35

THE GREAT ORCHID HEIST

ESTHER AND Rosemary spent the morning in the hospital, in and out of Eugene’s room as doctors and nurses came and went and told them again and again how lucky he was, how close he’d come. Esther’s heart had never hurt so much before; she hadn’t been aware before that day that things like betrayal and grief could hurt as much as physical pain. When she thought of Eugene and what he’d done, she couldn’t breathe. When she thought of her father and how he’d been rushed to the hospital alongside his son, because he was too weak even to move, her eyes burned. When she thought of Jonah and what he’d done, she wanted to vomit.

People had seen her. Strangers on the internet had watched her in some of her most private, vulnerable moments: when she was wet and sobbing and hyperventilating and shaking and weak and a coward. It had taken so much for her to let Jonah in, and he had just let them see her like that. Jonah had given her to them willingly, against her wishes. And that, Esther thought—that was unforgivable.

More than that, she hated herself for caring about something so trivial and stupid when her brother, her twin, her own flesh and blood, was lucky to be alive.

Esther rested her head on her mother’s shoulder. Rosemary looked and smelled and sounded thoroughly out of place in the washed-out hallways of the hospital. Today she was wrapped in layers of bright silk, her fingers still heavy with rings, her clothing still tinkling from all the little gold coins sewn into hems and sleeves and stitched to the inside of every pocket. Her brown hair was piled high on her head and threaded with sprigs of yarrow, and her eyes were bloodshot. Esther thought she looked like a mad seer, descended from her tower to tell of a terrible premonition.

“Oh. I forgot to tell you. Fred is dead,” Rosemary said solemnly as she stared at the stalk of tea that had floated to the top of her cup. Esther knew what this beverage-based omen supposedly meant, because her mother had told her many times before: a stranger is coming.

“What? How’d that happen?”

“I don’t know. All that’s left of him is a large scorch mark in the kitchen. You know Aitvarases become a spark when they die.”

“You think the chicken spontaneously burst into flames,” Esther said slowly.

“Fred was a rooster, not a chicken. Well, goblin rooster, technically. And yes.”

“Did you see this happen?”

“No, but I think he sacrificed himself to save Eugene.”

“Okay.”

Esther stood up. Rosemary fished out the tea stalk, placed it on the back of her left hand, and hit it with her right. After only one hit, the stalk slid off her skin and fell to the ground. “A stranger will come in one day,” she said. “A man. He’ll be short.”

•   •   •

THE CALL FROM LILAC HILL came in the afternoon. Rosemary pulled Esther out of Eugene’s room and told her, as they collected cans of Coke and packets of chips from the vending machine, that Reginald was close now. Very close to slipping away.

“The nurse said you need to say your good-byes,” Rosemary said. “Today, not tonight. Now. As soon as possible.”

Esther pressed a finger and thumb into her burning eyes. Great timing. “We have to tell Eugene.”

“Absolutely not. There’s no way he can leave to go and see him. Telling him would only make him upset.”

“He’ll never forgive us if we don’t give him the chance to say good-bye.”

“I will never forgive myself if I don’t give him the chance to get better. You know I’m right about this, Esther. Don’t even try. You’ve both said good-bye to your grandfather so many times already.”

“Eugene loves him so much.”

“I know, honey. I know. You should go, while he’s sleeping.”

“Will you come later?”

“Reg is a good man, but I said my good-byes to him a long time ago, too. Eugene needs me more than he does.”

What Esther wanted to say: We’ve all been living without you for years. What makes you think having you here now is enough to make up for that? Instead she said nothing, but her expression must have betrayed some of what she was feeling, because Rosemary pulled her daughter in and hugged her. For a moment Esther felt the spark of the tether that bound them, the magic that had once burned bright. She wanted so badly to melt into her mother and have the world feel right again.

“I know I don’t live up to most of your expectations,” Rosemary whispered. “I know you think I could be better in a lot of ways, and maybe if you could pick and choose some new parts for me, I’d be a better mom.”

The words stung, mostly because they were true, and Esther felt the spark waver and die. “Mom. Please.” She sighed and pulled away from her embrace and leaned forward to rest her head against the vending machine. “I really don’t want you to think that.”

“It’s okay, honey. I know, sometimes, that I’m not enough. You and Eugene make sure I know it. But I really do love you. More than anything.”

Esther opened her eyes. Was love enough? If a person could offer you nothing but broken promises and disappointment, was love enough to make up for that? She thought of Jonah, and what he’d done to her—how she’d shown him all of the most vulnerable corners of her soul, and he’d taken those secrets and sold them wholesale to the masses.

Esther held her mother’s hand. Rosemary pressed it to her cheek and kissed her daughter’s wrist. “My beautiful girl.”

“I should go,” she said, and then she did.

•   •   •

ESTHER BORROWED HER mother’s car to drive herself to Lilac Hill. The fear that’d once coursed through her at the thought of people seeing her stall somehow felt muted and dull after Eugene’s close call with Death. She drove slowly, carefully, but felt very little of the dread she once had.

These are the things she thought about instead:

- The fact that her grandfather was very close to death now, and hour by hour, it seemed less and less likely that he would drown. The impending reality that the Reaper’s prediction was, in fact, quite wrong, made Esther feel hopeful and sad at the same time.

- How much Reginald had loved orchids, and Johnny Cash, and birds, and his wife, and how he would have none of those things to comfort him as he left this world, and how very unfair that seemed.

So instead of going straight to her grandfather’s deathbed, Esther first made a small detour and brought the car to a stop two houses down from the one that had for many years belonged to Florence and Reginald Solar. The house remained as quaint and kempt as it was the day the Solars moved into it when Reg returned from the war. The window frames were still bright white, the twisting garden path was still flanked by bushels of flowers, and an American flag still flew from one of the posts on the little porch.

Before she got out of the car, Esther thought about the fourth time Reginald met Death, a meeting that occurred at the very house she stared at in the evening dark.

It happened in the greenhouse in the backyard, on the afternoon before her grandmother’s death. Reg had only told her the story once, the day after Florence died. Esther and Eugene were eleven. Jack Horowitz, slight, pale, pockmarked, and no older than when he’d first met Reg in Vietnam some forty years before, knocked on the greenhouse wall and waved politely through the glass.

Reginald took off his gardening gloves and opened the door for Death.

“I am here to tell you some news you will not take kindly to hearing,” said Horowitz.

“I’m about to die.”

“No. You will die some years from now, of dementia. You will plan to kill yourself after the diagnosis, but the disease will be incredibly swift. You will not have the time.”

“The hell I won’t.”

Horowitz shrugged. “For decades you have wondered how you will really die and now I tell you and you don’t care to hear it.”

“I get diagnosed with dementia, you can bet your ass I’m gonna put a pistol in my mouth before I start forgetting what my grandkids look like. And I’m still not going near water. Why are you here?”

“In the early hours of tomorrow morning—at 4:02 a.m., to be precise—someone you love dearly will die from a catastrophic brain aneurysm.”

“If you touch anyone in my family, Horowitz . . .”

“I’m doing you a favor that many would sacrifice everything they have for.”

“Oh, and what the hell is that?”

“The chance to say good-bye.” It was at this point that Horowitz picked up an unopened bulb. It didn’t wilt and turn black at his touch, as you might expect of Death. “You will invite your family over for a meal tonight. You will cook a grand feast. Roast lamb with rosemary and garlic, the same meal you cooked for your wife the first time you brought her home.”

“How the hell do you—”

“Later in the evening, when all your children and grandchildren have gone home, you will wash the dishes and pour her a glass of red wine and then you will dance together to ‘Moonlight Serenade,’ as you did at your wedding. Before you go to sleep, you will put freshly cut orchids by her bedside table, as you have done every week since those young girls died, and you will kiss her goodnight. It is a good death, Reginald. Better than the one you will get.”

“And if I take her to the hospital right now?”

“The aneurysm will still happen. Florence Solar will fall into a coma and pass away on Friday evening. If you take her to the hospital, you will give her five extra days, but they will not be days well spent. Take tonight, my friend. It is my gift.”

“I wish I’d never met you, Horowitz.”

Horowitz chuckled. “Believe me, that is the sentiment of many. Why orchids?”

“What?”

“On the afternoon you began investigating the murder of the Bowen sisters, you brought home dozens of orchids. I have never been able to figure out why.”

“Because of you, you miserable bastard.”

“Me?”

“Cut up an orchid and plant a piece of it in a new pot and a whole plant grows out of just that severed bit. They’re like hydras. Orchids are death-proof; that’s why the Reaper before you used them as his calling card. He was afraid of them and you should be too. You can’t get your grubby skeleton fingers into them.”

“So if I plant this spike, a new flower will grow from it? Immortality. Like those wretched jellyfish that taunt me.”

“Can you even grow anything? If you planted a seed, would it grow, or would it cower in your shadow, afraid to bloom? Why would you bother planting anything, knowing you’d have to reap it in the end anyway?”

“Why do you bother living, knowing you will have to die?” Horowitz stroked the bulb in his hand. It blossomed at his touch. He tucked the bloom into his buttonhole. “I have never gardened before, but perhaps I will start.”

“Leave, Horowitz.”

“That is the mistake most people make. To think that Death loves nothing.” Horowitz smiled. And then, still eighteen years old and covered in acne scars, Death dipped his hat and turned to leave, the orchid bright and blooming at his chest. “Good-bye, Reg. We will meet twice more. At the end, of course.”

“And the other time?”

“I’ll visit you in your nursing home. You’ll lose to me in a game of chess.”

“Typical. Can’t even let the dying man win.”

“You were supposed to die in Vietnam, you know,” said Horowitz at the doorway. “The day after we met. The bullet that tore through your chest was supposed to stop your heart.”

“But . . . you said . . . I was supposed to drown?”

“To know your fate is to change it. If I’d told you the truth, you never would have been shot.”

“But I was shot. I didn’t die.”

“Have you forgotten? I was otherwise occupied at the bottom of a river.”

“You were sent there to reap me.”

“You were to be my first. Then, on the day of my wedding in 1982, you and your lovely wife were supposed to be involved in a fatal head-on collision with a pickup truck but . . . I couldn’t have that. The afternoon you found the bodies of the Bowen sisters, you were supposed to be crushed to death by a collapsing brick wall. Freak accident. You would have, too, if I hadn’t phoned in a tip about someone dumping trash in Little Creek. Every time we’ve met, Reginald Solar, I have been here to reap your immortal soul.”

Reg felt suddenly uneasy, and glanced sidelong at his gardening shears. If he drove them into Death’s chest, would Death die? “And this time?” he said slowly.

“Relax. I’m purely here as a courtesy. To give you the time with your wife that I did not get with mine. Death is not cruel, but it is insistent. I have learned that firsthand. I wish it were not true, but it is.”

“You saved me three times. You didn’t save any of them.” Reg motioned to the ghost children that, even now, followed him everywhere.

“That is the other mistake people make. To think Death regrets nothing.” Horowitz bit his bottom lip, thinking. “I have a second gift for you. Something I have been saving since the Bowen girls died. I’ve never been sure if I was going to give it to you or not, but . . .” Death drew an envelope from his coat and handed it to Reginald. “You are, I imagine, the closest thing to a friend I will ever have.”

Reginald opened it. “A fucking condolence card?” he said, half choking on his anger and grief. “Get the hell off my property.”

“Do yourself a favor. Don’t check the news tonight.”

When Death was gone, Reg tucked the little white card into his jacket without reading it and went upstairs to find his beloved wife curled up on their bed, mid-nap. He sat down next to her and stroked her hair, then replaced the orchids on her bedside table with a new bunch, freshly cut. He thought about telling her, “You are going to die tomorrow. What is something you’ve always wanted to do but never got around to?”

Instead, he said, “How about we invite the kids around for dinner? I feel like making a roast. Something with rosemary and garlic from the garden.”

Later that evening, Esther’s grandmother turned the television on to watch the 6:00 p.m. news while she crushed herbs and drank a glass of her favorite red wine.

The little girl who’d been missing for three days had been found.

•   •   •

ESTHER CLOSED HER CAR DOOR quietly and crept across the yard, trying to look inconspicuous and unsuspicious, which was a very hard look to achieve and usually resulted in the person attempting said look appearing both very conspicuous and very suspicious at the same time.

The greenhouse was to the left of the house, behind a hedge and a fence. Esther scrambled over. Years had passed since she’d last been there. The yard was much smaller than she remembered it. Reg’s aviary where he kept doves and finches and parakeets and the occasional quail had been removed and replaced with grass. The vegetable patch that had once grown semisuccessful tomatoes and rarely-successful lettuce had been dug up and turned into a run-of-the-mill garden bed. The lemon trees where she used to play tag with Eugene looked so much closer together than they had when she was little. The yard used to be the size of a kingdom, with mountains and rivers and trolls and—if Esther would have had her way—the small bunker she’d planned to dig and live in. Now it was the size of a yard.

The kitchen windows were still covered in the stained-glass butterflies she and Eugene made with their grandma when they were kids. It used to bemuse Reg, coming home to find all the wineglasses and windows covered in stained glass, all the spare scraps of wood in the backyard painted with landscapes. This was also what he missed most about Florence when she was gone.

The front door of the greenhouse had no lock, naturally, because how often are flowers stolen? There weren’t many orchids left by then. The new owner had wanted to keep some, but maintaining hundreds of plants wasn’t feasible, and most had been cut up into pieces and left in green waste bins. But there were still several dozen flowers there. Esther took as much as she could carry, intending to make only one trip, but then she came back again and again for more. The flowers first, loading them pot by pot into a wheelbarrow and wheeling them quietly through a gate out to the street, where she loaded up the trunk and back seat of the car and even strapped some to the roof. The stem cuttings next, the immortal part, the death-proof blooms; these she stuffed into her backpack and pockets and scattered like confetti onto lawns and sidewalks as she drove toward Lilac Hill in the night.

The nursing home was peaceful in the low light. Esther heard nothing but the wind in the trees and the occasional calls of ghosts. She parked close to the building and carried the plants through Reg’s window, then placed the flowers around the room, working quickly, afraid that her grandfather might wake and freak out or that a doctor would bust her and freak out. But the only person who came was a nurse; she frowned at the flowers but didn’t say anything.

When all the orchids (bar one plant still in the car) were in the room, Esther marveled at her makeshift Eden. Every surface was carpeted in purple. In the small space of his room, the orchids seemed to move of their own accord, almost as if being in Reg’s presence fed them some invisible energy.

Were there always this many? she wondered, looking around. The plants seemed to have multiplied since she moved them from the greenhouse, seemed to have grown up the walls and across the ceiling. It was a still life vanitas painting: the bright white of Reg’s hospital bed, the way his skin strained skull-like across the bones of his face, his few possessions—a Bible, a watch, his reading glasses, a pipe, her grandmother’s wedding ring—arranged by his side next to the bed. And everywhere, everywhere, the flowers she’d brought him, their scent masking the sour smell of death that seeped from his skin.

Esther leaned down to kiss her grandfather on the forehead one last time. “I love you,” she whispered into his ear, and his lips trembled like he was trying to form words, but there was so very little left of him now, not enough even to say he loved her back. She pulled out her phone and found the emergency death slideshow Rosemary had been making since Reg’s diagnosis; it was her pièce de résistance. It seemed a shame to save it for his funeral, where he would never see or hear it, so Esther climbed into bed next to him like she’d used to when she was a kid, turned up the volume, and hit play.

With Johnny Cash playing in the background, Reg’s life passed before her. A chubby, smiling baby captured in black and white. A small boy in high socks pushing a wooden cart. A skinny teenager jumping off a cliff into the ocean. A wedding picture of him and a young Florence Solar, who was only nineteen at the time and looked like a hippie in her ’70s bridal gown. A series of shots of him during the war, smiling among his platoon mates. Reg in his police uniform standing next to his Toyota Cressida. With each of his newborn sons. A newspaper clipping about him receiving a commendation for bravery for disarming a gunman. With his newborn daughter. Shots of him with his three children as they grew up. A picture of him gardening. On vacation. Eating. Cooking. Laughing. Dancing with his beloved wife. At the weddings of his children. Holding his newborn twin grandchildren. Then many, many pictures of him with his grandkids. Getting his hair and makeup done by little Esther, holding little Eugene’s hand to cross the road, getting climbed on by all the cousins, reading to the twins, a glass of milk in his hand.

And then the disease. The red and blotchy skin. The thinning hair. The watery eyes. The gouged-out cheekbones. Pictures at Lilac Hill. Pictures in a wheelchair. Pictures of a thing that vaguely resembled but was no longer him.

The slideshow ended with Frank Sinatra’s “I Did It My Way,” which was cliché, but also appropriate. The final photograph, timed perfectly with the crescendo of the song, was a close-up profile shot of Reg in his greenhouse, surrounded by his orchids, unaware that the photographer (likely Florence Solar) was there. In it, he was bent over to closely inspect the bud of a flower.

Reginald Solar slipped away thirty-six seconds after the slideshow ended, a small smile on his face, a brightly blooming orchid held tightly in his palm.

•   •   •

ESTHER WAITED IN THE ROOM for the medical staff to declare Reginald dead, even though she already knew he was gone. As she stood by the window, she saw a man strolling across the parking lot, a short man in a dark coat and hat, a cane held in his gloved hands. She wasn’t quite sure what it was about him that made her slip through the window and run to her car to follow him. The man was already pulling onto the road by the time she had the key in the ignition, but Esther didn’t mind: She had a feeling she knew where he was going.

Ten minutes later, the cloaked man brought his car to a stop in the driveway in front of a quaint house with white window frames, a twisting garden path, and an American flag curling in the breeze. The house built by Reginald and Florence Solar. The house she’d robbed only an hour before.

The man got out of his vehicle. Esther followed suit.

“Excuse me!” she called after him, but he didn’t hear her, or if he did, he didn’t slow. “Wait up!”

She caught him at the front door, where he already had a set of keys out, ready to let himself in. Before he stepped inside, he turned, and she saw him clearly for the first time.

“Can I help you?” he said. He was young, not much older than Esther, and spoke with a Southern accent. On his head was a black hat, the type that gangsters used to wear in the ’20s, and his face was pocked with acne scars. Even when looking straight at him, Esther couldn’t quite make out the color of his eyes or hair.

And there, in the buttonhole of his jacket, was a bright purple orchid.

“You were at Lilac Hill,” she said. “You knew Reginald Solar. You knew my grandfather.”

“Not really, I’m afraid. Not at all.”

“Don’t make me ask.”

“Ask what?”

“Are you him?”

“Am I who?”

Esther didn’t want to sound too crazy if she was wrong, so she said, “Horowitz. Are you Horowitz?”

The man smiled. “Please excuse my presence at Lilac Hill. I simply bought Reg’s house when he moved out.”

“You live here now?”

“Yes. I purchased it as an investment property, but when I walked through it for the first time, well . . . I fell in love.”

“Then . . . why were you at the nursing home?”

“A storage company contacted me some months back. They were having trouble getting a hold of Mr. Solar’s family and had this address listed as a backup contact. I collected the items from his unit so that they wouldn’t be sold or destroyed or end up on Storage Wars, although I do love that show. I finally managed to find out where Reginald had moved, and just tonight delivered a message to Lilac Hill in the hopes that the staff would pass it on to his family. I didn’t know if I’d ever be able to reach you, yet here you are. You can come in and have a look, if you’d like.”

“How can you not be him?”

“Who, exactly, do you think I am?”

“Well . . . Death?”

The man gave her a bemused look. “Your grandfather must’ve been quite the storyteller, to have you believing he knew Death. Come inside.”

Esther thought that was a very odd reply indeed; she went inside regardless. The house was strangely decorated, like when her Grandma June had moved into a brand-new modern apartment at the age of seventy-eight but kept all of what Esther called her “old people stuff.” Old people all just seemed to own the same things: a cabinet full of plates and glasses that no one was allowed to eat or drink from, a hideous floral couch, a rocking chair, an herb rack, heavy wooden furniture, dozens of knickknacks collected over many decades (now proudly displayed on every available household surface), and faded photographs in mismatched frames all over the walls.

Two packed suitcases (old-fashioned brown leather ones; more old people stuff) had been placed by the front door. “Are you going somewhere?” Esther asked, but the man ignored her.

“Milk?” he said from the kitchen.

“No, thank you. You, uh, still haven’t answered my question.”

The man appeared in the kitchen doorway. “The one about where I’m going or the one about if I’m Death incarnate?”

“The latter would be good.”

“If I were Death, and your grandfather knew me, would it not comfort you to know that he had gone with a friend?” Esther didn’t answer. The man smiled. “The boxes are through here.”

All of the items from Reginald Solar’s storage facility were now kept in the room Florence Solar had once used for sewing. The concentrated contents of a life. Esther sifted through some of the boxes, trying to decide what to take now and what to come and collect later. In the end all she removed was a portrait of Reginald in his police uniform from sometime in the late 1970s, when he was young and handsome and not yet haunted by ghosts.

On her way out, she found the Man Who Might Be Death sitting in the living room sipping his milk.

There were so many things she wanted to ask him to fix. Liberate her father from the basement. Leave her brother be. Give Hephzibah a voice. Let her mother have one big win and then release her from her obsession. Lift the curse. Lift the curse. Lift the curse.

As she was about to open her mouth to let all these requests gush out, Esther realized this:

- Reginald Solar had lived with his fear, but it hadn’t killed him.

- Therefore, the curse was likely, as Eugene had insisted, a fiction, and Death—if the man in front of her was indeed Death—had, in his own strange way, protected the Solar family rather than condemned them.

- Curses needed to be believed in to continue, and the only one who’d kept the curse thriving was Esther.

So instead of asking the man to lift the curse, she asked him: “If your family believed they were cursed to live and die in fear, what would you say to them to make it easier? To make them less afraid.”

“I would say that everybody dies, whether they live their life in fear or not. And that—death—is not something to be afraid of.”

“Thank you,” Esther said. “We’ll come by another day to collect his things.”

As she turned to leave, she spotted it. There, on the wall above his head, was a small framed photograph. A Polaroid, now faded from the sun. A wedding. A woman in a pale pink sundress with a strand of pearls at her throat. A man in a heinous lavender tuxedo with white shoes and a ruffled shirt. And between them, a second man, a man with red hair and freckled skin, a man dressed in an officer’s uniform. A man who looked very much like he could be Reginald Solar.

The Man Who Might Be Death caught her looking at it. “My wedding, to my beloved, may she rest in peace. Such a shame that the faces are no longer discernable; it was the only photograph we had of the event.” And it was true; the faces were unclear, as was the name on the soldier’s uniform. But Esther knew. She knew. “Now, if you don’t mind, I must be on my way. Good day, Miss Solar. I have a plane to catch.”

“Where are you going?” she asked again.

The man put on his hat, picked up his bags, and smiled. “I hear the Mediterranean is nice at this time of year.”