31

THE DEATH DOOR

ESTHER:

Esther had sent him a message every day for the whole week; he’d seen them but hadn’t replied. On Sunday, when he didn’t show up at her house at their usual meeting time, she knew she had only two choices: call the police or check on Jonah herself. Both were unappealing. If she called the cops, Remy might be taken from him, and he’d never forgive her for that. If she went over there herself and Jonah was dead in a pool of his own blood, his skull caved in . . .

Don’t. Don’t even think like that.

Esther went to his place dressed as Matilda Wormwood. One needed to feel formidable on days like this.

From the outside, his house looked peaceful, but in the sad way that corpses looked peaceful after they’d been embalmed and made up for an open casket. Esther pushed the side gate open; there was noise coming from inside the house. Someone was yelling. Something thudded against the wall.

Around the back, the porch door was swung wide. Most of the drywall had been ripped down, and someone had taken to the mural on the ceiling with some kind of blunt object. Remy was huddled in a corner, crying.

“Where’s Jonah?” Esther asked her, panicked. “Where is he?”

Remy pointed, without speaking, into the house.

Esther pushed open the door of Death. Beyond it was a dimly lit hallway. She moved down it slowly, each of her footfalls measured. More noise. Grunting. A yelp of pain. For perhaps the first time in her life she had a fight instead of a flight response, and her adrenaline sent her careening in the direction of her fear.

In the living room, Holland Smallwood, Jonah’s father, had his son by the neck, pushed up against a wall. “Do I look fucking crazy to you?” he screamed. “Is this what a crazy person looks like, huh? Look at me! Is this what a crazy person looks like?”

Jonah, who was always so tall and bright, like a hero out of a comic book, was crying. Next to his dad he was a little kid. He closed his eyes and shook and didn’t do anything to defend himself except hold up his hands weakly.

“Please,” he muttered. “I’m sorry.”

Holland slammed him into the wall again.

“Stop!” Esther yelled, and then she was among it, part of it, scrabbling to get him off Jonah. Something solid connected with her cheekbone. An elbow? A fist? She didn’t realize she’d fallen until she was on the ground, the horizon vertical in her view. The world kept slipping sideways, an old projector stuck between frames.

“Get the fuck out of my house!” Holland screamed at her. She curled into a ball and covered her head with her arms. She thought he was going to kick her, but no blows came.

Jonah’s lip was split. There were dots of blood everywhere. Blood and spit and glass and pieces of a broken chair. Jonah just stared at Esther, heaving breaths.

It was the little girl who came to her rescue. Remy, dragging her up, pushing her out, whispering, “Go, go, go, go, go” as she guided Esther to the front door. She followed Esther out onto the porch and then retreated inside. Like the immune system expelling a pathogen.

Esther could hear heavy footsteps going up the stairs. She pressed the heel of her palm to the hot, throbbing lump on her cheek where some part of Holland had struck her.

Jonah came out a minute later. His lip was already swollen. Esther used her sleeve to clean away some of the blood, and then she just squeezed him. Wrapped her arms around his torso, his arms still pinned to his side, and squeezed him and squeezed him, like maybe if she applied enough pressure she could turn him into a diamond.

Jonah seemed empty. He didn’t react to her touch. “I can’t do this anymore, Esther,” he said eventually. “I can’t be brave for the both of us.” Then he broke down and collapsed into her, heaving sobs that shook his whole body. Tears rolled down Esther’s cheeks as she stroked the back of his neck and whispered, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry,” because what else was there to say? What else was there to do? They were teenagers, and they were powerless, and until they were adults they had no choice but to let their destinies be bent and swayed by outside forces.

It was the moment she’d been waiting for for months. The moment that was inevitable. The moment Jonah realized she was more trouble than she was worth.

People only understood mental illness up to a certain point. Beyond that point, their patience waned. She knew this, because she felt it sometimes with Eugene. With her mother. With her father. The desire just to take them by the shoulders and shake them and say, “Get better! Be better! For God’s sake, fix yourself!”

She’d known for a long time that this day would come, and now here it was, and she couldn’t blame him, because the shit he was going through was even worse than hers. The cumulative total of their collective pain was too much to bear. It was easy enough to hurt for yourself; hurting for other people was what broke you.

“Okay,” she said as she broke away from him. “Okay.”

“Hey, hey, wait. Where are you going?” Jonah said as he caught up to her on the lawn and ran his thumb over the bruise forming at her cheekbone. His jaw wobbled and jutted forward as he touched the swelling; she had never seen him so angry before.

“You just said . . . you couldn’t do this anymore?”

Jonah shook her head, then kissed her injured cheek softly. “Not you. I didn’t mean you.”

Esther collapsed into him. What had she done to herself? How had she let this happen? How had she allowed the boy who pickpocketed her at a bus stop become a person who could make her come undone?

“I’m sorry I’m crazy,” she sobbed. “I’m sorry you got sucked into all this. I’m sorry I can’t fix all of this for you.”

“Hey. You’re not crazy. And I didn’t get sucked into anything. We started this together,” he said. “We’re gonna finish it together.”

They waded out into the long grass behind his house, far enough that they could no longer see any lights but the half dozen solar garden lights they carried with them, stolen from a neighbor’s yard. Jonah set the lamps in a ring, like a fairy circle out of myth. The sky above them was heavy and thick with magic, and all around her, Esther could sense a danger that she could not see. An old danger, from a time before electricity and cars and the internet had made people forget what lurked in the dark. It stalked around them, a swirling mass of unknown menace. It sent goose bumps up her arms. It made her take small, shallow breaths through her mouth. It made her eyes water because she couldn’t bring herself to blink.

“I’ll never be rid of this fear,” she said as Jonah drove the final light into the ground. “I was stupid to think I could break the curse.”

“How about you fuck off, you giant bitch?!” Jonah yelled, and for a second she thought he was talking to her, but no—he had his hand cupped around his mouth and was yelling at the shadows. “Yeah, you, thou currish onion-eyed maltworm! I see you, dickwad. Take a hike!”

“You’re going to swear and shout Shakespearean insults at the dark?”

“Got a better idea?”

Esther turned back toward the gloom. “Piss off,” she said weakly.

“Come on, Solar, you can do better than that. Thou foul defacer of God’s handiwork!” Jonah boomed. “Thou mewling rump-fed clodpole! Suck my dick, thou frothy dread-bolted scullion!”

“Yeah!” Esther added. “Screw you, you piece of shit. You . . . uh . . . bucket of dildos!”

“Thou frothy dismal-dreaming horn-beast!”

“Douchenozzle!”

“Thou mewling crook-pated canker-blossom! The power of Christ compels you, bitch! Thou art unfit for any place but hell!” Jonah looked over at Esther, a lopsided grin on his swollen lips. “Better?”

Esther smiled. “Better.” She took a breath. Steadied herself to ask a difficult question. “Why do you stay? Every time I think you’ve had enough of me . . . you come back for more.”

“You really don’t know?” Jonah took a step back. Rubbed his eyes. “Because I . . . I kind of love you, Esther.”

“Why?”

“Why? Because . . . you’re so much braver than you realize. Look, I lied about not remembering how we met as kids, okay? I remember you being bullied. I remember the way you used to grit your teeth and stick your chin out and keep doing whatever you were doing even when you were being tormented. Most kids would’ve cried, you know, but you? You’ve got guts, Solar. You always have.”

“The only reason you like me is because you don’t see who I really am.”

“I see you.”

“Then let me see the portrait. Let me make sure.”

“Some paint on a canvas isn’t gonna make any difference if you don’t know by now. I knew this would be hard for you but . . . I thought you’d feel the same way.”

“Eugene flickers in and out of existence, sometimes for hours at a time. My father is turning to stone. My mother is being eaten by termites. I can’t be sure if Hephzibah is even real or not. You’re the only person I care about who’s solid and I don’t want to . . . to ruin you.”

What Esther didn’t say, what she didn’t add, was that she didn’t want to give Jonah the power to ruin her either. Love was a trap, a sticky trap of molasses meant to bind two people together. It was a thing that couldn’t be escaped, a weight that people strapped to their own legs before they waded into the water and wondered why they drowned. Esther had seen it time and time again. She’d seen the thing people called love, the thing romantic movies were made about, and the power of it scared the shit out of her.

Her grandfather had loved her grandmother, and the loss of her had sent him mad. Her mother had loved her father, and the disappearance of him had eaten her up, turned her into termite-eaten wood.

Despite the clear and present danger Jonah posed, Esther let him tuck a strand of her hair behind her ear. She let him lean close to her and press his swollen lips to hers. She pulled back, tried not to hurt him, but Jonah didn’t seem to care. His hand was in her hair, pulling her closer to him, pressing her mouth harder against his. He kissed her like he was going to war and didn’t expect to kiss anyone ever again.

Then it was over and he was resting his forehead against her. “Please prove me wrong,” she said quietly, her lips against the skin of his hand.

“Man, you’re wrong about so many things, I can’t pick where to start proving you wrong. What do you even want me to prove you wrong about?”

“Death, mostly. And love.”

“No way I can prove you wrong about love, unless you’ve gone and fallen in love with me too.”

As soon as you admitted to loving someone, you suddenly had a lot to lose. You freely gave them a way to hurt you.

There was never a single, grandiose moment of realization. Esther certainly noticed the big things: his goodness, his strength, the way he protected her when no one else would. But it was the little things that accumulated over time that made Jonah Smallwood extraordinary. The way he grinned when he was planning something mischievous, how he looked at her with wide, excited eyes in the moments after she’d faced a fear, the way his hips wiggled when he danced, and how he collapsed to the ground whenever he found something really, ridiculously funny.

A thousand little moments had made Esther fall more and more in love with him, without her even noticing. A thousand little pieces of his soul had splintered off and dug themselves into her.

“You got the hots for me, Solar?”

Esther didn’t answer.

“Well I’ll be damned.”

“Prove me wrong,” she whispered.

“You are so wrong,” he said, and then he kissed her forehead, the tip of her nose, her lips. Esther supposed, as they held each other under a threadbare carpet of stars, that this was how it must always feel in the beginning. Yet even there, next to him, the most excellent person in the universe, she couldn’t stop herself from thinking that love was a pitcher plant. Sweet with nectar on the outside, but once you caught the scent and took the plunge, it ate you whole.

Soul and all.