Page 3 of Persephone's Curse
He was about fifteen, if I had to give him an age, but he was alsosort of ageless, and if you caught him at the right moment, he could be seven or eight, and if you caught him an hour later, he might be almost seventeen.
He’d made us promise to never look for information about him. Never to see how he’d died. Never to seewhenhe’d died.It’s private,he’d said.
And although it wasn’t explicitly stated, it also felt like a promise that we never told anyone, not Dad or Mom or even Aunt Bea, the most likely to nod her head and think for a moment and say, “Well, that makes sense, that you’ve befriended a ghost. You have a direct connection to the Underworld, after all. One foot here, one foot there, the children of the in-between, you know.”
But we didn’t tell Aunt Bea. We didn’t tell anyone. And we never looked for information about Henry. We kept our promises, even Bernadette, whose angry stage had never completely faded and Clara, who was an artist and therefore rarely did anything she was told.
“I saw her hit you,” Henry said. “That wasn’t very nice.”
“I went into her room without asking,” I said, leaving out the part about her journals, because I didn’t want him to know, because I knew the trespassing was enough of a crime on its own, because I doubted Henry would even understand the importance of a journal to a teenage girl.
Henry nodded. He was always thoughtful with his words, slow to speak, as if he really considered everything he was going to say before he let it free. Evelyn was a bit like that, too, and sometimes I’d wondered if she’d learned it from him, growing up alongside him as she had, in a much closer way than any of the rest of us.
“Would you want her to go in your room without asking?”Henry said finally, and I huffed and bit my lower lip and then finally admitted I wouldn’t.
“Well,” he said. “She shouldn’t have hit you. But I think you should be the bigger person and apologize first. And she better apologize back to you, or I’ll put worms in her bed.”
“You wouldn’t!” I said, my eyes growing wider.
“I wouldn’t,” Henry admitted, smiling sweetly. He was a little fadey now, which happened right before he was going to disappear for a while. “Is Evelyn home?” he asked.
“Piano.”
“Oh, right.”
He was barely visible anymore, just the outline of a boy. The room smelled faintly of flowers. The sweet, subtle fragrance of jasmine. I breathed it in deeply. It made my eyes prickle.
When Evelyn woke me up an hour later, you could still smell it—the jasmine—and for some reason, I couldn’t quite look her in the eyes.
Bernadette dropped out of college a week into her sophomore year. It was almost midnight on a Friday night and Evie, Clara, and I were awake playing a game of Monopoly on the living room floor when we heard the key scrambling around for the lock, the click and twist when it caught.
“It’s Bernie,” Clara said, the only one of us who didn’t look startled by the midnight visitor, and we believed her, because every so often Clara just knew something, and we all understood that we shouldn’t question it.
I was sixteen then, Evie had just turned eighteen, Clara was fourteen, and Bernadette, soaking wet from the rain that was pouring down outside, was twenty, breathless, coatless, and wide-eyed as she flung herself into the entranceway.
“Bernadette!” Evie exclaimed, getting to her feet.
“Nobody say anything,” she pleaded, dropping her suitcase by the door, kicking off her shoes (because even in the middle of a mental breakdown, you took off your shoes in this house, or our mother would find out somehow).
Of course Clara ignored her, jumping up and shouting, “Bernie, whathappened?”
I was the only one still sitting. I wrapped my arms around my knees because I felt afraid for some reason I couldn’t immediately figure out.
Bernadette locked the door behind her. “Will you shut up? I don’t want Mom and Dad to hear.”
“Mom and Dad are away for the weekend,” Evie said. “The Berkshires.”
“Oh, God,” Bernadette said, putting her face into her hands. “ThankGod.”
“Put the kettle on,” Clara said to me, and I scuttled out of the room, relieved I wouldn’t have to think of anything to say to my oldest sister, who was so wet and looked sowild. The three of them stayed in the entranceway, talking in low voices, and I got four mugs and four bags of peppermint tea and tried not to look toward the back of the house, where the wide, dark windows would only reflect my scared face looking back at me.
Then Bernadette was beside me, and she was hugging me anddripping all over the floor and all over my clothes and for some reason I was starting to cry.
“You smell like a bus,” I said into her shoulder.
“Greyhound, baby,” she said, squeezing me tighter. “I missed you so much.”
“I just saw you last week,” I replied, which was true, she’d only left the house a week ago, but for some reason this made her laugh, and when she pulled away her face was contorted into some kind of joy.
