Chapter XI #2
She struggled to make herself seem tough and sure of herself.
“Don’t try and talk me out of it,” she said.
“I would never.”
“I’m running away from home.”
“Cool. Where are you gonna go?”
“To the bus station. I’ll go stay with Aunt Bea for a while, until I figure some things out.”
“Not a bad plan,” I said. “You have the money for the ticket?”
She patted the pocket of her shorts. “From my piggy bank.”
“And you’ve checked the schedule?”
“Of course. I’ll have to spend the night at the station, but the first bus leaves in the morning.”
It was just like Clara to check bus schedules, bring money; I was sure if I peeked in her suitcase I would find snacks and a water bottle.
“I’ll miss you,” I said, and I saw a flicker of doubt flash across her face. She had been expecting me to talk her out of it.
“Bernie is so mean,” she said.
“I know. She definitely can be.”
“I’m sick of it.”
“Me, too!”
“She can’t talk to people like that.”
“I agree.”
Clara’s eyes were filling up with tears. “I don’t even love her.”
“I think you do love her,” I said. “Otherwise she wouldn’t be able to upset you this much.”
Clara didn’t know what to do with that truth bomb, and for a moment she just glared at me and continued to produce tears that didn’t quite spill onto her cheeks.
“Just go home, Winnie,” she said. “Mind your own business.”
“You are my business, Clara. And I’m not going home without you.”
Here is where the dream departed from real life, because in the dream it started snowing, but the snow wasn’t snow, it was jasmine petals, and everything smelled beautiful and hypnotizing.
I caught a petal on my palm and closed my fingers around it.
I looked up and noticed, for the first time, a long, deep gash in the sky.
The petals were spilling out of the gash, floating down around us, quickly covering the street in a fragrant blanket of white.
“This is weird,” Clara said, sniffling.
“Come home, Clara,” I said, holding my hand out to her. “I can’t do this without you.”
“Do what?”
“I can’t fix this,” I said, pointing upward.
“But I don’t care about this,” she argued. “I care about Bernadette being a jerk.”
“She doesn’t mean to be,” I said. “She’ll apologize.”
“Will she never do it again?”
I thought of the glass slamming into the wall a few years from now, shattering into a million pieces, missing Clara’s head by such a slim margin.
“She’ll do it again,” I said. “She will definitely do it again.”
“Then why would I come home with you?”
“Because you love her. And she loves you. And we have to get home before this stuff drowns us, okay?”
Because the jasmine petals were up to our knees now, because I took a step toward Clara and it was hard to get my leg over it. Her suitcase was completely buried. She let it go and nodded.
“Okay, fine,” she said. “But I’m not talking to her for at least a week.”
“Very fair,” I said. “Make it two weeks.”
The petals were too high for Clara to wade through; I turned around and she climbed on piggyback.
It was ten times harder to move like this, but step by step we got closer to the house, step by step we got closer to home. The petals kept falling and the black tear kept getting bigger but I never stopped moving, not until we pulled open the front door and slipped inside.
Aunt Bea arrived late on Wednesday, and it started snowing sometime that night.
The walk with my mother, our conversation, and the dream with Clara stuck with me. I kept seeing echoes of jasmine petals threatening to swallow us whole.
On Thursday Aunt Bea slept late and the snow fell so quickly and so heavily that by midday, it was at two feet and quickly accumulating.
We spent hours sprawled around the living room, tending the fire, playing board games, drinking coffee and tea and hot chocolate and some truly disgusting smoothie Bernadette whipped up.
(“Oh, right, we have a blender,” Mom said, sounding genuinely surprised.)
In the evening Dad cooked dinner and Mom and Aunt Bea drank glasses of wine and occasionally “helped” (passed him the salt or refilled his glass).
In the living room, it was the five of us as it always had been: Bernie, Evelyn, me, Clara, Henry.
Girl, girl, girl, girl, ghost. If Mom and Dad and Bea noticed the five game pieces on the board, they didn’t mention it.
If they noticed the way one of the pieces (the hat) sometimes seemed to move of its own volition, they didn’t say anything.
If they noticed how one of us would occasionally talk to the empty space between Clara and Evelyn, wait for a response that never came, then burst into peals of laughter, they didn’t say anything.
But it was Christmas break and snowing and they were happy and preoccupied so most likely, they didn’t notice any of these things.
“Do you miss food?” Clara asked (she was currently dominating the game, owning multiple properties on every side of the board and occasionally counting her money aloud in a booming, irritating voice). “What was your favorite thing to eat?”
“Lasagna,” he said. “My mother made an excellent lasagna.”
“Did you have electricity?” she continued.
It was her turn, and she was taking a very long time deciding whether she wanted to buy another railroad (she owned two already and I owned a third; it had almost put me into bankruptcy but I was determined to stop her from becoming too powerful over our public transportation).
“Just missed it,” Henry said.
“What about toilets?”
“Yes, Clara,” Henry said with a smile. “We had toilets.”
“Thank god for that, at least.”
Bernadette’s phone chimed: a timer she had set for Clara’s move.
“I’ll buy it,” Clara announced. “I might as well. It’s becoming hard to find places to store all my money.”
“You are infuriating,” Evelyn declared.
“It’s all part of my strategy,” Clara said. “I’m embodying my role. I mean, did you ever meet a real estate tycoon who wasn’t infuriating?”
“Sustained,” Bernadette said, and handed Clara the card for Reading Railroad.
It was so normal.
It had been my entire life.
The five of us playing the same worn out, dingy board games.
The five of us being silly, being here, being together.
The five of us.
But soon …
“Are you not having fun?” Bernadette said, angling toward me. It was my turn, and I hadn’t moved a muscle. “Is it because you’re losing very terribly?”
“Is it because I’ve monopolized almost all forms of transportation?” Clara.
“Is it because you have to read Wuthering Heights for English over break and it’s the worst book ever written?” Evelyn.
“Is it because you thought I didn’t have toilets?” Henry.
“I liked Wuthering Heights,” Bernadette said, then tapped on her phone a few times. A moment later, “Wuthering Heights” by Kate Bush started playing on the stereo speakers.
Dad poked his head into the living room. “I love Kate Bush! Right on!”
Out the windows, I could still see the snow falling against the deep-blue blackness of the winter night.
On the stereo speakers, Kate Bush sang about wandering the moors at night.
Aunt Bea came into the living room then and I thought of Esme, all alone in Vermont, playing with her dolls in front of an unlit fireplace.
“Gosh, this snow,” Aunt Bea said, pausing by the wide front windows.
“And it’s not supposed to stop for days,” Dad replied, emerging from the kitchen looking slightly flushed now, from the heat or from the wine or both.
“Is the food ready yet, chef?” Aunt Bea asked, and Dad did a little flourish and bow and swept his arms toward the kitchen.
“Dinner is served,” he said dramatically, just as the lights flickered out.
Clara screamed, Evelyn gasped, Bernadette swore, and Aunt Bea drew in a sharp intake of breath. Mom came out from the kitchen a moment later, holding a candle in front of her face, shielding the flame with her hand.
“Be prepared,” she sang.
“Are there more of those?” Aunt Bea asked.
“A lot more,” Mom said. She brought the candle over to me as everyone else pushed into the kitchen, desperate for light. “Guard this flame well, for it is our only hope,” she said (she was a little drunk).
“What happens if it goes out?” I asked, taking it from her, playing along.
“Oh, gosh. We don’t want to think about that.”
She slipped back into the kitchen, leaving just Henry and me in the living room.
I could hear matches striking, the delicate whoosh of tiny flames catching. The kitchen glowed brighter and brighter with candlelight, and I moved to the window where Aunt Bea had just stood.
“I guess the game is over,” Henry said, a little sadly.
“Clara was crushing us, anyway.”
I moved the candle away from the window so I could see out and up. It was dark out, but the tear in the sky was darker, a clear outline against the sky. It was so big now that its edges almost reached the horizon. I was no expert on tears in the fabric of reality, but that didn’t seem good.
Henry moved to stand next to me. For a moment, the smell of jasmine was overwhelming. I closed my eyes and breathed it in.
With my eyes still closed, I said, “When are you going to do it?”
“I just want a little more time,” he said.
“I wish you didn’t have to.”
“I know.”
“We could find another way.”
“There’s no other way,” he said. Then, an afterthought: “I’m sorry.”
“When are you going to tell them?”
“Soon.”
I opened my eyes and turned around.
Aunt Bea was standing in the doorway of the room, holding a pillar candle, staring at me curiously.
“Talking to myself,” I said, a little too loudly.
“Sounded like a fascinating conversation,” she replied.
“Oh, you know.”
“I think maybe I don’t know,” she said, and I swore her eyes flickered over to Henry, and something flashed across her face—a memory, maybe, or some sort of recognition, or some sort of understanding.
“Come on,” I said. “Let’s go eat.”
“You would tell me, right?” she asked as I walked closer to her. “If something was really wrong? If you were in trouble? If you needed help?”
“Totally,” I said. “Of course.”
“The worst liar of the bunch,” she said, and gave a weary look into the living room before turning around and going back into the kitchen.
After dessert (Aunt Bea and Mom made sticky toffee pudding that was somehow both a little burnt and a little underdone) I was crawling out of my skin.
All I wanted to do was go for a nice, long, cold walk, but the snow was at least four feet high and still falling.
The farthest I got was the front door, pulling it open to let a sizable heap of snow fall in, soaking my feet and the stone tiles of the entryway.
My phone buzzed and I pulled it out of my pocket, thrilled to see it was a text from Maybe:
My grandma just said “Where do they think we’re going to put it all?”
I smiled. I wanted to meet her grandmother. I wanted to see where Maybe lived. I wanted this whole nightmare to be over.
I wrote her a reply:
Please tell her I will write a letter to the city weather committee immediately and bring her concerns to their attention.
Thank you. That’s a relief. Hope you’re having a good night, weather girl.
You too xx.
I closed the door and turned back to the living room.
Clara was reading her mythology book. Bernadette was nodding off in an armchair. Mom was putting away the abandoned board game. Aunt Bea was sitting on the floor in front of the fire, patiently waiting while our father showed her a very elaborate card trick.
“Oh, that’s not right,” he said. “Let me start over.”
Only Evelyn and Henry weren’t there, and I started the long journey upstairs to look for them, not liking how it felt to be apart from them. If I could lock everyone in a room, I would. If I could keep an eye on everyone forever, I would.
I found Evelyn in her bedroom. She had a small suitcase open on the floor and there were three piles on her bed, various clothes and belongings and knickknacks.
She didn’t hear me coming, and I stood in her doorway for a moment, watching her.
Henry wasn’t there, but I smelled jasmine, like I had just missed him.
“Marie Kondo?” I guessed, and she jumped a little and turned around.
“I didn’t hear you come up,” she said.
“Are you going somewhere?” I asked, nodding my head toward the suitcase.
She lowered her head and said, without looking at me, “No. I mean … No. This is just in case. Just in case we can’t fix it, and he can’t stay here, and I have to go back with him.”
“How does that make any sense, Evelyn? You went through twice and you ripped a hole in the sky. What would happen if you did it again? You’d destroy the entire city, probably.”
“I’m just planning for everything, okay?” she said. And it was so like her, so like my sister, to make sure she was ready for any possible outcome, even if one of the possible outcomes was leaving us forever.
“Where is he?”
“He went out. He doesn’t know I’m doing this.”
It was strange, that he could go out now. He could leave the house that had been his home-slash-prison-slash-afterlife for so many years.
I took a step into the room. The suitcase only had a few things in it. She had just started packing.
“Let me guess,” I said, pointing at the smallest pile on her bed (old paperback copy of Pride and Prejudice, dark-green clothbound journal, fancy fountain pen that had belonged to our grandmother).
“Yes.” I pointed to the next pile (small handwoven purse she’d bought in Mexico, collection of folded notes, hat our mother had knit for her).
“Maybe.” I pointed to the last pile, the biggest (selection of European coins, set of colored pencils and sketchpad, chunky plastic watch she had worn every day of third grade). “No.”
“I just don’t know what else to do, Winnie. We’re all just sitting around and waiting and meanwhile the tear is only getting bigger and nobody is coming up with any ideas of how to fix it.”
I know how to fix it, I wanted to say.
Henry told me how to fix it, and you’re not going to like it one bit.
“You told me you wouldn’t lie to me again,” she said, her voice quieter now, my own silence spreading out and filling up the room.
I didn’t answer. I couldn’t answer, I couldn’t think of anything else to say.
Eventually, she picked up a small stuffed animal from her bed. It was Roo, from Winnie the Pooh, complete with a powder-blue knit sweater that had his name embroidered on it in darker blue thread.
“Do you remember when we got this?” she asked.
“Of course. Disneyland.”
“You got Piglet. With the little scarf around his neck. Do you still have it?”
“Somewhere, sure.”
She held the small Roo tightly to her chest, closing her eyes, concentrating.
“What color was the scarf?” she asked, and I had to admit I didn’t remember.
She set Roo carefully down in the no pile, and that tiny action made me feel like when all of this was said and done, no matter where Evelyn ended up, we had really lost her for good.