The Winter Sister(29)

“Oh, shit,” he said.

My skin went cold, my legs felt loose, and it was as if I were standing outside being blown about by the January wind. We stared at each other, and for the first time since it happened, we were face-to-face—the one who’d lost Persephone and the one who’d taken her away.





9




Persephone once told me that Ben’s eyes were like black holes.

“In the most beautiful way possible,” she’d clarified. “They’re so dark and so deep, it’s easy to get lost in them.”

Her voice had been soft when she told me this, and all I could do was focus on the umbrella I was painting on her forearm, my grip tightening on the brush.

“And it’s not only that,” she continued. “His eyes are so dark they make everything else seem brighter. His skin. His hair. The air around you. And then, it’s like, among all that light, there’s just this pure, exquisite blackness. And it pulls you in.”

She’d had her free hand latched onto her starfish pendant, sliding it back and forth across its chain as she waited for me to respond. But ever since she’d come home that night, climbing through the window and pushing up her sleeve, offering her bruised arm to me like a request, I’d been trying to tune her out. I’d had no desire to hear about Ben’s eyes or his love for his grandfather or the way he laughed when she surprised him. I’d known that whatever Persephone said had no bearing on the person Ben really was; she’d only wanted me to believe there was something about him that warranted her return to him each night. She’d only wanted me to keep concealing the secrets that blushed blue and insistent on her skin.

As it turned out, though, she’d been right about Ben’s eyes. The longer we stared at each other there in the hospital, the more weightless I felt, my body seeming to pitch forward, floating toward those two dark pools that kept pulling me in. Only it wasn’t beautiful or alluring, as Persephone had tried to claim; it was dangerous, terrifying.

“You—you’re Persephone’s sister,” he said, and I felt as if I were hearing his voice from underwater.

The walls were blotted out by darkness. The windows, too. I’d been wading into an ocean black as ink, and now I was drowning in it, unsure which way would lead me back to the surface.

“Are you a patient here?” he asked.

Here. Where was here? A woman named Kelly, a needle, Wuthering Heights. Then—Mom. Her wig and makeup. The bones of her fingers as easily broken as twigs.

“No,” I said. “My mother.”

The light was coming back into focus—slowly at first, and only around the edges. Then I heard voices, textures of conversation, people speaking to one another in some place other than darkness. There was a beeping sound, steady and measured, drifting toward me from one of the open rooms, and I forced myself to blink—once, twice, then again—my eyelids moving so rapidly they seemed to be forcing out tears.

The blackness split into two separate circles, each becoming smaller and smaller until they were back in Ben’s eyes where they belonged. Finally, I could take in the rest of him again—the short hair, not long and ponytailed like it had been back then; the scar across his cheek; and the green scrubs with crisp sleeves.

“You’re a—a nurse?” I asked, my voice rising. His fingers, which had touched my face just a minute before, were the same ones that had pushed into my sister’s flesh, bursting her blood vessels, bringing up thumbprints of stormy blue. They were the same ones that circled her neck the night she died, pressing against her throat, crushing the air inside her. Now, I felt a hand squeezing my own neck, but when I reached up to tear it away, there was nothing there.

Ben nodded, but his eyes moved toward the windows to his right. He looked uncomfortable, guilty, as if he would claw through the glass just to have a way out. “Yeah,” he said. “I’m sorry about your mom. I had no idea she was a patient here—I’ve only been here since December. What kind of cancer is it?”

“Esophageal,” I said, the word shooting out of my mouth like a cannonball, an attempt to convey how my mother’s sickness was entirely his fault. If you hadn’t taken Persephone from us, I tried to say with my narrowed eyes, then my mother would have never started to drink. If you hadn’t strangled my sister, my mother’s insides wouldn’t have curdled and turned against her. If you hadn’t given me something to keep secret, if I hadn’t locked the window that night . . .

“Ben.” A voice cut through the monologue in my head, and I remembered that we weren’t alone; we were in a hospital—a hospital where he worked, where people trusted him to draw their blood, to put his fingers against the tender flesh of their wrists and count their pulse. I could feel my own blood simmering at the thought of it.

A nurse stood with a manila folder tucked beneath her arm. She had an impatient expression on her face. “You’ve got Mr. Donaldson in Room 3,” she said.

“Right,” Ben replied, and he slid his dark eyes carefully back to me. “I’m sorry, I’ve got to . . .” His voice trailed off as he gestured to a corner room. “It was . . . nice seeing you, Sylvie.”

Nice seeing you? I clenched my fists as he turned around and headed for Room 3—the room adjacent to the one where Mom sat, accepting her treatment, accepting, for the first time in years, an opportunity at life.