22

AND ADULTS WONDER WHY TEENAGERS DRINK

THE UPGRADE to DEFCON 2 came a few short days later. The house had been slowly drained of furniture, which meant Rosemary was on a bad losing streak, but this was nothing new. Money from the slots was like the tide: it came in, it went out, it came in, it went out. During a high tide the house overflowed with furniture and electronics and food, and then slowly began to recede again as the money ebbed and the slot gods took back what they’d given. Even with the salary from Rosemary’s horticulture job, the past due notices on personal loans began to accumulate.

Auntie Kate rang at 5:00 p.m. to talk to Rosemary, which she only ever did when Rosemary owed her a considerable sum of money. Esther did what was required of her: she cried. It wasn’t hard. She didn’t even have to fake it. She could feel the tide rushing out faster than ever before and sucking everything from her life with it. A tide like that meant only one thing—a tsunami was coming, and it would destroy everything in its path.

Once Kate finally hung up, Esther waited for Rosemary all afternoon and most of the evening. There was no food in the house, literally nothing, and her mother had promised to bring home pizza.

“She’s not coming, Esther,” Eugene said when she called Rosemary for the ninth time. “If she was coming home, she’d be here by now.”

At eleven o’clock, her stomach growling, Esther decided to send her mother a passive-aggressive message.

ESTHER:

ROSEMARY:

Okay x

ESTHER:

ROSEMARY:

Sorry, busy x

Esther wanted to send her texts that said things like, Don’t you realize how much you’re hurting your family? and Fuck you for being so selfish! but she knew it would only make Rosemary cry, and then Esther would feel bad, and it wouldn’t help anything anyway.

The whole situation made her so angry that she wanted to rip something, scratch something, tear something to pieces. She wondered if this was the feeling Eugene got before he slid a razor blade through his skin. She thought about trying it. There had to be some reason he did it. Maybe it felt good? In the end, she settled on knocking back a quarter bottle of vodka until she was in a different type of pain, an oh-god-there-goes-my-liver kind of pain. What better thing to destroy than yourself?

She messaged Jonah.

ESTHER:

JONAH:

Painting. What are you doing?

ESTHER:

JONAH:

Bring some of that rebellion over here. No one should rebel alone.

So she did. Eugene drove her to Jonah’s and they parked four houses down from his and snuck into the backyard, which was unnecessary, because Jonah’s dad wasn’t home.

They drank behind the house in the cold until everything was funny, and Jonah painted page after page of watercolors that went from bright and beautiful when he was sober to formless, swirling masses when he was drunk. Eugene described to him the apparitions he saw in the dark, and he painted those too, monstrous things with bright white eyes and skin made of dripping tar.

For a while, Jonah worked on his portrait of Esther. Eugene peered over his shoulder and said, “It’s just a mi—” but Jonah shushed him.

“Don’t spoil the surprise,” he said.

“I don’t get it,” Eugene said, frowning, but Jonah shook his head.

“She’ll get it, man,” he said as he looked up at her. “She’ll get it.”

Esther blushed and pressed her lips together to stop from breaking into a smile.

Later, when the portrait session was over, Jonah sat next to her, his paint-flecked fingertips tracing circles on her palm. Esther sipped her vodka and let her anger spill out. She told them that tomorrow would be the day she confronted her mother. She was going to do it, she was going to do it, she was going to say something.

They drove home at sunrise without having slept. Esther didn’t ask Eugene if he was sober enough to get behind the wheel of a car, because she thought if he wasn’t—if he was intoxicated—that maybe that would finally attract Death’s attention.

Eugene was sober, or at least sober enough to drive without hitting anything, so they made it home without any visits from the Reaper. It was a cool morning—she could tell from the lace of frost strung across the fallen leaves in their front yard—but she couldn’t feel anything, even though they drove with the windows down. Rosemary’s car was parked in the drive, which meant she’d come home and either a) found her children missing and hadn’t given a shit, or b) hadn’t even bothered to check if they were in their beds.

Esther wasn’t sure which was worse. She slammed the door of the car and stalked barefoot through the tinkling nazars up to the house, fired up and full of alcohol and ready to tell her mother exactly what she thought of her.

“Esther, don’t,” Eugene said as he closed the car door.

“Why the hell not?”

“You don’t think she feels bad enough? You screaming at her isn’t gonna help anyone.”

“It’ll help me feel better.”

Inside, though, she found her mother curled up in the hall with a pillow under her head, a hand pressed to the orange door that led down to her husband’s tomb. All the acid went out of Esther. Rosemary’s other hand was tucked tight against her chest, clasping the locket that contained a picture of her and Peter on their wedding day. Scattered on the wood beneath her pillow were sage leaves with wishes written on them. Set him free, they all said. Set him free, set him free, set him free.

Here was solid proof of the ruin love could sow. A reminder of how letting someone under your skin only gave them the power to destroy you in the end.

Esther wanted to wake Rosemary. She wanted to make her feel bad for what she’d become. She wanted to know why she stayed in a relationship that had halfway ruined her. She wanted her venom to burn in her mother’s veins and hurt her from the inside out. But then she noticed how the tips of her fingers had been eaten away.

How Esther saw her mother in her head: All over her skin—her ears, her nose, her neck, everywhere—there were little holes of decay, as if she were termite-ridden. Houses infested with termites became hollowed out and started to collapse under their own weight. Esther wondered if it was the same for people.

“Do you see that?” she said to Eugene as she touched the brittle ends of Rosemary’s fingers. Flecks of skin and bone chipped away in small chunks. “Our mother is made of wood.”

Back to reality. Eugene was gone. Esther searched the whole ground floor for him, and the yard, but he’d vanished. After half an hour of searching, she gave up and dragged a blanket off Rosemary’s bed and covered her mother. She stirred but did not wake.

“Do you want to go to school?” Eugene said when he reappeared from the ether three hours later. It was the longest time he’d spent invisible. When he returned, he smelled of damp soil and wood and some dark, unearthly scent Esther couldn’t place. She wondered where he went when he wasn’t there; she wondered if she wanted to know.

“It’s almost midday already,” she said, looking over at him from where she’d been waiting on the couch, Fleayoncé a puddle of fur and warmth curled up on her stomach. “So no.”

Eugene checked his phone. Esther saw him flicker for several seconds before becoming solid again. “Huh.” He looked around. “I must’ve lost track of the time.”

Then he meandered to his room and they did nothing for the rest of the day except sleep off their hangovers. Their mother, even when she woke, never came to check on them.