Chapter XIII #2
He was walking with a group of other people, some clergy, some not, and when he saw me, he smiled. A really big, genuine smile. And when no one was looking, he raised an index finger to his lips. Shh.
It was our little secret, that day in the crypt.
I smiled back at him and nodded.
What happened in the weeks that followed:
Our parents had, of course, noticed a shift in everyone’s mood, and while they might have written it off had it been just me or Bernadette or Evelyn, they looked to Clara as their canary in the coal mine, as their truest indicator that something was really, actually wrong.
Not for the first time in our collective lives, they thought maybe we’d had a sort of folie à deux, but not madness this time, rather, a seasonal affective depression.
It had been a very cold winter.
We were prone to fits of crying, fits of silence, fits of staring off into space at nothing.
I sometimes caught our mother looking at one of us, a perplexed expression on her face, perhaps wondering if Melinoe was exacting some revenge on our family, perhaps wondering why she was being spared.
I wore Bernadette’s old college sweatshirt every day.
I spent long hours staring out of windows, watching the snow fall steadily, burying all signs of life.
Sometimes I would smell jasmine, and I would turn around quickly, trying to catch sight of him, convinced he had found his way back to us.
Sometimes I closed my eyes and when I opened them, I would be, for a moment, among the stars, pinned across the sky like our Henry.
Clara spent hours in front of empty canvasses, holding a brush, never quite managing to paint.
Bernadette had started reading voraciously, an obsessive, frantic hobby. She ate breakfast behind a book, finished the last page of one and transitioned seamlessly into the first page of another, went days without speaking to anyone who wasn’t made of ink.
It wasn’t unusual to find Evelyn crying in strange places. Standing in the pantry. In the downstairs hallway. In the bathroom, sobbing so hard she made herself dry heave.
“All right,” my mother said at dinner, one of our last nights of Christmas break. “What is going on? Everyone is walking around like someone died.”
It was an unfortunate choice of words.
Evelyn burst into tears at the table. Clara, next to her, eyes widening with sudden fear, unsure of what else to do, wrapped her tiny arms around Evelyn’s shoulders. Bernadette covered her face with her hands.
My mother looked to me, and I could practically hear the unspoken question: Status report?
How could I possibly begin to sum up what had happened?
What answer could I possibly give that might satisfy them without raising too many questions, without giving too much away?
“Bernadette has decided to go back to school,” I finally said, and Bernadette uncovered her face and looked at me. “In Vermont. With Aunt Bea. And we’re all just really going to miss her.”
“Is that true, Bernie?” Dad said, brightening. “Oh, honey, that’s great.”
“It’s true,” Bernadette confirmed.
“And Evelyn has accepted a spot at the music conservatory,” I continued. “In Boston. She starts in the fall. And we’re really going to miss her, too.”
“Evelyn,” Mom said. “Oh, sweetheart, that’s magnificent.”
“I’m not going anywhere,” Clara said helpfully.
“Or me,” I said. “Not yet.”
“It’s a lot of changes,” Mom said, nodding her head, somehow satisfied with these answers. “It’s a lot of changes and you’re all just processing.”
“Yes,” I agreed. “We’re processing.”
“I think it’s fantastic,” Dad said, and raised his wineglass. “Cheers to my beautiful, bright young women. I’m so proud of all of you.”
“Persephone would be proud, too,” Mom added, winking, raising her own wineglass.
What happened in the months that followed:
I turned seventeen.
I blew out birthday candles on cupcakes and Evelyn put on the bravest face she’d managed in months, and all of us tried to be normal, at least for one night.
It was the first day of spring.
Seventeen years ago, on the night I was born, my parents watched the full moon through the hospital window and my mother declared, “For my next one, I’m doing it at home.” (Okay, so maybe Clara had been a distant thought.)
“Let’s focus on this one,” my father said.
“Trust me, I’m focused,” she replied. “And in a lot of pain.”
My father brought her more ice chips.
It was the very tail end of winter, and the past two weeks had brought hope that the world would not always remain such a cold, uninhabitable hellscape.
Persephone was returning from the Underworld, ushering in the spring.
In the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, the magnolias were having their moment: Yulan magnolia, saucer magnolia, star magnolia. The hellebore was blooming alongside its unfortunately named cousin, the stinking hellebore. The daffodils, the Korean rhododendron, the Japanese quince.
The winter honeysuckle. The winter aconite. The buttercup winter hazel.
The week before, during a particularly warm afternoon, our parents brought my sisters (and me, technically), to the gardens and our mother noted all the flowers with the word winter in their name.
It was our grandmother’s name, our mother’s mother, the original owner of Evelyn’s watch.
Another Farthing woman; another Farthing ghost. Our father squeezed our mother’s hand in front of all these winter flowers and they remembered her.
Then an old lady, passing by, remarked to my mother, “How are you even standing at this point, you’re as big as a house!” which kind of dampened the mood, and they all had lunch and went home.
“Remember that horrible lady at the gardens,” my mother said now, in the hospital, about two hours away from delivery.
“You can’t let people like that stay with you,” my father said. “Let’s remember the flowers, instead.”
“You try staying Zen with contractions,” she replied sulkily, but even so, she closed her eyes and remembered the flowers and then she knew what they would name me, just moments before my father arrived at the exact same conclusion.
And so I had been born on the vernal equinox and my parents had named me Winter, after a Farthing woman whose ghost I would never see again.
And now winter was officially over, behind us, and I felt a certain sense of relief at that.
It had been a long winter, to say the least.
It had been the longest winter of my life.
And now, on the night of my seventeenth birthday (the age Henry was when he died, the age Evelyn was when she realized she was in love with a ghost), I couldn’t sleep.
The moon was big tonight, it would be full in a few days, and the moonlight came through my window at the perfect angle, falling across my pillow, landing squarely in my eyes.
No matter how I adjusted the curtains or threw an arm over my face, it somehow reached me, turning impossible corners and penetrating what I swore was, just the other night, light-blocking fabric.
I felt dizzy.
I felt like …
Like it was Henry.
The moonlight was Henry.
Coming into my bedroom to wish me a happy birthday, to tell me everything was okay, he was okay, we would be okay.
That was perhaps the silliest thought I’d had in a long time, but it was also comforting, and before I knew what I was doing, I got out of bed and tiptoed out of my room, letting the thought guide me.
Clara’s light was still on, but I was quiet enough as I crept past her door that I didn’t think she heard me.
I walked down the stairs to the first floor, navigating my way through the living room back to the kitchen, to the wall of windows and the back door that led to the stairs and the backyard.
Despite it being spring now, it was a chilly night, and I was shivering by the time I reached the jasmine bushes, still dormant, but bound to come alive now that Persephone had returned.
I felt closer to Henry here, where his body was buried, somewhere underneath my feet, resting in the cold earth for the past hundred-odd years.
I felt closer to Henry outside, where the gash in the sky above me was covered by him, made of him, him.
Outside, here, in the backyard, he was above and below me.
He had never missed one of my birthdays before.
And I knew he was here now, all around me.
I knelt on the ground, putting my hand on the earth and forcing my fingers not to recoil at how cold it was. I thought of Henry’s bones, of my own bones, of all the bones that had ever been inside all of the people who had ever lived.
I squeezed my hand into a fist and knocked my knuckles against the ground just like Henry had knocked against the closet door as he fell in love with my sister, night after night after night over the course of her entire, sweet lifetime.
That part I understood. It was easy to fall in love with Evelyn.
“Henry,” I whispered, directing my words down, down, down, through the ground, through stones and insects and whatever else made up the Manhattan dirt.
Then I pointed my face to the sky and, for good measure, said his name again, this time sending my voice upward, covering all my bases.
“I miss you,” I said. “Winter is over.”
The days would get warmer now. It wouldn’t snow again. We might still have the occasional morning frost, but the sun didn’t have to work so hard to come out from behind the clouds, and most days we could get away with a T-shirt or a long skirt, sans tights.
The city would wake up, shake off its winter doldrums, stretch its limbs.
The Farthing girls would continue.
Thanks to Henry.
I was still looking up at the sky.
I could see the outline of the black tear, where it used to be before Henry fixed it.
I would always be able to see it, I knew; my sisters and I would always be able to tell where it was. Where he was.
I stood up again and closed my eyes. I was finally getting tired. I thought I might actually be able to fall asleep.
“Anyway,” I said, my eyes still closed, my face still turned up to the sky. “I just wanted to say hi. So—hi.”
I opened my eyes.
To the right of the moon, there were two stars.
If I suspended disbelief, if I squinted, if I used all my powers of wishful thinking, I could almost pretend they were Henry’s eyes.
And I could almost pretend that one of them winked at me.
That one of them said, “Happy birthday, Winter.”
That one of them said, “I miss you, too.”