Before I could knock or ring the bell, the front door opened. I had been looking down, careful not to slip on the icy walkway, and it took much more energy than it should have to lift my head and meet Jill’s eyes. She was smiling at me, dressed in a loose sweater that hid the weight she’d gained over the years, and I was so relieved that it was her instead of my mother that I rushed up the steps and threw my arms around her.
“Whoa,” she said, squeezing me in that strong, enveloping way of hers. “Don’t know what I did to deserve such a hello, but I’ll take it.”
Jill’s face was a bright burst of joy in the snowy gloom of the afternoon. The consequence of avoiding my mother during her illness, I suddenly realized, was that I’d been keeping myself from Jill as well. Jill who made banana bread on rainy days. Jill who smiled.
“Well, come in,” she said. “It’s freezing out there.”
I stepped inside and wiped my feet on the mat. Then I followed Jill to the living room, where it was so dark I could barely see. The curtains on the sliding glass door were closed, the lights were turned off, and when my eyes adjusted to the shadows, I didn’t find Mom on the couch like I’d expected. She was probably squirreled away in her bedroom, and even though that meant I still had a few more minutes alone with Jill until I had to face her, some part of me felt stung by the fact that she hadn’t even wanted to greet me.
Pulling off my scarf and shrugging out of my coat, I looked around for a place to put my things. Where had we hung our jackets? My memory offered up an image of Persephone bouncing through the doorway after school and flinging her red coat over the rack in the entryway—the same rack that Mom had knocked over when Persephone went missing. Her rage that day had momentarily paralyzed me, and even remembering it now, I could only stand in the middle of the room, my coat and scarf hanging limply over my arm as I stared at the carpet.
“So,” Jill said, “here we are.”
I nodded, knowing where this was going. The welcome was over, and now we had to get down to business.
“Is she in the bedroom?” I asked.
Aunt Jill cocked her head, her brow furrowing. “Who?”
Who? I actually laughed—the question was so strange. “Mom,” I said.
Jill squinted and then her eyes slid past me, toward the corner of the room.
“I’m right here.”
My lungs squeezed shut as I heard my mother’s voice, huskier than I remembered, but undoubtedly hers. I saw then what I hadn’t noticed when I’d entered the darkened room. Mom, or at least some version of her, was sitting in a recliner by the bookshelf. She was thinner than I’d ever seen her. When had been the last time? Two Junes ago when Jill dragged her to Hanover for another attempt at a family dinner? She’d been thin then as well, and had always been slender, but in the years since Persephone’s death, the shape of her body had become less and less defined, more like a teenage boy’s than a woman’s. Now, though, all of her features seemed sunken. Her cheekbones protruded, and her neck looked like a thin stalk that could barely hold up her head. She’d lost her hair, too—her long, blonde Persephone hair—or at least that’s what the scarf around her scalp suggested.
“I . . .” My throat felt dry all of a sudden; my vocal cords grated against each other. “I didn’t see you there.”
Aunt Jill laughed, the sound of it rich and rippling. “I guess not!” she said. “I was wondering why you hadn’t said hello. Thought you were just being shy.”
I looked at Mom, but her eyes were so masked by shadows that I couldn’t see if they looked at me in return. “I didn’t see you,” I repeated.
Aunt Jill walked around the couch toward the sliding glass door. “It’s because we’ve got these damn curtains closed,” she said. “Is your headache any better, Annie?”
“No.”
“Well.” Aunt Jill ripped open the curtains, and for a moment, all I could see was crisp, blinding ivory. “We need some light in here.”
Mom shielded her face with her hands and I saw how delicate her fingers looked, how easily it seemed they could break. When she lowered her hands, I noticed the brittleness of her skin, flakes gathering on the corners of her lips, the lobes of her ears. She had only wisps for eyebrows, making her forehead seem wide and vast as open land, and her cheeks looked sucked in. She was wearing a gray sweater, with large buttons down the front, and it was almost shocking how completely the shirt consumed her. She looked like a child playing dress-up in her mother’s clothes.
I hadn’t prepared myself for her deterioration. Every time I’d imagined seeing her again, I’d pictured her looking the same way she had when we were last at Jill’s together—curveless as a cigarette, heavy bags beneath her eyes, but still, even through her bitterness, familiar. I never once considered that the bones of her wrists would stick so closely to her skin, or that the shape of her head would seem so alien. I hadn’t thought to equate her illness with something that would vacuum her up inside.
“So.” Mom’s voice halted my thoughts, and I wasn’t sure how long or how noticeably I’d been staring at her. “What do you think? Will I be gracing the cover of Elle magazine soon?”
My eyes widened. My mother had just made a joke. A dark, mirthless joke, its tone laced with acidity, but a joke nonetheless. What’s more—she was speaking to me, and without Aunt Jill’s prompting.
“Um . . .” I struggled for an appropriate response. “Not Elle, no. But maybe Marie Claire. And only if all the regular models are busy that month.”
I winced, pulling the coat I was still holding even closer. Mom chuckled, though, and while it was a deeply cynical sound, it was the first time I’d heard any kind of laughter from her since before Persephone died. She rocked lightly in the recliner, her slippered feet pushing gently against the floor, and she was looking at me like she was performing an evaluation. I regretted then not having cut my hair like Lauren always urged me to do. It hung shapelessly down to my shoulders and, according to Lauren, gave me a look of “pathetic self-negligence—like a cat that’s given up licking itself.”
“Let me take your things,” Jill said, reaching for my coat and scarf. As she padded out of the living room, I crossed my arms and looked around, pretending to be interested in whatever changes had been made to the house’s decor over the years. But there were none. The couch was the same dusty brown it had always been, and the bookshelves of paperbacks and photo albums appeared unchanged. Even the TV had never been upgraded; it was small and boxy—nothing like the 48-inch flat screen that Lauren and I had in Providence—and on the wall beside that TV, Persephone’s constellation. It was twenty-six years old, but somehow, the painted stars still held their shine; the slash of silver where Persephone’s hand had angrily swiped was as vivid as the day it had happened. In smaller dots, like metallic snowflakes, the disappearance dust was scattered around the astral points of Persephone’s body.
“You kept this,” I said to Mom.
She’d been picking at the sleeve of her sweater. “Hmm?”
“Persephone’s constellation.”
Her lips tightened as she continued to look at her sleeve. She was plucking at something I couldn’t see, and as the seconds passed by, heavy and slow, I realized she wasn’t going to respond.
“So,” Jill said, entering the room again, “should we go over everything? I need to get going in a little bit. I told Missy I’d be in Boston by dinnertime.”
My heart quickened at the thought of Jill leaving, but I nodded and followed her into the kitchen. The small space, barely big enough for the table and chairs that were stuffed into it, was open to the living room, and I kept my eyes on Mom as Jill ticked off instructions.
“I’ve written everything down over here,” Jill said. She spread out a few pieces of paper on the counter, and I watched as Mom continued her light rocking. “This is Missy’s cell phone number, which I know you already have, but that’s okay. This is the number for the cancer center at Brighton Memorial, just in case you have any questions. They’re really great over there. During the first cycle of chemo, I was calling them up every other day, and they never got annoyed. This is the number for the pharmacy—try to talk to Fran if you can; she’s the nicest of the three—and this is . . .”
The litany of numbers, the orderly way in which she’d prepared me for almost any kind of emergency—it felt like I was babysitting. Still, I was grateful. I didn’t know the first thing about taking care of a sick person, and Mom was no child that I’d be watching for just a few hours.
“. . . But they’ll give it to you if you ask.” Jill clicked the top of her pen. “Now, her appointments each week are on Monday and Wednesday. Her chemo always starts at ten a.m., but they draw blood first and take her vitals and everything, so you have to get there at nine on Monday, okay?”
But today was only Saturday, which meant I had nothing to do on Sunday but be alone in the house with my mother.
I looked at her, still rocking gently in the living room, her eyes focused on nothing. She seemed so fragile, as if by pushing her feet too forcefully against the floor, her bones would shatter. So why did I feel so afraid of her? What could she do to me now, in her weakened, skeletal form, that she hadn’t ever done before?
“She should have a light meal before you leave on Monday morning,” Jill said. “I usually make her scrambled eggs, but cereal would be fine, too. Whatever you want.”
“And what about what I want?” We both looked over at Mom, who had turned her head toward us, the first indication she’d given that she’d even been listening.
“Well, okay,” Jill said. “What do you want, Annie?”
Mom made a quick scoffing sound. “Not eggs,” she said. “Not cereal.”
Jill drummed her fingers on the counter, breathed in and out. “Well, what then? Just let us know what you want and Sylvie can go to the store tomorrow.”
Mom cocked her head to the side, as if considering her options.
“Hmm,” she said. “I’d like some orange juice . . .” Jill grabbed the sheet of paper with the hospital’s information on it and started writing. “And some vodka . . .”
“Annie—come on.”
“What?” Mom opened her eyes wide in a look of feigned innocence. “It’ll be like a mimosa. That’s breakfast, Jill.”
Jill crossed out what she’d written, slicing her pen through the words “orange juice” as if she meant to obliterate the drink completely.
“I don’t get it,” Mom continued. “They pump me full of all this poison, but God forbid I enjoy a cocktail to make it all go down easier.”
As Jill glanced at me, the annoyance in her eyes was clear as the crow’s-feet that puckered her skin. “Your mother’s quite the comedian when she’s sober,” she said.
And that was it, of course. She was sober. It hit me like the sudden twitch of a body nearly asleep. That was why she was speaking to us, why she seemed so different from the woman who could only mumble out half-responses at Jill’s house two summers before. The vodka on her breath had been a constant for so many years that I hadn’t considered how her cancer would change that. She was sober—she was finally, finally sober—but even so, she didn’t feel like the mother I’d known before she started chasing her grief with alcohol. The mother from my childhood was peaceful, her voice as soothing to me as aloe on a burn, but this woman’s words had edges; they were cold and comfortless, wrapped in barbed wire.
“I’m sure you already know this,” Jill said to me, “but she can’t have any alcohol. No matter what she says or does. Besides being absolutely horrible for her, it hurts her now, too.” She turned her head back toward Mom. “Doesn’t it, Annie?” She raised the volume of her voice, as if talking to someone elderly.
“If you say so, Jill,” Mom said. “Thank goodness the chemo feels so good instead.”
Jill ignored the comment, leaning her face close to mine, speaking just above a whisper. “Alcohol makes her feel like her esophagus is burning. Her words—believe it or not—not mine. That’s how we first discovered something was wrong.”
I nodded, trying to imagine my mother calling Aunt Jill one day, a tinge of anxiety in her voice as she confessed that the thing she’d relied on for so long felt like it was killing her now instead.
“Hey.” Jill looked concerned. She circled her warm hand around my wrist, making me realize how cold I felt, even through my RISD sweatshirt. “Are you okay?”
“Yes,” I said. “I just . . .” I lowered my voice, turning my back toward Mom. “I didn’t expect it to be like this.”
Jill tilted her head, rubbing her thumb into my palm. “Which part?”
“All of it, I think.”
I knew I was being selfish. For the past several months, Jill had given up everything to take care of Mom—not to mention all the years she’d bought her groceries, paid her property taxes, handled general upkeep of the house, made sure Mom survived. Now, here I was, back home for only a few minutes, and already, I was buckling. How could Aunt Jill trust me with this? Even with her extensive notes and numbers, how could she expect me to know what my mother needed? I was in my thirties now—the deepening lines around my eyes reminded me of that every day—but suddenly, I felt more like a child than I had in years.
“It’s gonna be fine,” Jill said. And then, because she was always truthful, she added, “It’s gonna have to be.”
I squeezed Jill’s hand and managed a smile. “I know,” I said, though my nerves still felt taut as tightropes.
Her eyes lingered on my face before shifting over to the clock on the microwave. “I need to get going.” She sounded apologetic—guilty, even.
“Okay,” I said. “Are you sure you’re gonna be all right to drive, though?” I looked toward the sliding glass door, and the sky still glittered with falling snow. “It seems to have picked up a little.”
“Oh, she’ll be fine,” Mom said from the corner of the room. “Don’t you know? Your Aunt Jill is a superhero, always swooping in to save people. Not even a blizzard could stop her.” A wry smile crept into her lips.
“I’ve got four-wheel drive,” Jill said to me, as if she hadn’t even heard Mom speak. “It’ll be a piece of cake.”
“Yeah, of course,” I agreed. “Tell Missy I’m thinking about her, okay? And let me know as soon as the baby’s born.”
A soft glow blossomed on Jill’s cheeks at the mention of her soon-to-be grandchild. “You bet,” she said. Then, with a slow intake of breath, she walked toward Mom. “Okay, Annie. Sylvie’s gonna take it from here, all right?” I followed her into the living room, watching as she put her hand on Mom’s shoulder. “Is there anything I can do for you before I leave?”
Mom shook her head, and as she did, I noticed a few strands of blonde hair still clinging to the nape of her neck. “I’m peachy,” she said.
“Okay.” Jill leaned down, kissing Mom’s cheek, and I was surprised to see that Mom closed her eyes. She even lifted her hand to cup Jill’s elbow, a gesture so tender that I felt as if I’d intruded on something by witnessing it.
“Love you,” Jill said, and I saw when she straightened back up that her eyes were shiny with tears.
“Mmm,” Mom replied.
Jill ran a finger beneath her eyelashes and then focused her attention on me. “Well,” she said, “my stuff’s already in the car.” She stepped forward and wrapped me in a hug. “Oh, Sylvie. I wish I had more time to catch up with you. I’ll be back to help out as soon as I can, though. I promise.”
I nodded against her shoulder, and when we pulled away from each other, I whispered, “Okay.” There was more I should have said, but in that moment, I knew I could only say so much before my voice gave away how urgently I wanted her to stay.