Chapter VI #2
“Do they not have chocolate-chip pancakes in the Underworld?” Clara asked, her wide-eyed innocence successfully removing any trace of snark from her words.
“No,” Evelyn said. “But there are a lot of pomegranates.”
Evelyn and I walked across the park.
We had walked across the park together only a few days before, but it felt like a lifetime ago.
She did not ask to veer toward the reservoir.
We took the most direct route available to us.
She was quiet. She stood up very straight.
Shoulders back. Chin up. Steps light. Face smooth and impassive.
Distant. If I spoke to her, it took a moment for my words to register.
We hadn’t been alone together since she had come back, and I hadn’t expected the silence between us to feel so awkward.
But maybe I should have. There were, as it stood, about a million things I didn’t want to talk about with her, starting with what I had said to Henry, how I had sent him away, how I had lied to her, how all of this was my fault, etc. , etc.
“Do you believe me?” she asked suddenly, startling me. “I can’t decide if you all believe me or you think I’m lying or making it up or crazy or…”
“We grew up with a ghost in our attic, Evelyn,” I said. “We believe you.”
“He forgives you,” she said. “He wanted me to tell you that.”
“Forgives me for what?” I said too quickly. “I didn’t do anything. Did he tell you I did something?”
“And I know why you did it,” she continued. “And it upsets me, but I love you, and I know you were just doing what you thought was right, and I forgive you. You’re my sister. I’ll love you forever.”
I scratched the insides of my wrists. I didn’t know how to respond to any of that, so I just mumbled that I loved her, too, and then I said, feeling like I had to say something or else lapse back into uncomfortable silence, “So the Underworld, is it, like…” I pointed down, toward the earth.
“No,” Evelyn said. “Not really. It’s more like…”
She moved her hands in a wide circle, indicating everything all around us. Then she smiled and took my hands, holding them in her hands, which seemed just a little colder than I remembered.
“I’m sorry,” she said, looking so deeply into my eyes that I felt penetrated, violated, itchy all over.
“I’m sorry for leaving and not telling you where I was going.
I’m sorry for not trying to understand why you did what you did.
I’m sorry for pretending that I was completely blameless in this.
I’m sorry for falling in love with a ghost. I’m sorry that I have to go back and find him.
Even if that means … Even if that means never coming back here. I’m sorry.”
I wasn’t going to cry, I wasn’t, and so I took two very deep breaths before I responded to her.
“I’m sorry, too,” I said. “I’m sorry for not coming to you first, for not talking to you about my concerns. I’m sorry for thinking I knew what’s best for you. I’m sorry for going to Vermont without telling you.”
I’m sorry for what I said to Henry. I’m sorry for sending him away.
But I couldn’t say that yet.
Evelyn was still holding my hands, gripping them so hard, as if I was the one who’d disappeared, not her. And then she let them go, and I felt a phantom pressure where her fingers had dug into my skin.
“You don’t have to go,” I said. “We’re going to find a way to bring him back.”
“I tried everything,” she replied. “I don’t think he can come back.”
Her eyes were getting wet. We were in the middle of the Great Lawn. I could see the Museum of Natural History in the distance, peeking out from behind a cluster of trees. It was a mild day, a brief respite from the bitter cold. The sky was clear and blue and cloudless above us.
And that was when I saw it.
We were facing each other, and I was facing west, and there it was, over Evelyn’s head, back toward our house.
“Oh,” I said, and Evelyn turned around to look where I was looking, following my gaze up and up and up until she finally saw it, too.
The faint black smear across the sky.
The faint black smear that we could tell, even from here, was directly over our house.
It could have been a leftover exhale of exhaust from a plane or a distant smokestack.
A shadow, a rain cloud, a trick of the light.
But it wasn’t. It wasn’t any of those things. Because it was the thing from Clara’s painting: a clean slash through blue, a delicate line of black.
Evelyn tilted her head to the side, still looking at it.
“What is that?” she said.
“I don’t know, I don’t…”
My chest was filling with a cold, icy sort of panic.
Looking at the mark directly didn’t quite work; it faded into the brilliant blue of the sky around it. You had to look just to the left or just to the right, and then it leapt into stark clarity, became something huge and enormous and unmissable.
A man walked by in a rumpled business suit, his head down, his hands stuffed into his pockets.
“Sir! Sir!” I yelped before I could stop myself. Miraculously, he turned around (I would estimate about 90 percent of New Yorkers ignore any and all attempts to get their attention). “Do you see that?” I said, as soon as our eyes met, pointing urgently into the sky, toward the mark.
He lifted up his chin, followed my finger, squinted into the brightness of the winter sky.
“See what?” he asked after a minute, his voice already impatient, his feet inching forward to continue their stomp across the park.
“That mark! That black slash! That thing in the sky! Right there!”
I kept pointing. The man made a face (I don’t have fucking time for this) but looked up again, giving it one more try. He shrugged and when he turned back, his expression was a mixture of apologetic and annoyance.
“I don’t see anything,” he said. Then, as an afterthought, already pedaling away, hands back in pockets, he added, “Sorry, kid.”
When I pulled out my phone to text Clara and Bernadette, Clara had already texted our three-person group chat (No Ghost Lovers Allowed), a cell phone picture of a perfectly unblemished sky.
Clara:
It doesn’t show up in pictures.
Bernadette:
What doesn’t?
Clara:
The mark.
Bernadette:
What mark?
Clara:
From my painting.
Bernadette:
Holy shit. I just went outside. Wtf is it?
Clara:
I don’t know.
Me:
A man in the park couldn’t see it either.
Bernadette:
I don’t know what it is but why do I have this feeling like we’re fucked.
Clara:
same lol
Same lol
Same lol
Same lol
Clara’s text became something of a mantra as I made it through the school day, stumbling from class to class to class to lunch to class to class to class to class, taking every available opportunity to look out the window, confirming that the mark was still there, still the same size, still in the same spot, very obviously not a wisp of smoke or exhaust or cloud.
I asked five people throughout the day if they could see it and each of them did the same squint and shrug move.
And all of them said no. And one girl apologized again, just like the man in the park, a soft-spoken, sweet girl I’d always liked.
Her name is Jackie. When she apologized I felt, for five crushing, expansive seconds, the most alone I’d ever felt in my entire life.
“There has to be a reasonable explanation for it,” Evelyn said in the hallway between fourth and fifth period.
Our lockers were next to each other (Farthing, Farthing) and though we shared no classes, we met multiple times throughout the day, putting books away, taking books out, hyperventilating into the small metal box we were allotted to hold our things, including our secrets, including our tears, including the whispered screams we poured into them when we had no one else to tell.
“Like what?” I asked.
“Like … atmospheric pressure … conditions…”
“Atmospheric pressure conditions,” I deadpanned back at her, my words coming out more rudely than I had meant them to.
“I don’t know, Winnie, I’m not a weatherman,” she said, her voice withering, her expression withering.
They must teach you how to be 24/7 withering in the Underworld.
It must be one of the perks they offer, besides nonstop dancing and a different dead girl braiding your hair every morning (something Evelyn had told us and that Clara had later said, her voice dripping with jealousy, Damn, that sounds so nice).
“Clearly,” I said, too late, an already weak comeback becoming weaker, as I wasn’t even sure Evelyn had heard it; she had closed her locker and was turning to leave, walking to her next class, leaving me alone.
I turned and whisper-screamed into my locker, sticking my head as far into the metal cage as I could, really letting go.
That night we ate Chinese takeout because our parents were too tired to cook.
“Best Chinese food in New York City and we can just call up and have it delivered to our door,” Dad said happily. “How lucky are we, kids?”
“Pretty lucky,” Clara said, scooping up another spring roll, dunking it in two different sauces and eating it in two big bites.
“What did you get up to while we were gone?” Mom asked.
“We mostly just sat around and stared at each other,” Bernadette said.
“Same,” Dad said.
“Anything more interesting to report?” Mom pressed. She was slightly obsessed with fried rice and was steadily making her way through a mountain of it.
“No,” I said firmly. “It was a very boring weekend.”
“Same,” Dad said.
“Oh, stop it,” Mom said, ignoring me, hitting Dad playfully on the arm. “We had a lovely time. We went snowshoeing!”
“Same,” Evelyn said.
“Did you?” Dad said, perking up.
“No,” Evelyn said, apologetically.
“Ah,” he said. “I love snowshoeing. What a workout! Right, honey?”
Mom made a sound of agreement through a mouthful of fried rice. We slipped back into amiable silence.
Later, we brought bowls of green tea ice cream to the attic and sat eating it, some of us on the couch, some of us on the floor, Evelyn on her piano bench, legs crossed primly, every inch of her an undead queen.
It felt weird without Henry there.
Usually Henry would join us, pretend to eat, pantomime the actions of being alive, sometimes stare at our food mournfully.
(Do you miss eating? Clara had asked him once. Clara, he had replied, I miss everything.)
“Do you know how you’re going to do it? How you’re going to try and bring Henry back?
” Evelyn asked quietly, tentatively. She had finished her ice cream and was holding the bowl almost reverently, staring into its depths like trying to see something beyond its ceramic glaze (if it was scrying she was after, she needn’t have wasted her time; the leftover dairy would have made everything cloudy and unclear).
“No,” Clara admitted.
“But we will bring him back,” Bernadette said. “We’ll figure it out.”
We sat in silence for a while. I thought of the Pevensie children, opening a wardrobe and stepping through to a snow-covered wonderland.
I thought of Alice, stumbling down a rabbit hole.
I thought about the girl in Dark Magic. I didn’t know her name.
I kind of wanted to ask her on a date. Either that or become her best friend.
Either that or make a concerted effort never to see her again (I contained multitudes).
“I’m sure you will,” Evelyn said finally, with no conviction in her voice whatsoever. “I’ll take these bowls downstairs.” She got up and collected the bowls and started down the stairs, her footsteps getting quieter and quieter until we couldn’t hear them anymore.
Clara got up from the floor then; her left foot was asleep and she sort of half-hopped over to the window, pulling the curtain aside, craning her neck to look up at the sky.
“It’s still there,” she said. “It kind of glows a little, in the moonlight.”
“What do you think it is?” I asked.
“Well, it showed up when Evelyn came back,” Bernie said.
“And it’s right above our house,” I added. “So maybe something happened when she went through the doorway the second time? Like she … broke something?”
“Broke the sky?” Bernadette asked.
“I don’t know. Maybe? If there are these doorways between universes, Persephone’s footsteps, you know, and we’re not really supposed to use them, then maybe it was like …
like she forced her way through an entrance that wasn’t big enough for her.
It widened it, warped it. She went there and came back and pushed her way through, and now this doorway has been opened, really … I don’t know; this is stupid…”
“No, no,” she said. “I think that actually makes sense…”
“A tear,” Clara said slowly. “Between the universes.” She was still at the window, still looking up at the sky, at the black mark. “It’s like … pulsing.”
“Pulsing?”
“Or shimmering. Or breathing.”
“Breathing?”
“I don’t know,” Clara said, and pulled back from the window, shutting the curtain abruptly. “It’s creeping me out.”
“So what do we do?” Bernadette asked. “Is it going to get bigger?”
“Let me just google what happened the last time we had a crack between worlds,” I said.
“Guys,” Clara said. “Shut up. Stop fighting. If there’s a tear in the world, if there’s this open doorway between our New York and this other New York, this undead New York…”
“Maybe it means other things can get through…” Bernadette said.
“It means who knows what’s about to happen,” Clara said. “But it doesn’t feel like anything good.”