Page 4 of Persephone's Curse
“Fuck,Winnie,” she said.
“What happened?”
“I couldn’t do it anymore.”
“Dowhatanymore?”
“College. Life. My part-time job at the fucking bookstore. Any of it. Mom and Dad are really gone? Jesus, that’s a relief.”
The water in the electric kettle boiled and I poured some into each of the mugs. Bernadette took the one I knew she’d take, the one with a chip on the rim and faded photos of puppies all around it. She held it in her hands and looked at me so deeply it made my stomach twitch.
“I missed you,” she said again.
“Are you okay?”
“I’ll be okay now. I just… I had to come home.”
“Are you going back?”
“No,” she said, blowing into her mug. “Fuck no.”
She took a sip, but it was still too hot, so she made a face and put the mug down on the counter again. I wondered where Evelyn and Clara had gone; either of them would have been better at knowingthe right thing to say. I never knew the right thing to say; the best I could do was hope for poignant silences.
Bernadette pulled her sopping-wet shirt over her head and dropped it into the kitchen sink. She was wearing a light pink, lacy bra. My own chest was as flat as the kitchen counter.
“Did something happen?” I asked.
She shrugged. She twisted her long brown hair over one shoulder, held it over the sink, and wrung it out like a towel. I had brown hair, like her. Evelyn and Clara were blondes. All of our hair was long and snarly because our mother had an irrational fear of hairdressers and had never taken us to get trims. We cut our own hair in the attic bathroom when it got too knotted to comb anymore. I reached out now and took a piece of Bernadette’s hair in my hand. I knew I was crying and I didn’t know why and I couldn’t stop. If Bernadette had gone through an angry, wild phase, I was firmly in the middle of a phase of deep, impenetrable sadness. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d felt happy. It occurred to me then, standing in the kitchen with Bernadette, that the answer might have beennever.
“I missed you,” she said again, the third time now, an incantation, and I melted into her arms, my tears falling against her already soaking, bus-and rain-scented skin.
We all slept in the fourth-floor playroom that night, which wasn’t really a playroom anymore, but instead held Clara’s easel and a small upright piano Evelyn had gotten for her fifteenth birthday.They’d brought it in through the windows with a crane; it had been quite the operation. We dragged Evelyn’s and Bernie’s mattresses out of their rooms and pushed them together, all sleeping in a big clump of arms and legs and hair. I don’t think we fell asleep until dawn, and the last thing I remembered was a quiet whisper from beside me: Evelyn, on the end, saying something to Henry, who’d stayed mostly invisible that whole night, maybe not wanting to intrude as we each took turns crying and laughing and refilling our mugs of tea, the long walk from the fourth floor to the ground floor and back. It was just the five of us, all back together again: girl, girl, girl, girl, ghost.
I put my arm over Evie’s stomach and she got very quiet and very still, and then finally, a moment later, relaxed and curled up next to me.
I always woke up last, and when I woke up that next morning, the mattresses were bare beside me and someone, probably Evelyn, had left a now-tepid mug of coffee on the floor beside me. It was after ten and the house was quiet and still, which meant they’d all gone out. I sipped the coffee and got dressed in my uniform of late, jeans and a sweatshirt. Evie wore skirts and turtlenecks, Clara favored short dresses with tights, and Bernadette always looked so, so androgynous and hip, like she’d stepped out of the pages of a fashion magazine. I mostly wore her hand-me-downs but could never make a pair of high-waisted jeans look quite as good as she did.
They’d left me a note on the kitchen counter:Todd’s.
It was the diner on the corner of our street. The rain had stopped but the skies were still a threatening, steely gray. When I turned around on the sidewalk, there was Henry, in the fourth-floor bedroom he shared with Evie, waving to me. I waved back and he grinned, really wide, and it made me grin, and it made the knot of anxiety inside my stomach loosen, just a little. I carried an umbrella but left it closed up and tucked under my arm, and when I got to the diner, my sisters had already ordered for me and I realized that Bernadette had a black eye. How had I not noticed that last night?
“It’s not what you think,” she said as I slid into the seat. “It was barely there last night and just—fuck, it totally exploded overnight. I look like I’ve been punched, I know, but Ihaven’t. It was a fucking volleyball right in the fucking face.”
Bernadette always swore more in the mornings. She wasn’t a morning person but she also couldn’t sleep in, and this was a poor combination for her mood. She gulped coffee while Clara, sitting next to me, dropped a piece of her sourdough toast on my plate and exchanged it for a piece of my rye.
“Nobody is doubting you,” Evelyn said gently, even though we were literally all doubting her. “It just seems so… I mean… Well, Bernie, you don’t evenplayvolleyball.”
“That’s probably why I took a volleyball to the face,” Bernadette said brightly, and we all had to admit she had a point. She was wearing a vintage leather jacket with shiny silver buckles, and she’d smudged black eyeliner over the eye that wasn’t currently half-closed with swelling. Clara, to my left, wore a pale blue dress with a Peter Pan collar. She’d had Evelyn do her hair in two braids. She was fourteen and still looked a bit like a baby. On my diagonal,Evelyn spread a very even, neat layer of marmalade on a piece of wheat toast. She wore her favorite evergreen-hued turtleneck, and when she saw me looking at her, she smiled warmly.
“Are you going back to school?” Clara asked, even though Bernadette had sworn up and down all night that she would not be stepping foot back on that campus. But we all knew the morning light often changed people’s minds.
Not Bernadette’s, apparently.
She rolled her one good eye and said, “Can you all stop fucking asking me that?”
“But youlovethat school,” Evelyn said gently. Evelyn said everything gently.
We’d gone over all of this last night. Bernadette looked at me, for help, but I stuffed my mouth with toast and gave her a weak smile. She rolled her eye again.
