The Winter Sister(34)
I heard a noise like an animal retching. “Mom?” I called again, following the sound to the bathroom, where she kneeled on the tile in front of the toilet. Her back was to me, her wig off, and her head was a globe of thin veins that pulsed when her body heaved.
I was too late. I hadn’t listened to the nurse; I hadn’t returned right away with the pills. Now Mom would be miserable; she’d just throw the medication right up—and I hadn’t even considered that as I sat in the police station parking lot, letting my skin grow colder and colder like some useless punishment.
“Mom, I’m sorry,” I said. “I—”
But then she snapped her head toward me, and the sight of her cheeks, smudged with eyeliner, slick with sweat, made the words evaporate like snow on my tongue.
“Where the hell were you?” she spat, and as she stared at me, squinting through a dry heave, I saw that her eyes were the darkest gray they’d ever been. They looked shadowed and leaden, the color of clouds about to rain.
11
On Wednesday, I visited Persephone. I hadn’t been planning to do it until I jolted awake from a dream in which she crawled into my bed, her body so cold that, even through layers of sleep, I felt myself shiver. “You never talk to me anymore,” she said, her breath as solid as icy fingers on the back of my neck. “I’ve been here all along, but you keep ignoring me.” In the dream, she was crying, her tears the color of bruises, watercolor streaks of blue and gray. Then, with only the slightest waver in her voice, she said, “You did this to me, Sylvie,” and my body jerked in response, sending me shooting up in bed.
I hadn’t actually been to her grave since the day we buried her, so when I got to the cemetery, I had to weave through rows of headstones, my boots leaving tracks in the snow as I searched for her name. My memories of her burial were foggy. Mostly, I remembered Mom, who cried so loudly that the priest had to pause his prayers. She was wild that day—sobs as jarring as a car crash, debris of tears all over her face—and though I preferred any show of emotion to the silence she’d been keeping behind her locked door, I was hurt, too, that she never once composed herself enough to come to me, never once untangled herself from Jill’s arms to gather me in her own.
When I found Persephone’s grave, I was surprised to see a bouquet of white roses lying on the snow in front of the stone. The flowers looked fresh, the petals still clean and crisp, as if they’d only been there for a day or two. Bending down to pick them up, I turned them over to check for a note, struggling to imagine who might have left them. But then, like a surge of electricity passing through me, I remembered a night when Persephone came through our window, a single white rose clutched in her hand.
? ? ?
“Look what Ben gave me,” she said.
I closed the window behind her, shutting the cold air out of our room, and watched as she brought the flower to her nose and breathed in its scent. Shrugging out of her coat, she touched the petals to her face and dragged the rose from her temple to her chin. Then she placed her finger against a thorn, as if its sharp point were incapable of piercing her skin.
“It’s just one,” she continued, “so Mom won’t get suspicious, and he said he got it in white because—okay, this is a little corny, but I swear he was so sincere—because the color is as pure as the way we love each other.” She laughed quietly, careful even in her giddiness not to wake Mom. “I don’t know, he said it a lot better than that. I wish sometimes we could just stop and record moments, you know? I mean, he always says we—ouch!”
She sucked in her breath as she stared at her finger. A bright bead of blood blossomed on her skin. We stood together in the space between our beds, neither of us moving to grab a napkin or tissue, and I was stunned by how beautiful it looked, how the tiny wound reminded me of the first drop of paint on a canvas.
“Wow,” she said, and then she lifted her finger and swept it across the petals.
“What are you doing?” I asked, watching as she twirled the rose in her hand, leaving smudges of red among the luminous white.
“I don’t know,” she said, and she dropped her finger, smiling faintly at the flower. “It just makes sense like this, I think.” Then, pulling down the collar of her shirt, she revealed a dime-sized bruise just below her clavicle. “Take care of this for me?”
? ? ?
Still holding the bouquet at Persephone’s grave, I realized that my grip had crinkled the plastic wrapping. I dropped the roses into the snow and took a few steps backward, any peace I might have found now lost. My eyes darted around the cemetery, my body tense as the strings of a tightly tuned guitar. Was everything Ben did now—becoming a nurse, leaving flowers—just a calculated effort to try to soothe his guilt? Or, I wondered, the thought sliding through me like a stiff, paralyzing drug, was he sending me a message, telling me that he wasn’t just going to disappear, that even though Persephone was dead, he wouldn’t leave her or my family alone?
? ? ?
“Why are you driving so fast?” Mom asked an hour later as I barely braked at stop signs on our way to the hospital.
“I’m not,” I said, pressing my foot more firmly on the gas. “I’m just trying to get you there on time.”
“On time?” Mom smoothed down the hair of her wig before leaning back against the headrest. “At this rate, we’ll be twenty minutes early.”