Page 58 of Persephone's Curse
Of course both the church and the churchyard were closed for the day, but I pressed my face against the metal gates and stared inside.
There were no ghosts around, which was a bit unusual. I guess the Farthings never had a chance to be buried down here. We preferred unmarked graves.
I closed my eyes. The metal bars of the gates were freezing against my cheeks.
I couldn’t stop thinking of the third daughter thing.
A whole lifetime of Aunt Bea’s stories about the Farthing girls being descended from Persephone and now I had to confront the fact that it might actually betrue,not just some story she had made up to keep us entertained as children.
I don’t know how long I stood there with my eyes closed, but when I opened them, there was a face just a few feet away from my face, and I screamed and fell backward, hard, landing on my butt on the sidewalk.
“I wasn’t grave robbing!” I shouted, immediately unsure why that was where my mind went.
“Pretty hard to grave rob from outside the graveyard, I would imagine,” the priest said, for I guess that’s what he was, as he had the collar thing and he wore all black, like me. “Are you all right?” he added, as I scrambled to get back to my feet.
The priest took a big set of keys from his pocket, on a big rusty metal key chain, and unlocked a door in the gate. Obviously I thought ofFleabagas he pulled the door open and motioned with his head for me to come in. He was about my parents’ age and not unpleasant to look at, with a killer smile and really kind eyes.
“Thank you,” I said, slipping through.
“Hamiltonfan?” he guessed.
“Sorry?”
He started to quietly rap the first few bars from the musical, which is when I remembered that Hamilton’s grave was just beyond the gates, and I’m sure attracted many musical theater-obsessed fans.
“Oh,” I said. “No, nothing weird like that. I’m just trying to commune with a ghost.”
What was… wrong with me? I thought maybe I had stayed out in the cold so long that my brain had partially frozen, leaving the place that formed coherent language sluggish and strange, causing me to spew absolute nonsense at this poor (hot) priest.
But to his credit, he kept smiling. “What’s your plan, then?”
I sort of shrugged a little (not sure my shoulder movement was detectable underneath my enormous coat) and flapped my arms once, like a baby bird.
“I just lost someone close to me. Well. Two people, really. But one of them is dead. Actually, they’ve been dead a long time. But I really need to talk to them. I have a question for them. And I thought a cemetery, maybe—sorry, graveyard—I thought maybe this would be a place that’s, I don’t know… closer? To them? I don’t know where he’s actually buried, or else I would have gone there. But anyway. I came here. Does that make sense?”
“It makes perfect sense,” the priest said.
“Really?”
“No. But you seem harmless. So have at it.”
There was a bench nearby, and the priest gestured to it now, so I went and sat down. The stone was cold under my legs. I remembered all the superstitions around graveyards—hold your breath as you drove by one, be careful not to walk over any graves, never leave a new grave open overnight. We were squeamish about the dead, us humans. All these hang-ups and fears and mythologies around something that was inevitable. One thing all humans had in common: one day we’d all be dead.
Dressed in black sitting in the middle of a graveyard in the dead of winter, in the dead of night, thinking about death.
This was dramatic even by Farthing sister standards.
I was trying to center myself. I was thinking about the planchette again, how it had moved without us feeling anything, how it had pointed to NO and then flatly refused to answer any of our follow-up questions (okay wait is this actually Henry though, if you’re not Henry, do you KNOW Henry, who was that other ghost that just appeared for a minute, what is it like to be dead) (this last one was from Clara, who sort of hijacked the session by the end of it and went on a long tangent I won’t bother repeating here).
The priest had wandered away but was still in view, and every once in a while, he glanced back at me, making sure I wasn’t vandalizing headstones or taking any unauthorized stone rubbings (legal in most states but assuredly not allowed here, where the repeated motion of the rubbing could damage the delicate old stone).
He was out of earshot but I whispered anyway, releasing my words into the frigid air, hoping they would freeze into icicles and cut into the earth, wriggling their way like snakes into the ground, ending up wherever Henry was.
“I think you’re mad at me,” I began. “And I get that, I really do. I said some very fucked-up things and I’m truly sorry. But now Evelyn is gone and everything is so much more fucked up. I just need to know I didn’t ruin everything. I just need to know she’s okay. I have… this feeling? I have this feeling you’re together somewhere, and you can’t keep being together without at least letting me know she’s okay. It’s not fair if you don’t tell me if she’s okay. Whatever I did, however wrong it was, you have to tell me if she’s okay, Henry.”
After a few minutes, the priest came back over and sat down on the bench next to me.
“Did it work?” he asked. “Have you gotten your answer?”
