Page 24 of Persephone's Curse
“Why do you have to be like that?” I asked Clara.
“Like what?” she asked.
“So forthcoming.”
“I didn’t do anything!”
“It’s fine,” I said. “Forget it.”
She was pouting.
“Let’s all take a deep breath,” Evelyn said.
Clara took an exaggerated, rude inhale, and Evelyn actually laughed, which broke the tension. What brought the tension right back was a loud, shrill wail from the fourth floor.
“It sounds like she’s in pain,” Clara said, her eyes wide.
“She’s okay,” Evie said. “She’ll be okay.”
Another wail, followed by choked sobs. She had to have been crying really loudly for us to hear her all the way down here.
“Henry,” Evelyn said in a quiet voice.
And there he was, hardly more than an outline of a boy, standing in the middle of the kitchen.
“It’s so loud,” he said. Even his voice was thinner this far away from the attic.
In my sixteen and a half years of communing with ghosts, I’d learned that they really were quite tied to their own specific places, whether that was where they had died, where they were buried, or near something they had really, really loved in life (in the Met, there was a long-ago Farthing woman who stayed very close to a particular gold ring). But there were no other ghosts quite like Henry, not even my Aunt Esme, who could hold pretty reasonable conversations but never looked more solid than a wet paper towel.
“What’s happening?” Evelyn asked now. “Is she okay?”
Henry looked utterly out of his element, both being on the ground floor and trying to describe the familial drama that was now unfolding on the fourth floor.
“I don’t know,” he said. “She’s so upset. What happened?”
“She accidentally dropped a glass,” Clara explained, shooting me a quick look.
“And she just lost it,” Evelyn added. “She started screaming.”
“She’s still kind of screaming,” Henry said, looking upward, winking in and out of existence in a way that made me think he was popping back upstairs to check in on things. When he reappeared again, he took a staggered step backward and then sat down in one of the kitchen chairs. It struck me as odd, seeing him there, looking pale and strange under the bright light of the kitchen lights, fidgeting a bit, finally looking up and letting hiseyes land on Evelyn. How had I missed it before, the way he always found her in a crowd of Farthing sisters? How had I missed the way he never looked quite as alive as he looked when Evelyn was in the room?
She was leaning against the kitchen counter now, and as both Henry and I looked, she reached up and absentmindedly began unraveling her hair, which she had French braided that morning. Her fingers worked quickly, automatically, and soon her long hair hung in crimped curtains over her shoulders.
“I’m exhausted,” she said, but Clara was the only one who heard her words. Henry and I were both transfixed by the waves of dirty blond. Evelyn’s hair was darker than Clara’s and somehow right now, it seemed darker still. She was almost a stranger to us. We couldn’t take our eyes off her, and I noticed then, by the way the kitchen light hit her face, that she’d developed dark, purplish shadows underneath her eyes. How long had those been there? How unobservant had I become that I kept seeing things now that I’d never seen before?
“Me, too,” Clara said.
“What?” Henry asked.
“Me, too,” Clara repeated. “Evelyn said she was tired. I said, ‘Me, too.’”
“Right,” Henry said. “Right.”
We went into the living room. Evelyn got a board game out from the cupboard that all of us knew we weren’t going to play. It was just a prop of some sorts; if someone came downstairs, we could pretend that we weren’t devoting every ounce of our energy to the act of eavesdropping.
Clara sat on the floor next to Evie and the two of them set it up. Monopoly. They divvied out the money. They assigned each of us a pawn. They laid out the property cards by color. They set out the Community Chest and Chance cards in two neat piles. They put the two die in the middle of the board. With nothing else to do, Clara fidgeted, taking the pewter dog pawn and prancing him around the edges of the board. Evelyn was perfectly still. A statue with wavy hair.
“This is miserable,” I said.
