That night, I called Aunt Jill to tell her everything I’d learned. I explained how Mom had been locked in her room since I told her, how she hadn’t responded to my knocks at dinnertime, hadn’t even come out for the plate of food I’d left in the hallway. When I finished speaking, Jill immediately started planning a trip to see us in a few days.
“No,” I told her. “You should stay with Missy. She needs you.”
“Carl’s parents fly in on Tuesday. Missy and the baby will be fine until then.”
“Yeah, but—”
“No buts. Nothing you say will stop me from showing up, okay? That’s what family does, Sylvie. In times of crisis—or times of . . . unbelievable news—we show up.”
I imagined it then—Jill at the front door, gathering me into a hug. The smell of her—cinnamon cookies and coconut lotion—would feel more like home than the house I’d been living in for the past couple weeks.
“How do you do it?” I asked, a tear wetting my cheek.
“Bounce from person to person who needs you. You took care of me in high school, and spent years after that taking care of Mom. And now you’re taking care of Missy and the baby and Mom and me, all at once. It’s so much, Jill. I’d hate to think that you’re sacrificing your own needs.”
Jill sighed impatiently. “Oh, what do I need,” she asked, “other than the people I love?”
I wiped at my cheek with my sleeve. “Well thank you,” I said. “Seriously, thank you so much, Jill. I don’t know how I ever would have—”
“Stop,” she interrupted. “It’s nothing. Now, let’s hang up so I can text you a picture of the baby. She’s sure to make you feel a little better.”
And she was right. The picture that came in a few minutes later showed the baby wrapped tightly in a knitted blanket, her face poking out the top with wide, curious eyes. “Mallory Joy, our little potato,” Jill had captioned it, and I laughed then, as effortlessly as breathing.
I stared at the picture for a little while longer, running my pinky finger over the baby’s cheek. Then I took a deep breath, pulled up my list of contacts, and finally called Lauren back.
“You’re lucky I’m even picking up at this point,” she said by way of greeting. “And literally the only reason I am is because I have some news.”
I was startled by the tone of her voice. Along with the impatience and frustration I’d been expecting, there was a note of excitement, too.
“Okay . . .” I said.
“And obviously we have a lot to talk about, but I’ve been dying to tell you this all day. Only—I promised myself that I wasn’t gonna call you again until you called me. And yes, that sounds like something I’d say about a guy, but you’re basically my wife at this point, so shut up.”
“I wasn’t gonna say anything.”
“Okay, so . . . when I got into work this morning, Steve told me that some woman he knows is looking to hire a new tattoo artist at her parlor.”
“Oh. And you’re thinking of applying?”
“What? No, dummy. I already have a job. You’re going to apply. Steve said he’d give you a glowing recommendation. Isn’t that amazing?”
For a few moments, I didn’t know what to say. The snap of the latex gloves against my wrists, the buzzing of the tattoo machine—they seemed like details from a movie I’d seen, not something I’d lived every day for the past several years. It was as if someone else had been in control of my life, telling my body what to do, my mouth what to say, and all that time, I’d just been hunched somewhere deep inside of myself, letting it all happen because it was easier and less exhausting than trying to live on my own.
Lauren barreled through my silence. “It’s in East Providence,” she added. “So, you know, gross—but at least you’ll be doing what you love again, right?”
“Yeah,” I said reflexively. “Right.”
“What’s wrong? Why aren’t you more excited about this?”
“No, I am. But . . .”
“But what?”
“I’m not sure it’s the right job for me anymore.”
Actually, I knew that it wasn’t.
“What are you talking about?” Lauren challenged. “Of course it’s the right job for you. You’re so good at it.”
“Yeah, but I don’t think I need it anymore.”
“You don’t need it anymore? What’s going on? Did you win the lottery or something? Tap into some trust fund I don’t know about?”
There was so much I would tell her, finally—and once I did, she would know what I meant. I no longer needed to watch a needle sink pigment into flesh, no longer needed to punish myself by reenacting what I’d done to Persephone, always seeing her arm instead of the client’s, always seeing Ben’s dark fingerprints instead of the blank canvas of the stranger’s skin. Because I knew now that it wasn’t me who deserved to be tortured by guilt and memory. I’d been fourteen years old—just a kid, as Ben had said—and none of what Will did to her that night had been my fault. Never mind the painted bruises, never mind the window I’d locked up tight. There’d still been a man—not a kid, but a full-grown man—who had used his hands as a noose around his daughter’s neck, who had squeezed and squeezed until she—
My throat burned as I pictured it.
But still, I had to keep remembering; it had been his hands, not mine.
“The truth is,” I said to Lauren, “I’ve just been going through the motions with that job for a long time now, and I don’t want to anymore. I don’t know what I’m going to do next, and I’m not really sure what I love doing or what kind of job is right for me. But I feel free for the first time to figure out what it is.”
There was a pause on Lauren’s end. “Wow,” she said. “You’re being really serious.”
“Yeah, well, it’s been a serious couple of weeks. And I’m really sorry I took so long to return your messages.”
“Oh yeah,” Lauren said dryly. “That.”
“But you know what?” I continued. “I’m actually glad I didn’t talk to you about it before now. Because I didn’t know the whole story then. And you’re my best friend, Lauren. You deserve to know the whole story.”
She was quiet for a few moments, and I could hear her breathing against the phone. “You’re talking about your sister now,” she said.
“Yes,” I replied. “Persephone. And if it’s all right with you, I’d like to tell you all about her.”
• • •
The next morning, I stood outside Mom’s room holding my phone. I put my ear to the door, listening for a sound to confirm she was awake, and even though I heard none, I knocked.
“Come in,” Mom said after a moment.
When I tried the doorknob, it turned easily, and though the curtains were still closed, Mom’s light was on. She was sitting up in bed, a box of tissues in her lap.
“Hi,” I breathed.
“Hi.”
She was wigless and scarfless, her head all skin and skull, but she was up. She was speaking. She’d let me inside.
“Aunt Jill sent a new picture of the baby,” I said, stepping toward her. “Can I show you?”
Mom hesitated, her eyes swollen and uncertain, but then she shrugged. “Okay.”
I approached the side of her bed and held the picture up. She surprised me then by moving over a few inches so there was room for me to sit beside her. As the mattress creaked beneath our shared weight, she took the phone from my hand.
“Look at the caption,” I said.
She didn’t laugh or even smile as she read it, but her eyes softened a little. She used her fingers to zoom in on the baby’s face, and then, quietly, she gasped.
“She’s so pink,” she said. “Just like Persephone when she was born.”
I looked at the side of her face. “Really?” I said.
Mom nodded. “You were always so pale.” She spoke without moving her eyes from the picture. “Like a sheet of paper held up to the light. And that was pretty, too. But Persephone . . .”
Her lips lifted slightly, the promise of a smile budding on her face. “She was the most beautiful pink I’ve ever seen.”
• • •
I spent some time that afternoon tending to the driveway and front steps. A coating of snow had fallen overnight, and when I came back inside from clearing it, I saw I had a voicemail from an unfamiliar number.
“Hi, Sylvie,” the caller said, a wary tinge to her voice. “It’s Hannah Falley. I’m sorry to just call you like this, but I saw the news, and I spoke to Detective Parker, and now, I don’t know, really. I just wanted to say . . .” She cleared her throat. “I’m sorry we never figured it out. We just didn’t know to look at him. We should have. I want you to know we never dismissed what you said back then. But he just didn’t seem connected in any way, other than being Ben Emory’s father, so we missed it. And that’s on us.”
She made a soft chuckling sound, one without any humor in it at all.
“I mean, Tommy Dent pointed us right there, didn’t he? ‘Talk to the mother, talk to the mother.’ And now that I finally know what he meant, I keep thinking: maybe if we’d just hit harder when we asked your mom about Persephone’s father—who he was, how long since he’d been in the picture, all that—she would have told us the truth about your sister’s paternity. And then we would have had reason to look closer at Will. And then . . .”
She sighed. “Anyway, I just called to say I’m so sorry I didn’t catch it. But I’m glad you finally know. I hope this can be the start of some healing for you and your family. So take care, Sylvie, okay?”
For a while, I listened to the silence that followed Falley’s message. I stood in the middle of my room, staring at the wall, and when I finally pulled the phone away from my face, its screen was black. Pressing the home button, I watched it light up with my new lock screen photo, the one of a bundled-up Mallory Joy, and I savored the sight of her—how new she was, how beautifully unwounded—until a tap on my bedroom window startled me into dropping the phone. It thudded against the rug as I whipped toward the glass.
Ben’s face peered in at me.
“Jesus!” I breathed. And for just an instant, I saw him the way I used to, nights when he’d creep toward our window, waiting for Persephone to finish getting ready. I saw the scar on his cheek and felt that same old instinct to shudder.
But then I took a deep breath, unlocked the latch, and thrust the window open.
“What are you doing here?” I whispered, careful to keep my voice from reaching Mom in the living room.
“Sorry,” Ben whispered back. “I’m sorry. I needed to see you, but I still don’t have your number, and I didn’t want to go to the door, just in case your mom . . . And so I went to the window to see if you were in your room, but then I saw you were on the phone, so I waited, and now I’m just beginning to realize how stalkerish I’m being. Shit. I’m sorry.”
His cheeks reddened, and though I didn’t know if it was with embarrassment or cold, my hesitation was brief. Waving him inside, I put a finger to my lips in warning as he hoisted himself through the window. I crossed the room to lock the door, and when I turned back around, he was already standing on the rug between the beds.
“That’s a lot harder than it looks,” he whispered, gesturing toward the window. “Persephone made it seem so easy.”
“Persephone was an eighteen-year-old girl,” I reminded him, walking back across the room to close the window and shut out the cold. “Now what are you doing here?”
“Right,” he said, and he reached into his pocket. Pulling out his hand, he revealed Persephone’s necklace in his palm. For a moment, the starfish caught the sun and winked.
“With everything that happened the other night,” he said, “you never actually ended up taking this. But I still want you to have it.” He stared down into his hand. “I think Persephone would want that, too.”
Letting the chain dangle from his fingers, he held the necklace toward me, the same way he’d offered it at his house on Wednesday.
“I’ve been thinking about it,” Ben whispered, “and I think it must have been in my dad’s car that night, not mine. I think when he . . .” He pressed his lips together and shook his head. “Maybe it fell off in the struggle. Maybe it was caught in his sleeve or something and it fell into the driveway when he got out of the car. So you might end up wanting to give it to the police as evidence, I don’t know, but I wanted that to be your—”
“Ben, I’m sorry,” I cut in.
Meeting my eyes, he cocked his head to the side. “For what?”
I sat down on the edge of my bed, gesturing for him to do the same.
“For accusing you the other night,” I said as he settled down beside me. “For freaking out and running away before you had a chance to explain. I feel really stupid about that, especially given what happened after.”
Ben reached for my hand, and for a second, I thought he was going to hold it. Instead, he flattened my palm, dropping the necklace onto it. The gold shimmered against my skin, and I marveled at how light it felt. All these years, I’d imagined it so much heavier.
“Don’t worry about that,” Ben said. “I get why you freaked out. But now we know.” Even though he was already whispering, his voice grew quieter then. “We know for sure what happened.”
I nodded. Closing my fingers into a fist, I felt the points of Persephone’s starfish press into my palm. I looked at Ben, and the scar on his cheek was like the line of a mountain range on a map.
“How are you doing?” I asked.
His eyes were focused on my window.
“I’m okay,” he said. “I’m moving out of the guesthouse. I haven’t found a new place or anything yet, but I took today and tomorrow off to try to make some headway.”
He chuckled dryly. “The hospital’s cutting me some slack. ‘Take all the time you need,’ my supervisor said. But I wouldn’t be surprised if they try to fire me. Son of an alleged killer and all that. Sort of a PR nightmare.”
“They won’t fire you,” I assured him.
He blinked a few times and then looked at me, his eyes drilling into mine. “I think that bastard is going to get away with it,” he said.
I felt the pinch of my lungs as I stopped breathing. Then, the air hitching between my lips, I asked, “Why do you say that?”
Ben shrugged and looked back toward the window. “I haven’t talked to him,” he said, “but I hear he’s hired this whole team of lawyers. Some high-profile firm. And Tommy—well, suddenly this fancy attorney blows into town, offering to take on his case pro bono. But I bet my dad’s tied up in that, too.”
I gripped Persephone’s necklace harder in my hand. “So Tommy’s not going to testify against him?”
“Doesn’t look like it.”
The walls crept closer. The ceiling sagged toward our heads.
“Are you going to testify?” I asked. “I mean, I know he’s your father, but—”
“That man is not my father,” Ben declared. “Not anymore.” He scratched his scar, scraping his nail slowly along the ridge of it. “Not ever, really.”
As we sat in silence, I opened my fingers to glance at the starfish on my palm, and quickly closed them again. Then, Ben asked, “Is he yours?”
“My what?”
“Your father. Are we . . .”
“No. I asked my mom about that—twice, actually—and she insisted that he isn’t.”
“Well, good,” Ben said. “Because that would be a little much, learning my dad’s a murderer and sleeping with my sister, all in the same week?” He whistled so quietly the sound was mostly air. Then, as I lifted my eyebrows in surprise, he shook his head.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “That was so inappropriate. I’m just not sure how to deal with all of this. It’s so hard to even comprehend. I mean, first off—Persephone and I, we should have never been together in the first place, right? Someone should have told us the truth and stopped us. But, at the same time, it doesn’t change the way I think of her, you know? If I remember her now, I still feel that same spasm of love, deep in my stomach. And then I feel sick about that.”
I looked at him, saw the anguish and confusion in his eyes. Then I put my hand on top of his and squeezed. “Hey,” I said. “It’s only been a couple days since you found out. You just need time to process it all.”
He stared down at my hand. “Time?” he scoffed. “Time has never been enough to make me stop loving her. It’s been sixteen years, and I still haven’t stopped.” He sighed, his eyes scanning the back of my hand. “But maybe you’re right, maybe now that I know, it’ll be different.”
He laced his fingers with mine and held my hand hard, his knuckles white, my own pinched and pressured. I winced at the pain of his grip, but I relished it, too. It made the ache in my lungs, my heart, my stomach—the ache I’d felt for days, or maybe even years—subside. But then I saw the danger in that, in trading one pain for another, and I slipped my hand out of his grasp.
He didn’t fight it. He let me go.
“You don’t have to stop loving her,” I said. “I know I won’t.”
“That’s different.”
“It doesn’t have to be. You were there for her, and I’m grateful to you for that. She deserved to have someone who understood her,” I added. “We all do.”
His eyes were unreadable as they shifted back and forth between my own. Then he nodded, blinking, and tears slipped down his cheek.
“I should go,” he whispered, standing up. He took a couple muted steps toward the window before I stood, too.
“Wait,” I said.
He turned around, slowly, as if the air were becoming too heavy for him to move through. “Yeah?”
“It’s just—you know Tommy?”
He let out a short laugh. “I think I remember him, yeah.”
“Right. Well, why do you think he kept telling the police—and telling us—that my mother knew something important? He was clearly hinting at Will being Persephone’s father, but why would he point people in that direction? Your dad ended up bankrolling his whole life. He had a lot to lose if Will got arrested.”
Ben took a deep breath and shook his head. “I don’t know,” he said. “I guess he just loved knowing something that no one else did. I mean, we were closest to Persephone, and we didn’t have a clue. But maybe, maybe knowing this big, decades-old secret—it somehow proved to him that all that bullshit he’d said was true, about being the only one to actually see and know Persephone.” He shrugged. “And it probably made him feel powerful for once, you know? He must have just thrived on showing that off, on taunting people with the fact that he knew something. I mean, think about his life. That ounce of power, or control, or whatever it was, probably meant a lot more to him than money. I know it always does for my father.”
Ben shifted his feet, putting his hands in his pockets. “But speaking of Tommy,” he said. “I found all the stuff he sold my dad. Persephone’s stuff.”
I stood up straighter. “You did?”
“Yeah. After I got back from the police station, I went inside the main house. I’m not even sure why. I guess I just figured my dad would be arraigned in the morning, and this would be the only chance I’d have to look around. I think I hoped I’d find something to help me reconcile the fact that my father murdered my . . .” He swallowed. “Anyway, I noticed that this room on the third floor—my mom’s old office—was locked. And I kicked the door in. I didn’t even know I was capable of that, but I just kept picturing his face as he said that what he did was all my fault, and it went a lot easier.”
He paused, his mouth curling with a look of disgust, as if he were seeing his father in the room with us now.
“Anyway,” he went on, “the room was filled with all these boxes. I opened one of them, and at first I didn’t really know what I was looking at. Jeans, sweaters, stuffed animals. But then I saw a shirt that I recognized. It was that pink one, you know? With the gold stripes?”
My eyes closed around the image of Persephone standing in front of the mirror, holding her lip gloss up to the pink fabric, trying to see how well it matched.
“Yeah,” I whispered, my throat stinging.
“So then I remembered what Tommy was saying when we first heard them arguing. And I searched through the rest of the boxes and every once in a while, I found something else I recognized.”
A wave of dizziness spun the room around me. I closed my eyes, and when I opened them again, everything was still. “Why?” I asked. “Why would he want all of that?”
Ben shrugged, looking down at the space between our feet. “A part of me hopes it was guilt,” he said. “Something that would make him just a little bit human. But I have no idea. And I’ve decided it’s best not to wonder. Because I don’t want to humanize him. I want to always see him the way I do right now. As a monster.”
I nodded. I understood that feeling. How long had I held tight to the belief that my mother was beyond saving—just to make it easier to stay away? But she wasn’t Will. She hadn’t killed anyone. She’d simply swallowed her secrets like pills, then chased them with something she’d hoped would drown her.
“But listen,” Ben said. “I took all that stuff back to the guesthouse. It’s yours if you want it—unless the police end up taking it. You can come by anytime to go through it.” He shifted his weight and put his hands into his coat pockets. “I mean, hopefully I’m moving out of there within the next few days or so, but I won’t be far.”
I tried my best to smile at him. “Thank you,” I said. “And hey, let me give you my number, okay? That way, you can send me your new address when you know it.”
He smiled back at me, weakly. “Your number?” he said. “I don’t know, Sylvie. That feels like classified information at this point. Are you sure you trust me with that?”
His eyes—dark as a starless night, but deep, it seemed, as the sky itself—locked with mine.
“Yeah,” I said. “I do.”
• • •
On Saturday, I ran errands. When I returned home, Mom was just where I’d left her that morning—in her chair, wearing her robe and slippers. I brought my shopping bags into the living room and sorted through them, pulling out each item and setting them on the carpet. Then I split open the plastic that held a folded drop cloth and laid the canvas tarp across the floor.
“What are you doing?” Mom asked, eyeing me as I took a screwdriver to the lid of a paint can. “What’s all this?”
“This,” I said after a moment, mixing the paint and carefully pouring it into a plastic tray, “is our project for the day.” I looked at the pool of color, milky and glistening in the light. “There were a lot of choices, but I went with Blossoming White. I’m not sure what makes it blossoming white instead of just white, but it sounds nice, right?”
“You’re going to paint the wall?” Mom asked.
“No,” I said. “We are.”
She put her hand to her chest and clutched her robe closed. “But, you can’t do that,” she said, an edge of panic in her voice. “You’ll—you’ll make the other walls look all faded. What are you going to do then, paint the whole room?”
I clicked an orange roller into place on its handle and looked around at the rest of the room. “I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe.” Then I shrugged. “Why not?”
After unplugging the TV and wheeling its stand away from the wall, I studied the constellation for what I knew would be the final time. Somewhere, in the silver paint that tornadoed through the dots I’d once placed so meticulously, were skin cells from Persephone’s fingers. In that way at least, she was alive up there still, the paint laced with her desperate swipe for Mom’s attention. But she’d been dead for so long—whether or not, in life, she’d wanted more from us. And we needed to let her be dead. We needed to let ourselves keep living, for as long as we both were allowed.
“Okay, come here,” I said, and I walked over to Mom, holding my hands out for her.
She looked into my palms for a moment. Then, with a reluctant sigh, she put her hands into mine and I helped her out of her chair, her body feeling light as a stalk of wheat.
As she stood, something fell from the recliner, landing on the floor with a thump. We both looked down and saw the copy of Wuthering Heights I’d given her.
“Oops,” I said, bending down to pick it up, but she tightened her grip on my hands, holding me in place.
“Leave it,” she said. “You can take it out to the garbage bin later.”
“You want to throw it away?” I asked, a familiar itch gathering on my skin. I had bought that for her. She had wanted it at the hospital, and when they didn’t have it, I had gone out of my way to get her a copy of her own.
“I don’t want to read that story ever again,” she said.
She squeezed her eyes shut, her lids wrinkling with the effort, and it was then that I knew why she’d been drawn to that book in the first place.
“It reminds you of Will, doesn’t it?”
Her hands, still gripping mine, flinched when I said his name. It had been almost fifteen years since I’d read Wuthering Heights in school, but I remembered the gist of it well enough—two lovers, from vastly different circumstances, spend much of their lives with other people, their obsessive love for each other still raging around inside them, turning one ill, the other withered and bitter.
“I don’t want to read that story ever again,” she repeated—and I nodded, relief filling up my lungs.
“Then let’s do this,” I said.
I led her to the tray of paint on the floor, and I bent down to roll the brush in the shallow pool of Blossoming White. When it was fully saturated with paint, I handed the roller to Mom, watching as she took it with a shaking hand.
“I don’t know,” she said softly, staring at the stars on the wall, her eyes wide and fearful. “I don’t think I can.”
“It’s okay,” I said. “I’ll help you.”
Placing my hand on top of hers, I felt the bones beneath her skin, felt the wrist I used to bring to my nose and smell when I was a child, inhaling her perfume as if it were the scent of a delicate flower.
Then, our hands holding on together, we touched the brush to the wall, and we painted.