Chapter I #5
“A bit? A bit? A bit?” Evelyn sounded like a broken record, and she was still pacing, and the whole thing was kind of funny. I sat down on the love seat next to Henry, and he looked at me like you better not laugh.
“Duh,” I whispered.
“And processing what exactly?” Clara asked.
“That’s a great question,” Evie said. “I would love to know the answer to that question.”
“Why are you being so punchy?” I asked, and Evie didn’t respond, just let out a huge huff of air and went into her room. She slammed the door behind her.
Clara and I looked at the door, then at each other, then at Henry. He shrugged.
“I don’t know,” he said, to our unanswered question of, what is her problem?
“You always know,” Clara said.
“Not always,” he said.
I could tell he was lying.
“I can tell you’re lying,” Clara said.
Henry disappeared then, completely, which for a ghost was a pretty passive-aggressive way of getting out of a conversation.
“How does it look?” Clara asked, even though I’d already answered that.
“Really, really, good.”
“Ugh. Of course. Bernadette is the hot one.”
It was true—Bernie was the hot one, although Clara was fast on her heels. Evelyn was pretty in a subdued, understated, sneaks-up-on-you sort of way and I was what my mother had once annoyingly referred to as a late bloomer.
“Do you think something really bad happened to her?” Clara asked, in a small kind of voice. She put down her paintbrush and came and sat next to me, in the space Henry had just vacated. “I mean, aside from the volleyball to the face.”
“I don’t know. She hasn’t said. Maybe it was something big that happened or maybe it was more of…”
“A lot of little things?”
“Maybe, yeah.”
“She should have taken a gap year,” Clara said. Now that she was one year away from high school, she’d become very obsessed with the idea of taking a gap year. She had a map on her bedroom wall of all the places she’d go. She wanted me to go with her.
“You can’t take a gap year in the middle of college,” I said.
“Who is making these rules?” she asked. “Who is deciding all of these things for us?” Then she took a bunch of hair in her hand and arranged it so it covered her forehead. “Should I get bangs?” she asked.
“Yes. You’d look adorable.”
“I don’t want to look adorable,” she said.
“You’d look very pretty with bangs,” I amended.
“I do want to look pretty,” she admitted. “And if Bernie cut off all her hair, maybe it’s time for me to try something different.”
“It’s just hair,” I said, echoing her earlier words. “It grows back.”
She flashed a quick smile. Her blue eyes were bluer than Mom’s, bluer than Evelyn’s. A crystal blue. The color of a lake in summer, the sky reflected off the surface, deep and vast. I had brown eyes, like Dad’s. Bernadette’s were green. Like Aunt Bea.
“I miss Aunt Bea,” I said.
“Hey,” Clara said. “I was just thinking that.” She put her head against my shoulder. “Let’s go watch TV.”
But I didn’t feel like watching TV; I felt like getting out of the house before dinner, walking around the neighborhood, pounding the familiar pavement of the Upper West Side.
If getting a bit of fresh air could count as a personality trait, that was my father and me to a T.
He often said the cure for most of life’s woes was a brisk stroll around the block, and I’d picked up his penchant for sensible walking shoes and always double-checking that you’d grabbed your house keys.
The faster I walked, the less processing speed my brain had; my troubles simply couldn’t keep up.
I couldn’t wonder whether I should have talked Bernadette out of the haircut or tried to convince her to go back to school or dragged her to the museum come hell or high water.
I couldn’t think about how high school was already half over and most of my classmates were already working on their college admission essays.
I couldn’t compare myself to my sisters, endlessly wondering if I was the least interesting Farthing girl among us.
And I definitely couldn’t let the feelings of panic and despair catch up to me.
Panic and despair were notoriously slow walkers; I left them in the dust on Eighty-First Street and kept right on moving.
After fifteen minutes, I was feeling hot and slightly sticky and blissfully blank, my brain a clean, white space with high, high walls around it.
I loved this city. I loved being out in this city. I loved the way the walkers of New York had a rhythm and a cadence, and if you bumped into someone on the sidewalk, they were almost certainly a tourist, just trying their best to fit into the slots we had provided for them.
I loved this city, and I loved the way my father had filled up my head with random facts about this city, facts that had now become lodged in my own brain, resurfacing at relevant moments.
Like: no one, aside from a few very special pastors and the cardinal of the Archdiocese of New York, was allowed to be buried here anymore.
In the early 1800s, new burials were forbidden south of Canal Street. A few years after that, the rule was extended to anything south of Eighty-Sixth Street. You couldn’t make a new cemetery anywhere on the island.
But before that?
Before that Manhattan was a veritable free-for-all. Cemeteries were plentiful. You could barely walk for all the graves.
And were we ever-so-careful when we closed up all those little burial sites and told people to take their dead elsewhere? Or did we leave a lot of bodies in the ground and build Duane Reades on top of them?
I’ll let you guess.
For most people, this doesn’t pose much of an issue.
It’s superstitious faff that walking over a grave is bad luck, ditto holding your breath past a cemetery. There’s nothing technically dangerous or worrisome about living so close to so many long-dead people.
But I bring it up now, because …
Well, if you were like me—potentially descended from Persephone, Queen of the Underworld and all the ghosts in it—you occasionally ran into them.
The ghost in front of me now was nowhere near as distinct as Henry.
It was a woman—the ghosts I saw were always women, always Farthing women, distant relations who’d inhabited a version of New York much older than the one I currently lived in. Her body was buried somewhere close, probably underneath this very sidewalk, and she was tied to it like an anchor.
She was a wisp of a thing, all shadow and suggestion, really, the idea of a ghost. She wouldn’t be able to talk or communicate with me or do much of anything. The only ghosts I could actually speak to were Henry, of course, and my dead Aunt Esme in Vermont—another Farthing woman only I could see.
My sisters knew I could see other ghosts, and would sometimes ask me about them, but mostly I didn’t have anything interesting to report.
Aunt Esme only wanted me to sit and watch her play with her ghost dolls (“I like that she comes with accessories,” Clara had said once), and most of the others, like this one in front of me, were pretty boring.
(“Interesting to call a ghost boring,” Bernadette had noted before. “As if she should perform for you.”)
Where did this second sight come from, and why was I the only one of us who had it? Why could my sisters see Henry but not this ghost before me, who I swore seemed to smile a little, incline her heard toward me, then move aside to let me pass?
Was it a gift from Persephone, Queen of the Underworld, or was it a gift from her daughter, queen of the mad?
I thought it could go either way.
I nodded my head slightly to this Farthing woman now, giving her a moment of acknowledgment, unable to help myself from wondering—was she happy? Was she aware? Had she had a nice life? Was she having a nice death?
Then I put my head down and pointed myself toward home.
Bernadette didn’t come down for dinner.
“She’s fine,” Mom said. “She just needs a little rest.”
“What do you think of her hair?” Clara said, who somehow still hadn’t seen either Bernie or her hair.
“It suits her,” Mom said. “She has the face for it.”
“It’s a big change,” Dad said, who didn’t like change and reacted poorly whenever Mom suggested any home renovations.
The new living room set from a few summers ago had really thrown him for a loop and I still caught him occasionally turning around in a circle, eyeing everything with what I could only describe as the most extreme distrust.
“I think I’ll get bangs,” Clara said.
I actually saw Dad flinch.
“You’d look wonderful with bangs,” Mom said.
Evelyn stabbed at her mashed potatoes with unnecessary force. She was still not really speaking to Clara or me, and in general acting like a huge brat.
“I want to look French,” Clara said. “Or at least more French than I currently look. Will bangs do that?”
“Definitely,” Mom said. “Curtain bangs. Brigitte Bardot.”
“French?” Dad said.
“Everybody wants to look French,” I explained.
“I hate France,” he said.
“You don’t hate France,” Mom replied. “You’re thinking of Brussels. You had a nice time in France.”
He squinted, then nodded. “I hate Brussels.”
“You also don’t really hate Brussels. You just have a sour memory,” Mom said.
Dad tried to work out what that meant exactly, to have a sour memory, and Evelyn stabbed at her plate again. It must have been very unsatisfying, to stab at mashed potatoes, but we didn’t point that out.
“Evelyn, darling,” Mom said. “You haven’t had a bite to eat.”
“I’m not hungry,” she said.
“Am I sensing some…” Dad waved his fork back and forth between the three-out-of-four kids in front of him.
“I’m fine,” Clara said brightly.
“I’m great,” I said.
“I’m peachy,” Evelyn said.
Nobody in the history of the world has ever said they’re peachy and meant it, but Dad winked at me and said, “I don’t want to look French,” and Evelyn managed the smallest of smiles at that.