Page 69 of Persephone's Curse
Evelyn was still holding my hands, gripping them so hard, as if I was the one who’d disappeared, not her. And then she let them go, and I felt a phantom pressure where her fingers had dug into my skin.
“You don’t have to go,” I said. “We’re going to find a way to bring him back.”
“I tried everything,” she replied. “I don’t think hecancome back.”
Her eyes were getting wet. We were in the middle of the Great Lawn. I could see the Museum of Natural History in the distance, peeking out from behind a cluster of trees. It was a mild day, a brief respite from the bitter cold. The sky was clear and blue and cloudless above us.
And that was when I saw it.
We were facing each other, and I was facing west, and there it was, over Evelyn’s head, back toward our house.
“Oh,” I said, and Evelyn turned around to look where I was looking, following my gaze up and up and up until she finally saw it, too.
The faint black smear across the sky.
The faint black smear that we could tell, even from here, was directly over our house.
It could have been a leftover exhale of exhaust from a plane or a distant smokestack.
A shadow, a rain cloud, a trick of the light.
But it wasn’t. It wasn’t any of those things. Because it was the thing from Clara’s painting: a clean slash through blue, a delicate line of black.
Evelyn tilted her head to the side, still looking at it.
“What is that?” she said.
“I don’t know, I don’t…”
My chest was filling with a cold, icy sort of panic.
Looking at the mark directly didn’t quite work; it faded into the brilliant blue of the sky around it. You had to look just to the left or just to the right, and then it leapt into stark clarity, became something huge and enormous and unmissable.
A man walked by in a rumpled business suit, his head down, his hands stuffed into his pockets.
“Sir! Sir!” I yelped before I could stop myself. Miraculously, he turned around (I would estimate about 90 percent of New Yorkers ignore any and all attempts to get their attention). “Do youseethat?” I said, as soon as our eyes met, pointing urgently into the sky, toward the mark.
He lifted up his chin, followed my finger, squinted into the brightness of the winter sky.
“See what?” he asked after a minute, his voice already impatient, his feet inching forward to continue their stomp across the park.
“That mark! That black slash! That thing in the sky! Right there!”
I kept pointing. The man made a face(I don’t have fucking time for this)but looked up again, giving it one more try. He shrugged and when he turned back, his expression was a mixture of apologetic and annoyance.
“I don’t see anything,” he said. Then, as an afterthought, already pedaling away, hands back in pockets, he added, “Sorry, kid.”
When I pulled out my phone to text Clara and Bernadette, Clara had already texted our three-person group chat (No Ghost Lovers Allowed), a cell phone picture of a perfectly unblemished sky.
Clara:
It doesn’t show up in pictures.
Bernadette:
What doesn’t?
Clara:
