Chapter IX #2
“Remember when I said I thought I might actually sleep tonight?” Clara said.
“Well, I was clearly wrong about that. Because I was about to go to sleep and then my brain started whirring, and I kept thinking, I mean I kept having this feeling, well, really I’ve been having it the last few days, and right now specifically—”
“Spit it out, Clara,” Bernie said gently.
“My painting came to me in a dream, right?” Clara continued.
“In a nightmare. So many of my paintings do … And Melinoe is the goddess of nightmares. And we’ve always said, right, I mean maybe we were mostly joking but we’ve always said our nightmares were a message from her.
And maybe that’s actually true? And maybe if you’re a god, or you’re related to a god, those things you do, like painting, like music, they become kind of magic?
Because they’re sort of from the gods or messages from gods, maybe? Or gifts from them.”
“What are you getting at?” I asked.
Clara turned to Evelyn and said, “You said you used the piano to open the doorway, right? That you played some song, and that’s how you got in?”
“Yes…” Evelyn said. “I don’t know how I knew what to play, it just came to me…”
“Like a message,” Clara said excitedly. “That’s your gift, Evie, music, and it’s magical.”
“But now you can’t play anything,” I said.
“It feels like something was taken from me,” Evelyn whispered. “Like this black mark, this tear … like it’s doing something to us…”
“I’ve felt really tired,” Bernadette said, thinking. “And like … almost like … nothing. I’ve felt nothing. I tried to write in my journal last night before bed, and I just kept staring at the empty page. Like before I had all this anger and these emotions and now I’m just … empty.”
Sometimes Clara just knew things; she had always, always just known things.
“You think you can use your painting to open the doorway,” I said slowly, processing, trying to understand.
“Like maybe we were given these gifts, or … or … inherited these gifts,” Clara said, getting more animated as she struggled to find the right words. “Gifts handed down to us right from Persephone, from Melinoe. Gifts that can do things. Open a doorway. Like Evelyn’s music, like my painting…”
“I’m worried our family has jumped right off the deep end,” Bernadette said, mostly to herself, but I saw Evelyn almost crack a smile in response (and these days, Evelyn almost cracking a smile was a little bit of a miracle).
“But it makes sense, too, right?” Clara said.
“It does, Cece. It really does.”
And it did make sense.
It did.
But what I found myself fixating on, what I wanted to say was …
What’s my gift?
But maybe I was scared of the answer.
Because I didn’t say that.
I said, “So how do you do it?”
And in the end it wasn’t an incantation or a ritual or a big dramatic bloodletting—it was a quiet offering, a meditation, a promise that you were willing to give up the thing you most loved to get something even greater, to go somewhere greater (or, in our case, to call someone home).
And Clara gave up her painting.
We did it in the attic, of course, candles lit, Clara standing by her painting while the rest of us sat in a semicircle on the floor.
It felt very witchlike, very The Craft, very Charmed, which was fitting, because there were four girls in each of those (even if they had to kill off Prue to bring the fourth sister in).
“I think you all should close your eyes,” Clara said.
“What? No. Don’t be ridiculous.” Bernadette.
“Can you stop stalling, please?” Evelyn.
“Why do you want us to do that, Clara?” Me.
“It just feels a little personal,” Clara said. “I don’t know. You’re all just sitting there watching me. It’s distracting. It’s weird. I wish I were an only child.”
“I was an only child,” Bernie said. “For two whole years. It was delightful.”
“Oh, you don’t remember anything from before I was born, don’t be a dweeb,” Evelyn said. “We’ll close our eyes, Clara, okay? Will you hurry up now?”
“Yes,” Clara agreed. “Thank you.”
My sisters closed their eyes and I mostly closed my eyes, watching Clara through a blur of eyelashes as she turned to her painting. She took a breath so deep I heard it and saw it, her tiny shoulders rising and falling at least two inches.
And I will never be able to accurately describe what happened next.
In the flicker of the candlelight it was magical, incredible …
Clara reached a hand out and suddenly her painting was opening, the canvas swinging toward her like an actual door, and a light so enormous and bright was coming out of it; I had to actually close my eyes, and turn my face away, and shield my face with my arm, and even then the light was painful and hot and I thought I heard Clara yelp and I sort of groped around for her, trying to help her, but of course I couldn’t see anything, I could barely even move …
And then I smelled it.
And then I smelled him.
The familiar, missed, welcome smell of jasmine.
Then his voice: “Oh, Clara. Your painting.”
And it was Henry.
It was Henry.
Henry, Henry, Henry.
Henry was back.