The Winter Sister(49)

“That’s why she named her Persephone?”

I’d grown up knowing the myth, of course. Mom had told it to us one day when Persephone marched into the house, complaining how the kids at school were teasing her about her “stupid, weirdo” name. “It’s not weird,” Mom had said. “It’s ancient. Here, I’ll tell you the story.” But I didn’t know that she’d chosen the name as some kind of homage to Persephone’s father.

“Well, yeah,” Jill said. “Why? What did you think was the reason?”

“I never really thought about it.”

I’d always just accepted that the name was like Persephone herself—beautiful and uncommon.

“So wait—what happened with Persephone’s father, then?” I asked. “If Mom actually had a relationship with him, then why wasn’t he a part of Persephone’s life?”

How strange that, before now, I’d never even considered him—the man whose blood had been in Persephone’s veins. When I covered her bruises at night, I never once thought of him, never wondered if his skin, when wounded, blushed the same shade of blue.

“He didn’t know about her,” Jill said. “Annie never even told him she was pregnant. She just moved her stuff back into the house and went back to waitressing. Our parents begged her to tell him, but she was adamant. Actually, that’s why she decided on the name Persephone in particular. She said he wasn’t good enough to be her child’s father, so she was rescuing Persephone from a life in the Underworld.” She paused, as if hearing the words for the first time. “Gosh, she could be so dramatic.”

“So she never even gave him a chance?” I asked. “Why would she do that? Why wasn’t he ‘good enough’ in her eyes?”

Jill sighed, and I stepped outside of the rug’s perimeter, my feet more prepared for the coolness of the floor. “It’s simple,” she said. “He wasn’t good enough because he wasn’t Will.”

“But that’s stupid,” I protested. “You said yourself that, after Will got married, she got over him.” I walked by the closet, the dresser, the light switch, my hand skimming along the surface of things as I went.

“No,” Jill said. “I said she stopped waiting around for him. Stopped loving him, though? I don’t know. I’m pretty sure she only, uh . . . got with . . . Persephone’s father to try to get over Will.”

So was that it, then? Was that why Mom had only allowed herself those brief flings? Because her heart had long ago been given to Will Emory? Because all she could do after that was lend it out like a library book, something to be borrowed for a short period of time and then safely returned? That would mean, then, that she’d loved him so much longer than she should have. I hated to think of her like that, pining away for Ben’s father—of all people—wasting any chance she’d had on finding someone else to love. Now, it was too late. She was a different person—no longer the sun, as she’d once seemed, but a cloud, one that always held the threat of a storm, and I knew very well how much it hurt to love somebody like that.

“Sylvie?” Jill said.

“Yeah?”

“Where is this coming from? Why are you asking about all this ancient history?”

“Oh, um, I don’t know, I guess I just—ow.”

My hip bumped against the post of Persephone’s footboard. I hadn’t been paying attention to where I was going—I’d been speaking slowly, stalling as I scurried around my brain, wondering if I should tell Aunt Jill about running into Ben—and I’d jostled the bed out of place.

“Ow?” Jill said. “What happened?”

“Nothing,” I said. “I was . . .”

The end of the bed had only moved about an inch, but it was enough to reveal the edge of something—a box, it looked like, peeking out from underneath Persephone’s long blue quilt. I knelt to the ground and slid the rest of it out, pulling it onto the rug. As soon as it was free of the low frame of the bed, the two sides of the box’s unsealed top popped open.

“You were what?” Jill asked.

I saw Persephone’s green afghan before I registered anything else in the box. It was the one that had always been draped along the foot of her bed, the one she reached for in the middle of the night whenever she got too cold. I pulled it out and brought it to my nose, inhaling its scent, feeling its threads tickle my face in a way that felt profoundly familiar. It didn’t smell like her, but it made me feel closer to her, just the same.

“Uh, Jill?” I said. “Can I call you back later?”

“What? What’s going on?”

“Everything’s fine,” I said quickly. “Love you.”

I set the afghan aside and dropped the phone on top of it. When I reached into the shallow box again, I pulled out a necklace—some old chunky thing—and a bottle of lotion that looked thinned and yellowed with age.

“What the hell?” I whispered to the room, as if Persephone herself were watching and would answer me.

I closed the box’s flaps, looking for a sticker or label, something to explain why these three very disparate items had been packed away together and shoved under Persephone’s bed. Besides her blue quilt, these were the only things I’d seen of hers since I’d been home.