Chapter X #3
I felt how I felt after a glass of wine, drunk quickly and secretively on Christmas Eve, hiding in a closet with Bernadette.
Lightheaded and giddy, like my head could detach from my body and float upward like a balloon.
Never had Henry volunteered so much information about his life. Never had we even thought to ask.
“It’s not a very noteworthy death,” Henry said a moment later, when it became clear that I was too stunned to speak.
“A lot of people died. I wasn’t anything special.
Later, years later, they made up a skipping song about it.
Jump rope. I would watch them in the street outside my window. ” He cleared his throat and recited:
I had a little bird
And its name was Enza
I opened the window
And in-flew-Enza
“What is wrong with people?” I whispered.
“No, no, it wasn’t like that … It was a way to talk about the impossible,” he explained. “We’re always trying to find ways to talk about the impossible.”
I felt the wine I hadn’t actually drunk sloshing around in my stomach, turning sour.
I worried for a moment that I might be sick.
I wanted to hug Henry forever. I wanted to skate away across the frozen reservoir and never come back.
I wanted to disappear. I wanted to be a ghost myself, done with this mortal life and free to roam around forever, clanking chains and jumping out at people, saying boo.
“I’m so sorry for what I said to you,” I managed. “The most horrible, awful—”
“Winnie, no. I’m sorry. I wasn’t able to see past my own selfishness. I should have talked to her, I never should have…” He shook his head, trailing off. “I was letting myself live in a fantasy. Just for a little while. I know now, obviously, how wrong that was.”
A cold wind cut through the park then, slicing through our clothes and making us shiver.
“Do you feel that?” I asked him. “The wind?”
“I do,” he said, smiling. “It’s so nice, actually.”
I thought of Pinocchio, so insistent on becoming a real boy.
Had Henry become a real boy? I could almost see his pulse through the pale skin of his neck as he sat beside me, closing his eyes, turning his face into the wind.
But it might not have been his pulse at all.
A trick of the light. Wishful thinking. My own beating heart, obscuring my vision, causing the corners of my eyes to waver slightly with each thrum of blood sent pumping through my veins.
“What’s going to happen?” I asked—or more accurately, I begged, I pleaded.
Please tell me we aren’t all going to die because it will sort of be my fault and I don’t think I could recover from the guilt of killing absolutely everyone in the world, but I’d be dead myself at that point, and I don’t think you can heal from trauma if you’re dead yourself.
“It will be okay,” Henry said.
“But how do you know that?”
“Because I know,” Henry said. “Because I can fix it.”
“You know how to fix it?”
“I do. And you can’t tell them, okay? You can’t tell them.”
“I promise,” I said, aware that my promises weren’t worth much to anyone these days, were really just the ghosts of promises, maybe, which is why only Henry took a chance with them. A ghost for a ghost. An eye for an eye.
“It will keep getting bigger and bigger,” Henry said. “Eventually, it will get so big that it will reach the house. The house is magic, the land … Persephone’s footsteps. The tear is drawn to it. Drawn to you.”
“And what will happen then?”
“Nothing will happen. Because I can fix it.”
“How?”
“It’s complicated. Just trust me.”
“No way. No, you have to tell me. You have to tell me what will happen and you have to tell me what you’re going to do to stop it.”
He nodded. “Okay. Fine. The tear will sort of … merge with the house. It was Persephone’s domain, down there, for a long time, and she’s the one who planted the jasmine bushes, and she’s your relative and … Those things are trying to get back together now. To come back together.”
“Okay. So what does that mean?”
“It means … the two points, here and there … the Underworld is sort of like a mirror image of our world. And those two points would come together. Like I said—merge. Like a … oh what’s that famous painting.
M. C. Escher. With the stairs, you know.
A sort of … paradox. You’d all be trapped inside this infinite loop. In between worlds.”
“I understand why you didn’t want to tell me,” I said. “Because it’s terrifying.”
“It’s a bit terrifying, yes,” Henry agreed.
“I guess we could leave, though? We could all leave before that happened?”
“I’ve thought about that. And I think it would pull you back in. I don’t think any of you—as Farthings—would be able to get away.”
“Great. That’s really great. So how are you going to stop it?”
“I’m going to patch the hole.”
“Oh. Okay. That’s easier than I thought it would be…”
“It sounds easy, yes,” Henry said, and he smiled sadly. “How do I explain it … So basically. I lived here, right. When I was alive, and then after I’d died. And then, more recently, I lived there. For quite a long time.”
“Evelyn said three years…”
“Ah, but I got there before her. So I was there, and I was here … and now I’m back here again.”
“Okay?”
“And I don’t really have a body, you know.
Not like you. I’m just made up of … like …
spirit. And that spirit sort of holds me all together.
And that spirit has been here, has been there …
And if it holds me together, you could think of it as being, almost …
sticky. I could patch up the hole in the sky. As in—I could.”
It made no sense but it made all the sense, and I reached out to touch Henry now, to poke his arm, as if I might find him, in this moment, a little tacky, a little gluey, a little gloopy.
“Spirit glue,” I whispered before I could stop myself, and for one moment Henry and I looked at each other with wide, frightened eyes, and then, in the next moment, we fell into absolutely unhinged, hysterical laughter.
Anyone looking would have thought I was laughing by myself, holding on to the arm of nothing, beginning to cry even as I was struggling to catch my breath, laughing, laughing, laughing until I really was sobbing, sobbing and laughing and laughing and sobbing and holding on to the arm of a ghost who would save us all.