Esther looked at Eugene, waited for him to falter, but he didn’t. “But . . . that makes no sense. He . . . he told us for years that the curse is real.”
“It’s a story, Esther. A fairy tale.”
“What about Uncle Harold? What about cousin Martin and the bees? What about Pop’s dog? What about you?”
“No one believes but you. You’re the only one it’s real for. You’re the one who keeps it alive.”
Esther opened her mouth to disagree, but Eugene was either so tired or so drugged up that his eyelids grew heavy and his head nodded forward. “Move over,” she said, and he shuffled to the side as best he could, and she climbed into the narrow bed with him and carefully scrabbled her way under his injured arms and into his chest.
“Eugene,” she whispered into his hospital gown, beneath which his thin ribs moved up and down, drawing breaths against his will, “you cannot leave me.”
Eugene said nothing, just lifted a bandaged hand to place against her cheek. They lay how they did for nine months in the womb, all tangled limbs, until she felt his fitful breathing slow into the cadence of sleep. The frown lines on his forehead relaxed. The tensed muscles in his shoulders melted into the sheets.
How could death not be appealing, when the only thing that gave him comfort in life was being unconscious?
34
BETRAYAL
JONAH CAME by that morning, as soon as Esther called him. They ate breakfast together in the sad hospital cafeteria and waited for Eugene to return to the waking world he so desperately wished to leave.
“Do you think they purposefully make hospitals hideous?” Esther asked. The cafeteria had lemon walls and orange floors and all the furniture looked like it was from an old office building. A young girl, maybe thirteen or fourteen, with a cast on her arm, gave Esther a strange look as she and Jonah lined up to buy their food.
“Man, I hope they don’t serve this to Eugene or he’s gonna wanna kill himself all over again,” said Jonah as they sat down with their trays of bland eggs and “toast.”
Esther took a mouthful of food, but a strange sensation made it hard for her to chew and swallow. She looked up. The girl with the cast was still staring at her. Esther looked down at her Matilda Wormwood costume; nowhere near the weirdest thing she owned.
“That girl keeps looking at me,” Esther said. “It’s making me uncomfortable.”
“She’s clearly looking at me,” Jonah said. “You know what, this food isn’t bad. Come on, eat some more.”
“Okay, she just looked at me again.”
“Stop looking over there and she’ll stop looking over here.”
“Jonah, I’m not kidding. She’s staring at me.”
“It’s probably because you wear costumes everywhere. You’re being paranoid.”
“I am not being paranoid.”
“Eat your eggs, woman.”
“I’m not hungry.”
“How come?”
Something in Esther cracked. Her eyes welled and her throat swelled and suddenly she was crying. “Because my family is disintegrating around me and . . . and . . . and it’s all my fault. I should’ve . . . fought harder to get my dad out of the basement. I should’ve tried harder to break the curse before it tried to kill Eugene.”
“Hey, hey, hey, there’s no way any of this is your—” Jonah began, but the girl who’d been watching them was now standing behind him.
“Esther Solar?” she said. Esther wiped her eyes and frowned. “No way! It is you! I’m such a huge fan! Sorry, I don’t mean to interrupt but . . . can I get a photo with you?”
“What?” Esther said.
“Can I get a selfie with you?”
“Why?”
“I watch your YouTube channel.”
“My . . . YouTube? I don’t understand.”
“A Semi-Definitive List of Worst Nightmares,” the girl explained, looking between Jonah and her, like maybe they were not the people she thought they were. “The one where you guys go out every week and face a new fear. The geese were my favorite. One bit me when I was a kid and I’ve never—”
Esther looked at Jonah.
“Esther,” said Jonah, softly, pleadingly, but she’d already lurched up from the table and sent her bright orange tray of hospital food flying in the process. Jonah caught her at the cafeteria entrance.
“They’re online,” she said between gasps. She wasn’t sure if her breathing was wild from panic or from running or from pure rage or from all three. “You put the videos online.”
“It was supposed to be a surprise for 50/50.”
“You made me look like an idiot!”
“An idiot? You haven’t even seen them. You haven’t even seen how much people love you.”
“Don’t touch me!” she spat when he tried to put his hand on her arm. “You lied to me! You promised me that no one would ever see. You promised me. You promised.”
Jonah took a step back. “Yeah, okay, I lied. You wanna know why? Because what were we gonna do when we got to the number one slot? You aren’t scared of lobsters or snakes or blood or heights. That’s bullshit. I’ve known what you’re afraid of since the day I met you. I’ve known what you’re too chickenshit to write down.”
“Oh yeah, and what’s that, Dr. Phil? Please psychoanalyze me with all your many years of experience!”
“Are you kidding me? You actually don’t know? You have to know.”
“Screw you. You don’t know anything about me.”
“I see you, Esther. I meant it when I said that. You think your fear makes you so interesting and so special, but it doesn’t. You think you’re so unique or some shit because you carry around a list of everything you can’t do, but you’re not. Everyone is scared of exactly the same stuff. Everyone fights the same battles every day.”
“You don’t know what it’s like living with a cursed family.”
“Jesus. Your family isn’t cursed. Eugene’s been trying to tell you for months and months that he’s sick, but you don’t want to see it. You don’t pay attention. You want a simple solution to a complex problem. Well, there is none. People get depression and develop gambling addictions and have strokes and die in car crashes and get hit by the people who should love them, and it’s not because they were cursed by Death. That’s just how it is.”
“This isn’t about you and your fucked-up life.”
“Goddamn it, Esther,” he said, and then he kicked a trash can.
So Esther said the thing she knew would cut the deepest. “Already starting to take after your dad, I see.”
Jonah took a deep breath in and steadied himself. When he spoke again, his voice was low and measured. “You think so little of your family because they don’t love you like you wanna be loved, but that doesn’t mean they don’t love you with everything they’ve got. Just because they aren’t perfect people doesn’t mean they aren’t enough.”
“You promised me you’d prove me wrong.”
“You think this means I don’t love you?”
“No. I know you love me. This just proves to me that love was exactly what I thought it was all along. The power to cause pain.”
“I see you, Esther,” he pleaded. “I see you.”
All the times her mother should’ve left her father but didn’t, wasn’t strong enough, was too afraid of the unknown. But Esther had had practice. Months and months of practice being brave. So she was brave again then. There were no tears. She simply shook her head and walked away.
35
THE GREAT ORCHID HEIST
ESTHER AND Rosemary spent the morning in the hospital, in and out of Eugene’s room as doctors and nurses came and went and told them again and again how lucky he was, how close he’d come. Esther’s heart had never hurt so much before; she hadn’t been aware before that day that things like betrayal and g
rief could hurt as much as physical pain. When she thought of Eugene and what he’d done, she couldn’t breathe. When she thought of her father and how he’d been rushed to the hospital alongside his son, because he was too weak even to move, her eyes burned. When she thought of Jonah and what he’d done, she wanted to vomit.
People had seen her. Strangers on the internet had watched her in some of her most private, vulnerable moments: when she was wet and sobbing and hyperventilating and shaking and weak and a coward. It had taken so much for her to let Jonah in, and he had just let them see her like that. Jonah had given her to them willingly, against her wishes. And that, Esther thought—that was unforgivable.
More than that, she hated herself for caring about something so trivial and stupid when her brother, her twin, her own flesh and blood, was lucky to be alive.
Esther rested her head on her mother’s shoulder. Rosemary looked and smelled and sounded thoroughly out of place in the washed-out hallways of the hospital. Today she was wrapped in layers of bright silk, her fingers still heavy with rings, her clothing still tinkling from all the little gold coins sewn into hems and sleeves and stitched to the inside of every pocket. Her brown hair was piled high on her head and threaded with sprigs of yarrow, and her eyes were bloodshot. Esther thought she looked like a mad seer, descended from her tower to tell of a terrible premonition.
“Oh. I forgot to tell you. Fred is dead,” Rosemary said solemnly as she stared at the stalk of tea that had floated to the top of her cup. Esther knew what this beverage-based omen supposedly meant, because her mother had told her many times before: a stranger is coming.
“What? How’d that happen?”
“I don’t know. All that’s left of him is a large scorch mark in the kitchen. You know Aitvarases become a spark when they die.”
“You think the chicken spontaneously burst into flames,” Esther said slowly.
“Fred was a rooster, not a chicken. Well, goblin rooster, technically. And yes.”
“Did you see this happen?”
“No, but I think he sacrificed himself to save Eugene.”
“Okay.”
Esther stood up. Rosemary fished out the tea stalk, placed it on the back of her left hand, and hit it with her right. After only one hit, the stalk slid off her skin and fell to the ground. “A stranger will come in one day,” she said. “A man. He’ll be short.”
• • •
THE CALL FROM LILAC HILL came in the afternoon. Rosemary pulled Esther out of Eugene’s room and told her, as they collected cans of Coke and packets of chips from the vending machine, that Reginald was close now. Very close to slipping away.
“The nurse said you need to say your good-byes,” Rosemary said. “Today, not tonight. Now. As soon as possible.”
Esther pressed a finger and thumb into her burning eyes. Great timing. “We have to tell Eugene.”
“Absolutely not. There’s no way he can leave to go and see him. Telling him would only make him upset.”
“He’ll never forgive us if we don’t give him the chance to say good-bye.”
“I will never forgive myself if I don’t give him the chance to get better. You know I’m right about this, Esther. Don’t even try. You’ve both said good-bye to your grandfather so many times already.”
“Eugene loves him so much.”
“I know, honey. I know. You should go, while he’s sleeping.”
“Will you come later?”
“Reg is a good man, but I said my good-byes to him a long time ago, too. Eugene needs me more than he does.”
What Esther wanted to say: We’ve all been living without you for years. What makes you think having you here now is enough to make up for that? Instead she said nothing, but her expression must have betrayed some of what she was feeling, because Rosemary pulled her daughter in and hugged her. For a moment Esther felt the spark of the tether that bound them, the magic that had once burned bright. She wanted so badly to melt into her mother and have the world feel right again.
“I know I don’t live up to most of your expectations,” Rosemary whispered. “I know you think I could be better in a lot of ways, and maybe if you could pick and choose some new parts for me, I’d be a better mom.”
The words stung, mostly because they were true, and Esther felt the spark waver and die. “Mom. Please.” She sighed and pulled away from her embrace and leaned forward to rest her head against the vending machine. “I really don’t want you to think that.”
“It’s okay, honey. I know, sometimes, that I’m not enough. You and Eugene make sure I know it. But I really do love you. More than anything.”
Esther opened her eyes. Was love enough? If a person could offer you nothing but broken promises and disappointment, was love enough to make up for that? She thought of Jonah, and what he’d done to her—how she’d shown him all of the most vulnerable corners of her soul, and he’d taken those secrets and sold them wholesale to the masses.
Esther held her mother’s hand. Rosemary pressed it to her cheek and kissed her daughter’s wrist. “My beautiful girl.”
“I should go,” she said, and then she did.
• • •
ESTHER BORROWED HER mother’s car to drive herself to Lilac Hill. The fear that’d once coursed through her at the thought of people seeing her stall somehow felt muted and dull after Eugene’s close call with Death. She drove slowly, carefully, but felt very little of the dread she once had.
These are the things she thought about instead:
- The fact that her grandfather was very close to death now, and hour by hour, it seemed less and less likely that he would drown. The impending reality that the Reaper’s prediction was, in fact, quite wrong, made Esther feel hopeful and sad at the same time.
- How much Reginald had loved orchids, and Johnny Cash, and birds, and his wife, and how he would have none of those things to comfort him as he left this world, and how very unfair that seemed.
So instead of going straight to her grandfather’s deathbed, Esther first made a small detour and brought the car to a stop two houses down from the one that had for many years belonged to Florence and Reginald Solar. The house remained as quaint and kempt as it was the day the Solars moved into it when Reg returned from the war. The window frames were still bright white, the twisting garden path was still flanked by bushels of flowers, and an American flag still flew from one of the posts on the little porch.
Before she got out of the car, Esther thought about the fourth time Reginald met Death, a meeting that occurred at the very house she stared at in the evening dark.
It happened in the greenhouse in the backyard, on the afternoon before her grandmother’s death. Reg had only told her the story once, the day after Florence died. Esther and Eugene were eleven. Jack Horowitz, slight, pale, pockmarked, and no older than when he’d first met Reg in Vietnam some forty years before, knocked on the greenhouse wall and waved politely through the glass.
Reginald took off his gardening gloves and opened the door for Death.
“I am here to tell you some news you will not take kindly to hearing,” said Horowitz.
“I’m about to die.”
“No. You will die some years from now, of dementia. You will plan to kill yourself after the diagnosis, but the disease will be incredibly swift. You will not have the time.”
“The hell I won’t.”
Horowitz shrugged. “For decades you have wondered how you will really die and now I tell you and you don’t care to hear it.”
“I get diagnosed with dementia, you can bet your ass I’m gonna put a pistol in my mouth before I start forgetting what my grandkids look like. And I’m still not going near water. Why are you here?”
“In the early hours of tomorrow morning—at 4:02 a.m., to be precise—someone you love dearly will die from a catastrophic brain aneurysm.”
; “If you touch anyone in my family, Horowitz . . .”
“I’m doing you a favor that many would sacrifice everything they have for.”
“Oh, and what the hell is that?”
“The chance to say good-bye.” It was at this point that Horowitz picked up an unopened bulb. It didn’t wilt and turn black at his touch, as you might expect of Death. “You will invite your family over for a meal tonight. You will cook a grand feast. Roast lamb with rosemary and garlic, the same meal you cooked for your wife the first time you brought her home.”
“How the hell do you—”
“Later in the evening, when all your children and grandchildren have gone home, you will wash the dishes and pour her a glass of red wine and then you will dance together to ‘Moonlight Serenade,’ as you did at your wedding. Before you go to sleep, you will put freshly cut orchids by her bedside table, as you have done every week since those young girls died, and you will kiss her goodnight. It is a good death, Reginald. Better than the one you will get.”
“And if I take her to the hospital right now?”
“The aneurysm will still happen. Florence Solar will fall into a coma and pass away on Friday evening. If you take her to the hospital, you will give her five extra days, but they will not be days well spent. Take tonight, my friend. It is my gift.”
“I wish I’d never met you, Horowitz.”
Horowitz chuckled. “Believe me, that is the sentiment of many. Why orchids?”
“What?”
“On the afternoon you began investigating the murder of the Bowen sisters, you brought home dozens of orchids. I have never been able to figure out why.”
“Because of you, you miserable bastard.”
“Me?”
“Cut up an orchid and plant a piece of it in a new pot and a whole plant grows out of just that severed bit. They’re like hydras. Orchids are death-proof; that’s why the Reaper before you used them as his calling card. He was afraid of them and you should be too. You can’t get your grubby skeleton fingers into them.”
A Semi-Definitive List of Worst Nightmares Page 22