33

THE SHADOW BOY

MERCY GENERAL Hospital, the one built to replace Peachwood, was a big, geometric puzzle of a building, all glass and steel and concrete. Though its outsides were modern, its insides could be from any hospital in any decade: long, brightly lit corridors devoid of warmth or comfort, ugly industrial flooring, and the acid smell of bleach trying (and failing) to veil the stench of death.

Esther walked through the halls with grass from the night before still in her hair. Her Matilda Wormwood costume was ripped and dirty. She looked thoroughly out of place in such a sterile environment, a feral girl who’d wandered in from the jungle.

Or maybe, here on the mental health ward, she looked just right. Maybe this was where she belonged.

Rosemary had explained it to her on the car ride over, after she’d picked Esther up from the end of Jonah’s street. There had been a power outage on the street, and Eugene had disappeared into the sudden darkness. Whatever had snatched him and dragged him through the ether spat him back out, sweating and screaming and smelling of damp earth and decay. Smelling of the grave, Esther realized.

It had only taken him a minute or two to calm down once the lights were back on. Rosemary made him tea and tucked yarrow behind his ear.

He said he was fine. He said it was getting easier, now that he was older. He said she should go to the casino, if she wanted. He said he’d be fine on his own.

He said he’d be fine.

It was Peter who found him. It was Peter who, like his father, had a sixth sense for death. When he still took part in the world above, this extrasensory perception had made him an excellent veterinarian. He knew, without knowing how he knew, which animals to treat and which ones Death had already laid his hands on. Which ones were already marked and thus beyond the help of medicine. All he had to do was be near the dying to hear the dark, buzzing silence that was the symphony of Death.

The same symphony he heard when Eugene sank a veterinary scalpel into each of his wrists in the bathroom above the basement.

Eugene Solar was seventeen years old when he died.

“Aren’t you coming in?” Esther asked when Rosemary stopped at the door.

“You know he’d only want you.”

She nodded. She would be the same. If she was sick, or sad, or dying, or all three, Eugene would be the one she would ask for.

Esther watched her mother walk back down the hall toward the nurse’s station. She was rake thin and her skin fell in soft drapes across her cheekbones

Inside the room, Eugene was lying on his back in the bed, his eyes open but lifeless. Esther knocked on the wall. Eugene broke out of his corpse pose and looked over at her.

Eugene Solar was seventeen when he died. He was also seventeen when the EMTs brought him back from the clutches of the Reaper against his will—twice.

“Hey loser,” he said croakily.

Peter had gotten there in time. Just. Despite three strokes and a fear so great and terrible it had driven him underground for six years, their father had dragged himself, half paralyzed, up the basement stairs and gotten to the bathroom just in time to save his only son. Thirty more seconds, the EMTs said. Thirty more seconds and they wouldn’t have been able to bring Eugene back at all.

“Apparently you suck at dying,” Esther said. “Finally, something you’re not good at.”

“Oh no, didn’t you hear? I died twice. I’m just fine at dying. It’s the staying dead part that’s tricky.” Eugene stared at the ceiling again. “Well, this is not a conversation I was hoping to have. Now everyone’s gonna think it was a cry for help.”

“Our parents are so inconvenient. Never there when you need them and then right when you’re trying to kill yourself . . .”

“They barge in and ruin the whole thing. God, what dicks.”

“Dad really came out of the basement?”

“Yeah. I can’t explain it. I was quiet. I made sure I was quiet. I didn’t call for help or anything, but . . . he still found me. I don’t know how. I don’t remember much, just him stumbling into the room and practically falling on top of me. It might as well have been a dream.”

“So a casual suicide attempt was the answer all along.”

“Now if you develop a slight addiction to meth or something, we’ll get the family back together for sure.”

Esther laughed, which turned quickly to breathless sobbing. She didn’t really understand how she could be crying when there was nothing left inside her body. She sat on the side of his mattress and took one of his bandaged hands in hers. “Don’t leave me,” she whispered. “Don’t leave me here with them.”

Esther wanted to make her brother understand that he was the sun. That he was bright and burning and brilliant, and without his warmth, without his gravity to orient herself around, she would be nothing. She wished they had that psychic twin thing, that she could push images into his head and make him see. Make him see that he was everything.

Eugene was quiet for a moment, until he said, “I can’t stay, Esther,” as he twisted the ends of her hair in his fingertips. Esther started to cry harder, because she knew he didn’t mean I can’t stay in the hospital or I can’t stay in this town. Eugene meant he couldn’t stay on this planet, not when there were so many demons and ghosts to be stumbled upon in the dark, so many jump scares waiting in mirrors and blackened hallways and the bare branches of trees at night. The whole universe was wrong for a creature like Eugene; too much dark matter, too much space between stars, too many unknowns floating in the infinite abyss.

“It’ll get better,” she said through her tears. “I promise it’ll get better. You won’t always be scared.”

“Don’t be lame, Esther. You’re better than that. I don’t want to live like this anymore.”

She grasped desperately for bargaining chips, for reasons to make him stay. “You know if you die before her she’s going to play that terrible slideshow at your funeral.”

“That’s genuinely one of the reasons I put it off for so long. I tried to find it last night but the woman keeps it hidden like it’s a family heirloom.”

“How can you want to leave me?”

“Oh, Esther,” he said as she burrowed her face into his chest. “It isn’t about you. Not at all. It never has been. You can love someone with all your soul and still hate yourself enough to want to die.”

But she wasn’t willing to accept his surrender.

Not yet.

Not ever.

“You’ve gotta fight it, Eugene. Whenever you feel like hurting yourself, tell me, tell Heph, tell Mom, tell Dad, tell Jonah, tell your friends. I guarantee you that at least one of us will say, ‘Come over, I’ll be your backup.’ And then we fight the dark thoughts together. If you try and do this on your own, your chance of getting ambushed by your own mind skyrockets.”

“Sometimes there’s not a strategy for everything.”

“No. Shut up. I will not compromise with this thing inside you that makes you hate yourself so much. I can’t do that.”

“The thought of finishing high school, of graduating and going to college . . . it exhausts me. It makes me so tired. When I think about the future, all I feel is emptiness. Even if things get better, I know this feeling will come back eventually. It always does.”

“Give me your phone,” she said.

“I don’t have it. It’s in a bag somewhere.”

Esther found his phone in the bag Rosemary had packed for him and did a Google search and added the number for the suicide hotline into his contacts. “You ever wanna hurt yourself again, even if you feel like you can’t call anyone you know, you call this number.”

“You make it sound so easy.”

“Of course it’s not going to be easy. You’re fighting a war against yourself. Every time either side makes ground, you’re the one who gets hurt. But it’s not about winning the war against your demons. It’s about calling a truce and learning how to live with them peacefully. Promise me you’ll keep fighting.”

“Why should I? You don’t.”

“What does that mean?”

“You don’t fight. You think you’re so brave, but you don’t fight your demons either.”

“I’m trying. I’ve been trying for months.”

“Like hell you are. You go out every week and do some stupid stunt that you aren’t even really scared of. You get your heart pumping for a little while, but it’s not real fear.”

“We’re getting close, Eugene, I can feel it. We’re catching up to him. Or getting his attention. I can fix this.”

“The Reaper isn’t real, Esther. The curse isn’t real. Jack Horowitz is just some guy. Pop isn’t going to drown. I think that’s pretty clear by now. It’s a bedtime story he used to tell us when we were little kids, which—might I add—is pretty screwed up. I was close to the afterlife and I didn’t see anything or anyone.”

“Then why was all of this happening to us?”

“Because your life doesn’t need to be cursed for it to be a totally shit time. Look, Pop told me, okay? I asked him before he went into Lilac Hill if the curse was real, if he’d really met Death, and he just laughed. Said I should know by now that it was a fairy tale.”

Esther looked at Eugene, waited for him to falter, but he didn’t. “But . . . that makes no sense. He . . . he told us for years that the curse is real.”

“It’s a story, Esther. A fairy tale.”

“What about Uncle Harold? What about cousin Martin and the bees? What about Pop’s dog? What about you?”

“No one believes but you. You’re the only one it’s real for. You’re the one who keeps it alive.”

Esther opened her mouth to disagree, but Eugene was either so tired or so drugged up that his eyelids grew heavy and his head nodded forward. “Move over,” she said, and he shuffled to the side as best he could, and she climbed into the narrow bed with him and carefully scrabbled her way under his injured arms and into his chest.

“Eugene,” she whispered into his hospital gown, beneath which his thin ribs moved up and down, drawing breaths against his will, “you cannot leave me.”

Eugene said nothing, just lifted a bandaged hand to place against her cheek. They lay how they did for nine months in the womb, all tangled limbs, until she felt his fitful breathing slow into the cadence of sleep. The frown lines on his forehead relaxed. The tensed muscles in his shoulders melted into the sheets.

How could death not be appealing, when the only thing that gave him comfort in life was being unconscious?