The Winter Sister(11)

When we first met during orientation our freshman year at RISD, I was eager to detach myself from the person I’d been in high school. For those years at Spring Hill High after Persephone died, I stopped being Sylvie O’Leary. I was known instead, through whispers in the halls, as “Persephone’s sister.” Even as a senior, three years after everyone in my sister’s grade had graduated, I still heard that phrase. It hissed from the crowd when I won Outstanding Achievement in Visual Arts at awards night, and it followed me, weeks later, as I crossed the stage to get my diploma. Some days, “Persephone’s sister” was a comfort, a reminder that, no matter what had happened, I’d always be tethered to her. But most days, when I heard those words, it took everything I had not to buckle, not to see my fingers locking the bedroom window over and over, the click of the latch echoing in my head.

So in the early days of our friendship, when Lauren asked me about my family (first telling me all about her two “spoiled, obnoxious” brothers and her “embarrassingly boy-crazy” sister), I found myself giving her only the faintest sketch of my life: I had an alcoholic mother, I’d lived for several years with my aunt and cousin, and I had an older sister who’d died.

“Whoa,” Lauren said back then, “I’m so sorry. How did she die?”

For a moment, my stomach tightened and my skin felt instantly cold. But then, as if my voice belonged to someone else, I heard myself reply.

“Car accident.”

I thought of my grandparents’ fatal crash—the crumpled Honda, the faulty airbags that hadn’t deployed when they spun out on a patch of black ice and slammed into a tree. Persephone could have easily been in the car with them that night. They could have been taking her to get a hot chocolate at Spring Hill Commons. She’d have been seven at the time, and I, only three years old, might have stayed home with Mom, already blinking toward sleep at seven o’clock.

“But I was really young when it happened,” I added. “I barely even remember her.”

I held my breath for a moment, waiting to see if Lauren could sense the lies that hovered in the air, but she only frowned a little, said “I’m sorry” again, and that had been it. End of conversation. End of “Persephone’s sister.” As I exhaled, reveling in my revised history, my lungs felt lighter than they had in years.

After that, Lauren and I lived a thrifty but comfortable life together. We became roommates at RISD our sophomore year. “More like Rhode Island School of Detours,” she quipped, but I, having scrambled for my scholarship, having painted some nights until the tips of my fingers bled, didn’t view it the same way. She’d wanted to be a tattoo artist from the start (going to RISD was her parents’ dream, paid for by their six-figure salaries), and when she got the job at Steve’s she came alive in ways I’d never seen before. She designed new tattoos feverishly, leaving them on sticky notes around the apartment—on the toilet lid, an elephant with a trombone for a trunk; on the refrigerator, a light bulb with a ship inside; on the peephole of our door, a stained glass anatomical heart. Then she made me rate them, using a simple rubric of “Would you get this, yes or no?” It didn’t matter that she knew I would never get any tattoo (a brief point of concern when she later convinced Steve to hire me, saving me from the monotony of art supply stores); she just wanted a chance to talk about what she was doing, because she loved it with a pure, uncomplicated passion—and I envied her that.

When I started my apprenticeship at Steve’s, I came to understand what she liked about the job. It was creative, it required thought and skill, and it generated a considerable feeling of power; the tattoo artist, I soon learned, was not only the inflictor of pain, the drawer of blood, but also, on a good day, the fulfiller of dreams. None of that was why I kept up with the apprenticeship, though, or why I accepted the full-time job when I got my license.

After Persephone died, I kept on painting. At first, I wasn’t sure why, given how the chemicals had begun to smell like bruises to me, but it became something I loved and loathed in equal measure. I loved it because of how easily you could hide your mistakes—one wrong shade of red, and you could just cover it with another; one leaf that didn’t fall into place on a tree, and you could simply paint right over it, start all over. But still, there was always a catch. Even though no one would ever see your error, you never forgot it existed—a thing that haunted, a thing that whispered and gnawed at you beneath the paint. Tattooing was different, of course, but in the ways that mattered—bruise-scented chemicals, the masking of something old with something new—it was the same.

Now, outside my bedroom, the living room TV clicked on. I heard it surge to life and then quiet down as Lauren lowered the volume. But something stopped me from getting up and joining her, kept me staring instead at the moonlit cracks in my ceiling as my birthday slipped by. Somehow, it had happened again; another year had passed in which I’d grown older than my sister.





4




“Sylvie, I need you to come take care of your mother.”

A few months after my thirtieth birthday, everything had taken a turn for the worse. I’d been laid off at work unexpectedly, winter had settled over Providence like an icy steel dome, and now, on a particularly brutal January night, Aunt Jill had no patience left for me. I hadn’t been down to Spring Hill even once to visit my mother. In fact, I’d only been kept apprised of her treatments and condition because Jill had taken to calling me every Thursday night. Even for Thanksgiving and Christmas, which I usually spent in Hanover with Jill, Missy, and Missy’s husband, Carl, I had made flimsy excuses. Lauren’s family invited me to Virginia or I can’t get enough time off of work. Swallowing down acidic guilt was safer, I felt, than seeing my mother. I imagined her attached to an IV bag, her eyes widening with an unspoken fear, and each time, the tenderness I felt for her scared me. It was risky—thinking of her in a way that made her easier to love.