Page 41 of Persephone's Curse
Iwasa monster.
If she knew…
Never in a million, billion years would she have forgiven me.
“He’s gone,” she said. She was rocking back and forth, her whole body quivering. “He’s gone. He won’t answer me. He won’t come. He won’t appear.”
“Henry?” I asked, lying.
“Is it Henry?” I asked, lying.
“Henry won’t come?” I asked, lying.
“Last night,” she said, still sobbing, still rocking. “This morning. I knocked, and knocked, but he wasn’t there… I didn’t even… The jasmine… I didn’t even smell it. He’s not there. I don’t know where he is.”
“When was the last time you saw him?” I asked, lying.
“Yesterday morning,” she said.
“And how often do you usually see him?” I asked, lying.
“Every day,” she said, and she looked up then, directly into my eyes, an eye contact that made my retinas burn. “I see himevery day.”
“Okay, I hear you,” I said. “I hear you, Evie. But you did see him yesterday. You just said you did. So let’s just see what happens tonight, okay? Let’s just see what happens tonight.”
She buried her face in her hands. She rocked forward far enough that she was leaning into me, throwing her whole weight against me. I hardly heard her muffled retort.
“He has to come,” she said. “He has to come.”
“He will,” I said, lying. “He will.”
But he didn’t.
He didn’t come, no matter that Evelyn knocked on the closet door so frequently and so desperately that week that her knuckles really did turn bloody and fresh scabs were constantly breakingopen, sending tiny rivulets of blood down her fingers, just like in my vision.
She didn’t yell after that morning in the park.
She got very quiet.
Each night I went up to her bedroom and found her lying on her bed, bandages wrapped around her hands, her lips so chapped they were peeling.
“Maybe there’s someghostthing we don’t know about,” I said. Her stormy, ocean-blue eyes darted over to me, but she didn’t say anything. I tried to keep my voice light. “Like a convention or something.”
“He’s never gone away for this long. He’s never not answered me when I knocked,” she said, and her voice itself was a ghost, a faint picture of the real thing.
I took her hand in mine and gently unwrapped the bandages. Her poor knuckles took my breath away. I was a terrible sister.
“Let me get you a fresh wrapping,” I said. I kissed her forehead. She gave no indication that she’d either heard me or felt the kiss.
In the bathroom, I found Clara sitting on the edge of the tub and Bernadette sitting on the closed lid of the toilet. Over the past week, Bernadette had wiggled her way back into her old summer job at the florist down the street. She wore a green canvas apron now. She smelled like roses. She’d told Clara and Evelyn about her bipolar diagnosis one night after dinner that week. Evelyn had hugged her and said all the right things. Clara had been visibly frightened and had since treated Bernadette with a little more care than was probably needed. (“She’ll get over it,” Bernadette had told me when I’d asked if it bothered her. “We forget how young she is.”)
I shut the bathroom door.
“What did you do to Henry?” Bernadette asked, her voice quiet so it wouldn’t carry to Evelyn’s bedroom.
“What do you mean?” I asked, my own voice shaky and strange.
“Winnie, knock it off,” Bernie insisted, plowing right through my denial. “We need to know what’s going on.”
