sound. “Not eggs,” she said. “Not cereal.”

  Jill drummed her fingers on the counter, breathed in and out. “Well, what then? Just let us know what you want and Sylvie can go to the store tomorrow.”

  Mom cocked her head to the side, as if considering her options.

  “Hmm,” she said. “I’d like some orange juice . . .” Jill grabbed the sheet of paper with the hospital’s information on it and started writing. “And some vodka . . .”

  “Annie—come on.”

  “What?” Mom opened her eyes wide in a look of feigned innocence. “It’ll be like a mimosa. That’s breakfast, Jill.”

  Jill crossed out what she’d written, slicing her pen through the words “orange juice” as if she meant to obliterate the drink completely.

  “I don’t get it,” Mom continued. “They pump me full of all this poison, but God forbid I enjoy a cocktail to make it all go down easier.”

  As Jill glanced at me, the annoyance in her eyes was clear as the crow’s-feet that puckered her skin. “Your mother’s quite the comedian when she’s sober,” she said.

  And that was it, of course. She was sober. It hit me like the sudden twitch of a body nearly asleep. That was why she was speaking to us, why she seemed so different from the woman who could only mumble out half-responses at Jill’s house two summers before. The vodka on her breath had been a constant for so many years that I hadn’t considered how her cancer would change that. She was sober—she was finally, finally sober—but even so, she didn’t feel like the mother I’d known before she started chasing her grief with alcohol. The mother from my childhood was peaceful, her voice as soothing to me as aloe on a burn, but this woman’s words had edges; they were cold and comfortless, wrapped in barbed wire.

  “I’m sure you already know this,” Jill said to me, “but she can’t have any alcohol. No matter what she says or does. Besides being absolutely horrible for her, it hurts her now, too.” She turned her head back toward Mom. “Doesn’t it, Annie?” She raised the volume of her voice, as if talking to someone elderly.

  “If you say so, Jill,” Mom said. “Thank goodness the chemo feels so good instead.”

  Jill ignored the comment, leaning her face close to mine, speaking just above a whisper. “Alcohol makes her feel like her esophagus is burning. Her words—believe it or not—not mine. That’s how we first discovered something was wrong.”

  I nodded, trying to imagine my mother calling Aunt Jill one day, a tinge of anxiety in her voice as she confessed that the thing she’d relied on for so long felt like it was killing her now instead.

  “Hey.” Jill looked concerned. She circled her warm hand around my wrist, making me realize how cold I felt, even through my RISD sweatshirt. “Are you okay?”

  “Yes,” I said. “I just . . .” I lowered my voi
ce, turning my back toward Mom. “I didn’t expect it to be like this.”

  Jill tilted her head, rubbing her thumb into my palm. “Which part?”

  “All of it, I think.”

  I knew I was being selfish. For the past several months, Jill had given up everything to take care of Mom—not to mention all the years she’d bought her groceries, paid her property taxes, handled general upkeep of the house, made sure Mom survived. Now, here I was, back home for only a few minutes, and already, I was buckling. How could Aunt Jill trust me with this? Even with her extensive notes and numbers, how could she expect me to know what my mother needed? I was in my thirties now—the deepening lines around my eyes reminded me of that every day—but suddenly, I felt more like a child than I had in years.

  “It’s gonna be fine,” Jill said. And then, because she was always truthful, she added, “It’s gonna have to be.”

  I squeezed Jill’s hand and managed a smile. “I know,” I said, though my nerves still felt taut as tightropes.

  Her eyes lingered on my face before shifting over to the clock on the microwave. “I need to get going.” She sounded apologetic—guilty, even.

  “Okay,” I said. “Are you sure you’re gonna be all right to drive, though?” I looked toward the sliding glass door, and the sky still glittered with falling snow. “It seems to have picked up a little.”

  “Oh, she’ll be fine,” Mom said from the corner of the room. “Don’t you know? Your Aunt Jill is a superhero, always swooping in to save people. Not even a blizzard could stop her.” A wry smile crept into her lips.

  “I’ve got four-wheel drive,” Jill said to me, as if she hadn’t even heard Mom speak. “It’ll be a piece of cake.”

  “Yeah, of course,” I agreed. “Tell Missy I’m thinking about her, okay? And let me know as soon as the baby’s born.”

  A soft glow blossomed on Jill’s cheeks at the mention of her soon-to-be grandchild. “You bet,” she said. Then, with a slow intake of breath, she walked toward Mom. “Okay, Annie. Sylvie’s gonna take it from here, all right?” I followed her into the living room, watching as she put her hand on Mom’s shoulder. “Is there anything I can do for you before I leave?”

  Mom shook her head, and as she did, I noticed a few strands of blonde hair still clinging to the nape of her neck. “I’m peachy,” she said.

  “Okay.” Jill leaned down, kissing Mom’s cheek, and I was surprised to see that Mom closed her eyes. She even lifted her hand to cup Jill’s elbow, a gesture so tender that I felt as if I’d intruded on something by witnessing it.

  “Love you,” Jill said, and I saw when she straightened back up that her eyes were shiny with tears.

  “Mmm,” Mom replied.

  Jill ran a finger beneath her eyelashes and then focused her attention on me. “Well,” she said, “my stuff’s already in the car.” She stepped forward and wrapped me in a hug. “Oh, Sylvie. I wish I had more time to catch up with you. I’ll be back to help out as soon as I can, though. I promise.”

  I nodded against her shoulder, and when we pulled away from each other, I whispered, “Okay.” There was more I should have said, but in that moment, I knew I could only say so much before my voice gave away how urgently I wanted her to stay.

  7

  I’d been expecting our bedroom—Persephone’s and mine—to look exactly the same. I’d imagined it like an exhibit in a museum, the artifacts of our childhood untouched—and for my side of the room, that was true. Besides the tightly made bed that I assumed Aunt Jill had been sleeping in, all of my things were precisely, eerily, the way I had left them. But Persephone’s side looked plundered. Though her tag-sale dresser and her bed with its tattered quilt remained, everything else was missing—even the dream catcher that had hung above her bed, even the jewelry box full of chunky, colorful necklaces that she’d stopped wearing when Mom gave her the gold starfish.

  The closet held only my things: school folders, forgotten stuffed animals, old dresses and coats. Persephone’s clothes were gone, but the hangers that once held them were clinging to the wooden pole as if certain they still had a purpose. Where was her vial of dried lavender, which she’d smell sometimes after arguing with Mom? Where was her dark green afghan, which she’d draped around her body like a robe on winter mornings?

  When I left home—first to go live with Aunt Jill, and then to Providence—Persephone’s neat rows of lipsticks had still been on the bureau. I knew this because I used to open their caps, twist the sticks until their colors bloomed from their metal tubes, and mime the way my sister had put them on. It was always my own reflection that looked back at me, though, and never, as some childish part of me had hoped, Persephone’s.

  I couldn’t imagine Mom getting rid of Persephone’s things. That would have required her, in her glassy-eyed, boozed-up states, to gather boxes, sort through clothes, and face that her daughter was dead.

  As soon as Jill had left that afternoon, Mom had turned on the TV and seemed absorbed in an infomercial on vacuum cleaners. For a few moments, I’d stood in the middle of the room, watching the flashes of “easy payments” and “limited time offer,” but then I’d wondered if she’d turned the program on just so we wouldn’t have to speak to each other.

  “I’m gonna go get my suitcases from the car,” I’d told her, and she’d only lifted her hand a little in response. Now, looking at Persephone’s side of the room, scrubbed clean of her existence, I had the urge to march back into the living room, stand in front of the TV, and demand to know what had happened to all those scraps of my sister’s life. The thing that stopped me, though, was the window.

  After Persephone died, I’d kept the cheap venetian blinds drawn and closed, unable to look at the latch I’d locked that night. It didn’t matter that the room was always dim as a result; I had to give myself a fighting chance in those months after it happened. Now, the blinds were wide open, and I could imagine Aunt Jill pulling the string to lift them up that morning, blinking at the cloudy light outside. I walked to the window and reached for the latch, switching it back and forth—locked, unlocked, locked again. It would have been so easy to let her back in that night. I could have played off the lock as a prank, and maybe we even would have laughed about it together. Instead, I now had to wonder if one of her last thoughts, with Ben’s hands around her neck, with her breath trapped like a rock in her throat, was that I’d done this to her.

  Turning away from the window, I hefted one of my suitcases onto my bed. As I unzipped it, my phone chimed with a text message. I pulled it out of my back pocket and was immediately comforted by the sight of Lauren’s name on the screen.

  “Okay, it’s been a few hours,” she wrote. “You coming back yet?” Then she sent a picture of a sticky note, on which she had drawn a little map of Connecticut and Rhode Island. Over Spring Hill, she’d placed a bold red X, the upper right point of which extended into an arrow that traveled all the way to Providence. There, she’d outlined a boxy little house with hearts for the door and windows.

  “If you’re home by Monday,” Lauren added, “I’ll give you a huge discount on this tat.”

  “And mess up my whole brand?” I joked. “I’m the tattooless tattoo artist!”

  “Exactly! It’s so unexpected. Steve would hire you back in a second. He’d be like ‘OMG look at her commitment to the craft! And Lauren, YOU designed this stunner? I must give you a raise at once! An extra three thousand dollars a week, plus one puppy (pre-house-trained) every other month!’ ”

  I laughed, and then covered my mouth to catch the sound. With the TV on, Mom probably wouldn’t have even heard me, but it felt inappropriate, somehow, to be laughing in that house. I flicked my gaze toward the window latch again and I felt my smile go slack.

  “That sounds just like Steve,” I wrote after a few moments.

  “Obviously,” she replied. Then she added, “So how is it being back at your mom’s house?”

  I hesitated before responding. What could I say? That things
were even stranger here than I’d imagined? That it wasn’t just Mom that seemed skeletal, but my bedroom, too, Persephone’s things having vanished right along with the muscle from Mom’s bones? If I explained that to Lauren, I’d have to explain so much else. Instead, I wrote, “It’s okay, I’m unpacking now, I’ll update you later,” and I let my phone slip onto the bed.

  As I looked back toward my suitcase, my eyes swept across some of my old paintings that leaned against the wall in the corner of the room. I remembered bringing them over from Aunt Jill’s just before I left for college. I’d planned to find a place to store them in the house, but in the rush of it all, my eagerness to leave, I never had. Now, unlike Persephone’s things, they were still here, seemingly untouched. Kneeling in front of the stack, I blew a layer of dust off the top of the canvases and began to flip through them.

  How easily it came back to me then, the single-mindedness with which I’d painted in the years after Persephone died. My grades had slipped, and the school psychologist said it was normal, that I was likely depressed. In those days, all I wanted was to move away from the black hole of my mother’s grief, from the place where everything in my life had become unhitched.

  The guidance counselor kept reminding me that college could be my fresh start, that even as an underclassman, it was never too early to start preparing for my future.

  “Because you still have one,” she said, “no matter what you’ve lost. You’re still allowed to have dreams, you know. You’re still allowed to chase them.”

  I winced when she said it—the cheesiness of it, the fact that my only dream was to go, get out, be gone—but I couldn’t deny that college was the logical solution to my problem. I knew that I’d never be able to afford it—I didn’t have enough money for a week’s worth of groceries, let alone tuition—which meant I’d need to get a full scholarship somewhere. And with my missing homework assignments and late papers dragging down my once stellar GPA, the only chance I had left was art school.