The Winter Sister(78)

I thought about it, and then I answered him honestly. “No. I mean, I don’t hate it. But I don’t enjoy it, either. My roommate, Lauren—we worked at the same place, and she’s in love with it.”

I pictured the sticky notes she’d place around the apartment—a phoenix in transition from ash to bird, a woman’s eye with thin, barren trees for lashes. I pictured her face as she worked on someone’s arm or calf or shoulder blade, the way her eyes would smile even as her lips pursed in concentration.

“She would marry tattooing if she could,” I added, and then I cleared my throat, my voice too loud as it bounced off all the gleaming white surfaces in the kitchen. “I think that maybe I’ve always been a little jealous of that. I just can’t imagine being that passionate about a job.”

I slid my finger up and down my beer bottle, watching clear, glistening tracks of condensation emerge. “It’s only been a few weeks since I was laid off,” I said, “but it feels like a lifetime ago that I ever did that. It seems like it was someone else entirely.”

Ben tilted his head and knitted his brows together. “So how’d you get into tattooing in the first place, then? Is it something you have to go to school for?”

“You have to do an apprenticeship, get certified,” I said, shrugging. “But I originally went to art school. And then after that, I basically hopped on board my best friend’s plans because I didn’t have any of my own.”

“Art school,” Ben said. “That’s cool. What kind of art do you do?”

“I don’t do any art,” I said quickly.

“Oh. Sorry, I just thought—”

“Yeah, it would make sense,” I cut in, “for someone with a degree in fine arts to actually make art, but I don’t know.” I continued to trace the condensation on my beer, my fingertip wet and cold. “The truth is, I have no idea what I want to do with my life.”

I was buzzed by now, clearly—I was making admissions to Ben that I’d barely even articulated to myself. As I pushed my half-empty bottle a couple inches away, the beer and lingering whiskey kept unthreading thoughts that, up until now, had been knotted up inside me.

“My life is totally directionless,” I said. “In high school, I painted every day so I could get into RISD. At RISD, I painted every day so I could get a degree. And for years now since then, I’ve just been . . .” I searched for the correct word, thumbing through my brain until I landed on the one that Aunt Jill had often ascribed to me. “Floating.”

Ben shrugged. “That’s okay,” he said. “You’re—what? Thirty? That’s about the age I was when I figured things out. Before that, I never cared about a job, but now that I’m a nurse, I love going to work. It’s hard, but I love it.”

Looking at him then, I saw that, even with all their darkness, his eyes seemed earnest and encouraging, as if he truly believed that I, too, had a calling, and that mine was a path that would reveal itself in time. After a couple seconds, I had to look away from him.

“Yeah,” I said, “well, what you said before—about becoming a nurse to make up for your mistakes with Persephone? I think that, for me, doing tattoos is similar—only, in the opposite way.”

His eyes squinted in confusion. “What do you mean?”

I took a deep breath. “I think I only stuck with tattooing to remember my mistakes. Because if I remembered them, then I could keep punishing myself. Because I should be. I should be punished.”

Ben shook his head. “I don’t under—”

“You know I painted over Persephone’s bruises, right?”

He hesitated, looking away from me to stare at his drink, but then he nodded.

“I shouldn’t have done that,” I rushed on. “I shouldn’t have kept it a secret. But she asked me to, and so I did. And I always thought that covering her bruises, keeping her secret—I thought it led to what happened that night, because, as you know, I believed it was you who killed her. So tattooing—inking pictures onto people’s skin—it reminds me of what I did. Which is good. I don’t want to be able to forget. I don’t deserve to.”

A crease of concern spread across Ben’s forehead. “You were a kid,” he said. “You can’t carry that. You didn’t do anything wrong, Sylvie.”

I shook my head so hard that my hair flew across my face. “You don’t understand,” I said, brushing it back behind my ear. “You don’t know what I did.”

Standing up, I pushed my chair away from the counter and took a step back. My heart was a clenched fist knocking against my ribs; the air felt too thick, my throat too small. I could feel a film of sweat, sudden and slick, on my forehead, and I could see her in her red coat, the snow just beginning to dust her shoulders as she trudged back toward Ben, as she got in his car and never looked back. It’s such a betrayal, she’d written.

“Sylvie,” I heard Ben say, but my eyes were blurring and I was already walking away from him, stumbling down the hallway and toward the front door. I could see the handle, could almost reach out and grasp it. I could see the dead bolt, the latch that wasn’t locked.

“I have to go,” I mumbled, vaguely looking around for my coat but then deciding, somewhere in the fog beginning to envelop me, that I didn’t need it. It wasn’t as cold outside as it had been that night. My body wouldn’t freeze; my body would not be buried in snow.