Page 47 of Persephone's Curse
When I thought about it too directly, when I remembered Henry’s face in Evelyn’s bedroom, when I remembered the words that came out of my mouth, the vitriol, the hate…
I thought I would die from the guilt.
I thought it would tear me into pieces.
I let myself out of the bedroom and went downstairs. Everything was dark. Sometimes Mom stayed up later, hunched over the kitchen table, paying bills or doing a crossword or just watching her tea grow cold, but today it was only me. The wide windows at the back of the house were dark and creepy and haloed by cold; even double paned, they couldn’t completely keep out the chill of a New York winter. I stood close to the glass, all the lights off inside so I could actually see to the backyard, the outline of the high wooden fence at the back of the property, the scraggly branches of the jasmine bushes, dormant now until spring, when they would grow back with reckless abandon, needing multiple rounds of trimmingover the course of the year. Jasmine grew quickly, wildly, it was impossible to kill.
He smelled like jasmine. He always smelled like jasmine.
I put my hand on the glass. (“I swear to god I can never keep these things clean,” Dad would say, had said a hundred times before, and Mom would reply, “Maybe swear to goddess next time and you’ll have more luck,” and wink at me if we caught each other’s eyes.)
“I’m so sorry, Henry,” I whispered.
Did I still think I had done the right thing?
She’s doing better,Bernadette had said.
But at what cost?
At what cost was Evelyn doing better?
Where was Henry? Where had I sent him and was he okay and why did he always smell like jasmine and why did I miss that smell more than anything in the world? I felt the absence of that smell like a physical thing that had been ripped away from me. Like I had given up a kidney.
I took my hand from the window. Five perfect fingerprints.
The proof that I had been here, that I missed him, that I would hate myself for the rest of my life for the things that I had said to him.
The next morning was absolutely freezing, the first really, really cold day we’d had, the kind of cold that made your bones stiff before you even opened your eyes in the morning, the kind of cold thatdidn’t pay attention to how many layers you were wearing or how snuggly you wrapped your scarf around your neck. I wore jeans, wool socks, a long-sleeved T-shirt underneath my sweatshirt, an ankle-length winter coat, a hat and scarf and gloves. By the time I stepped out our front door I looked more like a bundle of laundry than a human being, and the cold found the only exposed skin it could—around my eyes—and crawled immediately downward, leaving me feeling completely naked.
Bernadette linked her arm through mine and snuggled close to me as we walked to the subway. “Winter,” she said dramatically, and kissed me quickly on the cheek. “It comes earlier every year, doesn’t it?”
“I guess so,” I said even as my wrists, inside my gloves, started to itch.
“Although Ihavefigured out the only thing I miss about having long hair.”
“What?”
“It’s warmer.”
We reached the subway entrance and as every New Yorker in the winter has experienced, I went from freezing to standing in a pile of my own sweat as we waited for the train to come.
We took the 1 to Columbus Circle and walked east along the southern edge of Central Park. Bernadette took my arm again and Evelyn and Clara walked together and Mom and Aunt Bea held hands and Dad looked like the odd one out, but happily oblivious to that fact as he stopped at a cart to buy a cup of black coffee.
Fifth Avenue was already swarming with tourists and shoppers—itwasBlack Friday, after all—but there was a certain order to thechaos, and a specific movement to the crowds of people itching to see the holiday windows. Bergdorf Goodman’s always had the best displays, and this year did not disappoint. They had gone with a mythology theme, and each window told a different story, all exploding with color and detail and over-the-top theatrics—Circe dripping in gold, mid-spell; Hermes with gold-winged ankles; Persephone covered in flowers.
“Did you know,” Aunt Bea said, suddenly next to me, wrapping her arm around my waist, “that we Farthing girls are descended from Persephone? That we live here and there, the children of the in-between…”
“How do you know if that’struethough?” I asked.
“Oh, can’t you feel it? Can’t you just feel it? A warm certainty just here—”
She put her hand at the base of my breastplate, somehow finding it through all the layers.
“I don’t feel certain about anything,” I responded darkly.
“Oh, Winnie,” she said. “You have to let it all in. You have to open up. You have to find it, know it, seek it.”
“Are you calling me closed off?”
