36

THE RED WOMAN

ESTHER TOOK the last orchid to Eugene, who was too drugged up to realize she was there, then slept in a cot by his bedside. When he woke at sunrise, she told him of Reginald’s death, and they cried together for a little while, until Eugene slipped back into sleep.

The Solar house felt strange when she opened the front door. It was morning, still gloomy, but the candles were unlit and the lamps were dim. Drifting sunlight bled through the windows, but it was not enough to shift the shadows that congealed in every corner of the room. Esther opened the basement door and went down the stairs, but there was only darkness there too. No twinkling string lights. No Christmas carols played on repeat. A dozen pictures of her past self smiled out at her from the darkness and made her believe, again, that there was such a thing as ghosts.

Peter was in the hospital, in the early stages of stroke rehab. The house was unrooted without his weight to hold it down. It had lost its anchor. It felt as though if a stiff breeze blew through the trees, it might drift away into the sky like a dandelion.

In the kitchen, just as Rosemary had said, was a large black burn mark where Fred had supposedly burst into flames and become a spark. Esther was skeptical that a) this had occurred at all, and b) if Fred was indeed a goblin, that he’d supposedly given his life to save Eugene’s. Maybe one of the rabbits had simply scared him to death and he’d spontaneously combusted in a fit of wild rooster rage. Still, she knelt at the scorched wood, which kind of did look rooster-shaped if she squinted, and gave thanks to the creature that her mother was convinced had kept them afloat for the past six years.

Esther went to her room and sat on her bed and contemplated what it meant that the curse wasn’t real. That it wasn’t a spell that made Eugene so sad, just depression. It wasn’t magic that bound her father to the basement, just anxiety. It wasn’t a jinx that drove her mother to the slots, just an obsession. For the first time, all the broken bits of her family and herself seemed fixable; curses couldn’t be broken, but mental illnesses could be treated.

Esther stood and looked around her room, at the costumes Jonah said she used to hide from being seen. Is that what they were for? All these years she’d told herself she wore the costumes to hide from people, and from Death. Had she really been using them to hide from herself?

Tears of frustration and betrayal and pain burning in her eyes, she started to tear down the cage of fear she’d built for herself, ripping apart strips of silk and shredding half-drawn patterns, until all she could do was collapse on the rug-strewn ground in a heap of color and fabric. There, sobbing on the floor, she noticed that the wood beneath the layers of paper and fabric was blue, which she was almost certain it hadn’t been before she’d covered it with several Persian carpets years ago. Esther cleared away some of the mess she’d made; more and more blue appeared on the floor, some of it light, some of it dark, some almost white, some almost black, all in a circular pattern she recognized well because she saw hundreds of them every day.

Esther peeled back a carpet and pushed her bed to the side of the room. On the floor, right where her bed had stood moments ago, someone had painted a huge nazar, the blue, white, and black paint faded and peeling now. Scattered over the charm to ward off the evil eye were dozens of sage leaves; some fresh, some brittle, some almost dust now, each with a different wish on them, all written in her mother’s handwriting.

Keep her safe.

Give her courage.

Let her escape this town.

Don’t let her become like me.

Make her see how much I love her.

Make her see how much I love her.

Make her see how much I love her.

Esther picked up a handful of them and held them to her chest before a sound from the hall made her breath catch. Her heart kicked up its tempo and her brain whispered run, run, run from the fear, but she didn’t. Let the monsters come, she thought, her mother’s wishes grasped tightly in her palm. Let them try and take me now.

She stepped out into the hall and noticed something she hadn’t seen when she came in. Outside the bathroom door, Rosemary had laid out her jewelry in a long line on the wood: her tiger’s-eye, her sapphires, her amber rings, the nazars that wrapped around her ankles. Her clothing—stitched with coins and stuffed with herbs for luck and prosperity—had been neatly folded and placed next to the trinkets. Another sound came from the bathroom. Sloshing water.

Esther pushed the door open. Rosemary was on all fours dressed only in her underwear, her knees and the soles of her feet stained red with blood. Her ribs were visible through her thin skin. A web of blue veins. The frightening mountain range of her spine. Wedged between her knees was a bucket of soapy water. The tiles were slick with bleach and blood and detergent. Esther always thought if you cut your wrists, your life just kind of leaked out of you quietly, poetically, pooling in delicate puddles at your sides. That was not the case. Though the skin might be broken, the heart still roared with life, pumping away at four miles per hour. There were arcs of blood on the walls. Spatters on the ceiling. Eugene had tried very hard to die in this small room, and his heart had tried very hard to keep him alive.

Esther exhaled at the horror of it and Rosemary noticed for the first time that she was there.

“Oh, no, Esther,” she said, her thin body springing up. Blood on her hands, blood on her knees, the blood of the son she almost lost. Jesus. The poor woman. “I can do this,” she said as she tried to push her daughter from the room. “You don’t have to see this. I don’t want you to see this.”

Esther put her hand to her cheek. Wiped away a speck of red. “Pop’s gone.”

“Oh, honey.” Rosemary tried to hug her with her elbows, careful to keep her bloody hands away from her clothes. “Oh, honey, I’m so sorry.”

Esther put her head on her mother’s shoulder and held her around her thin waist, hoping she could feel what she no longer had the words to express: I love you, I love you, I love you.

Was it so bad to hold onto something that was broken? All those years she’d judged Rosemary for staying with her father when she could’ve cut and run, but could she blame her? Rosemary left her first husband because he was a monster, but Peter was still good and kind and gentle, and perhaps that was worth staying for, even if the person was ruined.

As she watched her mother kneel again to wipe up her son’s blood, Esther thought she finally understood the woman who’d raised her. Jonah had once told her that one day, everybody would realize that their parents were human beings, and that sometimes they were good people and sometimes they were not. What he failed to mention—what she was only coming to appreciate at that exact moment—was that most of the time people were neither good nor bad, not righteous or evil, they were just people.

And sometimes love, even if it was all they had to offer, was enough.

It had to be.