Page 96 of Persephone's Curse
“By then, the city was already running out of graves. There were mass graves, illegal graves, a panicked disposal of the dead. The Farthings didn’t want that for me. They dug a place for me in the backyard, by the jasmine bushes. They put my body inside it as the first light of dawn was spreading across the sky.”
“The jasmine bushes,” I said, realizing.
Henry was buried beneath the jasmine bushes in our backyard.
Henry, who always smelled like jasmine, even now, even in the freezing cold.
Henry, whose bones were underneath the dirt where my sisters and I had sat and played dolls, sat and played Matchbox cars, sat and fought and loved each other and cried and laughed.
Had he looked out of the attic windows and watched us, so close to his remains?
I felt how I felt after a glass of wine, drunk quickly and secretively on Christmas Eve, hiding in a closet with Bernadette. Lightheaded and giddy, like my head could detach from my body and float upward like a balloon. Never had Henry volunteered so much information about his life. Never had we even thought to ask.
“It’s not a very noteworthy death,” Henry said a moment later, when it became clear that I was too stunned to speak. “A lot of people died. I wasn’t anything special. Later, years later, they made up a skipping song about it. Jump rope. I would watch them in the street outside my window.” He cleared his throat and recited:
I had a little bird
And its name was Enza
I opened the window
And in-flew-Enza
“What iswrongwith people?” I whispered.
“No, no, it wasn’t like that… It was a way to talk about the impossible,” he explained. “We’re always trying to find ways to talk about the impossible.”
I felt the wine I hadn’t actually drunk sloshing around in my stomach, turning sour. I worried for a moment that I might be sick. I wanted to hug Henry forever. I wanted to skate away across the frozen reservoir and never come back. I wanted to disappear. I wanted to be a ghost myself, done with this mortal life and free to roam around forever, clanking chains and jumping out at people, sayingboo.
“I’m so sorry for what I said to you,” I managed. “The most horrible, awful—”
“Winnie, no.I’msorry. I wasn’t able to see past my own selfishness. I should have talked to her, I never should have…” He shook his head, trailing off. “I was letting myself live in a fantasy. Just for a little while. I know now, obviously, how wrong that was.”
A cold wind cut through the park then, slicing through our clothes and making us shiver.
“Do you feel that?” I asked him. “The wind?”
“I do,” he said, smiling. “It’s so nice, actually.”
I thought of Pinocchio, so insistent on becoming a real boy. Had Henry become a real boy? I could almost see his pulse through the pale skin of his neck as he sat beside me, closing his eyes, turning his face into the wind. But it might not have been his pulse at all. A trick of the light. Wishful thinking. My own beating heart, obscuring my vision, causing the corners of my eyes to waver slightly with each thrum of blood sent pumping through my veins.
“What’s going to happen?” I asked—or more accurately, I begged, I pleaded.Please tell me we aren’t all going to die because it will sort of be my fault and I don’t think I could recover from the guilt of killing absolutely everyone in the world, but I’d be dead myself at that point, and I don’t think you can heal from trauma if you’re dead yourself.
“It will be okay,” Henry said.
“But how do you know that?”
“Because I know,” Henry said. “Because I can fix it.”
“You know how to fix it?”
“I do. And you can’t tell them, okay? You can’t tell them.”
“I promise,” I said, aware that my promises weren’t worthmuch to anyone these days, were really just the ghosts of promises, maybe, which is why only Henry took a chance with them. A ghost for a ghost. An eye for an eye.
“It will keep getting bigger and bigger,” Henry said. “Eventually, it will get so big that it will reach the house. The house is magic, the land… Persephone’s footsteps. The tear is drawn to it. Drawn toyou.”
“And what will happen then?”
