The Winter Sister(61)

I leaned forward, trying to get her to turn her head and look at me. “Why not?” I asked.

She shrugged. “I have nothing to say.”

“What do you mean you—” I stopped, my chest tightening. “You can literally just say ‘Hey—I’m thinking of you guys. Hope Missy and the baby are okay.’?”

“Why don’t you say that, then?” she asked. “From you.”

“I already did say that from me.”

“Then why do I need to say it, too?”

The question shoved me backward. I hadn’t known my mother could still surprise me. I hadn’t thought that, after all the ways that Jill had been there for her, Mom could deny her sister the smallest of gestures in return. Her apathy was a door slammed shut, her refusal a lock she clicked into place. My skin felt warm, flushing with familiar bitterness, and I swung my eyes toward the wall. I didn’t want to look at her, didn’t want to see the show that interested her more than the anxiety her family was experiencing.

That wall, though—it, too, made something churn inside me, the Persephone constellation still studding it like silver thumbtacks. That constellation had been my own creation, but when I looked at it now, all I could see was Persephone, how her hand reached out in a spurt of anger, how she growled when she wrecked it, more animal than sister. I’d painted the constellation myself, but after that moment, it had never been mine again. Whenever I saw it, it only reminded me of the darkness that swirled inside Persephone, how something as harmless as painted stars, and Mom’s appreciation of them, could turn her smile into a snarl. For decades now, that constellation had belonged to my sister, and as I stared at it, imagining I could still see her fingerprints in the paint, it almost surprised me that Mom hadn’t carved it right out of the wall, hadn’t given it to Tommy Dent in exchange for a few hours of fog.

All at once, the TV seemed to blare from the speakers. I fumbled for the remote and then shoved my finger onto the mute button.

“Hey!” Mom protested. “I’m watching that!”

“Mom,” I said sharply.

She looked at me, her eyes wide with the injustice of her show being silenced, and my nerves sizzled, ready to ignite.

“Do you have any idea how selfish it is,” I started, “that you can’t even offer your sister a single encouraging word right now?”

She sighed, reaching down to scratch her ankle. I looked away when it seemed that all she scratched was bone. “Come on,” she said. “It’s not as serious as you’re making it out to be. Millions of women have had C-sections, Sylvie.”

“Well, this is Missy’s first. And Jill’s probably out of her mind. You know how she worries. You know that she—”

“Oh, I know how she worries, all right.”

My fingers curled into fists.

“Exactly,” I said. “You know better than anyone, don’t you? Because for half of her life, she’s been worrying about you—an alcoholic who goes catatonic at the slightest mention of anything hard.”

It felt good to finally say it—and terrible, too. Terrible that it was true, terrible that we’d once been so gentle with each other, curling up in bed together, singing and giggling as if both of us were children, and now—we were here, a place where all the edges were sharp.

“I don’t want to fight with you, Sylvie,” Mom said, but there was something about her voice—too even, too contained—that made me think she did.

“Jill has done everything for you,” I pressed on. “She did your grocery shopping, your laundry, she made sure your house was taken care of, she took you to your doctor’s appointments, your chemo. And that’s only in the past few months. She also took care of me when you were too drunk to be my mother, helped me get into RISD, helped me—”

“Oh, right,” Mom interrupted. “RISD. Are you sure it was art you studied and not theater? You’re being incredibly dramatic.”

“She stepped in the second you fell apart.”

“I lost my daughter, Sylvie.”

“And I lost my sister. You don’t think that was hard? I needed you, and you weren’t even there. You were ten feet away but there might as well have been an ocean between us.”

The corners of my eyes burned, but I blinked the sensation away. “Jill took care of everything. She dealt with the police and the reporters and the TV stations. She cooked me dinner, talked to my school, planned the entire funeral. And oh! Speaking of funerals, what the hell were you doing at Richard Emory’s?”

It caught us both off guard—how quickly my track had changed. Mom jumped a little in her chair, and even I felt a jolt as my muscles tensed. I hadn’t meant to bring it up—not right then, at least—but now that it was out, the question remained, humming with expectation.

“How do you even know about that?” Mom asked, her eyes so narrowed it was as if she’d caught me in her bedroom snooping through her things.

“I ran into Ben again,” I said. “He was at . . .”

But I didn’t have to finish, didn’t have to decide between the truth and the same old lie; Mom’s eyes flashed with fury, and she plowed through my hesitation.

“Seriously, Sylvie? You haven’t been able to find a man on your own, so you move onto your sister’s boyfriend?”