The Winter Sister(81)

I switched off the lamps, each of the bulbs lingering a dull orange before snuffing out completely, but the darkness didn’t take. There was still another light, coming from somewhere down the hall. As I got closer, I saw that Mom’s door was open, the light spilling out. Tiptoeing into the doorway and resting my shoulder against its frame, I found her asleep on top of the bed, bald as a baby and curled up like one, too.

I watched the flicker of a vein on her head, how it forked across her skull like pale blue roots. Then, her arm twitched, responding to something from deep within the folds of sleep, and I noticed her fist, tightly balled and clutching something. Taking a couple steps into the room, I saw that it was a tissue—that, in fact, the bed was littered with tissues crumpled up around her, fist-like themselves.

At the foot of the bed was a lidless shoebox stuffed with what appeared to be small white envelopes. I glanced back at Mom’s face, noted her pink, swollen eyelids, the hints of dried tears on her cheeks, and I looked at the box again. My heart sputtered, seeming to understand something before my mind could catch up, and I reached for the box, my movements as slow and soundless as dust floating through air. Palms flat against the cardboard, I lifted it up and snuck back into my room, where I switched on the light and carried the box to my bed. For a few moments, I could only stare at all those envelopes lined up like entries in a card catalogue.

I picked out one at random. “Annie – January 15,” it said, and then a year. I did the math quickly—I would have been four years old when Mom received this; Persephone would have been eight. I plucked out another envelope (“Annie – October 15,” it said, with the same year as the first) and then another (“Annie – May 15,” dated two years later). Flipping through more and more, I saw that there were ones with years that predated the first one I’d picked up, and ones with years when I hadn’t even been alive yet. But every single one arrived on the fifteenth of the month—Mom’s Dark Day.

Envelopes scattered around me, I pulled out another from the box (I’d been seven for this one, Persephone eleven), and I looked inside. A strip of paper no bigger than a credit card said, “I can’t stop thinking about you.” For a second, I let my eyes trace the bulky handwriting, and then I reached for another (I’d been two, Persephone six) and read the note inside: “I took my son blueberry picking yesterday and remembered that stain on your lips.” I fingered the top edges of the envelopes until I stopped on one that was closer to the end of the box (I’d been thirteen, Persephone seventeen), and when I opened it, I read his words: “In my dream last night I was kissing you.”

Will’s words, of course. So now I knew. On the fifteenth of each month, he’d sent my mother a letter—no stamp, no address, hand-delivered apparently. “I miss your face,” one said. Then Mom would glide through the hallway like a ghost, turn into her room, shut the door. “The other day, a song came on the radio that reminded me of you and I had to pull over on the side of the road for ten minutes.” We’d press our ears to her door, pancake batter dripping from the wooden spoon that Persephone held up in the air, and we’d hear nothing but the sound of our own breathing. “I love you. I’ll always love you. Only you.” Darkness would swallow the house as we’d wait in the living room, still in our pajamas, the rumble of our stomachs reminding us to turn on the light, heat up the leftover pancakes, have breakfast for dinner. “It’s not enough to just remember you.” The next morning, she’d emerge from her room, the creak of her door a sound that pulled us from dreams, and her eyes would be puffy. Then she’d kiss us on the tops of our heads—Persephone just a peck, me a kiss of hard I’ve-come-back-to-you lips, her palm lingering under my chin, Persephone’s eyes lingering on Mom’s hand.

“Those are mine.”

Her voice made me jump—not because Mom was there, in my doorway, and who knew for how long, but because of the anger trembling in each word. I looked at her, her arms crossed, a gnarled twig of a woman.

“These notes,” I said. “They’re why you had your Dark Days.”

“My what?”

“Every fifteenth, you’d slink off to your room and not come out until the next day.”

She was silent then, her lips pinched so tightly together they almost disappeared.

“So this was why,” I continued. “Because Will would write you these notes. And then you’d miss him, I guess. You’d miss him so much you’d abandon us.”

She unsealed her mouth to scoff. “Abandon you? Please. You girls could take care of yourselves.”

“Because we had to,” I said. “You can do nearly anything when you have to.”

Mom rolled her eyes.

“He was toying with you,” I said. “You know that, right?”

“What are you talking about?”

“Sending you these notes—with no intention of actually seeing you. He just wanted to know you were still under his thumb. He was manipulating you.”

“And what makes you think he had no intention of actually seeing me?”

I hesitated, the answer so obvious. “Because you never saw him.”

“Like hell I didn’t.”

Her eyes blazed, practically scorching my skin with the heat of their conviction, even from across the room.