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Two weeks after the funeral, Calla sends everyone out of the house on various contrived errands. They go, knowing it’s contrived, piling children into strollers and the back of neighbors' vans. Adam swings by to pick up Blue, and Calla is accidentally in the front door at the same time. He gives her a look like I can see your insides, can you see mine? and it makes her so furious she needs to go into the kitchen and open the freezer and let it blow cold air on her face. His open, aching eyes. Knowing that Persephone saw him as her successor makes Calla’s blood boil. This child. This boy. This man. The idea of him between her and Maura, taking their hands, sharing a spirit. It makes her want to spit.
It’s not his fault. He’s grieving. He never felt as cared for, as respected, or as grown up as he did under Persephone’s hands. Calla doesn’t need to touch him to see that; he oozes it. Not quite adoration, but loyalty, pure and simple. Love, probably. Comfort. Familiarity.
She can’t take it.
When she takes her head out of the freezer, everyone is gone. She steels herself and heads to the stairs. She gets five steps up and loses her nerve, goes to the liquor cabinet, gets a bottle of Beefeater and heads back upstairs. In the doorway of Persephone’s room she stops, uncaps the bottle, swishes a mouthful of gin around in her mouth. She’s tempted to gargle, to make Persephone laugh, but Persephone is dead so she chokes it down around a tightness in her throat.
She steps in. She straightens the blankets on the bed, fluffs the pillows. She’s slept in this bed enough, she knows the way she likes it. The way Persephone likes it.
She’s avoiding.
She presses down on the mattress, lets the memories sink into her palms. Sweat and laughter and anger and sleep and the deep, pulsing kind of love that knocks you off balance like an ocean until you find your feet. Loving Persephone was like finding her sea legs, and losing Persephone is being shipwrecked.
She folds her arms around herself. She is the only thing that is safe to touch.
On the desk is an overstuffed three-ring binder. On the cover is a label that just says Dissertation in Persephone’s neatest handwriting. Calla takes a deep breath, sits down at the desk, and opens it.
I have loved Calla for the entirety of my life.
The entirety of my life is a pile of sand between her knees. As I die, I pull her hands down around me like blankets and she holds me as an embryo until I grow into a brain.
Meals are wrong. There is butter and there is bacon, but where there used to be sweetness there’s a lingering burnt flavor. Even if nothing’s been burnt - even if nothing’s been cooked, they taste acrid smoke in the back of their mouths. All of them, even the little ones. The absence of sweetness isn’t bitterness, isn’t salt. It’s carbon.
Maura brought the baby home today. She’s named after the most beautiful feeling in the world. She rolls her head around and looks at me out of the corner of her eye, like she’s suspicious. I love her so much I’m afraid it’s going to rupture something inside my body.
“Being a woman,” says Calla, “is about taking responsibility. It doesn’t matter what’s in your pants or how old you are, if you take responsibility for your shit then you can be a woman.
Blue asks, “What about guys who do?”
Calla snorts. “Never seen it.”
I thought about my father today, strange, strange, strange, strange, strange, strange, strange
Blue starts doing her homework on Persephone’s bed. Calla is passing by the door when Jimi asks her why, one hand smoothing Blue’s hair back from her forehead. Blue looks up at her like it’s a silly question.
“My words always work better in here. She said so.”
Jimi nods and leaves her to it. She catches Calla listening and takes her hand, pulling her into her own room and the covered balcony she’s turned into a greenhouse. It’s too warm under the glass, and humid, and Calla’s never liked it, but she goes and let’s Jimi press her fingers into pots of damp earth until she feels like a person again.
Calla says that being a woman is about taking responsibility. I don’t know if I am capable of womanhood. Though sometimes I bleed and I don’t know why and I find it on my legs.
It’s awkward having a past around Gansey. It’s so infuriating to feel awkward around a boy, a child, because your parents never moved off the land that their parents and parents’ parents sharecropped. The worst part of it is his sincerity, his good-natured charm. The fact that he wishes your life could be whatever you want it to be. The fact that he can’t see himself.
She realized it on one of the first days Ronan Lynch was in their house for more than three minutes. The way Gansey watched him, the way he reacted to every change in Ronan’s breathing. As a test, she led them past the big cracked mirror in the hallway, the one that begs you to look into it where the jagged pieces catch the light. Ronan stared, of course, and Gansey stared at Ronan. Calla tracked his eyes, where they skittered and stopped and landed, and watched them slide right over his own reflection. Not even a hesitation. Not so much as a moment of recognition.
“Huh,” she said aloud.
He looked over to her, brows raised in curiosity. A minute ago it would have looked imperious, a king deigning to give permission to speak. Now, it’s a different sort of intimidating, the kind of intimidating that comes with a young man thinking you are so important in the loudest possible way at every other being in the room. Everything that should be cheesy about him is, in practice, terrifying.
Calla doesn’t spend much time with him, because she isn’t sure how to handle it. She hates being unsure.
And either way, it’s best not to get invested.
Last night I dreamed that there were rats chewing at the veins in my arms, like electrical wires in the walls of the house. And the pain made me cry and the blood was slippery and warm. And Calla was shouting at me, shaking me, because she could not see the rats and she thought that I had done it myself. Over my head there was a bird and it was holding a snake in its talons and it was eating it like fast food in a fast car and when the snake screamed it had the voice of a boy.
Calla sleeps with the binder under her pillow. It’s stuffed - overstuffed - so it props her head up and cricks her neck. She refuses to roll out the kinks, though. She does not stretch, she does not massage her own muscles and tendons, she does not relax. Each day the pain of it builds on itself, little by little. Calcifying. She sits very still and very tense and wills herself to fossilize.
Calla touched me today, so gently, just her lips, just a little bit wet. She said sorry after, she said she took it back because she is too abrasive for a person like me and I told her the truth, I told her that I need someone to remind me of my edges, where my body stops and the atmosphere begins, and she said “Oh you want me to show you, do you?” and I laughed because it was sexy and I think we’re close to forty. But maybe we weren’t, this day, this first day. Maybe we were younger.
She writes a letter to Persephone’s mother, letting her know what happened. She’s unsure if Persephone’s mother is actually still alive, because time and the order of events was always fuzzier for Persephone than it was for anyone else. She never gets a response
Sometimes when we’re alone and only when we’re alone, Maura calls me baby.
Maura tries to get Calla in the same room with Adam. She starts out subtle, but eventually calls him over for the most threadbare reasons, all but locking them in rooms together. Adam is afraid of her, of both of them. Calla doesn’t want to blame him for what happened, but it’s harder to do when he’s always around. It’s much easier to forgive people from afar.
She can’t seem to find the distance to forgive Maura, but at least Maura doesn’t expect her to.
Human beings figured out knives at least a million years before they figured out fire. Cooking has always been violent. I never seem to remember eating, but I remember the knives. Calla keeps them sharp. Calla says it’s safer that way. It’s true, and it’s lovely.
Calla brushes against Ronan, purely by accident this time. She’s always so careful with who and what she touches, but she’s been clumsy lately. Everything in the house is the same, anyway. Persephone, Persephone, Persephone. There’s a little variety when Blue’s around: Persephone, Persephone, Maura, Gansey, Adam, Gansey. And Ronan’s rarely there, anyway. He doesn’t like it. He’ll put up with them more now, for Adam’s sake. She doesn’t need to touch him at all to know what he’d do for Adam’s sake.
It hits her like burning this time, though, like a bare hand on a cast iron skillet, and she pulls away.
“What?” he growls.
She’s going to growl something back, show him his place, but she sees an empty room behind his eyes, a new one. He really is just a kid. She reaches out and holds his arm right at the elbow. He doesn’t pull away, even when she flinches. He can’t know what she’s seeing or he would have pulled away.
“I’m sorry,” she says.
He blinks at her. “For what?”
“I’m sorry that happened to you.”
He laughs, humorlessly. “Which part?”
“You know which part.”
He doesn’t understand, for a moment, and she sees when the pieces fit together. He yanks his arm back and stumbles into an end table, knocking off an empty mug, which shatters on the hardwood. He looks seventeen. Younger, even.
Calla, who’s never had a maternal instinct in her life, wants to make it better. Or, no. She wants it to be better, whether or not she has anything to do with it.
“That’s private,” he grinds out, but he’s not looking her in the eye.
“You tell anyone about it?”
He shakes his head, violently, like he’s shaking something loose inside it.
“That kind of thing, it’ll fester.”
“I know.” He sticks his hands in his pockets. Pulls them out. Turns to leave and then changes his mind. She waits for him to settle.
“He’s dead anyway, so it doesn’t matter.” He's aiming for bravado, or something like it, but he's missed it by a mile. Part of her wishes he'd found it.
“It wasn’t about you, you know.”
“What?”
“It wasn’t because of you, or who you are, or what you are, or something you did. That kind of thing, that’s all him.”
“You don’t know that.”
“I do.”
He meets her eyes, finally, and gives her a second of truth before he shutters them.
“Whatever,” he grunts. “Blue home?”
Calla sighs and bends to clean up the broken mug. “Upstairs. Don’t be loud; I’ve got work to do.”
“Yeah, yeah,” he says and takes off.
Blue came into my room today, to ask me a question. It wasn’t the question she asked, though, what she asked was “Why are you crying?”
She’s very small, still.
I said it was because I was sad. Because of a man. Because of a man who was gone.
She said, “Dead gone or gone gone?”
I didn’t answer.
She asked if I loved him and I said, “Everyone loved him. He was so, so, loved.”
It will be a few years. She’ll grow another three inches before he arrives. The year her heart shatters, it’s three inches further from the ground.