She also mentioned something about a “fear of commitment” and how Esther was attempting to “mitigate any future pain” by finding faults with the people she grew close to. By finding excuses to stay away from them, by avoiding intimacy and any deep emotional connections, by cutting off her feelings to preserve her emotional well-being, she insulated herself against pain but also against life.
Esther thought this was very reasonable behavior. Dr. Butcher did not happen to agree. To this end, she gave Esther three steps to control her anxiety and fear:
Externalize anxiety
The first thing to do was to imagine her anxiety as a thing apart from herself; the world’s most hideous, unpleasant pet (apart from Fleayoncé). Esther saw hers as a black misshapen lump with teeth and hair growing randomly from its bulbous body. Its skin was slick tar and it had a mouth full of sharp toothpick teeth. It was also the size of a grapefruit and couldn’t quite get its tiny bat wings to function properly, which meant it was always bumping angrily into walls. She named it Gertrude, and when it whispered to her that she was too fat or too ugly or people were judging her or she was going to die or she wasn’t smart enough, or brave enough, or good enough, she flicked it off her shoulder and told it to go away.
Correct thinking mistakes
This one was a little harder. Whenever her brain told her that she was absolutely, 100 percent about to die in a tsunami, or that velociraptors were unquestionably outside her bedroom window, or that a cougar was definitely, without doubt, going to maul her in her sleep, these were thinking mistakes, because they were a) unlikely to happen, b) might not be catastrophic if they did happen, and c) even if they did happen and even if they were catastrophic, Esther might surprise herself and, like, kick the velociraptor’s ass or something. It was hard, when the anxiety got ahold of her and started pumping adrenaline through her system at the perceived threat, to cycle through these steps, but the more she did it, the easier it got.
Exposure
The goal in facing fear, Dr. Butcher said, was actually facing it. Not waiting to not be afraid, but seeking out your fears and meeting them head-on. Esther knew this already, of course—she’d been doing exactly that for months. But then Dr. Butcher told her it might be a good idea to watch the YouTube videos. That if she didn’t, the knowledge of their existence would continue to fester and grow black in her mind, and she wouldn’t be able to move on from them.
• • •
ESTHER DIDN’T WATCH THE VIDEOS. She didn’t talk to Jonah.
Several national newspapers covered the strange happenings of Little Creek and criticized Reginald Solar, recently deceased, as one of the failings of the justice system for the unsolved murder of the Bowen sisters. She cut the clips from the papers and included them in Reg’s scrapbook, alongside all the old reports of the Harvestman and the one bizarre, misplaced article about the man who’d drowned in his bathtub.
Four weeks passed without a single fear being faced.
It was during this time period that Esther decided to reframe Reginald Solar’s portrait, the one she’d taken from the unnamed man who now lived in his old house, a man with a face she already couldn’t remember. Tucked behind the glass and photograph she found a small, square condolences card, now warped and buckled by water damage. Inside was nothing but a name, with blue ink bleeding down the card. The writing was hard to make out now, but Esther was fairly certain it said Arthur Whittle. She searched the name on the internet, but couldn’t find anything that seemed relevant.
Then came the fourth Sunday, post Jonah Smallwood. Esther hadn’t looked at her list for a month, but she knew it so well by now that she didn’t have to. The fear this week—29/50—was ghosts. She wondered what Jonah would’ve had planned for today. Wondering about Jonah was something she did often, despite how much it hurt.
Esther got home from work just before midnight. She’d taken a job at the nearby 7-Eleven to help Rosemary out with Eugene’s and Peter’s medical bills, on the proviso that her mother went cold turkey on the slots. So far the arrangement seemed to be holding up. Rosemary’s car was in the drive, as it had been every night since Peter exhumed himself from the basement. Esther didn’t mind working every night, or falling behind on her schoolwork, or feeling like hot coals had been buried in her heels at the end of every shift: it was all worth it to have her family whole.
The house was quiet in the low light. It was a strange thing, to come home to dimness when all you could remember was light. The first thing she did was check on Eugene, as she did every night. Lamps still surrounded his funeral bed, as they had for years, but he had a mask over his eyes and appeared to be sleeping. At nighttime.
The second thing she did was head toward the kitchen to heat up her taquitos, which is when she found Fleayoncé sitting at the base of the staircase, staring intently at the second floor landing with her tail flicking.
“Fleayoncé, don’t do that, you creep,” she said. This was why pets and children were so eerie; they saw things they weren’t supposed to. She picked the cat up and took her to the kitchen and set her on the bench, but Fleayoncé just slunk down (well, kind of slumped down) to the floor and went back to the foot of the stairs. Esther followed her and looked at the spot the cat was fixated on: the door to her childhood bedroom.
She scooped the cat up again. “Seriously,” she said to it. “You need to stop.” Fleayoncé just meowed, sounding more like a goat than a feline. Then the wood creaked upstairs and Fleayoncé hissed and twisted her way out of Esther’s grasp.
Someone was up there.
Esther thought about calling the police, or maybe a priest, or maybe just burning the house down. But something called to her, like it had that afternoon on the cliff all those weeks ago. Something upstairs whispered yes, yes, yes.
Go forward, onward, into the unknown.
The thing with facing fear, she reminded herself, was that you actually had to face it.
The wood creaked again. It sounded like footsteps. Esther unlocked her phone, turned the camera around, and pressed record.
“Why do I feel like this is going to end up in a B grade, found footage horror movie?” she said to the camera. “Okay, so, something just moved upstairs. Which would be entirely normal in most houses, but no one has been upstairs in my house for about six years now, so, if I’m being entirely realistic here, it’s probably a poltergeist. Let’s go find out.
“I’m Esther Solar, and this is apparently ‘29/50: ghosts.’”
The discarded furniture on the staircase had been there for so long now that it had begun to grow together. She tried to yank a dining room chair out of the mound, only to find that tendrils of creeping vine held it firmly in place. There was no way to go but through. Luckily for her, she was now both a) a master spelunker, and b) fairly certain there were no troglofaunal flesh-eating humanoids inhabiting the staircase. (Surely they would’ve eaten her by now if there were.) So she found an opening in the haphazard stack between the shopping cart and a wardrobe, and began to climb. After a few minutes she was joined by Fleayoncé, who batted at her soles and darted through the rubble with surprising dexterity, scaring away rats or bats or critters that had taken residence in the scrap heap in the last half decade.
Finally she broke free on the dark landing and tried the light. It buzzed angrily, a bee woken from its slumber, then snapped on.
The world upstairs was preserved in a thin film of dust, a portrait of a past life frozen in time. Esther pushed open the door to her parents’ bedroom, the one they’d shared before Peter disappeared from their lives. It was as it had been the day her father was swallowed by the basement: the bed was neatly made, the light switches were not taped permanently on, and her mother’s jewelry—the pieces she’d worn for their beauty and not for their luck—were spilling from a metal box atop a chest of drawers. All their clothes—none of them with coins stitched into the lin
ing or bulbs rotting in the pockets—still hung in the closet. The small bathroom was halfway through being painted: a drop sheet still covered the floor tiles and a tin of paint still sat in the corner, waiting to be opened. It had the feel of a place abandoned in a hurry, without time even to pack personal belongings or photographs. Which had indeed been the case.
Rosemary had woken them in the middle of the night, shaking and sweating and speaking of ghosts. She’d ushered Eugene and Esther downstairs, still dressed in their pajamas, and all three of them had worked together to block off the staircase. They’d slept on the floor inside a salt circle in the kitchen. It hadn’t felt like it at the time, but it was beginning of the end.
Eugene’s room was next. It was so cluttered with toys and books and posters that Esther’s heart hurt. It was a kid’s room. A normal kid’s room. Sometimes it was hard to remember, but Eugene had been a normal boy only six years ago.
Esther’s door was last. She opened it and walked inside and turned on a white lamp hung with crystals. Fleayoncé slalomed in and out of her feet. It was a little girl’s room. Almost shockingly so. There were fairies on the duvet cover, a large dollhouse built by her grandfather, and a basket of toys, mostly Barbies and baby dolls, things that she’d already started to feel far too old to play with when her mother made her leave them. There were fur cushions on her bed and several posters of “Love Story”-era Taylor Swift on the walls and a scattering of clothing that was both so tiny and so pink it was hard to believe she’d ever worn them.
What made her breath catch, though, was the photograph on her bedside table, and the hand-drawn card that sat beneath it. Esther wiped the thick coat of dust from the frame. She was in the middle, freckled and pale with a firestorm of red hair atop her head. Hephzibah was to her left, as faded and ghostly at eight as she was now. And to her right was Jonah, smiling cheekily. They all had their arms around each other’s shoulders.
The card was as she remembered it: two crudely drawn pieces of fruit that could’ve been apples or grapes or perhaps even avocados. We make the perfect pear, said the writing beneath them.
Maybe Rosemary had been right. Maybe there were ghosts upstairs after all.
39
HOW TO RECOVER FROM THE HEINOUS BETRAYAL OF YOUR GOOD FRIEND/LOVE INTEREST IN FOUR SIMPLE STEPS
STEP ONE. Reconcile with your mute best friend.
Malka Hadid answered the door when Esther knocked on Monday morning before school. Her husband, Daniel, had once explained that his wife’s name meant “queen” in Hebrew, and Esther had always thought it was appropriate. Malka was possessed of the kind of beauty that made her seem ethereal, like an elven queen out of a storybook. Her eyes were an impossible shade of amber and her hair fell in a tawny curtain to her chest. She was Hephzibah all over, only fuller and brighter, like the warmth and saturation had been turned up.
Malka crossed her arms and looked down at Esther expectantly. “Do you happen to know why my daughter hasn’t spoken to anyone in four weeks?” she said in her Israeli accent, which was more like Israeli mixed with Arabic mixed with French, because Malka was fluent in four languages and conversational in another three.
“I might’ve had something to do with it,” Esther confessed.
Malka sighed. “Come in. She’s in her room.”
If Esther’s room was a cluttered museum, then Hephzibah’s room was a mad scientist’s laboratory. Her uncle was some famous physicist in Tel Aviv who—when he found out about Heph’s love of science—started sending her monthly packages of Bunsen burners and telescopes and microscopes and fossils and peer-reviewed journal subscriptions and a large, somewhat creepy bust of Albert Einstein. Planets hung from the ceiling and one entire wall had been devoted to articles on and illustrations of Heph’s favorite gen IV nuclear reactor, the Transatomic WAMSR (Waste-Annihilating Molten Salt Reactor), which Esther knew far more about than she needed to.
Hephzibah was sitting cross-legged on her bed, her arms folded and jaw set. It was the longest they’d gone without seeing each other since they were little kids, and the mere sight of her made Esther want to kick herself for being such a dick.
If a person could be home, she’d built her foundations in both Eugene and Heph.
“Hephzibah,” Esther began, but Heph held up a hand to silence her.
“Stand around the corner,” she signed.
“Please let me—” she tried again, but again Heph mimed for her to zip it.
“Go. Around. The. Corner,” she signed again, each movement exaggerated.
“I’m trying to apologize here.”
Hephzibah groaned and flopped back on her bed and signed to Esther without looking at her. “Shut up, you bitch. I’m trying to talk to you. Go around the fucking corner!” That’s how Esther knew it was all going to be okay. Bitch was the first word they’d learned in ASL and they’d used it so frequently in middle school that it had almost become a pet name.
“Bitch,” Esther signed back, smirking.
Heph looked up, a crack in her serious expression. “Bitch.”
“Bitch.”
The hint of a smile. “Bitch.”
“I’m really sorry about what I said. I know better than anyone that you can’t just turn off your fear because someone else wants you to. I was a—wait for it”—Esther switched to ASL again—“bitch.”
Heph nodded. Licked her lips. Motioned with her head for Esther to leave the doorway and step into the hall.
Esther did as she asked, then heard bedsprings creak as Heph rose and walked across the floorboards toward the door. For a few minutes, all she could hear from the other side of the wall was Heph’s breathing, until her hand appeared in the hall. Esther held it. Squeezed it.
“You were kind of right though,” she said finally, quietly, from around the corner. Not signed. Said. Out loud.
“Is that . . . is that your voice? Oh my God, Hephzibah, no wonder you haven’t been speaking all these years. That’s terrible!”
“Bitch,” said Heph with a giggle as Esther pulled her into the hall and gave her a brief yet crushing hug.
• • •
STEP TWO. Watch the goddamn videos already.
After reconciling with Hephzibah, Esther decided, finally, that it was time to take Dr. Butcher’s advice and watch Jonah’s channel.
After school, the two of them went back to Heph’s house. Malka and Daniel Hadid were working on a story in their home office (a terrible slew of suicide bombers in Istanbul—Death had again been very busy), so they had the place to themselves. Heph got the projector working in the living room, and then Eugene showed up out of nowhere, saying he couldn’t stand their mother hovering around him anymore, which was not something either of the Solar children ever expected to say.
They all sat down together on the (very nicely upholstered) couch in front of the screen, on which “1/50” was waiting to be played.
“Okay, do it,” said Esther, but as soon as Heph moved the mouse, she changed her mind. “No, stop, wait a minute.” Then she proceeded to pace around the room for ten minutes, waiting for the unconscious push that would lead her to watch it.
Everything you want is on the other side of fear, she reminded herself.
Esther knew it would be better once it was over. For the last month, like Dr. Butcher had said, the videos had been a splinter digging into her mind and ignoring them had only caused an infection that seemed to leak out into everything she did.
The push didn’t come. There seemed to be a physical block between Esther and the play button, a strong force field, the kind of fear she’d experienced only once before. Esther couldn’t hit play, so she started to scroll down instead. Hephzibah immediately stopped her.
“Do you really want to read YouTube comments?” she signed. And then, as if suddenly remembering that she could speak, she said, “Do you really want to do that to yourse
lf?”
“How bad are they?” Of course they would be bad. Of course the world would hate her, judge her, call her names.
“I don’t know. I haven’t even bothered looking.”
Esther scrolled down and started to read the comments on “1/50: lobsters.”
I love this girl!
This bitch got some balls on her for real
God that was intense. I’m sweating. Fuck yeah, Esther!
Why is anyone even scared of lobsters? Stupid
It’s called a phobia dickcheese
Esther brave af
Came here after watching the one with the geese. Was literally screaming at my screen OMFG
I freaking *hate* lobsters. HATE them. You badass Esther.
MORE MORE MORE MORE MORE yes please
Ew they’re so gross, they look like the facehugger things from Alien amirite
Not sure I’ll know what to do with my life after 50/50
Why are these even popular, I don’t get it?
SHUT YOUR MOUTH FOOL YOU DO NOT EVEN REALIZE
I had anxiety just watching this.
Cannot stand this shit. These videos are all so staged.
Can we dox this fucker?
I’m game.
But by far the most popular comment was this:
Hi Esther. I know I’m just a random stranger on the internet and we’ll never meet, but I wanted to thank you for this channel, because it’s changed my daughter’s life. Before Nightmares she had severe social anxiety and was badly bullied at school. After she watched your videos, she decided to try and make some of her own. So far she’s faced her fear of snakes, spiders and even public speaking (she gave a presentation on your channel in class—up until now I’ve had to write notes to excuse her from all class presentations because she has panic attacks). I cried when she told me she’d been able to stand up in front of her class and speak about something she’s so passionate about. It wasn’t something I thought she’d ever be able to do. I know I speak for everyone here when I say thank you, from the bottom of my heart, for your bravery; it means more than you know.
A Semi-Definitive List of Worst Nightmares Page 25