Chapter II #4
That night, in bed, stuck in the in-between place, both sleep and awakeness so close and equally so far away at the same time, I kept dreaming I was the unicorn.
I could feel the collar around my neck, the grass underneath my hooves, the way the long, skinny horn on my forehead weighed down my neck.
I could smell the pomegranates, thick and ripe just above me.
Did I want to stay here, in this walled garden, or did I want to be free again?
What did I want? Why was my own mind so hard to read?
You would think that would be the one thing you’d always know, what your own heart wanted.
“What the hell?” Clara said from the foot of my bed. I hadn’t heard the door open. “You keep, like, neighing.” Her voice was thick with sleep.
I tried to rub my eyes, but my hand was still a hoof. I smacked myself in the face.
“Ouch.” Not a hoof. Just a hand, but asleep. Coming awake now with a million pricks.
“Neighing,” Clara repeated.
“I wasn’t.”
“You were. I had just fallen asleep, too.”
“I’m sorry.”
“It’s fine.” She sat on the edge of my bed. “It’s almost two in the morning, you know.”
“Two?” I’d gone to bed at eleven, which meant I’d been stuck in the in-between for hours, fighting off the strange unicorn nightmare.
“I was working on my painting,” Clara said. “Henry was there. He looked so sad.” She looked upward, as if she could see through the ceiling, then she shrugged and sighed. “I almost know what it is now.”
“Your painting?”
“Almost.”
“Can you remember your dream any better?”
“Not at all. I just let my hand go.” She swiped her hand through the air, like she was conducting an invisible orchestra with an invisible paintbrush. “I don’t know. It will come to me.”
“It always does.”
“Mostly, yeah,” she agreed.
“I’m sorry I woke you up.”
“It’s fine. Are you okay now? No more horse dreams?”
“I was the unicorn,” I said.
“Ahh,” she said, nodding. “That makes more sense.” She hopped up from the bed. “Night.”
“Night, Clara.”
“Hey,” she said, turning around at my door. “You can always come back.”
“What?”
“If you’re the unicorn in the tapestry, and you do decide to break free, you can always come back. If you decide freedom isn’t your bag, you know. Hop right back over that fence and go back to resting in the garden.”
“What is freedom, anyway?” I asked, fake-dramatic.
“Exactly,” she said, and left the room, closing my door behind me.
“You can always come back,” I whispered to my empty room.
I didn’t dream of the unicorn again, but instead of the courtyard in the Cloisters, and all its rows of solid, steadfast archways and my mother’s perfume, and my mother herself, just out of reach.
Despite what I had told Bernadette in the kitchen that one afternoon, we had all been sort of waiting for it to happen, and it happened on Monday night, after dinner.
She was helping Dad wash the dishes and her hand slipped and she dropped a wineglass on the kitchen floor.
It shattered everywhere, shards of glass flying clear across the room, one large piece landing so close to my foot that I bent down and picked it up carefully between my thumb and index finger.
“I’ll get the vacuum,” Evelyn said.
“Oopsie daisy,” Dad said. “Don’t move, Bernadette.”
And Bernadette didn’t move, but she did scream, a sudden, sharp, angry, gunshot-loud scream that made Clara jump and me freeze and Evelyn, just coming back with the vacuum, stop dead in her tracks.
Mom was working late. Dad looked like a deer in headlights for just two or three seconds.
Bernadette kept screaming and finally Dad grabbed her, pulled her close to him, and hugged her hard to his chest, like he was a straitjacket.
She melted into him and buried her face in his T-shirt and he looked over the top of her head to each of us, landing on me, raising his eyebrows as if to ask me, What the fuck is going on?
Bernadette stopped screaming and started wailing—a sad, animal noise that was more guttural than anything, starting in the pit of her stomach, escaping her mouth unbidden.
“Evelyn, can you…” Dad trailed off but pointed his chin at the vacuum, and Evelyn nodded, turning it on, sucking up a trail of glass from the kitchen sink to the doorway, so they could get out.
When she was done, she turned off the vacuum again and pressed herself against the fridge door.
Dad gently turned his body and led Bernadette out of the room, step by cautious step, his eyes searching the floor for glass.
When they were gone, we all stood motionless for a long time, maybe thirty seconds, and then Clara said, in a small voice, “Do you think it will be like last time?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t think we can know.”
Evelyn turned on the vacuum again and I brought the chunk of glass I was holding over to the garbage, opening my hand and letting it fall into the bag.
“Why did she scream?” Clara pressed. She still hadn’t moved. She had to raise her voice, to be heard over the vacuum.
“I don’t know,” I repeated. I spotted another shard of glass and picked it up, depositing it in the trash.
Evelyn was methodical in her cleaning. She spent at least ten minutes going over every inch of the floor. Occasionally Clara or I would point to a smaller piece she’d missed, and she’d diligently suck it up.
“Did she do it on purpose?” Clara asked when Evelyn had finally turned off the vacuum. “Drop the glass?”
“Of course not,” Evie said.
“No, I was looking right at her,” I added. “It slipped.”
There were still a few plates on the table; Evelyn gathered them up and washed them off in the sink, then loaded the dishwasher.
“Shit,” she said. “There’s glass in here, too.”
So we spent another five minutes cleaning the dishwasher, picking glass out of its nooks and crannies, Clara standing over us with a flashlight, me holding the bottom rack up as Evelyn dug around.
“What is happening here?” Mom said when she found us like that. She looked tired and worn around the edges, and almost amused to find the three of us hunched over the dishwasher.
“Bernadette broke a glass,” Clara said.
“Accidentally,” I added quickly.
“Where is she now?” Mom asked.
“Upstairs, with Dad,” Evie said.
“She screamed,” Clara added. “A lot.”
I smacked her on the leg. Mom looked alarmed.
“Okay. Okay. I better go up and see.”
She left the kitchen. I set the rack back down and we closed the dishwasher door.
“Why do you have to be like that?” I asked Clara.
“Like what?” she asked.
“So forthcoming.”
“I didn’t do anything!”
“It’s fine,” I said. “Forget it.”
She was pouting.
“Let’s all take a deep breath,” Evelyn said.
Clara took an exaggerated, rude inhale, and Evelyn actually laughed, which broke the tension. What brought the tension right back was a loud, shrill wail from the fourth floor.
“It sounds like she’s in pain,” Clara said, her eyes wide.
“She’s okay,” Evie said. “She’ll be okay.”
Another wail, followed by choked sobs. She had to have been crying really loudly for us to hear her all the way down here.
“Henry,” Evelyn said in a quiet voice.
And there he was, hardly more than an outline of a boy, standing in the middle of the kitchen.
“It’s so loud,” he said. Even his voice was thinner this far away from the attic.
In my sixteen and a half years of communing with ghosts, I’d learned that they really were quite tied to their own specific places, whether that was where they had died, where they were buried, or near something they had really, really loved in life (in the Met, there was a long-ago Farthing woman who stayed very close to a particular gold ring).
But there were no other ghosts quite like Henry, not even my Aunt Esme, who could hold pretty reasonable conversations but never looked more solid than a wet paper towel.
“What’s happening?” Evelyn asked now. “Is she okay?”
Henry looked utterly out of his element, both being on the ground floor and trying to describe the familial drama that was now unfolding on the fourth floor.
“I don’t know,” he said. “She’s so upset. What happened?”
“She accidentally dropped a glass,” Clara explained, shooting me a quick look.
“And she just lost it,” Evelyn added. “She started screaming.”
“She’s still kind of screaming,” Henry said, looking upward, winking in and out of existence in a way that made me think he was popping back upstairs to check in on things.
When he reappeared again, he took a staggered step backward and then sat down in one of the kitchen chairs.
It struck me as odd, seeing him there, looking pale and strange under the bright light of the kitchen lights, fidgeting a bit, finally looking up and letting his eyes land on Evelyn.
How had I missed it before, the way he always found her in a crowd of Farthing sisters?
How had I missed the way he never looked quite as alive as he looked when Evelyn was in the room?
She was leaning against the kitchen counter now, and as both Henry and I looked, she reached up and absentmindedly began unraveling her hair, which she had French braided that morning. Her fingers worked quickly, automatically, and soon her long hair hung in crimped curtains over her shoulders.
“I’m exhausted,” she said, but Clara was the only one who heard her words.
Henry and I were both transfixed by the waves of dirty blond.
Evelyn’s hair was darker than Clara’s and somehow right now, it seemed darker still.
She was almost a stranger to us. We couldn’t take our eyes off her, and I noticed then, by the way the kitchen light hit her face, that she’d developed dark, purplish shadows underneath her eyes.
How long had those been there? How unobservant had I become that I kept seeing things now that I’d never seen before?
“Me, too,” Clara said.
“What?” Henry asked.
“Me, too,” Clara repeated. “Evelyn said she was tired. I said, ‘Me, too.’”
“Right,” Henry said. “Right.”
We went into the living room. Evelyn got a board game out from the cupboard that all of us knew we weren’t going to play. It was just a prop of some sorts; if someone came downstairs, we could pretend that we weren’t devoting every ounce of our energy to the act of eavesdropping.
Clara sat on the floor next to Evie and the two of them set it up.
Monopoly. They divvied out the money. They assigned each of us a pawn.
They laid out the property cards by color.
They set out the Community Chest and Chance cards in two neat piles.
They put the two die in the middle of the board.
With nothing else to do, Clara fidgeted, taking the pewter dog pawn and prancing him around the edges of the board.
Evelyn was perfectly still. A statue with wavy hair.
“This is miserable,” I said.
“Yes,” Evelyn agreed.
“When she threw the glass at my head, do you think she really meant to hit me, or she didn’t, like she said?” Clara asked quietly. It wasn’t the first time she’d asked that question, and nobody knew how to answer her, because nobody knew.
“She’s just adjusting,” Evelyn said. We weren’t sure what she was adjusting to, but still. It sounded like a nice excuse, so we didn’t press it.
Footsteps on the stairs and then Dad was in the doorway, squinting, rubbing at his temple.
He surveyed the room, the Monopoly board, the fourth spot that he must have assumed was for Bernadette but had really been for Henry, who of course by that point had disappeared (he had never shown himself to my father, and I wasn’t sure my father would even be able to see him, had he done so).
“I don’t think Bernadette is going to be up for any games tonight, girls,” he said sadly.
He went into the kitchen and came back a few moments later with a glass of water, which he took upstairs.
“Let’s just play,” Henry said, there again. “We might as well just play.”
“Oldest goes first,” Clara said brightly, and handed the dice to Evelyn.
She stared at them in her hand for a long time before letting them tumble to the floor.