The Winter Sister(23)
“Okay.” Jill leaned down, kissing Mom’s cheek, and I was surprised to see that Mom closed her eyes. She even lifted her hand to cup Jill’s elbow, a gesture so tender that I felt as if I’d intruded on something by witnessing it.
“Love you,” Jill said, and I saw when she straightened back up that her eyes were shiny with tears.
“Mmm,” Mom replied.
Jill ran a finger beneath her eyelashes and then focused her attention on me. “Well,” she said, “my stuff’s already in the car.” She stepped forward and wrapped me in a hug. “Oh, Sylvie. I wish I had more time to catch up with you. I’ll be back to help out as soon as I can, though. I promise.”
I nodded against her shoulder, and when we pulled away from each other, I whispered, “Okay.” There was more I should have said, but in that moment, I knew I could only say so much before my voice gave away how urgently I wanted her to stay.
7
I’d been expecting our bedroom—Persephone’s and mine—to look exactly the same. I’d imagined it like an exhibit in a museum, the artifacts of our childhood untouched—and for my side of the room, that was true. Besides the tightly made bed that I assumed Aunt Jill had been sleeping in, all of my things were precisely, eerily, the way I had left them. But Persephone’s side looked plundered. Though her tag-sale dresser and her bed with its tattered quilt remained, everything else was missing—even the dream catcher that had hung above her bed, even the jewelry box full of chunky, colorful necklaces that she’d stopped wearing when Mom gave her the gold starfish.
The closet held only my things: school folders, forgotten stuffed animals, old dresses and coats. Persephone’s clothes were gone, but the hangers that once held them were clinging to the wooden pole as if certain they still had a purpose. Where was her vial of dried lavender, which she’d smell sometimes after arguing with Mom? Where was her dark green afghan, which she’d draped around her body like a robe on winter mornings?
When I left home—first to go live with Aunt Jill, and then to Providence—Persephone’s neat rows of lipsticks had still been on the bureau. I knew this because I used to open their caps, twist the sticks until their colors bloomed from their metal tubes, and mime the way my sister had put them on. It was always my own reflection that looked back at me, though, and never, as some childish part of me had hoped, Persephone’s.
I couldn’t imagine Mom getting rid of Persephone’s things. That would have required her, in her glassy-eyed, boozed-up states, to gather boxes, sort through clothes, and face that her daughter was dead.
As soon as Jill had left that afternoon, Mom had turned on the TV and seemed absorbed in an infomercial on vacuum cleaners. For a few moments, I’d stood in the middle of the room, watching the flashes of “easy payments” and “limited time offer,” but then I’d wondered if she’d turned the program on just so we wouldn’t have to speak to each other.
“I’m gonna go get my suitcases from the car,” I’d told her, and she’d only lifted her hand a little in response. Now, looking at Persephone’s side of the room, scrubbed clean of her existence, I had the urge to march back into the living room, stand in front of the TV, and demand to know what had happened to all those scraps of my sister’s life. The thing that stopped me, though, was the window.
After Persephone died, I’d kept the cheap venetian blinds drawn and closed, unable to look at the latch I’d locked that night. It didn’t matter that the room was always dim as a result; I had to give myself a fighting chance in those months after it happened. Now, the blinds were wide open, and I could imagine Aunt Jill pulling the string to lift them up that morning, blinking at the cloudy light outside. I walked to the window and reached for the latch, switching it back and forth—locked, unlocked, locked again. It would have been so easy to let her back in that night. I could have played off the lock as a prank, and maybe we even would have laughed about it together. Instead, I now had to wonder if one of her last thoughts, with Ben’s hands around her neck, with her breath trapped like a rock in her throat, was that I’d done this to her.
Turning away from the window, I hefted one of my suitcases onto my bed. As I unzipped it, my phone chimed with a text message. I pulled it out of my back pocket and was immediately comforted by the sight of Lauren’s name on the screen.
“Okay, it’s been a few hours,” she wrote. “You coming back yet?” Then she sent a picture of a sticky note, on which she had drawn a little map of Connecticut and Rhode Island. Over Spring Hill, she’d placed a bold red X, the upper right point of which extended into an arrow that traveled all the way to Providence. There, she’d outlined a boxy little house with hearts for the door and windows.
“If you’re home by Monday,” Lauren added, “I’ll give you a huge discount on this tat.”
“And mess up my whole brand?” I joked. “I’m the tattooless tattoo artist!”
“Exactly! It’s so unexpected. Steve would hire you back in a second. He’d be like ‘OMG look at her commitment to the craft! And Lauren, YOU designed this stunner? I must give you a raise at once! An extra three thousand dollars a week, plus one puppy (pre-house-trained) every other month!’?”
I laughed, and then covered my mouth to catch the sound. With the TV on, Mom probably wouldn’t have even heard me, but it felt inappropriate, somehow, to be laughing in that house. I flicked my gaze toward the window latch again and I felt my smile go slack.