23

THE COLD KISS OF DEATH

THE HEATING gave out the weekend before Thanksgiving. Esther woke shivering in her bed, her breath a cloud that hung over her mouth. The house was cold and gloomy—even the lamps and candlelight didn’t seem able to shift the weight of the dark. Eugene was hovering in her doorway, a vengeful spirit woken by the frost; it looked like he’d been crying.

“No heat,” he said. “Everything is darker in the cold.”

“Can’t sleep?” Esther asked.

Eugene rubbed his arms, the skin beneath his hands covered with goose bumps. “I never sleep. Can I come in here?”

Esther nodded and Eugene came and curled up with his back to her. He was shaking. Sobbing, she realized. There were small tremors from the other side of the bed, aftershocks of whatever terrible thing had made him desperate enough to come into her room. She put her palm against the thin ribs protruding from his back and hoped he could feel the calm they’d always been able to pass between their skin.

“Why are you sad?” she whispered. A superfluous question, perhaps. In the broken remains of the Solar family, there were so many reasons to choose from. Still, despite how bad the situation had gotten, Esther didn’t feel the need to drag blades through her skin.

Something more plagued Eugene. Something deeper.

“I don’t know,” he whispered back. “It’s just the way I am.”

Esther couldn’t fix that. She couldn’t help him. She couldn’t change Eugene being sad any more than she could change that his eyes were brown or his hair was black. There were temporary fixes for those things—hair dye, contact lenses—but underneath, really, they were what they were. She couldn’t help him, didn’t know how to help him, and that killed her.

Not for the first time, she wished that his injuries were more obvious. That whatever swollen, infected thing inside his head that made him feel this way could be seen, could be sliced away, could be stitched up and covered with a bandage like any other wound.

Eugene was always waiting for the jump scare even though it never came. Always waiting for a face to appear in the mirror behind him. Always waiting for a demon to snatch at any ankle skin not covered by a blanket. Always waiting for the lights to flicker out and a serial killer to be watching him with night vision goggles.

To the kids at school, the ones who were drawn in by his magic, he was tall and dark and beautiful, a boy witch made of mystery.

To Esther he was a reedy figure, like taffy stretched too thin. And behind him, dragging him back, dragging him down, a thick black mass, a swelling tar creature that he fought with all his might but could never beat. There was no Eugene without this darkness. And maybe that was the problem.

Maybe Eugene wasn’t afraid of what was in the darkness.

Maybe Eugene was afraid of the darkness that was inside himself.

•   •   •

WHEN ESTHER WOKE AGAIN IN THE MORNING, the hall was white with frost. Rosemary was sitting in the kitchen, wrapped in a blanket, her hand curled around a steaming cup of coffee. Fred’s head poked out from beneath the layers, and four soft rabbits nestled into her legs.

“The heating,” she said, motioning to the frosted patterns spreading on the walls, as though Esther might not have noticed, “is broken.”

The rest of the week was unnaturally cold. A bitter freeze crept across the state, slipping its way under doors and through the cracks in windows, shifting blankets off feet so it could turn the pink and tender flesh of toes to stone overnight. Death was busy, with the elderly, alone in their houses, and with the homeless on the street. He was busy rocking the cradles of newborns, kissing their cheeks to infect their tiny lungs with pneumonia. He was busy wandering through thickets of dying woodland, laying his fingers on all the squirrels and rabbits and raccoons and foxes that would rot and bloat in their holes when the warmth returned, their small bodies unable to fend off the cold.

The cold came for the Solars, too. It wandered the increasingly barren halls of their gloomy home. It seeped into their bones and made them shudder as they slept.

By Monday, Esther had a cough and could no longer feel her fingers.

By Tuesday, she gave in.

“Call someone to come fix it,” she told her mother through chattering teeth. All along, this had been a game, who could stay cold the longest. Hardly fair when you were up against a ghost boy and a woman made of wood. “I’ll pay for it. I have some money saved. I’ll pay.”

Rosemary actually smiled when she told her this. She smiled because she knew she’d won.

•   •   •

THE HEAT GUY came the day before Thanksgiving while Esther was home alone after school. She let him in and stood in the kitchen close to the steak knives in case he got any ideas, but he wandered around the house without attacking her, so she relaxed a little. He didn’t normally work so close to Thanksgiving, he explained, but he knew Rosemary from the casino.

It was a bad situation, heating-wise. The guy poked and prodded at the house’s guts for ten minutes before asking her where her mom was. She started to give him Rosemary’s cell number but he said he already had it, then stepped outside onto the porch to call her.

Esther listened through the mail slot. She heard only half of the conversation, from the guy’s end: “The whole system’s dead. It’ll need to be entirely replaced. I’ve never seen anything like it,” he said. Then: “Two thousand,” he quoted for the job. “Two thousand, minimum, and that’s with a friend discount.”

Esther left before he’d even finished talking. She rode to Jonah’s. They were supposed to go hiking, but she couldn’t muster the energy for it, so they sat in the bitter cold in the gutter outside his house and looked out at the whole wasted world—the trees stripped of leaves, the cars stripped of paint, the damp trash collecting on people’s lawns, the bleached and hazy sky.

What a shithole.

Jonah put his arm around her shoulder even though he knew that wasn’t allowed.

Esther said: “I hate it here.”

And he said: “Tell me about it.”

She said: “Do you ever feel like a rose that grew from a compost heap?”

And he said: “No.” Then: “Do you think your family is the compost heap? Or this town? Or me?”

“How could you think I mean you’re the compost?”

“Because I’m not a rose. So I must be part of the heap.”

“You’re a rose. The most beautiful one I’ve ever seen.”

“Stop trying to woo me.” He elbowed her playfully, then took a strand of her hair and twisted it around one of his fingers and stared at it contemplatively. “You’re gonna get out of here, Esther.”

“I’m gonna take you with me.”

“Sure.”

They didn’t say anything more for a while because they were both such terrible liars.

•   •   •

WHEN THE COLD got its long fingers inside their jackets, they went inside. Jonah worked on her portrait for a while, and Esther tried not to let him see her cry. Two thousand. Two hundred would’ve been too much, but two thousand? Two thousand would break them.

Jonah was quiet as he packed up his paints and came to lie next to where she was curled up in a blanket. He wiped a tear from her eyelashes and put his hand on her cheek, but there was nothing he could say to make it better, any of it, so he didn’t try. They fell asleep together, huddled close to ward off the cold, both dreaming of another life—any life—that wasn’t the one they’d been dealt.

When Esther woke, it was with a start. The sun had gone down, and a man was standing over her, screaming. She couldn’t make out most of what he was yelling, except for “SLUT” and “PREGNANT.” Jonah was pushing her roughly toward the door and chanting, “Go, go, for fuck’s sake Esther, go.” She moved as if in a dream, desperate to go faster but unable to get her heavy, sleepy body to do exactly what she wanted.

Remy was in the backyard, hiding in the long grass behind the house, crouched and unmoving. She watched Esther as she stumbled toward the side gate, her scarf bundled up in her hands.

When she finally stopped shaking, she texted Jonah.

ESTHER:

Then she waited at the end of the street until the streetlights came on and the sun slid below the horizon. Fall sunsets were her favorite, so crisp and cool, a vast pane of clear glass tinged with green in the last moments before the whole sky blinked into blackness. This was the only time of year and the only time of day that magic, the kind from storybooks, felt like it could be real. The buttery sunlight of summer dissolved from the world, leaving the light thin, the atmosphere thin, the space between realities thin.

Impossible things from other realms could slip through the sky on nights like tonight, Esther was almost sure of it.

Something smashed inside Jonah’s house. Glass. Esther sucked in a breath of cold air. It was strange that such beauty should exist alongside such ugliness.

Jonah didn’t come out. He didn’t message her back. The windows of his house stayed unlit. Nothing impossible slipped into our world from the sky.

Esther walked home in the dark, wondering if she was more of a coward for not calling the police, or for still dreaming of magic in her senior year of high school, when it was pretty damn clear that there was no magic now. At least not for her.

The nazars whispered welcomes to her as she threaded through the oak trees. The house, as always, was bursting with light.

Rosemary was curled up on the couch, asleep, her face puffy from crying. She looked so small, like a child, the rings that dripped from her fingers slipping over her skinny knuckles. There were bowls on the ground beside her, each filled with water and some herb meant to bring prosperity: basil, bay leaves, chamomile. Tonka beans spilled from her hands. Emergency measures, meant to bring money their way in a hurry.

Seeing her mother cry made Esther want to cry. She hated not just that they were broke, but that everything they touched seemed to turn sour and curdled, breaking to pieces in their hands. She hated their life. She hated the bits of it they’d chosen for themselves and the bits of life that had fallen on them like dandruff, unpleasant and unwanted. She hated that she couldn’t pull her father from the pit of sludge that had become his existence, that he would drown there and she’d have to watch his last gurgled breaths because she wasn’t enough—strong enough, smart enough, brave enough, enough, enough, enough—to save him.

Not enough to save Eugene. Not enough to save her grandfather. Not enough to save Jonah. Not even enough to save herself.

If Dad dies, she thought as she watched her mother, it will be the end of her. If he dies, she’ll unravel, and our family will be over.

Esther wanted to ignore her. She wanted to walk past her into her bedroom and close the door. But she couldn’t. She couldn’t. Rosemary was lying there on the couch, her cheek resting heavily on her hand, as still and pale as a statue, and she wanted to yell at her and tell her it was her fault, her fault, all her fault, but she couldn’t do that either. Whatever primordial magic that bound them whispered to Esther and said, Comfort her. So Esther pressed her hand to her mother’s clammy cheek, still wet and warm with tears. Rosemary opened her eyes wide and looked up at her as a small, sleepy smile spread across her face.

“Hi, baby,” she whispered, still somewhere between sleep and waking.

“Hi, Mama,” Esther whispered back. She crouched next to her and rested her head on the sofa and let Rosemary run her fingers through her hair, like she’d done when she was a child. Esther breathed in the scent of her mother and tried to remember exactly when they’d started drifting apart. The rift hadn’t been a sudden thing, more like something that happened inch by inch, so you couldn’t see how far apart you were until the distance was insurmountable.

“I’ll pay for it,” Esther mouthed. She said it twice before she realized no sound was coming out of her mouth, only breath. She cleared her throat. “I’ll pay for it.”

“No, you won’t,” Rosemary said, but Esther could feel the way her muscles relaxed in her hands. “You worked hard for that money. That’s for your college fund.”

“Is there anyone else.” It wasn’t a question, because questions were things you asked when you wanted an answer, but she already knew the answer. “Anyone else who could loan you the money.”

“No.”

That night, Esther used her phone to transfer her mother the money to have the heating fixed. Two thousand dollars. Just about all the funds she’d saved from her baking business. As Rosemary kissed her cheeks, her eyelids, her forehead, Esther wondered if they would ever find their way back to each other, or if the continental drift that separated them would only continue to wrench them apart, so slowly that neither of them felt enough pain to try and stop it.

“I’ll pay you back,” Rosemary assured her daughter as she rinsed her hands in chamomile tea. “I’ll pay it all back to you, I promise.”

How could you save people who were drowning in themselves?