“The car accident my mom died in was just after Remy was born,” Jonah said quietly. “The day I disappeared from school. Valentine’s Day. That’s why I left. I got pulled out of school before recess. Everything fell apart after she was gone.”
“Jesus, Jonah. I had no idea. Shit. I’m so sorry.” All these years some dark little voice had been whispering to her that Jonah had left because of her. Because all the other kids had called her names and been so mean and he’d grown tired of being the only thing that stood between her and their cruelty. Of course that wasn’t true. Of course Esther had made herself the center of the universe. Anxious people always thought the world revolved around them, but knowing the truth didn’t make it any easier to stop believing the lie. “Tell me more about her.”
Jonah smiled. “She taught literature, but she’d always wanted to be an actress. That’s why she loved Shakespeare so much. Man, I swear, she was reading me Shakespeare before she was reading me picture books. And she bought me my first paint set when she saw that I was good at art. She was the only person who didn’t laugh at me when I told her I wanted to do movie makeup when I grew up. I told her about you, you know.”
“No way.”
“Yeah, I did. Told her about you being picked on at school, because it upset me. She sat me down and read me that quote, the one that says, ‘All tyranny needs to gain a foothold is for people of good conscience to remain silent,’ then explained what it meant and what I needed to do. I sat with you for the first time the next day.
“Ruined my dad, though, her dying. He was a good guy before that, but then I guess the grief turned to depression and the depression turned to booze and the booze is what makes him mean.”
Esther didn’t know what to say, so she did the only thing she could do: put her hand on Jonah’s shoulder and leaned her head against him.
“One day,” he said, “everybody’s gonna wake up and realize their parents are human beings, just like them. Sometimes they’re good people, sometimes they’re not.”
Before Esther and Jonah went home, they each bought a cookie from the same store Rosemary Solar had taken her children to six years earlier. Esther made a mental note to add gingerbread men to the roster of illicit treats she sold at school.
Near the car, they spotted a quarter glinting in the dark, but neither of them stopped to pick it up.
• • •
THAT NIGHT, Jonah decided to stay for his bro date with her dad, which she was, he informed her, invited to. Esther tried to talk him out of it—it wasn’t Jonah’s burden to carry—but he refused, saying he’d already promised Peter he’d come, and besides, he didn’t mind spending the evening in a musty basement if it meant he didn’t have to go home. Holland wasn’t cruel to Remy, Jonah said. In fact, he barely acknowledged her existence.
Jonah left around sunset and returned half an hour later with an expensive bottle of Scotch. Esther didn’t ask how he acquired it. Then he scooped up his cat and slung her around his neck like a scarf, like always, and they went down to the basement.
Once they were downstairs, she was glad Jonah had wanted to stay. The junk, normally stacked up in perilous columns, had been pushed to the sides and neatly arranged. The floors had been cleaned. A table had been set up with three chairs around it, a strip of fabric usually hung on the walls used as a tablecloth. Peter was shining, the petrified half of his body gleaming like polished wood in the low light. Esther could see the age rings that had formed beneath his skin, the opaline veins of white glitter that threaded through the darker wood.
Peter had washed his hair and trimmed his beard. He told them how he’d eaten nothing but beans and rice for four weeks so he could justify spending his carefully rationed savings on this one meal. Esther and Jonah offered to pay for the Thai food they ordered, but Peter wouldn’t hear of it.
They stayed for hours. Jonah was the Jonah she’d first seen at the nickel refinery, the one with a drink in each hand, telling some grand story to a crowd of people. The one who painted the brightness of the galaxy to hide the darkness that lived inside him.
Peter adored him, that much was clear. “We should do this again sometime,” he said, raising his good arm for a toast. “To new friends.”
They raised their glasses of Scotch too. “To new friends,” she and Jonah said together.
Esther thought, as she watched them, that perhaps she’d judged her mother too harshly for not leaving her father despite the constant pain he caused her.
Perhaps falling and remaining in love with people, even if you didn’t want to, was not the great disaster she’d always imagined it to be.
21
9/50: SATAN INCARNATE AKA GEESE
ON THE Sunday of 9/50, before Jonah could even ask, Esther held up her hand and explained to him why she avoided geese: “a) Canada geese brought down the plane that crashed into the Hudson River, and b) geese are generally just terrible, horrible, satanic beasts.”
“For once,” he said, pulling oven mitts out of his backpack and taping them around his wrists, “I agree with you.” He looked her up and down, taking in her Stormtrooper armor. “I brought you gloves and goggles, but it doesn’t look like you’ll need them.”
“I have battled a goose before,” she said as she put on her helmet, praying to the Great Pit of Carkoon that it would be enough to protect her face from being mangled. “I will not meet them unprepared again.”
“You ready?”
“For geese?” Her voice was muffled and her breath was warm against her face, but she didn’t care, because geese. “No. Let’s go.”
They walked to the park near her house, where the local geese were made of beaks and hatred. The pond had been cordoned off for the better part of a decade, ever since the birds tried to maul a small child to death. There were signs pegged into the lawn everywhere that read WARNING: AGGRESSIVE GEESE.
They were going to die.
“Geese are the only birds to have killed a man,” Esther said as Jonah strapped his GoPro to his forehead.
“That’s not true,” he said.
A goose locked eyes with her and hissed, even though they were fifty feet away. “I’m pretty sure it’s true. They’re ready for us.”
Jonah crossed himself and took a breadstick out of his backpack. They nodded at each other in understanding that this may very well be the end.
How Esther saw it in her head: an establishing shot, her and Jonah on one side of the screen, the goose horde, on the other, as they marched toward the birds to the tune of Carl Orff’s epic “O Fortuna.” They began running; so did the geese. There were battle cries from each side. Jonah held up the breadstick and screamed “FOR HUMANITY!” Then a sweeping aerial shot, showing the armies about to collide, and how the two mammalian warriors were vastly outnumbered. A close-up of her Stormtrooper helmet. A close-up of a goose’s face, its expression bloodthirsty (aka resting goose face). And then the shot this had all been building toward: their armies meeting in the middle of the screen, two tsunamis slamming into each other, feathers flying everywhere as the geese set upon them.
Back to reality: Esther lost Jonah in the carnage, but she heard him scream, “Take the bread you sons of bitches! Just take the bread!” The birds were everywhere, snapping at her plastic suit, trying to find the weaknesses in her armor. They were hissing madly, necks outstretched, wings flapping wildly, as they tried to decide whether to eat the breadstick or murder the intruders or both.
“There are too many of them! Retreat, retreat!” Esther yelled. That’s when a goose bit Jonah’s ankle and brought him down. He screamed and collapsed in a heap, his chest and arms exposed to the fury of a dozen beaks.
“Go on without me!” he said between goose bites. “Go on without me!”
“That’s a negative, Ghost Rider!” Emboldened by adrenaline, Esther dove into the demon bird tornado and grabbed Jonah under the arms. But
the geese were fast and knew how to hold a grudge, so even though she dragged him halfway across the park, they still followed, hissing and biting and flapping like some symphony of evil. The geese finally decided they were far enough away from their territory and went dead still on the lawn, sentries waiting for the duo to regroup and strike again. Esther dropped Jonah and sank to her knees, heaving breaths inside her helmet. She yanked it off, and then her gloves, so she could tear open Jonah’s shirt to check for injuries. He was moaning and writhing on the ground, mumbling over and over, “I can’t feel my legs.” There were three blood blisters on his shoulders and a dozen on his ankles and legs where the geese got their beaks into him, but apart from that, she couldn’t see any lasting damage.
She stared at the geese. “O Fortuna” started playing in her imagination again. “It isn’t over,” she said, shaking her head. “They’ll come for us when we least expect it.”
Jonah stood, limping. A goose hissed at him and he jumped. “Man, fuck this. Fuck geese.”
22
AND ADULTS WONDER WHY TEENAGERS DRINK
THE UPGRADE to DEFCON 2 came a few short days later. The house had been slowly drained of furniture, which meant Rosemary was on a bad losing streak, but this was nothing new. Money from the slots was like the tide: it came in, it went out, it came in, it went out. During a high tide the house overflowed with furniture and electronics and food, and then slowly began to recede again as the money ebbed and the slot gods took back what they’d given. Even with the salary from Rosemary’s horticulture job, the past due notices on personal loans began to accumulate.
Auntie Kate rang at 5:00 p.m. to talk to Rosemary, which she only ever did when Rosemary owed her a considerable sum of money. Esther did what was required of her: she cried. It wasn’t hard. She didn’t even have to fake it. She could feel the tide rushing out faster than ever before and sucking everything from her life with it. A tide like that meant only one thing—a tsunami was coming, and it would destroy everything in its path.
Once Kate finally hung up, Esther waited for Rosemary all afternoon and most of the evening. There was no food in the house, literally nothing, and her mother had promised to bring home pizza.
“She’s not coming, Esther,” Eugene said when she called Rosemary for the ninth time. “If she was coming home, she’d be here by now.”
At eleven o’clock, her stomach growling, Esther decided to send her mother a passive-aggressive message.
ESTHER:
Don’t worry about dinner if it’s too much hassle.
ROSEMARY:
Okay x
ESTHER:
Oh so NOW you see your phone?
ROSEMARY:
Sorry, busy x
Esther wanted to send her texts that said things like, Don’t you realize how much you’re hurting your family? and Fuck you for being so selfish! but she knew it would only make Rosemary cry, and then Esther would feel bad, and it wouldn’t help anything anyway.
The whole situation made her so angry that she wanted to rip something, scratch something, tear something to pieces. She wondered if this was the feeling Eugene got before he slid a razor blade through his skin. She thought about trying it. There had to be some reason he did it. Maybe it felt good? In the end, she settled on knocking back a quarter bottle of vodka until she was in a different type of pain, an oh-god-there-goes-my-liver kind of pain. What better thing to destroy than yourself?
She messaged Jonah.
ESTHER:
What are you doing right now?
JONAH:
Painting. What are you doing?
ESTHER:
Contemplating alcoholism as a legitimate form of teenage rebellion.
JONAH:
Bring some of that rebellion over here. No one should rebel alone.
So she did. Eugene drove her to Jonah’s and they parked four houses down from his and snuck into the backyard, which was unnecessary, because Jonah’s dad wasn’t home.
They drank behind the house in the cold until everything was funny, and Jonah painted page after page of watercolors that went from bright and beautiful when he was sober to formless, swirling masses when he was drunk. Eugene described to him the apparitions he saw in the dark, and he painted those too, monstrous things with bright white eyes and skin made of dripping tar.
For a while, Jonah worked on his portrait of Esther. Eugene peered over his shoulder and said, “It’s just a mi—” but Jonah shushed him.
“Don’t spoil the surprise,” he said.
“I don’t get it,” Eugene said, frowning, but Jonah shook his head.
“She’ll get it, man,” he said as he looked up at her. “She’ll get it.”
Esther blushed and pressed her lips together to stop from breaking into a smile.
Later, when the portrait session was over, Jonah sat next to her, his paint-flecked fingertips tracing circles on her palm. Esther sipped her vodka and let her anger spill out. She told them that tomorrow would be the day she confronted her mother. She was going to do it, she was going to do it, she was going to say something.
They drove home at sunrise without having slept. Esther didn’t ask Eugene if he was sober enough to get behind the wheel of a car, because she thought if he wasn’t—if he was intoxicated—that maybe that would finally attract Death’s attention.
Eugene was sober, or at least sober enough to drive without hitting anything, so they made it home without any visits from the Reaper. It was a cool morning—she could tell from the lace of frost strung across the fallen leaves in their front yard—but she couldn’t feel anything, even though they drove with the windows down. Rosemary’s car was parked in the drive, which meant she’d come home and either a) found her children missing and hadn’t given a shit, or b) hadn’t even bothered to check if they were in their beds.
Esther wasn’t sure which was worse. She slammed the door of the car and stalked barefoot through the tinkling nazars up to the house, fired up and full of alcohol and ready to tell her mother exactly what she thought of her.
“Esther, don’t,” Eugene said as he closed the car door.
“Why the hell not?”
“You don’t think she feels bad enough? You screaming at her isn’t gonna help anyone.”
“It’ll help me feel better.”
Inside, though, she found her mother curled up in the hall with a pillow under her head, a hand pressed to the orange door that led down to her husband’s tomb. All the acid went out of Esther. Rosemary’s other hand was tucked tight against her chest, clasping the locket that contained a picture of her and Peter on their wedding day. Scattered on the wood beneath her pillow were sage leaves with wishes written on them. Set him free, they all said. Set him free, set him free, set him free.
Here was solid proof of the ruin love could sow. A reminder of how letting someone under your skin only gave them the power to destroy you in the end.
Esther wanted to wake Rosemary. She wanted to make her feel bad for what she’d become. She wanted to know why she stayed in a relationship that had halfway ruined her. She wanted her venom to burn in her mother’s veins and hurt her from the inside out. But then she noticed how the tips of her fingers had been eaten away.
How Esther saw her mother in her head: All over her skin—her ears, her nose, her neck, everywhere—there were little holes of decay, as if she were termite-ridden. Houses infested with termites became hollowed out and started to collapse under their own weight. Esther wondered if it was the same for people.
“Do you see that?” she said to Eugene as she touched the brittle ends of Rosemary’s fingers. Flecks of skin and bone chipped away in small chunks. “Our mother is made of wood.”
Back to reality. Eugene was gone. Esther searched the whole ground floor for him, and the yard, but he’d vanished. After half an hour of searching, she g
ave up and dragged a blanket off Rosemary’s bed and covered her mother. She stirred but did not wake.
“Do you want to go to school?” Eugene said when he reappeared from the ether three hours later. It was the longest time he’d spent invisible. When he returned, he smelled of damp soil and wood and some dark, unearthly scent Esther couldn’t place. She wondered where he went when he wasn’t there; she wondered if she wanted to know.
“It’s almost midday already,” she said, looking over at him from where she’d been waiting on the couch, Fleayoncé a puddle of fur and warmth curled up on her stomach. “So no.”
Eugene checked his phone. Esther saw him flicker for several seconds before becoming solid again. “Huh.” He looked around. “I must’ve lost track of the time.”
Then he meandered to his room and they did nothing for the rest of the day except sleep off their hangovers. Their mother, even when she woke, never came to check on them.
23
THE COLD KISS OF DEATH
THE HEATING gave out the weekend before Thanksgiving. Esther woke shivering in her bed, her breath a cloud that hung over her mouth. The house was cold and gloomy—even the lamps and candlelight didn’t seem able to shift the weight of the dark. Eugene was hovering in her doorway, a vengeful spirit woken by the frost; it looked like he’d been crying.
“No heat,” he said. “Everything is darker in the cold.”
“Can’t sleep?” Esther asked.
Eugene rubbed his arms, the skin beneath his hands covered with goose bumps. “I never sleep. Can I come in here?”
Esther nodded and Eugene came and curled up with his back to her. He was shaking. Sobbing, she realized. There were small tremors from the other side of the bed, aftershocks of whatever terrible thing had made him desperate enough to come into her room. She put her palm against the thin ribs protruding from his back and hoped he could feel the calm they’d always been able to pass between their skin.
A Semi-Definitive List of Worst Nightmares Page 16