The Winter Sister

by Megan Collins

  “How are you doing?” I asked.

  His eyes were focused on my window.

  “I’m okay,” he said. “I’m moving out of the guesthouse. I haven’t found a new place or anything yet, but I took today and tomorrow off to try to make some headway.”

  He chuckled dryly. “The hospital’s cutting me some slack. ‘Take all the time you need,’ my supervisor said. But I wouldn’t be surprised if they try to fire me. Son of an alleged killer and all that. Sort of a PR nightmare.”

  “They won’t fire you,” I assured him.

  He blinked a few times and then looked at me, his eyes drilling into mine. “I think that bastard is going to get away with it,” he said.

  I felt the pinch of my lungs as I stopped breathing. Then, the air hitching between my lips, I asked, “Why do you say that?”

  Ben shrugged and looked back toward the window. “I haven’t talked to him,” he said, “but I hear he’s hired this whole team of lawyers. Some high-profile firm. And Tommy—well, suddenly this fancy attorney blows into town, offering to take on his case pro bono. But I bet my dad’s tied up in that, too.”

  I gripped Persephone’s necklace harder in my hand. “So Tommy’s not going to testify against him?”

  “Doesn’t look like it.”

  The walls crept closer. The ceiling sagged toward our heads.

  “Are you going to testify?” I asked. “I mean, I know he’s your father, but—”

  “That man is not my father,” Ben declared. “Not anymore.” He scratched his scar, scraping his nail slowly along the ridge of it. “Not ever, really.”

  As we sat in silence, I opened my fingers to glance at the starfish on my palm, and quickly closed them again. Then, Ben asked, “Is he yours?”

  “My what?”

  “Your father. Are we . . .”

  “No. I asked my mom about that—twice, actually—and she insisted that he isn’t.”

  “Well, good,” Ben said. “Because that would be a little much, learning my dad’s a murderer and sleeping with my sister, all in the same week?” He whistled so quietly the sound was mostly air. Then, as I lifted my eyebrows in surprise, he shook his head.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “That was so inappropriate. I’m just not sure how to deal with all of this. It’s so hard to even comprehend. I mean, first off—Persephone and I, we should have never been together in the first place, right? Someone should have told us the truth and stopped us. But, at the same time, it doesn’t change the way I think of her, you know? If I remember her now, I still feel that same spasm of love, deep in my stomach. And then I feel sick about that.”

  I looked at him, saw the anguish and confusion in his eyes. Then I put my hand on top of his and squeezed. “Hey,” I said. “It’s only been a couple days since you found out. You just need time to process it all.”

  He stared down at my hand. “Time?” he scoffed. “Time has never been enough to make me stop loving her. It’s been sixteen years, and I still haven’t stopped.” He sighed, his eyes scanning the back of my hand. “But maybe you’re right, maybe now that I know, it’ll be different.”

  He laced his fingers with mine and held my hand hard, his knuckles white, my own pinched and pressured. I winced at the pain of his grip, but I relished it, too. It made the ache in my lungs, my heart, my stomach—the ache I’d felt for days, or maybe even years—subside. But then I saw the danger in that, in trading one pain for another, and I slipped my hand out of his grasp.

  He didn’t fight it. He let me go.

  “You don’t have to stop loving her,” I said. “I know I won’t.”

  “That’s different.”

  “It doesn’t have to be. You were there for her, and I’m grateful to you for that. She deserved to have someone who understood her,” I added. “We all do.”

  His eyes were unreadable as they shifted back and forth between my own. Then he nodded, blinking, and tears slipped down his cheek.

  “I should go,” he whispered, standing up. He took a couple muted steps toward the window before I stood, too.

  “Wait,” I said.

  He turned around, slowly, as if the air were becoming too heavy for him to move through. “Yeah?”

  “It’s just—you know Tommy?”

  He let out a short laugh. “I think I remember him, yeah.”

  “Right. Well, why do you think he kept telling the police—and telling us—that my mother knew something important? He was clearly hinting at Will being Persephone’s father, but why would he point people in that direction? Your dad ended up bankrolling his whole life. He had a lot to lose if Will got arrested.”

  Ben took a deep breath and shook his head. “I don’t know,” he said. “I guess he just loved knowing something that no one else did. I mean, we were closest to Persephone, and we didn’t have a clue. But maybe, maybe knowing this big, decades-old secret—it somehow proved to him that all that bullshit he’d said was true, about being the only one to actually see and know Persephone.” He shrugged. “And it probably made him feel powerful for once, you know? He must have just thrived on showing that off, on taunting people with the fact that he knew something. I mean, think about his life. That ounce of power, or control, or whatever it was, probably meant a lot more to him than money. I know it always does for my father.”

  Ben shifted his feet, putting his hands in his pockets. “But speaking of Tommy,” he said. “I found all the stuff he sold my dad. Persephone’s stuff.”

  I stood up straighter. “You did?”

  “Yeah. After I got back from the police station, I went inside the main house. I’m not even sure why. I guess I just figured my dad would be arraigned in the morning, and this would be the only chance I’d have to look around. I think I hoped I’d find something to help me reconcile the fact that my father murdered my . . .” He swallowed. “Anyway, I noticed that this room on the third floor—my mom’s old office—was locked. And I kicked the door in. I didn’t even know I was capable of that, but I just kept picturing his face as he said that what he did was all my fault, and it went a lot easier.”

  He paused, his mouth curling with a look of disgust, as if he were seeing his father in the room with us now.

  “Anyway,” he went on, “the room was filled with all these boxes. I opened one of them, and at first I didn’t really know what I was looking at. Jeans, sweaters, stuffed animals. But then I saw a shirt that I recognized. It was that pink one, you know? With the gold stripes?”

  My eyes closed around the image of Persephone standing in front of the mirror, holding her lip gloss up to the pink fabric, trying to see how well it matched.

  “Yeah,” I whispered, my throat stinging.

  “So then I remembered what Tommy was saying when we first heard them arguing. And I searched through the rest of the boxes and every once in a while, I found something else I recognized.”

  A wave of dizziness spun the room around me. I closed my eyes, and when I opened them again, everything was still. “Why?” I asked. “Why would he want all of that?”

  Ben shrugged, looking down at the space between our feet. “A part of me hopes it was guilt,” he said. “Something that would make him just a little bit human. But I have no idea. And I’ve decided it’s best not to wonder. Because I don’t want to humanize him. I want to always see him the way I do right now. As a monster.”

  I nodded. I understood that feeling. How long had I held tight to the belief that my mother was beyond saving—just to make it easier to stay away? But she wasn’t Will. She hadn’t killed anyone. She’d simply swallowed her secrets like pills, then chased them with something she’d hoped would drown her.

  “But listen,” Ben said. “I took all that stuff back to the guesthouse. It’s yours if you want it—unless the police end up taking it. You can come by anytime to go through it.” He shifted his weight and put his hands into his coat pockets. “I mean, hopefully I’m moving out of there within the next few days or so, but I won’t be far.�
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  I tried my best to smile at him. “Thank you,” I said. “And hey, let me give you my number, okay? That way, you can send me your new address when you know it.”

  He smiled back at me, weakly. “Your number?” he said. “I don’t know, Sylvie. That feels like classified information at this point. Are you sure you trust me with that?”

  His eyes—dark as a starless night, but deep, it seemed, as the sky itself—locked with mine.

  “Yeah,” I said. “I do.”

  • • •

  On Saturday, I ran errands. When I returned home, Mom was just where I’d left her that morning—in her chair, wearing her robe and slippers. I brought my shopping bags into the living room and sorted through them, pulling out each item and setting them on the carpet. Then I split open the plastic that held a folded drop cloth and laid the canvas tarp across the floor.

  “What are you doing?” Mom asked, eyeing me as I took a screwdriver to the lid of a paint can. “What’s all this?”

  “This,” I said after a moment, mixing the paint and carefully pouring it into a plastic tray, “is our project for the day.” I looked at the pool of color, milky and glistening in the light. “There were a lot of choices, but I went with Blossoming White. I’m not sure what makes it blossoming white instead of just white, but it sounds nice, right?”

  “You’re going to paint the wall?” Mom asked.

  “No,” I said. “We are.”

  She put her hand to her chest and clutched her robe closed. “But, you can’t do that,” she said, an edge of panic in her voice. “You’ll—you’ll make the other walls look all faded. What are you going to do then, paint the whole room?”

  I clicked an orange roller into place on its handle and looked around at the rest of the room. “I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe.” Then I shrugged. “Why not?”

  After unplugging the TV and wheeling its stand away from the wall, I studied the constellation for what I knew would be the final time. Somewhere, in the silver paint that tornadoed through the dots I’d once placed so meticulously, were skin cells from Persephone’s fingers. In that way at least, she was alive up there still, the paint laced with her desperate swipe for Mom’s attention. But she’d been dead for so long—whether or not, in life, she’d wanted more from us. And we needed to let her be dead. We needed to let ourselves keep living, for as long as we both were allowed.

  “Okay, come here,” I said, and I walked over to Mom, holding my hands out for her.

  She looked into my palms for a moment. Then, with a reluctant sigh, she put her hands into mine and I helped her out of her chair, her body feeling light as a stalk of wheat.

  As she stood, something fell from the recliner, landing on the floor with a thump. We both looked down and saw the copy of Wuthering Heights I’d given her.

  “Oops,” I said, bending down to pick it up, but she tightened her grip on my hands, holding me in place.

  “Leave it,” she said. “You can take it out to the garbage bin later.”

  “You want to throw it away?” I asked, a familiar itch gathering on my skin. I had bought that for her. She had wanted it at the hospital, and when they didn’t have it, I had gone out of my way to get her a copy of her own.

  “I don’t want to read that story ever again,” she said.

  She squeezed her eyes shut, her lids wrinkling with the effort, and it was then that I knew why she’d been drawn to that book in the first place.

  “It reminds you of Will, doesn’t it?”

  Her hands, still gripping mine, flinched when I said his name. It had been almost fifteen years since I’d read Wuthering Heights in school, but I remembered the gist of it well enough—two lovers, from vastly different circumstances, spend much of their lives with other people, their obsessive love for each other still raging around inside them, turning one ill, the other withered and bitter.

  “I don’t want to read that story ever again,” she repeated—and I nodded, relief filling up my lungs.

  “Then let’s do this,” I said.

  I led her to the tray of paint on the floor, and I bent down to roll the brush in the shallow pool of Blossoming White. When it was fully saturated with paint, I handed the roller to Mom, watching as she took it with a shaking hand.

  “I don’t know,” she said softly, staring at the stars on the wall, her eyes wide and fearful. “I don’t think I can.”

  “It’s okay,” I said. “I’ll help you.”

  Placing my hand on top of hers, I felt the bones beneath her skin, felt the wrist I used to bring to my nose and smell when I was a child, inhaling her perfume as if it were the scent of a delicate flower.

  Then, our hands holding on together, we touched the brush to the wall, and we painted.

  acknowledgments

  Thank you to my extraordinary agent, Sharon Pelletier, who has been an enthusiastic champion of this novel since I first pitched the idea to her. Without her guidance and expertise, this story would not be what it is today, and I am immeasurably grateful for all the time and effort she has invested in my work.

  Thank you to the entire Touchstone team, especially my editor, Kaitlin Olson, whose sharp, insightful edits and thoughtful questions pushed me in ways I did not know I needed to be pushed. I am thankful that my book has been in such masterful hands.

  There are not enough words to properly thank Maureen O’Brien for everything she has given me in this journey. From teaching me about the path to publication, to making me laugh after disappointing rejections, to sending me cheerleading emojis as I stared at the blinking cursor in a Word document, she has offered me unwavering support. Thank you, Maureen, for your artistic integrity and partnership.

  Thank you to my colleagues in the Creative Writing/Media Arts department at the Greater Hartford Academy of the Arts. I love you all like family, and I am continuously inspired by you, both as teachers and artists.

  Thank you to the incredible writing teachers I have had, especially Sue Standing, Deyonne Bryant, Robert Pinsky, Rosanna Warren, and the late Derek Walcott. I still can’t believe how fortunate I am to have studied with you all.

  Thank you to Sue Murray, who first taught me the myth of Persephone, and who instilled in me a passion for Greek mythology, without which this book would not exist.

  I also want to express my immense gratitude for my family, particularly my sister and my parents, who never once told me that my dream of being a writer was an impractical one. I know what a gift that is, and I do not take it for granted. Mom and Dad, thank you for everything you’ve done to get me to this point, and for always being sure, especially when I wasn’t, that this would happen.

  Finally, thank you to my husband, Marc—my first reader and best friend. Thank you for your spot-on feedback, your game-changing suggestions, and your unparalleled support and encouragement every step of the way. I don’t think I could have done this without you, but even if I could have, I’m so glad I didn’t have to.

  An Atria Reading Club Guide

  The Winter Sister

  Megan Collins

  This reading group guide for The Winter Sister includes an introduction, discussion questions, ideas for enhancing your book club, and a Q&A with author Megan Collins. The suggested questions are intended to help your reading group find new and interesting angles and topics for your discussion. We hope that these ideas will enrich your conversation and increase your enjoyment of the book.

  Introduction

  Sixteen years ago, Sylvie’s sister, Persephone, never came home. Out too late with the boyfriend she was forbidden to see, Persephone was missing for three days before her body was found—and years later, her murder remains unsolved. In the present day, Sylvie returns home to care for her estranged mother, Annie, who is undergoing treatment for cancer. Prone to unexplained “Dark Days” even before Persephone’s death, Annie let her once-close bond with Sylvie dissolve in the weeks after their loss, making for an uncomfortable reunion all these years later. Wo
rse, Persephone’s former boyfriend, Ben, is now a nurse at the cancer center where Annie is being treated. Sylvie’s always believed Ben was responsible for the murder—but she carries her own guilt about that night, guilt that traps her in the past while the world goes on around her. As she navigates the complicated relationship with her mother, Sylvie begins to uncover the secrets that fill their house—and what happened the night Persephone died. As it turns out, the truth really will set you free, once you can begin to look at it.

  Topics & Questions for Discussion

  1. The title of Megan Collins’s debut novel is The Winter Sister. Which sister do you think the title refers to—Sylvie or Persephone? Why do you think Collins chooses to leave this interpretation open to the reader?

  2. Even though Lauren is Sylvie’s best friend, Sylvie reveals that she has lied about the truth of Persephone’s death for the majority of their relationship. How would you feel if you found out that an important person in your life had lied about something like this? Would you try to understand? Feel betrayed? How do you think your relationship with that person would change after the fact?

  3. Although Sylvie never forgets about Persephone, she doesn’t actively reinvestigate her sister’s case until after she returns to Spring Hill. Why do you think her homecoming sparks a renewed dedication in solving Persephone’s cold case? Is it returning to Spring Hill itself? Seeing her mother in a weakened state? Make a list of Sylvie’s possible motivations, and share them with your fellow book club members to compare.

  4. The majority of the novel takes place sixteen years after Persephone’s death, but the loss still feels fresh for many characters in the novel. Consider the following passage: “I didn’t know that stars don’t last forever. I had no idea that the light we see is just an echo of an old burn, or that, most of the time, it’s the absence of a glow, instead of the glow itself, that goes on and on and on” (p. 45). How is this a metaphor for Persephone? How does her absence continue to affect the lives of Sylvie, Annie, Jill, and Ben? How might things have been different for them had she survived? Do you think that the effects of a loss like this can ever dissipate?