Page 50 of Persephone's Curse
I didn’t want to call Henry back. I didn’t want to see Henry ever again, not after the things I had said to him. Not after what I had done to him…
But I nodded stiffly. My body didn’t really belong to me, it felt like it was my first day getting used to new controls, and it took a minute to figure out which lever made my legs work, and another minute to figure out how to get my arm to raise.
I knocked on the closet door.
“Henry? Henry, it’s me… Can you come out? If you’re there?”
I never wanted to see Henry again but also, I was desperate to see him. I was desperate to apologize, to beg him for his forgiveness. I didn’t realize, until that moment, how much I’d missed him, this ghost-boy who was like a brother to us, this constant in our lives, this seventh member of the Farthing household. I held my breath while I waited for him to appear, and he kept not appearing, and I kept holding my breath, and—
“Make him, Winnie,” Bernadette said, interrupting my thought spiral. “If you made him go away, you can make him come back again.”
“Henry,” I said, trying again. “Henry, come back, comeback…”
But my words wouldn’t have commanded anything, there was nothing behind them, I could barely catch my breath. Finally Bernadette nudged me out of the way and knocked herself, louder, anda bit more aggressively, and it was a good thing she did, because the sound somehow reminded me to breathe again, and truth be told, I had come a little close to passing out.
“Henry! Comeback,” she demanded, and in the silence that followed I heard Clara’s stomping footsteps on the stairs again as she pounded her way back to us.
She appeared seconds later, my youngest sister, still in her winter coat, still annoyed, her eyes narrowed into two little slits. “I’mhungry,” she barked. “What is your actualproblem?”
Neither of us replied. Probably Bernadette was trying just as hard as I was to figure out what the fuck to say.
Clara looked like she was going to say something else, but she paused with her mouth half open, and she said, after a long moment, evenly and quietly, “Wait, were you knocking? Why were you knocking?”
Henry had been gone for a month. Five weeks? Time was blurring together; I could barely keep the days of the week straight. I didn’t so much sleep as have a long, constant rotation of nightmares. (“Melinoë’s really working overtime,” Bernadette had said one night when we’d met, both sleepless, in the kitchen at two or three in the morning.)
I had to say something, to respond to Clara, who was currently looking at me with wide, scared eyes. It was my responsibility because wherever Evelyn was, it was my fault. I had driven her there.
“We don’t know where Evelyn is,” I said, struggling to make my voice calm and even. Clara looked at me for a moment, then looked at Bernadette, then unzipped her coat and shrugged it off her shoulders and let it fall to the floor. She pulled her knit hat offand her hair stuck out at odd angles, staticky and alive, and she let the hat, too, drop to the ground.
Then she said, in a small voice, “You said she was at Danielle’s house.”
“That was a lie. We don’t know where she is.”
“Well, just call her,” Clara said, and although the change was subtle, I could detect the panic in her voice, the rising swell of it.
“She left her phone here,” Bernadette said, holding it up as proof. “Cece, did she tell youanything,sayanything?”
“I didn’t talk to her last night,” Clara said, biting her lip, her hand moving to the watch that had once belonged to our grandmother and had then belonged to Evelyn and that now looked out of place on Clara’s small wrist.
“Where would shego?” I asked.
Henry obviously wasn’t answering us, so I brushed past Bernadette and threw open the closet door to look inside. “All of her stuff is here. I don’t think anything is missing. Her suitcase, her backpack… It doesn’t look like she packed anything.”
“We have no ideawhenshe left,” Bernadette said.
“The camera!” Clara exclaimed.
“What camera?”
“That doorbell camera thing Dad bought last year!” Clara had already pulled her phone out; she was tapping the screen furiously.
“You have the app?” I asked.
“I taught Dad how to use it,” she said, still tapping. “I kept it on my phone. What time did they leave for the Berkshires?”
“It was around eight,” Bernadette said. “After dinner. After rush hour.”
“Okay, got them,” Clara said. “There are a few motion alerts during the night, let me check… Nothing… Enormous rat, gross… Nothing… Nothing… I don’t… I don’t understand.”
