Dead Beautiful (18 page)

“I hear — ” she begins, then hesitates. “Hecate tells me I am to be a grandmother.” There is both anticipation and apprehension in her words.

“Yes,” I answer. “In four months.” I stop and place her hand on my belly. “Can you feel it?” The passenger is moving slowly and dreamily.

“Was that it?” Her voice is quick with excitement.

“Yes … there it is again.”

She smiles. “You were like that,” she tells me. “Restless, eager to get out.”

“Really?”

She nods. “Oh,” she cries. “I am so happy you’re back.”

Demeter

She is so pale. When I first saw her, the breath was knocked out of me. She looked wan and frail. Ghostlike. Her colourless skin was almost translucent; her eyes huge and dark in her pallid face.

She wore an expression I had never seen on her face before, serious and austere. Where has my laughing daughter gone? What has become of my sweet girl, full of mischief and playfulness? She has been replaced by this silent young woman who carries herself with such dignity and self-possession.

We walk the fields again. She takes my hand and places it on her swelling belly: hard and round and taut as a melon. I feel the little one within flutter gently, turning in the inner sea.

“I would not have chosen such a husband for you,” I mutter.

“You didn’t,” she tells me. There is a new tone in her voice: assertiveness, confidence. “I chose.”

Silence blooms between us, a landscape, a plain on either side of which marshall armies of unspoken words.

“He is a good husband,” she says quietly before I have a chance to speak. “Kind and thoughtful. If it were up to him, I wouldn’t be here. He would rather I stayed in Hades. He was concerned about my health and the baby’s. But he saw how homesick I was, so he called Hecate and arranged it all.”

“I see.”

She smiles, a bit sadly, and shakes her head. “I don’t expect you to understand.”

I stop, take her shoulders in my hands, and turn her so she faces me. “Not understand?” I say. “Not understand the rush of blood and passion that blind you to all but the one you love? Not understand being consumed by the thought of that person — the smell, the sight and sound of them? Not understand the hunger for their touch, their voice? I understand,” I tell her. “I understand completely. And I know what it’s like when that first ardour has cooled. Perhaps I wanted to spare you that.”

“Or perhaps,” she smiles, “perhaps you just wanted to keep me with you.”

“I see my little girl has grown up,” I laugh, taking her arm in mine again. “Maybe that, too.”

Cyane

Persephone is back. Did she get in touch with me, the way a real friend would? No, I heard it from a little breeze — one of Zephyr’s hangers-on. She said she was zipping along, minding her own business, when she looked down and saw Demeter and Persephone walking together. “Hand in hand,” she told me. “Just like before. And where they walked, a carpet of lush grass and beautiful flowers sprang up. It was so beautiful.” She let fall a few drops of rain.

“Hey, hey,” I cried, ducking beneath a nearby tree, out of the shower. I checked my hair and gown to see how wet they had gotten. “No downpours here.”

“Sorry. It’s just so nice to see them back together again.”

Sentimentalist I thought, then: now she’s back she’ll want to hook up with Darryl again. I know how these things work. I’ve been much nicer to him than she ever was, but all he’ll have eyes for is the Level-1 Goddess. He won’t have time for a simple water nymph anymore. It’s not fair. And if she finds out Darryl and I have been hanging out together she’ll probably get all shirty at me.

I didn’t say any of this to the breeze. I simply smiled and nodded. “Yes, it is.” But she was already on her way. Short attention spans, that bunch.

I found a stream and sat down beside it. Should I be pro-active about this and track down Persephone? She’s the one who left without saying goodbye — I really think it’s up to her to get in touch with me. On the other hand, it might be best to take the bull by the horns and go find her. That way I can get my story to her first.

But what is my story?

I know: Oh, Pers, I’ve missed you so much. Darryl did, too. The two of us have spent the last couple of months just sick with worry. Especially Darryl. I had to keep an eye on him after you vanished, I was so afraid he might have a breakdown or something. He’ll be so glad to see you. I know I am.

And Darryl won’t say anything different. If I put it to him that’s how it was, he won’t remember our long walks, our long conversations. If I tell him I was just keeping him company while Persephone was away, that’s how he’ll remember it.

It’s not fair.

I’d better get going.

Persephone

O, the wild joy of plunging your hands into the living earth! There is nothing like it, nothing. To feel the currents that spark the seeds to life moving through it. I feel the energy humming there.

How I have missed the mossy smell of rotting leaves, the sharp, iron scent of water, the whispering of winds and streams. And light — most of all I have been hungry for Helios’ bright gaze.

Mother was right. My fields were blasted. Where once tulips, roses, morning glories, lilies bloomed there now stretched a desolate wasteland. All that remained were bleached, withered husks.

We spent a few days collecting the dead plants and piled them to compost or to use as mulch on the new beds I would plant.

“I’m sorry,” Mum said, standing beside me, surveying the damage, her face grim. “I’m sorry.”

“It’s all right,” I told her, spinning a brittle tulip leaf in my hand. “I can start new, avoid the mistakes I made before.”

“That’s true.” She bent to pick up a pile of dried leaves and stems. “It will be better than before.”

At night I plan what I will plant: masses of white galanthus, with their heads that will bob in the breeze, vast carpets of jewel-coloured tulips interspersed with brilliant daffodils. Trailing up and down: clematis, roses, sweet peas, scarlet runners, wisteria, thunbergia. In the forest, orchids to grow on air. In shady places: hostas, impatiens, ferns.

Each night I fall into bed exhausted, my mind a riot of colour. The flowers’ names a lullaby to soothe me to sleep.

Zeus

Good. It’s all sorted out; Persephone’s back earth-side, Demeter’s back at work, I’m in my place, and all’s right with the world.

Now, maybe, things will settle down, there’ll be some peace and quiet, and I can get onto that coffee problem I was thinking about earlier. Or maybe Hera and I could get a little quality time in together. That’s a thought. I’ll go see what she’s up to.

Persephone

It begins with dreams, long, troubling dreams, dreams during which I am so deeply asleep that I wake feeling drugged and groggy. Dreams of darkness, of narrow tunnels twisting and turning, moving deeper and deeper into gloom down which I travel, deeper and deeper without ever finding, without ever knowing what it is I’m searching for.

The dreams grow in intensity. They seem so real, and my journey so long, that each morning I wake up more tired than when I fell asleep the night before. There is an urgency to my search now, but the point of it remains a mystery. I only know I must keep traveling down the tunnels in search of something unnamed.

The baby inside me seems restless, too, whether because of my dreams or my uneasiness it’s impossible to tell. It spins and kicks throughout the day and night. (Perhaps I dream the baby’s dreams.)

I send a note to Cyane and one afternoon she drops in to chat. She tells me how worried she and Darryl have been, but I glance at her from beneath lowered lids when she doesn’t know I’m watching and I see eddies of anxiety and resentment move across her face like currents through water. She is afraid I have come to take Darryl away from her. She wants him — or, not him, but what I have had (she doesn’t know this herself). What will she feel when she learns the truth? But I don’t worry about her — she will do fine. It’s Darryl I feel sorry for, tossed back and forth between the two of us like a shuttlecock. But Cyane will have him, and she’ll convince him he is happy with her. Whether she will be happy with him is another story.

We talk for a while, Cyane angling for answers to questions, and then mum comes in. Apprehension flits across Cyane’s face quick as a blink, then it’s gone. She drops a pretty curtsey. “Hail, oh Demeter —”

“Thank you, dear.” Mum brushes past Cyane and stands in front of me, takes my chin in her hand and tilts my face up to hers. She gazes long into my eyes. “You’re tired,” she observes.

I nod.

Mum turns to Cyane. “Would you please excuse us, dear?” she asks. “Persephone has had a long trip and I think she needs to rest.”

“Sure.” Cyane jumps up, eager to please, equally eager to get away. “Call me, o.k.?” she says, smiling.

“I will,” I tell her.

After she leaves mum asks, “Did you say anything to her?”

I shake my head.

“That’s good. They have no discretion, those water nymphs, no boundaries. You have to assume whatever you say to her will be broadcast all over. Don’t tell her anything you don’t want everyone to know.”

And yet, from what mum told me, it seems Cyane didn’t tell mum about me and Hades. Mum found out from others.

Days come and go and I have to become accustomed to Helios’ rhythms again. In Hades it was always the same time, a silvery twilight.

As time goes on I see more clearly the differences between the upper world and the lower. At moments during the busy, talking, sun-bleached days I wish for the quiet calm world of Hades. Bird chatter wakes me from a thin, patchy sleep. Sunlight sneaks around the curtains and tickles my eyelids, urging them open. Gradually a wave of noise builds until it is so overwhelming sleep is shattered. Resigned, I open my eyes, wishing for another five minutes of sleep, knowing it has fled, and struggle out of bed.

The noise, the constant bustle, begins to wear on my nerves. Listening to the nymphs chatter I think longingly of the quiet rooms I have left behind in Hades’ palace, the steady, measured flow of eternity through them. The girls strike me now as silly and empty-headed. Their conversation — boys, gowns, favourite musicians — bores and oppresses me. I miss sitting with Hades, discussing the day and thinking of ways to improve spirits’ post-life experiences. (I think I’ve convinced him talk therapy is more effective, and more cost-effective, than a pharmacological approach.)

My body is getting in the way, too, continuing to expand, although my gown disguises the fact very effectively. Still, my ankles are swollen, my feet are sore, morning sickness may have passed, but I still can’t stomach some of my favourites: coffee, chocolate, spicy foods. My back aches, my hair is lank, I feel like a hippopotamus. And sleep has become a foreign country. What with Junior’s nightly gymnastics, I’m lucky to get two consecutive hours’ sleep.

Only my work at the greenhouse — coaxing life from seeds and bulbs — gives me a sense of happy fulfillment. That, and spending time with mum.

Although even that has changed. She is so delighted to have me back, so excited about my pregnancy that she flutters around me like a large bird and seems to forget I am a grown-up, I am a separate person from her, able to make my own decisions. She worries about the baby, constantly telling me to eat this (“Green leafy vegetables are full of folic acid”) and avoid that (“Do you really think you need that second bowl of ice cream?”). She reminisces at length about her own pregnancy, tells me what I was like as a baby, infant, and toddler, and frets about Hades.

“He’s great, mum,” I tell her. “You just need to get to know him better.”

“I suppose so,” she says, but she never gets in touch with him or asks me to.

“You should at least give him a chance. You always told me to give others the benefit of the doubt.”

“That’s true,” she says, and changes the subject.

And Hades — I miss him. Differently than I missed mum, but as acutely. I miss the hint of sadness in his expression that evaporates when he sees me. I miss his teasing, his solicitude. I fall asleep at night thinking of him and wake hoping to see him beside me. I am always disappointed.

Days turn to weeks, weeks to months. Time’s inexorable progress wears on. Mum begins to talk about who will serve as midwife.

“Hestia, I think,” she says one day. “She’s the best. I’ll ask her.”

“Hades must be there, too,” I tell her.

We are sitting in the living room folding some cashmere baby blankets she bought on sale this morning. She stops what she is doing and stares out the window.

“He is the father of my child,” I say. She makes no comment. “He must be there.”

“I’m not entirely comfortable — ” she begins.

I push my chair away from the table and heave myself onto my feet. “This isn’t about you,” I say. “He is my husband. He must be there.”