Chapter VI
VI
There have always been accounts of people traveling from one world to another.
The Pevensie children stepped through a wardrobe and into the snow-covered wonderland of Narnia.
Alice fell down a rabbit hole and ended up in Wonderland.
Dante Alighieri wrote an incredibly detailed account of Virgil guiding him into Hell.
And Persephone herself spent half the year in our world and half the year under it, ruling over the dead.
So it doesn’t seem so unreasonable, really, that a Farthing girl, a girl descended from Persephone herself, might be able to discover the secret of making such a journey.
Evelyn had been gone for three nights and claimed she’d been away for three years. I’d read as much Narnia as the next introverted nerd; I knew about fantasy world time distortion.
“The camera didn’t show you leaving the house,” Clara said later, when we’d convinced Evelyn to come in from the snow and change into more reasonable clothes.
Bernadette had put on a fire and I had made us grilled cheeses that I personally wasn’t eating so much as tearing into tinier and tinier pieces.
I paused now, mid-tear, because something Evelyn had said to me outside the Met came flooding back:
They say she came to Manhattan before it was even Manhattan.
That she planted a jasmine bush on a plot of bare land.
They say her descendants would forever be drawn to it, like moths to a flame.
They say that her footsteps left fragile places in the earth, places you could crawl from one world to another …
“Persephone’s footsteps,” I said.
Evelyn looked up at me and blinked. She was still moving slowly and blinking a lot, but she had wolfed down her own sandwich and the food had seemed to help; she wasn’t shaking anymore.
“Yes,” she said.
“The camera didn’t show you leaving the house because you didn’t leave the house. You got to the Underworld from here. From inside.”
“The old story,” Evelyn said, her voice raspy as if she hadn’t used it in a long time.
“Years and years ago, Persephone came to Manhattan and ushered in the spring. She planted a jasmine tree. Her descendants were bound to tend to it forever, drawn to it always. Wherever she stepped, her footsteps—”
“Left fragile places in the earth,” Bernadette finished. “We’ve all heard this one, Evie. It’s just a bedtime story for weird sisters.”
“No, Bernie,” Evelyn said. “It’s true. It’s all true. Everything Aunt Bea told us.”
“Did you meet her?” Clara asked, wide eyed. “Persephone?”
“No,” Evelyn said. “She wasn’t where I was.”
“And you got to the Underworld from here?” Clara pressed. “From inside the house?”
“It’s all kind of fuzzy now,” Evelyn said.
“But I think so … I remember looking and looking and trying to find a way to get to Henry … and then I found it. I found him. But we couldn’t get back and …
And I don’t know. We spent three years together and …
Some of it was nice. I won’t lie about that; some of it was really, really beautiful, but we also kept looking for a way to come back… ”
“What was it like?” Clara asked. “What did it look like?”
“The sky is a dark aubergine. And the trees were fuller. It’s almost a copy of our world, but …
Different. Deeper. Darker. Oh, in Grand Central they have these columns, and the ceiling is alive, the stars twinkle and comets shoot by overhead and …
There was dancing. A lot of dancing.” She looked faraway and dreamy when she said this; she looked like our Evelyn but she didn’t talk like our Evelyn and she didn’t smell like our Evelyn and her eyes looked two shades darker and her skin looked two shades paler, as if she hadn’t seen the sun in quite some time.
And her hair was longer. Three years longer.
“I have to get back,” she said now. “I have to get back to him…”
“You can’t go back,” I said. “You just said you almost didn’t make it home.”
“But Henry’s still there,” she said, her eyes brimming with tears.
“Let’s say we did try and go back,” Bernadette said. “Do you think it would work again? The … portal? Are we calling it a portal?”
“A doorway,” Evelyn said. “It’s more like a doorway. And I don’t know if it would work again. Henry said those doors, they’re tricky to figure out. Sometimes they’ll only work once. And I can’t remember…”
“In the story, the thing about the jasmine bushes…” Clara began slowly. “That Farthings will always be drawn to the jasmine bushes because Persephone planted them. Is that why Henry smells like jasmine? But he’s not a Farthing.”
“He’s not a Farthing, but he lived here,” Evelyn said. “In this house. And he died here. I think that’s why he never left. Why he became a ghost.”
“Because he died in the house,” Bernie said, catching on.
“And the house is magic,” I finished.
“Magic is such a simple way of putting it,” Evelyn said. “But, yes. The house is magic. The land is magic. Farthings have always been here, lived here, breathed in it.”
“Of course Henry became a ghost,” Clara whispered. “He was drenched in that energy every day he lived in this house. Our energy.”
“But what about the others?” Bernie asked. “What about the other Farthing ghosts, the ones Winnie can see?”
“They’ve never been as real as Henry,” Evelyn said. “You’ve always said that, Winnie, about the other ghosts. They’re just copies.”
At the mention of other Farthing ghosts, I remembered Evelyn’s ghost, standing next to the Ouija board, standing in the kitchen, the way I knew the shape and size of her, how she had held her hand out to me, reaching for me, how I had let go of her in the backyard because of how much she was shaking, how Bernadette had stepped in and pulled her close, pulled her inside, turned on the fire and tried to bring some warmth back into the house.
I had seen Evelyn’s ghost because she had been in the Underworld. I had seen her because she had, sort of, been dead. Or at least more dead, technically, during those three days, than she had been alive.
“Persephone could come and go from the Underworld,” Clara said. “It must be like that, for us, sort of. Our … energy, maybe. It’s there but it’s also here. The children of the in-between, like Aunt Bea says.”
“This is giving me a headache,” Bernie said, at the same time I said, “I saw you, Evelyn.”
Evelyn looked up at me and her eyes were, for a moment, unrecognizable. A full shade lighter than they had been three days ago. I wanted to scream. I wanted to pull her hair. I wanted to push her over and hold her down and tell her how sorry I was.
“I remember…” she said.
“Saw her when?” Clara asked.
“When she was down there … She was a ghost…”
“You didn’t tell us,” Bernadette said.
“Because I didn’t know if that meant she was…”
“I was,” Evelyn said. “Kind of.”
A moment of quiet, and then Clara said, a bit too loudly, “Doesn’t it kind of feel sometimes like we’re all ghosts? You know?”
Evelyn blinked, blinked, blinked, then said, “I think I need to lie down for a while.”
She got up and brought her plate into the kitchen, then walked silently past us and went up to her room.
“Okay, so, either Evelyn has completely lost it or we’ve all completely lost it or none of us have lost it, and I’m really trying to figure out which one it is,” Clara said that night, the three of us crammed into her small bedroom, Bernadette on the bed with Clara, me on the floor, rocking back and forth, unable to be still.
Evelyn had gone to bed and not gotten up again and we’d all gone in to check on her at various points, finding her stripped down to her underwear underneath the covers of her bed, sleeping so soundly and so deeply it gave us the feeling that we couldn’t wake her even if we’d tried.
“Something happened to her,” Bernadette said thoughtfully. “She was gone for three days. Clearly she went somewhere.”
“And the cameras…” Clara said.
“And Evelyn doesn’t lie,” I said.
“Mom and Dad come back tomorrow,” Clara said. “What are we going to tell them?”
“Nothing,” Bernadette and I said at the same time.
“Are we supposed to just go to school tomorrow?” Clara asked.
“Yes,” I said. “I think we have to.”
“I think it’s all true,” Bernadette declared. “Don’t you think it must all be true? Everything she told us? Maybe we should call Aunt Bea.”
“Aunt Bea will tell Mom,” I reasoned. “Like, immediately.”
“She wants to go back,” Clara said. “She’s going to insist on going back for him.”
“Well, obviously we can’t let that happen,” Bernie said.
“Maybe we should all go?” Clara proposed. “You know, just to check it out.”
“No,” Bernadette and I said at the same time (again).
“Aubergine skies,” Clara mumbled.
“We have to figure out how to get Henry back here,” I said. “If Henry comes back here, Evelyn has no reason to leave again.”
“No reason to leave ever again,” Bernadette said. “We’d be right back where we started. She would never leave this house again.”
“I don’t think we can worry about that right now,” I said. “I think all we can worry about is making sure she doesn’t go back to the Underworld and get trapped there again.”
“Great, I’ll go to the library tomorrow and check out all the books I can on how to resurrect a ghost and we’ll wrap this up by the weekend,” Bernadette said with an eye roll, lying back on the bed with a huff.
“I know someone I could ask,” I said, and my sisters both shot me a look like, Who?? “Just someone I know. She works in a store. It’s fine.”
“This is all very weird,” Clara said.
“Yes,” Bernadette said. “And I can’t even talk about it in therapy. Who would believe me?”
We did go to school on Tuesday. Mom and Dad hadn’t made it back yet; they’d hit traffic halfway to the city and sent us many apology texts for being absent parents.
Bernadette had the day off but got up early and made everyone chocolate-chip pancakes, something she hadn’t done in years.
They were Evelyn’s favorite, and she ate them ravenously, going back for seconds.