Now, outside my bedroom, the living room TV clicked on. I heard it surge to life and then quiet down as Lauren lowered the volume. But something stopped me from getting up and joining her, kept me staring instead at the moonlit cracks in my ceiling as my birthday slipped by. Somehow, it had happened again; another year had passed in which I’d grown older than my sister.
4
“Sylvie, I need you to come take care of your mother.”
A few months after my thirtieth birthday, everything had taken a turn for the worse. I’d been laid off at work unexpectedly, winter had settled over Providence like an icy steel dome, and now, on a particularly brutal January night, Aunt Jill had no patience left for me. I hadn’t been down to Spring Hill even once to visit my mother. In fact, I’d only been kept apprised of her treatments and condition because Jill had taken to calling me every Thursday night. Even for Thanksgiving and Christmas, which I usually spent in Hanover with Jill, Missy, and Missy’s husband, Carl, I had made flimsy excuses. Lauren’s family invited me to Virginia or I can’t get enough time off of work. Swallowing down acidic guilt was safer, I felt, than seeing my mother. I imagined her attached to an IV bag, her eyes widening with an unspoken fear, and each time, the tenderness I felt for her scared me. It was risky—thinking of her in a way that made her easier to love.
Jill never called me out on my lies or excuses; she’d just sigh into the phone and say things like, “You can’t stay away forever,” or “She’s your only parent, Sylvie.”
I’m your only sister, Sylvie.
Back when I was living with Aunt Jill and Missy, I used to get jealous whenever Missy went to her dad’s house for the weekend. I’d watch her pack a duffel bag with T-shirts and jeans and makeup, and I’d feel a tug at my heart that I didn’t yet know was envy. It wasn’t that I didn’t love Aunt Jill, or didn’t feel grateful that she’d swooped in to save me from my mother’s darkness; it was just—having a father would have been nice, too. Useful, even.
All my life, it had been just Persephone, Mom, and me, and I had never felt the need for another parent. Still, when I watched Missy’s dad pull up to the curb and honk his horn, when I saw Missy’s ponytail bounce in the air behind her as she ran to the passenger side of his car, I wondered if things would have been different if one of our fathers—Persephone’s or mine—had stayed in the picture. Maybe, I often thought, Mom had lost herself so easily because she had so few people who loved her; in that way, losing just one of us meant losing nearly everything.
Now, the phone pressed to my ear, and Aunt Jill waiting for my response on the other end, I had another, more selfish reason for wishing for a father. If there’d been someone else living in my mother’s house, then the task of taking care of her wouldn’t have fallen to me.
“I—can’t,” I said to Jill. “I meant to tell you, actually. I just got laid off at the tattoo parlor, so now isn’t really the best time. I have to stay here to look for a new job, send out my résumé, hopefully go on inter—”
“No,” Jill cut in, quick to refute the excuse I’d been crafting ever since Steve called me into his office the Friday before. “I’m sorry you were laid off—I really am, and I want to hear more about that later—but if you don’t have a job, then this is actually the perfect time for you to come home.”
“Yeah, but—”
“Sylvie, there’s no ‘but’ about it. You know that Carl was deployed last month, and that the baby is due next week. I have other responsibilities, okay? Missy needs me, so I’m heading up to Boston to be with her. If you hadn’t been dodging my calls, then we would have had more time to discuss this and it wouldn’t have seemed so sudden. Now, I’ll drive down to your mother’s whenever I can get away, but in the meantime, she needs someone to stay with her. Someone to drive her to her appointments. Someone to help her when she feels sick.”
Her voice wavered, and I closed my eyes as she cleared her throat. “As you know, she finished up her first chemo cycle back in November, but things haven’t progressed the way the doctors were hoping. They’re starting her chemo again next week, and she can’t drive herself to the hospital. You have to do this, Sylvie. I know it’s hard, but you have to stop thinking only of yourself and just step up.”
I’d never heard Aunt Jill speak to me that way before. I knew she was exhausted and stressed and overwhelmed, but besides all that, I could tell she was profoundly disappointed in me. In a way, the realization of that fact hit me even harder than hearing about my mother’s diagnosis had.
“You’re right,” I said. “I just—I don’t know how to talk to her.”
“So don’t talk. Just drive. And cook. And clean. And help.”
I hadn’t been back to Spring Hill since I’d graduated high school. On the few occasions I’d seen my mother since then, it was always at Aunt Jill’s, mere miles from the house I grew up in, but miles I was, nevertheless, unwilling to travel. During those times, our tense barbecues and forced family dinners, Mom pushed around the food on her plate and said only the shortest sentences to me (“Fine.” “That’s interesting.” “Huh.”), and I was always uncomfortable, always aching, my mind churning to conjure reasons for an early return to Providence.
“I just don’t think Mom’s gonna be happy to see me,” I finally said.
“So what?” Jill shot back. “You think she’s ever happy to see me? Hell, the way she is—the way she’s been to you and to all of us for all these years—I’m never that happy to see her, either. But this is bigger than that, Sylvie. You have to know that. And if you’re not going to do it for your mother, then could you please—please—just do it for me?”
Can you please just do this for me? I’m your only sister, Sylvie.
I squeezed my eyes shut, willing Persephone’s voice out of my head. Because it wasn’t Persephone asking. It was, with a tone that was both defeated and desperate, Aunt Jill, who had signed my high school permission slips and gone to parent-teacher conferences, who had made my favorite meatballs when I got into RISD and sent me peanut butter cookies all through college. She was right, of course. Someone had to take care of my mother, and the only person left was me.
Lauren saw things differently, though.
“I don’t get it,” she said the next night as I packed. Her lips were set in a pout, and every time I folded another shirt and put it in the suitcase, she plucked it out and threw it on the floor. “Why can’t your mom just hire one of those home-care nurses?”
I folded a pair of jeans, placed them on top of a stack of sweaters, and put my hand over the pile to keep Lauren’s off of it. “My mom hasn’t worked in years. I don’t even know how she’s managed to afford her vodka all this time—let alone her treatment.”
Lauren groaned, throwing her body back on my bed and swinging her feet up onto the mound of shirts I had yet to fold. “Maybe your aunt can pay for home care, then.”
“No,” I said quickly. “I can’t ask her to do that. She’s been supporting my mother financially for years. She’d never admit it, but I know things are tight for her.”