Chapter II
II
They say Persephone came to Manhattan before it was even Manhattan.
That she planted a jasmine bush on a plot of bare land.
They say her descendants would forever be drawn to it, like moths to a flame.
They say that her footsteps left fragile places in the earth, places you could crawl from one world to another …
Having secrets from my sisters made me itchy, and for a few days I simply avoided them altogether, waiting until Clara had finished breakfast and left for school before darting downstairs and grabbing a piece of toast and walking across the park with Evelyn.
Bernadette slept late, so I didn’t have to worry about her much, and when I got home, I complained loudly about all the homework I had to do and nobody really questioned it when I spent hours locked in my room, running downstairs to shovel dinner into my mouth and retreating as soon as I was done.
I was worried I’d develop a UTI from holding my bladder, waiting until everyone else had gone to sleep before I crept to the bathroom.
Sometimes I’d catch a glimpse of Henry, shining and bright in the moonlight, wandering the halls of our brownstone, moody and morose, like a caricature of a ghost, and my stomach would twist uncomfortably as I’d pray he didn’t see me.
My walks across the park with Evelyn were quiet, although I could tell now, in the silence, how little I’d been paying attention to my older sister.
It was painstakingly, achingly obvious that she was in love.
It was obvious in the way she left the house as if against her will, turning back every ten or twenty feet to gaze longingly at her own bedroom window.
It was obvious in the way she pressed rose petals between her fingertips when we passed the florist on the corner.
It was obvious in the way she sighed heavily at absolutely fucking nothing, every five or six minutes.
And it was obvious in the way we were late to school every single morning, because she’d started insisting we walk along the southern edge of the reservoir, even though it was absurdly out of our way, going north only to come back south again once we’d reached Fifth Avenue.
Finally, on Thursday morning, I whirled around to face her after she’d stopped walking to gaze mooningly over the water.
“I am going to fail history if I keep being late, Evie, please throw me a bone here.”
She blinked, then glanced at the time on her watch (she always wore a dainty gold watch that had belonged to our grandmother) and swore under her breath.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m just … This weather. You know?”
I didn’t know.
The weather was great, sure, and autumn in New York was almost as good as spring in New York, and I was happy to not be sweating buckets anymore, but still. We both knew this was not about the temperature of the air, but the temperature of my sister’s raw and aching heart.
“If you want to keep walking by the reservoir, we’re going to have to leave earlier, okay?”
“No, it’s stupid,” she said, her shoulders falling slightly.
“It’s not stupid. It’s nice. I get it.”
“We can go back to the usual way. I just…”
“What?”
“I like looking at the water.”
Her voice was thick. I gently took her by the hand and guided her forward. She could cry, but she had to walk and cry, or else I was going to miss history altogether.
“Water is nice,” I said after a few minutes, feeling guilty for rushing the moment.
“He used to go to the reservoir. When he was alive. To sit and read.”
Because our father was a true history nerd, I knew that the Central Park Reservoir—renamed in 1994 to the Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis Reservoir—had been completed in 1862.
Because I was a possible descendant of Persephone and slightly obsessed with morbid facts, I knew that Central Park had been built over several cemeteries.
“You think it’s ridiculous,” she said. “That I love a…”
The word ghost, if left unsaid, is a bit like a ghost itself. You can’t see it, but you know it’s there.
“It’s not ridiculous, Evie,” I said, and squeezed her hand, which I was still holding, worried, maybe, that if I let go, she would drift away from me. “That’s not what I was thinking.”
“What were you thinking, then?”
Since I was thinking about dead bodies would potentially ruin the mood, I softened my voice and said, “I was wondering how long it’s been going on.”
“Oh,” she said, sighing. “A year.”
“A year?”
“My seventeenth birthday. Do you remember?”
Evie had never been one for celebrations.
We had a quiet family dinner. I had baked a carrot cake, her favorite.
Bernadette had videoed in from school, where she was knee-deep in finals and couldn’t get away.
Clara had upset a piece of cake onto the table and Dad had eaten it anyway, forkful by forkful.
“That was a good cake,” I said.
She smiled, a zillion miles away. “He was seventeen when he died.”
My heart gave a little flutter. New information I tucked away for later. “Really?” I’d always thought he was younger.
She nodded. “When we were all kids, he could kind of make himself a little younger. He didn’t want to be too much older than us. That would have been creepy.”
Oh yes, that would have been creepy, says the ghost in the attic.
“But he can’t make himself older than seventeen,” she continued. “After cake, when I’d brushed my teeth and gotten into bed, he knocked on my closet door—”
“He knocked?”
“That’s how we do it,” she said. “He stays in the closet and knocks, and if I say it’s okay, he comes into the room. That way he doesn’t see me, you know … changing or something.”
I’d never really thought about Henry visiting my sister after-hours, but I felt very grateful for that little system. It felt incredibly decent to me. I nodded.
“Anyway, he came out and sat on the edge of my bed, and I was really tired, but I could tell something was wrong. He wasn’t saying much, he was sad.
So I kept asking and asking, and finally …
He said, ‘Happy birthday, Evie.’ And I said, ‘This is about my birthday?’ And he said, ‘You’re seventeen now. ’”
“And he was sad because you were finally leaving him behind,” I finished. “Getting older while he stayed the same, forever.”
“It had honestly never occurred to me until that moment,” she continued. “I had never looked at him and realized … But of course, I loved him. And he loved me.”
“Love,” I said. “Wow.” Which wasn’t the most elegant contribution I’d ever made, but this was all still very new to me.
The northern facade of the Metropolitan Museum of Art was just coming into view.
Evie saw it and quickened her pace, leading us along the great wall of slanted windows.
Through the glass we could see the Temple of Dendur, taken apart brick by brick in Egypt and painstakingly pieced back together here.
It was imposing and slightly weird in its urban setting; we were in the middle of Central Park in New York City, and this was the most-visited Egyptian temple in the entire world.
Evie stopped walking abruptly. We were as close to the glass as we could get.
“The ancient Egyptians knew a lot more about death than we do,” she said.
“Okay…”
“They understood the changeability of death. The thin veil that separates our world from their world. The processes a human might go through, to…”
“To…?”
She turned to me. Her eyes were wide.
“He found a way to stay here,” she said. “To live forever.”
I was definitely going to miss history.
“Well … to be dead forever … if we’re being technical.”
“Don’t be crass, Winnie.”
“I think I’m being realistic,” I said. All that talk about death was making my teeth hurt.
Evelyn smiled, and truth be told, her smile looked a little bit terrifying.
“Persephone came to New York once,” Evelyn said, beginning to walk again.
I knew all the same Persephone stories that my sister did, could recite them line for line, but I let her talk, a little bit afraid of her in that moment.
“She used to wander the earth in spring, ushering in the new growth, shaking off the cobwebs of the Underworld.”
We reached Fifth Avenue and turned right. The expansive front steps of the Met were mostly empty, save for a few small clusters of people eating breakfast or drinking coffee.
“They say she came to Manhattan before it was even Manhattan. That she planted a jasmine bush on a plot of bare land. They say her descendants would forever be drawn to it, like moths to a flame. They say that her footsteps left fragile places in the earth, places you could crawl from one world to another…”
“Although I’ve never actually found myself tripping into Hell while walking around the brownstone, you know?”
Evelyn shot me a perfectly withering look, then reached over and took my hand.
“I understand that you’re not in a place to receive this information,” she said quietly, infuriatingly.
“Exactly what information are you hoping I’d receive?”
“Forget it,” she said. She let go of my hand, and it couldn’t help but feel like a metaphor I wasn’t quite smart enough to understand.
Evelyn was quiet on the walk home from school, and when we got back to the brownstone, she went right upstairs to her room.
I went into the kitchen to get an apple and paused only slightly when I saw Bernadette already there, at the kitchen table, writing in her journal.
“I know you’re avoiding me,” she said. “It’s very obvious when you avoid me because you eat your food quickly so you can get up to your room sooner, and I’m always afraid you’re going to choke.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said, and even I could hear the lack of conviction in my voice.
I grabbed an apple from the fruit bowl on the counter and took a very slow, purposeful bite, chewing it extra slowly.
Bernadette rolled her eyes so far back in her head that I could only see white, then she shut her journal and got up from the table.