The Winter Sister(14)

Lauren loved to claim discrimination. She did it at pizza restaurants when our order took a long time coming out, and she screamed it at female bartenders when they batted their lashes at men while pouring our drinks.

“It doesn’t matter,” I said. “What’s done is done. Even if I still had a job, I don’t know that it would change much. My mom’s still dying.”

The words came out louder than I’d anticipated. They bounced off the ceiling and walls. I hadn’t said it like that before. I’d said, “My mom is sick,” and “My mom has cancer,” but I hadn’t yet said what even the hopeful doctors probably knew: she was dying.

Lauren sat up, pulling her knees close to her chest. Then, after staring in silence at my suitcase, she grabbed a shirt from the pile on the bed and folded. “I’m sorry,” she said, and then, quietly, “You’re doing the right thing.”

? ? ?

It was painful to remember, of course, but the truth was—I had once loved my mother so deeply that I couldn’t imagine there being anything in the world that could complicate that feeling. Sometimes—it could be anytime, really; when I was just eating cereal, or loading ink into a tattoo gun—a memory of my mother, the way she’d been during the first half of my life, sharpened into focus. When that happened, I often had to brace myself, close my eyes until the familiar pangs in my chest subsided.

That night in particular, as I continued to pack after Lauren had gone to bed, one of my earliest memories suddenly swept through me, rushing into my mind like cold air through an open window.

I was four years old, and I was inventing constellations with Mom on our living room wall. Persephone watched us from the couch, her eyes peering over the third-grade science textbook propped against her knees. As I faced the wall, assessing my canvas, Mom passed me a thin paintbrush, then placed her palm on my shoulder. Even at such a young age, I handled that tool with reverence, with care; I understood that we were working together, the brush and I, to tell a story with stars.

“It’s Persephone,” I said, touching silver paint to our wall. Three slow, patient dots, then two more, then three again. I dipped the brush back onto the palette that Mom held out for me, then continued to constellate.

“This is your face,” I explained, looking back at Persephone on the couch and pointing with the brush. “These are your legs, and this is your dust.”

“What dust?” she asked.

“The disappearance dust.”

My sister screwed up her nose the way she did whenever she heard an answer that didn’t satisfy her. She chewed on the open tip of a Pixy Stix and waited for me to continue. The blue sugar on her lips made her mouth look cold.

“Go on, Sylvie,” Mom coaxed. “What’s disappearance dust?”

“It’s magic,” I said. “Now she’s here, now she’s not.”

“What makes you think I have disappearance dust?” Persephone asked.

“You don’t in real life,” I said, “but in the stars, you’re magic.”

Mom knelt down so she could look into my eyes. “That’s a beautiful idea, Sylvie,” she said. She turned her head to look at my sister, who squinted at us, at Mom’s hand on my arm in particular. “Don’t you think so, Persephone?”

“No,” my sister said, her tone sharp but still casual enough. “It doesn’t make any sense. There’s no such thing as disappearance dust.”

Mom looked at the constellation on the wall, the scattered stars near the points that would be Persephone’s hands, and smiled. “It’s something your sister invented,” she said, “and that makes it very special.”

Persephone stood up off the couch, her textbook thumping to the floor. “It doesn’t make any sense!” she insisted. “It’s just stupid! Ooooh, look, I’m going to disappear.” She spun around, shaking the remaining sugar from her Pixy Stix onto the carpet, and for a moment, it looked like it was snowing blue flurries in the living room.

As much as she tried to hide it, I could see the promise of a smile on my sister’s lips. She meant to be biting, and sarcastic, and perhaps even hurtful, but she was only eight years old, and there is something about spinning freely in a room that just dissolves a child’s anger. Persephone twirled and twirled until a single giggle escaped her lips, and then, just like that, she tripped. She fell to the floor, hands first, knees next, her science book caught between her feet.

I couldn’t help it; I laughed. I laughed the way we did when we played in the snow together and made facedown angels, our cheeks stinging with the cold and the widths of our smiles.

“Shut up,” Persephone snapped, her back arching like an animal as she struggled to get up.

“Hey—language,” Mom warned. “Are you okay?” She reached for one of my sister’s hands to try to help her up, but Persephone pulled away. Then, as if reconsidering, Persephone crawled back toward my mother and the two became mirror images of each other—the same blonde hair, same slender figure—kneeling together on the floor.

“Looks like a rug burn,” Mom said, rubbing a finger against the textured red spot on Persephone’s knee.

Persephone looked down and winced. “It hurts,” she said. Then her icy eyes sparkled. “Can you kiss it and make it better, Mom?”