The Winter Sister(56)
I didn’t respond. Instead, I kept my eyes on the phone, where the typing icon flashed and disappeared, flashed and disappeared, over and over again. I slouched down on the couch, huddling deeper into myself as I waited for her to hit Send, and I tucked my icy hands into the sleeves of my sweatshirt.
“But I GUESS I can understand why you never talked about it,” Lauren finally wrote, and I released a breath I hadn’t realized I’d been holding. “That’s some heavy shit for a toddler to go through.”
For a moment, I blinked at her text in confusion. Then I recalled the rest of the lie I’d told her, the paint that still remained. And right away, I knew I could fix that. I could tell her I’d been fourteen years old when I lost Persephone—old enough to know and love her, old enough to be baffled by her, too.
“Do you want me to call you right now?” Lauren asked. “I have so many questions but it seems weird to talk about it over text. I don’t want to overwhelm you or anything, but I’m just over here like OMG where did it happen, where were YOU when it happened, etc. etc.”
I remembered Persephone hissing at me through the window that night. I remembered holding the blanket tighter over my head, ignoring her so hard that she walked away. And then I remembered what I’d always known; paint is stubborn. It clings instead of chips, and even after more than a decade, it has to be scraped and scraped and scraped. But right then, my hands were stiff with cold, and my entire body was trembling.
“I’m so sorry,” I managed to type, “but I have to help my mom with something. Can we talk about this later? Tomorrow maybe?”
“Uhhh sure . . .” she replied after a moment, and I looked over at Mom, asleep in her chair.
? ? ?
The next morning, Mom brought Wuthering Heights to chemo. I watched her as she read, trying to distract myself from my conversations with Lauren—both the one I’d stumbled through the night before, and the one I still needed to have. Each of them filled me with a light-headed anxiety that made the words in Mom’s book seem to blur.
Clearing my throat, I forced my eyes to focus, and I saw that the corners of several pages were folded down. It seemed so unlike her—flagging a passage with the intention of returning to it later—and for a moment, I had to resist the urge to rip the book from her hands, comb through those pages, and see what had moved her so much that she felt the need to mark them.
“You know,” I said, “I had to do a paper on that book in high school, but I barely remember it. Is it good?”
She didn’t look at me when she responded.
“It’s not that it’s good,” she said distractedly. “It’s just true.” The page she’d been reading made a whispery sound as she turned it. “Be quiet, though, okay? I can’t concentrate if you’re talking to me.”
“Sorry,” I said, and I turned my attention toward the entrance of the room. I jolted then, seeing Ben walk by. He glanced in casually, but as soon as he noticed me, he hurried away down the hall.
I looked at Mom, who held the book so close that it blocked her face entirely, and then I stood up and followed him into the reception area.
“Ben,” I whispered, and when he turned around, there was a twinge of pain—or guilt—in his eyes, as if it hurt him just to look at me.
“Hey,” he said, coming to an abrupt stop. “I wasn’t trying to get in your way or anything. I forgot this was your mom’s chemo time.”
“That’s not—”
“But while you’re here, can we talk for a second? I want to apologize.”
I paused. “About what?”
Cupping my elbow gently with his palm, he led me toward a window in front of some chairs. “I’m sorry about what I said to you last week,” he said.
“Um,” I started, “you’re going to have to be more specific.”
“About Tommy Dent,” he said, shaking his head, as if disappointed with himself. “I was a jerk about it. It’s obviously a sensitive subject, and I sort of threw him in your face.”
I rubbed the toe of my shoe into the carpet, keeping my eyes on my feet as I responded.
“Actually,” I said, “you might be right about Tommy.”
When I looked back up at him, his brow was furrowed, his dark eyes slightly squinted. “You’re going to have to be more specific,” he echoed.
“I think he—” I stopped, knowing that once I said it, I wouldn’t be able to take it back. “I think he might have killed my sister.”
The words thudded against the air, louder than I’d intended, as I finally said the thing I’d only been able to imagine in sporadic flashes so far. My breath became sharp yet shallow, my skin suddenly hot. I lifted my hand to my forehead, and then my body loosened, my arms flopping to my sides.
“Here. Come with me,” Ben insisted. He put his hand on my back and I allowed myself to be led away from the windows and down a hall. We walked until we reached a door marked “Staff Only,” and then Ben nudged me inside.
At first, it was dark, but I could sense that the room was small, and when Ben flicked on a light switch and my eyes recovered from the shock of brightness, I saw that we were standing in a tiny bathroom. Ben slid the silver lock into place, and I had to blink away the image of my bedroom window, the old white latch so easy to turn that it made betraying my sister seem almost natural.