“So if I plant this spike, a new flower will grow from it? Immortality. Like those wretched jellyfish that taunt me.”
“Can you even grow anything? If you planted a seed, would it grow, or would it cower in your shadow, afraid to bloom? Why would you bother planting anything, knowing you’d have to reap it in the end anyway?”
“Why do you bother living, knowing you will have to die?” Horowitz stroked the bulb in his hand. It blossomed at his touch. He tucked the bloom into his buttonhole. “I have never gardened before, but perhaps I will start.”
“Leave, Horowitz.”
“That is the mistake most people make. To think that Death loves nothing.” Horowitz smiled. And then, still eighteen years old and covered in acne scars, Death dipped his hat and turned to leave, the orchid bright and blooming at his chest. “Good-bye, Reg. We will meet twice more. At the end, of course.”
“And the other time?”
“I’ll visit you in your nursing home. You’ll lose to me in a game of chess.”
“Typical. Can’t even let the dying man win.”
“You were supposed to die in Vietnam, you know,” said Horowitz at the doorway. “The day after we met. The bullet that tore through your chest was supposed to stop your heart.”
“But . . . you said . . . I was supposed to drown?”
“To know your fate is to change it. If I’d told you the truth, you never would have been shot.”
“But I was shot. I didn’t die.”
“Have you forgotten? I was otherwise occupied at the bottom of a river.”
“You were sent there to reap me.”
“You were to be my first. Then, on the day of my wedding in 1982, you and your lovely wife were supposed to be involved in a fatal head-on collision with a pickup truck but . . . I couldn’t have that. The afternoon you found the bodies of the Bowen sisters, you were supposed to be crushed to death by a collapsing brick wall. Freak accident. You would have, too, if I hadn’t phoned in a tip about someone dumping trash in Little Creek. Every time we’ve met, Reginald Solar, I have been here to reap your immortal soul.”
Reg felt suddenly uneasy, and glanced sidelong at his gardening shears. If he drove them into Death’s chest, would Death die? “And this time?” he said slowly.
“Relax. I’m purely here as a courtesy. To give you the time with your wife that I did not get with mine. Death is not cruel, but it is insistent. I have learned that firsthand. I wish it were not true, but it is.”
“You saved me three times. You didn’t save any of them.” Reg motioned to the ghost children that, even now, followed him everywhere.
“That is the other mistake people make. To think Death regrets nothing.” Horowitz bit his bottom lip, thinking. “I have a second gift for you. Something I have been saving since the Bowen girls died. I’ve never been sure if I was going to give it to you or not, but . . .” Death drew an envelope from his coat and handed it to Reginald. “You are, I imagine, the closest thing to a friend I will ever have.”
Reginald opened it. “A fucking condolence card?” he said, half choking on his anger and grief. “Get the hell off my property.”
“Do yourself a favor. Don’t check the news tonight.”
When Death was gone, Reg tucked the little white card into his jacket without reading it and went upstairs to find his beloved wife curled up on their bed, mid-nap. He sat down next to her and stroked her hair, then replaced the orchids on her bedside table with a new bunch, freshly cut. He thought about telling her, “You are going to die tomorrow. What is something you’ve always wanted to do but never got around to?”
Instead, he said, “How about we invite the kids around for dinner? I feel like making a roast. Something with rosemary and garlic from the garden.”
Later that evening, Esther’s grandmother turned the television on to watch the 6:00 p.m. news while she crushed herbs and drank a glass of her favorite red wine.
The little girl who’d been missing for three days had been found.
• • •
ESTHER CLOSED HER CAR DOOR quietly and crept across the yard, trying to look inconspicuous and unsuspicious, which was a very hard look to achieve and usually resulted in the person attempting said look appearing both very conspicuous and very suspicious at the same time.
The greenhouse was to the left of the house, behind a hedge and a fence. Esther scrambled over. Years had passed since she’d last been there. The yard was much smaller than she remembered it. Reg’s aviary where he kept doves and finches and parakeets and the occasional quail had been removed and replaced with grass. The vegetable patch that had once grown semisuccessful tomatoes and rarely-successful lettuce had been dug up and turned into a run-of-the-mill garden bed. The lemon trees where she used to play tag with Eugene looked so much closer together than they had when she was little. The yard used to be the size of a kingdom, with mountains and rivers and trolls and—if Esther would have had her way—the small bunker she’d planned to dig and live in. Now it was the size of a yard.
The kitchen windows were still covered in the stained-glass butterflies she and Eugene made with their grandma when they were kids. It used to bemuse Reg, coming home to find all the wineglasses and windows covered in stained glass, all the spare scraps of wood in the backyard painted with landscapes. This was also what he missed most about Florence when she was gone.
The front door of the greenhouse had no lock, naturally, because how often are flowers stolen? There weren’t many orchids left by then. The new owner had wanted to keep some, but maintaining hundreds of plants wasn’t feasible, and most had been cut up into pieces and left in green waste bins. But there were still several dozen flowers there. Esther took as much as she could carry, intending to make only one trip, but then she came back again and again for more. The flowers first, loading them pot by pot into a wheelbarrow and wheeling them quietly through a gate out to the street, where she loaded up the trunk and back seat of the car and even strapped some to the roof. The stem cuttings next, the immortal part, the death-proof blooms; these she stuffed into her backpack and pockets and scattered like confetti onto lawns and sidewalks as she drove toward Lilac Hill in the night.
The nursing home was peaceful in the low light. Esther heard nothing but the wind in the trees and the occasional calls of ghosts. She parked close to the building and carried the plants through Reg’s window, then placed the flowers around the room, working quickly, afraid that her grandfather might wake and freak out or that a doctor would bust her and freak out. But the only person who came was a nurse; she frowned at the flowers but didn’t say anything.
When all the orchids (bar one plant still in the car) were in the room, Esther marveled at her makeshift Eden. Every surface was carpeted in purple. In the small space of his room, the orchids seemed to move of their own accord, almost as if being in Reg’s presence fed them some invisible energy.
Were there always this many? she wondered, looking around. The plants seemed to have multiplied since she moved them from the greenhouse, seemed to have grown up the walls and across the ceiling. It was a still life vanitas painting: the bright white of Reg’s hospital bed, the way his skin strained skull-like across the bones of his face, his few possessions—a Bible, a watch, his reading glasses, a pipe, her grandmother’s wedding ring—arranged by his side next to the bed. And everywhere, everywhere, the flowers she’d brought him, their scent masking the sour smell of death that seeped from his skin.
Esther leaned down to kiss her grandfather on the forehead one last time. “I love you,” she whispered into his ear, and his lips trembled like he was trying to form words, but there was so very little left of him now, not enough even to say he loved her back. She pulled out her phone and found the emergency death slideshow Rosemary had been making since Reg’s diagnosis; it was her pièce de résistance. It seemed a shame to save it for his funeral, where he wo
uld never see or hear it, so Esther climbed into bed next to him like she’d used to when she was a kid, turned up the volume, and hit play.
With Johnny Cash playing in the background, Reg’s life passed before her. A chubby, smiling baby captured in black and white. A small boy in high socks pushing a wooden cart. A skinny teenager jumping off a cliff into the ocean. A wedding picture of him and a young Florence Solar, who was only nineteen at the time and looked like a hippie in her ’70s bridal gown. A series of shots of him during the war, smiling among his platoon mates. Reg in his police uniform standing next to his Toyota Cressida. With each of his newborn sons. A newspaper clipping about him receiving a commendation for bravery for disarming a gunman. With his newborn daughter. Shots of him with his three children as they grew up. A picture of him gardening. On vacation. Eating. Cooking. Laughing. Dancing with his beloved wife. At the weddings of his children. Holding his newborn twin grandchildren. Then many, many pictures of him with his grandkids. Getting his hair and makeup done by little Esther, holding little Eugene’s hand to cross the road, getting climbed on by all the cousins, reading to the twins, a glass of milk in his hand.
And then the disease. The red and blotchy skin. The thinning hair. The watery eyes. The gouged-out cheekbones. Pictures at Lilac Hill. Pictures in a wheelchair. Pictures of a thing that vaguely resembled but was no longer him.
The slideshow ended with Frank Sinatra’s “I Did It My Way,” which was cliché, but also appropriate. The final photograph, timed perfectly with the crescendo of the song, was a close-up profile shot of Reg in his greenhouse, surrounded by his orchids, unaware that the photographer (likely Florence Solar) was there. In it, he was bent over to closely inspect the bud of a flower.
Reginald Solar slipped away thirty-six seconds after the slideshow ended, a small smile on his face, a brightly blooming orchid held tightly in his palm.
• • •
ESTHER WAITED IN THE ROOM for the medical staff to declare Reginald dead, even though she already knew he was gone. As she stood by the window, she saw a man strolling across the parking lot, a short man in a dark coat and hat, a cane held in his gloved hands. She wasn’t quite sure what it was about him that made her slip through the window and run to her car to follow him. The man was already pulling onto the road by the time she had the key in the ignition, but Esther didn’t mind: She had a feeling she knew where he was going.
Ten minutes later, the cloaked man brought his car to a stop in the driveway in front of a quaint house with white window frames, a twisting garden path, and an American flag curling in the breeze. The house built by Reginald and Florence Solar. The house she’d robbed only an hour before.
The man got out of his vehicle. Esther followed suit.
“Excuse me!” she called after him, but he didn’t hear her, or if he did, he didn’t slow. “Wait up!”
She caught him at the front door, where he already had a set of keys out, ready to let himself in. Before he stepped inside, he turned, and she saw him clearly for the first time.
“Can I help you?” he said. He was young, not much older than Esther, and spoke with a Southern accent. On his head was a black hat, the type that gangsters used to wear in the ’20s, and his face was pocked with acne scars. Even when looking straight at him, Esther couldn’t quite make out the color of his eyes or hair.
And there, in the buttonhole of his jacket, was a bright purple orchid.
“You were at Lilac Hill,” she said. “You knew Reginald Solar. You knew my grandfather.”
“Not really, I’m afraid. Not at all.”
“Don’t make me ask.”
“Ask what?”
“Are you him?”
“Am I who?”
Esther didn’t want to sound too crazy if she was wrong, so she said, “Horowitz. Are you Horowitz?”
The man smiled. “Please excuse my presence at Lilac Hill. I simply bought Reg’s house when he moved out.”
“You live here now?”
“Yes. I purchased it as an investment property, but when I walked through it for the first time, well . . . I fell in love.”
“Then . . . why were you at the nursing home?”
“A storage company contacted me some months back. They were having trouble getting a hold of Mr. Solar’s family and had this address listed as a backup contact. I collected the items from his unit so that they wouldn’t be sold or destroyed or end up on Storage Wars, although I do love that show. I finally managed to find out where Reginald had moved, and just tonight delivered a message to Lilac Hill in the hopes that the staff would pass it on to his family. I didn’t know if I’d ever be able to reach you, yet here you are. You can come in and have a look, if you’d like.”
“How can you not be him?”
“Who, exactly, do you think I am?”
“Well . . . Death?”
The man gave her a bemused look. “Your grandfather must’ve been quite the storyteller, to have you believing he knew Death. Come inside.”
Esther thought that was a very odd reply indeed; she went inside regardless. The house was strangely decorated, like when her Grandma June had moved into a brand-new modern apartment at the age of seventy-eight but kept all of what Esther called her “old people stuff.” Old people all just seemed to own the same things: a cabinet full of plates and glasses that no one was allowed to eat or drink from, a hideous floral couch, a rocking chair, an herb rack, heavy wooden furniture, dozens of knickknacks collected over many decades (now proudly displayed on every available household surface), and faded photographs in mismatched frames all over the walls.
Two packed suitcases (old-fashioned brown leather ones; more old people stuff) had been placed by the front door. “Are you going somewhere?” Esther asked, but the man ignored her.
“Milk?” he said from the kitchen.
“No, thank you. You, uh, still haven’t answered my question.”
The man appeared in the kitchen doorway. “The one about where I’m going or the one about if I’m Death incarnate?”
“The latter would be good.”
“If I were Death, and your grandfather knew me, would it not comfort you to know that he had gone with a friend?” Esther didn’t answer. The man smiled. “The boxes are through here.”
All of the items from Reginald Solar’s storage facility were now kept in the room Florence Solar had once used for sewing. The concentrated contents of a life. Esther sifted through some of the boxes, trying to decide what to take now and what to come and collect later. In the end all she removed was a portrait of Reginald in his police uniform from sometime in the late 1970s, when he was young and handsome and not yet haunted by ghosts.
On her way out, she found the Man Who Might Be Death sitting in the living room sipping his milk.
There were so many things she wanted to ask him to fix. Liberate her father from the basement. Leave her brother be. Give Hephzibah a voice. Let her mother have one big win and then release her from her obsession. Lift the curse. Lift the curse. Lift the curse.
As she was about to open her mouth to let all these requests gush out, Esther realized this:
- Reginald Solar had lived with his fear, but it hadn’t killed him.
- Therefore, the curse was likely, as Eugene had insisted, a fiction, and Death—if the man in front of her was indeed Death—had, in his own strange way, protected the Solar family rather than condemned them.
- Curses needed to be believed in to continue, and the only one who’d kept the curse thriving was Esther.
So instead of asking the man to lift the curse, she asked him: “If your family believed they were cursed to live and die in fear, what would you say to them to make it easier? To make them less afraid.”
“I would say that everybody dies, whether they live their life in fear or not. And that—death—is not something to be afraid of.”
As she turned to leave, she spotted it. There, on the wall above his head, was a small framed photograph. A Polaroid, now faded from the sun. A wedding. A woman in a pale pink sundress with a strand of pearls at her throat. A man in a heinous lavender tuxedo with white shoes and a ruffled shirt. And between them, a second man, a man with red hair and freckled skin, a man dressed in an officer’s uniform. A man who looked very much like he could be Reginald Solar.
The Man Who Might Be Death caught her looking at it. “My wedding, to my beloved, may she rest in peace. Such a shame that the faces are no longer discernable; it was the only photograph we had of the event.” And it was true; the faces were unclear, as was the name on the soldier’s uniform. But Esther knew. She knew. “Now, if you don’t mind, I must be on my way. Good day, Miss Solar. I have a plane to catch.”
“Where are you going?” she asked again.
The man put on his hat, picked up his bags, and smiled. “I hear the Mediterranean is nice at this time of year.”
36
THE RED WOMAN
ESTHER TOOK the last orchid to Eugene, who was too drugged up to realize she was there, then slept in a cot by his bedside. When he woke at sunrise, she told him of Reginald’s death, and they cried together for a little while, until Eugene slipped back into sleep.
The Solar house felt strange when she opened the front door. It was morning, still gloomy, but the candles were unlit and the lamps were dim. Drifting sunlight bled through the windows, but it was not enough to shift the shadows that congealed in every corner of the room. Esther opened the basement door and went down the stairs, but there was only darkness there too. No twinkling string lights. No Christmas carols played on repeat. A dozen pictures of her past self smiled out at her from the darkness and made her believe, again, that there was such a thing as ghosts.
Peter was in the hospital, in the early stages of stroke rehab. The house was unrooted without his weight to hold it down. It had lost its anchor. It felt as though if a stiff breeze blew through the trees, it might drift away into the sky like a dandelion.
A Semi-Definitive List of Worst Nightmares Page 23