The Winter Sister(63)

“I still dream about him,” she said, and even her voice was in another place. “Ever since it ended, I have these dreams. They’re so real, I can—I can hear his voice. And not in a vague, dreamlike way. I can actually hear the . . . grit of him. I can remember his voice in my dreams better than I can when I’m awake. I can feel his fingertips on my skin. I can smell him, even. Like leather and mown grass. And every time, every dream, no matter what he’s done—I always take him back.”

Her eyelids fluttered, and her head shook back and forth so slightly I wasn’t even sure she was controlling the movement.

“Then I wake up,” she said. “And I lose him all over again. He’s gone and I’m—still alone, but with a fresh new ache. The wound, it’s—never fully closed, you know. Not with those dreams. Not with—”

She pressed her lips together, cutting off the sentence as cleanly as scissors cutting through thread. Then, as slowly as I’d ever seen, she stood up from her chair and wavered a little where she stood.

“I’m going to bed,” she said. “You’ve made me so tired.”

I watched her turn around, her feet soundless on the carpet.

“Mom, wait.”

It reminded me of something—the way she’d described her dreams, the effect they had on her in the morning. I could easily imagine her waking to a world without Will, remembering what she’d lost, and then curling into herself under the sheets. She’d be unable to face the day after that, unable to open the shades or even leave her bed.

She looked back at me, but her gaze was limp, falling more against my collarbone than my face. “What?” she asked.

“What was the fifteenth?”

The clock continued ticking as she paused. “Huh?”

“The fifteenth of every month. What happened then?”

In an instant, her eyes sharpened; a tendon in her neck went tight. “How do you know about that?” she asked, and it was the second time in one conversation that she’d uttered that question, the same accusatory tone lacing her words.

“Persephone used to call it your Dark Day. Every fifteenth—or nearly, anyway—it was like you were a different person. You’d just . . . disappear.”

She turned away from me again, and I watched the stiff, unyielding board of her back.

“What was it, Mom? Tell me.”

The silence became so dense for a minute that it swallowed all other sounds—the clock, the refrigerator, the blood drumming against my temples. I felt like I was impossibly close to something, and that if she’d just answer me, she’d become less like the question mark that had too frequently punctuated my past. She could tell me what it was—the fifteenth, the Dark Day—and I could finally know her. We could know each other, maybe, again.

“You really want to know what it is?” she asked quietly.

“Yes,” I breathed.

“It’s . . .”

I stopped my lungs, listening.

“. . . none of your fucking business.”

She left me then, moving away down the hall, and my shoulders sunk so low they seemed to become edgeless. In a moment, I heard her bedroom door close and then lock, a sound I knew as well as my own voice.

“Idiot,” I muttered to myself.

After a few minutes, I turned off the TV and the lights, checked the dead bolts, and headed into my own room—that somber, sisterless place. Glancing at Persephone’s bed, I felt something in me throb. The box for Tommy Dent was still there, right where I’d tossed it on Thursday. I averted my gaze and crossed the room to crawl into my bed. My eyes traced the cracks in the ceiling, and at some point—maybe an hour later, maybe just fifteen minutes—I heard my phone vibrate with a text.

“Everything went great,” Jill wrote. “Missy and Baby are just fine. She doesn’t have a name yet, but she’s gorgeous.”

Then a picture came in—a little blurry and off-center, but it showed a tiny pink body in a tiny white blanket tucked up against Missy’s neck. I smiled at the image, putting my finger on the baby’s cheek.

“She’s perfect,” I wrote back to Jill. “I can’t wait to meet her.”

“We’ll come visit you and Annie as soon as we can,” Jill replied—and I picked my head up, staring at the wall as the edges of an idea came together in my mind.

“Or I could come to Boston,” I wrote. “It’s probably easier that way. I could stay for a weekend, days when Mom doesn’t have treatment.”

I was instantly comforted by the possibility of it. I would cradle this new little human, and Jill would hum in the kitchen, stirring pots of food that, even three rooms away, smelled delicious. I’d help with the laundry and the cooking, I’d watch the baby so Missy could nap, and Mom would be fine back at home. She’d probably revel in my absence, breathe it in like a scent she wanted to savor. For days, there’d be no one to pester her with questions, no one who cared enough to try to understand who she was, and I’d be in Boston, a city even farther from home than Providence, and whenever a bedroom door was closed, the person behind it would never turn the lock.

“No,” Jill wrote, and the fantasy crumbled as quickly as I’d built it. “I need you to be there with your mother.”

The walls in my room crept closer. The house itself was shrinking, shriveling up like the raisin Mom believed was her heart.