Page 15 of Persephone's Curse
I didn’t know.
The weather was great, sure, and autumn in New York was almost as good as spring in New York, and I was happy to not be sweating buckets anymore, but still. We both knew this was notabout the temperature of the air, but the temperature of my sister’s raw and aching heart.
“If you want to keep walking by the reservoir, we’re going to have to leave earlier, okay?”
“No, it’s stupid,” she said, her shoulders falling slightly.
“It’s not stupid. It’s nice. I get it.”
“We can go back to the usual way. I just…”
“What?”
“I like looking at the water.”
Her voice was thick. I gently took her by the hand and guided her forward. She could cry, but she had to walk and cry, or else I was going to miss history altogether.
“Water is nice,” I said after a few minutes, feeling guilty for rushing the moment.
“He used to go to the reservoir. When he was alive. To sit and read.”
Because our father was a true history nerd, I knew that the Central Park Reservoir—renamed in 1994 to the Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis Reservoir—had been completed in 1862.
Because I was a possible descendant of Persephone and slightly obsessed with morbid facts, I knew that Central Park had been built over several cemeteries.
“You think it’s ridiculous,” she said. “That I love a…”
The wordghost,if left unsaid, is a bit like a ghost itself. You can’t see it, but you know it’s there.
“It’s not ridiculous, Evie,” I said, and squeezed her hand, which I was still holding, worried, maybe, that if I let go, she would drift away from me. “That’s not what I was thinking.”
“Whatwereyou thinking, then?”
SinceI was thinking about dead bodieswould potentially ruin the mood, I softened my voice and said, “I was wondering how long it’s been going on.”
“Oh,” she said, sighing. “A year.”
“A year?”
“My seventeenth birthday. Do you remember?”
Evie had never been one for celebrations. We had a quiet family dinner. I had baked a carrot cake, her favorite. Bernadette had videoed in from school, where she was knee-deep in finals and couldn’t get away. Clara had upset a piece of cake onto the table and Dad had eaten it anyway, forkful by forkful.
“That was a good cake,” I said.
She smiled, a zillion miles away. “He was seventeen when he died.”
My heart gave a little flutter. New information I tucked away for later. “Really?” I’d always thought he was younger.
She nodded. “When we were all kids, he could kind of make himself a little younger. He didn’t want to be too much older than us. That would have been creepy.”
Oh yes,thatwould have been creepy, says the ghost in the attic.
“But he can’t make himself older than seventeen,” she continued. “After cake, when I’d brushed my teeth and gotten into bed, he knocked on my closet door—”
“He knocked?”
“That’s how we do it,” she said. “He stays in the closet and knocks, and if I say it’s okay, he comes into the room. That way he doesn’t see me, you know… changing or something.”
