It was the moment she’d been waiting for for months. The moment that was inevitable. The moment Jonah realized she was more trouble than she was worth.
People only understood mental illness up to a certain point. Beyond that point, their patience waned. She knew this, because she felt it sometimes with Eugene. With her mother. With her father. The desire just to take them by the shoulders and shake them and say, “Get better! Be better! For God’s sake, fix yourself!”
She’d known for a long time that this day would come, and now here it was, and she couldn’t blame him, because the shit he was going through was even worse than hers. The cumulative total of their collective pain was too much to bear. It was easy enough to hurt for yourself; hurting for other people was what broke you.
“Okay,” she said as she broke away from him. “Okay.”
“Hey, hey, wait. Where are you going?” Jonah said as he caught up to her on the lawn and ran his thumb over the bruise forming at her cheekbone. His jaw wobbled and jutted forward as he touched the swelling; she had never seen him so angry before.
“You just said . . . you couldn’t do this anymore?”
Jonah shook her head, then kissed her injured cheek softly. “Not you. I didn’t mean you.”
Esther collapsed into him. What had she done to herself? How had she let this happen? How had she allowed the boy who pickpocketed her at a bus stop become a person who could make her come undone?
“I’m sorry I’m crazy,” she sobbed. “I’m sorry you got sucked into all this. I’m sorry I can’t fix all of this for you.”
“Hey. You’re not crazy. And I didn’t get sucked into anything. We started this together,” he said. “We’re gonna finish it together.”
They waded out into the long grass behind his house, far enough that they could no longer see any lights but the half dozen solar garden lights they carried with them, stolen from a neighbor’s yard. Jonah set the lamps in a ring, like a fairy circle out of myth. The sky above them was heavy and thick with magic, and all around her, Esther could sense a danger that she could not see. An old danger, from a time before electricity and cars and the internet had made people forget what lurked in the dark. It stalked around them, a swirling mass of unknown menace. It sent goose bumps up her arms. It made her take small, shallow breaths through her mouth. It made her eyes water because she couldn’t bring herself to blink.
“I’ll never be rid of this fear,” she said as Jonah drove the final light into the ground. “I was stupid to think I could break the curse.”
“How about you fuck off, you giant bitch?!” Jonah yelled, and for a second she thought he was talking to her, but no—he had his hand cupped around his mouth and was yelling at the shadows. “Yeah, you, thou currish onion-eyed maltworm! I see you, dickwad. Take a hike!”
“You’re going to swear and shout Shakespearean insults at the dark?”
“Got a better idea?”
Esther turned back toward the gloom. “Piss off,” she said weakly.
“Come on, Solar, you can do better than that. Thou foul defacer of God’s handiwork!” Jonah boomed. “Thou mewling rump-fed clodpole! Suck my dick, thou frothy dread-bolted scullion!”
“Yeah!” Esther added. “Screw you, you piece of shit. You . . . uh . . . bucket of dildos!”
“Thou frothy dismal-dreaming horn-beast!”
“Douchenozzle!”
“Thou mewling crook-pated canker-blossom! The power of Christ compels you, bitch! Thou art unfit for any place but hell!” Jonah looked over at Esther, a lopsided grin on his swollen lips. “Better?”
Esther smiled. “Better.” She took a breath. Steadied herself to ask a difficult question. “Why do you stay? Every time I think you’ve had enough of me . . . you come back for more.”
“You really don’t know?” Jonah took a step back. Rubbed his eyes. “Because I . . . I kind of love you, Esther.”
“Why?”
“Why? Because . . . you’re so much braver than you realize. Look, I lied about not remembering how we met as kids, okay? I remember you being bullied. I remember the way you used to grit your teeth and stick your chin out and keep doing whatever you were doing even when you were being tormented. Most kids would’ve cried, you know, but you? You’ve got guts, Solar. You always have.”
“The only reason you like me is because you don’t see who I really am.”
“I see you.”
“Then let me see the portrait. Let me make sure.”
“Some paint on a canvas isn’t gonna make any difference if you don’t know by now. I knew this would be hard for you but . . . I thought you’d feel the same way.”
“Eugene flickers in and out of existence, sometimes for hours at a time. My father is turning to stone. My mother is being eaten by termites. I can’t be sure if Hephzibah is even real or not. You’re the only person I care about who’s solid and I don’t want to . . . to ruin you.”
What Esther didn’t say, what she didn’t add, was that she didn’t want to give Jonah the power to ruin her either. Love was a trap, a sticky trap of molasses meant to bind two people together. It was a thing that couldn’t be escaped, a weight that people strapped to their own legs before they waded into the water and wondered why they drowned. Esther had seen it time and time again. She’d seen the thing people called love, the thing romantic movies were made about, and the power of it scared the shit out of her.
Her grandfather had loved her grandmother, and the loss of her had sent him mad. Her mother had loved her father, and the disappearance of him had eaten her up, turned her into termite-eaten wood.
Despite the clear and present danger Jonah posed, Esther let him tuck a strand of her hair behind her ear. She let him lean close to her and press his swollen lips to hers. She pulled back, tried not to hurt him, but Jonah didn’t seem to care. His hand was in her hair, pulling her closer to him, pressing her mouth harder against his. He kissed her like he was going to war and didn’t expect to kiss anyone ever again.
Then it was over and he was resting his forehead against her. “Please prove me wrong,” she said quietly, her lips against the skin of his hand.
“Man, you’re wrong about so many things, I can’t pick where to start proving you wrong. What do you even want me to prove you wrong about?”
“Death, mostly. And love.”
“No way I can prove you wrong about love, unless you’ve gone and fallen in love with me too.”
As soon as you admitted to loving someone, you suddenly had a lot to lose. You freely gave them a way to hurt you.
There was never a single, grandiose moment of realization. Esther certainly noticed the big things: his goodness, his strength, the way he protected her when no one else would. But it was the little things that accumulated over time that made Jonah Smallwood extraordinary. The way he grinned when he was planning something mischievous, how he looked at her with wide, excited eyes in the moments after she’d faced a fear, the way his hips wiggled when he danced, and how he collapsed to the ground whenever he found something really, ridiculously funny.
A thousand little moments had made Esther fall more and more in love with him, without her even noticing. A thousand little pieces of his soul had splintered off and dug themselves into her.
“You got the hots for me, Solar?”
Esther didn’t answer.
“Well I’ll be damned.”
“Prove me wrong,” she whispered.
“You are so wrong,” he said, and then he kissed her forehead, the tip of her nose, her lips. Esther supposed, as they held each other under a threadbare carpet of stars, that this was how it must always feel in the beginning. Yet even there, next to him, the most excellent person in the universe, she couldn’t stop herself from thinking that love was a pitcher plant. Sweet with nectar on the outside, but once you caught the scent and took the plunge, it ate
you whole.
Soul and all.
32
EUGENE
THEY SLEPT in the closed-in porch, curled up together under a blanket beneath a galaxy of painted stars. Esther awoke in the early morning to twenty-three missed calls, all of them from her mother, and two text messages:
MOM:
Call me immediately.
It’s Eugene, Esther. It’s Eugene.
33
THE SHADOW BOY
MERCY GENERAL Hospital, the one built to replace Peachwood, was a big, geometric puzzle of a building, all glass and steel and concrete. Though its outsides were modern, its insides could be from any hospital in any decade: long, brightly lit corridors devoid of warmth or comfort, ugly industrial flooring, and the acid smell of bleach trying (and failing) to veil the stench of death.
Esther walked through the halls with grass from the night before still in her hair. Her Matilda Wormwood costume was ripped and dirty. She looked thoroughly out of place in such a sterile environment, a feral girl who’d wandered in from the jungle.
Or maybe, here on the mental health ward, she looked just right. Maybe this was where she belonged.
Rosemary had explained it to her on the car ride over, after she’d picked Esther up from the end of Jonah’s street. There had been a power outage on the street, and Eugene had disappeared into the sudden darkness. Whatever had snatched him and dragged him through the ether spat him back out, sweating and screaming and smelling of damp earth and decay. Smelling of the grave, Esther realized.
It had only taken him a minute or two to calm down once the lights were back on. Rosemary made him tea and tucked yarrow behind his ear.
He said he was fine. He said it was getting easier, now that he was older. He said she should go to the casino, if she wanted. He said he’d be fine on his own.
He said he’d be fine.
It was Peter who found him. It was Peter who, like his father, had a sixth sense for death. When he still took part in the world above, this extrasensory perception had made him an excellent veterinarian. He knew, without knowing how he knew, which animals to treat and which ones Death had already laid his hands on. Which ones were already marked and thus beyond the help of medicine. All he had to do was be near the dying to hear the dark, buzzing silence that was the symphony of Death.
The same symphony he heard when Eugene sank a veterinary scalpel into each of his wrists in the bathroom above the basement.
Eugene Solar was seventeen years old when he died.
“Aren’t you coming in?” Esther asked when Rosemary stopped at the door.
“You know he’d only want you.”
She nodded. She would be the same. If she was sick, or sad, or dying, or all three, Eugene would be the one she would ask for.
Esther watched her mother walk back down the hall toward the nurse’s station. She was rake thin and her skin fell in soft drapes across her cheekbones
Inside the room, Eugene was lying on his back in the bed, his eyes open but lifeless. Esther knocked on the wall. Eugene broke out of his corpse pose and looked over at her.
Eugene Solar was seventeen when he died. He was also seventeen when the EMTs brought him back from the clutches of the Reaper against his will—twice.
“Hey loser,” he said croakily.
Peter had gotten there in time. Just. Despite three strokes and a fear so great and terrible it had driven him underground for six years, their father had dragged himself, half paralyzed, up the basement stairs and gotten to the bathroom just in time to save his only son. Thirty more seconds, the EMTs said. Thirty more seconds and they wouldn’t have been able to bring Eugene back at all.
“Apparently you suck at dying,” Esther said. “Finally, something you’re not good at.”
“Oh no, didn’t you hear? I died twice. I’m just fine at dying. It’s the staying dead part that’s tricky.” Eugene stared at the ceiling again. “Well, this is not a conversation I was hoping to have. Now everyone’s gonna think it was a cry for help.”
“Our parents are so inconvenient. Never there when you need them and then right when you’re trying to kill yourself . . .”
“They barge in and ruin the whole thing. God, what dicks.”
“Dad really came out of the basement?”
“Yeah. I can’t explain it. I was quiet. I made sure I was quiet. I didn’t call for help or anything, but . . . he still found me. I don’t know how. I don’t remember much, just him stumbling into the room and practically falling on top of me. It might as well have been a dream.”
“So a casual suicide attempt was the answer all along.”
“Now if you develop a slight addiction to meth or something, we’ll get the family back together for sure.”
Esther laughed, which turned quickly to breathless sobbing. She didn’t really understand how she could be crying when there was nothing left inside her body. She sat on the side of his mattress and took one of his bandaged hands in hers. “Don’t leave me,” she whispered. “Don’t leave me here with them.”
Esther wanted to make her brother understand that he was the sun. That he was bright and burning and brilliant, and without his warmth, without his gravity to orient herself around, she would be nothing. She wished they had that psychic twin thing, that she could push images into his head and make him see. Make him see that he was everything.
Eugene was quiet for a moment, until he said, “I can’t stay, Esther,” as he twisted the ends of her hair in his fingertips. Esther started to cry harder, because she knew he didn’t mean I can’t stay in the hospital or I can’t stay in this town. Eugene meant he couldn’t stay on this planet, not when there were so many demons and ghosts to be stumbled upon in the dark, so many jump scares waiting in mirrors and blackened hallways and the bare branches of trees at night. The whole universe was wrong for a creature like Eugene; too much dark matter, too much space between stars, too many unknowns floating in the infinite abyss.
“It’ll get better,” she said through her tears. “I promise it’ll get better. You won’t always be scared.”
“Don’t be lame, Esther. You’re better than that. I don’t want to live like this anymore.”
She grasped desperately for bargaining chips, for reasons to make him stay. “You know if you die before her she’s going to play that terrible slideshow at your funeral.”
“That’s genuinely one of the reasons I put it off for so long. I tried to find it last night but the woman keeps it hidden like it’s a family heirloom.”
“How can you want to leave me?”
“Oh, Esther,” he said as she burrowed her face into his chest. “It isn’t about you. Not at all. It never has been. You can love someone with all your soul and still hate yourself enough to want to die.”
But she wasn’t willing to accept his surrender.
Not yet.
Not ever.
“You’ve gotta fight it, Eugene. Whenever you feel like hurting yourself, tell me, tell Heph, tell Mom, tell Dad, tell Jonah, tell your friends. I guarantee you that at least one of us will say, ‘Come over, I’ll be your backup.’ And then we fight the dark thoughts together. If you try and do this on your own, your chance of getting ambushed by your own mind skyrockets.”
“Sometimes there’s not a strategy for everything.”
“No. Shut up. I will not compromise with this thing inside you that makes you hate yourself so much. I can’t do that.”
“The thought of finishing high school, of graduating and going to college . . . it exhausts me. It makes me so tired. When I think about the future, all I feel is emptiness. Even if things get better, I know this feeling will come back eventually. It always does.”
“Give me your phone,” she said.
“I don’t have it. It’s in a bag somewhere.”
Esther found his phone in the bag Rosemar
y had packed for him and did a Google search and added the number for the suicide hotline into his contacts. “You ever wanna hurt yourself again, even if you feel like you can’t call anyone you know, you call this number.”
“You make it sound so easy.”
“Of course it’s not going to be easy. You’re fighting a war against yourself. Every time either side makes ground, you’re the one who gets hurt. But it’s not about winning the war against your demons. It’s about calling a truce and learning how to live with them peacefully. Promise me you’ll keep fighting.”
“Why should I? You don’t.”
“What does that mean?”
“You don’t fight. You think you’re so brave, but you don’t fight your demons either.”
“I’m trying. I’ve been trying for months.”
“Like hell you are. You go out every week and do some stupid stunt that you aren’t even really scared of. You get your heart pumping for a little while, but it’s not real fear.”
“We’re getting close, Eugene, I can feel it. We’re catching up to him. Or getting his attention. I can fix this.”
“The Reaper isn’t real, Esther. The curse isn’t real. Jack Horowitz is just some guy. Pop isn’t going to drown. I think that’s pretty clear by now. It’s a bedtime story he used to tell us when we were little kids, which—might I add—is pretty screwed up. I was close to the afterlife and I didn’t see anything or anyone.”
“Then why was all of this happening to us?”
“Because your life doesn’t need to be cursed for it to be a totally shit time. Look, Pop told me, okay? I asked him before he went into Lilac Hill if the curse was real, if he’d really met Death, and he just laughed. Said I should know by now that it was a fairy tale.”
A Semi-Definitive List of Worst Nightmares Page 21