6

THE CURSE AND THE REAPER

IN THE evening the sun began its ominous sink into the mountains, a ball of red-hot nickel drowning in the sky, and the Solar household prepared for another night in the trenches. Another battle against the ever-encroaching dark. A procedure that had been going on every night for six years.

Eugene was lighting candles like a maniac, slipping through the halls of the house armed with matches and his favorite novelty lighter, a dragon that shot flames out of its ass. It was a long process. Every now and then he looked out a window and said “Fuck. Fuck me. Fucking sunset” or something to that effect and went back to madly clicking the smiling dragon’s tongue until it shat blue fire from its bowels. Occasionally he asked Esther what time it was and she checked her phone and said “five thirty-two” or “quarter to six.” And each time she gave him a number, no matter what number it was, Eugene swore and started moving faster, lighting candles without even touching them, all the illumination he’d saved up in his skin jumping from his fingertips to the wicks. Not many people could light a candle with sheer willpower alone, but Eugene Solar could. Eventually the whole house was humming with electricity and glowing with firelight and the air smelled of burnt wick and melting wax.

Esther’s role to play in this psychotic ritual was security; she closed all the windows, drew the curtains, sprinkled salt lines across doorways, and ensured the front door was securely locked. She was about to complete this last task, her hand hovering inches from the dead bolt, when there came a series of bangs from the other side of the door, which was alarming. Everyone in the neighborhood knew not to come to their house (no one ever answered), which meant that the person banging was almost certainly a violent home invader. Esther was midway through weighing her options—call the police, grab a knife from the kitchen, barricade herself in the basement with her father—when the violent home invader called out.

“Esther! Esther, open up!” said a familiar voice.

Jonah Smallwood was on her front doorstep, sobbing. She knelt by the mail slot.

“I’m not falling for that again,” she said. “Steal my Fruit Roll-Up once, shame on you. Steal my Fruit Roll-Up twice—”

“Open the damn door!” Jonah said.

“Put the list in the mail slot and—”

Jonah banged the door again. “Come on, it’s an emergency!”

What a person with anxiety hears: I am here to murder you and your family. Esther looked behind her, but Rosemary and Eugene had disappeared, swallowed by the house after the first knock. They wouldn’t reemerge from their hiding places until the coast was clear.

So—knowing the risk was only to herself, and feeling fairly certain Jonah wasn’t the murdering type—she took a breath and opened the door.

“I hit it with my moped!” Jonah said, rushing inside. Cupped in his hands, he held what she first mistook for a wet ushanka, one of those furry Russian hats, but was, in actual fact, a very limp kitten. Out in the front yard, Jonah’s cream-colored moped was toppled in some tree roots, its tires still spinning.

The kitten was clearly not breathing.

“I think it’s dead,” she said, closing her hands gently over Jonah’s.

“It’s not dead!” He pulled the kitten away from her and pressed it to his chest.

“What do you want me to do?”

“Your dad’s a vet, isn’t he?”

“Jonah, he hasn’t . . . He hasn’t left the basement for six years. I don’t think he’s seen a stranger in all that time.”

Jonah Smallwood, to his credit, didn’t seem to find this half as weird as most people who knew about Peter Solar’s condition. “Where’s the basement at?” he asked, so she led him to the orange door her father walked through on a cold Tuesday morning six years ago and never walked out of again. They descended the stairs together, the feathers of her cloak lifting eddies of dust from the wood. Even down there, the lights were taped on with electrical tape for when Eugene had still visited their father.

The basement that was now Peter Solar’s whole life looked like what you’d expect if someone hadn’t left it for six years. The walls had been hung with yards and yards of red fabric so that the space kind of had an opium den vibe. The only furniture consisted of what had already been down there the day he decided he couldn’t ever leave. A ping-pong table, a couch that had been fashionable in the ’80s, four mismatched bar stools, and a black-and-white TV, all surrounded by the usual basement clutter—a ladder, three lamps, a stack of board games, bags of old clothes earmarked for Goodwill years ago, golf clubs, a guitar, two fake Christmas trees (both decorated and lit up, all year round—Peter loved Christmas), Reginald’s record player, and dozens of precariously balanced towers of books and newspapers.

Six years ago, Esther thought this was cool. She looked at his basement and saw the Room of Requirement from Harry Potter and believed her dad was an eccentric wizard worthy of a position at Hogwarts. Now she could smell the anemic scent of human skin that hadn’t seen sunlight for half a dozen years, see the layer of fine grease settled over the tomb that had become his life.

Peter Solar had come down here one afternoon when Esther was eleven to hook up the second generator that Eugene had requested. Perhaps he was deep in mourning for his brother, Uncle Harold, who had recently succumbed to his fear of germs, or perhaps the horror of suffering a stroke had driven him into the comfort of the dark, or perhaps it was simply his time to fall victim to the curse. Whatever the case, what happened was this:

At the foot of the stairs, he had a panic attack and found himself unable to climb any farther than the second step. That afternoon, Peter quit his job, hired a plumber to get the basement toilet operational, ordered enough canned food to see him through two apocalypses, and vowed never to come to the surface again.

The vow, so far, had remained unbroken.

Peter was sitting on the couch in a tartan bathrobe and slippers, sipping home-distilled spirits and listening to Christmas carols. Before his interment, he’d always been impeccably groomed, his hair slicked back and his handlebar moustache curled. For the first year or so, he’d been careful to maintain his appearance. Then people stopped visiting. His coworkers first, and then his best friends, and then even his sister. They wrote him off as a lost cause pretty early on. It took Esther and Eugene and Rosemary at least two years more, but eventually they all stopped visiting too. It was too painful to watch his slow-motion transformation into a grotesque.

Peter Solar was a wild man now. His hair was matted and tangled. His beard was disheveled and streaked with gray. Once trim, he was now huge; not fat, exactly, just broad and massive. He looked like something out of a legend, Esther thought. A Viking after a long and lonely journey at sea, weathered by salt and sun.

The left side of his face sagged and had begun to petrify, and his left hand curled into his body. Another stroke, the doctors thought, this one worse than the last. It was three months before anyone knew. Peter could feel that something was wrong but was so afraid he’d have to leave the basement he never dared to ask for help. Three months. Two strokes. It was hard to be down there, knowing that. As much as Esther loved him, every time she saw him now (which wasn’t frequently), it reminded her of the man she used to know. The man she couldn’t save.

Months had passed since she last dared look upon the ruined remains of her father.

“Dad—” she said, and he turned, the light glistening off the petrified side of his face. Peter had her eyes. Or rather, she had his; eyes with thunderstorms in them. Eyes that broke her heart.

Jonah was already weaving through the stacks of junk toward him.

“I hit it with my moped!” Jonah said, pressing the damp kitten into the wild man’s chest.

A long time had passed since Peter’s last interaction with a stranger. Even more time had gone by since he’d practiced medicine. Esther tried to remember when she’d last seen her father treat an animal. The twins had been ten or maybe eleven, and he’d taken them on a bike ride to the playground near their house. On the way home, Esther had found a bird in the gutter, injured and left for dead after being hit by a car.

The sparrow was in a bad way, and in retrospect, Peter probably knew from the beginning that it would die, but he couldn’t bear to tell his daughter that. Instead he scooped the bird up and carried it home, and they stayed up all night together, just the two of them, feeding it and keeping it warm and comfortable. Esther had named the sparrow Lucky. It died in the morning, its little heart unable to keep beating, and Peter held his daughter on his knee while she cried into his shoulder.

Not long after, he went into the basement, and everything changed.

Esther wondered if he would freak out and have a panic attack at this sudden and unexpected invasion of his safe space, but he didn’t. She stood back and watched them from the shadows, watched as Peter put down his potent gin and looked from her to Jonah to the kitten in his hands and ordered Jonah (slowly, speech slightly slurred from the strokes) to fetch his med kit from beneath a stack of newspapers and bring it to him. She watched as he found the source of the bleeding and stopped it, watched as he reinflated a collapsed lung, watched as he gave the kitten painkillers and stitched a wound and set a broken leg and said—though he couldn’t be one hundred percent sure, but he was pretty sure—that it had no other mortal injuries, just a bad concussion that might lead to permanent brain damage. It would be touch and go for a few days, but that it might just make it. All this he did one-handed, with Jonah assisting when Peter couldn’t do something himself.

“Put your hand here, very gently,” Peter said. Jonah put his palm over the kitten’s thin ribs. His hand moved up and down, up and down in time with its rapid breaths. It mewled groggily at his touch.

“Looks like a stray,” Peter said as he handed the bundled up kitten to Jonah with his good hand, who took and held it as if the animal was glass. “Her fur’s matted and she’s malnourished and she has an eye infection. Esther,” he said, turning to his daughter, “we should still have some cat milk substitute upstairs in the garage. Think you can bring it down?”

Esther’s first instinct was to say, “What makes you think you know anything about the world upstairs?” But this was the first time he’d showed interest in something beyond the orange door that led to the basement in more than half a decade. So she said, “Sure,” and left Jonah, now rocking the concussed cat like a baby, sitting next to her father on the ’80s couch.

Over the next hour, Peter taught Jonah how to feed the kitten now-expired milk supplement, how to clean her infected eyes, how to treat her fleas and unmat her fur and make sure she stayed warm, make sure she stayed breathing.

Esther watched Jonah warily in this space. Her father had lost everything. To lose even more to a pickpocket would be unforgivable. So she kept her eyes on his long fingers to make sure they didn’t dip into the pockets of her father’s bathrobe, or wander too close to the gold watch strapped around his wrist, but Jonah seemed wholly uninterested in anything except the cat. Eventually, she found herself relaxing in his presence. She felt strangely . . . calm.

“Can you take her home?” Peter asked Jonah.

“Nah. Probably not the best idea,” he said as he stroked her nose. “Not such a nice place right now.”

“I’m sure Esther wouldn’t mind helping you out by looking after her here.”

And that was how she got stuck with the responsibility of caring for Jonah’s stupid cat, who he named Fleayoncé Knowles.

Naturally.

•   •   •

BEFORE THEY LEFT THE BASEMENT, Peter put his good hand on Esther’s shoulder. “It was nice to see you,” he said. For a moment, Peter looked like he was thinking about hugging his daughter, but he hesitated and raised his glass of gin to her instead.

“It was nice to see you, too,” she said, forcing a smile. In her head she was chanting I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry even though she didn’t quite know what she was sorry for. For not visiting more often? For thinking, on the days when she most missed the man he used to be, how much easier it would be to explain his absence if he was simply dead? “Do you want to come up for dinner?”

It was Peter’s turn to fake a smile. “Maybe next time.”

Esther so badly wanted to save her father, to bring him back from the half death that had become his life. Every time he reminded her that he couldn’t be saved, Esther’s heart broke a little more.

•   •   •

“DO YOU WANT TO STAY FOR FOOD?” she asked Jonah once they were upstairs because she didn’t know how else to make him feel better about possibly brain-damaging a kitten, which was not something you really wanted on your conscience. So the day after he robbed her at the bus stop and they had been apprehended by law enforcement together, Jonah made the acquaintance of her family and joined them at the table, where she had to push aside two lamps and a dozen candles and scrape off several years of built up wax to make room for his plate. He said nothing about her basement-dwelling father, nothing about the taped-on lights, nothing about how Eugene let his palm hover for slightly too long over a candle flame, barely reacting as his skin began to burn and blister. What he was not doing a good job of was not staring at the cock perched on Rosemary’s shoulder.

On the list of strange things in her household, Fred, the big black rooster with plumes of fiery feathers sticking out of his butt, was admittedly on the stranger end. Rosemary had purchased him from their Lithuanian dry-cleaning lady for one thousand dollars three years ago, and Fred had been terrorizing the house ever since. Why does someone pay one thousand dollars for a rooster? Because, according to the woman who sold him, Fred the rooster was not, in fact, a rooster at all: Fred the rooster was an Aitvaras, a supernatural goblin capable of bringing good luck to those who lived with him.

Fred had, so far, not done much except be a rooster, but that didn’t stop Rosemary from vehemently believing he’d bring “wealth and grain” into the home if she treated him well and that he would spontaneously combust into a spark when he died.

Jonah chewed slowly, staring at Fred. Fred stared back, cocking his head from side to side, because that’s what roosters do.

“So, Jonah,” said Rosemary, making the kind of small talk that gets injected into your veins when you procreate or something. “What do you do in your spare time?”

“Effects makeup, mostly,” Jonah said around his mouthful of slightly burned store-bought lasagna, Rosemary’s specialty. “You know, like gunshot wounds and gashes across the forehead and bruises and stuff.” Jonah looked at Esther apologetically. She narrowed her eyes at him and pressed her tongue into the back of her teeth. That little shit. The swollen cheek and split in his eyebrow at the bus stop had been fake after all.

“What a handy skill to have,” Esther said slowly.

Jonah winked. “Comes in useful from time to time.”

“Is that what you want to do when you grow up?” Rosemary asked.

“Mom, he’s not seven.”

“Sorry, when you graduate?”

“Yeah, I wanna work in movies I guess. I try and practice as much as I can using YouTube tutorials. I’m learning how to make prosthetics at the moment, like the fake noses from The Lord of the Rings. My dad hates it, says I’ll never make any money, but I’m saving up for film school anyway, kind of without him knowing.”

“Oh, Esther bakes to save for college. Do you have a job?”

“Um . . . It’s more of an entrepreneurial endeavor.”

Esther couldn’t hold her tongue. “What he means to say is, he pickpockets helpless people at bus stops.”

Jonah looked sheepish, but shrugged. “I mean, at least you know your stolen goods are going to a charitable cause.”

At that moment, Fred decided to be his diabolical self and swoop down from Rosemary’s shoulder to have a major freak-out in the middle of the table (probably because Fleayoncé was asleep on Jonah’s lap and therefore getting more attention than he was). Candles and lamps went flying. Their plates ended up broken on the floor, their half-eaten meals strewn all over the table and the wood and the walls. Fred squawked and flapped his wings, his evil work done, and then waddled off to the kitchen to terrorize the rabbits.

Once he was gone, Rosemary hovered her hands over the spilled wax and scattered lasagna, her eyes closed. “Something big is coming,” she said ominously. “This is a bad omen.”

“A bad omen for my stomach,” added Eugene as he knelt to scoop his dinner off the floor.

“I think you better go,” Esther said to Jonah.

Unsurprisingly, he did not protest.

•   •   •

OUTSIDE, THE NIGHT was warm and heavy with humidity. Crickets chirped in the oak trees. The nazars sang quietly.

“Do you ever hate your family?” Esther asked.

Jonah chuckled. “All the damn time. I think you can love people and still disapprove of stuff they do. Your family . . . they’re weird but they love you.”

“I know.”

“So what’s this about?” he said, taking out the semi-definitive list of worst nightmares he’d stolen from her at the bus stop. It was six years old, worn thin at the folds, the writing that detailed her fears going from barely legible chicken scratch (3. Cockroaches) to the slightly more legible entry she’d made in green ink the day before Jonah had stolen the list from her (49. Moths and/also Mothmen). Over the years, she’d taped on extra pieces of paper and bits of colored card so she had enough room to keep track of all the things that seemed scary enough that they could one day become a great fear. There were photographs and small diagrams and printed Wikipedia definitions and maps of streets/towns/countries/oceans to be avoided at all costs.

“Fears can’t become full-blown phobias if you avoid them, and phobias can’t kill you if you don’t have them,” she explained, taking the fragile document back from him. The list was a roadmap of the last six years of her life: darkness appeared at number two, around the same time Eugene developed his phobia of the night. Heights was number twenty-nine, after the first time they had been to New York and she had a panic attack at the top of the Empire State Building. Fear by fear, Esther had constructed a list of everything the curse could use to get to her, every weakness it could exploit to make its way into her bloodstream. She couldn’t live like Eugene, or her father, or her mother, or her aunt, or her uncle (when he was alive), or her cousins, or her grandfather.

Three Solars had already been claimed by the curse:

1. Uncle Harold, Peter’s brother, had been afraid of germs, and had died from the common cold. Eugene said this was a self-fulfilling prophecy, brought about by two decades of Harold taking unnecessary antibiotics, vacuum sealing his house so no outside air could get in, and wearing surgical masks wherever he went. So fragile was his immune system from lack of exposure to infection that a mild virus was eventually enough to do him in.
2. Martin Solar, Esther’s cousin, had been afraid of bees. When he was fourteen, he’d disturbed a beehive while at summer camp and subsequently stumbled into a ravine as he tried to escape their stings. Eugene maintained that it was the ravine that had killed him, not the bees.
3. Reg’s dog, Go Away, had been afraid of cats—which is exactly what had been chasing him when he darted out onto the road in front of a pickup truck.

Yes, the Solars died from their fears. Esther couldn’t let herself get so deeply, bone-shakingly afraid of something that it took over her whole life and, eventually, led to her death. So every time she felt a twinge of fear in her gut at the thought of something, she put it on the list and avoided the item forevermore thereafter. If you didn’t dwell on the anxiety, didn’t indulge it, it couldn’t get to you.

“I’m trying to outsmart the curse,” she said. “I’m trying to hide from Death.”

“You don’t really believe that voodoo shit.”

“Do I believe my grandfather genuinely met Death a handful of times and thus somehow cursed our family for eternity?” She wanted to say no, but Jonah Smallwood, with his coin-wide eyes and unfairly full lips, was hard to lie to. “I do. I believe. Eugene thinks it’s just a silly tale, and that the Solars are predisposed to mental illness, but . . . Reg Solar is a compelling storyteller.”

“So your grandpa says Death is a real person?”

“Yeah. They were, I don’t know, like friends I guess. They met in Vietnam. Ran into each other a few times since then.”

“So try and find him. Talk to him. Get him to lift the curse.”

“You want me to go looking for Death?”

“Sure. If you really believe Death is just some dude walking around, some guy that actually knew your grandpa, then you can find him and talk to him.”

“That makes a large amount of sense.”

“Why’s the top space empty?” The ink in number one had run from an old coffee stain, and the numeral was half eaten away by moths (hence their appearance at forty-nine on the list, furry bastards), but there was no fear recorded there.

“One great fear,” she explained. “That’s what you get cursed with. One great fear to rule your life and then take it. My granddad’s afraid of water. My dad of leaving the house. Eugene of darkness. My aunt of snakes. My mom of bad luck. If I leave that slot empty, and put everything else below it . . .”

“Nothing can touch you?”

“Exactly. The list keeps me alive. I’m not more afraid of any one of these things than another. They act like a dam. A kind of levy to keep the big bad fear away.”

“Have you forgotten about Katrina? Levies break.”

“Thank you, Dr. Phil.”

Jonah went down the porch stairs and walked through the trees toward his moped. Esther followed him. “Where did you go?” she asked him. “When you disappeared?”

Jonah shrugged. “I changed schools. Kids do that.”

“Everything got so bad after you left. People got mean again, without you there.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Do you remember how we met?”

“We were in the same class. Mrs. Price.”

“No one ever talked to me or Heph. Before you, kids used to tell me how ugly I was. Red hair, thousands of freckles. I was always going to be bullied. And Hephzibah was an even easier target. Kids used to trip and hit her, just to try and get her to speak. No one would sit near us; they said my freckles and her muteness were diseases and they didn’t want to catch them.”

“Kids are assholes.”

“Then one day at recess you sat down with us. You didn’t say anything, you just ate your food and glared at every person who walked past, daring them to harass us. Within a week, you were one of my best friends.”

“I remember that. We were the freaks. We had to stick together.”

“Then you were gone. And Heph and I went back to being freaks on our own. We needed you, and you disappeared.”

“I don’t know what to say, Esther.” Jonah ran his hands through his hair. “I’m sorry I wasn’t there, but it wasn’t my choice. I was eight. It wasn’t my job to protect you.”

Esther thought about her family as she watched him go. Eugene would die of the darkness. Her father would die in the basement. Her grandfather would drown. And one of these days, Rosemary Solar would cut herself on a broken mirror, or trip over a black cat, or walk under a ladder, only to have a great weight come crashing down on her moments later.

One great fear to rule your life. One great fear to take it. There was no escaping her fate, and no way to save the members of her family from theirs; this Esther’s grandfather had told her since she was a child.

Unless . . . Unless . . .

“Where would you start?” she asked Jonah hurriedly as he lifted his moped off a knot of tree roots. “If you were looking for Death? If you wanted to find him so you could ask him a favor, where would you start?”

Jonah paused to think, then answered her question with another question. “What are you doing tomorrow?”

She thought about lying. It would be so easy to say, “Oh, I’m moving to Nepal for senior year to learn the ways of the Sherpa,” and let Jonah forget that she existed. But she remembered, in that moment, the way he smelled at the warehouse last night, the truth of it, and how sad he’d looked when he thought Fleayoncé was dead in his arms, and—even though he’d robbed her and left her abandoned to walk home for three hours by herself in the rain—she didn’t want to say good-bye to him. Not again. Not quite yet.

So she said, “Looking for Death.”

And he said, “Sounds good.”

“How?”

“You know that saying, ‘You should do something every day that scares you’?”

“Yeah.”

“That’s how we find Death, I think. Everyone’s afraid of dying, right? Maybe that’s what attracts Death. Maybe that’s what brings him to you. Fear. So that’s what we do: we find him, we talk to him, we get him to lift the curse.”

“No more great fears?”

“No more great fears. You in?”

Esther weighed her options. On the one hand was certain death, for herself and everyone she loved. For six years, she’d avoided everything that had sent even a twinge of fear up her spine in an attempt to save her own life. As long as you avoided the curse, it couldn’t kill you, so charging headlong into the grip of fear seemed to border on insane.

But there was a chance, however small, that she could save everyone. Save Eugene from the dark. Save her mother from bad luck. Save her father from the basement. Save her grandfather from drowning—and that was a chance worth taking.

A small spark of what she would later recognize as bravery pinged up her spine as she nodded and said, “Yes.”

Esther noticed, even though a breeze hummed through the trees, the nazars had gone silent, as though they approved of Jonah Smallwood’s presence at the house. When he was gone, she added lobsters to her list, in fiftieth place, then went inside and checked eight times that all the doors were locked before going to bed.