Page 10 of Persephone's Curse
She flashed a quick smile. Her blue eyes were bluer than Mom’s, bluer than Evelyn’s. A crystal blue. The color of a lake in summer, the sky reflected off the surface, deep and vast. I had brown eyes, like Dad’s. Bernadette’s were green. Like Aunt Bea.
“I miss Aunt Bea,” I said.
“Hey,” Clara said. “I was just thinking that.” She put her head against my shoulder. “Let’s go watch TV.”
But I didn’t feel like watching TV; I felt like getting out of the house before dinner, walking around the neighborhood, pounding the familiar pavement of the Upper West Side. Ifgetting a bit of fresh aircould count as a personality trait, that was my father and me to a T. He often said the cure for most of life’s woes was a brisk stroll around the block, and I’d picked up his penchant for sensible walking shoes and always double-checking that you’d grabbed your house keys.
The faster I walked, the less processing speed my brain had; my troubles simply couldn’t keep up. I couldn’t wonder whether I should have talked Bernadette out of the haircut or tried to convince her to go back to school or dragged her to the museum come hell or high water. I couldn’t think about how high school was already half over and most of my classmates were already working on their college admission essays. I couldn’t compare myself to mysisters, endlessly wondering if I was the least interesting Farthing girl among us. And I definitely couldn’t let the feelings of panic and despair catch up to me. Panic and despair were notoriously slow walkers; I left them in the dust on Eighty-First Street and kept right on moving. After fifteen minutes, I was feeling hot and slightly sticky and blissfully blank, my brain a clean, white space with high, high walls around it.
I loved this city. I loved beingoutin this city. I loved the way the walkers of New York had a rhythm and a cadence, and if you bumped into someone on the sidewalk, they were almost certainly a tourist, just trying their best to fit into the slots we had provided for them.
I loved this city, and I loved the way my father had filled up my head with random facts about this city, facts that had now become lodged in my own brain, resurfacing at relevant moments.
Like: no one, aside from a few very special pastors and the cardinal of the Archdiocese of New York, was allowed to be buried here anymore.
In the early 1800s, new burials were forbidden south of Canal Street. A few years after that, the rule was extended to anything south of Eighty-Sixth Street. You couldn’t make a new cemetery anywhere on the island.
But before that?
Before that Manhattan was a veritable free-for-all. Cemeteries were plentiful. You could barely walk for all the graves.
And were we ever-so-careful when we closed up all those little burial sites and told people to take their dead elsewhere? Or did we leave a lot of bodies in the ground and build Duane Reades on top of them?
I’ll let you guess.
For most people, this doesn’t pose much of an issue.
It’s superstitious faff that walking over a grave is bad luck, ditto holding your breath past a cemetery. There’s nothing technically dangerous or worrisome about living so close to so many long-dead people.
But I bring it up now, because…
Well, if you were likeme—potentially descended from Persephone, Queen of the Underworld and all the ghosts in it—you occasionally ran into them.
The ghost in front of me now was nowhere near as distinct as Henry.
It was a woman—the ghosts I saw were always women, always Farthing women, distant relations who’d inhabited a version of New York much older than the one I currently lived in. Her body was buried somewhere close, probably underneath this very sidewalk, and she was tied to it like an anchor.
She was a wisp of a thing, all shadow and suggestion, really, theideaof a ghost. She wouldn’t be able to talk or communicate with me or do much of anything. The only ghosts I could actually speak to were Henry, of course, and my dead Aunt Esme in Vermont—another Farthing woman only I could see.
My sisters knew I could see other ghosts, and would sometimes ask me about them, but mostly I didn’t have anything interesting to report. Aunt Esme only wanted me to sit and watch her play with her ghost dolls (“I like that she comes with accessories,” Clara had said once), and most of the others, like this one in front of me, were pretty boring. (“Interesting to call a ghostboring,” Bernadette had noted before. “As if she should perform for you.”)
Where did this second sight come from, and why was I the only one of us who had it? Why could my sisters see Henry but not this ghost before me, who I swore seemed to smile a little, incline her heard toward me, then move aside to let me pass?
Was it a gift from Persephone, Queen of the Underworld, or was it a gift from her daughter, queen of the mad?
I thought it could go either way.
I nodded my head slightly to this Farthing woman now, giving her a moment of acknowledgment, unable to help myself from wondering—was she happy? Was she aware? Had she had a nice life? Was she having a nice death?
Then I put my head down and pointed myself toward home.
Bernadette didn’t come down for dinner.
“She’s fine,” Mom said. “She just needs a little rest.”
“What do you think of her hair?” Clara said, who somehow still hadn’t seen either Bernie or her hair.
“It suits her,” Mom said. “She has the face for it.”
