Demeter scoured the Earth for her daughter. She ran into witches and princes, merchants and sailors, farmers and weavers, and yet nobody, nobody could tell her where Persephone had gone. It was nearly fall; the harvest was coming in, the wheat fields full of ripe, plump gold. And yet none of it mattered, because Persephone was lost to her forever.
—DEMETER AND PERSEPHONE, EVELYN HARPER KREIS (UNFINISHED MANUSCRIPT)
September 2001
Saskia was eighteen, and the summer had emptied her of everything she’d been. By the time she was ready to leave for Juilliard at the beginning of September, she felt like she was almost nothing at all. The airport, which had always felt like neutral territory, betrayed her by being filled with memories: the time they came back from Italy with that mirror; the trip to Los Angeles when both she and Mike played with the Symphony; the flight to New York when she got her first period.
In her own estimation, when she cut right down to the bone: relatively, she’d been a better pianist at thirteen. Maybe she’d even been a better pianist at twelve. She didn’t know what she was, now, at eighteen. She was talented, yes, but she was no longer so talented that she stood out from the other talented students her age. She was pretty, yes, but she was no longer cute, she was no longer adorable, she was no longer surprising and striking. She was intelligent, yes, but she was no longer precocious.
She was no longer remarkable.
And it all felt like she was no longer herself. No longer Saskia.
Evie had spent the last month buying extra-long sheets and huge boxes of Tampax at Target, enough to fill an entire suitcase. That suitcase, cream colored and hard shelled and embossed with her own initials, SJK, a gift from Mike, who was currently in Tokyo with the Symphony. Who had wrapped her gruffly in his arms and pretended not to notice the tears in her eyes before he left.
And then they were at the gate, the two of them. Saskia and Evie. Together.
“Well,” Evie said, and suddenly the only thing in the world Saskia wanted was for her mother to leave. She was so tired, and she wanted to put on her sunglasses and sit facing the tarmac and listen to Joni Mitchell whirring on her Discman, the CD that Patrick had given her years ago … something’s lost, but something’s gained / In living every day. She wanted to cry where nobody could see her, and she wanted to get on the plane empty and dry and wrung out.
But then her mother was clutching at her, sobs shaking her body with greater and greater force until Saskia could not tell anymore which of them was crying.
“I’m going to miss you so much,” her mother said when she finally caught her breath. She spoke into Saskia’s ear, and the low buzzing of it tickled, and Saskia tried to pull away but her mother clutched her upper arms and she couldn’t get the distance between them that she wanted.
“Sas, I know the last few months have been hard for you. I know they have been. But I want you to know, too, how proud I am of you. You’re so resilient, you know that? You’re like me. Life knocks you down and you just—somehow, you just bounce.”
The hands relaxed in Saskia’s flesh. And it was an unfamiliar feeling, the cry that came ripping out of her. Something she had not felt in years and years. Maybe ever.
“Mom, I’m so tired,” she said, her words wet between tears. “I’m tired. I don’t want to bounce anymore.”
And her mother pulled back. She put the back of her hand against Saskia’s left cheek, then her right. Wiping the tears away.
“But you will. Because— Oh, darling. There’s so much more to go.”
And maybe.
Maybe there was.
Maybe there is.
Maybe Saskia will play again at Carnegie Hall. Maybe she will record one, two, four more albums. Maybe she moves to Prague, Vienna, Berlin. Maybe she learns how to read poetry. Maybe maybe maybe, and as her mother kisses her cheek, Saskia feels herself propelled, on the balls of her feet. Like she is pushing the floor away.
Like she’s bouncing.
And Evie leaves.
And Saskia does sit facing the tarmac. And she does press play, and Joni Mitchell does spin on. And the wide Midwestern sky is bright blue and wide as the earth. And maybe something is lost. Maybe something is gained. In living every day.
And she wonders what comes next.
February 2020
She wears the house heavy around her that night. The wallpaper wavers with ancient stories, ancestors’ visages flicker in and out of mirrors, of windows: peripheral and forever uncatchable. The decades thick in the air, 1870s, 1970s. Evie’s bare child-feet pounding through the halls, her own immediately behind them.
This place is so fucking haunted, she thinks as she runs a hand over her marble mantelpiece, flames licking high from the fireplace below.
Because if you lived here, that was all you really did, that was all you really were, pressed between its hallways like flowers in the pages of an old book. You were a Harper, you lived in the Elf House. The house turned everyone into stories, fixed them in time, fixed them in mirrors. Dour Georg. Flighty Emilia. Poor Cecilia, poor Annabelle. Playful Constance. Ambitious Frederick. Creative Evelyn.
Prodigy Saskia.
Maybe it’s not haunted so much as it’s haunting.
You couldn’t escape the stories. They were fixed, carved into the panels of the walls. But maybe, she thinks, maybe she could turn them into numbers. She can play with numbers; manipulate them, mold them. Thirteen bedrooms, seven baths. Two towers, twins. Fourteen thousand square feet. $50,000 in property taxes. $100,000 foundation. $120,000, $2,900,000—
No good. You could turn it into music, maybe. It was already halfway to music. The metronome, the chime of the grandmother clock. The dripping of the tap in the Gold Room’s claw-footed bath that no plumber could ever fix. The bright bell of the door, the hiss of the kettle, the bark of the dog—
At the top of the stairs, she catches Wolfie, curled up on the window seat. He looks more like a wolf than ever when he folds his body into a ball like that. He stares at her with watchful, curious eyes and she collapses down beside him, runs her fingers through his fur.
She wishes she could be like him. Forever in the moment, never looking forward or back. Each day a fresh start, each day an unknown adventure. Each walk exciting, each meal a gift—
Was that a thump?
She freezes, Wolfie’s fur caught between her fingers.
It was. It was a thump.
Saskia drags herself grudgingly up to her bedroom and grabs her key, takes out her phone, presses record with a heavy hand.
“Get back,” she hisses at the tower door, and waits for the footsteps to retreat.
But when she’s spiraled her way upstairs, Patrick’s sitting, composed, on the edge of the mattresses.
“What?” she says.
“Saskia,” he says, and his eyes are clearer than they’ve been since he got up there. Clear gold around the center. “Saskia, I’m sorry. No, it was never my intention to give the house to the university. And those pictures—” The pictures surrounding him, now, the pictures spread around his body. He hangs his head. “You were fifteen.”
Everything she wanted.
It is what she wanted. Isn’t it? It’s what she’s been demanding, been begging for in the only way she knows how.
And her heart lies like a stone, caught heavy somewhere in the bones of her pelvis.
The cops, the recordings, the trail she’s surely, unknowingly, left—
Prodigy Saskia.
Prodigy Saskia isn’t worried about the trail of evidence at all.
Prodigy Saskia is thinking about him in jail. She’s thinking about a check for $100,000 with his name in the corner, his signature on the bottom. She’s thinking about the ten, twenty years of life he has left, spent in a cage, and it isn’t enough.
It isn’t enough, it was never going to be enough for her. She wants him up here, she wants him to suffer, she wants to watch him die, slowly, over and over again, because everything she is, everything she was, everything she has always been—
“Fifteen,” she cries. “I was fucking fifteen.” She scrambles around him, grabbing photo after photo, cradling them in her arms like a pile of wood, like a bundle of laundry, like a baby.
“I know,” he says, holding his hands up. “I know.”
“I was a child, and you ruined me, you pinned me into place as this person, this teenager who thought she was a woman, and once you’ve been that person, you can’t ever stop being that person, you can’t ever let her go because she’s all you have—” She’s pacing, wild-eyed, clutching the photos ever closer, ever tighter, and her voice breaks. “She’s all you are anymore.”
“I’m sorry,” he mutters again.
“Are you? You are? Sorry, then. Sorry for fucking what?”
In the beam of her gaze, he crumbles. He scrambles back along the mattresses, toward the wall.
“I don’t know!” he cries as his head thumps against it. “You want the truth? That’s it. I don’t fucking know! We were in love, then we weren’t. What’s so bad—”
“I was fourteen when we started!” she screeches. “I was fourteen, I was a child.”
He’s hiding his face in his hands. “You were a woman to me.”
“I was— What if I’d been twelve, Patrick? What if I’d been ten? Six?”
His voice is muffled, and yet he can’t stop himself from saying it. “But you weren’t.”
“How,” she says, her voice curdling into something calm, sour. “I don’t know how to make you see what you did.”
He lets his hands slide down his cheeks.
“Sas,” he says, and she knows this voice now, the unfamiliar panic is gone. She hears the condescension, the cajoling. “Will you just admit it? You’re not mad because of our relationship. You’re mad because we broke up. And you never got over it.”
She mirrors his tone back to him. On her, it’s a nursery school teacher’s voice, it’s nasal, it’s delicious. “Let’s just pretend that I am mad. That I never got over it. Because why did you break up with me?” she says. She says it like a liturgy, like a call-and-response. She knows the answer. She’s known the answer for a long time, even if she didn’t want to admit it to herself. “It wasn’t because of Juilliard, it wasn’t because you were worried about me ‘missing out’ on having a ‘college experience.’ It’s because I grew up. Because I got old. But, Patrick, tell me.” And she lets the photos fall, bends over the bed, propping herself up on her knuckles, as she hisses it into his face. “What was I supposed to do instead?”
He shakes his head. Just once. Side-to-side motion and something catches in his throat, she can hear it in his breath.
“I loved you—I did love you. I loved you more than I think you’ll ever realize. Ever know.”
She can’t breathe.
“That wasn’t love,” she manages through her teeth.
And his expression is one of pure—bafflement.
“I have these dreams. You’re there, and Kelly, and Julia—” And the names come spilling out, each a stone weighing her to the earth. “And in the dreams, you’re seventeen. All of you. Seventeen, and you’re so full of—promise, of hope. Everything is exciting, nothing has been ruined.”
She closes her eyes.
“And then I wake up,” he continues. “I wake up and you’re all gone and that’s all you ever are. Just gone.”
He looks at her.
Her mouth and eyes feel unbearably wet in skin that is too dry, Wisconsin winter skin. It’s like he’s cast a spell and she can feel the folds of her skin where it’s wrinkled, she can feel the sag of her small breasts down, ever down. She can feel the places where already her body has gone loose, already started to fall apart.
What if she had never grown up? What if there was a version of her life in which Saskia Kreis, seventeen-year-old ingenue, had been driving back from a late night turned into an early morning at the beach. A version in which a truck had T-boned the already old Saab. A version in which, Malibu pounding through her system, she’d driven over the edge of St. Mary’s Hill. A version in which she’d sat beside Lexi on the cliff and gestured too broadly, tumbled down onto the sand below. A version in which she’d been frozen forever in that perfect moment.
She never would have seen the towers falling, crumbling to the earth. She never would have run through Lake Park at sunrise, felt the pain and the pleasure coursing through her veins. She never would have truly known her father—not as he is now, not with his faults and his ferocity revealed in equal measure. Never would have known the joy of a knockout, the shame of losing. The grace of her body as she moves through the ring. All of the awful and mundane and agonizing events of her life; she’d never have lived them. The idea of their loss does something inside her chest, clamping a fist around them, pulling them closer. Those are my memories. Mine. Me.
But she looks into his eyes, then. He is watching her. And he is—fascinated. Scared. Unsure.
She is so tired of him having feelings about her.
She is so tired of being perceived.
“You were fif—”
“Don’t say it,” she says, her voice hoarse as she picks up the pictures. “Don’t you dare fucking say it.”
And the pulse, racing through the vein in his temple.
“But you said…” He clears his throat. “You said that once I admitted it … Sas. You said I could go.”
She looks at him. Cowering before her. Frightened.
Still, always, trapped in his own story. Never so much as trying to see hers.
“I know what I said,” she says softly.
You could turn him into music, she thinks as she turns the key behind her, clutching the slippery photos close to her breast. The wheeze of his breath when he runs. The low chime of his laughter. The moan of him when he’s hit in the sternum or when he comes.
You could turn him into numbers. Sixty years old. A hundred and fifty thousand dollars a year. Three museum collections. Five years until retirement. Two boats. Five, six, seven girls.
You could turn him into stories—but no, she can’t. Because he’s already turned her into one. Patrick has as many stories as the house, but in all of them she is who he wants her to be, she is who he saw her as, she is pure potential; she is everything and nothing, but all of it bounded by the limits of his vision, by the limits of his own imagination.
Yet at the end of the day—she remembers the feeling of her fist going into his chest. At the end of the day, he is muscle and blood and bone. At the end of the day, he is just a man.
Patrick and the Elf House. They have one thing in common, at least. They exist in the physical realm.
And Saskia—Saskia has spent her whole life existing in abstract worlds. Of music, of numbers. Of illusions. Boxing was the only place where her body had broken through, merged with her mind. Her way of punching back, saying, This right here, this is who I am. Her way of saying, This right here, this is my story.
Hadn’t that been what her mother had wanted for her the whole time? For her to take ownership, to lay claim to her life. She’d shown her with the princesses, she’d told her to fight for what she wanted. How hard she’d tried, to hammer it into Saskia’s head: that this is her story. Hers alone. That she is the only one who can write it. The only one who gets to.
And after all. What is a fairy tale, anyway, but a ghost story about the living? About taking care of unfinished business, while you still have time.
She closes her eyes and sends a silent prayer of thanks to her mother. It is, she realizes, the first time she has ever thanked her.
Maybe a clean slate isn’t about having nothing to lose, she thinks as she shoves the photos back into the holes of the violin. Maybe it’s about channeling the energy that you’d let leak into the past, turning it around. Pointing it to the future.
And for the first time in a long time, the story she’s telling herself feels true.
Wolfie at her heels, she treads in slippered feet down to the basement. The cobwebs are thick as lace, dust gathered in balls in the corners. The scratching of mice, scampering in the walls.
It takes her only a minute. She was a genius, you know. It takes only a minute, and then she goes upstairs to get her father.