The Winter Sister(52)

“Wait,” I said. “This is a Hanover address. He’s only lived there since he got out of prison last year. But you said—you said you had your little deal with him a couple years after Persephone died, when he would have still lived down the street, right? So how did you know where to send this?”

Mom opened her eyes, looked at her fingernails, and slid one beneath the other as if cleaning it of dirt. “He called me, all right?” she said. “He told me his new address. Not a big deal.”

“When?” I asked. “When did he call you?”

“I don’t know, sometime early last fall. I hadn’t heard from him in years.”

“Eleven years, to be exact?” I pressed. “Because he was in prison?”

She took a deep breath, rubbed the arms of the chair with her hands, and then gripped the edges. “I don’t know how long it had been,” she said, her voice pinched. “I wasn’t keeping track. All I know is he called me up and said he wanted to resume our deal. He told me it was going to be harder this time around to get my pills, so he wanted a gesture of good faith that I was ready to start things up again.”

She put a finger in the air as if to stop me from speaking. “And before you get all high and mighty,” she said, “I wasn’t even sure that I wanted those pills again, but I figured it would be good to have some options. So . . .” She exhaled loudly. “I told him I’d send him a package. But as I’m sure you saw, there wasn’t much left. I’d already given him most of it.”

I pushed my toes into the carpet, my fingers into my arms. “That didn’t strike you as strange?” I asked. “He’s supposedly this great, honest guy in your book, but he demands this—‘gesture of good faith,’ as you called it?”

Mom waved away my question. “Oh, he was always a little strange,” she said. “Sweet. But strange.”

“So why didn’t you send it to him?” I asked. “Why was the package just sitting under Persephone’s bed, with his address already on it?”

“I was going to send it,” she said. “I had it ready to go, obviously. But then the doctor called and told me I had to come in, and then I got my CV, and—”

“CV?”

“Cancer verdict. Anyway, you know your aunt—she steamrolled over the whole situation. Moved right in, whether I wanted her to or not. Started watching my every move. So I hid it—I didn’t want her asking all her damn questions—” She flashed her eyes toward me and narrowed them. “And then I just forgot about it. Tom never called me again. So there—are you happy? I’ve told you everything. Now leave me alone so I can take a nap.”

As I dug my fingernails deeper into my arms, my throat burned with betrayal. She had let Tommy into our house, ushered him into our living room, but me—me she’d closed her door on. No matter how long I’d waited in the hallway, begging her to open up, she’d kept herself locked away from me. Now, she settled farther into her chair and closed her eyes, sealing me from her sight the same way she’d always sealed me from her room, and I took a step forward, unwilling to be shut out anymore.

“Why didn’t you ever tell me you dated Will Emory?”

The change in her body was instantaneous. Her limbs stiffened for a moment, her eyes shooting open like a person shaken from a dream. Then her fingers dug into the arms of her chair, and her face became gnarled with agony.

“What are you—” She looked at me as though I had punched her, as though my fist were still raised in the air, ready to strike again. “Why would you say that name?”

I went rigid then. “What do you mean?”

“That name! Why would you say it?”

It was the same thing she’d cried on my first day back, when I’d asked if Ben Emory was the “neighbor boy” she’d given Persephone’s things to. The look she’d given me then had been similar, too—the same cornered-animal eyes, same quiver in her chin—and it occurred to me, only now, that the name she’d been objecting to that day hadn’t been Ben at all—but Emory.

“I just want to know why you never mentioned that you dated him.”

She stood up from her chair, her arms shaking with the effort of pushing herself up, and before I could leap forward to stop her or help her, she stumbled toward the hallway, reaching for the walls like someone without sight.

“Mom,” I called after her, but she disappeared around the corner. “Mom, we’re not doing this again.”

With a few quick steps, I caught up to her, just as her hand stretched toward her doorknob. Grabbing her arm gently, I had to swallow my surprise at how little there was to grasp; her arms felt thin as broom handles.

“Come on,” I said, but she pulled and pulled and pulled, and I loosened my grip for fear that she’d hurt herself.

“I don’t want to talk about it!” she cried, and she pushed her door open, threw herself into her dark, shrouded room, and shoved her body back against the door to close it again.

“Mom—no.”

I twisted the knob just in time, heard her groan as she held her place, and then felt the pressure lessen as she backed away. The door swung open easily, and as the light from the hallway gushed into her room, she crawled onto her bed, then clutched her legs to her chest like a child.