I could hear Jill’s voice pleading from down the hall—“Annie, please, open up. We’ll find her, I know we will”—and I knew that Falley was waiting for me to say something, but I’d already forgotten what she’d asked. Who was that woman inside my mother’s room? What rabid animal was making those noises?
“Sylvie,” Falley said. “It’s Sylvie, right?”
I nodded slowly.
“Have you ever known your mother to hurt your sister—physically?”
“Um,” I said, “she . . . what did you say?”
“Annie, please. Open the door and let me be here for you.”
“Ms. O’Leary, would you mind opening the door for a moment?”
“I said, have you ever known your mother to hurt your sister? Did she maybe hit her one time? Push her?”
I later learned that Falley was breaking protocol by asking me these questions—not because she felt that the situation was too urgent for all the red tape of recording devices and child psychologists, but because she was, in fact, a young detective. She’d only been promoted to that title six months before, and when she put her hands on my shoulders that day, they were shaking.
“Sylvie,” she said, “do you understand what I’m asking you?”
Something about my mother. Something about somebody hurting my sister.
No one thought to look at my hands. But even if they’d noticed the splotches of blue and gray on my fingers, or the flashes of red near my nails, they wouldn’t have connected it to Persephone walking toward Ben’s car and not coming back. They wouldn’t have seen it as evidence of a terrible crime. But Sylvie, she’d whispered the night before she disappeared, I need you.
• • •
As usual, I hadn’t heard her return. I’d only woken to the feeling of my sheets and comforter being ripped off my body. “No,” I groaned, trying to roll toward the wall.
“Yes,” Persephone said, grabbing my arms and shaking me. “There’s not much this time. Come on, you have to do this for me.”
I opened my eyes to find my mother staring at me. That’s what it seemed like, anyway, the two looked so similar—their large gray eyes, their blonde hair, their chins that came to a delicate point beneath their mouths. I knew that my sister and I had two different fathers, but with my brown hair and brown eyes and paler-than-pale complexion, it always surprised me how little I resembled the rest of my family.
Persephone leaned over and swung her head so that her hair tickled my face.
“I can do this all night,” she said. She moved even closer to me, still swishing her hair around, but now the gold necklace she always wore fell forward, and the tip of the starfish pendant grazed my lips.
“Okay, fine,” I conceded, pushing her hair, her necklace, away. “Show me.”
Persephone turned on my bedside lamp and lifted the side of her shirt. “There’s this one,” she said, pointing to a fresh bruise the size of a quarter just beneath her rib cage. “But Mom won’t see that one.” She let her shirt fall back down and then showed me the inside of her right wrist. There were two more bruises rising toward the surface of her skin. “It’s just these ones really.”
I swore I knew the size of Ben’s fingertips better than I knew my own. I sighed as I reached beneath my desk for the bucket of acrylic paints Mom had bought me for Christmas two months earlier. Grabbing some brushes and a Styrofoam palette, I sat back down beside my sister. Then I took her arm in my hand and turned it this way and that, assessing my canvas.
I worked in silence. I squirted Midnight Blue onto my palette and mixed it with Eggshell, not bothering to ask Persephone why she stayed with him. As I painted a moon over the first of the bruises, then crossed it with red-tinged waves that covered the other, I didn’t remind her that I thought love should be painless, that it shouldn’t be sneaking in and out of windows, or blood vessels bursting. We’d already had those conversations before, and they all ended the same way: “You don’t understand. You don’t know him. It’s not what you think.”
“Okay,” I told Persephone, lifting my brush from her skin. “I’m done.”
She smiled approvingly at the moonscape, and I rubbed at the colors that had bled onto my hands. There were always traces of my work on my own skin in the morning, and though my mother often commented on what I’d done to Persephone, praising me for the “beautiful little tattoos” I’d given her, she never seemed to notice the tattoos I’d given myself, the paint that screamed on my knuckles and fingers. When Persephone showered each day, she was careful to keep her concealed bruises away from the water. When I showered, I scrubbed and scrubbed.
• • •
“Sylvie.” Detective Falley squeezed my shoulder gently. “Are you okay?”
The screaming had stopped. The hammering and crashing of furniture had stopped. Now, all I could hear from down the hall was the faint sound of paper being ripped, over and over, ssshhhhk, ssshhhhk, ssshhhhk. What could she be tearing in there? Photographs? Letters? Secrets? Later that day, when Mom finally left her room to use the bathroom, I crept across the hallway to find that it was a calendar she’d been destroying. Scraps of months lay scattered across the carpet like seeds in a garden, and among all those fragmented squares of dates, every fifteenth was circled in red.
“I’m really sorry about this, Detective,” Aunt Jill was saying to Parker as they walked into the living room, where Falley still bent toward me with concerned eyes. “I don’t know what to say.”
Missy followed them. She was wearing one of Persephone’s T-shirts, which snapped “I DON’T CARE.” I hadn’t seen her take it from our dresser the night before or I would have offered her some of my own clothes to wear. Missy shuffled in slippers—Persephone’s slippers—toward the couch.
“Are you able to stay here for a while?” Detective Parker asked Jill. “With the family?” He shifted his eyes toward me.
“Of course,” Jill said. “The girls have tomorrow off for Presidents’ Day. I’m a teacher’s aide—over at the middle school in Hanover?—so I’m off, too. We can be here, no problem.”
“Good,” Parker said. “Now, do you have a recent picture of Persephone we can take with us?”
“Yes!” Jill said. “I actually took out the photo albums first thing this morning. I was thinking of making some flyers to hang around town.” She walked into the kitchen, which was open to the living room, and flipped through one of the faux-leather books on the table. “It would just feel better to actively do something, you know?”
She pulled my sister’s senior portrait, taken earlier that school year, from its plastic sheath. In the photo, a painted bruise peeked out from Persephone’s neckline, a shadow to anyone who didn’t know, but to me, a focal point.
“So should I put the police station’s number on the flyers,” Jill asked, “or have people call us directly?”
Parker reached into his pocket and handed Jill a card in exchange for the picture. “Thank you,” he said. “You can put that info on the signs. Though I should warn you that, with things like this, we get a lot of false information. Ninety-five percent of the calls that come in are useless.”