Chapter I #2
And although it wasn’t explicitly stated, it also felt like a promise that we never told anyone, not Dad or Mom or even Aunt Bea, the most likely to nod her head and think for a moment and say, “Well, that makes sense, that you’ve befriended a ghost. You have a direct connection to the Underworld, after all.
One foot here, one foot there, the children of the in-between, you know. ”
But we didn’t tell Aunt Bea. We didn’t tell anyone. And we never looked for information about Henry. We kept our promises, even Bernadette, whose angry stage had never completely faded and Clara, who was an artist and therefore rarely did anything she was told.
“I saw her hit you,” Henry said. “That wasn’t very nice.”
“I went into her room without asking,” I said, leaving out the part about her journals, because I didn’t want him to know, because I knew the trespassing was enough of a crime on its own, because I doubted Henry would even understand the importance of a journal to a teenage girl.
Henry nodded. He was always thoughtful with his words, slow to speak, as if he really considered everything he was going to say before he let it free.
Evelyn was a bit like that, too, and sometimes I’d wondered if she’d learned it from him, growing up alongside him as she had, in a much closer way than any of the rest of us.
“Would you want her to go in your room without asking?” Henry said finally, and I huffed and bit my lower lip and then finally admitted I wouldn’t.
“Well,” he said. “She shouldn’t have hit you. But I think you should be the bigger person and apologize first. And she better apologize back to you, or I’ll put worms in her bed.”
“You wouldn’t!” I said, my eyes growing wider.
“I wouldn’t,” Henry admitted, smiling sweetly. He was a little fadey now, which happened right before he was going to disappear for a while. “Is Evelyn home?” he asked.
“Piano.”
“Oh, right.”
He was barely visible anymore, just the outline of a boy. The room smelled faintly of flowers. The sweet, subtle fragrance of jasmine. I breathed it in deeply. It made my eyes prickle.
When Evelyn woke me up an hour later, you could still smell it—the jasmine—and for some reason, I couldn’t quite look her in the eyes.
Bernadette dropped out of college a week into her sophomore year. It was almost midnight on a Friday night and Evie, Clara, and I were awake playing a game of Monopoly on the living room floor when we heard the key scrambling around for the lock, the click and twist when it caught.
“It’s Bernie,” Clara said, the only one of us who didn’t look startled by the midnight visitor, and we believed her, because every so often Clara just knew something, and we all understood that we shouldn’t question it.
I was sixteen then, Evie had just turned eighteen, Clara was fourteen, and Bernadette, soaking wet from the rain that was pouring down outside, was twenty, breathless, coatless, and wide-eyed as she flung herself into the entranceway.
“Bernadette!” Evie exclaimed, getting to her feet.
“Nobody say anything,” she pleaded, dropping her suitcase by the door, kicking off her shoes (because even in the middle of a mental breakdown, you took off your shoes in this house, or our mother would find out somehow).
Of course Clara ignored her, jumping up and shouting, “Bernie, what happened?”
I was the only one still sitting. I wrapped my arms around my knees because I felt afraid for some reason I couldn’t immediately figure out.
Bernadette locked the door behind her. “Will you shut up? I don’t want Mom and Dad to hear.”
“Mom and Dad are away for the weekend,” Evie said. “The Berkshires.”
“Oh, God,” Bernadette said, putting her face into her hands. “Thank God.”
“Put the kettle on,” Clara said to me, and I scuttled out of the room, relieved I wouldn’t have to think of anything to say to my oldest sister, who was so wet and looked so wild.
The three of them stayed in the entranceway, talking in low voices, and I got four mugs and four bags of peppermint tea and tried not to look toward the back of the house, where the wide, dark windows would only reflect my scared face looking back at me.
Then Bernadette was beside me, and she was hugging me and dripping all over the floor and all over my clothes and for some reason I was starting to cry.
“You smell like a bus,” I said into her shoulder.
“Greyhound, baby,” she said, squeezing me tighter. “I missed you so much.”
“I just saw you last week,” I replied, which was true, she’d only left the house a week ago, but for some reason this made her laugh, and when she pulled away her face was contorted into some kind of joy.
“Fuck, Winnie,” she said.
“What happened?”
“I couldn’t do it anymore.”
“Do what anymore?”
“College. Life. My part-time job at the fucking bookstore. Any of it. Mom and Dad are really gone? Jesus, that’s a relief.”
The water in the electric kettle boiled and I poured some into each of the mugs. Bernadette took the one I knew she’d take, the one with a chip on the rim and faded photos of puppies all around it. She held it in her hands and looked at me so deeply it made my stomach twitch.
“I missed you,” she said again.
“Are you okay?”
“I’ll be okay now. I just … I had to come home.”
“Are you going back?”
“No,” she said, blowing into her mug. “Fuck no.”
She took a sip, but it was still too hot, so she made a face and put the mug down on the counter again.
I wondered where Evelyn and Clara had gone; either of them would have been better at knowing the right thing to say.
I never knew the right thing to say; the best I could do was hope for poignant silences.
Bernadette pulled her sopping-wet shirt over her head and dropped it into the kitchen sink. She was wearing a light pink, lacy bra. My own chest was as flat as the kitchen counter.
“Did something happen?” I asked.
She shrugged. She twisted her long brown hair over one shoulder, held it over the sink, and wrung it out like a towel.
I had brown hair, like her. Evelyn and Clara were blondes.
All of our hair was long and snarly because our mother had an irrational fear of hairdressers and had never taken us to get trims. We cut our own hair in the attic bathroom when it got too knotted to comb anymore.
I reached out now and took a piece of Bernadette’s hair in my hand.
I knew I was crying and I didn’t know why and I couldn’t stop.
If Bernadette had gone through an angry, wild phase, I was firmly in the middle of a phase of deep, impenetrable sadness.
I couldn’t remember the last time I’d felt happy.
It occurred to me then, standing in the kitchen with Bernadette, that the answer might have been never.
“I missed you,” she said again, the third time now, an incantation, and I melted into her arms, my tears falling against her already soaking, bus-and rain-scented skin.
We all slept in the fourth-floor playroom that night, which wasn’t really a playroom anymore, but instead held Clara’s easel and a small upright piano Evelyn had gotten for her fifteenth birthday.
They’d brought it in through the windows with a crane; it had been quite the operation.
We dragged Evelyn’s and Bernie’s mattresses out of their rooms and pushed them together, all sleeping in a big clump of arms and legs and hair.
I don’t think we fell asleep until dawn, and the last thing I remembered was a quiet whisper from beside me: Evelyn, on the end, saying something to Henry, who’d stayed mostly invisible that whole night, maybe not wanting to intrude as we each took turns crying and laughing and refilling our mugs of tea, the long walk from the fourth floor to the ground floor and back.
It was just the five of us, all back together again: girl, girl, girl, girl, ghost.
I put my arm over Evie’s stomach and she got very quiet and very still, and then finally, a moment later, relaxed and curled up next to me.
I always woke up last, and when I woke up that next morning, the mattresses were bare beside me and someone, probably Evelyn, had left a now-tepid mug of coffee on the floor beside me.
It was after ten and the house was quiet and still, which meant they’d all gone out.
I sipped the coffee and got dressed in my uniform of late, jeans and a sweatshirt.
Evie wore skirts and turtlenecks, Clara favored short dresses with tights, and Bernadette always looked so, so androgynous and hip, like she’d stepped out of the pages of a fashion magazine.
I mostly wore her hand-me-downs but could never make a pair of high-waisted jeans look quite as good as she did.
They’d left me a note on the kitchen counter: Todd’s.
It was the diner on the corner of our street.
The rain had stopped but the skies were still a threatening, steely gray.
When I turned around on the sidewalk, there was Henry, in the fourth-floor bedroom he shared with Evie, waving to me.
I waved back and he grinned, really wide, and it made me grin, and it made the knot of anxiety inside my stomach loosen, just a little.
I carried an umbrella but left it closed up and tucked under my arm, and when I got to the diner, my sisters had already ordered for me and I realized that Bernadette had a black eye. How had I not noticed that last night?
“It’s not what you think,” she said as I slid into the seat. “It was barely there last night and just—fuck, it totally exploded overnight. I look like I’ve been punched, I know, but I haven’t. It was a fucking volleyball right in the fucking face.”
Bernadette always swore more in the mornings. She wasn’t a morning person but she also couldn’t sleep in, and this was a poor combination for her mood. She gulped coffee while Clara, sitting next to me, dropped a piece of her sourdough toast on my plate and exchanged it for a piece of my rye.