The Winter Sister(62)

The words stung like a slap across the face, the kind that keeps vibrating on the skin. My mouth dropped open, but there was nothing to pass through the space where my breath had tumbled out.

“You don’t know what men like that can do to you,” Mom continued. “They suck the blood right out of your heart until all you’re left with is a heap of raw meat. No—not even meat. More like a raisin. A twitching, shriveled raisin where your heart’s supposed to be.”

I struggled for a response. “Ben and me—we’re—it’s not like that.”

“Oh, of course it’s like that,” she stormed ahead. “Listen to you—‘Ben and me.’ Well, let me tell you, little girl. The apple doesn’t fall far from the Emory tree. It never does. Don’t be such a fool as to think he might be different.”

Our eyes locked like the antlers of two panting animals, and I felt like the weaker one. Mom was all bone and tendon and spine, but in that moment, I believed she could snap me in half if she wanted to. She was fueled by something—anger or resentment or pain—and it was so potent I could feel it radiating from her body. My only weapon, I was sure, was to keep on digging at the thing that had set her off.

“Then why did you go to Will’s father’s funeral?” I asked. “If the Emorys are so horrible, why would you ever step foot in a service for one of them? Why bother paying your respects to Will at all?”

I saw the second that she loosened, her hands unclenching from the armrests as she sagged back into her chair. Just like that, I noticed, I was the stronger one again.

“Because I love him, obviously,” she said. “He’d had a loss, and I love him.”

“Still?” The word shot out of my mouth. “You love him now, present tense? Even after he hurt you so badly? Even after what you just said about your—your twitching raisin?”

“Yes,” she said quietly, dropping her gaze into her hands. “Even after that.”

“Why?” I demanded. I heard the clock on the wall ticking, the refrigerator’s buzz and hum. I saw her right hand squeeze her left, her knuckles going white.

Finally, she shrugged. “I don’t know,” she said. “It just won’t stop.”

Her voice was a leaf letting go of its branch, gentle as an exhalation, but I shook my head, unsatisfied. “I don’t understand,” I said. “It’s been—how many years?”

I thought of the date scrawled on the back of the picture of Mom and Will.

“Like, thirty-seven?” I asked. “It’s been thirty-seven years since you dated him?”

Mom shrugged again. “That sounds right,” she said, turning her head away from me to stare at the muted TV. “But it doesn’t matter how long it’s been.”

“How could it not matter? How could you not have moved on in all that time? Mom, this—this isn’t good for you.”

She watched the screen awhile before she spoke. “Haven’t you ever been in love?”

I straightened my spine, glanced at the TV as if it were another person in the room that she might have been speaking to.

“I mean—I guess,” I said. “I’ve had relationships. And they’ve ended. And I’ve always moved on.”

“No,” she said, her eyes still focused on the screen in front of her. “Not that kind of love. I’m talking about love that feels like—like your bones are filled with light.”

I flicked my eyes toward the Persephone constellation, where all the edges of her body were formed by stars. After so many years, she still remained there, a painted skeleton simulating brightness.

“Um,” I said, “I can’t say that I have. But still—”

“Well, what about me, then?”

When I looked back at Mom, her eyes were already clamped onto mine. Lit by the lamp beside her, they seemed almost metallic—more silver than gray.

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“You still love me, right?”

The question made my heartbeat stutter. It was a moment before I could answer. “Why would you ask that?”

“Well,” she began, “here you were just now, cataloguing all my faults. I’m an alcoholic. I shut down. I shut you out. Jill had to step in because I was ‘too drunk to be your mother.’?” She air-quoted the phrase, her tone slightly mocking.

“But,” she added, “you still love me, don’t you?”

I hesitated. My mind flashed between memories of her fingers on my face—her scent a floral, lingering thing I could still smell while I was at school—and memories of her fingers choking the neck of a bottle as she dragged herself into her room.

“That’s not the same,” I finally said.

“Of course it is,” she insisted. “I hurt you, Sylvie. I know that I did.”

I felt my throat hollow out. What Mom had just said—it wasn’t an apology exactly, but it was the closest thing I’d ever gotten to one.

“It’s the same with”—Mom paused and then swallowed—“me and Will. I can’t stop loving him just because he hurt me, not when I loved him so deeply to begin with. And it’s not only that, it’s . . .”

Her eyes became distant, as if she could see right through me to the kitchen, to the houses down the street, to the gray and shimmering past.