Chapter XIII
XIII
Does Persephone know intimately every soul that has ever passed through her kingdom, every baby yet to be born, every old and weary traveler ready for a rest before they are put back in the game?
Did she know us before we were us, before we were the Farthing sisters, before we were Bernadette and Evelyn and Winnie and Clara?
Does her daughter, Melinoe, handpick the ghosts that will return to Earth as people, as babies again?
If so, what made her put the four of us together? (Even though I am glad she did, grateful she did, so, so happy she did.)
But was it chance or was it something deeper than that? Something predetermined, something eternal and ageless and immutable?
When I am with my sisters, when we are all together, when the room feels too small to contain all of us—
Well I have to imagine it is the latter.
Our aunt has only seen the ghost once.
On the night I was born, Bernadette was four and Evelyn was two and Clara wasn’t even a distant thought on the minds of a single human in the world.
Isn’t that weird, how humans don’t exist and then do, how life is created out of a few small building blocks, how it grows and grows and grows until it is a full person who likes to make friendship bracelets and paint and dreams of taking a gap year and has more financial stability than most fifty-year-old men I’ve met?
On the night I was born, my parents didn’t see a ghost because they’d gone to a hospital to have me.
And there was no possible way any of us could remember this, certainly not me, just a few minutes old at the time and not even there with my sisters, but anyway, here it is:
Aunt Bea came down from Vermont and stayed with Evelyn and Bernadette in our brownstone.
She made omelets for dinner. She let my sisters play in the bathtub until the water was cool and all the bubbles had popped.
She dressed them in pajamas and brushed teeth and brought them to Bernadette’s bedroom, which back then wasn’t in the attic, it was where my future bedroom would be.
Evelyn’s bedroom was where Clara’s would be.
Nobody bunked with a ghost then; there would be no closet-knocking for some years, yet.
Evelyn and Bernadette were both tucked into Bernie’s bed, a sleepover for a special occasion.
Aunt Bea was weaseled into reading far too many books, and when my sisters finally fell asleep, her voice was hoarse and she was tired and all she wanted in the world was a cup of tea.
She switched on Bernadette’s nightlight and left the door open a crack and walked to the stairs that led down to the second floor.
She paused at the top, her hand on the banister, something making her pause.
She turned around and looked up the stairs that led to the attic, which back then held a guest bedroom and a catchall room—catching everything from a broken sewing machine to a large amount of mostly unused ski equipment to a set of dumbbells to a myriad of board games to an old bike with flat tires and many, many plastic totes full of infant clothes that had once belonged to my sisters and would soon be mine.
And a ghost.
The catchall room had a ghost.
He was a shy ghost, a sweet ghost, a lonely ghost.
He hadn’t quite befriended the young souls who lived in the house with him yet, but he watched them from afar as they learned to walk, learned to talk, learned to play, learned to laugh.
He watched them from afar as they multiplied.
He knew them intimately, and occasionally he would show himself to them and he would wave and he would delight in their manic giggles, in their squeals of happiness.
Even then, before they knew his name, they loved him. How could you not love Henry?
But back to Aunt Bea, paused in between stairwells, looking up into the darkness. It was a little creepy, how dark it was on the fourth floor, how the stairs stretched up into nothingness, disappeared into shadow.
But Aunt Bea was a fan of creepy things, and something was telling her to go up there, and something was telling her not to turn on the light, and if there was one thing about our aunt, it was that she always listened to those voices in the back of her head, she always listened to those little instincts that told her what to do, those whispered messages from Persephone (or from her daughter).
So she went up.
It was lighter in the attic; there was a full moon the night I was born, and it shone through the windows, and it lit up the space in a warm, yellow glow, and it wrapped itself around Aunt Bea’s body, and it made her feel safe and protected.
Remember, Aunt Bea lived with a ghost, too, and though I don’t think she ever saw her little sister the way I did, I knew she sometimes caught movement out of the corner of her eye, I knew she sometimes heard little ghostly footsteps on the hardwood floor, I knew she sometimes knew.
“Is someone up here?” she said, quietly, hopefully, and there was the tiniest noise from the doorway of the catchall room, a noise that would have scared the pants off anyone else in the world but which invigorated Aunt Bea, and she turned again, her heart racing, her senses tingling, and there he was—our Henry.
“Oh,” she said. “You’re something else.”
And he was, wasn’t he?
He was both something else (unique, unusual, set apart from the crowd) and something else (not a human, not alive, not really meant to be here on this celestial plane at all).
“You can see me?” Henry asked—a somewhat stereotypical response for a ghost, but he had never been seen by a grown-up before, and he was very young at this point, just a boy, hardly older than Bernadette herself.
He was just getting used to Bernie and Evelyn seeing him, and it thrilled him and scared him all at once, but this, a grown-up seeing him, after he had spent so long in this house without anyone at all to watch over him, well … This was almost too much.
Aunt Bea, sensing all of this, sensing everything in the entire world, knelt on the floor.
She put her hands on her thighs and smiled at the little ghost boy.
In that moment, for whatever reason, because of her ancestry, perhaps, because of all of our ancestries, she knew him intimately.
She could sense his loneliness. She could see his life with us (maybe not all the details, but the general gist), and, most importantly, she could see the end of it.
The end of everything. Henry saving us, saving the world. This was a very important ghost.
“You’re so brave,” she said to him then, and Henry, having of course no idea what she was talking about, nevertheless liked this immensely. A strange lady comes into your attic and calls you brave, well, he about fell in love with her.
He gave a little half-shrug, made a noncommittal sort of grunting sound, then, overwhelmed with happiness and peace and the distinct joy of being perceived, disappeared.
She never saw him again.
And then, Christmas Day, almost seventeen years later.
This is what happened in the immediate aftermath:
Our mother, arriving home just as we were leading Evelyn up the first flight of stairs to our attic respite, each of us holding a different part of her, guiding her forward as gently as we could, said, “Why do I suddenly feel so much lighter?”
I made new cups of tea, reheating the water in the kettle, taking the little circular tray down from the cabinet so I could carry them all upstairs at once.
We sat on the floor in the attic, so quiet that we could hear the clock chime midnight all the way downstairs in the living room.
Clara glanced at our grandmother’s gold watch and frowned slightly. The time was off. She adjusted the delicate gold crown until she was satisfied, then she stared at it for another moment, unclasped it from her wrist, and turned to Evelyn, who sat close beside her.
Evelyn did not say a word, did not move her eyes to meet Clara’s gaze, but she did hold her hand out, and Clara carefully placed the watch back on Evelyn’s wrist and clasped it shut.
Evelyn covered the watch with her other hand, holding it, feeling the cool metal against her skin once again.
Aunt Bea came upstairs to say good night.
We hadn’t talked for so long, it was startling to hear her voice, even if she did whisper (sensing the mood called for it).
“Everyone still awake up here?”
She walked to the window, which we had opened, despite the cold winter air. To let in the smell of jasmine. As much of it as we could get.
There was no way she could see the once-black-slash-now-mended, but she looked up at the sky for a long time, then turned back to us.
“Good night, my little demigods,” she said.
What happened in the days that followed:
Aunt Bea went back to Vermont.
She called me on a Saturday afternoon. I had gone back to the churchyard. I answered the phone amongst the graves.
“It feels like something has happened,” she said. “It feels like something is different.”
“How do you mean?” I asked. Perhaps if one thing had changed about me in the last few months, it was that I had become a slightly better liar.
“My house feels different,” Aunt Bea said. “Your house felt different, too.”
“I hadn’t noticed.”
“Oh, you noticed. All you girls noticed.”
“Well, I don’t know about that.”
“Emptier,” Aunt Bea said. “That’s what my house feels like. Like it’s emptier.”
Esme, playing dolls in front of the fireplace.
Henry, introducing himself to our mother.
Every Farthing ghost I had ever seen, gone now, released, never to return.
“Is it okay?” Aunt Bea asked when it became clear I wasn’t going to be responding. “Is it going to be okay, Winnie?”
“Yes,” I said, and at least I didn’t think I was lying now. At least I thought I meant it. “Yes, it’s going to be okay.”
We hung up. I wandered the paths of the churchyard for a long time.
I saw the priest.