Page 18 of Persephone's Curse
I stopped ignoring Bernadette and, for good measure, I stopped ignoring Clara, too—although to be fair, it hadn’t appeared that my avoidance had even been detected by my youngest sister. Clarahad recently begun a new painting, and when she was in the early stages of her art, she didn’t really notice anything that was going on around her.
“It came to me in a dream,” she said on Friday night. It had been a full week since Bernadette had arrived home and she had been strange that morning, at breakfast. Bernadette, not Clara. Although Clara had been a little strange, too. And Evelyn. I must have been the only normal one, actually, because Dad peered into each of my sisters’ faces, then settled on mine, and, liking what he saw there, smiled and asked me to pass the jam.
It was after dinner now and I was sitting on the love seat in the attic. Evelyn sat on the floor in front of me while I tried and failed to braid her hair into a crown. Clara painted. Bernadette was in her room, the door closed, some quiet audiobook playing from her computer’s speakers.
“Well really, it was a nightmare,” Clara amended. All of her best paintings came to her in nightmares; we Farthing girls were prone to them. We called them Melinoë’s messages, her secret whispers to us, trying to frame them in a more positive light. But of course there wasn’t anything positive about waking up in a cold sweat, about being six years old and terrified to go to sleep because your great-great-goddess aunt was a vessel of nightmares and now, ages later, you were, too.
“Is it a person?” Evie asked, squinting, cocking her head, ruining the braid I was working on (no, I’ll be honest, it was already ruined).
“I don’t think so,” Clara said. “The dream was fuzzy. Like… out of focus.”
The painting was out of focus, too, but I didn’t say that out loud. Plus I knew it would come together if we gave it some time to develop.
“What happened in the dream?” I asked.
“I don’t remember,” Clara said. “But it felt like maybe someone had died.”
“Woof,” Evelyn said. “Bummer.”
It was a little bit unlike her, thewoof,but the energy in the room was weird, slightly sparky, like someone had stuck their finger in an electrical socket. I kept braiding, undoing what I’d done, starting over. At some point, Henry showed up, sitting cross-legged on the floor and staring very thoughtfully at Clara’s painting. He was fully-formed tonight. If you looked quickly, you might mistake him for a real boy.
“A building?” he said after a while, still looking at the painting.
“I don’t know,” Clara said. “Does it look like a building?”
She stepped back, and we all studied the painting.
“Yes,” Henry said.
“No,” I said.
“Yes,” Evie said.
“Who knows,” Clara said.
She dipped her brush in paint and stepped toward the canvas.
Clara painted in precise, rhythmic strokes. She reminded me of a ballerina, when she painted, but instead ofpliéswith her body, they were concentrated in her fingers, which were nimble and long and elegant. She had our Aunt Bea’s hands.
“Devant,”I said. “Derrière.Croisé. Um…”
“Seconde,”Henry supplied.
“How do youknowthat?” Evelyn asked him.
“Ècarté. Effacé. Epaulé,”I finished. How didIknow that? It was information wedged somewhere in my brain from the two years I’d spent, ages nine to eleven, absolutely convinced I’d become a ballerina. I’d taken lessons. Our father had installed a short bar on one wall in this very room (gone now). Henry used to watch me practice. It made me happy, that I knew why he knew the French word for the fourth position. I knew something about Henry that Evelyn didn’t, and I didn’t know why that made me feel so…superiorwasn’t the right word. (And was Ijealousof Evelyn? Of course. I was jealous of all of my sisters, each so perfect and full in their own ways. And was I jealous of Henry? Of course. I’d often wondered what it might feel like to be dead.)
The next day, we drove to Washington Heights, to the Cloisters, the six of us piling into Mom’s SUV and heading north, up and up and up, the Hudson River on our left and the windows cracked to let in the sweet autumn breeze. Mom drove, Dad sat in the passenger seat, Evie and Bernie took the second row, and Clara and I, the youngest, were eternally relegated to the third row. Clara worked on a friendship bracelet she’d started about a month ago, only pulling it out during car rides and leaving it in the SUV the rest of the time, untouched.
“I don’t think I even like this,” she said now, holding it out to examine it. “I keep unraveling it and starting over. I’m like Penelope, but with friendship bracelets, not tapestries.”
“Excellent reference,” Bernadette called over her shoulder.
“Are you making it for yourself?” I asked.
“I thought I was. But now I’m not so sure. Do you want it?”
“Okay,” I said. She was still less than halfway done, but she nodded and kept working at it, lazily, her fingers finding the knots and then pausing as she zoned out, staring out the window at the water. She wasn’t fast at anything, painting or friendship bracelets, but the end product was always worth the wait.
