The Winter Sister(101)

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.”

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.