Page 14 of Persephone's Curse
“Well… You don’t want to live with Mom and Dad forever.”
“This house,” she insisted. “I don’t want to leave thishouse.”
“This house? I mean, it’s nice, sure, but won’t it be a relief when you don’t have to climb three flights of stairs to get a pair of socks?”
“You’re being so obtuse,” she said, almost smiling.
It clicked for me then. The smell of jasmine. “Henry?”
She bit her bottom lip so hard that when she stopped biting it, I could see her teeth marks in the red flesh.
“He doesn’t have anyone else,” she said, her voice quivering, the tears welling up in her eyes.
“Well, he has me,” I said. “And Clara.”
“And when you leave? When you both leave?”
I honestly hadn’t thought about it. It had never really occurred to me, what Henry’s life (well, death) had been like before the four of us. Or what it would be like after we’d gone.
“I mean… We can’t justnotlive our lives. Because of Henry,” I said, feeling like a huge asshole even as I said it. “I don’t mean… I mean, I’msorry. I know that’s terrible, but… You can’t just…”
It clicked for me again. Puzzle pieces falling into place.
“Oh,” I said. “You love him.”
The tears were spilling out of her eyes now, running down her cheeks, and it occurred to me then just how much our house full of girls cried.
“I don’t… I don’tknow,” she said. “I just know that I don’t want to leave him, okay? I’m not ready to leave him.”
“Well you have… some time,” I said. Not the greatest advice in the world, but to be fair, I felt very put on the spot. Evelyn had a crush on Henry? My sister was in love with a ghost? I needed a few minutes to process that information before I came up with any advice worth giving.
She didn’t say anything. She just nodded her head a little.
“Maybe you’ll…” I didn’t finish that sentence. What was I going to say? Maybe you’ll fall out of love with the ghost that haunts our house? Maybe you’ll fall in love with someone else? To be honest, I was surprised I had never picked up on the fact that my sister was having a secret love affair with the spirit that haunted our four-story brownstone. But maybe I shouldn’t have been that surprised. Evelyn was the only one of us who could actually touch Henry. I’d always thought it had something to do with their proximity, the bedroom that was now hers but had once been his. The rest of us, if we brushed against him, felt only a slight thickening in the air. A coldness. To Evelyn, he had always been as solid as anyone else.
“I’m sorry,” I said. I couldn’t think of anything else to say. Shetook my hand and then crawled slowly toward me, so we ended up hip to hip. She put her head on my shoulder.
“Please don’t tell them,” she said.
“I won’t.”
I saw ghosts and my sister was in love with one.
If only Persephone could see us now.
II
They say Persephone came to Manhattan before it was even Manhattan. That she planted a jasmine bush on a plot of bare land. They say her descendants would forever be drawn to it, like moths to a flame. They say that her footsteps left fragile places in the earth, places you could crawl from one world to another…
Having secrets from my sisters made me itchy, and for a few days I simply avoided them altogether, waiting until Clara had finished breakfast and left for school before darting downstairs and grabbing a piece of toast and walking across the park with Evelyn. Bernadette slept late, so I didn’t have to worry about her much, and when I got home, I complained loudly about all the homework I had to do and nobody really questioned it when I spent hours locked in my room, running downstairs to shovel dinner into my mouth and retreating as soon as I was done. I was worried I’d develop a UTI from holding my bladder, waiting until everyone else had gone to sleep before I crept to the bathroom. Sometimes I’d catch a glimpse of Henry, shining and bright in the moonlight, wandering the halls of our brownstone, moodyand morose, like a caricature of a ghost, and my stomach would twist uncomfortably as I’d pray he didn’t see me.
My walks across the park with Evelyn were quiet, although I could tell now, in the silence, how little I’d been paying attention to my older sister. It was painstakingly, achingly obvious that she was in love. It was obvious in the way she left the house as if against her will, turning back every ten or twenty feet to gaze longingly at her own bedroom window. It was obvious in the way she pressed rose petals between her fingertips when we passed the florist on the corner. It was obvious in the way she sighed heavily at absolutely fucking nothing, every five or six minutes. And it was obvious in the way we were late to school every single morning, because she’d started insisting we walk along the southern edge of the reservoir, even though it was absurdly out of our way, going north only to come back south again once we’d reached Fifth Avenue. Finally, on Thursday morning, I whirled around to face her after she’d stopped walking to gaze mooningly over the water.
“I am going to fail history if I keep being late, Evie,pleasethrow me a bone here.”
She blinked, then glanced at the time on her watch (she always wore a dainty gold watch that had belonged to our grandmother) and swore under her breath.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m just… This weather. You know?”
