The Winter Sister

by Megan Collins

  “Then why did you go to Will’s father’s funeral?” I asked. “If the Emorys are so horrible, why would you ever step foot in a service for one of them? Why bother paying your respects to Will at all?”

  I saw the second that she loosened, her hands unclenching from the armrests as she sagged back into her chair. Just like that, I noticed, I was the stronger one again.

  “Because I love him, obviously,” she said. “He’d had a loss, and I love him.”

  “Still?” The word shot out of my mouth. “You love him now, present tense? Even after he hurt you so badly? Even after what you just said about your—your twitching raisin?”

  “Yes,” she said quietly, dropping her gaze into her hands. “Even after that.”

  “Why?” I demanded. I heard the clock on the wall ticking, the refrigerator’s buzz and hum. I saw her right hand squeeze her left, her knuckles going white.

  Finally, she shrugged. “I don’t know,” she said. “It just won’t stop.”

  Her voice was a leaf letting go of its branch, gentle as an exhalation, but I shook my head, unsatisfied. “I don’t understand,” I said. “It’s been—how many years?”

  I thought of the date scrawled on the back of the picture of Mom and Will.

  “Like, thirty-seven?” I asked. “It’s been thirty-seven years since you dated him?”

  Mom shrugged again. “That sounds right,” she said, turning her head away from me to stare at the muted TV. “But it doesn’t matter how long it’s been.”

  “How could it not matter? How could you not have moved on in all that time? Mom, this—this isn’t good for you.”

  She watched the screen awhile before she spoke. “Haven’t you ever been in love?”

  I straightened my spine, glanced at the TV as if it were another person in the room that she might have been speaking to.

  “I mean—I guess,” I said. “I’ve had relationships. And they’ve ended. And I’ve always moved on.”

  “No,” she said, her eyes still focused on the screen in front of her. “Not that kind of love. I’m talking about love that feels like—like your bones are filled with light.”

  I flicked my eyes toward the Persephone constellation, where all the edges of her body were formed by stars. After so many years, she still remained there, a painted skeleton simulating brightness.

  “Um,” I said, “I can’t say that I have. But still—”

  “Well, what about me, then?”

  When I looked back at Mom, her eyes were already clamped onto mine. Lit by the lamp beside her, they seemed almost metallic—more silver than gray.

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “You still love me, right?”

  The question made my heartbeat stutter. It was a moment before I could answer. “Why would you ask that?”

  “Well,” she began, “here you were just now, cataloguing all my faults. I’m an alcoholic. I shut down. I shut you out. Jill had to step in because I was ‘too drunk to be your mother.’ ” She air-quoted the phrase, her tone slightly mocking.

  “But,” she added, “you still love me, don’t you?”

  I hesitated. My mind flashed between memories of her fingers on my face—her scent a floral, lingering thing I could still smell while I was at school—and memories of her fingers choking the neck of a bottle as she dragged herself into her room.

  “That’s not the same,” I finally said.

  “Of course it is,” she insisted. “I hurt you, Sylvie. I know that I did.”

  I felt my throat hollow out. What Mom had just said—it wasn’t an apology exactly, but it was the closest thing I’d ever gotten to one.

  “It’s the same with”—Mom paused and then swallowed—“me and Will. I can’t stop loving him just because he hurt me, not when I loved him so deeply to begin with. And it’s not only that, it’s . . .”

  Her eyes became distant, as if she could see right through me to the kitchen, to the houses down the street, to the gray and shimmering past.

  “I still dream about him,” she said, and even her voice was in another place. “Ever since it ended, I have these dreams. They’re so real, I can—I can hear his voice. And not in a vague, dreamlike way. I can actually hear the . . . grit of him. I can remember his voice in my dreams better than I can when I’m awake. I can feel his fingertips on my skin. I can smell him, even. Like leather and mown grass. And every time, every dream, no matter what he’s done—I always take him back.”

  Her eyelids fluttered, and her head shook back and forth so slightly I wasn’t even sure she was controlling the movement.

  “Then I wake up,” she said. “And I lose him all over again. He’s gone and I’m—still alone, but with a fresh new ache. The wound, it’s—never fully closed, you know. Not with those dreams. Not with—”

  She pressed her lips together, cutting off the sentence as cleanly as scissors cutting through thread. Then, as slowly as I’d ever seen, she stood up from her chair and wavered a little where she stood.

  “I’m going to bed,” she said. “You’ve made me so tired.”

  I watched her turn around, her feet soundless on the carpet.

  “Mom, wait.”

  It reminded me of something—the way she’d described her dreams, the effect they had on her in the morning. I could easily imagine her waking to a world without Will, remembering what she’d lost, and then curling into herself under the sheets. She’d be unable to face the day after that, unable to open the shades or even leave her bed.

  She looked back at me, but her gaze was limp, falling more against my collarbone than my face. “What?” she asked.

  “What was the fifteenth?”

  The clock continued ticking as she paused. “Huh?”

  “The fifteenth of every month. What happened then?”

  In an instant, her eyes sharpened; a tendon in her neck went tight. “How do you know about that?” she asked, and it was the second time in one conversation that she’d uttered that question, the same accusatory tone lacing her words.

  “Persephone used to call it your Dark Day. Every fifteenth—or nearly, anyway—it was like you were a different person. You’d just . . . disappear.”

  She turned away from me again, and I watched the stiff, unyielding board of her back.

  “What was it, Mom? Tell me.”

  The silence became so dense for a minute that it swallowed all other sounds—the clock, the refrigerator, the blood drumming against my temples. I felt like I was impossibly close to something, and that if she’d just answer me, she’d become less like the question mark that had too frequently punctuated my past. She could tell me what it was—the fifteenth, the Dark Day—and I could finally know her. We could know each other, maybe, again.

  “You really want to know what it is?” she asked quietly.

  “Yes,” I breathed.

  “It’s . . .”

  I stopped my lungs, listening.

  “. . . none of your fucking business.”

  She left me then, moving away down the hall, and my shoulders sunk so low they seemed to become edgeless. In a moment, I heard her bedroom door close and then lock, a sound I knew as well as my own voice.

  “Idiot,” I muttered to myself.

  After a few minutes, I turned off the TV and the lights, checked the dead bolts, and headed into my own room—that somber, sisterless place. Glancing at Persephone’s bed, I felt something in me throb. The box for Tommy Dent was still there, right where I’d tossed it on Thursday. I averted my gaze and crossed the room to crawl into my bed. My eyes traced the cracks in the ceiling, and at some point—maybe an hour later, maybe just fifteen minutes—I heard my phone vibrate with a text.

  “Everything went great,” Jill wrote. “Missy and Baby are just fine. She doesn’t have a name yet, but she’s gorgeous.”

  Then a picture came in—a little blurry and off-center, but it showed a tiny pink body in a tiny white blanket tucked up against Missy’s neck. I smiled at the imag
e, putting my finger on the baby’s cheek.

  “She’s perfect,” I wrote back to Jill. “I can’t wait to meet her.”

  “We’ll come visit you and Annie as soon as we can,” Jill replied—and I picked my head up, staring at the wall as the edges of an idea came together in my mind.

  “Or I could come to Boston,” I wrote. “It’s probably easier that way. I could stay for a weekend, days when Mom doesn’t have treatment.”

  I was instantly comforted by the possibility of it. I would cradle this new little human, and Jill would hum in the kitchen, stirring pots of food that, even three rooms away, smelled delicious. I’d help with the laundry and the cooking, I’d watch the baby so Missy could nap, and Mom would be fine back at home. She’d probably revel in my absence, breathe it in like a scent she wanted to savor. For days, there’d be no one to pester her with questions, no one who cared enough to try to understand who she was, and I’d be in Boston, a city even farther from home than Providence, and whenever a bedroom door was closed, the person behind it would never turn the lock.

  “No,” Jill wrote, and the fantasy crumbled as quickly as I’d built it. “I need you to be there with your mother.”

  The walls in my room crept closer. The house itself was shrinking, shriveling up like the raisin Mom believed was her heart.

  “I’ll call you soon,” Jill wrote. “We’re going to Skype with Carl and show him his beautiful daughter!”

  I let my phone slip from my grasp. Then I lay with my arms at my sides as if strapped to my bed with restraints. A few moments later, another text came in, and instead of Jill again, it was Lauren.

  “Hey,” she’d written, “I looked up your sister’s murder and I think we should talk.”

  I sucked in my breath, held it for a moment, and then slowly let it out. So now she knew—when Persephone died, how old I’d been, how much I’d kept from her about who I really was. I should have figured she’d do some research; Lauren wasn’t the type to wait for information.

  Nausea roiled in my stomach, my hands suddenly clammy. I knew what she’d ask me now: Why didn’t you tell me? But the only way to defend my decision was with the indefensible, the details that all the articles hadn’t reported. And how could I explain the window, the lock, the taps on the glass that I’d heard that night but hadn’t answered? How could I expect her to know the truth and love me anyway?

  I turned off my phone without responding. Rolling onto my side, I blinked a few times at Persephone’s bed, and studied the flaps of Tommy’s box, splayed open like begging hands. His name stared out at me in bold black letters, reminding me that I was not the only one who’d done my sister wrong. At the very least, he had watched her, left her notes, and then after she had died, he’d conned his way into taking her things. But what exactly had he wanted from her? And what had he done with her scarves, or the jeans she’d once drawn on, or her starfish necklace? My fingers twitched with the need to touch them all.

  I stared at the space beneath Tommy’s name, where the address of his house was neatly written. Each word was clear and unmistakable, as if I’d always been intended to see it and know exactly where he lived.

  Sitting up in bed, I swung my feet over the side and felt my pulse begin to pound. My heart was not a raisin—it was furiously pumping inside me—and I knew now it wasn’t Boston I needed to drive to; it was Tommy’s.

  20

  The sign announcing my arrival to Pewter Hinge, the trailer park where Tommy lived, called the place “a luxurious mobile home community,” and I wondered if I’d been wrong to picture Tommy’s trailer as little more than a dirty boxcar. I’d imagined dishes competing for space in the sink, a sheetless mattress kicked into the corner of the room. I’d imagined all of his spaces, even the road itself, to be dark and neglected, but the piles of shoveled snow beneath the sign were reflecting the afternoon sunlight, and I had to pull down my visor to keep from being blinded.

  Just before I’d left the house that afternoon, I’d received another text from Lauren. “Come on, Sylvie,” she’d said. “Don’t ignore me. Let’s talk.” But I didn’t want to talk, I wanted to do, and now my phone sat in my cup holder with the ringer turned off as I navigated the rows of trailers, all with the same awning-covered doors and muted siding. As soon as I found Tommy’s, confirming the address with the piece of paper I’d gripped to a moist crinkle, I squeezed the steering wheel with both hands.

  A navy BMW sat in front of his house. It was a scratched older model, but it looked wildly out of place. Parking behind it, I grabbed the package that Mom had made for Tommy and got out of the car. As I walked toward the front door, I measured my breaths, and when I climbed up the steps, I kept my teeth clenched together, my toes curled tight in my boots. An icy wind swirled around me as I knocked.

  For a few moments after Tommy opened the door, I could only blink at him—the bulk of his body, broader than I remembered; the sandy hair that was already thinning; the goatee that seemed coarse as a broom. He looked nothing like the scrawny boy who once lived on my street. He blinked at me, too, taking in my face, the box in my arms, the entire length of my body, and then he laughed, loud and explosive as a car with a broken muffler.

  “Jesus,” he said. “Special delivery?” He nodded toward the package.

  “Um . . .” I looked at his eyes, a deep but murky brown. “You probably don’t remember me, but I used to—”

  “I know who you are,” he said. “And I didn’t kill your sister.”

  My mouth fell open, cold air rushing along my teeth. He was grinning at me, seeming to find pleasure in my surprise, the smile slinking farther up his cheeks as he continued to look me over.

  “What?” I said. “I didn’t even . . .”

  He took a step back and opened the door as wide as it would go, allowing me a glimpse into his living room. I squinted into the shadows, and when I saw what Tommy was gesturing toward, I stiffened.

  There, standing in front of a chair, as if it were the most natural place in the world for him to be, was Ben.

  “What are you doing here?” I hissed at him.

  He looked a little embarrassed, rubbing the back of his neck and staring at the floor, but there was something else in his expression, too—annoyance, maybe? Frustration? I didn’t have time to untangle what I was seeing. He started toward me, and when he reached the door, he turned to Tommy.

  “Mind if I step outside with her for a second?” he asked.

  “Oh sure,” Tommy replied. “But hurry back, okay? I can tell this is gonna be fun.”

  He was still grinning, and as Ben came out onto the steps and grabbed the knob to close the door behind us, Tommy moved to keep us in his view, craning his neck until the door was fully shut.

  I marched down the steps, gripping the box to my chest, and Ben followed, the two of us stopping on the stretch of curb in front of the BMW—which, I realized now, belonged to him.

  “What are you doing here?” I asked him again.

  He crossed his arms over his sweater—his coat must have been inside; he must have made himself right at home in Tommy’s trailer—and his breath resembled smoke as it slipped through his lips.

  “What are you doing here?” he fired back. “You said you didn’t want to go anywhere near him.”

  “I don’t,” I said. “But I realized that I have to, okay? I need some answers.”

  “Well so do I,” he replied. “But if you changed your mind, then why didn’t you call me?”

  “Because we’re not a team, Ben.”

  He shook his head, then glanced at my car, tucked into the space behind his. “I can’t believe you came here alone. That’s so dangerous.”

  “You came alone.”

  “Yeah, but—”

  “But what?” I pressed. “I can take care of myself, you know.”

  “That’s not the point,” he said. “We have no idea what this guy is capable of. And you—you’re Persephone’s sister. Who knows what that might trigger in him
. You could’ve gone in there and . . . and he might have . . .”

  “He might have what?”

  “I don’t know. That’s the problem. I just . . . I want you to be careful.”

  He let out his breath in a rush, as if it had been spooled up tight inside him. As the muscles in his face relaxed, the expression he’d had drained away. His eyes became softer around the edges, and I wondered, for only a moment, if his frustration just now had been out of a feeling of protectiveness for me, the little sister of the girl he claimed to love.

  His brows knitted together. “What?” he said. “Why are you looking at me like that?”

  “Huh?” I blinked and glanced over his shoulder at Tommy’s door. It was still shut, but I could imagine Tommy with his ear pressed against it on the other side. “Nothing. I’m not—looking at you like anything. How long have you been here anyway?”

  He shook his head. “Not long. You showed up maybe ten minutes after I did.”

  “Oh.” I shifted my weight, repositioned my hands under the box. “Well, what have you guys talked about so far?”

  Ben looked at his shoe while he flattened a clump of snow. “A whole lot of nothing. He’s very amused by it all. My questions. My showing up in the first place. It’s one big joke to him.” His foot shot out and kicked at the hardened snow along the curb. Then he looked at what I was carrying. “What is that? You brought him something?”

  I glanced at the box. “No,” I said. “Well—kind of. It’s leverage.”

  He nodded, as if that were all the explanation he required. “We’re gonna need it,” he said. “That guy’s a piece of work. But, who knows, maybe you’ll have better luck with him. You’re her sister—that might . . .” He put his finger near his temple and swirled it in the air. “Scramble him all up.”

  “You just told me five seconds ago that that would be a bad thing,” I reminded him. “You said I might trigger him.”