Chapter X #2
We heard the footsteps on the stairs at the same time. Two sets of footsteps. Did Henry have footsteps before he went to the Underworld? I genuinely couldn’t remember.
They came into the kitchen holding hands. Henry was as bright and solid down here as he had been upstairs. He seemed to be in an excellent mood. Evelyn went to pour herself some coffee and he sat down next to Clara and tapped her book.
“Nothing in there is accurate,” he said, picking up the book, scanning through it briefly.
He smirked at something, then bit his lower lip and said, “All right—hardly anything in here is accurate. There is a flaming blood river that boils souls. But this makes it sound much more dramatic than it actually is.”
“Phlegethon,” Clara whispered reverently.
“Bless you,” Bernadette replied.
“I just have a few dozen questions, actually, if you’re available,” Clara said, rustling her paper, which I saw now was absolutely covered in writing.
“Maybe later,” Henry said. “I’m still sort of adjusting. I thought we could go for a walk or something?”
“But you can’t go for walks,” Bernadette said.
“It’s different now,” Henry said. “I’m not tied to the attic anymore.”
“How do you know?” Bernie pressed.
“I just know, I guess.”
This was interesting. This was something none of us had considered.
Would he be able to … stay here now? Go to college with Evelyn?
She would become the weird loner kid who actively refused to make any friends, join any study groups, trudge across campus with anyone to the school cafeteria.
People would whisper about her. What’s with that girl who always looks like she’d holding hands with the air?
Would he age now, too? Or would Evelyn celebrate birthday after birthday, blooming, blossoming.
She’d graduate college and Henry would still be seventeen.
She’d turn thirty, thirty-five, forty. And Henry would still be a teenager, still invisible, still as dead then as he was now, even if he didn’t really look dead, not to us, not at all.
There was even color in his cheeks, as if somewhere in the Underworld, he had found a good supply of blood to inject into his veins.
He looked in my direction now. He had a shy smile on his face. “You’re staring at me, Winnie.”
“What? No? I wasn’t?”
“You were,” my sisters said at the exact same time. A chorus of annoyance.
“Well, I wasn’t.”
“I think maybe we should talk?” Henry said. “Alone?”
“Whatever. Not now. Sure. I don’t care.”
“Who is Maybe? I heard her come through very strongly during the séance. Very funny, by the way, that you all had a séance. Well—sort of funny, sort of dangerous. You could have summoned a demon.”
“There are really demons?” Clara said, picking up a pencil and scribbling more questions on her list.
“There was already a hole in the sky at that point,” Bernadette pointed out. “Can’t get much worse than that.”
“And now you’re back, so we can get everything sorted out,” Clara said. “Fix the tear in the sky, repair whatever’s going on between you and Winnie, get back to life.”
“There’s nothing going on between us,” I said, trying to keep my voice light and airy but managing, I was sure, the exact opposite.
“Maybe’s a cute girl who works at a magic shop,” Clara said.
“Not, like, card tricks,” Bernie clarified.
“They probably do have card tricks,” Clara said. “It’s a really big store.”
“I think I hear my phone ringing,” I said, leaving the kitchen even as Clara said, “I don’t hear anything.”
I was already dressed, so I pulled on a pair of Bernadette’s boots (closest to the door), a jacket, a hat, and pushed out into the cold air before I (or my sisters) could change my mind.
The tear in the sky was—I couldn’t think of a better way to describe it—writhing.
Pulsating. No longer just shimmering around the edges but actually moving, the black perimeter changing shape, coming together then wriggling apart again.
It was about the size of a plane on its descent, taking up a fair amount of sky over our brownstone, looking exactly like it might land on top of us.
I tried not to look at it.
I needed to walk, and I kept my head down as I set off toward Central Park, letting my feet lead the way while trying to keep every and any thought from entering my consciousness.
The farther I got from the brownstone, the better I felt.
I hadn’t realized how heavy my body had become until that heaviness dissipated.
To get out from underneath the black tear was like breaking through the surface of a great body of water, taking a breath after years of not breathing, feeling the pressure on my skin lessen and lessen until I felt so light I might float away.
With my head mostly down (just aware enough to avoid crashing into anything), I didn’t realize where I was going until I got there, out of breath and slightly sweaty even in the frigid winter air.
The reservoir.
Of course.
I had maybe seen enough of the reservoir to last me a good lifetime or two, but my directional subconscious apparently had other ideas.
It was gray, very cold, and when the wind blew it felt like a personal attack. I pulled the collar of my coat as high as it would go and sat down on a bench that, I quickly realized, was covered in a thin sheet of ice.
The reservoir was frozen over.
If Evelyn were here, she would have said something poetic and sweet like, It looks like a postcard.
If Bernadette were here, she would have said something witty and dark like, I wonder how many dead bodies are in there.
If Clara were here, she would have said something innocent and completely random like, Do you know Dante Alighieri dedicated most of his poetry to a girl named Beatrice? Like Aunt Bea! Isn’t that a weird coincidence?
But I was alone.
Or—I was alone.
Because just then, Henry sat down beside me, cracking the ice on the bench, bringing with him the faint but beautiful smell of jasmine.
It was so strange to see him here, so far from the attic. For a long time I just looked at him, trying to process the fact of his existence. I reached out and poked his arm. He smiled, then shrugged.
“I know, it’s hard to believe.”
“But how?” I asked. “How are you here?”
“I don’t think any ghost has gone there and come back again,” Henry said. “I imagine there will be some … side effects?”
“And this is one of them?”
He shrugged again, then turned toward the reservoir. The expression on his face was hard to read.
“I thought I’d never see this place again,” he said after a long silence. “We used to go ice-skating here,” Henry said. “My sisters and me.”
You weren’t allowed to ice-skate here anymore. Instead, everyone crowded into Rockefeller Center and rented cheap ice skates and hoped not to fall on their ass.
More importantly, though: Henry had sisters. Henry had sisters.
It was the first new piece of knowledge I’d learned about Henry in years. Henry, who was so careful and so private and so reserved.
Henry had sisters.
“You had sisters,” I whispered, and he nodded slightly.
“Three of them. Just like you.”
“Will you tell me about them?”
He smiled, and I knew, as he looked out at the reservoir, that he was remembering them. That maybe he was letting himself remember them, for the first time in a long time.
“Emma, Lucy, and Olive. We were all very close in age. I was the oldest, Lucy and Olive were the youngest—they were twins—and Emma was in the middle. Our father was a doctor. Our mother was an expert embroiderer. She had years-long commission waits for her work. Pillows, chairs, curtains, she did everything. We had a dog. Aramis.”
“The Three Musketeers,” I said.
Henry laughed. “We were obsessed with it. And obsessed with that dog; we took him everywhere with us. He’d slip and slide all around us while we skated. Emma was the best. She looked like a ballerina out there, which was ironic, because on dry land, she was quite clumsy.”
He paused, lost in thought. I elbowed him gently.
“I know you all want to know how I died,” he said.
“And I didn’t want to tell you because …
it’s sad. It’s terrible. It’s … private, I guess.
But that’s silly. It was a lifetime ago.
Literally. A hundred years ago. I was born in 1901.
Emma in 1903. The twins in 1906. And everything was pretty quiet.
Everything was nice. My childhood was … peaceful. And then right around 1918…”
“Oh,” I said.
“My father was a doctor,” Henry continued.
“He brought it home early. We all got sick. My parents died first, then my sisters … They say thirty thousand people died in New York, but now they think that number is so much higher … The Farthings took me in. Our neighbors. Even though … Even though I was sick, too. They were taking a big risk. I stayed in the attic, away from them. They gave me a safe place to die, a quiet place … I’ll always love them for that. I’ll always love all the Farthings.”
He smiled at me, his eyes watery.
“Henry…” I whispered.
“By then, the city was already running out of graves. There were mass graves, illegal graves, a panicked disposal of the dead. The Farthings didn’t want that for me.
They dug a place for me in the backyard, by the jasmine bushes.
They put my body inside it as the first light of dawn was spreading across the sky. ”
“The jasmine bushes,” I said, realizing.
Henry was buried beneath the jasmine bushes in our backyard.
Henry, who always smelled like jasmine, even now, even in the freezing cold.
Henry, whose bones were underneath the dirt where my sisters and I had sat and played dolls, sat and played Matchbox cars, sat and fought and loved each other and cried and laughed.
Had he looked out of the attic windows and watched us, so close to his remains?