On Wednesday, I visited Persephone. I hadn’t been planning to do it until I jolted awake from a dream in which she crawled into my bed, her body so cold that, even through layers of sleep, I felt myself shiver. “You never talk to me anymore,” she said, her breath as solid as icy fingers on the back of my neck. “I’ve been here all along, but you keep ignoring me.” In the dream, she was crying, her tears the color of bruises, watercolor streaks of blue and gray. Then, with only the slightest waver in her voice, she said, “You did this to me, Sylvie,” and my body jerked in response, sending me shooting up in bed.
I hadn’t actually been to her grave since the day we buried her, so when I got to the cemetery, I had to weave through rows of headstones, my boots leaving tracks in the snow as I searched for her name. My memories of her burial were foggy. Mostly, I remembered Mom, who cried so loudly that the priest had to pause his prayers. She was wild that day—sobs as jarring as a car crash, debris of tears all over her face—and though I preferred any show of emotion to the silence she’d been keeping behind her locked door, I was hurt, too, that she never once composed herself enough to come to me, never once untangled herself from Jill’s arms to gather me in her own.
When I found Persephone’s grave, I was surprised to see a bouquet of white roses lying on the snow in front of the stone. The flowers looked fresh, the petals still clean and crisp, as if they’d only been there for a day or two. Bending down to pick them up, I turned them over to check for a note, struggling to imagine who might have left them. But then, like a surge of electricity passing through me, I remembered a night when Persephone came through our window, a single white rose clutched in her hand.
• • •
“Look what Ben gave me,” she said.
I closed the window behind her, shutting the cold air out of our room, and watched as she brought the flower to her nose and breathed in its scent. Shrugging out of her coat, she touched the petals to her face and dragged the rose from her temple to her chin. Then she placed her finger against a thorn, as if its sharp point were incapable of piercing her skin.
“It’s just one,” she continued, “so Mom won’t get suspicious, and he said he got it in white because—okay, this is a little corny, but I swear he was so sincere—because the color is as pure as the way we love each other.” She laughed quietly, careful even in her giddiness not to wake Mom. “I don’t know, he said it a lot better than that. I wish sometimes we could just stop and record moments, you know? I mean, he always says we—ouch!”
She sucked in her breath as she stared at her finger. A bright bead of blood blossomed on her skin. We stood together in the space between our beds, neither of us moving to grab a napkin or tissue, and I was stunned by how beautiful it looked, how the tiny wound reminded me of the first drop of paint on a canvas.
“Wow,” she said, and then she lifted her finger and swept it across the petals.
“What are you doing?” I asked, watching as she twirled the rose in her hand, leaving smudges of red among the luminous white.
“I don’t know,” she said, and she dropped her finger, smiling faintly at the flower. “It just makes sense like this, I think.” Then, pulling down the collar of her shirt, she revealed a dime-sized bruise just below her clavicle. “Take care of this for me?”
• • •
Still holding the bouquet at Persephone’s grave, I realized that my grip had crinkled the plastic wrapping. I dropped the roses into the snow and took a few steps backward, any peace I might have found now lost. My eyes darted around the cemetery, my body tense as the strings of a tightly tuned guitar. Was everything Ben did now—becoming a nurse, leaving flowers—just a calculated effort to try to soothe his guilt? Or, I wondered, the thought sliding through me like a stiff, paralyzing drug, was he sending me a message, telling me that he wasn’t just going to disappear, that even though Persephone was dead, he wouldn’t leave her or my family alone?
• • •
“Why are you driving so fast?” Mom asked an hour later as I barely braked at stop signs on our way to the hospital.
“I’m not,” I said, pressing my foot more firmly on the gas. “I’m just trying to get you there on time.”
“On time?” Mom smoothed down the hair of her wig before leaning back against the headrest. “At this rate, we’ll be twenty minutes early.”
“That’s fine. Maybe they’ll take us early.”
“They won’t,” she insisted. “Everything’s on a schedule there. And I hate waiting. It’s bad enough having to sit in that chair for a couple hours—just waiting, waiting, waiting while I get the damn treatment. Now we’re going to be waiting beforehand, too.” Crossing her arms, she turned her head to stare out the passenger window like a sulky teenager.
“Well, listen,” I said. “About that.” I reached into the back seat and felt around until my fingers closed around the handle of a plastic bag. Pulling it forward, I plopped it gently into her lap. “I got you something.”
“What is it?” she asked, staring down at it apprehensively, like it was a dog that might bite her.
“It’s something I picked up yesterday,” I said. “Just open it.”
Up the road, a green light switched to yellow and then red. As I slowed to a stop behind a line of cars, Mom reached into the bag and pulled out a copy of Wuthering Heights, which I’d bought while running errands the day before. It had a dark blue hardcover and its pages looked as if they’d been dipped in gold.
“Is this because you feel bad about the other day?” she asked.
“What do you mean?”
The light switched back to green, and I eased my foot back onto the accelerator.
“Being late with the pills,” Mom said. “Making me throw up.”
“No, Mom, I told you—there was a line at the pharmacy and I saw someone I knew from high school. I’ve already apologized a hundred times about that.”
I’d had to lie to her, of course—just another item on the growing list of ways I’d failed her since I’d been home. But I couldn’t tell her where I’d been without explaining why, and I wasn’t about to let her know how dangerously close she was to Ben each time she got her treatment. That was my problem and mine alone—even more so now that I’d seen the roses—and I was going to handle it.
“I know that,” Mom said. “Which is why you don’t have to be giving me books. You’ve been attentive enough as it is the last two days. Annoyingly attentive, I’d say. If you’re not careful, you’re going to end up as bad as Jill.”
I wasn’t sure how heating up soup, getting her crackers, and periodically asking her if she needed anything qualified as “annoyingly attentive,” but I brushed past the comment anyway. Turning a corner, the hospital came into view ahead of us, and I accelerated toward the entrance to the parking garage.
“Well, I didn’t get you the book because of that,” I said. “I got it because you wanted to read it on Monday and they didn’t have it. I just thought you might like to have your own copy.”
Mom turned the book over in her hands, as if looking for the latch to a secret compartment along its edges. “I don’t really like hardcovers,” she said, putting it back into the bag.
I took a left turn, driving faster than I should have down a ramp into the garage. As I pulled sharply into a space, the book slid off Mom’s lap and onto the floor. She glared at it, its pages thrust open against the dusty mat, but she made no movement to pick it up. When we got out of the car, I watched as she closed the door behind her, leaving the book locked inside.
• • •
It didn’t take me long to find Ben. Once Mom was settled into her chair in the treatment room, her IV taped to her arm, I told her I had some questions for the woman at the front desk. She stared out the window and lifted her hand in a slight, listless wave as if to dismiss me.
I walked around the cancer center, glancing into every open door for a glimpse of Ben. I wanted to seem strong when I saw him, fierce and invulnerable, but my pulse was already betraying me. When I finally found him, coming out of a closed room, a pen clamped between his teeth as he stuffed a paper into a folder, my knees buckled a little, and I forced myself to remember the roses in the snow, how intrusive they were, how thorned and threatening.
“Ben.” I called his name before my throat had the chance to tighten up like a fist.
Ben’s eyes latched onto mine and his mouth opened just enough for his pen to clatter to the floor.
“Hi,” he said. “I thought you didn’t—”
“I don’t.” We were standing only a few feet apart. “Did you put roses on Persephone’s grave?”
Ben tilted his head, his brows furrowing. “Yeah,” he said. “I always do.”
Stiffening my jaw, I was afraid that if I didn’t keep speaking, it would set like concrete. “What do you mean you always do?”
He shifted his weight, looking around the large space, its couches and windows, its doors to rooms where people suffered and survived. “I’ve been leaving her roses for years,” he said. “Ever since . . .” He cleared his throat as I narrowed my eyes. “But when I saw you on Monday, I realized that I hadn’t done it in a couple months, so I brought some over yesterday.”
A nurse squeezed between us then, glancing up at Ben as she passed, and a wave of nausea rose within me. “And it’s always white roses,” I said.
Ben nodded. “Yeah, because—”
“Because they’re as pure as your love for each other?”
Again, his brows furrowed, a crafted look of confusion distorting his features. “What?”
“That’s what you told her the first time you gave her a white rose. Persephone said you chose that color because it was as pure as the way you loved each other. I know this, because she told me things.”
I wanted that last sentence to make him nervous, make him wonder how much else I knew about their relationship, but he surprised me by chuckling, lifting a hand to cover his face. “Oh God,” he said. “Did I really say that? Okay, that’s embarrassing, but, uh, no. That’s not why I keep getting white roses. I just remember she liked them.”
“Well, you need to stop,” I snapped. “Don’t you think you’ve done enough? Do you think that when we visit her grave, we want to see any evidence that you’ve been there? You got what you wanted—you’re free, the police have nothing against you—so just leave us alone, okay? And for God’s sake—leave Persephone alone, too.”
I started to spin around, but Ben’s fingers latched onto my wrist, tugging me back toward him. “You think I killed her?” he whispered. His dark eyes were shining like the ocean at night.
I looked down at my wrist, how his fingers dug into my skin, and as I did, he looked, too, then immediately let go. “Sorry,” he said. “Sorry. But, seriously, you think I’m the one who killed her?”
I couldn’t read his expression. It seemed to flicker between bewilderment and anger, caution and aggression. His nostrils flared as he breathed, but whether it was out of nervousness or fury, I couldn’t tell.
“Of course I know you killed her,” I whispered back, rubbing at my wrist. It was red where he’d grabbed it, but it didn’t look like it would bruise. “Do you think I’m stupid?”
For some reason, I wasn’t afraid of him right then. Even though he’d grabbed my arm, I felt something like empowerment. For the first time, I was able to speak the truth to his face, to tell him how disgusting and cowardly I knew him to be, and it felt good—exhilarating, even. It felt like I was finally protecting Persephone the way I should have done all along.
“It wasn’t me,” he said, shaking his head vigorously. “In fact . . .” He tucked his folder under his chin and patted at the pockets of his scrubs. “Shit, I think I left it in my locker. Um, do you think we could go somewhere for a few minutes?”
He looked toward the reception desk, where a couple nurses stood together, one staring at us with interest, the other stern, resting her fist on her cocked hip.
“I’m not going anywhere with you,” I said.
“No, it’s just—that’s my supervisor over there.” He gestured toward the women. “I can take my break a little early, and we could go down to the cafeteria—it’s public, so we wouldn’t be alone or anything, if that’s what you’re worried about. I have something I want to show you. I found it a few weeks ago, and I brought it today, on the off chance I got to talk to you again. I was wondering if you could help me understand it.”
“Ben,” I said sharply. “I don’t want to help you do anything.”
“No, I know, I get it,” he said. “But what I’m trying to say is that I realized something—or, at least, I think I did—and I think it will help you understand what happened that night.” His eyes flicked toward the nurses again. “Please?”
I didn’t want to admit it, but part of me was curious to know what he was talking about. He had a fumbling desperation that made me think it might be useful to let him keep rambling. He wanted to show me something—after my meeting with Parker, the word evidence flashed in large letters in my mind—and maybe, while trying to convince me of his innocence, he would slip up, mention a detail that only Persephone’s killer would know.
“Fine,” I said after a moment.
“Really?” His face instantly relaxed. “Oh man, thank you. I’ll meet you in the cafeteria in a few minutes. It’s on the third floor.”
He was walking backward as he said this, his eyes fixed on mine, but just before he turned around, I could have sworn I saw him smile.