Chapter III
III
Persephone had two children, Melinoe and Zagreus.
Zagreus, the prince of the Underworld, was the god of hunting and rebirth.
Melinoe, his sister, was the goddess of madness and nightmares, but also of ghosts and spirits.
She could speak to them, converse with them, guide them, command them.
She loved them, just as her father, Hades, loved them.
People debate endlessly over whether Melinoe was a good goddess or a bad goddess but that is ultimately irrelevant, because in the end she loved her favored subjects endlessly: the mad, the dead, the sleepless. …
September gave way to October, and it grew chilly and gray in the city.
The days were getting shorter. It was dark when Evelyn and I walked to school in the mornings and it was dark when we walked home.
Sometimes we’d meet up with Clara at Todd’s and do homework together at one of the back tables, pressed against a wall with endless hot chocolate delivered by Todd himself, who was a friend of Dad’s and who had obviously, judging by the expression on his face, heard about Bernadette.
Otherwise we’d never have gotten away with the homework thing; there were signs everywhere—NO LAPTOPS! !!
We made quite the trio. Evelyn: sad and morose.
Me: lonely and irritable. And Clara: frustrated with her painting, withdrawn and sullen.
You knew things were really bad when Clara descended into a dark mood.
Her painting wasn’t progressing how she wanted; she had covered up half the canvas with a wash of white paint.
I had found her late one night with a brush in her hand, murmuring to herself angrily.
After that night with the broken glass, we hadn’t seen Bernadette for four days, and then she was gone in the middle of the night; I’d woken up and just knew, could feel that four had become three, that one Farthing sister was missing from the nest. I went upstairs early and peeked into her room.
The bed was made, the clothes that usually littered the floor had been folded and put away, the dirty glasses and candy wrappers had been disposed of.
“She left,” Evelyn had said from the doorway of her room. She’d had a blank expression on her face.
“Gone where?” I’d asked.
She’d shrugged.
To Aunt Bea’s, it had turned out.
“In Vermont?” Clara had shrieked at breakfast when our parents told us.
“A little bit of country air will do her good,” Dad had said, keeping his voice bright and calm.
Mom hadn’t been there; we’d assumed she’d driven Bernadette north.
She’d returned a few days later, sans Bernadette, and none of us had asked any of the questions we’d wanted to, like How long is this going to be?
and What is wrong with her? and Do we need to be seriously concerned here?
Now, at Todd’s, we trudged through our school assignments and diligently plodded along with essays and Clara held an enormous English textbook in front of her face, reading some short story that made her knit her eyebrows together in maybe confusion or maybe dislike; I didn’t ask.
After my second mug of hot chocolate I felt bloated and a little too warm. Todd’s was filling up with its early dinner crowd and I was having trouble concentrating over the increasing volume, the dull murmur of voices.
“I think I’m going to go home,” I said.
“I’m in the middle of this,” Evelyn said, not taking her eyes away from her laptop screen.
“Same,” Clara said.
Neither of them looked up at me, so I gathered my things and left them behind, stepping out into the sharp chill of the night, grateful it was almost the weekend, ready to sleep in on Saturday and put my schoolbooks away for a few days.
We were split fairly down the middle for school—Bernadette and I had always been average students, Evelyn would likely be valedictorian, and Clara was constantly fielding scholarships for private high schools around the city.
She took each letter she received, gave it a brief once-over, and tossed it in the trash.
“It’s a grotesque waste of money,” she always said, never minding the fact that said scholarships often offered full rides.
I was only wearing my usual sweatshirt and I raised the hood to try and stave off the chill of the night, even though it was less than a block to our house and I walked quickly, as if I could avoid the breeze.
Mom was coming down the stairs when I reached the sidewalk in front of the house, and I stopped and waited for her. She didn’t see me until she was almost on top of me, then she looked up and jumped a mile and grabbed at her chest dramatically.
“Jesus,” she said. “What gives?”
“Where are you going?” I asked, because she had an overnight bag in one hand and she was wearing leggings and an oversize wool fisherman’s sweater, two articles of clothing she wore exclusively on long car rides or if she didn’t feel good and was planning on spending the day on the couch.
“I was attempting to sneak out so as not to answer any tough questions,” she said, sighing.
“Is ‘Where are you going?’ a tough question?”
“Give me a break, will you, kid?”
“Where are you going? Vermont?”
Another sigh. “Yes. I am going to Vermont.”
“Is she okay?”
“She’s okay. I’m going to bring her home.”
“Can I come with you?”
“You have school tomorrow, honey.”
“Yeah, but I haven’t missed a day all year.”
“It’s October,” she said. “You’ve been in school a month.”
“Almost a month and a half. I want to see Aunt Bea. I want to see Bernadette.”
Mom took a very mom-like inhalation of breath and let it out slowly through her mouth. I could see it in the air, the faintest puff of white.
“Where are your sisters?” she asked.
“Well, one of them is in Vermont.” She gave me a look. “The others are at Todd’s.”
She checked the time on her phone. “If you can get ready and be down here in eight minutes, you can come. If anyone catches you leaving, you tell them you were going to run away but have decided against it, and you go right back upstairs and unpack, and you stay here. Got it?”
“Got it.”
“Meet me at the car,” she said, and didn’t wait for an answer before charging off down the street, in the opposite direction of Todd’s.
I ran.
I ran upstairs and dumped the contents of my backpack on my bed, then shoved clean underwear into it, pajamas, another pair of jeans, some clean long-sleeved shirts and socks, my phone charger, and my laptop (under the delusion that I might actually work on school assignments).
In the bathroom, I grabbed my toothbrush and my face wash and my moisturizer and then I was downstairs again, passing not a single soul as I burst out of the house and kept running all the way to the parking garage where we kept the SUV.
Mom was waiting in the driver’s seat, the engine already running, her hands already on the steering wheel, and I climbed into the passenger seat, throwing my backpack behind me. I buckled my seat belt quickly, as if that could keep her from changing her mind.
“Your sisters are going to kill me,” she said.
“I’ll text them.”
“Not until we’re a few blocks away. I don’t want anyone running after the car.”
It took us awhile to get out of the city. I texted Evelyn and Clara as we crossed the George Washington Bridge, the Hudson River dark and ominous below us as we slipped from New York into New Jersey.
“Are they upset?” Mom asked after I’d stared at my phone for a while.
“Clara called me a traitor,” I said. “Evelyn hasn’t responded.”
“Sounds about right.”
Once we got out of New Jersey and back into New York (that part always tripped me up, how we left only to come back), the traffic got a lot better. Mom put on the cruise control and let out a big sigh that I thought she’d probably been holding since Eighty-First Street.
“You okay?” I asked.
She reached over and patted my leg. “I’m okay, honey. I’m glad you’re with me.”
“You were trying to sneak out,” I reminded her.
“Yes,” she agreed. “But this was a happy accident. I’ve found I’d much rather be with you than be alone.”
It was about a six-hour drive to Burlington, Vermont, where Aunt Bea lived in the big old farmhouse where she’d grown up with my mother.
There was a huge barn in the back where she made her art.
Clara had gotten her love of painting from Aunt Bea, who was a few years my mother’s junior and had never married or had kids herself.
She was a professor of art history at the University of Vermont and although she traveled all the time and was constantly zipping off to faraway locales, she always returned to her childhood home.
“It’s my favorite place in the world,” she often said. “Why would I ever leave it?”
Aside from art, she was also an accomplished musician (that’s where Evelyn had gotten it) and had a very cool sense of style (Bernadette had inherited her love of vintage clothing).
It seemed like all of my sisters had gotten something from Aunt Bea, but what about me?
What did I have in common with my aunt?
“Status check?” Mom asked, glancing at me.
“Oh, just thinking.”
“About what?”
“Do you think Aunt Bea and I have anything in common?”
“Hmm. What do you mean?”
“Like, you know. She and Clara are both artists…”
Mom tilted her neck left, tilted her neck right, flexed and unflexed her fingers on the steering wheel. Finally she said, “There is something, yes. You both show up exactly when you’re needed. Like tonight. I walked down the stairs and boom—there you were.”
“And I was needed?”
“You’re always needed,” Mom replied. “But yes, when it’s most important, you’re always there. And you always seem to know exactly what to do. Empathic. Maybe that’s what I’d call it. A bit of empathy, coupled with a bit of ‘right place, right time.’”
I scratched the insides of my wrists as I thought about what she’d said.
“You really think so?”
“You know I don’t lie,” she said. And it was true, she didn’t.