The Winter Sister(60)

I allowed myself to imagine it—sneaking off down a hallway while Ben distracted Tommy, finding his bedroom, rummaging through drawers until my fingers latched onto a box. It would be small, no bigger than a cell phone, no thicker than a couple of inches. I saw myself open it, saw the lid lift away, and inside, coiled on a piece of cloth, I saw a gold chain, a pendant shaped like a star.

“I don’t know,” I said quietly. “I don’t—”

“I have the day off tomorrow,” Ben cut in. “We could go then. Early afternoon, maybe? I could pick you up and we could drive there together.”

“Pick me up?” I heard myself ask, my voice distant and soft.

His car on the street, still running. A plume of exhaust in the air. My sister going back to him, and back to him, opening the door and slinking inside.

“No,” I said, snapping to attention.

“But we could—”

“There’s no we! I’m not going with you to Tommy’s!”

He’d been using that word—we—as if we were teammates or partners or even on the same side. I glared at him, trying to make my eyes as sharp as possible, and the flicker of determination on his face slowly dimmed to embers.

“Okay,” he said after a moment, and he put up his hands in a gesture of surrender. “Sorry.”

“I need to go.”

I stepped forward and yanked open the door, Ben dodging to the side so it didn’t hit his feet. I blinked as I entered the hallway, trying to orient myself.

“Sylvie, wait,” Ben said.

When I turned around, he was stepping into the hall and pulling a pen from his pocket. “Here, let me just . . .” He looked around and tore off a strip of paper from a nearby bulletin board. Using his palm as a writing surface, he scribbled something down.

“Here. Take this.”

He held the paper out to me, and I could see, as it dangled from his fingers, that he’d written a series of numbers on it.

“You’re giving me your phone number?” I asked. “Seriously?”

“In case you change your mind,” he said.

I thought about refusing to take it, just walking away and letting him stand there, stupidly watching me go, but something about that felt childish. It was just a piece of paper; I could put it in my pocket and throw it away when I got home.

“I’m not going to change my mind,” I promised, and when I reached out to take it, my fingers grazed against his. I pulled back quickly, as if recoiling from an electric shock, and he smiled at me—kindly, one might think, a little sheepishly even. If he had been anyone else, I might have smiled back as a measure of habit.

As he headed off down the hall, I watched him get farther away. Then I saw him round the corner and finally disappear. I had to get back to Mom—I knew that I did—but my feet wouldn’t move. The feeling of his skin was still singeing mine. Ben’s fingers—I knew what they could do, the colors they coaxed from blood. Stuffing his number into my pocket, I made myself remember. I made myself think of what they’d done.





19




Missy went into labor that afternoon, though I didn’t hear about it until well after dinner when Jill sent me an alarming text. “Baby’s coming. Complications. Prepping for emergency C.” I imagined the panic in Missy’s eyes, her hand reaching for Jill’s as the nurses wheeled her toward an operating room.

“Oh my god,” I wrote back. “I hope everything’s okay. Let me know when you can.”

Mom and I were in the living room again, me scrolling through my phone, her gently rocking in her chair. I didn’t want to tell her about Missy. I didn’t know what the word complications might trigger in her—if she’d think of the baby being motionless and blue as it was lifted from Missy’s body, then think of Persephone’s lips, motionless and blue under layers of snow. Still, she needed to know. Her sister and niece were enduring something terrifying together, and if there was anyone who knew about the ways a person’s body could betray them, it was Mom.

“The baby’s coming,” I told her. “There were complications, though, so they have to do a C-section.”

Her eyes didn’t move from the TV; the rhythm of her rocking didn’t stutter.

“Mom? Did you hear me?”

“Hmm?”

“The baby. Something’s wrong. They have to do a C-section.”

She still didn’t look at me, but after a moment, she said, “What baby,” her inflection as flat and nonchalant as if she were asking me to clarify a detail in the show we were watching.

I paused, studying her face. “Missy’s baby,” I said.

“Oh,” Mom said. “Her.”

She put her heels on the floor and the chair stopped moving.

“Yeah . . .” I said. “Do you want me to send Jill a message for you? You can just tell me what to say and I’ll text it to her.”

“No, that’s okay,” Mom said, and the rocking resumed.

“I don’t mind,” I insisted. “It doesn’t have to be long. Just something to let her know that you’re thinking about her and hoping everything goes well.”

“No,” Mom said again. “I don’t think so.”