4
STRING LIGHTS AND SERIAL KILLERS
HOME WAS, as she knew it would be, bright but abandoned. Esther went to the kitchen and searched the drawers for the book where Rosemary scribbled down all their phone numbers in case of an emergency. Rabbits, small and gray and twitchy, hopped at her feet, hoping to be fed. Like most everything Rosemary brought into the house—the chamomile tea she washed her hands in before she went to play the slots, the sage leaves she carried in her wallet, the coins she sewed into her clothing, the horseshoe, that goddamn evil goblin rooster—the rabbits were for good luck. Most people just carried around a single rabbit’s foot, but why buy a single foot, her mother reasoned, when you could buy a whole rabbit and get four times the amount of luck without spilling any blood?
Esther called Rosemary on the landline, but she didn’t answer, so she checked all the downstairs rooms, but her mother wasn’t in any of them. Rosemary thought the house was haunted, but really, the only ghosts inside these walls were her parents. (That still didn’t mean Esther was going to go snooping around upstairs—that’s how horror movies started.) She tried Eugene and Heph on their cells, but they both went straight to voicemail.
What she did next was a testament to how much she loved her stupid brother: She located her long-abandoned bike in the garage, pumped up the tires, pimped the thing out with half a dozen bike headlights scavenged from Eugene’s bedroom, and then wrapped a string of lights around her chest and torso, just for good measure. Have you ever seen a horror movie where someone gets murdered with a string of madly flashing lights wrapped around them? Of course not. No one wants to murder ridiculous people. It gets the cops asking too many questions. Plus, no one was going to forget if they saw Wednesday Addams wrapped in string lights. Murderers want, like, drifters and prostitutes. Fade-into-the-background type people that no one will remember seeing and no one will miss.
Nobody would forget seeing her.
Outside, the early morning was dark and quiet. Esther slowly peddled past the 7-Eleven, because it was about the only thing still open and therefore the only place that her “last known sighting” would occur if someone did decide to murder her. She thought about this too much. Like, what if Jonah Smallwood was the last person to see her alive (apart from her killer, obviously). What would the cops make of the grainy 7-Eleven CCTV footage that showed her riding past with a loop of string lights around her chest? Would they simply conclude she’d gone bat-shit crazy and cycled off a cliff somewhere? Probably. Her mutilated corpse wouldn’t be discovered for months. Years maybe.
“Get it together, Esther,” she muttered.
The bright lights of the 7-Eleven faded and then she was riding on gloomy back streets, and then no streets at all, making her way toward the industrial part of town where no one but serial killers and drunk teenagers went anymore.
“Fuck you, Eugene,” she chanted as she bowed her head and rode as fast as she could, her heart hammering in her chest. “Fuck you, Eugene. Seriously, Eugene, fuck you.”
When she finally made it to the refinery, the light inside was dead. No more coal-bright flames, no more whooping teens, no more long shadows dancing in the windows. Esther ditched her bike and climbed through the chain link fence, the lights around her chest barely puncturing the heavy dark. Two figures huddled close to what was left of the bonfire, now no more than a pit of slow-burning embers. Hephzibah had her arm around Eugene’s shoulders and was whispering in his ear, singing maybe, to keep him calm as the firelight died. Around them, Eugene had set up a safety circle of flashlights all pointing in their direction, an island of bright light in the shadows. A stranger stumbling upon them might have mistaken them for spirits: the ashen girl with the ashen hair in the ashen dress, softly singing tunes about love and death, and the boy, dressed like a faded memory, shaking in the ghost light.
Eugene had tried therapy a few times when he was younger, when the family had money for that kind of thing, before Rosemary had started feeding all their spare cash into the slots. But the vehemence with which he believed his delusions—the consistency of them, the depth of the detail he used to describe the monsters he saw in the dark—well, it crept under the skin of each therapist he saw. The things he spoke of filled their heads with half-remembered horrors they’d seen or heard or felt as young children, things they’d spent a lifetime convincing themselves weren’t real, things most people successfully stopped noticing after they reached a certain age. And here was a boy of no more than eleven, twelve, thirteen, who had them half convinced that these impossible memories were true.
No one slept in the dark after sessions with Eugene Solar.
Hephzibah spotted Esther hovering at the entrance to the warehouse and smiled brightly and waved, but she wouldn’t speak or sing again, not with Esther so close. She used to get upset that Heph could whisper to Eugene but not to her. That he knew what her voice sounded like, really knew, and she didn’t. It took Esther a couple of years to work out that Hephzibah was in love with him. That whatever magic had once burned brightly in their mother had lived on in Eugene, and his enchantment over her had done what no therapist could: get her to talk.
“Thanks for coming back for him, kid,” Esther said to Heph.
“Anytime,” she signed.
Esther sat on the other side of Eugene and put her arm around him too, so that he was wedged safely between them, so that—as always—the demons would eat them first. They stayed there pressed tight against each other until dawn, Heph and Esther holding hands behind Eugene’s back, Eugene’s fingers curled around a sprig of yarrow plucked from Rosemary’s garden, trying and failing to find courage in the strong, sweet scent of the devil’s nettle. When the sky finally lightened, he rose and went out into the gray sunlight and breathed it in and in and in, angry at himself and exhausted and above all shocked, as always, to have survived another long night in the dark.
“Come on you beautiful weirdo,” Esther said, standing on her tiptoes to rest her chin on his shoulder. Even though they looked different and felt different and disagreed on most things, she’d never be able to think of Eugene as anything less than the second half of her soul. “Let’s get you home.”