Page 101 of Persephone's Curse
“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 ablender,” 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 boardand 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 whowasn’tinfuriating?”
