The Dark Wife (5 page)

I sat outside of the palace and stared down at my lap and willed, wished, that Hades would find me. This was the only entrance, the only exit. Surely, sooner or later, she would come. Perhaps she would take my hand again. Ornament me with her dust of gold.

But she did not come. At the end, when gods were strewn about the floor, ambrosia so thick that my sandals stuck with each step, I wandered, cautious, until I found Zeus unconscious and spent, sprawled, one leg dangling over the arm of his throne. I was safe.
For now.

Hades was not there.

I woke my mother, drew her up,
helped
her into her chariot of cows that trundled us down, through the heavens, back to our beckoning earth.

Through the warm air, through the forest, back in the bower, my lifelong home, I moved without seeing, lay down and stared.

I was bewitched. I could think of nothing but the goddess of the dead.

Two: Visitation

“To be honest, I don't remember much about last night.” Demeter smiled softly, shook her head. “But it wasn’t terrible—was it terrible? Zeus was favorable toward you, I think.”

We stood together in the bower, late morning sunshine bright and shafted, lancing through the green leaves and grapevines. The air smelled heady, of warm earth and sweet fruits, but when I took one of the grapes in my mouth, it tasted bitter.

“It wasn’t terrible.” I held my tongue in regard to Zeus. My mother knew how much I hated him. But there was one topic I must broach. “Hades,” I whispered, startling myself by speaking her name here, aloud. Our encounter, the words we shared only hours ago—they seemed like a secret, a secret all my own, and I was protective of them. “She’s a woman. You never told me that.”

Demeter sighed, sat down on an accommodating swell of greenery. She spread her hands, studied my face. “It never mattered, Persephone. I wasn’t hiding it from you.”

 “I didn’t say you were.” I smoothed my tunic beneath me and sat opposite her, my eyes drawn down to the ground. “Is Zeus…cruel to her?” I didn’t want to know that he was, but, still,
  I
needed to ask.

“Oh…” My mother exhaled once more, patted the space above my knee. “He taunts her.
Calls her the ‘lord’ of the dead because she favors the company of women.
She is not like him, or Poseidon. Hades is good.”

My lips parted, surprised. “Are you familiar with her, then?”

“Oh…” She hesitated. “No, no one is, not really. Except, I suppose, for the dead. But that’s too somber a subject for a golden morning, the morning after your debut. I am so proud of you, my Persephone.” She held out her arms to me, and I felt like a little girl again as I ducked my head against her shoulder. But I did not feel the old comfort blossom inside my heart when she held me in her arms. She was trembling a little.

“Speaking…of Zeus…” she spoke haltingly into my hair, pausing for a long moment during which neither of us moved—or breathed. “Since he was unable to talk long with you last night, he hoped to remedy that…” She strung the stilted words together like red berries on a poison tree. I arched back from her in horror.

There was such sadness in her eyes.

“He is coming down later today so that he may bless you, acquaint
himself
with you.”

“
Here
,” I whispered. “Zeus is coming here?”

“Persephone, I couldn’t dissuade him. I tried—please believe me, I tried. Once he gets an idea in his head…” She looked so small, so defeated.

I found my feet, cleared my throat,
closed
my eyes as my mother’s fears collided with my own. “I’m sorry, but I won’t be here when he comes—I
can’t
be. I’d do something wrong. I’d make him angry with me.
With you.”

My mother was nodding, her lovely face pale.

“That may be best,” she whispered, petting the blue morning glory vine curling like a puppy in her lap. “I’ll…I’ll think of an excuse for you. It will be all right. It will.” She sounded unconvinced, and her eyes shone like moons. “I’m sorry, Persephone.”

I stood for a moment, disarmed, as I gazed down at my mother, my mother who would lie to the king of all the gods for me, for
me
.
My mother.
After
Charis
, I had doubted her. But I knew, had always
known,
the depth of her love for me, deeper than the deepest roots, deeper than the Underworld itself. Words crowded my throat; I could say them, could say anything, but words would never be enough, truly.

She rose, smooth and tall and serene.
I could not help her, could not save her. I could not save myself.

My heart splintered, and I needed to leave, needed to escape her kindness and her courage, her trembling hands, the fear buried behind the calm of her eyes. So, slowly, I kissed my mother on her cool cheek and turned and left, vines catching at my hair.

Under the pink clouds, beneath the hum of growing things, I cursed myself, balled my fists. I felt like a coward and a traitor. I should have stayed.
But to engage in a father-daughter meeting with Zeus?
My skin chilled at the thought.

I don’t remember how I moved through the forest—I must have run, though, because my legs were bleeding the blue blood of the immortals. It pooled on my briar-torn shins, and I stumbled and fell, over and over. I didn’t know where to go. The nymphs stared at me when I passed them. They must have thought me mad. I just wanted to be alone, left alone, safe in a new world, where Zeus could never come. An idea woke in my heart then, and I followed the curve of the sun in the sky, creating my own path through the overgrown woods.

Finally, the trees fell away, the ground softened beneath my feet, and I threw myself toward the sea.

My legs could not carry me fast enough. I ran through the dunes, kicking up a fog of sand. I felt a rhythm within me: the crashing of the waves, the crashing of my heartbeat. I fell down upon the hot sand, sunk my hands deep into the damp, golden crumbles of it, and sobbed—wet, heaving sobs—for the hopelessness, the unfairness, the prison in my mother’s eyes. I sobbed as the wind sang through the sea grasses, as the surf crested, spilled, water removing earth, water sweeping it all away.

Through tear-filled eyes, I gazed at the endless blue of the ocean. I had been here a few times but not many. My mother had taken me here once, when I was very small, to play with the sea nymphs. Their laughter had been strange but sweet, kind. They had made me a necklace of pearls, had called it the hearts of oysters. They’d shown me an oyster, then, tickled him so that he smiled at me, so I could see the hard shining pearl lying within. My mother and I had laughed, and the sun had gleamed like a polished yellow stone, and all I knew was joy.

I stood up, dusted the sand from my tunic, moved nearer to the sea. The surf pounded against the earth, over and over, and it was so loud and still so comforting, a roaring hush that silenced my heart.

When Zeus arrived, found me missing, he would command my mother to find me. And she would have no choice but to ask her flowers, her trees, her vines and grasses where I’d hidden myself, and—traitors all—they would bend and shift, recreate my trail. I would be caught as swiftly as a rabbit in the mouth of a fox.

And when I was dragged before Zeus, I would spit on him. I would scream and sob. I would say, “You have taken away the only person who meant anything to me.” I would say, “Why does my mother fear you so much? What have you done to her?” And he would regard me with that smug twist to his lips and laugh until his sides were sore, while my mother’s hands shook, while she shrunk smaller and smaller in his electric shadow. Then he would punish me in some clever way—perhaps I’d become a rosebush like
Charis
, or a mirror pool, or a monstrous creature that no mother or sweet nymph could ever love—and I would be lost forever.

I would speak the truth, but it wouldn’t make a difference. Zeus would be the same as before, my mother the same, cowering before him, and the pattern would repeat itself over and over and over again. There was nothing I could do to stop it.

Nothing.

I made my way down to the seawater, felt it
wash
over my feet, cooling me, and I closed my eyes and held my face up to the light. I was weary: world weary, bone weary. I wanted my halcyon days back, those too-few days of laughing in the sunshine hand-in-hand with my beloved, of feeling her warmth beside me as night fell and the stars peeked out. I was so innocent then to the pain in the world, the pain a cruel father could cause. The pain of hearts ripped in half.

I wanted my life to be beautiful again. No matter what foul things lurked in my future, that future Zeus and my mother intended for me, could I hold onto the shining, lovely past, when this, all of this, became too difficult to bear? Would I always remember that, once, my life
had
been beautiful, that I had experienced—felt, touched—beauty? Could that alone sustain me for an immortal’s lifetime? I was so young. I had experienced so little, in the grand scheme of forever. Could the memory of that handful of months, drawn thin and threadbare over the centuries, be enough?

“Demeter’s daughter…”

The words were so soft, at first, that I almost didn’t hear them over the crash of the sea.   But they came again, like music: “Demeter’s daughter…”

Lovely—so lovely.
They rode the waves up and
down,
their long green hair braided with pearls or swept up with coral combs. Their eyes were milky and wet, smooth spongy skin white as the bellies of sharks.
My old friends.
The sea nymphs.

“You remember me?” I murmured, holding out my hands. “It’s been so long…”

They came ashore one by one, a stream of lithe ladies with haunting, slippery smiles. They embraced me, kissed me, whispered in my ears, and when they laughed, it was the sound of tide breaking.

“We never forget, Demeter’s daughter. We have missed you.”

I stepped into the water with them, and they held me up, like a queen in a chair.

When I was small, they filled my hands with broken bits of water-smoothed pottery, iridescent shells, and other mysteries of the deep. They did so again, heaping shining, strange things upon me; soon my palms overflowed with wet, glistening treasure.

“Thank you,” I whispered, and I carried it all back to the shore. Making a little hollow in the hot sand, I buried the tokens.

The wet skin along my back prickled, and I stood, brushing coarse sand from my hands and arms. The wind was picking up, and the water crashed harder against the sand and rocks, over and over, as if—by pounding the earth—it could shape the dirt, the stone, to something new, something more like itself, liquid and lucid and changing. I stooped and gathered a handful of ocean. The sea nymphs, quiet now, watched me with unblinking white eyes. It had been so many years since I had seen them last, but they remembered me. How much longer would it take them to forget me?
For the world to forget me?

“Persephone…” The sea nymph brushed webbed fingers against the cool skin of my leg. I shuddered, though the sensation was not unpleasant, only surprising.

“We do not have flowers in the ocean,” she whispered to me. “Persephone, will you gather flowers for us? We so love beautiful things, and they are the most beautiful of all. If you pick us flowers, we will weave crowns for ourselves, and for you. We will all be lovely together.”
Again, her hand on my leg.
“Oh, pick us flowers, Persephone!”

It was a simple wish to grant. Water streamed over my body as I moved out of the ocean, and I hitched up my drenched tunic to my thighs. Footprints trailed behind me to the water’s edge, as if I had just risen from a shell, new-created in the frothing secrets of the deep.

There was a flower near the shoreline, choked by sea grasses. It was white and plain, not the loveliest of my mother’s kingdom, but I admired its stubbornness, sprouting here in the sand, so far from its native ground.