The lights were still on when I got home. I wiped my feet on the mat and paused at the front door, pressing my back against the wood as the imprint of Ben’s body continued to hum inside me. The air felt taut, as if stretched over too small a space, and I closed my eyes to the accusations I could imagine Mom hurling at me: Where the hell were you? I’ve been here alone for hours, wasting away. I guess it means nothing to you that I’m sick.
But when I walked through the entryway into the living room, wincing in anticipation, I was surprised to find that she wasn’t in her chair. All the lamps were on, casting a buttery glow on the furniture and walls. Even the Persephone constellation, usually shadowed by the nearby TV, was perfectly spotlighted. I stared at it—that angry, silver swipe of my sister’s hand—and quickly looked away.
When I saw the time on the microwave in the kitchen, I knew why Mom wasn’t there. It was eleven thirty-two. I’d stayed with Ben even longer than I’d thought, and Mom was asleep. Of course she was—she had chemo in the morning—and if I had even a chance of enduring her eye rolls and complaints, her acidic comments bookended by silence, then I needed to get some sleep myself.
I switched off the lamps, each of the bulbs lingering a dull orange before snuffing out completely, but the darkness didn’t take. There was still another light, coming from somewhere down the hall. As I got closer, I saw that Mom’s door was open, the light spilling out. Tiptoeing into the doorway and resting my shoulder against its frame, I found her asleep on top of the bed, bald as a baby and curled up like one, too.
I watched the flicker of a vein on her head, how it forked across her skull like pale blue roots. Then, her arm twitched, responding to something from deep within the folds of sleep, and I noticed her fist, tightly balled and clutching something. Taking a couple steps into the room, I saw that it was a tissue—that, in fact, the bed was littered with tissues crumpled up around her, fist-like themselves.
At the foot of the bed was a lidless shoebox stuffed with what appeared to be small white envelopes. I glanced back at Mom’s face, noted her pink, swollen eyelids, the hints of dried tears on her cheeks, and I looked at the box again. My heart sputtered, seeming to understand something before my mind could catch up, and I reached for the box, my movements as slow and soundless as dust floating through air. Palms flat against the cardboard, I lifted it up and snuck back into my room, where I switched on the light and carried the box to my bed. For a few moments, I could only stare at all those envelopes lined up like entries in a card catalogue.
I picked out one at random. “Annie – January 15,” it said, and then a year. I did the math quickly—I would have been four years old when Mom received this; Persephone would have been eight. I plucked out another envelope (“Annie – October 15,” it said, with the same year as the first) and then another (“Annie – May 15,” dated two years later). Flipping through more and more, I saw that there were ones with years that predated the first one I’d picked up, and ones with years when I hadn’t even been alive yet. But every single one arrived on the fifteenth of the month—Mom’s Dark Day.
Envelopes scattered around me, I pulled out another from the box (I’d been seven for this one, Persephone eleven), and I looked inside. A strip of paper no bigger than a credit card said, “I can’t stop thinking about you.” For a second, I let my eyes trace the bulky handwriting, and then I reached for another (I’d been two, Persephone six) and read the note inside: “I took my son blueberry picking yesterday and remembered that stain on your lips.” I fingered the top edges of the envelopes until I stopped on one that was closer to the end of the box (I’d been thirteen, Persephone seventeen), and when I opened it, I read his words: “In my dream last night I was kissing you.”
Will’s words, of course. So now I knew. On the fifteenth of each month, he’d sent my mother a letter—no stamp, no address, hand-delivered apparently. “I miss your face,” one said. Then Mom would glide through the hallway like a ghost, turn into her room, shut the door. “The other day, a song came on the radio that reminded me of you and I had to pull over on the side of the road for ten minutes.” We’d press our ears to her door, pancake batter dripping from the wooden spoon that Persephone held up in the air, and we’d hear nothing but the sound of our own breathing. “I love you. I’ll always love you. Only you.” Darkness would swallow the house as we’d wait in the living room, still in our pajamas, the rumble of our stomachs reminding us to turn on the light, heat up the leftover pancakes, have breakfast for dinner. “It’s not enough to just remember you.” The next morning, she’d emerge from her room, the creak of her door a sound that pulled us from dreams, and her eyes would be puffy. Then she’d kiss us on the tops of our heads—Persephone just a peck, me a kiss of hard I’ve-come-back-to-you lips, her palm lingering under my chin, Persephone’s eyes lingering on Mom’s hand.
“Those are mine.”
Her voice made me jump—not because Mom was there, in my doorway, and who knew for how long, but because of the anger trembling in each word. I looked at her, her arms crossed, a gnarled twig of a woman.
“These notes,” I said. “They’re why you had your Dark Days.”
“Every fifteenth, you’d slink off to your room and not come out until the next day.”
She was silent then, her lips pinched so tightly together they almost disappeared.
“So this was why,” I continued. “Because Will would write you these notes. And then you’d miss him, I guess. You’d miss him so much you’d abandon us.”
She unsealed her mouth to scoff. “Abandon you? Please. You girls could take care of yourselves.”
“Because we had to,” I said. “You can do nearly anything when you have to.”
Mom rolled her eyes.
“He was toying with you,” I said. “You know that, right?”
“What are you talking about?”
“Sending you these notes—with no intention of actually seeing you. He just wanted to know you were still under his thumb. He was manipulating you.”
“And what makes you think he had no intention of actually seeing me?”
I hesitated, the answer so obvious. “Because you never saw him.”
“Like hell I didn’t.”
Her eyes blazed, practically scorching my skin with the heat of their conviction, even from across the room.
“What?” I asked.
“You think you have it all figured out, but you don’t know anything.”
“When would you have seen him? The only time I ever saw the two of you together was at Persephone’s wake.”
She shrugged. “I saw him now and then.”
“When?” I asked. “Where?”
“We made arrangements.”
“You made arrangements. How? Through these?” I picked up a couple of envelopes, then loosened my grip, letting them slip back onto the bed like leaves floating to the ground.
She shrugged again. “Guess you didn’t pay close enough attention when invading my privacy.”
I stared at her—her nearly translucent skin thin as an onion’s, her eyebrows all bone, her gray eyes like clouds holding in their rain—and I saw her look at the notes that were scattered all around me. Her lips twitched, as if she wanted to say more.
Running my fingers over the letters still in the box, I grabbed a few at a time. “My new secretary is named Annie,” one said. “I find all sorts of reasons to say her name.” Without bothering to return it to its envelope, I dropped that note and went on to the next: “I saw you with your kids last week. You were checking out at the grocery store when I walked in. I had to stop myself from whisking you away.” I dropped that note and went on to the next: “I’m aching to see you.” I dropped that note, and as it fluttered on to the bed, it turned itself upside down, revealing another message, the handwriting cramped and small in the corner. “This Thursday,” it said. “2 p.m., usual place.”
I glanced up at Mom. Even as her mouth held on to a tiny, satisfied smile, her eyes brimmed with anxiety. I dug back into the notes I’d already read, flipping them over to see the words on the opposite side of each one. “Saturday night, 9:30 p.m., usual place.” “Next Wednesday, 3:30 p.m., usual place.” “Tomorrow, 8 a.m., usual place.”
“You were having an affair with him?” I blurted. “All that time?”
“Oh, don’t look so scandalized,” Mom said, but she wasn’t even looking at me; her eyes were stapled to the wall behind my head. “It was just a few times a year.”
“Just a few times a year? He was married.”
“And that was his business, not mine. If his wife couldn’t make him happy, then that was her problem.”
My mouth fell open. “Her problem? Oh my God, Mom—who are you?”
“I’m the woman who loves him.”
She tightened her crossed arms, her body rigid, as if she were solid as a deeply rooted tree—not the hollow stalk, easily snapped by the wind, that we both knew she really was. I held myself back from responding right away. I wanted the words she’d just said to reverberate in the air, mock her with their absurdity.
I looked down at the notes again. “What’s the usual place?” I asked.
“Does it matter?”
I pictured them in the back seat of a car, like two teenagers with no better options. I pictured them in Will’s office, his wife unknowingly on her way with the bagged lunch he’d forgotten at home that morning.
“No,” I said. “But—when were you even meeting up with him? I feel like I’d remember that.”
And then, all at once, I did. I remembered those nights she’d come into my bedroom after one of her dates, tucking me deeper into sleep, her skin bringing the scent of peonies into the air. I remembered mumbling questions about the men she’d had dinner with, and I remembered her shushing me as if I were a baby beginning to fuss.
All those nights, she’d been going out with Will? I shook my head at the thought. She couldn’t have been. I’d seen some of the men she dated. There was that one who pulled into our driveway in a red Ferrari and Mom rolled her eyes as the three of us peeked at him through the curtains. We watched him check his reflection in the side-view mirror and nod his approval before heading toward the door.
“The men I went out with were just distractions,” Mom said now, as if reading my mind. “They were few and far between—fewer and farther than I let you think. I hardly dated anyone but Will. Sometimes I did—here and there, just to make him jealous, or just to feel like I was calling the shots—but mostly, it was him.” Her eyes glazed over and her voice became brittle. “All him.”
She slouched a little, her arms dropping to her sides, the knot of her body beginning to loosen. I watched her waver slightly, like a branch swaying with a breeze, before she placed her hand on the dresser to steady herself.
“So you understand what he was doing to you, then,” I said.
Mom squinted. “Doing to me?”
“You just said you went out with other men to feel like you were calling the shots. Because you were completely powerless, right? Completely under Will’s control, at the whim of his desires. If he wanted to see you, he didn’t ask when you were available. He told you when and where, and you just—you just showed up!” I laughed—a dry, abbreviated chuckle. “I mean, didn’t you have any respect for yourself?”
The silence she offered was enough of an answer, and as another thought pushed its way to the surface of my mind, gasping for attention, my stomach clenched.
“Oh my God,” I said. “Is this still going on?”
Mom shook her head so slightly it was as if she didn’t move it at all. “No,” she said, but her voice was distant.
“You’re lying!” I screeched. “You’re still seeing him, aren’t you?”
I thought of Ben’s scar, how Will had thrown a blade at his son and sliced the boy he was into two—one who had trusted his father and one who never would again. I raked my eyes over Mom’s body, searching for signs of Will’s damage on her skin. She was pale as milk and there were bruises on her arms—but that was because of her sickness, that was because of the chemo. Right?
“No, I’m not still seeing him,” she hissed, and when her eyes connected with mine, there were tears in them. “The last time we met up, your sister was still alive, okay? The last time I even saw him was at her wake. Do you think I don’t wish I’d seen him since then? That we were together right now? But look at me. I’ve hardly left the house in the last sixteen years, and he’s never asked me to.”
Her eyes fell to the floor again, a tear sliding down the sharp curve of her cheek. “He doesn’t love me anymore. He’s forgotten I even exist.”
I was struck by how young she sounded—like a lovelorn teenager, or like Lauren when she got attached to someone who then began ignoring her texts. “He’s over me,” she’d always say, her tone nearly theatrical.
I shook my head, glancing at Will’s letters on the bed. “I don’t get it,” I said. “These notes are clearly connected to your Dark Days—the dates prove that. But shouldn’t they have made you happy? I mean, he was sending you a letter once a month telling you how much he wanted to see you. Isn’t that what you wanted?”
“Do you see two hundred and sixteen notes in there?” Mom snapped.
I paused. “What?”
“It wasn’t once a month. The notes weren’t, anyway. And that’s what broke me, if you really have to know. Eight, nine, ten times a year—I’d go to the mailbox, take out the envelope, and there’d be no note inside it at all. It was . . . Jesus, it was brutal. I’d wait for weeks for the fifteenth, for his middle-of-the-night courier or whoever the hell he sent, and then, most of the time—nothing. He’d completely shut me out.” She turned her head to look at the wall, crossing her arms once again. “You can’t possibly know how that feels.”
Laughter burst through my lips. “I can’t possibly know how it feels to be shut out? Are you ser—” But then I stopped. “Wait.”
I rewound the words she’d just said, playing them back in my mind.
“Why would there be an envelope in the mailbox if there wasn’t a letter?” I asked.
Mom stared at the wall, her mouth firmly closed.
“What else was in the envelopes?” I tried.
When she still didn’t answer, I riffled through the notes again, picking out envelopes in the box I hadn’t yet touched. I opened them up and shook them out, as if whatever else had been in them were still inside. But all that slipped out were the same strips of paper with the same handwriting I was already beginning to hate.
“I still have dreams about us at the lake.”
“I ate our favorite pizza last week. It wasn’t the same without you.”
“I saw you outside the movie theater with another guy. I wanted to kiss you right in front of him.”
“Couldn’t get to the bank in time to make the withdrawal. I’ll—”
My pulse sped up. I tightened my grip on the note, crinkling it a little. Then I started over.
“Couldn’t get to the bank in time to make the withdrawal. I’ll get it to you tonight. Wear the green dress.”
I flipped the paper over. “Usual place. 8:30.”
“He was giving you money?” I asked. “Why?”
Mom drummed her fingers on her arm as if she were bored, but her eyes flicked nervously across the wall.
“Was he buying your silence?” I pressed. “You got to have your affair with him but you couldn’t let anyone know?”
She opened her mouth a little, but she didn’t respond.
“It couldn’t have been very much,” I said. “We lived paycheck to paycheck.”
Finally, she shrugged. “I saved it.”
“For what?”
She pinched her lips together, resuming her silence.
“Is that how you’ve been paying for your treatment?” I asked.
“My insurance pays for my treatment.”
“Right,” I said. “But you told me you pay for your own insurance—and since you don’t have an income, that’s never made any sense to me. Is this how you’ve been able to afford it?”
Her eyes crept toward me. “I’m tired of this conversation. Give me back my box.”
“No.” I picked up the box and held it to my chest, protecting it as Mom took a few steps and reached out her hands. I was close to something—I could feel it. There were tremors of it in the air, beckoning me closer, or warning me to turn back.
“Does he still send you money?” I asked.
She dropped her arms. “What?” There was genuine surprise in her voice. “No.”
“Yes, he does. He has to be. That’s how you keep affording everything.”
“No, he doesn’t! I told you already, I saved everything he ever gave me. And anyway, why would he send me money now, huh? He’s had no reason to for a very long time.”
“Why not? Because the affair’s been over since Persephone died?”
There was a beat of silence before she responded. “Yes.”
She was lying—or, at the very least, withholding. There was something I was still missing. I could almost make it out; it pulsed beneath her skin like a vein.
“So he really hasn’t given you a single dime since . . .”
The rest of the sentence crumbled in my mouth. I clamped my lips shut, holding the words tightly between my teeth. Then I swallowed them, sharp as a jagged crust of bread. I was struggling to put it all together, but every part of it was blurred. Will had sent my mother money for years, and had only stopped when Persephone died.
“Oh my God.”
I was forgetting how to breathe. I couldn’t get my chest to expand or contract.
“Oh my God.”
“Sylvie, please . . .”
“He’s her father, isn’t he? Will Emory is Persephone’s father.”
As I looked her in the eyes, I drank the air in shaky, uneven gulps. Silence spread through the space between us, and I watched as she walked toward Persephone’s bed, her steps like an old woman’s. Easing herself onto the blue quilt, she sat down without a squeak or groan from the decades-old mattress.
Then, finally, in a voice as creaky as a coffin being pried open, she answered, “Yes.”