The Winter Sister(95)

She pressed a palm into the arm of the chair and shifted her body, her other hand still holding on to the bucket. Then she looked me over, her eyes trailing from the top of my rumpled head, over the jeans and sweatshirt I’d slept in, all the way down to my sockless feet.

“What were you doing in there?” she asked.

“In where?”

“Your room.” Her voice was laced with suspicion.

“I was sleeping,” I said.

“It’s the afternoon.”

I looked at the sliding glass door, the dim light trickling through it, and I saw that she was right. I’d slept through most of the day.

“I had a rough night,” I said.

“Well, maybe if you weren’t so involved with Ben Emory, you wouldn’t be having rough nights.”

“I don’t think you have any right to talk.”

Mom set her lips into a firm line, looked into her bucket, and leaned her head back again.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” she asked.

“Tell you what?”

“About Ben,” she said, her voice brittle. “Working at the hospital.”

The air pressed against me, and I slumped onto the couch, landing heavily against the cushions.

“I didn’t want to upset you,” I said.

“Oh, well, you did a great job.”

“You know, can you just cut the sarcasm for, like, two seconds? You make it so difficult to talk to you about anything.”

Mom narrowed her eyes at me but didn’t speak, and I turned my head away from her, my gaze falling onto the wall that still, after all these years, remained a white sky to the metallic constellation I’d once painted. I could imagine a bomb going off, a fire swallowing up the whole house, and still, that wall would be standing, alone in the charred yard, Persephone’s angry handprint gleaming like the stars she’d tried to wipe away.

“Why is that still there?” I asked.

I looked at Mom and saw that she was staring at it, too, her eyes a little gentler now. When she didn’t respond, I continued.

“You got rid of everything Persephone ever owned, but you didn’t get rid of the one thing that, to me, feels so much more like her than anything else.”

“What do you expect me to do, Sylvie—tear down the wall?”

“I expect you to paint it. Why haven’t you painted over it? She was mad at you when she wrecked the constellation. Why would you want to be reminded of that?”

She was quiet for a few moments, but her dry, parted lips seemed ready to respond. I pressed my teeth together, willing to wait her out, and when she finally answered me, her voice was soft as the sound of wind rustling grass.

“Because I have to be.”

I hesitated. “You have to be what?”

“Reminded.”

Her arm loosened around the bucket, her hand slipping into her lap.

“Why?” I asked.

“Because I deserve that,” she said. “Don’t you think?”

Her tone wasn’t sarcastic, wasn’t taunting or edged with any kind of malice. It seemed like an honest question—one I had no idea how to answer.

“Why do you say that?” I prompted.

She shrugged one shoulder. “You said it yourself, the other night—she didn’t know I loved her. What kind of mother does that make me?”

She paused, leaving a space for me to respond, but when I didn’t speak, she continued.

“The kind that deserves to be reminded,” she answered for herself.

“Mom,” I said. “I was angry when I said that. I had just found out that you’d—”

“I know what you were,” she interrupted. “But I know that what you said was true. I’ve always known it. I just—” She looked back at the constellation, her eyes seeming to trace what was left of its stars. “I always tried so hard to be good to them.”

“Them?”

“Your sister. Will.”

At the sound of his name, my throat stiffened.

“I thought protecting her was the same as being good to her,” Mom went on. “But I was wrong, maybe. I still don’t know for sure. All I know is I got so caught up in all that protecting that I ended up protecting the wrong person.”

“What do you mean?”

She looked at me sharply. “Me, obviously. I was so afraid of losing her that I pushed her away. I made that—” She gestured weakly toward the wall. “I made that happen. And, in the end, I lost her anyway—more than just physically—because, when I look back on my memories of her, they’re all just . . .”

She closed her eyes, gripping the armrests, and after a wave of something—nausea or pain or guilt—seemed to rise and subside within her, she shook her head, letting out a breath.

“They’re just her being mad at me,” she said. “Or her reaching out to me, and me turning away.”

She glanced down at the bucket in her lap, and with a look of revulsion, she picked it up and placed it on the floor.

“Mom,” I started, “I have to tell you something. But first, I have to, I need to . . .”

Her eyes opened again, the gray of them like a shadow falling over snow.

I struggled to continue. “You said the other night that my father is someone named Eddie, someone you barely knew—and I believed you—but . . . I just need to know with absolute certainty that that’s true, that Will is not my father.”