Chapter XII #3
The black tear took up the entire sky now.
It was blacker than the sky had ever been, and devoid of stars, and echoing and cavernous and horrible.
It pulsed down on top of us, sending waves of something we could feel in our fingertips.
It would swallow the entire house, just like Henry had said.
It would swallow all of us. We couldn’t wait any longer.
Henry stepped into the circle and stood before Evelyn.
“No, Henry,” she said, her voice a little more than a whisper.
“I’m sorry, Evie,” he whispered back, and raised his free hand and brushed her hair with the back of his knuckles. “It’s the only way.”
“You were mine,” she said, her voice small and fragile. “You were mine.”
“I’m still yours.”
Henry dropped her hand, moved to Clara, who was openly weeping, her small shoulders shaking.
“I love you, okay?” he said, and pulled her into a hug.
“I’m going to miss when you would sit and watch me paint,” she sobbed.
“I will always watch you paint,” he said. “Always.”
She pulled away then and looked up at him, her eyes panicked. “But I can’t paint anymore. What if I never paint again?”
“When this is over, you’ll paint again. As soon as this is over.”
“You promise?”
“I promise.”
He turned to Bernadette next. She stood tall and unwavering, like a sentinel watching us all, the older sister in her age-old role of strength. She had jasmine flowers caught in her short hair.
“Remember the magpies,” he said, a reference I did not get, a secret joke between them.
“I’ll always count them,” Bernadette said, her words a vow.
They hugged for a long time, and then Henry turned to me, and I tried not to let my knees buckle.
“Are you almost ready?” he asked.
I nodded.
Because somehow, in the shower of the jasmine petals, in the circle with my sisters, somehow, without knowing how, I knew what to do. I knew what to sacrifice, what to give up.
I had always been the only one of us who could see the other ghosts.
Sometimes I had liked it, sometimes I had hated it, sometimes it had made me feel alone in a way I couldn’t really describe. But it had always been mine. My connection to her, to them, to Persephone and Melinoe.
Henry hugged me—still such a new, weird feeling, that he could hug us—and the smell of jasmine surrounded me, like a blanket, and the feel of Henry’s arms around me, well, they weren’t the arms of a dead boy.
He had come back to life in that moment.
He had come back to life before dying all over again.
When he let me go, I felt colder than I had before, and I couldn’t watch as he stepped back to Evelyn again.
The three of us, Clara, Bernadette, and me, we stepped a few feet away from them, so we couldn’t hear what they said, so we wouldn’t intrude on their privacy.
We held hands.
We put our foreheads together, leaning into each other.
Clara was still crying. We put our arms around her shoulders. We closed our eyes.
Then I felt a hand on my arm and Henry pulled me gently away from my sisters. Bernadette and Clara drew Evelyn in between them.
“I’m not really sure what to do,” I said.
“Winnie, you’ve always known exactly what to do,” he replied. “Even if your execution is a bit hit or miss.”
He smiled and I smiled and how could I possibly be smiling here, at the end of the world? At the end of Henry.
“Will it come back? Like with Clara?” I asked. “Will I see them anymore?”
“No,” he said, shaking his head. “No, I don’t think so.”
My mother’s words came back to me then:
You’re always exactly where you’re supposed to be. And you keep everyone together.
Is that what I had done, with all the Farthing ghosts? Had I kept us all together without even really meaning to?
Would I miss them, the ghostly strangers I passed on my nighttime walks, the Farthing women who had come before me?
Would I miss Esme?
“You’re releasing them,” Henry continued. “All the Farthings. Esme. And me. You’re releasing all of us.”
“And that’s okay?” I asked. “You think they will want that?”
“Yes,” he said. “I know they will.”
“But you?”
“Well, that’s a bit more complicated,” he said, and his smile turned sad, and he took my hand and held it between us.
“I don’t know how,” I said.
“You do,” he assured me. “You’ll find it.”
I closed my eyes.
I remembered Henry watching Clara paint on a thousand different nights, listening to Evelyn play the piano, sitting quietly as Bernadette sat and journaled, occasionally showing him something she had written, making him laugh or grow serious or shake his head in disbelief.
Henry reciting silly poems to make me laugh.
Henry appearing out of nowhere, scaring me to death. Henry, Henry, Henry.
And he was right.
I did find it.
The thing inside of me that let me see them all, the same thing that kept them here. And I could release it, release them. I had that power, inside me, that power over them, that power for them. I could open a door, raise the curtains, set everything right.
I opened my eyes before I did it. Just to see him one last time, our ghost, our Henry.
Then I let go of his hand and set him free.
The light, when it came, was so bright I couldn’t understand it.
It burned through my closed eyes, a hot, warm, bright light that pulsed and thrummed, that contained music and felt like static in my brain. The whole city was going to see that light. The whole city would know about Henry.
I found out later that the light did touch everything, sweeping down alleyways and snaking down avenues and crawling through open doorways and windows.
The news would write about it.
MYSTERIOUS LIGHT BAFFLES CITY OFFICIALS
brIGHT FLASH OF LIGHT LASTS TEN SECONDS BEFORE DISAPPEARING
DID ALIENS VISIT US ON CHRISTMAS?
But the light was Henry, somehow. Henry expanding, Henry releasing.
The light was Henry, growing, stretching, building, soaring, floating, rising.
The light was Henry, and it grew wider and thinned out to cover the tear in the sky perfectly, blending in so seamlessly that no one ever noticed it.
Except us.
We noticed it.
Every time I looked up, I could see it.
The thinnest, subtlest whisper of gold.
Like the Japanese art of kintsugi.
Like anything torn apart and glued carefully, lovingly back together.
Delicate stitches along the seam of a beloved dress.
A stuffed animal hugged every night for years and years until the stuffing starts to leak out of its ear and your mom fixes it, mends it, makes it good as new again.
Your grandmother’s gold watch, once shut in a car door, glass replaced, worn forever and ever on the wrists of one sister, then another.
An eye blackened by a fist, hair tangled in gum and cut short to grow again, a broken heart, a broken piano string, a canvas with one black gash across the perfect winter sky, a journal stuffed with so many thoughts, so many words, that it becomes exponentially heavier than when you bought it.
And then Henry.
Henry, above us.
Henry, saving us.
Henry, always, always with us.
The brightest light I had ever seen.
A closet door.
A thousand games of Monopoly.
Our mother, asking who Henry was.
The rich, syrupy smell of jasmine.
And then the light went out.