Even though I hadn’t left her a message, Aunt Jill called me back. I woke up on Thursday morning to the phone shouting in my ear, and when I rolled over to silence it, it took me several shrill seconds to find it under my pillow. I’d been up late doing research in bed—scrolling through web results of “Thomas Dent, Spring Hill, Connecticut,” or “Thomas Dent, Connecticut, sexual assault”—and I must have passed out in the middle of it all. Now, I fumbled to get ahold of the phone, my fingers stiff and clumsy.
“Hi, Jill.”
It was the second time in a week that I’d been sleeping when she called. I tried to sound steady and focused when I answered, as if I’d been up for hours and had even made Mom breakfast, but my throat betrayed me, filtering out my voice in thick, scratchy waves.
“Hi yourself,” Jill said. “What do you think you’re doing, calling me and not leaving a message? I was going to call you back last night, but I didn’t notice the little notification thingy until after ten o’clock, and Missy told me you would have left a message if it were important. But you can’t do that to me, okay? Not with your mom the way she is. If you call, you leave a message, got it?”
“Okay,” I said. “I’m sorry. How’s Missy doing?”
“Good, good, her due date is today, you know.”
“Oh, wow,” I said. “So it could be any minute, then, huh?”
Jill chuckled. “Only if you listen to Missy. She’s sure it’s going to be today, but I keep telling her that first babies always come late. I wouldn’t be surprised if, a week from now, we’re still waiting for the little lady to arrive.”
I heard Missy groan from somewhere behind Aunt Jill. “Oh my God, don’t say that.” Then, louder, as if leaning closer to the phone, she added, “I’m the hugest woman who’s ever lived, Sylvie!”
“Don’t listen to her,” Jill said. “Surely the circus has huger women.”
When Missy responded with a squeaky, indignant “Mo-om!” I tried to laugh, but the sound came out of me in a whisper. I wanted so badly to be with them, helping to prepare the nursery, listening to Aunt Jill and Missy go back and forth.
“Anyway,” Jill said. “What did you call about yesterday? Did everything go okay with Annie’s session?”
Still lying in bed, I fidgeted with my blankets, picking at lint that wasn’t there. If I closed my eyes, I could see the picture of Mom and Will that Ben had showed me in the hospital the day before. She’d tilted her face toward his like a flower toward the sun, and she’d clung to his body like ivy on a brick wall. Once again, questions bubbled up inside me, ready to come frothing out.
“Um,” I started. “No, yeah, everything went fine yesterday.”
“Okay. Good,” Jill said. “And that’s why you called? To tell me things went well?”
“Well . . . not exactly. No.” I set my eyes on the thin space between my closed door and the floor. “It’s just . . . I have a question.”
“Uh-huh,” Jill prompted. “Go on.”
I listened for the TV, or a faucet turning on, or a creak in the floor, anything that would tell me where Mom was at that moment.
“Well, it’s about”—I lowered my voice—“Mom. And Will Emory. I don’t know if you remember who that is, but he’s the mayor. And Ben Emory’s father.”
She paused. “I remember.”
“Okay, well . . .” The house was unnervingly quiet, like a street after snow has stopped falling. “I was just wondering if you knew anything about Mom and Will. Like, did they go out or anything?”
Jill sighed against the phone, and her breath sounded like the air outside on nights when I left the window cracked for Persephone. “Yeah, they dated,” she said.
“Oh,” I replied, trying to sound casual. “Why’d you sigh about it? Was it a bad relationship? Did he hurt her or something?”
“Yeah, he hurt her quite a bit, actually.”
I swallowed, imagining blue fingerprints like smudges of paint on Mom’s skin. “Bruises?”
“No,” Jill said after a moment’s hesitation. “No, not that kind of hurt. I was away at college when she was with him. I never even saw them together—not until he came to Persephone’s wake. And by then, it had already been over between them for—what? Twenty years?”
I pulled back my blankets and got out of bed, the floorboards cold against my feet. Pacing around the space between Persephone’s bed and mine, careful to keep to the large oval rag rug that had been there for as long as I could remember, I posed my next question.
“Was it serious?”
“Eh,” Jill said, her voice like a shrug. “It was to your mother, but I don’t know about him. They started dating in high school—senior year, I think? Then he went off to some fancy university and your mom stayed in Spring Hill so she could go to community college. She’d only applied to one school—one that was close to where Will wanted to go—and she hadn’t gotten in. So he broke up with her soon afterward. The distance was too hard, I guess.”
She coughed for a second, and I stopped pacing, watching my toes dig into the rug. When she continued, my feet resumed their steady march between the beds.
“Anyway,” she said, “maybe a year or so later, he ended up getting married to some girl he’d met at school. Your mom was devastated. I think she thought they’d eventually get back together, once he graduated and came back to Spring Hill. Instead, he came home with a wife. She used to call me up back then and just cry into the phone about it.”
I tried to picture it—Mom crying over a boy. All my life, she’d been the one to leave men feeling jilted and disappointed. There was one who’d shown up at our door once, a couple days after they’d been on a date, and he’d had a look on his face like he wasn’t sure how he’d ended up there. “Send him away,” Mom had told us from the couch with a dismissive wave of her hand, and Persephone and I had had to stand in the doorway and explain that it was nothing personal—our mom just didn’t do second dates.
“Did she . . . lock herself up in her room?” I asked. Her closed door was the only way I knew how to measure my mother’s grief.
“I don’t know,” Jill said. “As I said, I wasn’t really around. But you know, to me, it was a good thing—Will getting married—because she finally stopped waiting around for him. She sent out some more applications, transferred to a four-year college, finally started—”
“Mom went to college?”
As far as I knew, she’d always been a waitress, drawing flowers on people’s checks, maintaining eye contact even with those who looked down on her for her faded green uniform, her sauce-splattered shoes.
“Well,” Jill said, “briefly. You know what I mean. Just that one semester before she got pregnant.”
I froze midstep, my legs locking into place. “Wait, what?” I asked. “Mom went to college . . . and met Persephone’s dad there?”
Jill was silent for a moment. “Well—yeah,” she said. “Annie never told you any of this?”
“She always said he was a one-night stand. She said both of our fathers were one-night stands.”
“She actually used those words?” Jill asked. “When you were a kid?”
“Yeah.”
“Oh, Annie,” Jill said, as if Mom were on the line with us and could hear the disappointment in her sister’s voice.
I remembered knowing that phrase—one-night stand—before I was even old enough to fully grasp its meaning. I remembered how literally I took it, imagining my parents in an open field beneath a sky dusted with stars, standing together until morning came and they went their separate ways. I couldn’t expect Aunt Jill to understand how, as a child, that phrase had been a comfort to me. How could she know that, for me, being with Mom had been like sitting in the sun on a cloudless spring morning? Never mind the Dark Days. Never mind the shifts she had at the diner, the dates she had with men whose names we never knew. When she was with me, she was all that I needed. I was warm and safe and loved, and a father—someone more than a one-night stand—would only distract her from me, only pull the sun from my sky.
“Well, sure, she had some of those over the years,” Jill said, as if unwilling to use the phrase that Mom had taught me without a second thought. “Your dad, for example. Definitely a quick fling. He wasn’t from town. He was in and out, and Annie didn’t seem to mind. But Persephone’s father—I don’t really know how long that lasted. Less than a semester, I guess. They met in her classical mythology course, which I only remember because that’s why she named Persephone the way she did.”
“That’s why she named her Persephone?”
I’d grown up knowing the myth, of course. Mom had told it to us one day when Persephone marched into the house, complaining how the kids at school were teasing her about her “stupid, weirdo” name. “It’s not weird,” Mom had said. “It’s ancient. Here, I’ll tell you the story.” But I didn’t know that she’d chosen the name as some kind of homage to Persephone’s father.
“Well, yeah,” Jill said. “Why? What did you think was the reason?”
“I never really thought about it.”
I’d always just accepted that the name was like Persephone herself—beautiful and uncommon.
“So wait—what happened with Persephone’s father, then?” I asked. “If Mom actually had a relationship with him, then why wasn’t he a part of Persephone’s life?”
How strange that, before now, I’d never even considered him—the man whose blood had been in Persephone’s veins. When I covered her bruises at night, I never once thought of him, never wondered if his skin, when wounded, blushed the same shade of blue.
“He didn’t know about her,” Jill said. “Annie never even told him she was pregnant. She just moved her stuff back into the house and went back to waitressing. Our parents begged her to tell him, but she was adamant. Actually, that’s why she decided on the name Persephone in particular. She said he wasn’t good enough to be her child’s father, so she was rescuing Persephone from a life in the Underworld.” She paused, as if hearing the words for the first time. “Gosh, she could be so dramatic.”
“So she never even gave him a chance?” I asked. “Why would she do that? Why wasn’t he ‘good enough’ in her eyes?”
Jill sighed, and I stepped outside of the rug’s perimeter, my feet more prepared for the coolness of the floor. “It’s simple,” she said. “He wasn’t good enough because he wasn’t Will.”
“But that’s stupid,” I protested. “You said yourself that, after Will got married, she got over him.” I walked by the closet, the dresser, the light switch, my hand skimming along the surface of things as I went.
“No,” Jill said. “I said she stopped waiting around for him. Stopped loving him, though? I don’t know. I’m pretty sure she only, uh . . . got with . . . Persephone’s father to try to get over Will.”
So was that it, then? Was that why Mom had only allowed herself those brief flings? Because her heart had long ago been given to Will Emory? Because all she could do after that was lend it out like a library book, something to be borrowed for a short period of time and then safely returned? That would mean, then, that she’d loved him so much longer than she should have. I hated to think of her like that, pining away for Ben’s father—of all people—wasting any chance she’d had on finding someone else to love. Now, it was too late. She was a different person—no longer the sun, as she’d once seemed, but a cloud, one that always held the threat of a storm, and I knew very well how much it hurt to love somebody like that.
“Sylvie?” Jill said.
“Yeah?”
“Where is this coming from? Why are you asking about all this ancient history?”
“Oh, um, I don’t know, I guess I just—ow.”
My hip bumped against the post of Persephone’s footboard. I hadn’t been paying attention to where I was going—I’d been speaking slowly, stalling as I scurried around my brain, wondering if I should tell Aunt Jill about running into Ben—and I’d jostled the bed out of place.
“Ow?” Jill said. “What happened?”
“Nothing,” I said. “I was . . .”
The end of the bed had only moved about an inch, but it was enough to reveal the edge of something—a box, it looked like, peeking out from underneath Persephone’s long blue quilt. I knelt to the ground and slid the rest of it out, pulling it onto the rug. As soon as it was free of the low frame of the bed, the two sides of the box’s unsealed top popped open.
“You were what?” Jill asked.
I saw Persephone’s green afghan before I registered anything else in the box. It was the one that had always been draped along the foot of her bed, the one she reached for in the middle of the night whenever she got too cold. I pulled it out and brought it to my nose, inhaling its scent, feeling its threads tickle my face in a way that felt profoundly familiar. It didn’t smell like her, but it made me feel closer to her, just the same.
“Uh, Jill?” I said. “Can I call you back later?”
“What? What’s going on?”
“Everything’s fine,” I said quickly. “Love you.”
I set the afghan aside and dropped the phone on top of it. When I reached into the shallow box again, I pulled out a necklace—some old chunky thing—and a bottle of lotion that looked thinned and yellowed with age.
“What the hell?” I whispered to the room, as if Persephone herself were watching and would answer me.
I closed the box’s flaps, looking for a sticker or label, something to explain why these three very disparate items had been packed away together and shoved under Persephone’s bed. Besides her blue quilt, these were the only things I’d seen of hers since I’d been home.
In the upper left-hand corner of the box’s top, Mom had written our address. I noticed that first because of how thick the letters looked, as if she’d traced over them with her pen several times, wanting to make sure that, if the package didn’t make it to its intended recipient, it would at least make it back to her. Then, in the middle of the right flap, there was another address, and when I read it, my breath caught in the back of my throat.
“Tom Dent,” it said, followed by a house number and street in Hanover.