25

17/50: DOLLS

IN THE week before Christmas, the world grew as bitter and gloomy as Eugene’s fitful nightmares. The last of the leaves dropped away from the trees, the cold came in blankets to settle over the town, and Esther and Jonah continued their search for Death, despite the ever increasing pressure from school to STUDY HARD AND DO WELL OR YOUR LIFE IS GOING TO SUCK SERIOUSLY YOU GUYS WE’RE NOT EVEN JOKING WITH THIS.

The four of them met on Sunday—Christmas Eve—at Hephzibah’s house, partly because she had the creepy dolls they needed to film 17/50, but mostly because her house was the nicest, and her parents spoke softly to each other, and one of her grandmothers always brought around freshly rolled rum balls on Christmas Eve which were strong enough (when they’d been in elementary school anyway) to get them halfway tipsy. The other grandmother brought over latkes topped with applesauce in an attempt to out-grandma the other grandmother, so the real winner was their stomachs.

It always felt like Christmas was supposed to feel at Hephzibah’s: warm and fragrant and festive and distinctly Middle Eastern (the baby Jesus was from there after all). The Hadids, half Christian, half Jewish, were big believers in Chrismukkah, and decorated accordingly.

For the decade before her birth, Heph’s parents had been foreign correspondents and lived in half a dozen cities. Their house was a catalogue of where they’d been in the world: handwoven Afghan carpets covered the floor, heavy Balinese chairs with intricately carved backs sat in the dining room, and the lounges were Scandinavian, their minimalist design clashing with the Japanese room divider and all the Peruvian pottery scattered about the place.

Hephzibah had been born in Jerusalem but spent the first few years of her life pinballing between Paris, Rome and Moscow, and had even done her first year of school in New Delhi before her parents came to the United States and decided to settle down. They still travelled for work sometimes, mostly to Mexico or Canada, and Daniel, Heph’s dad, had even covered the early days of the Syrian Civil War until journalists became afraid to go there, but mostly they worked from home.

The four of them filmed 17/50 after dinner, when the night was dark and cold and the basement where Hephzibah kept her childhood toys was appropriately horror-movie-esque. The toys had been moved down here at Esther’s request sometime in late elementary school, when she’d started sleeping over at Heph’s and found herself quite unable to close her eyes in the same room as dolls that were clearly created for the main purpose of becoming receptacles for demonic possession and little more.

Jonah made her stand surrounded by the dolls for five minutes with the lights off. Esther almost started hyperventilating at first, thinking of all the dolls she’d seen in movies that came to life and tore out people’s jugulars, but the longer she spent with them, the slower her breathing became. They didn’t move. They didn’t blink. They didn’t reach out with their creepy little porcelain fingers to gouge her eyes out when she wasn’t looking.

In the end, when the five minutes was up, she felt sorry for them. Little girls, frozen in time and left alone in the dark, smiles painted on their still faces. Esther was the one who’d condemned them to this cage years ago, just as Death had been the one who’d condemned her family to live in fear.

When Jonah flicked the light on, she carried each of them, one by one, back up to the world above.

•   •   •

ESTHER AND EUGENE spent Christmas morning at Lilac Hill. It was not a good day. Reginald had fallen the night before—a bout of syncope—and today he was in pain and couldn’t remember why. It was a terrible thing to see. Like when babies or animals were sick and you couldn’t explain to them what was happening, so they cried and cried and it made you want to cry too because there was nothing you could do, nothing at all. There was a bruise, the nurses told them, from his hip to his armpit, splashed down his side like a watercolor storm cloud, and he had difficulty breathing or sitting up or moving too much. Four broken ribs, they said.

Reg’s hands shook so violently that he couldn’t feed himself; Eugene had to do it. He choked on his food because the disease was eating away his ability to swallow and he cried most of the time his grandchildren were there, though he didn’t seem to notice their presence or recognize who they were. Eugene sat and glowered out the window for most of the visit, looking how Esther felt. Like, if she met Death in a dark alleyway, she would take no prisoners.

These are the things she remembered about Reg that day:

- The story Rosemary had told her, that when she and Eugene were babies, Reg would come by unannounced almost every day to see them. The way he’d pick them up from their cribs and wake them even when they were sleeping just so he could read to them or play with them or take them for a walk through the garden to see the birds and the flowers and the trees.

- The way he loved Johnny Cash, and would sing “I Walk the Line” to Florence Solar on a regular basis, even though he couldn’t hold a tune.

- The way, whenever Esther wanted to run away from home, she’d call her grandfather, and he’d come and pick her up and pretend he was helping her escape great tyranny. The way they’d sneak out together like spies, even though Peter and Rosemary knew very well he was there, and go back to Reg’s and Florence’s house for fish sticks, Esther’s favorite food as a child.

Before they left, the nurses pulled them aside and informed them that his hallucinations had worsened, that he scared the other patients when he told them that Death was there with them, that he visited him once to play chess, that his time was very close to being near.

“Death comes here?” Esther asked. “Have you seen him?”

The nurse looked at her like she was crazy, then explained again that Lewy body dementia caused recurrent visual hallucinations, and that nothing of what Reginald said should be believed. Eugene raised his eyebrows and looked at his sister.

“She means now that he’s sick,” she said when the nurse was gone.

“No, she means ever.”

“You’re not allowed to believe in demons and not Death,” she reminded him.

Eugene turned to stare out the window again. “Again: I believe what I can see.”

•   •   •

WHEN THEY GOT HOME, there were no presents to be opened; there was no tree and no decorations, unless you counted the ones permanently set up downstairs. Esther sat at the top of the basement stairs and listened to the Christmas carols jingling from the record player and wondered if she should tell Peter that his father was coming undone at the seams. Would it make a difference? Would he be any more inclined to unstick himself from the basement and venture outside, or would the imminence of his father’s death only drive him further underground?

Jonah snuck into her room sometime after midnight, his lip busted.

“Let me call the police,” she said as she pressed the sleeve of her sweatshirt to his mouth, but Jonah shook his head.

“If we get taken by the state, they’ll split us up. I might never see her again,” he said. “Tell me a story. That’s what I need right now.”

And so, with his head in her lap, her fingers in his hair, her sleeve pressed to the split at his lip, Esther told Jonah about the third time her grandfather met Death.