The Winter Sister(73)

I have to go now. The bell’s gonna ring soon. I can’t wait to see you tonight. (But I guess by the time you read this, I’ll have already seen you! Lucky me!)

Loving you endlessly,

Persephone

I stared at the curves of her name, the way the end of the e looped back up and around to cross over the h. It was my sister’s signature, distinct as a fingerprint, and it was scrawled on a letter that had called me her betrayer.

But what, exactly, was the betrayal? My love for my mother? My determination, as a young girl, to see only the best in her? If that was it, then what had she thought of the locked window? What was the word for something stronger than betrayal?

And had she been that bad, our mother? I didn’t remember the moment she mentioned in the letter, but I trusted it was true. The flippancy in saying “That’s nothing” to a daughter offering her something—a chance to connect over an accomplishment that should be celebrated together—felt like the mother I knew now. Was it possible, then, that she’d always been so harsh and dismissive, and I simply hadn’t seen it?

Sometimes, Persephone would say to me, it’s like you and I have two different mothers. But we didn’t. We had one mother, one woman who had birthed us both. Maybe it was just the two of us who’d been different—one who saw her clearly, and one who saw her impossibly, as a garden constantly in bloom.

She didn’t mean it like that. Those were the words that Persephone had imagined I’d say, and they rang true to me, too. I was always thinking of Persephone as having a darkness inside her that kept her from absorbing Mom’s light. How ferociously she’d swiped her hand across the constellation I’d made of her, how thunderously her words could roar across our house as she and Mom shouted at each other. But what if it had always been Mom’s darkness, to begin with, that had slid like a cloud over Persephone, denying her a view of the sun and other stars, blacking out what she should have always been surest of—that she was worthy, that she was loved?

And when I said those things—She didn’t mean it like that and a thousand other excuses—did she see that as me taking sides? When she tried to open the window that final night and found it wouldn’t budge, did it confirm for her a suspicion that I, too, didn’t love her? When she marched back to Ben’s car, was she not just furious with me, as I’d always thought, but also deeply wounded?

It all just dissipated, she’d written—all that pain and rejection, from Mom, from me—when Ben’s arms were around her, when he pressed her skin to bone. I shook my head, standing in the room of the man who’d held her and hurt her, and I tried to will away the dizziness that was whirling right through me.

“Are you okay?” I heard Ben ask.

When I blinked my eyes away from the letter, I saw that he was still sitting on the edge of his bed, his face as blank as a clean sheet of paper.

“I don’t understand,” I said.

Ben closed his eyes and nodded. “I know,” he said. “That’s why I was having second thoughts about showing it to you. It wasn’t your fault, though. You know that, right?”

I had a breath of hesitation, and then I squinted until my eyes were slits that I could barely see him through. “What wasn’t my fault?”

“The whole situation,” he said. “The bruises and all that.”

“Obviously it wasn’t my fault,” I snapped. “It was your fault.”

Ben cocked his head to the side, his brow furrowing. “I know, but I just mean—did you read the whole thing?” he asked. “The part where she—”

“Are you being serious?” I cut him off. “Let me get this straight. She had the impulse to self-harm, but instead of actually doing it herself, she wanted you to do it—and you did—and that’s supposed to prove that you’re innocent? That’s supposed to make it all okay? What happened exactly? Did she say, ‘I’m thinking of cutting,’ and then you said, ‘Wait, let me just give you all these bruises instead’?”

“No,” Ben protested. “No, it wasn’t like that. It was an accident, at first.”

“An accident,” I repeated. “You just accidentally held on to her so hard that she bruised?”

“Well . . .” He flipped over his palms so they faced the ceiling and he stared into them. “Kind of,” he said. Then, rushing into the next sentence, he looked at me and added, “But it was complicated.”

“I’m sure,” I said, crossing my arms.

“No, really, it was. I don’t know where to start to try to explain it.”

“The beginning usually works.”

“Yeah, but the beginning,” he said. “I don’t even know where that is.” He shook his head. “Listen. Long story short, I was really messed up at the time. I was—”

“Drunk?” I demanded. “On drugs?”

“No,” he said. “Not that kind of messed up. I was emotionally messed up, I guess. Things had been happening, and I was crying one night. And not just crying, but, like, all-out uncontrollably sobbing. And Persephone was trying to comfort me. She pulled me into her arms and I held on to her, and I was gripping her so hard, just bawling into her neck, and . . . I didn’t even know about the bruises until I saw them on her the next day. I apologized a million times, I felt so terrible, but she said no, she liked it. She said she wanted to do it again. She said we could help each other.”