Chapter II #2
“It’s clear what’s going on here,” she said.
I swallowed the apple and a piece of it lodged in my throat, despite my excellent chewing. I gagged for a moment and when I finally got it loose, I didn’t really feel like eating the apple anymore. Bernadette plucked it from my hand and took a bite.
“It is?” I asked.
“Yes. And frankly, it’s so unfair.”
“It is?”
“Stop acting like you don’t know exactly what I’m talking about,” she demanded.
I was trying to figure out how Bernadette had discovered the secret love affair between Evie and Henry when she set the apple down on the counter and crossed her arms over her chest.
“You think I’m going to snap again,” she said.
“Ohhh,” I said. That made much more sense. “No, I don’t.”
“You do. Of course you do. You won’t even look at me!”
“I do not think you are going to snap again. Look, you even put the apple down instead of throwing it at my head.”
I smiled. She snarled.
“Well then why have you been avoiding me?”
I wasn’t a good liar. In the few seconds after she asked me that question, I came up with absolutely nothing that she might believe. So I decided to lean into the excuse she’d already hand-delivered to me.
“Fine,” I said. “I’ve been a little worried, yes. Not that you’ll snap, Bernie. But just worried about you, okay? I don’t know how to say the right thing or do the right thing, so I guess I was subconsciously avoiding you to avoid saying something wrong.”
Finally, after what seemed like an endless amount of time, she nodded. Hook, line, and sinker. “I wish you had just told me that,” she said, softening. She picked up the apple again and took a bite. “You always make everything more complicated than it needs to be.”
“I do not,” I said.
“I’m fine,” she continued. “It would have been nice if you had asked me that at any point during this week.”
“I know. I’m sorry.”
“But I am fine. It’s not like last time. This isn’t The Bell Jar.”
“I’ve never read The Bell Jar.”
“Then my perfect reference is lost on you.” She sighed and set the apple down again. I could tell she was gearing up for some truth speaking. She rubbed at her eyes. “It’s not like last time,” she repeated. “I just knew. If I spent one more night there … I just knew.”
“You knew what?” I asked, when she didn’t elaborate.
“I just knew it would end up like The Bell Jar.”
“I’ll look up the SparkNotes later,” I said.
She laughed. “It’s really, really nice to be home. It feels like the right place for me. I think we underestimate, sometimes, or we don’t stop to pause and really think … Is this where I’m supposed to be?”
“And this is where you’re supposed to be?” I asked.
“For now, yes,” she said, her voice confident and sure.
“But did something happen? It feels like maybe something happened.”
“I don’t want to talk about this anymore,” she said, and picked up the apple and her journal and left me alone in the room.
I stopped ignoring Bernadette and, for good measure, I stopped ignoring Clara, too—although to be fair, it hadn’t appeared that my avoidance had even been detected by my youngest sister.
Clara had recently begun a new painting, and when she was in the early stages of her art, she didn’t really notice anything that was going on around her.
“It came to me in a dream,” she said on Friday night.
It had been a full week since Bernadette had arrived home and she had been strange that morning, at breakfast. Bernadette, not Clara.
Although Clara had been a little strange, too.
And Evelyn. I must have been the only normal one, actually, because Dad peered into each of my sisters’ faces, then settled on mine, and, liking what he saw there, smiled and asked me to pass the jam.
It was after dinner now and I was sitting on the love seat in the attic. Evelyn sat on the floor in front of me while I tried and failed to braid her hair into a crown. Clara painted. Bernadette was in her room, the door closed, some quiet audiobook playing from her computer’s speakers.
“Well really, it was a nightmare,” Clara amended.
All of her best paintings came to her in nightmares; we Farthing girls were prone to them.
We called them Melinoe’s messages, her secret whispers to us, trying to frame them in a more positive light.
But of course there wasn’t anything positive about waking up in a cold sweat, about being six years old and terrified to go to sleep because your great-great-goddess aunt was a vessel of nightmares and now, ages later, you were, too.
“Is it a person?” Evie asked, squinting, cocking her head, ruining the braid I was working on (no, I’ll be honest, it was already ruined).
“I don’t think so,” Clara said. “The dream was fuzzy. Like … out of focus.”
The painting was out of focus, too, but I didn’t say that out loud. Plus I knew it would come together if we gave it some time to develop.
“What happened in the dream?” I asked.
“I don’t remember,” Clara said. “But it felt like maybe someone had died.”
“Woof,” Evelyn said. “Bummer.”
It was a little bit unlike her, the woof, but the energy in the room was weird, slightly sparky, like someone had stuck their finger in an electrical socket.
I kept braiding, undoing what I’d done, starting over.
At some point, Henry showed up, sitting cross-legged on the floor and staring very thoughtfully at Clara’s painting.
He was fully-formed tonight. If you looked quickly, you might mistake him for a real boy.
“A building?” he said after a while, still looking at the painting.
“I don’t know,” Clara said. “Does it look like a building?”
She stepped back, and we all studied the painting.
“Yes,” Henry said.
“No,” I said.
“Yes,” Evie said.
“Who knows,” Clara said.
She dipped her brush in paint and stepped toward the canvas.
Clara painted in precise, rhythmic strokes. She reminded me of a ballerina, when she painted, but instead of pliés with her body, they were concentrated in her fingers, which were nimble and long and elegant. She had our Aunt Bea’s hands.
“Devant,” I said. “Derrière. Croisé. Um…”
“Seconde,” Henry supplied.
“How do you know that?” Evelyn asked him.
“ècarté. Effacé. Epaulé,” I finished. How did I know that?
It was information wedged somewhere in my brain from the two years I’d spent, ages nine to eleven, absolutely convinced I’d become a ballerina.
I’d taken lessons. Our father had installed a short bar on one wall in this very room (gone now).
Henry used to watch me practice. It made me happy, that I knew why he knew the French word for the fourth position.
I knew something about Henry that Evelyn didn’t, and I didn’t know why that made me feel so …
superior wasn’t the right word. (And was I jealous of Evelyn?
Of course. I was jealous of all of my sisters, each so perfect and full in their own ways.
And was I jealous of Henry? Of course. I’d often wondered what it might feel like to be dead.)
The next day, we drove to Washington Heights, to the Cloisters, the six of us piling into Mom’s SUV and heading north, up and up and up, the Hudson River on our left and the windows cracked to let in the sweet autumn breeze.
Mom drove, Dad sat in the passenger seat, Evie and Bernie took the second row, and Clara and I, the youngest, were eternally relegated to the third row.
Clara worked on a friendship bracelet she’d started about a month ago, only pulling it out during car rides and leaving it in the SUV the rest of the time, untouched.
“I don’t think I even like this,” she said now, holding it out to examine it. “I keep unraveling it and starting over. I’m like Penelope, but with friendship bracelets, not tapestries.”
“Excellent reference,” Bernadette called over her shoulder.
“Are you making it for yourself?” I asked.
“I thought I was. But now I’m not so sure. Do you want it?”
“Okay,” I said. She was still less than halfway done, but she nodded and kept working at it, lazily, her fingers finding the knots and then pausing as she zoned out, staring out the window at the water.
She wasn’t fast at anything, painting or friendship bracelets, but the end product was always worth the wait.
“Nothing like the Cloisters in the fall,” Dad kept saying, a broken record of optimism. “How lucky are we, kids?”
Bernadette grunted. Evelyn made a small noise of agreement. Clara hadn’t heard him.
“It’s gonna be really nice, Dad,” I said.
He turned around and smiled at me gratefully.
In truth, the Cloisters was my favorite museum.
We all had our favorites: Bernadette’s was the Natural History, Evelyn’s was the Met, and Clara’s was the Frick.
I liked the Cloisters because it was so old and because it was out of the way; we only went once a year, always in the fall, and that made it more special to me.
In the seat in front of me, Evelyn fidgeted, uncrossing her legs and crossing them the other way.
She’d slept in the braided crown I’d eventually managed to give her and it was perfectly messy and undone today.
Next to her, Bernie’s black eye was finally fading and she was quiet and still, staring out the window, her hair mostly hidden by a stylish French beret only she could get away with.
I’d tried it on once; it looked like I was wearing a pancake on my head.
(“Les bérets ne sont pas pour tout le monde, mon ami,” she had said. In response, I had rolled my eyes so far back in my head that they had ached for minutes afterward.)
We parked on a tree-lined street in Fort Tryon Park. It was as if we’d been plunged into a perfect oil painting of autumn. Leaves crunched underneath my feet as I got out of the car, and it smelled so deeply of earth and green that I actually sneezed.
“Bless you,” Clara said, squeezing past me.
“Wow,” Evelyn breathed as she slid out of the car. “It’s so beautiful.”