1
When they found my sister’s body, the flyers we’d hung around town were still crisp against the telephone poles. The search party still had land to scour; the batteries in their flashlights still held a charge. Persephone had been missing for less than seventy-two hours when a jogger caught a glimpse of her red coat through the snow, but by then, my mother had already become a stranger to me.
On the first morning of my sister’s disappearance, Mom locked herself in her bedroom. I stayed in my room, too—my and Persephone’s room—but I left the door ajar. For a long time, I watched the plows push through the foot of snow that had fallen overnight, and I kept imagining I saw Persephone out there, her fingers tapping on the window that fogged with my breath, and my hand opening it. Opening it every time.
The hours of that day were punctuated by my mother’s sobs. In fourteen years of being her daughter, I’d never heard such a thing. Even on the fifteenth of every month—what Persephone, rolling her eyes, called “Mom’s Dark Day”—there was only silence behind her bedroom door. Whenever she emerged the next morning, her eyelids were always swollen, but I had never actually heard her pain. But on this day, the first day, she cried so hard and so loud that I could swear I saw my paintbrushes quiver in their cup on my desk.
It wasn’t until years later that I wondered why my mother didn’t try to be strong for me, tell me that Persephone was just being Persephone and that she’d be home before we knew it. What did she know right then? What does a mother feel in her bones when her daughter stops breathing?
Aunt Jill came over with my cousin, Missy, at five o’clock that first day. The roads were clear enough by then, though the snow banks were as tall as our mailbox. Jill tried for fifteen minutes to reach her younger sister. She leaned her forehead against Mom’s bedroom door and softly begged her to open up. When that didn’t work, and the sobs continued, she plucked a bobby pin from Missy’s bun and picked at the lock until the pin snapped between her fingers. “For Christ’s sake, Annie,” she said. Then she ushered my cousin and me to the kitchen where she splayed out Missy’s issues of Seventeen and told us to sit tight while she called the police from my room.
Mom had already contacted the cops early that morning, her sentences sharp and shrill as she berated them for saying they’d “make a note of it” and that she should call back later if Persephone hadn’t come home. Then she’d hung up with a long, tearful moan, and that’s when she went to her room and shut the door. Even as the hours passed and daylight turned to dusk, she never did call them back. She stayed locked away, sobbing, the phone undisturbed on its hook.
Now, I could hear Jill spelling Persephone’s name as she told the police that her niece had been missing for an entire day. But was she really missing? I’d seen her ride off with Ben the night before, just as the first flakes fell, and although I hated him more than I hated stiff paintbrushes or the loneliness of Mom’s Dark Days, I hoped she was with him still—angry at me, maybe, but okay just the same.
“Tell them to check with her boyfriend,” I told my aunt, stepping into the room. My voice startled her.
“Hold on a moment,” Jill told the police. “What boyfriend, Sylvie?”
This was the second way in twenty-four hours that I betrayed my sister.
Ben was a secret—our secret, Persephone loved to remind me. The way he drove down our street and parked his car a couple houses down was a secret. The way Persephone opened the window in our room and straddled the sill until one foot touched the ground was a secret. And here were some more: how I’d keep the window open, just enough for her to slip her fingers under and pull it up when she returned; how, on many of those nights, I’d wake hours later to the cold shock of her snapping back my sheets. Sylvie, she’d whisper, her voice hoarse in the darkness. I need you. And then began the biggest secret of all.
“Ben Emory,” I told my aunt. “The mayor’s son. He graduated last year, and Persephone’s been seeing him. But Mom doesn’t know.”
Jill frowned, the skin between her eyebrows wrinkling. “Why not?”
“We’re not allowed to date. But Persephone sneaks out all the time to see him anyway. She left with him last night, about ten thirty.”
Jill’s eyes widened. “Sylvie,” she said. “Why didn’t you . . .” But then she shook her head, leaving the question unfinished, and put the phone back up to her ear. “She was last seen with Ben Emory,” she said.
My pulse pounded as I walked back to the kitchen table, where Missy was braiding her hair to match a bright, glossy photo in one of the magazines. She was sixteen, the age smack-dab between Persephone and me, but she was carrying on as if this were a slumber party.
Why didn’t you? Jill had asked, and it was a reasonable question. Why didn’t I tell my mother about Ben the second I jolted awake that morning, the stillness of the house alerting me to Persephone’s continued absence? I’d like to believe I was trying to protect Persephone’s secret—our secret—but the truth, I know, is that I was trying to protect myself.
A little while later, Jill hurried into the kitchen to ask me for the names of Persephone’s friends.
“Ben,” I said.
“I called over there already. I had to leave a message because no one picked up. Who else?”
I shrugged, and then mentioned some girls I’d once seen Persephone with in the library as they worked on a project for school. Jill retreated back to my room, and I listened through the thin walls as, call after call, she reached a dead end: “Oh, they’re not really friends? Okay, well thank you anyway. Let me give you my number just in case she . . .”
When she ran out of people to contact, Jill insisted we try to sleep—me in my bed, Missy in Persephone’s, Jill on the lumpy couch in the living room. For a while that night, I kept myself awake, listening for the tap of Persephone’s fingers on the window. All I ever heard, though, were Missy’s kitten-like snores in my sister’s bed, and the sound of Persephone’s watch, ticking on somewhere in the room like a promise.
• • •
On the morning of the second day, I waited for Mom outside her door, sitting like a puppy that had been shut out. Normally, she was able to soothe me in ways that nothing else, not even painting, could. Her hand on my forehead was a cool washcloth, her voice a lullaby. We often played a game where she pretended to plant a garden on my face, using her fingers to show me where the roses would go (on my cheek) or where the lilies would be (on my forehead). “You’re blooming,” she’d say, and then she’d pretend to pick some of the flowers. “I’ve got three roses, two hydrangea bunches, and a stem of baby’s breath. How much will that cost me?” She’d pinch her fingers together as if holding a tiny bouquet. “It’ll cost you one hug,” I’d say, and then we’d hold each other tightly, laughing at how ridiculous we were, how happy.
But when her door finally creaked open, her eyes were so swollen they looked as if they’d been punched. Her cheeks seemed to sag, and she was still wearing the bathrobe she’d had on the morning before when I told her that Persephone was gone.
She looked at me on the floor but didn’t kneel down beside me or put her hand on my head. It was almost as if she knew what I had done, and hated me for it.