Chapter III #2
She put on an audiobook a few minutes later, some very boring nonfiction thing about people who were absolutely batshit in love with orchids, and I leaned my head back and closed my eyes, not really meaning to fall asleep, but waking up with a jerk, surprised to find that two hours had passed.
“Are we there yet?” I mumbled, my mouth dry and sour.
“We probably won’t get there until about one,” Mom replied. “Rush hour slowed us down a bit.”
Aunt Bea was a night owl, another thing she shared with Clara, and I knew she’d be awake and ready for us with cups of tea and a midnight snack.
And I knew Esme would be there, too.
The first time I’d seen her, I’d been younger, just around the age she’d been when she died.
I’d asked her name, and then repeated it aloud, verifying.
My mother had heard me, but luckily, just past the ghost-Esme, on the mantel over the fire, there was a photo of her.
Mom had thought I was looking at the picture, and she laid a hand on the top of my head and said, “That’s right. That’s Esme.”
Years later, I would learn that Esme had died in the house, after a short battle with a particularly aggressive cancer. She had been six years old, and she had never left.
Now, her favorite activities included playing with dolls and attempting to scare the absolute bejesus out of me (a skill at which she was most adept, though I couldn’t tell if it was malicious or accidental).
Despite being constantly in fear of her sneak attacks, I was actually looking forward to seeing her again.
“Has Aunt Bea said how Bernadette is?” I asked now, my thoughts wandering back to my oldest sister.
“I’ve been talking to her every day,” Mom said. “Your sister is doing much better.”
“And why exactly did you banish her to Vermont?”
“When you say it like that, it makes it sound quite dramatic,” Mom said.
“It felt a little dramatic, to be fair.”
“I just wanted your sister to have some time alone. There are a lot of people in our house, and it can be hard to think. There’s a lot more breathing room in Vermont.”
“You think she needed breathing room?”
“I do,” Mom said. “Plus, I wanted Bea to take her to a few classes. Let her sit in the back, audit, listen in. Maybe your sister picked the wrong college. It’s very possible for her to transfer, you know.
It might be nice for her to have family nearby.
She could even live with your aunt. Bea would love that. ”
“What if she doesn’t want to go to college at all?”
“That’s another option,” Mom said, nodding. “And that would be fine, too.”
“But she’s okay? She’s going to be okay?”
Mom paused, and for a moment I wondered if she’d even heard me.
Then she said, slowly, “Winnie, your sister struggles a bit. It seems like the older she gets, the more she struggles. And that was another reason we sent her up north. Your aunt has had her fair share of troubles, too. I thought maybe she was the right person for this job.”
I thought of Bernadette in Vermont, hanging out with our aunt(s), convalescing. I couldn’t help but think of Beth March, going to the seaside to beat the remnants of the fever that would eventually kill her. But everyone knew Bernadette was Jo, right down to the chopping of the hair.
Mom turned up her audiobook. Everyone was looking for some super rare kind of orchid.
The ghost orchid.
“Well, that’s a coincidence,” I said.
“Hmm?”
“Oh, nothing,” I replied, and closed my eyes, suddenly there with them in Florida, for once smelling orchids instead of jasmine.
“Wake up, sleepyhead,” Mom said, and I realized I had fallen asleep again. It was 12:45 and we were idling in Aunt Bea’s driveway.
“Ugh,” I said.
“Indeed,” Mom said, opening her door to a blast of cold air.
I pulled my phone out of my pocket as I slid out of the car.
Evelyn had never texted me back.
Clara had texted me a string of different emojis, from sad faces to angry faces to dead faces. I knew she was still up, so I texted her before I got out of the car.
Is Evelyn mad?
Her response came almost immediately: yup.
I typed back: are you mad?
Her response: YUP
I put my phone in my pocket and helped Mom with her suitcase. Aunt Bea was waiting in the front doorway, dressed in paint-splattered overalls. She had her hair in a messy ponytail and her smile was so wide it looked like it hurt.
“I wasn’t expecting you,” she exclaimed, throwing her arms around me and nuzzling her cheek into mine.
“She’s a stowaway,” Mom said, pushing past us into the house.
“It’s lovely to see you,” Aunt Bea said, pulling away and looking earnestly into my eyes. Everything she said was said earnestly. Everything she said, you got the feeling that she really meant, with every fiber of her being.
“It’s nice to see you, too,” I said. We stepped into the foyer and Aunt Bea shut the door. “Is Bernie awake?”
“No, sound asleep,” she said. “Are you tired? Or will you have a cup of tea before bed?”
“I’ll have some,” I said.
“Great! Sissy, what about you?” Aunt Bea only ever called Mom Sissy, a remnant from their childhood, when she couldn’t pronounce Mom’s name—Anastasia.
“Sure, sure,” Mom said. She was rummaging in her suitcase for something; she pulled out a cardigan and slipped it on. “It’s freezing in here, Bea.”
Aunt Bea rolled her eyes at me. “It’s Vermont, Sissy. You grew up here. Surely your blood hasn’t thinned that much.”
“Just because it’s freezing outside, doesn’t mean it has to be freezing inside,” Mom said, then she rolled her eyes at me, because when the two of them were together, they regressed about thirty years each.
I wanted to see Bernadette. I wanted to wake her up, crawl into bed with her, peer into her eyeballs and make sure she was okay, but I knew I shouldn’t.
She needed her sleep, and I needed to not give her a heart attack by jumping into her bed in the middle of the night.
(Plus, you could always crawl in bed with Evelyn; you could sometimes crawl in bed with Clara; you could never crawl in bed with Bernadette.) I went and sat at Aunt Bea’s kitchen table, repurposed wood from a barn that used to be on my grandparents’ property.
One of the professors at the school had made it for Bea.
He taught woodworking or architecture or something.
“Why do men always bring you gifts?” Mom had asked her once.
And Bea had smiled and said, “Not just men.”
There was a large painting hanging on the wall above an old record player, because of course Aunt Bea played actual vinyl records at one in the morning.
The painting was one I’d always loved. It showed a naked woman reclining in a rural field, a river running alongside the left of her and a creepy old man peering around a tree on her right.
The woman was Persephone; she wore a languid, sultry expression on her face and her body was all glowing skin and supple curves.
The man was Hades, spying on Persephone right before he steals her away to the Underworld.
The original painting was by Thomas Hart Benton and hung in the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art.
Bea’s copy had been painted by one of Benton’s students and was, in my opinion, just as good as the original.
I had seen Aunt Bea talking to this version of Persephone, telling her about the day, our plans, keeping her abreast of the goings-on of the Farthing girls.
“As long as she never talks back,” Mom had said once.
“Of course she talks back, Sissy. You just have to know the right way to listen.”
Aunt Bea caught me looking at the painting now, and she put an arm on my shoulder as Mom settled down at the kitchen table. “Did I ever tell you about the time I fell out of a tree?”
“Here we go,” Mom said, but her eyes were twinkling, and she sat up a little, listening. You always listened to Aunt Bea’s stories.
“I should have died, honestly. Must have been fifteen, twenty feet up. Broke my arm in two places. And I swear, I swear, as I was lying there on the grass waiting for your mother to run and get help, I saw this face…” She trailed off, her eyes unfocusing, letting the moment breathe, letting the image of her lying on the grass really take shape. She was an excellent storyteller.
“Persephone?” I asked, expertly delivering my line (I had of course heard this story a hundred times before; we all had).
Aunt Bea shook herself out of her trance and smiled at me, shrugging her shoulders. “I know it sounds like a tall tale, kid. But stranger things have happened.”
Stranger things have happened could have been the slogan for a show about the Farthing girls, I thought to myself as Aunt Bea set mugs of peppermint tea in front of Mom and me and then slid into her seat.
One thing I loved about Aunt Bea is that she never asked boring questions like how was the drive, instead she went right from a story about how Persephone saved her from the clutches of death to looking at each of us for a moment, clearing her throat and saying, “Is there a reason you both sort of look like shit?”
I burst out laughing, but Mom just took a careful sip of her tea and said, “I’m sorry car travel doesn’t agree with us as it does with you, Beatrice.”
“No, that’s not what I meant,” she said. “There’s something … going on.” When she said going on, she waved her hand in a circle in front of my face. It felt vaguely ritualistic.
“What do you mean?” Mom asked.
“An energy,” Bea said.
“Please don’t bring out the crystals.”
“I’m considering it.”
“We’re just tired,” Mom insisted. “It’s been a long day. A few long weeks.”
“Isn’t life just a series of a few long weeks, over and over and over until we die?
” Aunt Bea mused, and she seemed almost chipper, even when talking about our inevitable deaths.
It was hard to dampen Aunt Bea’s spirits.
That was one thing I didn’t think any of us Farthing girls had gotten from her, unfortunately.
One wrong look could pretty much dampen the spirits of any of us.