Chapter V
V
Persephone’s footsteps were said to cause plants to bloom, trees to blossom, flowers to open wider.
But they were also said to cause weak spots in the fabric of the universe, becoming their own tiny little portals to another world.
Persephone loved her husband, and she loved the Underworld but she also loved our world, and when she was there, she longed for here, and when she was here, she longed for there.
You might say she was destined to never be completely satisfied; you might say she lived so firmly in the in-between as to have no real home.
You might say that women who grew up in these footsteps lived in the in-between, too.
So close to two worlds they might somehow find a way to travel between them …
I found her empty bed, of course. It was ten o’clock in the morning and our parents had gone to the Berkshires for a four-day trip with friends; they’d left the night before.
Bernadette and Clara and I had decided to go to Todd’s for breakfast and I’d volunteered to wake Evelyn.
So of course it was me who pushed open her bedroom door and found her bed, perfectly made, perfectly smooth, and her room, neat and clean, with not a piece of clothing or scrap of paper out of its proper place.
I didn’t move for a long time.
I didn’t move for so long that I heard Clara stomping up the stairs, grumbling, emerging on the fourth floor, and huffing impatiently behind me.
“Hel-lo,” she said.
I turned around stiffly. My joints felt unlubricated. I felt like a wooden board, unbendable and frozen.
“She’s … not here,” I said.
I almost said She’s gone, but I stopped myself, because Clara was sometimes so young to me, even though there were only two years between us, it felt like the space between fourteen and sixteen was expansive and huge, a massive ocean I was even now still wading through.
And in that moment, with her winter coat on and her hair a mess underneath her pale pink knitted hat and her eyes narrowed at me and annoyed, I felt this sudden need to protect her.
To not cause her unnecessary worry and harm.
“What do you mean she’s not here?” Clara asked, still annoyed.
“I think she told me she was staying over Danielle’s house last night,” I lied.
It was the first name that popped into my head.
Truth be told, none of us Farthing sisters were the best at having or keeping friends (a side effect, perhaps, of having three ready-made ones), but Evelyn and Danielle had met in kindergarten and were close enough that it wouldn’t be unheard of, if Evie spent the night there.
Of course no one ever spent the night here.
But that felt obvious. We had a ghost.
“Oh,” Clara said. “Why didn’t you just say so?”
“I forgot.”
“Okay. Well, I’m hungry. Can we go now?”
“Yeah, of course. Hey, can you send Bernadette up here? I want to ask her if I can borrow something.”
“I’m hungry,” Clara repeated, annoyed again. “Just take whatever it is you want to take.”
“I’ll be quick,” I said. “It’s important.”
Clara rolled her eyes and stomped back down the stairs.
I counted the stomps as they grew quieter and quieter, then I counted the seconds before Bernadette started walking upstairs, then I counted her footsteps, and by the time she reached the fourth-floor landing, my head was full of numbers and when she spoke, I didn’t hear what she said, just a sort of whomp whomp whomp, like the sound the grown-ups made in Peanuts.
Bernadette’s expression darkened, she frowned, she pushed me aside and stormed into Evelyn’s room, then rounded on me again, put her hands on my shoulders. It felt nice, having her hands there. It made me confident that I was standing on the ground instead of floating into outer space.
“Where is she?” Bernadette asked.
“I don’t know. She’s gone.”
“Fuck. Fuck. Did you call her?”
“My phone’s downstairs.”
Bernadette pulled her phone out of the pocket of her corduroys and tapped the screen. She held it to her ear and we both heard it immediately—the buzzing.
Our heads swiveled into the room, toward Evelyn’s nightstand. I couldn’t move yet, but Bernadette crossed over to it and pulled the drawer open and there, of course, was Evelyn’s phone.
“Okay,” Bernadette said. “Something isn’t right.”
“Something isn’t right,” I repeated dimly.
“We have to call him back.”
“We have to call … What? Who? Henry?”
“Yes. Call him back, Winnie. It’s time to call him back.”
My body filled with an achy, throbbing panic.
I didn’t want to call Henry back. I didn’t want to see Henry ever again, not after the things I had said to him. Not after what I had done to him …
But I nodded stiffly. My body didn’t really belong to me, it felt like it was my first day getting used to new controls, and it took a minute to figure out which lever made my legs work, and another minute to figure out how to get my arm to raise.
I knocked on the closet door.
“Henry? Henry, it’s me … Can you come out? If you’re there?”
I never wanted to see Henry again but also, I was desperate to see him.
I was desperate to apologize, to beg him for his forgiveness.
I didn’t realize, until that moment, how much I’d missed him, this ghost-boy who was like a brother to us, this constant in our lives, this seventh member of the Farthing household.
I held my breath while I waited for him to appear, and he kept not appearing, and I kept holding my breath, and—
“Make him, Winnie,” Bernadette said, interrupting my thought spiral. “If you made him go away, you can make him come back again.”
“Henry,” I said, trying again. “Henry, come back, come back…”
But my words wouldn’t have commanded anything, there was nothing behind them, I could barely catch my breath.
Finally Bernadette nudged me out of the way and knocked herself, louder, and a bit more aggressively, and it was a good thing she did, because the sound somehow reminded me to breathe again, and truth be told, I had come a little close to passing out.
“Henry! Come back,” she demanded, and in the silence that followed I heard Clara’s stomping footsteps on the stairs again as she pounded her way back to us.
She appeared seconds later, my youngest sister, still in her winter coat, still annoyed, her eyes narrowed into two little slits. “I’m hungry,” she barked. “What is your actual problem?”
Neither of us replied. Probably Bernadette was trying just as hard as I was to figure out what the fuck to say.
Clara looked like she was going to say something else, but she paused with her mouth half open, and she said, after a long moment, evenly and quietly, “Wait, were you knocking? Why were you knocking?”
Henry had been gone for a month. Five weeks?
Time was blurring together; I could barely keep the days of the week straight.
I didn’t so much sleep as have a long, constant rotation of nightmares.
(“Melinoe’s really working overtime,” Bernadette had said one night when we’d met, both sleepless, in the kitchen at two or three in the morning.)
I had to say something, to respond to Clara, who was currently looking at me with wide, scared eyes. It was my responsibility because wherever Evelyn was, it was my fault. I had driven her there.
“We don’t know where Evelyn is,” I said, struggling to make my voice calm and even.
Clara looked at me for a moment, then looked at Bernadette, then unzipped her coat and shrugged it off her shoulders and let it fall to the floor.
She pulled her knit hat off and her hair stuck out at odd angles, staticky and alive, and she let the hat, too, drop to the ground.
Then she said, in a small voice, “You said she was at Danielle’s house.”
“That was a lie. We don’t know where she is.”
“Well, just call her,” Clara said, and although the change was subtle, I could detect the panic in her voice, the rising swell of it.
“She left her phone here,” Bernadette said, holding it up as proof. “Cece, did she tell you anything, say anything?”
“I didn’t talk to her last night,” Clara said, biting her lip, her hand moving to the watch that had once belonged to our grandmother and had then belonged to Evelyn and that now looked out of place on Clara’s small wrist.
“Where would she go?” I asked.
Henry obviously wasn’t answering us, so I brushed past Bernadette and threw open the closet door to look inside. “All of her stuff is here. I don’t think anything is missing. Her suitcase, her backpack … It doesn’t look like she packed anything.”
“We have no idea when she left,” Bernadette said.
“The camera!” Clara exclaimed.
“What camera?”
“That doorbell camera thing Dad bought last year!” Clara had already pulled her phone out; she was tapping the screen furiously.
“You have the app?” I asked.
“I taught Dad how to use it,” she said, still tapping. “I kept it on my phone. What time did they leave for the Berkshires?”
“It was around eight,” Bernadette said. “After dinner. After rush hour.”
“Okay, got them,” Clara said. “There are a few motion alerts during the night, let me check … Nothing … Enormous rat, gross … Nothing … Nothing … I don’t … I don’t understand.”
“What is it?” Bernadette asked.
“She doesn’t leave. She never leaves.”
“Back door?” I asked. “Is there a camera there, too?”
“Yeah, hold on.” Clara tapped the screen a few times, concentrating so hard I could practically feel her biting her own tongue, then shook her head. “Nothing. She doesn’t leave the house.”
“Evelyn?” Bernadette said suddenly, raising her voice. “Evie?”
She stepped out of Evelyn’s room and Clara and I followed right behind her. We went through the house from top to bottom, moving like a search party, fanning out on each floor, heading back upstairs again when we didn’t find her, ending up back in her bedroom, all of us breathing harder.
“Let me see that app,” Bernadette said, and Clara handed her phone over.