Epilogue
So what, then, becomes of the Farthing sisters?
What becomes of the children of the in-between, of the great-great-great-great-great-great-grandchildren of the gods?
Well, we continue, of course.
We persevere.
We practice our gifts, we find new gifts, we go forth into the world and make a life for ourselves.
In a lot of ways, we are more fortunate than Persephone, because we are bound to no one, to nowhere, to nothing.
We can change our minds a hundred times.
We can try one college, drop out, try another, move to Vermont, eat croissants every single morning for breakfast, spend hours in coffee shops drinking lattes and missing our sisters and writing down our story while it is still fresh in our memory.
We can take art history classes and go to therapy and heal generational trauma from a generation that most people think only existed in myth.
But what is myth, anyway, if not stories?
And what are stories if not recounts of our history? And no matter how embellished, no matter how many times a story is told and retold, there is always truth there. There is always some basis in reality.
So, yes, the Farthing sisters are real.
The Farthing sisters continue.
And we are just fine.
I turned eighteen.
It had been a mild winter, much milder than last winter, and Mom insisted on an afternoon garden party, setting up a long table in the backyard and crossing her fingers that the weather would hold.
I submitted my very short guest list. Bernadette and Aunt Bea drove down from Vermont.
Evelyn took the train from Boston. Maybe rang the front doorbell around three; she wore a long-sleeved floral dress and her floral Doc Martens Clara loved so much and she had put her hair into twin braids.
“Oh, man,” I said when I pulled the door open. “You look so beautiful.”
“Happy birthday, ghost girl,” she said, and held out a small package, wrapped sloppily but perfectly in dark-purple paper.
“I said if you brought a gift, you wouldn’t be allowed inside.”
“I’m a rebel. Now open it!” she said, bouncing on her heels in excitement.
It was always best not to argue with Maybe, especially when it came to gift-giving, which she took very seriously and was very good at.
I tore off the paper to reveal a square jewelry box. “Maybe … I can already tell that this is too much…”
“You can tell nothing of the sort,” she said, still bouncing.
I opened the box and actually gasped.
Sitting inside was a beautiful silver cuff bracelet with a quarter-sized blue stone. The stone was a soft, delicate blue-gray and it sparkled in the light of the small foyer chandelier.
“Oh my gosh…”
“I had it made for you,” she said. “By my friend, the jeweler. I just couldn’t find anything that was perfect, and I couldn’t find anything that was you enough, so I asked her to—”
I cut her off with a kiss, then pulled away and carefully put the bracelet on my wrist. “I love it.”
“The stone is celestine,” she said. “To strengthen communication with ethereal beings.”
“Oh…” I said, looking at her, feeling tears well up in my eyes.
“I know how much you talk to him,” she said. “I just thought … Well, this couldn’t hurt, you know? Maybe give things a little boost.”
“It’s perfect…”
“I just love you,” she whispered.
It wasn’t the first time she had told me she loved me, but each time was a tiny thrill, and each time was unbelievable in its own way, and each time made me pause and close my eyes and wonder how I had gotten so lucky.
“I love you, too,” I said. “Thank you.”
We held hands as we walked through the house and out to the backyard, where my sisters and parents and Aunt Bea were already sitting around the long table, drinking prosecco (Dad, Mom, Aunt Bea, and finally, to her immense pleasure, Bernadette) and eating finger sandwiches Dad had meticulously put together from classic British recipes.
“Maybe!” Mom exclaimed, standing up when she saw us approaching. “My goodness, you look like a little spring flower.”
“Oh, Anastasia,” Maybe said with a wave of her hand, affecting an English accent. “This setup is absolutely divine.”
“You’re a nut,” Dad said, hugging Maybe. Then, winking at me over her shoulder, he added, “Just like my daughter.”
It was so rare, these days, that we were all together. It was all I had wanted for my birthday. It was all I ever wanted.
We ate about a hundred finger sandwiches each, snuck sips of prosecco, laughed, talked, cried happy tears.
The jasmine had bloomed early that year, and every time the wind blew, I smelled Henry.
And every time the wind blew, I caught Evelyn’s eye, and she smiled at me so sadly and so sweetly and I knew we were both thinking of him.
After dinner, Mom and Aunt Bea lugged out a cake they had made themselves—well, really, it was two cakes, one in the shape of the number one and the other a number eight. They put the two plates on the table backward and Dad gasped and said, “You’re eighty-one?? Man, I feel old.”
Then Bernadette laughed and switched the plates and Clara lit the candles, one on each, and everyone instructed me to make a wish.
The obvious choices danced through my head (I wish Henry was still here, I wish my sisters and I would always be together, I wish Maybe doesn’t wake up one day and realize I am not as cool as I’ve managed to trick her into thinking I am), but in the end I went with a classic:
I wish I always feel as happy as I do right now.
It was only after I had blown out the candles, after Maybe had rested her hand on my leg, after everyone had eaten their fill of cake and my sisters had begun to clear the dirty plates away, that I realized it was true.
I was happy.
We were happy.
Despite everything, we really were.
Once early evening hit, the weather turned chillier, and we moved inside to open presents, spreading ourselves out in the living room.
Aunt Bea and Maybe shared the love seat and I heard Aunt Bea, working on her fourth or fifth glass of prosecco, lean close to Maybe and say, “Have I ever told you that Farthing girls are descended from Persephone?”
“Have I ever told you that I once held a séance in this very house?” Maybe countered.
“Gosh, I like you,” Aunt Bea said, and wrapped her arm around my very cute girlfriend.
The first present I unwrapped was from Mom, who affected a wise-ass smirk as I pulled a sweatshirt from Hunter College out of the gift bag. It was the school I was attending in the fall. (I had indeed kept in touch with Professor Natalie Beard.)
“You will burn the other one,” Mom said, referring to the sweatshirt from Bernadette’s old college, which I wasn’t currently wearing and—to be fair to me—usually only wore around the house now.
“Point taken,” I said, hugging the sweatshirt to my chest.
Dad, notoriously bad at gifts but incredibly well-meaning, had gotten me a gift card to the Hunter College co-op.
“For your books,” he explained helpfully.
“Oh, and this is probably silly, but—” He tossed me a small, unwrapped box: a replica set of the illuminated fifteenth-century playing cards he always went to see at the Cloisters.
“Dad … these are perfect,” I said.
“Who knows the next time we’ll be able to go together,” he said, trying to keep his voice light but clearly beginning to tear up. I got up from my seat and went and hugged him.
“I’ll be about a twenty-minute bus ride away, Dad,” I said.
“I know, I know,” he said.
“A forty-minute walk, if it’s nice out.”
“I do love walking,” he said, sniffling loudly in my ear.
“I know you do,” I said. “Thank you for the cards. I love them.”
“I love you. I’m so proud of you.”
“Keep it together, waterworks.”
I gave him a kiss on the cheek and went back to my seat.
Aunt Bea had gotten me an incredible vintage Coach messenger bag, big enough for my laptop and a few textbooks.
“I picked it out,” Bernadette fake-whispered, and Aunt Bea elbowed her in the side and said, “Happy birthday, honey.”
Bernadette’s present was next, and it made my breath hitch in my throat: it was a red leather journal, just like the one she had used, over a year ago, to close the doorway that Persephone had opened all those years ago.
“It helps,” she said. “To write it down. That’s what I’m doing, you know?”
Then Evelyn handed me a small, thin box, and I opened it to find a beautiful silver fountain pen. She smiled and tilted her head in Bernadette’s direction. “We coordinated,” she said.
“This is so lovely,” I said, uncapping the pen to reveal a delicate, gold-plated nib.
“There’s a bottle of ink upstairs, too,” Evelyn said. “I forgot to wrap it.”
“It’s green,” Bernadette added. “Hunter green. Get it?”
“Thank you, guys,” I said. “This is really, really nice.”
“My turn!” Clara exclaimed, and from behind the couch, she pulled a flat package, about as long as her torso.
I knew what it was before I even touched it. “Clara…”
Out of everyone, Clara’s ability to paint had taken the longest to come back.
For months, she sat in front of empty canvasses, holding her paintbrush so hopefully, so longingly, but she couldn’t make so much as a single stroke.
Evelyn began to play the piano again, Bernadette went back to journaling every morning, but Clara was somehow left behind.
I took the package from Clara when she held it out to me. “Is this…”
“The first thing I’ve actually finished in a year,” Clara confirmed. Then, with a wink: “It came to me in a dream.”
I took the longest to open Clara’s gift, because my fingers were shaking and kept slipping off the wrapping paper. When I finally got the last strip of paper off the canvas, I closed my eyes, waiting a moment before I opened them and looked at the canvas.
The first thing I noticed were the jasmine flowers.
There were hundreds of them, painstakingly rendered with the most delicate of brushes, filling the bottom half of the canvas and practically spilling over its edges. They were so realistic and so beautiful that I swore I could smell them.
It was our backyard, of course, similar in composition to the painting Clara had destroyed but more zoomed in, cutting out the bench and focusing only on the jasmine bushes and the sky above them, where Clara had painted the tear, then painted a shimmer of gold around the edges.
Henry, holding up the universe.
Henry, always above us.
“Clara, it’s so…”
But I couldn’t get the words out.
And that’s when I noticed us, the four of us, in the bottom left corner of the canvas, just our hands, peeking through the branches of the jasmine bush, one of us holding a flower, two of us holding hands, one of us wearing a dainty gold wristwatch …
The five of us, as we had always been.
Girl, girl, girl, girl, ghost.
Later, we stood in front of the jasmine bushes, just like in Clara’s new painting.
Maybe had gone home and Mom and Dad and Aunt Bea were inside, and it was just the four of us, now, just the Farthing girls, and the smell of jasmine all around us and the bones of a boy we had loved below us and a perfect, chilly blue sky above us.
A perfect, chilly blue sky with one almost imperceptible blemish.
We might have been standing in one of Persephone’s footsteps even now, in a place she had stood hundreds of years ago, in a place she had knelt down, to strike her shovel against the earth, to plant the jasmine bushes that exploded every spring, announcing her return.
I reached out to touch one of the flowers and it fell off in my hand, a tiny blessing, a tiny hello from a goddess aunt who had really thrown us all for a loop, who had blessed us all, in a way, but also cursed us all in a way, too.
“I wish I could talk to her,” Clara said, reaching out to touch the flower in my palm. “Just talk to her. I have so many questions. I have a list of questions. Should I go get it?”
“Not just yet,” Evelyn said. “Let’s enjoy this moment. Just for a little bit. It’s really been such a beautiful day.”
Clara let her hand fall and I closed my own fingers in a gentle fist around the flower.
Later, I would put it on my bedside table so I could fall asleep with the smell of jasmine, with the smell of Henry. A talisman for good dreams, I hoped.
We were all quiet now, all reading each other’s thoughts, dipping into each other’s memories, the shared knowledge of sisters that would forever connect us.
I looked around at them all and smiled and said, “How lucky are we, kids?” and Bernadette laughed, and Clara snorted, and Evelyn took my free hand.
And we were.
I knew that now.
We really, really were.