When Aunt Jill called to tell me about my mother’s cancer, I was forcing down my second tequila shot in a bar on Thayer Street. It was my thirtieth birthday, and Lauren was buying. “All night,” she said, “anything you want. None of this Sober Sylvie shit.” I was wearing a black dress that dug into my thighs and black strappy shoes that dug into my ankles. When I stumbled outside to answer my phone, my jerky movements were less a product of the tequila than the four-inch heels that Lauren had forced me to wear (“Don’t even think about putting on flats. That dress is a fuck-me dress, and a fuck-me dress needs fuck-me shoes.”). I’d been working at Steve’s Ink all day, so I hadn’t had the energy to argue with her, or to explain that I didn’t care that much about my birthday. With Lauren, it was easier to just wear whatever outfit she threw at me, drink whatever shots she bought me, and hope she found a guy she liked within the first thirty minutes. That way, I could feign queasiness and spend the last hours of my birthday alone in my bed.
I leaned against a telephone pole just outside the bar, watching a parade of young people—Brown students, most likely—marching inside. Putting one finger into my ear, I tried my best to shut out the music that blasted through the door of the bar.
“Jill,” I said. “Hi.”
“Happy birthday!” she said. “I can’t believe you’re thirty years old. That must make me—what? Thirty-seven?”
I smiled, shifting my weight from foot to foot. “No way,” I said. “Thirty-five. Tops.”
“Great. I’ll take it.”
In the pause between us, I flicked through my brain for something to tell her, some recent activity or achievement that would prove to her that I wasn’t “just floating,” as she had said during our last conversation in September. But what was there?
“So,” Jill said. “Anything new?”
I scanned the other side of the street, where a man sitting on the curb snuffed out a cigarette and then reached into his jacket pocket for another. Behind him was the Thai restaurant where Lauren and I often got takeout, and I looked at the flashing “OPEN” sign, my mouth watering. When I glanced back at the man a moment later, I was startled to find that his eyes were already locked onto mine. He cupped his hand over his lighter and lit a cigarette, his gaze lingering as he inhaled. I quickly looked away, busying my fingers by picking at an old staple on the telephone pole.
“Nothing much,” I said to Jill. “I’m still at Steve’s. Still living with Lauren. You know, same as last month.”
“I don’t know how you do it, working at that tattoo store.”
“Tattoo parlor,” I corrected her.
“Right. Parlor. It’s just—all those needles, the blood. I wouldn’t last a minute. Surely there must be something else you can do with your talents.”
The man with the cigarettes stood up. He wiped his hands on his pants and walked down Thayer Street. A girl, coming from the opposite direction, sped up her pace to meet him. When they reached each other, they embraced, and the girl snagged his cigarette with a laugh. He put his arm around her and kissed her cheek as she took a drag.
I turned away, facing the bar again. He’d been harmless, of course—just someone waiting for his girlfriend to arrive. Lauren always told me I was paranoid, that the things that ran through my head on any given Tuesday could be lifted straight from the script of a Lifetime Original Movie. The ones where women are always at risk, and men, though beautiful and benign to the untrained eye, are always, inevitably, monsters.
“The needles and blood are no big deal,” I said to Jill. “You get used to it.”
“Okay,” Jill said. “So are you just used to it, then, or do you actually like tattooing?”
“I like it,” I lied, because it was easier than explaining the truth.
“Okay. Well, listen, Sylvie,” Jill said, her tone suddenly shifting. “I know this isn’t the best time for this. You’re celebrating right now, I’m sure. But can we make some time to talk tomorrow? There’s something I need to discuss with you.”
There was an edge to her voice that I hadn’t heard in years. For the first time since I’d walked outside, I registered the cool October air on my skin.
“What is it?” I asked. “Is it something about Persephone?”
“It’s—what? No. Nothing like that.” I could hear her, probably in her kitchen in Connecticut, sighing.
Sixteen years after my sister’s murder, the case was as cold as her body must have been that night. But there were still days when I found myself hoping for some kind of news, some fresh lead that had come to light, some witness that hadn’t found the courage to speak, until now. Never mind that it had happened on a street without many houses. Never mind that the snow had compromised the crime scene, made the chance of finding DNA evidence or fibers of clothing nearly nonexistent. After all those years, I’d never stopped waiting.
“Is it Missy, then? Something wrong with the baby?”
“No,” Jill said. “No, no. She and Carl just went for an ultrasound last week actually. The baby’s doing great. It’s . . . about your mother actually.”
A group of wobbly, laughing girls spilled out of the bar, and the sudden flare of music felt like a punch in the stomach.
“Listen,” Jill said, “I can hear that you’re busy. Let’s just—”
“No,” I interrupted, walking a few yards down the street. “It’s okay. I can hear you. Just tell me.”
I waited as Jill inhaled on the other end of the phone. Even with the muffled sounds of the bar surrounding me, I could still hear her slow, deliberate breath. I put my hand on the arm of a sidewalk bench.
“I’ve been taking your mother to a few doctor’s appointments lately,” Jill said. “She’s been getting treated for what they thought was just acid reflux. But . . . well, new test results came back today, and it’s . . . cancer. Esophageal cancer. I’m so sorry, Sylvie.”
My fingers tightened on the bench’s metal arm.
“Is that the one you get from drinking a lot?” I asked.
In the pause that followed, I could tell that Jill was surprised by my question. But what surprised me was that she hadn’t been calling to tell me my mother was dead. In the months after Persephone was murdered, how many times had Jill and I pressed our ears against Mom’s bedroom door, listening for some sound of life inside? How many times had I picked her lock, only to creak open the door and find her lying the way I imagined that people in coffins did? At a certain point—when our pleas did nothing, when the bottles continued to pile up in the sink, when the meals we made her never made it to her lips—I’d stopped seeing her as a withered plant that could be watered and sunshined back to life. Instead, I’d started seeing the sagging stem of her spine for what it was: a sign that death was rooted within her.
“Uh, yes,” Jill said. “Well, that’s not the only cause of it, but . . . alcoholism can definitely be a factor.”
My heart contracted. I tried to imagine my mother’s face as the doctor told her the news, but whether her expression was one of fear or anxiety or relief, I couldn’t tell; in my mind, she kept looking away.
“How long does she have?” I asked.
Again, there was a pause from Jill’s end.
“She’s starting chemo next week,” she said. “Then, depending on how that goes, there might be another round before, hopefully, she can have surgery.”
“Oh,” I said. “Okay.”
“It’s not a death sentence just yet, Sylvie. But, I’ll be honest—it doesn’t look good.”
I nodded, staring at the goose bumps that had risen to the surface of my skin. I wanted a sweater. I wanted my blankets and pillows. I wanted to crawl into bed.
“I’m going to be staying with her during the treatment,” Jill continued, “in her house. But if you want to stop by sometime soon, that would be great. I’m sure she’d be happy to see you.”
I heard, more than felt, myself chuckle. “No, she wouldn’t,” I said, and I loved Jill then for not trying to argue otherwise.
“Well,” she said. “You should get back to your night. I’m sorry about the terrible timing, but I didn’t want to wait too long to tell you.”
“It’s okay,” I said. “I’m glad you told me.”
“Let’s talk more about this soon, okay? Will you call me if you have any questions?”
“Sure.”
“Okay, Sylvie. Good night. Happy birthday.”
In her last few words, there was a tinge of sadness that I knew was more than grief about my mother. I should have said more to her, asked her more questions—the whole conversation was over so quickly—and yet, it was exhausting trying to be what Aunt Jill expected of me. I couldn’t pretend that, just by turning thirty, I was old enough now to have outgrown my feelings of motherlessness.
I knew that Jill understood, on some level, what those years had been like for me, but she hadn’t lived them like I’d lived them. She couldn’t know the ache of remembering how my mother didn’t fight for me that first year, when Jill had declared that until Mom got her act together, I would stay with her and Missy. She never tried to get me back, never contacted Jill to see how I was doing. Every Sunday, when Jill and Missy and I went back to the house to check on her, stocking her cabinets with groceries and toiletries that Jill had bought with her own money, Mom cracked open her door, asked in a paper-thin voice if we’d brought any booze, and then shut us out again when we told her, our arms firmly crossed, no—no, we had not. “Well then what the hell did you come here for?” she yelled, a phrase that still jostled me out of sleep sometimes.
When I went back inside the bar, it took me only a few seconds to find Lauren. Her teal hair, which fell in loose curls around her shoulders, was like a spotlight in the dim room. She was talking to two guys in button-down shirts, each of them holding a beer, and when she saw me squeezing between the crowds of people, she began to laugh.
“Here she is!” she said, her voice straining to be heard over the music. “See, I told you the birthday girl exists!” She handed me a drink, something frothy and blue.
“Listen . . .” I started.
“Oh no you don’t!” Lauren interrupted. She looked at the guys. “This is classic Sylvie. Watch. She’s gonna try to go home early.”
“I’m really tired,” I said, moving so that I was standing between Lauren and the two guys. “Just—please. Don’t make a big deal out of this. Looks like you’ve already made some new friends, and you said Jake and Jenna are showing up in a little while.”
Something must have shown on my face. Lauren narrowed her eyes, and then pulled me away, using her elbows to create a space for us among the groups of people in the bar.
“What is it?” she asked, her forehead nearly touching mine. “Who was that call from?”
“My aunt. Nothing’s wrong. I’m just tired, like I said.”
She held my gaze before responding. “So you’re not upset about something?” Her mouth fell open, as if she’d figured it out. “Is it about your cousin’s baby? Is it okay?”
I forced myself to laugh. “No, no, the baby’s great. I’m serious, Lauren. I’m fine. I just think those shots were a little much for me.”
Lauren pursed her lips in thought, and then she nodded. “Well, that I believe. You’re such a lightweight, it’s embarrassing. Fine, okay, whatever. You go home and be eighty, and I’ll stay here with Rob and—hey! Where’d they go?”
She looked back at the space we’d just left, the two guys lost behind a group of college students wearing purple fraternity shirts.
“You’d better go find them,” I said. Reaching out to hug her, I added, “Be careful, okay?”
“Yeah, yeah. Okay, Mom,” she said, and we went our separate ways—me back to our cramped but cozy apartment, and Lauren back to the nighttime buzz of Providence, Rhode Island.
• • •
It took me a long time to fall asleep that night. I was even still awake when, sometime after two o’clock, our apartment door opened. Lauren’s heels clicked across the floor, followed by a thud as she tossed them off her feet. At the distinctive sound of chip bags opening, I considered getting up, putting my head in her lap on the couch, and telling her everything—or half of everything, anyway.
When we first met during orientation our freshman year at RISD, I was eager to detach myself from the person I’d been in high school. For those years at Spring Hill High after Persephone died, I stopped being Sylvie O’Leary. I was known instead, through whispers in the halls, as “Persephone’s sister.” Even as a senior, three years after everyone in my sister’s grade had graduated, I still heard that phrase. It hissed from the crowd when I won Outstanding Achievement in Visual Arts at awards night, and it followed me, weeks later, as I crossed the stage to get my diploma. Some days, “Persephone’s sister” was a comfort, a reminder that, no matter what had happened, I’d always be tethered to her. But most days, when I heard those words, it took everything I had not to buckle, not to see my fingers locking the bedroom window over and over, the click of the latch echoing in my head.
So in the early days of our friendship, when Lauren asked me about my family (first telling me all about her two “spoiled, obnoxious” brothers and her “embarrassingly boy-crazy” sister), I found myself giving her only the faintest sketch of my life: I had an alcoholic mother, I’d lived for several years with my aunt and cousin, and I had an older sister who’d died.
“Whoa,” Lauren said back then, “I’m so sorry. How did she die?”
For a moment, my stomach tightened and my skin felt instantly cold. But then, as if my voice belonged to someone else, I heard myself reply.
“Car accident.”
I thought of my grandparents’ fatal crash—the crumpled Honda, the faulty airbags that hadn’t deployed when they spun out on a patch of black ice and slammed into a tree. Persephone could have easily been in the car with them that night. They could have been taking her to get a hot chocolate at Spring Hill Commons. She’d have been seven at the time, and I, only three years old, might have stayed home with Mom, already blinking toward sleep at seven o’clock.
“But I was really young when it happened,” I added. “I barely even remember her.”
I held my breath for a moment, waiting to see if Lauren could sense the lies that hovered in the air, but she only frowned a little, said “I’m sorry” again, and that had been it. End of conversation. End of “Persephone’s sister.” As I exhaled, reveling in my revised history, my lungs felt lighter than they had in years.
After that, Lauren and I lived a thrifty but comfortable life together. We became roommates at RISD our sophomore year. “More like Rhode Island School of Detours,” she quipped, but I, having scrambled for my scholarship, having painted some nights until the tips of my fingers bled, didn’t view it the same way. She’d wanted to be a tattoo artist from the start (going to RISD was her parents’ dream, paid for by their six-figure salaries), and when she got the job at Steve’s she came alive in ways I’d never seen before. She designed new tattoos feverishly, leaving them on sticky notes around the apartment—on the toilet lid, an elephant with a trombone for a trunk; on the refrigerator, a light bulb with a ship inside; on the peephole of our door, a stained glass anatomical heart. Then she made me rate them, using a simple rubric of “Would you get this, yes or no?” It didn’t matter that she knew I would never get any tattoo (a brief point of concern when she later convinced Steve to hire me, saving me from the monotony of art supply stores); she just wanted a chance to talk about what she was doing, because she loved it with a pure, uncomplicated passion—and I envied her that.
When I started my apprenticeship at Steve’s, I came to understand what she liked about the job. It was creative, it required thought and skill, and it generated a considerable feeling of power; the tattoo artist, I soon learned, was not only the inflictor of pain, the drawer of blood, but also, on a good day, the fulfiller of dreams. None of that was why I kept up with the apprenticeship, though, or why I accepted the full-time job when I got my license.
After Persephone died, I kept on painting. At first, I wasn’t sure why, given how the chemicals had begun to smell like bruises to me, but it became something I loved and loathed in equal measure. I loved it because of how easily you could hide your mistakes—one wrong shade of red, and you could just cover it with another; one leaf that didn’t fall into place on a tree, and you could simply paint right over it, start all over. But still, there was always a catch. Even though no one would ever see your error, you never forgot it existed—a thing that haunted, a thing that whispered and gnawed at you beneath the paint. Tattooing was different, of course, but in the ways that mattered—bruise-scented chemicals, the masking of something old with something new—it was the same.
Now, outside my bedroom, the living room TV clicked on. I heard it surge to life and then quiet down as Lauren lowered the volume. But something stopped me from getting up and joining her, kept me staring instead at the moonlit cracks in my ceiling as my birthday slipped by. Somehow, it had happened again; another year had passed in which I’d grown older than my sister.