The Winter Sister(74)

He looked at me, his eyes locking me into their magnetic darkness. “I was in so much pain,” he said, “that I actually agreed to it. And then it just became this ritual. Every time we saw each other, we’d—I don’t know—share our pain, I guess.”

My throat contracted, my breath quickening. The shame in his eyes was so palpable I had to turn my gaze away. I even wondered how my own eyes looked, the word betrayal staring unblinkingly up at me from the letter still clutched in my hand.

“I just,” he continued. “I loved the way it felt, you know? Holding on to something so tightly that you know it can’t leave you. I don’t know if you’ve ever felt that kind of desperation to keep something you love before, to make sure it will always stay with you, but it’s a powerful feeling, and it made it easier for me to convince myself that we really were just helping each other.”

He cleared his throat, and when I glanced back at him, he was looking just past me, his eyes focused on the gathering darkness outside the window.

“I know now,” he said, “that it was fucked up. I’ve known that for a long time. What we did back then, it was unhealthy. It was wrong. Even if we both thought we wanted it, thought it was healing us, it was actually damaging. But I didn’t get that then. I couldn’t see beyond my grief. I was just so grateful.”

His fingers trembled, the tips of them flickering like flames.

“I mean, here was a girl I loved,” he continued, “who was willing to bear my pain.” He scratched his cheek with his shaking fingers. “She shouldn’t have had to, though, no matter what she said. I know that. I know that.”

Then he met my eyes again with a look so pained and penetrating it felt like a hand reaching between my ribs and grabbing onto my heart. “I know that, Sylvie. I know it now and I’ve known it for a while, but by the time I did it was too late. I—God, I fucking . . .”

He stood up and walked toward the French doors, placing his hand on one of them before glancing back at me. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I need to—” His gaze darted around the room. “I’ll be right back.”

He disappeared down the hallway, and in a few moments, I heard a door open and close. Then there was only silence.

I looked at the letter, the words blurred together, and I let the confusion wash over me, disorienting as waves that crash and pull against a body at sea. Listening to Ben, watching the weight of memory drag him down, my anger toward him had quickly melted into—something else, though I had no idea what to call it. Pity? That didn’t seem right. Understanding? No, that wasn’t it either; there was still so much I didn’t understand. But that look in his eyes when he’d spoken of his pain, his regret—I knew it, I recognized it, I’d seen it countless times in mirrors, in pictures, in self-portraits I was assigned in college.

“Your eyes seem so sad here,” my professor once said, evaluating my work. Then I’d looked at the painting and found what I’d just seen in Ben—the ache in him throbbing, as if the air he was breathing was something he didn’t believe he deserved.

And then, standing alone in his bedroom, not even sure if he was coming back, I knew what I was feeling, what had swooped in so suddenly to replace my anger.

It was belief. Simple, unguarded, lightweight belief.

He had loved her and he had bruised her. He had stained her skin with his pain, and she had let him—encouraged him, even. He had believed her when she said he was helping her, that Persephone could exchange her own pain for another, and when he finally stopped believing it, it was too late. There was nobody to hear his apologies, nobody to forgive him, nobody to bear his grief or love.

So strange to even think it, but I believed him. I did. I did. I believed that you could love someone so much, and still, you could hurt them. I believed that a heart could pound with pain and love at exactly the same time.





23




When Ben returned, he was holding a glass of whiskey.

“Sorry,” he said once he swallowed. He nodded at the drink. “I just needed this. Memory Lane is a difficult road to walk.” He chuckled briefly, then shook his head, sobering. “Do you want some? I could go make another.”

I thought of Mom—how quickly she’d turned to alcohol to dilute her difficult emotions, how cowardly I’d always felt that was—but then I imagined how the whiskey would feel on my tongue, warm and velvety.

“Sure.”

“Cool,” Ben said. “I hate drinking alone. Be right back.”

I unbuttoned my coat and sloughed it off like a snake unpeeling from its skin. Then I placed it on the bed and sat down beside it, crossing my legs and uncrossing them, crossing and uncrossing again. I didn’t have the energy to keep standing, but my nerves felt too frayed to let me sit still.

Ben held a glass out toward me as he walked back into the room. He took another sip from his own. As I accepted the whiskey from him, our fingers brushed together, and reflexively, I jerked away, the liquor sloshing against the sides of the glass. He looked at me, his eyebrows raised, but he didn’t say anything, just sipped and then sipped again.

“Thanks,” I muttered.

He nodded, and I drank, feeling the satisfying burn of the whiskey at the back of my throat as I swallowed. Silence settled like dust over the room, and I kept my eyes pointed down toward the whiskey, cupping the glass as if it contained tea leaves I knew how to read.