Page 6 of Persephone's Curse
“What was I supposed to do!” Her voice was getting high-pitched, like it did when she was worried she’d done something wrong, so I gave a half-hearted wave to Dad and turned around to face her.
“It’s fine, Clara,” I said. “They’re here. It’s fine. It’s going to be fine.”
“Traitor,” Bernadette mumbled from underneath Mom’s left arm, but we could tell from the sound of her voice that she was mostly joking, and Clara relaxed a little and stabbed at her egg scramble, because she never left a meal unfinished, as a rule.
Dad was still sort of hanging out around the entrance, but Todd spotted him and brought a chair over next to me, apologizing to the woman who’d admonished us for our language but who was now looking quite thrilled at the soap opera of our family. Dad came and sat down next to me. I’d always been closest with him, just by a little, and he put his hand on my knee and squeezed, relieved to finally be sitting.
“Hi, kiddo,” he said.
“Hi, Dad.”
He was facing me but his eyes were trained on Bernadette and Mom, who were still hugging. But at least it seemed like Bernie had stopped crying by then.
I slid my plate toward Dad, suddenly not very hungry, and hestarted eating without a moment’s hesitation, I think happy for the distraction. Across the table, Evelyn met my eyes and she looked a little sad and far away. With Evelyn, though, it was hard to tell what that meant. Was she actually sad and faraway or was she composing a sonata in her mind?
I smiled at her and she smiled back and I noticed that her smile didn’t touch her eyes. She started eating again. Mom and Bernadette were still hugging. Everybody was either eating or hugging, except me and the woman next to us, who was eagerly awaiting the next move in our little family drama.
“Luckily there was no traffic,” Dad said, apropos of absolutely nothing. “Made it in about two and a half hours, if you can believe it.”
That meant Clara had been up at least three hours before anyone else, calling them from another floor, speaking in hushed tones so we wouldn’t overhear. Clara didn’t seem to need as much sleep as the average person. She was always the last to close her eyes and the first to open them. She must have seen Bernadette’s black eye and sneaked downstairs to call our parents.
“Sleep is a waste of time,” she’d said once, lying across my bed, her long, blond hair waterfalling over the side of my mattress. It was exactly like her to be a petulant, slightly bratty kid in one moment, and a waxing philosopher in the next, with barely a breath between the two extremes.
Nobody had answered Dad’s traffic comment, but he didn’t seem dismayed. He was very used to people not answering him, and he simply tried again, taking a sip of my coffee and sighing happily. “The best coffee in the city, and it’s right on our block. How lucky are we, kids?”
How lucky are we, kids?was a true Dadism, and we all nodded our agreement while, again, not answering.
The woman next to us was getting bored. She went back to her food.
Mom finally pulled away from Bernadette and I saw that they’d traded places—Mom was crying and Bernadette was looking worried. Then Dad looked up and for the first time caught the full extent of Bernie’s battered face, and he paused, a statue, with a bite of egg halfway raised between his plate and mouth.
Bernadette pulled her phone out of her pocket and tapped it a few times, then handed it over to Dad. I leaned in to watch over his shoulder, and to my surprise, it was an actual video of said volleyball getting spiked into my sister’s face. I didn’t think my sister had made any friends in college, at least she’d never spoken of anyone, so I found myself focusing on who exactly had taken the video, although I recognized that wasn’t the point.
“Yikes,” Dad said, after he’d played the video three times, once holding the phone at a bit of an angle, so the woman next to us could get a better view. “That looks like it hurt.”
“The whole world erupted into a beautiful cacophony of color,” Bernadette said loftily, taking the phone back and winking at me with her good eye. “And then, yes, it did hurt, a fucking lot.”
Mom called the server over and ordered poached eggs and toast and “A lot more coffee, please,” and Bernadette watched the video of herself getting volleyballed in the eye with a weird smile on her face.
“You can’t saycacophony of color,” Clara said thoughtfully, to no one in particular. “Cacophonyrefers tosounds.”
“This was yesterday morning,” Bernadette clarified. “But it’s not why I came home.”
“You can tell us when you’re ready,” Mom said.
“I might not ever be ready,” Bernadette replied.
Mom wiped at her eyes. Out of all of us, she looked the most like Evelyn, especially when she was sad.
“Well, if you’re going to be home for a while, I do think you should get a job,” Dad said, and Bernadette gave me a look of such dramatic annoyance that I actually laughed.
“Let’s go to the museum today,” she said suddenly.
“I have to practice,” Evelyn replied.
“I have an assignment to finish,” Clara said.
“I’ll come,” I said.
