The next morning, I woke to a call from Aunt Jill.
“Hey,” I answered, my voice deeper than normal. I pulled the phone away from my ear to check the time. It was eleven thirty-two—the latest I’d managed to sleep since college—and I sat up sharply.
“Hey yourself,” Jill said. “I’m just calling to see how things went yesterday and to make sure you’re all set for tomorrow.”
I grabbed a sweatshirt from the foot of my bed, struggling to respond as I pulled it on. “Things didn’t go so well,” I started to say, but the words stopped dead in my mouth as soon as I saw Persephone’s bed. All through the night, I’d been careful to keep my body turned to the wall. I hadn’t wanted to risk glimpsing what used to be the space where she slept. Stripped of all the belongings that once surrounded it, it looked so impersonal, so unhaunted, but I knew that if I squinted, I could still make out her ghost.
“Hello?” Jill prompted, but she sounded so far away.
I twisted to face the wall again, sinking down under my blankets as if going back to sleep. “Mom locked herself up,” I said quietly.
“Oh Lord.” I could almost hear Jill rolling her eyes. “What happened now?”
“I brought up Ben Emory.”
There was a beat of silence as Jill hesitated. “Why?”
“Because when I asked her where all of Persephone’s things were, she said she gave them to ‘that boy.’ I didn’t know what other boy it could have been, so I asked if she meant Ben. Then she freaked out, and she’s been in her room ever since. She didn’t even come out for dinner.”
The more I spoke, the wearier I felt. Instead of being refreshed from sleep, my body felt drained, weightless.
“It was crazy,” I went on. “It was just like . . .”
Mom’s Dark Days, I was going to say. But Jill didn’t know about those. Persephone and I had never told her how on the fifteenth of each month, Mom would begin the day normally—sometimes even giddily—and then, just a little while later, the atmosphere in the house would change, and Mom would slink off to her bedroom, where she’d lock herself away for the rest of the day.
Persephone would tighten her lips then, watching Mom disappear down the hall. She’d help me pack my schoolbag and walk me to the bus stop. And we lived like that, month after month, until Persephone died and then all of Mom’s days became dark.
“Just like what?” Jill asked.
“Just like after Persephone died,” I said. “I told you I’d be terrible at this, Jill. It hasn’t even been a full day yet, and I’ve already upset her so much that she’s right back where she was. I’m sorry, I just don’t—”
“All right, stop it.” The firmness in Jill’s voice made me flinch. “Do you think I expected you to walk right in, snap your fingers, and have everything be perfect?”
“No . . .”
“Do you think she never once locked herself away while I was taking care of her?”
“Sylvie, this is your mother we’re talking about. She’s not drinking anymore, so she’s much more alert, yes, but she’s still Annie. And I love my sister, I swear I do, but that woman has been a mystery to me for a very long time. So buck up. She’s bound to backslide now and then. And just remember—when she gets like this: let the child pass out.”
“Let the what?”
“It’s something Grandma used to tell me, a million years ago, when I started babysitting. I was so nervous that they wouldn’t listen to me and they’d threaten to hold their breath or something until I—I don’t know—gave them cookies, or let them tie me to a chair and set the house on fire. So Grandma told me, ‘Let the child pass out,’ meaning—let them have their tantrum. Let them hold their breath all they want, because they’ll only pass out and then wake up again a few seconds later.”
I smiled a little. Jill always found a way to comfort me.
“Let the child pass out,” I repeated. “Okay, I’ll keep that in mind. But, Jill—do you know what boy she was talking about?”
Jill chuckled. “The boy she supposedly gave your sister’s things to? No. In fact, you got a much more specific answer than I ever did. All she told me was that she’d gotten rid of it all. Like I said, she’s a mystery to me.”
“Okay, but—”
A creak from across the hall—the sound of Mom’s door opening—forced me to stop. I jumped out of bed, like a soldier snapping to attention.
“She just came out,” I whispered. “I should go.”
With the phone still pressed to my ear, I cracked my door just wide enough to see Mom head into the living room, carrying a bowl with a spoon in it. She wore the same sweater and head wrap as the day before, but still, the smallness of her, the acuteness of her frame, was just as shocking as the first moment I’d seen her.
She’d had her tantrum, though—I’d let the child pass out—and now, at the sight of a cereal bowl in her hands, I felt a whisper of hope. She must have already come out that morning, or even late last night, and sick and skeletal as she looked, she had eaten something. This was a good sign.
“Okay,” Jill said in my ear, and I realized with a jolt that she was still on the line. “Listen—just keep me in the loop about how things are going, all right?”
“I will,” I said. “I’ll talk to you soon. Love you.”
Following Mom to the kitchen, I watched her place her bowl into the sink.
“Did you have some breakfast?” I asked.
Her only response was to turn the faucet on, watch the water as it collected in her bowl, and then turn it off. Walking closer to her, my bare feet winced against the cold kitchen tiles.
“Mom?”
The knuckles of her left hand were white from gripping the counter. As she stood there, staring into the sink, I thought I could smell something familiar rising off her skin—not a perfume, exactly, but a scent that was naturally, uniquely, hers. It reminded me of those nights she’d return home late from her shift at the restaurant and I’d already be in bed. She’d creep into our room so quietly I almost didn’t hear her, and then she’d kiss my forehead, run her long, cool fingers down the side of my face. “Good night, my sweet girl,” she’d say, and as I stood behind her now, my eyes closing as I breathed her in, I remembered how she would pull my blankets up toward my chin, tucking me in and making me safe.
“Mom,” I said again. “Are you okay? Can I get you anything?”
She swayed a little, like a thin tree in a breeze, and just as I was about to put my hands out to steady her, she turned around. Her face was so close to me then, so significantly changed from those childhood nights I remembered, that I almost stopped breathing again. Her eyes were two moons, gray and opaque.
“I’m fine,” she said abruptly, and then she moved to step around me.
As she walked back toward the cave of her bedroom, the ridge of her spine stabbed through her sweater. Soon she disappeared around the corner, and it was only a few moments before I heard her door close, heard the lock click from inside.
• • •
She didn’t speak to me again until the next day, when the nurse at Brighton Memorial’s cancer center hooked an IV into her arm. We hadn’t spoken in the car, where the only sounds between us were that of a morning radio show, and we hadn’t spoken when I checked her in at the hospital or when her blood was drawn and vitals were taken.
She’d replaced the head wrap she’d been wearing for the past two days with a shoulder-length blonde wig. She was wearing makeup, too—just some eyeliner and blush, maybe a hint of color on her lips, but it softened her features. She seemed less angular and washed out, and though the clothes she wore sagged against the edges of her body, she looked more like the woman I’d known before Persephone died. More like Mom.
Still, it was only when they led us into the chemotherapy room, sat Mom down in what looked like a dentist’s chair with a small TV attached to it, and threaded the needle into her vein that she finally said a word to me.
“That person you were talking to on the phone yesterday,” she said. “Was that your boyfriend?”
I snapped my eyes to the few other patients in the room, as if they would share my surprise at Mom’s bizarre question. No one even glanced my way, though, and the nurse making adjustments to Mom’s IV bag only smiled at me and offered a look that said, “Oh moms.”
“No,” I said. “It was Aunt Jill.”
Mom nodded. “I see,” she said, holding her arm out as the nurse strapped another piece of tape over the IV. “Have you spoken to your boyfriend yet?”
I opened my mouth to answer and then closed it again. Had Aunt Jill, for some inexplicable reason, told her I had a boyfriend? Or was she working off old information? Maybe she was thinking of Robbie Silano from a couple years back. Maybe Jill had mentioned that she met him one time when she came to visit me, and Mom just assumed we were still together.
“I don’t have a boyfriend,” I told her.
“Oh.” Mom folded her hands together in her lap. “Well, you better hurry up, then,” she said. “You’re almost thirty.”
The nurse—Kelly, she’d told me when she’d introduced herself—gave a quick, throaty chuckle, but I was too taken aback to respond myself. Almost thirty—even though I’d been thirty for four months. It shouldn’t have bothered me—I hadn’t received so much as a birthday card from her in years—but still, something heavy gathered in my chest.
“Oh, Annie, don’t give her such a hard time,” Kelly said, gently flicking Mom’s shoulder with her hand. “She has plenty of time to find someone.”
Kelly winked at me and I managed a smile.
“Easy for you to say,” Mom replied. “Your wedding’s in March, right?”
“March twentieth,” Kelly said, nodding. “Good memory! I haven’t even seen you since—when was it? November?”
“Good memory yourself.”
Kelly smiled, leaning forward to press some buttons on Mom’s TV screen. “Just don’t be expecting an invitation to my wedding. I don’t want Owen to take one look at your pretty face and then leave me at the altar.”
“That’s probably wise,” Mom said. “I’ve been cultivating a new look lately that will be sure to drive men wild. I call it cancer chic.”
I stared at the two of them in disbelief. As they joked together, Mom seemed so normal. With just a couple of sentences and a wave of authentic laughter, it was as if she hadn’t spent most of the last sixteen years in self-imposed isolation, as if she hadn’t just lost track of her daughter’s age, and hadn’t shut herself in her room at the mention of Ben Emory two days before.
“So I’m sure you remember the drill,” Kelly said, “but since it’s been a little while, I’ll give you a quick refresher. This is your TV, and you can press these buttons on the side to change the channel. I’ll be in and out to check on you, but you can press this other button over here if you need me at any time. We’ve got bottled waters in the little fridge over there—you’re welcome to one as well, Sylvie—and there are some books and magazines on the bookshelves in the corner. Just have Sylvie get them for you if you want anything. Your job now is just to sit and relax.”
Mom leaned her head against the back of the chair and closed her eyes as if she were going to sleep. “Ahhh,” she said, “a regular day at the beach. Just bring me a piña colada and I’ll be all set.”
Kelly laughed, met my gaze, and pointed at Mom. “I love her,” she mouthed, and then she turned around and left us there, Mom stretched out in her modified dentist’s chair, hooked up to a bag and a machine, and me sitting down slowly, uncertainly, in the seat beside her.
As I glanced around the room, I realized that it looked nothing like I’d anticipated. I’d been picturing a small, dim space with a smell like a damp basement and a feeling of dread pushing down from the ceiling. This wasn’t like that, though. It was bright and modern and clean, smelling faintly of citrus, and there were vases of fresh flowers throughout the room.
“Wow,” I said, “this is a pretty nice place, huh? For—a treatment center, I mean.”
Mom shifted her eyes toward me. “Oh yeah. It’s a real five-star resort.”
There was that acidic tone again.
“Well,” I replied, “it just looks, and feels, a lot better here than I expected. It’s—actually—how are you able to afford this, Mom?”
She shrugged. “I have health insurance. Jill nagged me to get it.”
“So Jill’s paying for it?” This made sense. Jill had paid for everything else that had kept Mom alive and comfortable over the years—food, carbon monoxide detectors, a new furnace when the one that was original to the house broke down and Mom barked, “Leave it, Jill. I don’t mind the cold.”
“No,” she said now. “I’m not her child, you know. I pay for it myself.”
“But how?” I pressed. “I mean, growing up, we lived paycheck to paycheck, and now you’re just—”
“It’s none of your goddamn business, okay?”
Her eyes were cool as metal as she snapped them toward me. A couple of other patients turned their heads my way before quickly returning to their screens and magazines.
“Okay,” I said, “I’m sorry.”
But I couldn’t stop thinking about it. She’d done nothing in the last sixteen years but spend whatever money she’d had on alcohol. She shouldn’t have been able to afford the type of health insurance that would cover her treatment. I decided to let it go for the moment, though; it was clear I wasn’t going to get anywhere.
“You look nice, Mom,” I said, changing tactics. “I like that wig on you.”
She ran her hand over the unnaturally smooth hair on her head. “Jill picked it out,” she said.
“It’s nice. Do you always wear it when you leave the house?”
“Most of the time,” she said. “No need to go around looking like a bald eagle.” Her eyes were focused on her hands in her lap, her fingers rubbing at the knuckles that bulged beneath her skin. “I don’t want anyone I know to see me the way I am now.”
It was an unusually vulnerable thing for her to say, and I tried to appreciate that, but there was a nagging, bitter part of me that reacted differently. You never cared how people saw you before, it whispered. You never cared that people at school always talked about how they’d seen “Annie O’Drunkie” walking to the liquor store in her nightgown, or how you showed up to my high school graduation with your hair a total mess and your stained clothes reeking. But, I tried to remind myself, that was back then. She wasn’t a drunk anymore; she was sober, and maybe sober, she’d regained her ability to feel exposed in the world.
“Can I get you anything?” I asked. “A bottle of water?”
Mom curled up her lip. “Ugh, no. Chemo makes water taste terrible. I could throw up just thinking about it.”
“Okay,” I said, scanning the room for other things to offer her. “How about a magazine, then?”
She shook her head. “I don’t care about celebrities.”
“Do you want to watch your TV?”
“I don’t care about celebrities,” she repeated. Then, cocking her head as if she’d just thought of something, she added, “But there was a book I was reading during my last chemo—whenever I could concentrate, anyway. Jill found it for me on the bookshelf over there.”
She pointed to one of the pristine white shelves in the corner, and I stood up, eager to have a task to complete. “What book?” I asked.
“Withering Heights,” she said.
“Oh—you mean Wuthering Heights?”
“That’s what I just said.”
“Right,” I replied, smiling a little.
I walked to the bookshelf and ran a finger along the titles. There was no rhyme or reason to the way the books had been shelved; Michael Crichton was next to a Spider-Man comic, and a volume of Walt Whitman poems was stuck between Dracula and a book with a bright pink spine. Unable to find Wuthering Heights, I moved on to the other bookshelf, which mostly held old issues of Time, National Geographic, and People.
“I didn’t see it over there,” I said to Mom when I reached my seat again. “I’m sorry.”
She looked at the other patients suspiciously, as if somebody were hiding the book from her. “But no one else in here is reading it,” she whined.
“Do you want me to ask one of the nurses if they’ve seen it anywhere?” I asked, and I was surprised when she nodded her head vigorously.
“Okay,” I said. “I’ll be right back.”
As I walked out of the treatment room and tried to orient myself in the bright, spacious lobby where the elevator had dropped us off that morning, I felt instantly more at ease. This was good, having a job to do. I could get books, I could get blankets, I could even try to find liquids that didn’t taste as terrible as water. And, for all the stops and starts we’d been having, Mom and I had actually talked to each other for a few minutes. It hadn’t been the warmest conversation in the world, but it was still something, and it was infinitely better than her being—
“Oof.”
“Oh God, I’m so sorry.”
I’d crashed right into a nurse, my forehead colliding with his chin.
“That was totally my fault,” he said. “I wasn’t watching where I was going. Are you okay?”
I kept my head down and my hand against my forehead, a wave of embarrassment flooding my cheeks.
“I’m fine,” I said. “I wasn’t watching where I was going, either. I’m sorry.”
“Here, let me just . . .” He raised his hands as if to touch my face and then lowered them. “Can I?” he asked.
I nodded, then quickly winced as his cool fingers pressed against my forehead, targeting the exact point of pain.
“Yeah, that’s gonna hurt for a bit,” he said. “But I think you’re gonna live.”
I was about to apologize again, but suddenly, he jerked backward. That’s when I got my first clear look at him—short brown hair, dark eyes, midthirties. I saw the scar along his cheek, the way it swept across the side of his face like a large comma, and I remembered that face—I remembered it in windows, in nightmares.
“Oh, shit,” he said.
My skin went cold, my legs felt loose, and it was as if I were standing outside being blown about by the January wind. We stared at each other, and for the first time since it happened, we were face-to-face—the one who’d lost Persephone and the one who’d taken her away.