14

4/50: SMALL SPACES

THAT’S HOW it began. Esther wasn’t entirely sure how seeing Jonah went from a Sunday-only thing to something else, but after the day at Storage King, he came to her house in the afternoons most days after school and helped her bake. He tutored her and Eugene in Shakespeare, which they sucked at, and they tutored him in math, which he sucked at. They sat on the uncomfortable, badly upholstered couch and watched The Babadook and Evil Dead II and The Birds, thinking up new ways they could lure Death, taking notes on Esther’s semi-definitive list about all the reckless things they could try.

The ridiculous cat followed Jonah everywhere, tongue lolling out of one side of its mouth, but he treated her like she was the best cat he’d ever seen, lugging Fleayoncé around in his arms like a baby and talking to her like she was a person and—occasionally—wearing her as a scarf, which she especially loved.

Sometimes Jonah called Esther in the afternoons before his dad got home, to talk about the list, or Reginald’s scrapbook, or the Harvestman, or who took everything from the storage unit and why. He never talked about his school or his parents or his house, which was fine by Esther, because she didn’t want to talk about her school or her parents or her house either. He put her on speakerphone while he repainted the walls, or helped Remy with her homework, or worked on Esther’s portrait, and even though she hated phone calls (they were on her semi-definitive list at number forty-one), with him on the other end of the line it was kind of okay. Not quite okay enough to take off the list—she still couldn’t call strangers—but okay.

She could always tell when his dad got home, because Jonah would mutter, “I gotta go,” or the line would suddenly go dead, and Esther knew not to call back. When this happened, she spent the rest of the night thinking about him and Remy in the room where the walls were alive with movement and color even though the house it was attached to was dead and dark and hollow.

On the Sunday of 4/50, Jonah came over in the morning to visit Fleayoncé and “hold her paw” as she had her cast taken off. It was the second time in four weeks that Esther had been down in the basement, and although he didn’t say anything, she could tell that Peter was buzzing with happiness (which might have had something to do with the 9:00 a.m. glass of gin he was downing, but almost definitely something to do with the presence of other humans). He shuffled around his junk stacks like a mad magician, pressing old photographs into Esther’s hands as he worked on the cat, telling Jonah stories about when she was a kid, stories that seemed like fiction now because they were so normal and so far removed from anything that resembled her life.

Esther and Eugene at the playground with Dad, before he became agoraphobic.

Esther and Eugene in Reg Solar’s orchid greenhouse, one twin on each hip, his mind still whole.

If something was once true but now wasn’t, was it ever true?

Jonah cooed at the cat and asked why she was mewling as Peter took approximately seven times longer to remove her cast and do a checkup than was necessary. Fleayoncé’s tongue still lolled sideways out of her mouth, and she would never have the coordination to climb a tree or catch a mouse. Jonah didn’t seem to mind that, by all measurable standards, his cat was a sucky cat. When her examination was complete, he scooped her up and held her in his arms like a baby, like he always did.

Esther sat on the couch and tried not to touch anything. Tried not to glance at the framed photographs of her and Eugene that Peter kept on his bedside table, windows into a long-faded past. She couldn’t remember exactly when they’d stopped coming down here. It used to be fun when they were eleven, like Christmas all the time with the star-spangled trees and scent of old books. What she could remember was that Eugene had stopped first. When Peter missed another baseball game, another birthday party, another parent-teacher night, despite how much Eugene begged him to come. As they got older, and the whole situation got sadder, it was harder and harder to be around their father, so they just . . . stopped.

She sank back into the conversation in time to hear Peter say: “Would you like to come down for dinner one night? I don’t cook much—I’ve only got the gas hotplate—but we could order in, all three of us. I’ll save up for something special.”

“Sure,” said Jonah, shaking Peter’s hand, clapping him on the back. “Sounds good.”

“You don’t have to eat dinner with him if you don’t want to,” Esther said quietly as they left the house on their way to film 4/50, which she was particularly stressed about because she worried that Jonah was going to seal her in a coffin or something. “Don’t feel any pressure.”

“What? Your dad’s all right. I like him.”

Esther swore she felt her heart grow a full three sizes larger, like the Grinch.

It was another long moped ride to some surprise destination. When the drive was over, they dismounted and wandered for twenty minutes through scrubland that clawed at her costume (Indiana Jones, complete with whip, hat, and brown leather jacket), pulling tendrils of hair out from her ponytail to fall unkempt about her shoulders.

At first she thought Jonah had again brought her to another abandoned prime location for murder, but the farther they hiked, the more and more people they started to see. People with helmets and lights strapped to their heads. People with ropes and carabiners attached to their harnesses. Only upon reaching the mouth of a cave did Esther know for sure what Jonah’s plan was, and it was so, so much worse than she could’ve imagined. Before she could protest, he’d gone to collect equipment from the dude running the show, who was wearing a T-shirt that said JESUS LOVES THE HELL OUT OF YOU.

“I’m drawing a line,” she said as soon as he got back and handed her a helmet. “I’m drawing a line in the goddamn metaphorical sand.” And then, because Jonah didn’t seem to understand the gravity of the situation, she dropped the helmet, picked up a stick from the undergrowth and drew a line in the literal sand with it. They were standing twenty feet from the mouth of a cave, into which Jonah had organized a guided spelunking tour.

“Not an option,” Jonah said, already buckling his caving helmet.

“I’m serious. I should’ve set some ground rules. And rule one is no caves. Ever. Have you not seen The Descent?”

“No.”

“Well I have, and I know how this story ends, and there is no way—no way—I am ever going in a cave.”

“All right, people, everyone make sure your helmets are on and then follow me into the mouth for our safety briefing,” said the Jesus-shirt guy, who entered the cave and walked casually toward his death. A small child, decked out in caving gear, ran past them and plunged into the darkness after him.

“You gonna let that kid out-spelunk you?” Jonah said.

“That child is going to be viciously hunted and eaten by troglofaunal flesh-eating humanoids.” The child in question’s parents overheard her say this. “Sorry,” she said. “Have you not seen The Descent?” They both shook their heads. “I’m sure he’ll be fine. Just fine.”

The kid was definitely going to die.

“Did you memorize the Wikipedia page for that movie?” Jonah asked. “Look, are you even afraid of small spaces, or are you just scared of what you think might be in those small spaces?”

“I’m afraid of going in a cave, getting stuck in a tight tunnel, and having a creature start eating me from the toes up while I can’t move, because I’m trapped in a small space. It’s a bit of both. Hence, I’m not going in the cave.”

“You’re going in the cave.”

“No.”

“Yes.”

“No.”

“You really want this week’s video to be thirty seconds long? You want the last frame to say, ‘Esther failed after only four weeks because she’s chickenshit’?”

“What are you doing with these videos anyway?”

“Never you mind. Get in the damn cave.”

“But . . . I’m scared.”

Jonah picked up her helmet and put it on her head over her Indiana Jones hat and rapped his knuckles against it twice. “That’s exactly why you gotta do it.”

“I really hate you.”

“So hurtful. Get in the cave.”

So she did. The grapnel anchor was wedged firmly through her spine, scraping against the inside of her sternum and making it hard for her heart to beat properly, but she did. She turned her helmet’s light on and kind of wandered toward the cave’s mouth in a trancelike state, because her legs were shaking and she couldn’t feel her body—but one couldn’t be dressed as Indiana Jones and then refuse to go in a cave, she reasoned, so she drew on the power of the costume to help her feel strong.

“Never gonna meet Death at this rate,” Jonah muttered from behind her. “Damn tricycle flesh-eating something somethings. Girl watches too much damn TV.”

The antechamber was not immediately as bad as Esther had thought it would be. For starters, there were about a dozen other people on the tour with them—all potential bait for the monsters, so she wouldn’t be the first one eaten at least—and secondly because it was, naturally, attached to the mouth of the cave, which had garlands of sunlight spilling through. Jesus-shirt dude, who turned out to be a young priest named Dave, introduced himself and talked them through how to stay safe on their two-hour expedition underground. He mentioned a lot of stuff, but nothing about cave-dwelling carnivores, which seemed like a huge oversight. There would be some tight squeezes, he said, some water in places, but nothing too challenging, nothing to be too concerned about.

Thousands of people had done this before; none of them had been eaten.

After the briefing, Priest Dave came up to Esther personally and told her that Jonah had informed him about her claustrophobia. Esther grimaced. If there was one thing worse than being stupidly afraid of something, it was having other people know you were stupidly afraid of something. But Priest Dave was cool about it and told her that he, too, had pretty bad claustrophobia and she could stick with him at the front of the group if she wanted to, which yes, that sounded good, because then he could lead her out of the cave to safety while everyone else got eaten.

Esther made Jonah go behind her and said, “I expect you to sacrifice yourself for me if the need arises. I am not even kidding about this.”

To which Jonah replied, “Nah, I’ll just toss the monsters the kid.” The kid’s parents overheard this, too, and decided to relocate to the back of the group, as far away from them as possible, which was reasonable.

The tour started off not so bad. The tunnel was tall enough to stand up in and wide enough that Esther couldn’t touch either wall with her arms outstretched. They didn’t walk on rock or dirt, but instead on a metal platform, which quelled some of her anxiety because it was solid proof that humans had been here before and lived long enough to erect infrastructure. They wended their way through the insides of some giant limestone beast, observing the snaking white tubes of its bowels, the rust-red blood of its veins, the stalactite toothpick teeth jutting from its jaws, sharp enough to skewer skin and bone. Esther moved quickly beneath these hanging death traps, sure that an earthquake would shake them loose at any moment.

The deeper they went, the cooler it got. Whispers began to echo. The light from camera flashes moved strangely, licking at the shadows but unable to remove them. Priest Dave stopped from time to time to point out different cave phenomena. Stalagmites. Underground rivers. Glowworms that clung to the roof and gave the whole tunnel a blue haze. When they reached another chamber, the metal platform still blessedly beneath them, Dave told them to turn their headlamps off so they could experience “cave darkness,” a darkness so absolute that you apparently couldn’t even see your own hand in front of your face (or the approach of bloodthirsty predators).

Esther’s light was the last one on. By then everyone was looking at her, waiting, and she could feel their judging gazes boring hot cavities into her skin. Her cheeks burned and her palms grew sweaty, like they always did whenever she thought people were judging her, except this time everyone was really, really judging her. She could practically hear their thoughts echoing in the dark. Chicken, coward, fake, they chanted. She didn’t want to turn the light off, but she couldn’t be the only one who didn’t when there was a goddamn six-year-old who wasn’t scared.

“Hold onto me if you want,” Jonah said quietly. Esther wrapped her arms around his waist and pressed her cheek to his chest and held onto him as tight as she could, like he was an anchor and gravity was about to be switched off. Which, in a way, it was. Then she jammed her eyes closed and flicked off her light. The change in perception wasn’t immediately palpable, because her eyes were still scrunched shut, but everyone began talking about how amazing the absolute dark was. Esther kept waiting for a set of long fangs to sink into her neck.

“Damn, that’s awesome,” Jonah said. “How you doing, Esther?”

“I’m good.”

“You haven’t looked yet, have you?”

“I’m good.”

“Open your eyes.”

“Stop telling me what to do.”

Then, very slowly, she opened her eyes. It was hard to tell the difference.

It was dark. Like really, really dark. She moved her hand in front of her face and couldn’t see it. She poked a finger toward her eye and couldn’t sense how close it was until it brushed her eyelashes. Absolute, disorienting, impossible blackness. Esther wasn’t even sure Eugene could be afraid down here. It wasn’t the darkness itself that bothered him so much, but the flicker of things he saw in the darkness. A wing here, a limb there, a clawed hand emerging from the closet. You couldn’t fear that down here, because you simply couldn’t see it.

It made her think of the first few months Eugene had become afraid of the night, when the only way he could sleep was if he was holding Esther’s hand. The tether that bound her to her mother might have degraded over time, but whatever magic she shared with Eugene was still there. Still strong.

After a few minutes, the spelunkers turned their lights on again and continued the tour, their eyes burning from the sudden brightness. They left behind the safety of the metal platform in favor of smaller, tighter tunnels that bore no sign of human survival. Esther had to crouch. Then she had to crawl on her hands and knees. Then—Lord have mercy on her circulatory system—they each had to worm their way through an opening barely large enough to accommodate Priest Dave’s shoulders and belly.

This would be the worst of it, Priest Dave assured her from the other side of the hellhole. This would be the only tight squeeze on the entire adventure, and after that, everything would feel like a breeze.

Esther was still at the front of the group. She had no choice; she had to go first.

She lay down flat like Dave had and started to army crawl forward. The rock pressed against her helmet, her shoulders, slanted up slightly to press into her stomach and thighs. The space tightened as she moved through it, seizing up to swallow her body.

Her goal was not to screw around. Get through the hole before the cave collapsed (which, in her head, was inevitable). Survive for two weeks underground by eating Dave, who would (tragically) die in the accident. Write a book about her grand tale of survival, and then write the screenplay for the film adaptation. Maybe win an Oscar for screenwriting. A Golden Globe at the very least.

There was a slight bend in the tunnel up ahead, and a puddle of water about two inches deep. (Of course, of course, of course she was going to get wet again.)

“Goddamn you, Jonah,” she muttered to herself as she navigated the turn, trying and failing not to think about earthquakes and cave-ins and flash floods. “Damn you, damn you, damn you.”

The tightest part of the tunnel was just on the other side of the bend, where the roof dipped down and Esther had to turn her head sideways to keep her mouth and nose out of the water. She shuffled forward another foot before both of her arms became pinned beneath her, elbows bent, and she couldn’t lift her cheek more than an inch from the pool of muddy liquid.

Fuck.

Don’t freak out.

She tried to push one of her arms forward and unpin it from under her, but this crushed her ribs. She tried to scrabble her legs against the rock to squeeze herself through, but couldn’t find a foothold. Backward. Go backward. She tried to use her elbows to force herself back, but her body was still half wedged in the turn in the tunnel.

Fuck.

The hyperventilation started before she even realized she was panicking.

“Hey, hey, hey, hey, hey,” said Priest Dave, who was there suddenly, in front of her face. (It reminded her how quickly things could sneak up on you in caves.) “Slow your breathing. Listen to me, slow your breathing.”

“I’m stuck,” Esther managed to strangle out. “I’m stuck.”

“You’re not stuck. I’m gonna help you out of this, okay?”

Esther nodded. Dave already had his hand underneath her cheek so she could rest her neck without drowning.

“Have you seen The Descent?” she asked him as he gave her a moment to catch her breath.

“Yeah. That’s what got me interested in spelunking in the first place, actually.”

“What is wrong with you?” she choked out.

Dave laughed. “The opportunity to see things that humans have never seen before. To discover secrets that were billions of years in the making, it was too good to pass up. Plus I was scared shitless of small spaces, but I didn’t want to let my fear get the best of me, so I found a way to enjoy it.”

“You can’t say shitless. You’re a pastor.”

“Priest, actually. Look, Esther, I’ve been through this cave system a hundred times, okay? Haven’t been eaten once. Not even nibbled. So what do you say we get you out of here so you can check out the beautiful cavern on the other side?”

Esther thought of the package Jonah had brought her after 1 of 50. Everything you want is on the other side of fear, it had said. She’d never particularly wanted to see a beautiful cavern in a cave system, but she did want to be in an open space, so she supposed that what she wanted was on the other side of fear, in a way. She nodded again.

“Shuffle forward for me, okay?” said Dave. “Just like you’ve been doing. Tiny little army crawl steps.”

As Esther moved, inch by inch, she felt less and less trapped. Her arms became freer, the rock let go of its crushing hold on her rib cage and—a couple of minutes later—the tunnel spat her out entirely, into a cavern that was every bit as picturesque as Priest Dave had promised. And there, on the other side, was the most beautiful thing she’d ever seen: the return of the metal platform. Humans had been here, and they hadn’t all been consumed.

“Good work!” Dave said as he clapped her on the back. “Why don’t you take a look around while I help the others through?”

Esther stood up and took several deep breaths. It was over. She’d done it. The tunnel hadn’t collapsed, she hadn’t drowned in a flash flood, and she hadn’t even been eaten by troglofaunal flesh-eating humanoids. As she left the damp darkness of the tunnel, still uneaten by the monsters from The Descent, Esther thought she understood, for the first time, the quote Jonah had written on the newspaper after 1/50.

Esther had never before believed that there was anything nice or useful on the other side of fear. Fear was a sensible barrier that kept the living from becoming the dead, and it shouldn’t be crossed under any circumstances. Yet as she stood up in that room built by the hands of the Earth itself, she found a hole punched through the cavern roof where green-tinted sunlight rushed in, and directly beneath it, a peridot-colored pool where millions of years of rain and wind and floodwater had carved away at the rock. Emerald-bright plants and moss grew from the walls, devouring the daylight, and birds spiraled down to their nests to bring their chirping chicks fat worms.

She’d passed the fear barrier, and she’d lived, and she’d discovered not certain death, as she’d imagined, but impossible splendor.

What other beautiful things had fear been hiding from her? What else had the curse long kept her from discovering?

For the first time in a long time, she wanted to find out.