The Winter Sister(35)

“That’s fine. Maybe they’ll take us early.”

“They won’t,” she insisted. “Everything’s on a schedule there. And I hate waiting. It’s bad enough having to sit in that chair for a couple hours—just waiting, waiting, waiting while I get the damn treatment. Now we’re going to be waiting beforehand, too.” Crossing her arms, she turned her head to stare out the passenger window like a sulky teenager.

“Well, listen,” I said. “About that.” I reached into the back seat and felt around until my fingers closed around the handle of a plastic bag. Pulling it forward, I plopped it gently into her lap. “I got you something.”

“What is it?” she asked, staring down at it apprehensively, like it was a dog that might bite her.

“It’s something I picked up yesterday,” I said. “Just open it.”

Up the road, a green light switched to yellow and then red. As I slowed to a stop behind a line of cars, Mom reached into the bag and pulled out a copy of Wuthering Heights, which I’d bought while running errands the day before. It had a dark blue hardcover and its pages looked as if they’d been dipped in gold.

“Is this because you feel bad about the other day?” she asked.

“What do you mean?”

The light switched back to green, and I eased my foot back onto the accelerator.

“Being late with the pills,” Mom said. “Making me throw up.”

“No, Mom, I told you—there was a line at the pharmacy and I saw someone I knew from high school. I’ve already apologized a hundred times about that.”

I’d had to lie to her, of course—just another item on the growing list of ways I’d failed her since I’d been home. But I couldn’t tell her where I’d been without explaining why, and I wasn’t about to let her know how dangerously close she was to Ben each time she got her treatment. That was my problem and mine alone—even more so now that I’d seen the roses—and I was going to handle it.

“I know that,” Mom said. “Which is why you don’t have to be giving me books. You’ve been attentive enough as it is the last two days. Annoyingly attentive, I’d say. If you’re not careful, you’re going to end up as bad as Jill.”

I wasn’t sure how heating up soup, getting her crackers, and periodically asking her if she needed anything qualified as “annoyingly attentive,” but I brushed past the comment anyway. Turning a corner, the hospital came into view ahead of us, and I accelerated toward the entrance to the parking garage.

“Well, I didn’t get you the book because of that,” I said. “I got it because you wanted to read it on Monday and they didn’t have it. I just thought you might like to have your own copy.”

Mom turned the book over in her hands, as if looking for the latch to a secret compartment along its edges. “I don’t really like hardcovers,” she said, putting it back into the bag.

I took a left turn, driving faster than I should have down a ramp into the garage. As I pulled sharply into a space, the book slid off Mom’s lap and onto the floor. She glared at it, its pages thrust open against the dusty mat, but she made no movement to pick it up. When we got out of the car, I watched as she closed the door behind her, leaving the book locked inside.

? ? ?

It didn’t take me long to find Ben. Once Mom was settled into her chair in the treatment room, her IV taped to her arm, I told her I had some questions for the woman at the front desk. She stared out the window and lifted her hand in a slight, listless wave as if to dismiss me.

I walked around the cancer center, glancing into every open door for a glimpse of Ben. I wanted to seem strong when I saw him, fierce and invulnerable, but my pulse was already betraying me. When I finally found him, coming out of a closed room, a pen clamped between his teeth as he stuffed a paper into a folder, my knees buckled a little, and I forced myself to remember the roses in the snow, how intrusive they were, how thorned and threatening.

“Ben.” I called his name before my throat had the chance to tighten up like a fist.

Ben’s eyes latched onto mine and his mouth opened just enough for his pen to clatter to the floor.

“Hi,” he said. “I thought you didn’t—”

“I don’t.” We were standing only a few feet apart. “Did you put roses on Persephone’s grave?”

Ben tilted his head, his brows furrowing. “Yeah,” he said. “I always do.”

Stiffening my jaw, I was afraid that if I didn’t keep speaking, it would set like concrete. “What do you mean you always do?”

He shifted his weight, looking around the large space, its couches and windows, its doors to rooms where people suffered and survived. “I’ve been leaving her roses for years,” he said. “Ever since . . .” He cleared his throat as I narrowed my eyes. “But when I saw you on Monday, I realized that I hadn’t done it in a couple months, so I brought some over yesterday.”

A nurse squeezed between us then, glancing up at Ben as she passed, and a wave of nausea rose within me. “And it’s always white roses,” I said.

Ben nodded. “Yeah, because—”

“Because they’re as pure as your love for each other?”

Again, his brows furrowed, a crafted look of confusion distorting his features. “What?”