That afternoon, I tried to remember everything I could about Tommy Dent.
I pictured his messy blonde hair, and I remembered how he’d sometimes toss rocks at cars as they drove down our street. There’d been a rumor that his mother chased him around their house with a baseball bat whenever he got in trouble, and his father had supposedly overdosed on heroin when Tommy was a baby. But beyond that, I didn’t know much, and the only clear memory I had of Tommy wasn’t even really about him.
“I just saw Tommy Dent hacking at the Townsends’ flowers with an axe,” Mom had said to us, unloading groceries in the kitchen. “He’s a bad kid. I better never see you girls hanging out with him.”
I was twelve years old at the time, still in middle school. Tommy went to Spring Hill High, and we’d never really interacted with each other, not even to wait at the bus stop, since the high school started thirty minutes before the middle school did. Everything I’d ever heard about him seemed to corroborate Mom’s statement, though, so I just nodded in agreement, certain that she knew what was best for us. But Persephone, who rode the bus with Tommy every day, rolled her eyes and stomped off to our room.
“What’s the matter?” I asked, following her in before she had a chance to slam the door, as she so often did in those days.
“Mom, obviously,” she said. “Mom’s the matter.” She pulled a scrunchie out of her hair, her eyes set fiercely on the mirror above her dresser, and reset her ponytail, smoothing back each blonde strand until they were all firmly pushed into place.
“What do you mean?” I asked. “Are you friends with Tommy Dent or something?”
“What?” Persephone looked at me in the mirror, her eyes sharp and narrowed. “Of course not. Tommy Dent is weird.”
“Then I don’t get it.”
Spinning around to face me, she sighed. “No, I don’t think you would,” she said. Then she sat down on her bed, leaning her back against the headboard and crossing her arms over her knees. “It’s just how Mom is, and I’m sick of it. She’s always making these proclamations, like ‘Oh, Tommy Dent is a bad person,’ or ‘Your teenage years are for friendship, not love,’ or, today at the store, when I picked up a box of hair dye, just because I’ve been considering adding some highlights, she was like ‘Hair dye is for people with low self-esteem, Persephone.’ She acts like she knows everything about everything, and that what she says is the ultimate truth. And if you even try to convince her that something might not be exactly the way she thinks it is, then watch out. Because then you’re just being disrespectful and hurtful and the worst daughter on earth.”
I sat down at the foot of her bed and picked at some lint on my T-shirt. Without looking at her, I said, “I don’t really think she’s like that.”
“Of course you don’t,” Persephone scoffed. “Because you’re her perfect child who gets perfect grades and still snuggles in bed with her like a five-year-old.”
I could feel myself blushing. I knew I was too old to be climbing into my mother’s bed, pressing my back against her body so she’d wrap her arm around me, but it was a childhood comfort I hadn’t been willing to let go of yet. I loved the faint floral scent of her sheets, the way she hummed sometimes instead of snored, and I loved how her thick curtains kept out the moonlight, making the darkness rich and enveloping. Still, I hated when Persephone thought of me as a child. At sixteen, she was wearing makeup and buying her own bras and taking driver’s ed, and I sometimes felt as if the older she got, the more the years between us widened.
“Sorry,” Persephone said, stretching her leg out to nudge me with her foot. “I didn’t mean that. It’s just—I swear, Sylvie. Sometimes it’s like you and I have two different mothers.”
I never knew what she meant by that. I knew that Persephone fought with Mom in ways that I never did; I knew that Persephone believed that Mom loved me more—but that was just misplaced jealousy, remnants of whatever she’d felt when Mom first told her that she was going to have a sister.
“But anyway,” Persephone said, “it’s not fair for Mom to go around saying who we can and can’t hang out with. I’m not running down the street to be Tommy’s friend or anything, but if I were friends with him, she’d just have to deal with it. I mean, she doesn’t even know him. Like, yeah, he does stupid things, but one, he doesn’t have a dad, and two, everyone’s heard the stories about Mrs. Dent chasing him with a bat. But Mom doesn’t care. To her, he’s just a bad kid, and that’s it. End of story.”
End of the memory, too. That day in our bedroom was the only time I could recall Persephone even mentioning Tommy. Detective Parker had said there’d been other suspects, but could our neighbor, who’d barely factored into our lives, really have been one of them? If he’d been sending her threatening notes or following her around at school, wouldn’t I have known about it? If she could talk to me about Ben, the guy who was abusing her, why would she never once tell me about a boy who was supposedly stalking her? It was highly possible that Ben had lied about Tommy, that he’d just been trying to shift the focus away from himself. But there was an itch—a pulsing, persistent itch right beneath my skin—that made me keep trying to remember.
“That neighbor boy.” Mom’s phrase snapped into my brain like a puzzle piece clicking into place. She’d said it so casually, as if I wouldn’t question why she’d given Persephone’s things to “that neighbor boy, her friend from down the street.” My stomach soured at the thought that she might have been talking about Tommy. But Tommy and Persephone weren’t friends and Mom had never liked him. Sure, she’d done a lot of out-of-character things since Persephone died, but I couldn’t imagine that giving away her daughter’s possessions to a virtual stranger could be one of them.
Then, of course, there was the other thing gnawing at me—Mom and Will Emory. I hadn’t asked about the photograph on the way home from the hospital. I couldn’t figure out how to bring it up without revealing that I’d been talking to Ben—and anyway, Mom had seemed reluctant to speak to me in the first place. She’d had her arms crossed over her seat belt and her chin kept drooping toward her collarbone. When I asked her if she was feeling okay, she only nodded softly before mumbling, “I’m just tired, all right? Keep driving.” Her voice sounded muted and far away, and her words seemed brittle as dried leaves. Watching out of the corner of my eye as she leaned her head against the window, I decided that I would just ask Aunt Jill about Will. After all, she was Mom’s sister, and sisters were supposed to know everything.
Now, with Mom in the living room napping in her recliner, I sat down on my bed and picked up my phone, where there was a new text from Lauren on the screen.
“Work is stupid without you,” she’d written. “Someone asked for the Chinese symbol for clarity and I had no one to roll my eyes with. Home is stupid too. Watching Friends dubbed in German isn’t as funny when you’re not there.”
My eyes lingered on her message. On a normal Wednesday, Lauren and I would be leaving work in a few hours and then we’d park ourselves on the couch for some TV and takeout. I ached a little, remembering it—the comfort of it all, the simplicity of that routine.
“I miss you too,” I wrote. Then I pulled up Jill’s number and pressed the button to connect the call.
After the fourth ring, I heard the click of her voicemail. I waited for the familiar and clipped “Hi, it’s Jill, leave me a message,” but her outgoing message was one I’d never heard before.
“Hi there—Jill here! Sorry I can’t answer the phone right now, but I’m busy waiting to become a grandmother! That’s right—it could be any day now, so I’m either out shopping for the baby or helping Missy prep for the baby or—God, if I’m lucky—holding the baby! You can leave me a message, but I don’t know how good the reception is on cloud nine!”
There was a quick girlish laugh just before the beep, and I immediately hung up. The energy in her voice was dizzying. It felt like, wherever she was, folding tiny clothes into drawers in a nursery or driving Missy to a doctor in Boston, the sky was a soothing unbroken blue, completely empty of the plump gray clouds that hovered over the houses on our street. I hadn’t heard her voice sound that way—so chipper and buoyant—in a long time, and hearing it bounce so easily against my ear, I knew that my questions about Will and Mom would have to wait. She was only one state away, but even still, she was in a whole different world, one of cheerful excitement and trips to the doctor that ended in smiles instead of dread. After taking care of Mom for months—for years, really—Aunt Jill deserved that joy. She deserved to remain in her blissful, hopeful present—not to be dragged back into her exhausting sister’s past.
I reached for my purse and dug around for the piece of paper that Detective Parker had given me on Monday. He’d told me that I should contact Detective Falley if I was unsatisfied by his answers to my questions, and now, with Aunt Jill a temporary dead end, I realized that unsatisfied was the perfect word to describe how I’d been feeling—not just that afternoon, but for days. Ever since I’d come back to Spring Hill, it seemed that our past—Persephone’s, Mom’s, and mine—had been circling around me while remaining tauntingly out of reach, and after my conversation with Ben in the hospital, I could feel it slipping even further away. I got up and paced around the room, the slip of paper with Falley’s number gripped between my fingers, and decided that if I wasn’t going to find out about Will that afternoon, then I at least needed to know about Tommy.