Persephone’s Curse

Chapter I

I

Every family has their myths, their stories passed down from generation to generation, a game of telephone that subtly shifts from one mouth to another, from one mother to her daughter, until the message has changed almost entirely.

It is hard to tell the truth of something, hard to tell what your aunt means when she whispers a favorite bedtime story into your ear: the Farthing girls are descended from Persephone, are the children of the in-between, one foot in this world and one foot in another …

It is hard to tell the truth of something, and yet … it feels real, doesn’t it?

My mother has only seen the ghost once.

And that was fourteen years ago.

If we asked her about it now, she’d dismiss it as a labor-induced hallucination, the result of immense pain and no drugs, a home birth she’d decided to have for her fourth and final daughter, since she’d done the hospital three times before, considered herself something of a pro, wanted to try something different.

But we knew the truth.

Of course she’d seen the ghost.

We all had.

The night our youngest sister was born, we waited on the third floor with Aunt Bea. There were three of us then—Bernadette, six; Evelyn, four; me, two. Clara would make four. Four Farthing sisters, each two years apart.

The labor was happening on the fourth floor, which had once been the attic in our family’s Upper West Side brownstone but had been converted by our parents into two rather cramped bedrooms with a larger playroom attached.

The birthing pool was set up in the playroom, and every now and then we heard a low, mournful wail drift down the stairs.

The fourth floor was where the ghost lived, in the smaller bedroom, which was now empty but, with the arrival of the baby, would soon be Evelyn’s room.

She didn’t mind sharing a bedroom with a ghost. He’d always been nice to her, to all of us.

He wasn’t a scary ghost at all. He was a largely shy, mostly quiet, very gentle ghost. If he thought he had spooked us accidentally, turning a corner in the middle of the night as we made our way to the bathroom or down to the kitchen for a glass of water, he grew agitated and insisted—oh, I didn’t do it on purpose!

And we knew that. Of course we knew that.

While my mother gave birth to Clara upstairs, the three of us already-born Farthing sisters and Aunt Bea camped out in what was now Evelyn’s room but would soon be the new nursery.

We all loved whenever Aunt Bea came to visit because she told the best stories and she always smelled like mint and vanilla and you could often find strange and wonderful things in the pockets of her linen skirts (a partial catalogue: matchbox cars, tiny notebooks, propelling pencils that opened with a tug, satchels of tea, pages torn from her favorite books, hard caramel candies, soft caramel candies).

“Did you girls know…” she’d begin, and we’d snuggle into her sides, all of us piled on the twin bed, running our hands through her hair, down her arms, pinching her knees and her elbows, squeezing as close to her as possible, “that us Farthing girls are descended from Persephone?”

Our mother hadn’t taken our father’s last name, so we were all Farthing girls, and so was she, and so was Aunt Bea, and so was little Esme, the sister they’d had who died when she was just a child.

“Is that true, Auntie?” Bernadette prompted, and the three of us held our breaths, desperate for her to continue.

“Yes,” she said, pausing to bop each of us gently on our perpetually sticky noses.

“You girls are the great-great-great-great-great-great-grandchildren of Persephone. The children of the in-between, just like she was. Persephone, daughter of Zeus and Demeter, wife of Hades, mother of Melinoe and Zagreus.”

Melinoe, Persephone’s daughter, would always be our favorite.

She was the goddess of nightmares and madness, and in a houseful of women, there was plenty of that to go around.

Were we really descended from Persephone?

Did we believe it then, snuggled up together, the lilt of Aunt Bea’s voice putting us half to sleep, the lollipops our father had given us sticking to the sheets as we let them fall from our hands, distracted?

All I will say is this:

We believed everything Aunt Bea told us. Without reservation, without hesitation, without verification.

So, yes.

Even that, we believed.

“How do you feel?” Bernadette asked our mother, when we were allowed to see her.

She held a naked, pink baby to her chest—the stranger Clara, who none of us really loved yet but would, quickly, because she was a bubbly, sweet baby with an easy laugh, unlike me, who, at two years old, still cried an awful lot.

“I feel wonderful,” my mother said.

“Did it hurt?” Evelyn asked.

“A bit.”

“Who that?” I asked, and pointed at the baby. Everyone laughed.

(Of course, in practicality, I don’t remember saying this, I don’t remember anything about the night Clara was born; I was too young, everything I know came from Bernadette, a collective memory of sisters now.)

“This is your sister. Clara.”

“Clara.” We all practiced saying her name.

Then my mom took Bernadette by the hand. She rubbed her knuckles and pulled her in a bit closer. My mother whispered, so no one else would hear, “Have you ever met Henry?”

And Bernadette’s eyes grew wide, wide, wide.

And she nodded.

Of course she’d met Henry.

We’d all met Henry.

Henry was our ghost.

I know what you’re thinking. Shared hysteria, maybe, what Bernadette called folie à deux after one year of French in high school made her act like she’d grown up in the bell towers of Notre-Dame.

That’s certainly what our mother believed, what she convinced herself, even though she’d seen and talked to the little boy when my father had taken a quick pee-break and left her alone with the midwife, who’d been momentarily distracted by some rare type of bird out the window.

(“One second, just keep breathing, holy shit,” she’d said to our mother, “it’s a western fucking tanager, wait until Eileen hears about this. ”)

“Who are you?” our mother had asked the little boy poking his head out from the as-yet-unoccupied fourth-story bedroom that would soon belong to Evelyn.

“I’m Henry,” Henry said.

“What are you doing here?”

“I live here.”

“But we live here.”

“Well, I live here, too,” he insisted. “Actually, I lived here first.”

“Are you real?” my mother asked, cutting to the chase as she usually did, trying to decide, maybe, if Henry was a figment of her imagination or a squatter or a friend of Bernadette’s who’d squirreled away when nobody was looking. I don’t think or a ghost would have crossed her mind.

“Are you real?” Henry responded.

And then he’d disappeared.

This conversation was relayed to Bernadette by our mother in whispers, while she held both the naked, new Clara and Bernadette’s hand.

“Have you ever met Henry?” she’d asked, and Bernadette’s eyes had grown wide, wide, wide, and she’d nodded, and Clara had fussed, and our mother had grown distracted and, it seemed, when she next looked up at Bernadette, she had made the decision to forget about the ghost entirely.

Her expression softened and she let go of Bernadette’s hand to cup her cheek instead.

“You’re an older sister again, Bernie,” our mother said. “You have a new little sister to watch out for. I’m so proud of you.”

And in true Bernadette fashion, she had taken a step backward, shrugged ambivalently, and said, “I’m descended from gods, so, I won’t be changing any diapers.”

Once, when I was nine and Bernadette was thirteen and going through the worst of her I hate everyone phase, she’d slapped me, hard, for going into her room and looking at her journals without her permission.

I hadn’t read them, I hadn’t, I’d just wanted to hold each one in my hands, feel the smoothness of the leather or the way another one’s cardboard cover was so worn and soft that it was pliable, like water in my hands.

Bernadette had always written in her journals incessantly, every day, filling up page after page with her innermost thoughts and secrets.

It was an irresistible treasure trove for a younger sister.

Evelyn had been out at her weekly piano lesson, so after Bernadette slapped me, I’d gone into Evie’s room and flung myself across her bed, sobbing into her pillow.

Evie would never yell at me for going into her room without permission.

Evie would never slap me for touching her things.

Evie would sit next to me and stroke my hair and tell me, quite clearly, how she could see both sides of the story and how, no matter what I’d done, Bernadette shouldn’t have hit me.

And even though Evie wasn’t there, suddenly Henry was, standing by the foot of the bed, looking translucent and ephemeral and (if I had to admit it), quite dreamy in his deadness.

“Are you all right?” he asked.

I stopped crying right away and sat up on the bed. It was always Evie who’d been the closest with Henry, but that was inevitable, they shared rooms, after all, and Evie was the quiet, sensitive, sweet one, the patient, kind, and friendly one. Of course her best friend would be a ghost.

“Bernadette hit me,” I said, my voice hiccupping, my breath catching in my throat. In her bedroom next door, Bernadette had put on some toneless, loud, angry music and was singing along in a toneless, loud, angry voice.

Henry nodded.

He was about fifteen, if I had to give him an age, but he was also sort 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 see when he’d died. It’s private, he’d said.