Page 112 of Persephone's Curse
Did she know us before we wereus,before we were the Farthing sisters, before we were Bernadette and Evelyn and Winnie and Clara?
Does her daughter, Melinöe, 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 theattic, 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 sometimesknew.
“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 somethingelse(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, agrown-upseeing 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 smiledat 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.
