We didn’t speak much as we ate. Sitting at the white marble counter of Ben’s breakfast bar, we inhaled slice after slice of mediocre—yet wholly delicious—pizza, taking breaks only to drink long, thirsty gulps of the beers we’d opened while waiting for the oven to preheat.
“Okay,” Ben said after a while, a single slice remaining on the pan between us. “I think I’m ready to come up for air.”
He wiped his hands on a napkin and tossed it onto the counter. Shifting his weight on the tall, low-backed chair, he looked at me and crossed his arms. “So,” he said, “your turn. I want to know about you.”
I swallowed the bite I’d been chewing and set my crust on my plate. “What about me?” I asked, reaching for my beer.
“Well,” he said, “I feel like I told you everything there is to know about me, but I don’t know much about you. I don’t even know what you do for a living.”
“Oh,” I said. “Well, I’m sort of between jobs right now—that’s the fancy way of saying ‘unemployed,’ right? I was a tattoo artist until I got laid off.”
“Oh, that’s awesome!” Ben said. Then he shook his head. “Not the getting laid off part. I mean being a tattoo artist. That must be so cool. Do you like it?”
I thought about it, and then I answered him honestly. “No. I mean, I don’t hate it. But I don’t enjoy it, either. My roommate, Lauren—we worked at the same place, and she’s in love with it.”
I pictured the sticky notes she’d place around the apartment—a phoenix in transition from ash to bird, a woman’s eye with thin, barren trees for lashes. I pictured her face as she worked on someone’s arm or calf or shoulder blade, the way her eyes would smile even as her lips pursed in concentration.
“She would marry tattooing if she could,” I added, and then I cleared my throat, my voice too loud as it bounced off all the gleaming white surfaces in the kitchen. “I think that maybe I’ve always been a little jealous of that. I just can’t imagine being that passionate about a job.”
I slid my finger up and down my beer bottle, watching clear, glistening tracks of condensation emerge. “It’s only been a few weeks since I was laid off,” I said, “but it feels like a lifetime ago that I ever did that. It seems like it was someone else entirely.”
Ben tilted his head and knitted his brows together. “So how’d you get into tattooing in the first place, then? Is it something you have to go to school for?”
“You have to do an apprenticeship, get certified,” I said, shrugging. “But I originally went to art school. And then after that, I basically hopped on board my best friend’s plans because I didn’t have any of my own.”
“Art school,” Ben said. “That’s cool. What kind of art do you do?”
“I don’t do any art,” I said quickly.
“Oh. Sorry, I just thought—”
“Yeah, it would make sense,” I cut in, “for someone with a degree in fine arts to actually make art, but I don’t know.” I continued to trace the condensation on my beer, my fingertip wet and cold. “The truth is, I have no idea what I want to do with my life.”
I was buzzed by now, clearly—I was making admissions to Ben that I’d barely even articulated to myself. As I pushed my half-empty bottle a couple inches away, the beer and lingering whiskey kept unthreading thoughts that, up until now, had been knotted up inside me.
“My life is totally directionless,” I said. “In high school, I painted every day so I could get into RISD. At RISD, I painted every day so I could get a degree. And for years now since then, I’ve just been . . .” I searched for the correct word, thumbing through my brain until I landed on the one that Aunt Jill had often ascribed to me. “Floating.”
Ben shrugged. “That’s okay,” he said. “You’re—what? Thirty? That’s about the age I was when I figured things out. Before that, I never cared about a job, but now that I’m a nurse, I love going to work. It’s hard, but I love it.”
Looking at him then, I saw that, even with all their darkness, his eyes seemed earnest and encouraging, as if he truly believed that I, too, had a calling, and that mine was a path that would reveal itself in time. After a couple seconds, I had to look away from him.
“Yeah,” I said, “well, what you said before—about becoming a nurse to make up for your mistakes with Persephone? I think that, for me, doing tattoos is similar—only, in the opposite way.”
His eyes squinted in confusion. “What do you mean?”
I took a deep breath. “I think I only stuck with tattooing to remember my mistakes. Because if I remembered them, then I could keep punishing myself. Because I should be. I should be punished.”
Ben shook his head. “I don’t under—”
“You know I painted over Persephone’s bruises, right?”
He hesitated, looking away from me to stare at his drink, but then he nodded.
“I shouldn’t have done that,” I rushed on. “I shouldn’t have kept it a secret. But she asked me to, and so I did. And I always thought that covering her bruises, keeping her secret—I thought it led to what happened that night, because, as you know, I believed it was you who killed her. So tattooing—inking pictures onto people’s skin—it reminds me of what I did. Which is good. I don’t want to be able to forget. I don’t deserve to.”
A crease of concern spread across Ben’s forehead. “You were a kid,” he said. “You can’t carry that. You didn’t do anything wrong, Sylvie.”
I shook my head so hard that my hair flew across my face. “You don’t understand,” I said, brushing it back behind my ear. “You don’t know what I did.”
Standing up, I pushed my chair away from the counter and took a step back. My heart was a clenched fist knocking against my ribs; the air felt too thick, my throat too small. I could feel a film of sweat, sudden and slick, on my forehead, and I could see her in her red coat, the snow just beginning to dust her shoulders as she trudged back toward Ben, as she got in his car and never looked back. It’s such a betrayal, she’d written.
“Sylvie,” I heard Ben say, but my eyes were blurring and I was already walking away from him, stumbling down the hallway and toward the front door. I could see the handle, could almost reach out and grasp it. I could see the dead bolt, the latch that wasn’t locked.
“I have to go,” I mumbled, vaguely looking around for my coat but then deciding, somewhere in the fog beginning to envelop me, that I didn’t need it. It wasn’t as cold outside as it had been that night. My body wouldn’t freeze; my body would not be buried in snow.
“Sylvie,” Ben said again, and I felt his hands on my shoulders. When he turned me around to face him, his eyes looked into mine so deeply I wondered if he could see her, too—her blonde hair tinted almost pink by his taillights, her boots leaving ghosts of herself on the ground.
“Talk to me,” Ben said. “It’s okay. It’s okay.”
He guided me into his bedroom and flicked on the light switch, a yellow glow flooding the carpet, the walls, the air. Sitting me down on the bed and taking the space beside me, he kept his hand on my back, rubbing it up and down. “Shh,” he soothed. “It’s okay. It’s okay.”
It wasn’t until a tear, fat yet weightless, splashed onto my hand that I realized why he kept saying that. My cheeks were wet, I registered now; my shoulders were shaking and my lungs kept sucking in air.
“Whatever it is,” he said, “it can’t be that bad. You were a kid, Sylvie. Just a kid.”
“It doesn’t matter how old I was,” I spat. “She’s dead because of me. Because I—” A burning sob raged through me. “I locked her out!”
Ben was silent, watching me.
“I was—I was always supposed to keep the window open. Just a crack. That’s all she needed to get back in, but I—I was sick of it. I didn’t want to cover for her anymore. I wanted our mom to know what was happening to her. Only I didn’t—I didn’t think that—I only locked it because I thought she’d come to the front door. I thought she’d have to ring the doorbell and wake up my mom and they’d have a fight but then everything would be out in the open. I didn’t know she’d—I had no idea . . . oh God.”
I slumped forward, my face falling into my hands. Tears slipped between my fingers, and as I endured the sobs that spasmed through my stomach, my throat, my lungs, I felt Ben’s body tense up beside me. Even his hand on my back went stiff.
I straightened up, wiping at each of my cheeks, and I looked him in the eyes. “I locked her out,” I confessed again. “She couldn’t come back that night because I locked her out.”
Ben pulled his hand away from me and placed it on his lap. For a while, he just sucked on the inside of his cheek, the one that was scarless and smooth, and I watched his pulse as it throbbed against his neck.
“I locked her out,” I repeated.
Now that I’d finally come clean, now that—for the first time in my life—I’d spoken the words out loud, I couldn’t stop saying them. It was as if my tongue were a diving board, and they kept lining up, one after another, to jump right off.
“I locked Perseph—”
“So what?” Ben snapped his head to look at me.
I blinked, tears catching in my eyelashes. “So what?” I said back. “So everything.”
Ben shook his head. “No. It doesn’t matter. You locked her out, okay, but what about Persephone?”
I stared at him, watching how the light in the room pooled and swirled in his eyes. “What about her?”
“It was her decision to come back to my car. She could have rung the bell, like you said, gotten in trouble and that would’ve been it. But she didn’t. She got in my car instead. And we fought. She said she hadn’t been able to get back in, and I told her we should just tell her mom so this wasn’t such an issue in the future, but she said no. She got angry. She demanded I let her out.”
I narrowed my eyes, my tears stalling on my cheeks. “Are you saying this was her fault?”
“No. Not at all. Because the next thing that happened was that I did let her out. And if I could redo anything in my life, that’s the one thing I’d take back. But even if I did take it back—even if I’d found a way to calm her down and then drove her home again and she’d figured out how to sneak inside—would it matter? Would she still be alive today?”
“Yes,” I said, and Ben tilted his head to the side.
“I’m not so sure about that. Because, just like she made the decision to get out of my car, and I made the decision to let her, someone else made the decision to kill her. And if it was Tommy, then he could have done it another time, too. He was stalking her, Sylvie. He was biding his time. He—”
He stopped himself, taking a deep breath before continuing.
“What I’m saying is—Persephone made a decision to sneak out, to come back to my car, to demand to be let out, and I made a decision to let her go, and you made a decision to lock the window because you were tired of covering up a dangerous situation. But only one person made a decision that night to hurt her. To kill her. You were—God, Sylvie—you were only trying to help her. You were trying to keep her from getting hurt. Why the hell would you blame yourself—let alone punish yourself—for that?”
My lips parted to say something, and then closed, parted and closed, parted and closed. I was stunned into stillness, my hands half open, half fisted in my lap. I was stunned by the reflections of light I could see in those obsidian eyes, the ones my sister had called black holes, the ones that seemed to make their own gravity as they pulled me toward their gaze.
He was right.
I actually laughed when I realized it, my breath gushing out of me as if it were water that had filled my lungs to bursting. In an instant, I felt lighter, pounds and years lighter, and I was about to press my hand to my mouth, dam up the laughter that was coming and coming in an otherwise somber room, but then I changed my mind, let the sound spill from my body until nearly all of it had been drained.
“Uh . . .” I heard Ben say. “What’s so funny?”
All this time, I’d remembered locking the window as something I’d done to Persephone. But Ben was right—God, he was so right, it felt wonderful and terrible at once—I’d locked the window for her. I’d locked it because I’d loved her, deeply, and I’d wanted to save her from herself, wanted to protect her from boyfriends and bruises and misinterpretations of love.
But still—and here, the laughter dried up, quick as the stopping of a faucet—I had lost her.
The tears flowed again as I collapsed against Ben, boneless as a pile of laundry. For whole moments, whole minutes maybe, I continued to cry, crumpled up in his arms.
That loss—the absence of Persephone—had always been an ache so fierce that, at times, it was difficult to breathe. I felt it now, again, my lungs gasping to keep up with the pace of my tears, and I missed her. I missed how she scrunched up her nose when looking in the mirror, how she hummed whenever she brushed her hair. I missed the pinches and Indian burns we’d given each other, just kids with no understanding yet of bruises, of what it would take to want them, of what it would take to cover them up. I missed movie nights and buttered popcorn, missed rewinding again and again to rehear the lines we loved. I missed kicking each other under the table at breakfast, both of us stifling smiles that threatened to give us away. There were so many things—millions of tiny, essential things—that I’d been too busy living my life to appreciate and cherish. How many times had I crawled into bed with my mother, when my sister, alive and just as warm, had a bed to crawl into, too? She might have pushed me away, grumbled her annoyance into her pillow, but when she placed her hands on my arms or my shoulders or my back, they would have had blood coursing through them, round and round again.
I straightened up, and Ben’s arms loosened as I wiped a hand across my nose. When I met his eyes—eyes that Persephone had gazed into each night, eyes that she’d said she could get lost in—I saw that our faces were very close. I could feel his breath on my lips.
“I know,” he whispered, and his voice was so fragile it sounded like my own. “I miss her, too. I miss her all the time.”
I kissed him then. Without thinking, without understanding, I pressed my mouth against his. I cupped his face and felt the ridge of his scar beneath my fingers. He’d been wounded there, hurt by a parent who was supposed to only love him, and I kissed him harder for that. I could feel his surprise in the shape of his mouth, the initial stiffness of his lips, but then he kissed me back, lifting his hand to cradle my neck, and my nerves became electrified. Something in my body roared back to life.
I gripped him closer, pulling him down with me to the bed. I felt the weight of him, his chest rising and falling in tempo with my own, and I wrapped my legs around him, fastening his body to mine.
His lips were softer than I would have expected, and as our mouths moved together, breathy and slick, I slipped my hands under the back of his sweater, felt the heat of his skin against my palms as I pulled him even closer.
His thumb stroked my cheek as he kissed me and kissed me again, and I struggled with his belt, trying to unbuckle it without unthreading my lips from his. He leaned back then, his breathing heavy and rhythmic, and he peeled off his sweater, undid his belt, and slid out of his pants. I tugged my shirt over my head and pulled my jeans and underwear down together. When he came back to me, his skin already beading with sweat, he wrapped his fingers around the straps of my bra and slipped them down over my shoulders, kissing each inch of my body he revealed.
I didn’t want his mouth that far from mine. I put my hands on the sides of his face and guided him back to my lips. We kissed each other again—and again and again and again—until he finally entered me, and I gasped, his mouth trailing down to my neck, where he breathed hot and hard against my skin.
As I pressed my fingers into his shoulder blades, as I turned my head to run my lips along his scar, I didn’t stop to wonder why tears still dampened my cheeks. I only thought of all the parts of my sister that Ben alone had known—parts secret and mysterious, parts I’d never been able to reach. Then I felt the rhythm of him inside me for the miracle that it was; with every gentle but insistent thrust, he was pushing Persephone back, back, back into me.