Esther thought about her family as she watched him go. Eugene would die of the darkness. Her father would die in the basement. Her grandfather would drown. And one of these days, Rosemary Solar would cut herself on a broken mirror, or trip over a black cat, or walk under a ladder, only to have a great weight come crashing down on her moments later.
One great fear to rule your life. One great fear to take it. There was no escaping her fate, and no way to save the members of her family from theirs; this Esther’s grandfather had told her since she was a child.
Unless . . . Unless . . .
“Where would you start?” she asked Jonah hurriedly as he lifted his moped off a knot of tree roots. “If you were looking for Death? If you wanted to find him so you could ask him a favor, where would you start?”
Jonah paused to think, then answered her question with another question. “What are you doing tomorrow?”
She thought about lying. It would be so easy to say, “Oh, I’m moving to Nepal for senior year to learn the ways of the Sherpa,” and let Jonah forget that she existed. But she remembered, in that moment, the way he smelled at the warehouse last night, the truth of it, and how sad he’d looked when he thought Fleayoncé was dead in his arms, and—even though he’d robbed her and left her abandoned to walk home for three hours by herself in the rain—she didn’t want to say good-bye to him. Not again. Not quite yet.
So she said, “Looking for Death.”
And he said, “Sounds good.”
“How?”
“You know that saying, ‘You should do something every day that scares you’?”
“Yeah.”
“That’s how we find Death, I think. Everyone’s afraid of dying, right? Maybe that’s what attracts Death. Maybe that’s what brings him to you. Fear. So that’s what we do: we find him, we talk to him, we get him to lift the curse.”
“No more great fears?”
“No more great fears. You in?”
Esther weighed her options. On the one hand was certain death, for herself and everyone she loved. For six years, she’d avoided everything that had sent even a twinge of fear up her spine in an attempt to save her own life. As long as you avoided the curse, it couldn’t kill you, so charging headlong into the grip of fear seemed to border on insane.
But there was a chance, however small, that she could save everyone. Save Eugene from the dark. Save her mother from bad luck. Save her father from the basement. Save her grandfather from drowning—and that was a chance worth taking.
A small spark of what she would later recognize as bravery pinged up her spine as she nodded and said, “Yes.”
Esther noticed, even though a breeze hummed through the trees, the nazars had gone silent, as though they approved of Jonah Smallwood’s presence at the house. When he was gone, she added lobsters to her list, in fiftieth place, then went inside and checked eight times that all the doors were locked before going to bed.
7
1/50: LOBSTERS
THE NEXT morning, Esther woke early and dressed in her grandmother’s egg-yolk-yellow 1960s stewardess uniform and waited for Jonah to arrive. Then she paced around the house for half an hour and decided to message him saying that she was sick, because maybe tempting Death wasn’t such a great idea after all.
ESTHER:
I have contracted the measles.
Please don’t come over.
Jonah didn’t write back, so she assumed she was off the hook and wouldn’t ever have to see him again, which left her both relieved and a tiny bit . . . sad? It was the last Sunday before school started up again after summer break, and she had a lot of baking to do if she was ever going to escape the gravitational pull of the black hole that was her hometown, but a small part of her had been curious about him. A small part of her felt calm when he was around. A small part of her missed him when he wasn’t there.
Not ten minutes later there came the distinct sound of a moped parking outside her house. She dashed out onto the porch.
“You ever dress like a normal person?” was the first thing Jonah said when he saw her.
Esther regarded his clothes. “You do realize you look like you’ve been thrift shopping with Macklemore, right?” Then she remembered that she was severely infected and forced a cough. “I told you, I have the measles.”
“You don’t have the measles.”
“I am very ill with the measles.”
“You do not have the measles.”
Esther threw her hands up in the air. “Fine! This is a stupid idea. I don’t want to do it.”
“That isn’t an excuse I’m willing to accept.”
“What is an excuse you’re willing to accept?”
“That you urgently have to reupholster a couch.”
“That’s a weird excuse.”
“Yeah, but it’s not one you can use right now, so I’m sticking with it. Besides, you think I’m just gonna run out on my baby like that? Where’s my little Fleayoncé? Tell her Daddy’s here.”
“Ugh. Fine. Come in. She’s in the living room.”
Esther believed that what Peter diagnosed as a concussion was probably going to be something more permanent. Already Fleayoncé’s tongue lolled out of her mouth and her head was tilted, so that when she walked (which she hadn’t quite yet mastered with the cast), she moved diagonally, as if her head was weighted on one side with sand. Jonah didn’t seem to notice. They sat in the living room together and he fed the cat her kitten milk replacement with a syringe, drip by drip.
While he was feeding Fleayoncé, he looked around, taking in the bare walls, the clumps of candles and clusters of lamps in every corner of the room, the mound of cast-off furniture blocking the stairs, the sprigs of dried herbs hanging over every window and doorframe, the rabbit that had escaped the confines of the kitchen and was now gnawing at the foot of a sofa.
“Guessing you guys don’t have many houseguests, huh?” he said.
“Oh no, we have parties here all the time. People just keep bringing lamps as gifts. It’s becoming a real problem.”
“Let me look at your list,” he said, so she did. Jonah unfolded it gently and scanned, making comments like “hmmm” and “okay” and “not sure what that is, but sure.” And finally, “Hell, I might have to sit that one out. That is actually some scary shit!”
“We’ll work backwards,” he said, and then he was handing the list back to Esther, who still didn’t really understand what was going on.
Jonah set Fleayoncé down in her bed and handed Esther a helmet.
They drove for a while—or puttered, if you want to get technical—and ended up on the outskirts of the outskirts of the outskirts of town. The day was warm, the last of summer still clinging to everything. There wasn’t much out there but fields of long sun-bleached grass swaying as if they were underwater. Jonah stopped in front of a sign that read: PRIVATE PROPERTY. TRESPASSERS WILL BE PROSECUTED.
“Where are we going?” Esther said as she (quite ungracefully) dismounted the moped and followed him past the sign into the brush beyond. At that moment, her brain decided to remind her that the Zodiac Killer had never been caught and—even though Jonah was slightly too young to have murdered eight people in the 1960s—to an anxious person, logic didn’t matter. She fished her house keys out of her bag and held them in the webs of her fingers in case he tried to strangle her. They walked for ten minutes, and then fifteen minutes, treading a path that left scrapes on her legs and snagged long tendrils of red hair out from under her cap so that by the time they stopped she looked like a flight attendant who’d survived a plane crash.
And then, from close by, came the sound of water lapping at a shore. The shrubbery fell away and a clear water lake opened up before them. No one else was there. Sunlight sank through the mid-morning mist on the water and gave everything an amber glow. The white stone beach was littered wit
h debris from the lake: seaweed, shells, bits of green glass rubbed smooth from the waves. The wind whistled. The water lapped. It was lovely, in a horror movie opening kind of way.
“You’re not going to murder me, are you?” she asked, but Jonah was already getting organized (hopefully not to murder her). He took a GoPro out of his pocket and strapped it to his head.
“Where did you get that, I wonder?” she said.
“I found it,” Jonah said.
“Yeah, found it in someone else’s backpack.”
“That’s prejudiced.”
“It’s a comment based purely on past observation and personal experience.”
“C’mon,” he said, and then he was taking off his clothes, all of his clothes, down to his boxers, which Esther was not about to do, because a) stretch marks and cellulite and all that boring body image stuff, and b) she hadn’t been aware that partial nudity was going to be required today, and thus had not worn her Very Nice Underwear, which she kept especially for Potential Sexual Encounters, the current tally of which stood at zero. Not that this constituted a Potential Sexual Encounter in any way, shape or form.
Esther smoothed down the front of her dress. “I will remain clothed, thank you.”
To which Jonah replied, “Suit yourself. Ha. Get it? Suit yourself?” Then he ran back up the beach and foraged around in the grass and dragged out a rowboat painted pale blue and white, as pretty as a fondant cake. “You can float out in this,” he said when he reached her again, breathless, his brown eyes wide with excitement. Esther found it ridiculous that someone with such a strong jaw and stubble could somehow look so young and vulnerable.
“How did you even know that was there?” she asked him.
“My mom used to bring us here when we were kids.”
And that was how, on a warm late-summer morning two days after he robbed her, Esther Solar rowed out into a lake with Jonah Smallwood while dressed as a flight attendant.
The boat had room enough for two, but Jonah swam by the side of it instead, and they went out, out, out until the mist swallowed the land and it was just them, two solitary humans in the bright abyss. The water was deep but clear, and Jonah dived every now and then, the GoPro still strapped to his head as he darted into schools of silver fish, his body a long shadow in the depths. The bottom was carpeted with swaying sea grass, the kind that was generally populated by great white sharks (unlikely in a lake, Esther knew—but she feared them even in swimming pools) and those freaky merpeople from Harry Potter. Esther was very happy to be in the boat.
Far out from the shore was a small karst island of white rocks that jutted out of the water like a single shark tooth. They moored the boat and Jonah sat in the shallows, looking down to the rocky lakebed. Esther looked too and saw dozens of hard-shelled bodies in dull green and vein blue. Crawfish.
Freshwater lobsters. The last fear added to her list. Jonah was going to set a crustacean on her.
She slapped her hands so hard over her eyes that her skin stung. “Don’t you even dare think about bringing one of those things near me.”
“Lobsters are mermaids to scorpions,” Jonah said. She heard him slide into the water. “Why are you even scared of them?”
“One, they have claws. Two, they give you food poisoning. Three, they look like the face huggers from Alien. Four, they have beady eyes. Five, that sound they make when you cook them.”
“What sound?”
Esther made the hissing sound lobsters make when they’re being cooked.
Jonah shook his head (or at least she imagined he shook his head; she still had her hands over her eyes). “You get yourself dunked in boiling water, see how you sound.”
The boat rocked a little. Esther peeked between her fingers. A lobster had been placed on the seat across from her, its black beady eyes locked on hers. I will kill everyone you love, it rasped in lobster-tongue. Its antennae twitched. Esther stood up quickly. Lost her balance. Fell backward into the water. The lobster, she imagined, was pleased. She came up gasping, shocked at the cold of the water, at the depth of it, at the sudden panic that there might be freshwater sharks in the lake, or a school of piranha, or one of those flesh-eating parasites that crawls up your urethra when you pee and, like, lays eggs in your kidneys or whatever.
“Esther?” growled a quiet voice.
The lobster, was her first irrational thought. It knows my name. And then: For the love of God, do not pee.
She scrabbled to find her footing on the rocks and pushed a sopping curtain of hair out of her eyes. The rocks were too slippery to stand on, so she grabbed hold of the side of the boat and hauled herself up. Two lobsters were being held like puppets on the other edge of the boat.
And then Jonah’s voice, with a terrible English accent reminiscent of the Impressive Clergyman from The Princess Bride:
“Two lobsters, both alike in dignity,
In this fair lake, where we lay our scene,
From ancient grudge break to new mutiny,
Where civil blood makes civil claws unclean.”
“What are you doing?” she said. Esther could see almost nothing of Jonah, just his long dark fingers as he made the lobsters dance, made them kiss, made them dramatically commit suicide (i.e., plop back into the water), all over aquatically altered lines from Romeo and Juliet.
“Lobster Shakespeare,” Jonah said. “Obviously.
“O happy claw,” said Lobster Juliet in her shrill, offensively feminine voice. Lobster Romeo had already been dropped back into the water, where he’d quickly scuttled to the rocks, no doubt eager to spread his incredible tale of survival to the others. “This is thy sheath. There rust and let me die.” Jonah mimed Lobster Juliet stabbing herself in the chest with her own claw, and then she, too, gasped and collapsed backward into the water and sank down, down, down to the white sandy bottom.
Jonah dragged himself up and hooked his arms over the side of the boat, mirroring Esther’s pose, his grin mischievous.
“You’re not funny,” she said.
“Then why are you smiling?” he asked.
He had, she had to admit, a very good point.
After seeing them stripped of their dignity and resigned to their fate, the lobsters didn’t seem quite so face-hugger-y. The two spent the next hour in the water, Esther still fully clothed, shoes and all. They dove down to see how long they could hold their breaths, how many lobsters they could catch by hand, how many they could carpet the bottom of the boat with. They climbed to the top of the rocky outcrop and cannonballed into the water and let themselves sink to the bottom, all the air pulled ragged from their lungs, and then they waited underwater for Death, but he didn’t show.
In the end, the rowboat was alive with black beady eyes and wobbling antennae. Esther and Jonah were breathless, lungs aching, but alive. When the mist cleared, they floated on their backs in the last of the warm summer sunlight, and Death still didn’t come looking for them, and it didn’t escape Esther that Jonah was, in fact, not unfortunate looking, which she found more annoying than she should, mostly because you weren’t supposed to have “that guy is actually mildly to moderately attractive” thoughts about people who’d both abandoned and swindled you.
They emptied most of their catch back into the water—all but an unlucky two. When Esther and Jonah grew hungry, they rowed to shore, where she lit a small fire on the beach. (Eugene, naturally, had passed on his fire-starting knowledge to her.) Jonah disappeared and reappeared ten minutes later with a pot, two plates, cutlery, candles, a picnic blanket, a loaf of bread, and a not-unimpressive selection of condiments, lobster sauce included.
“I found a lake house,” he said as explanation.
“And it was . . . deserted?” she said hopefully.
“Yes. I definitely did not break and enter.”
“Jonah.”
“What? We’re only borrowin
g, I promise. Everything goes back after this. They won’t even know. Besides, the doors weren’t even locked. People who don’t lock their doors are too rich to care if anything gets stolen.”
“Yeah, or—hear me out here—they live on a large tract of private land and don’t expect anyone to trespass.”
They debated for a while about whether lobsters could feel pain and whether it was humane to plop them in boiling water or if they should sever their heads first or something. No conclusion could be reached on a nice way to kill the crustaceans, so they released them back into the water. The lobsters scuttled into the depths as fast as their little legs could carry them.
Esther and Jonah decided to eat the loaf of bread with the lobster sauce in lieu of eating the actual lobsters.
“We could do this, you know,” Jonah said between mouthfuls. “Every Sunday for the next year. Fifty fears. Fifty weeks. Fifty videos.” He tapped his GoPro. “What do you think?”
“Why are you filming exactly?”
Jonah lifted one shoulder in a casual half shrug. “Maybe I can use the footage to apply for film school scholarships one day. Then my dad would have to let me go.”
“I better not see any of that footage on the internet. Ever. Promise me.”
Jonah put his hand over his heart.
Esther thought about the offer he was making: a chance to have someone by her side as she worked her way through the list. A chance, however slim, to live a life without fear. But the challenge was harder than Jonah made it out to be. The curse was real to her, a weight she carried every day. The thing that would kill her was possibly on the list somewhere. Avoiding it meant a long life. Facing it meant fear, and ruin, and eventual death. Just because lobsters hadn’t turned out to be her great fear didn’t mean that snakes or heights or needles wouldn’t be, and then, once she knew, once it had her, it would consume her from the inside out. “Fear has ruined the lives of all the people I love,” she said finally. “I don’t want to be like them. I don’t think I want to find out what my great fear is. It’s better to live in fear than to not live at all.”
A Semi-Definitive List of Worst Nightmares Page 6