Page 119 of Persephone's Curse
“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 loveyou. 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.
