38

THE GHOSTS OF ESTHER’S PAST

THE DAY after Reginald’s funeral and subsequent ash scattering, Little Creek inexplicably began to dry up. Within a week all the water had sunk into underground reservoirs and the riverbed was as bone dry as it had always been before the murder of the Bowen sisters. The remains of the girls were located two weeks to the day after Reginald’s death, not far from where he first found them, each with wild orchids bursting from their rib cages.

Esther felt strange living in a world in which Reginald Solar no longer existed. Death made perfect sense in the scientific (the redistribution of atoms, etc.) and philosophical sense (anything that lived forever would have no value, like the Reaper’s most hated jellyfish), and Esther understood that it was natural and necessary, but trying to wrap her head around the undeniable fact that her grandfather no longer had a body, that the electrical signals that had sparked through his brain making him him no longer sparked . . . it made no sense. She was a smart and (mostly) rational human being, and still she couldn’t make herself understand how it was possible that he was just . . . gone.

And then the thought that she herself would die . . . Well, that was another panic attack entirely.

So Esther started going to therapy with Eugene, as she said she would. They shared one-hour sessions, to save money; fifty minutes for him, because he needed it the most, and ten minutes for her at the end. The therapist, Dr. Claire Butcher, was nothing like what Esther had expected. For one thing, she didn’t seem like a psychotic ax murderer, as her name might suggest. For another, Esther assumed it would only take one session with Eugene before she’d diagnose him as schizophrenic or chronically depressed and try and pump him full of tranquilizers and have him institutionalized. Instead, she mostly listened. Sometimes she gave Eugene coping strategies—breathing exercises, podcasts to listen to as it was getting dark, links to videos on meditation, the option of trying prescriptions if these approaches failed—but she was never forceful, or frustrated, or condescending. Together they came up with plans to wean him off light and—shockingly—Eugene had begun to try them. Each night, he peeled a strip of electrical tape off one switch. Each night, he lit one less candle than the night before. It might take years, but he was breaking through his own protective dam against fear, and he wasn’t drowning. He was teaching himself to swim.

Esther told Dr. Butcher nothing of importance. “I’m just here because of Eugene,” she said the first week, but Eugene wasn’t going to let that slide. He told her everything Esther refused to: about the curse, about Death, about Jonah, about the list, about their grandfather, even about how she compartmentalized her life into lists sometimes. It took him two weeks (well, technically only twenty minutes) to cover everything, and once he had, Dr. Butcher started working on tactics with Esther too, coaching her through her anxiety and grief and utter mortification that there was footage of her on the internet.

She also mentioned something about a “fear of commitment” and how Esther was attempting to “mitigate any future pain” by finding faults with the people she grew close to. By finding excuses to stay away from them, by avoiding intimacy and any deep emotional connections, by cutting off her feelings to preserve her emotional well-being, she insulated herself against pain but also against life.

Esther thought this was very reasonable behavior. Dr. Butcher did not happen to agree. To this end, she gave Esther three steps to control her anxiety and fear:

1. Externalize anxiety

The first thing to do was to imagine her anxiety as a thing apart from herself; the world’s most hideous, unpleasant pet (apart from Fleayoncé). Esther saw hers as a black misshapen lump with teeth and hair growing randomly from its bulbous body. Its skin was slick tar and it had a mouth full of sharp toothpick teeth. It was also the size of a grapefruit and couldn’t quite get its tiny bat wings to function properly, which meant it was always bumping angrily into walls. She named it Gertrude, and when it whispered to her that she was too fat or too ugly or people were judging her or she was going to die or she wasn’t smart enough, or brave enough, or good enough, she flicked it off her shoulder and told it to go away.

1. Correct thinking mistakes

This one was a little harder. Whenever her brain told her that she was absolutely, 100 percent about to die in a tsunami, or that velociraptors were unquestionably outside her bedroom window, or that a cougar was definitely, without doubt, going to maul her in her sleep, these were thinking mistakes, because they were a) unlikely to happen, b) might not be catastrophic if they did happen, and c) even if they did happen and even if they were catastrophic, Esther might surprise herself and, like, kick the velociraptor’s ass or something. It was hard, when the anxiety got ahold of her and started pumping adrenaline through her system at the perceived threat, to cycle through these steps, but the more she did it, the easier it got.

1. Exposure

The goal in facing fear, Dr. Butcher said, was actually facing it. Not waiting to not be afraid, but seeking out your fears and meeting them head-on. Esther knew this already, of course—she’d been doing exactly that for months. But then Dr. Butcher told her it might be a good idea to watch the YouTube videos. That if she didn’t, the knowledge of their existence would continue to fester and grow black in her mind, and she wouldn’t be able to move on from them.

•   •   •

ESTHER DIDN’T WATCH THE VIDEOS. She didn’t talk to Jonah.

Several national newspapers covered the strange happenings of Little Creek and criticized Reginald Solar, recently deceased, as one of the failings of the justice system for the unsolved murder of the Bowen sisters. She cut the clips from the papers and included them in Reg’s scrapbook, alongside all the old reports of the Harvestman and the one bizarre, misplaced article about the man who’d drowned in his bathtub.

Four weeks passed without a single fear being faced.

It was during this time period that Esther decided to reframe Reginald Solar’s portrait, the one she’d taken from the unnamed man who now lived in his old house, a man with a face she already couldn’t remember. Tucked behind the glass and photograph she found a small, square condolences card, now warped and buckled by water damage. Inside was nothing but a name, with blue ink bleeding down the card. The writing was hard to make out now, but Esther was fairly certain it said Arthur Whittle. She searched the name on the internet, but couldn’t find anything that seemed relevant.

Then came the fourth Sunday, post Jonah Smallwood. Esther hadn’t looked at her list for a month, but she knew it so well by now that she didn’t have to. The fear this week—29/50—was ghosts. She wondered what Jonah would’ve had planned for today. Wondering about Jonah was something she did often, despite how much it hurt.

Esther got home from work just before midnight. She’d taken a job at the nearby 7-Eleven to help Rosemary out with Eugene’s and Peter’s medical bills, on the proviso that her mother went cold turkey on the slots. So far the arrangement seemed to be holding up. Rosemary’s car was in the drive, as it had been every night since Peter exhumed himself from the basement. Esther didn’t mind working every night, or falling behind on her schoolwork, or feeling like hot coals had been buried in her heels at the end of every shift: it was all worth it to have her family whole.

The house was quiet in the low light. It was a strange thing, to come home to dimness when all you could remember was light. The first thing she did was check on Eugene, as she did every night. Lamps still surrounded his funeral bed, as they had for years, but he had a mask over his eyes and appeared to be sleeping. At nighttime.

The second thing she did was head toward the kitchen to heat up her taquitos, which is when she found Fleayoncé sitting at the base of the staircase, staring intently at the second floor landing with her tail flicking.

“Fleayoncé, don’t do that, you creep,” she said. This was why pets and children were so eerie; they saw things they weren’t supposed to. She picked the cat up and took her to the kitchen and set her on the bench, but Fleayoncé just slunk down (well, kind of slumped down) to the floor and went back to the foot of the stairs. Esther followed her and looked at the spot the cat was fixated on: the door to her childhood bedroom.

She scooped the cat up again. “Seriously,” she said to it. “You need to stop.” Fleayoncé just meowed, sounding more like a goat than a feline. Then the wood creaked upstairs and Fleayoncé hissed and twisted her way out of Esther’s grasp.

Someone was up there.

Esther thought about calling the police, or maybe a priest, or maybe just burning the house down. But something called to her, like it had that afternoon on the cliff all those weeks ago. Something upstairs whispered yes, yes, yes.

Go forward, onward, into the unknown.

The thing with facing fear, she reminded herself, was that you actually had to face it.

The wood creaked again. It sounded like footsteps. Esther unlocked her phone, turned the camera around, and pressed record.

“Why do I feel like this is going to end up in a B grade, found footage horror movie?” she said to the camera. “Okay, so, something just moved upstairs. Which would be entirely normal in most houses, but no one has been upstairs in my house for about six years now, so, if I’m being entirely realistic here, it’s probably a poltergeist. Let’s go find out.

“I’m Esther Solar, and this is apparently ‘29/50: ghosts.’”

The discarded furniture on the staircase had been there for so long now that it had begun to grow together. She tried to yank a dining room chair out of the mound, only to find that tendrils of creeping vine held it firmly in place. There was no way to go but through. Luckily for her, she was now both a) a master spelunker, and b) fairly certain there were no troglofaunal flesh-eating humanoids inhabiting the staircase. (Surely they would’ve eaten her by now if there were.) So she found an opening in the haphazard stack between the shopping cart and a wardrobe, and began to climb. After a few minutes she was joined by Fleayoncé, who batted at her soles and darted through the rubble with surprising dexterity, scaring away rats or bats or critters that had taken residence in the scrap heap in the last half decade.

Finally she broke free on the dark landing and tried the light. It buzzed angrily, a bee woken from its slumber, then snapped on.

The world upstairs was preserved in a thin film of dust, a portrait of a past life frozen in time. Esther pushed open the door to her parents’ bedroom, the one they’d shared before Peter disappeared from their lives. It was as it had been the day her father was swallowed by the basement: the bed was neatly made, the light switches were not taped permanently on, and her mother’s jewelry—the pieces she’d worn for their beauty and not for their luck—were spilling from a metal box atop a chest of drawers. All their clothes—none of them with coins stitched into the lining or bulbs rotting in the pockets—still hung in the closet. The small bathroom was halfway through being painted: a drop sheet still covered the floor tiles and a tin of paint still sat in the corner, waiting to be opened. It had the feel of a place abandoned in a hurry, without time even to pack personal belongings or photographs. Which had indeed been the case.

Rosemary had woken them in the middle of the night, shaking and sweating and speaking of ghosts. She’d ushered Eugene and Esther downstairs, still dressed in their pajamas, and all three of them had worked together to block off the staircase. They’d slept on the floor inside a salt circle in the kitchen. It hadn’t felt like it at the time, but it was beginning of the end.

Eugene’s room was next. It was so cluttered with toys and books and posters that Esther’s heart hurt. It was a kid’s room. A normal kid’s room. Sometimes it was hard to remember, but Eugene had been a normal boy only six years ago.

Esther’s door was last. She opened it and walked inside and turned on a white lamp hung with crystals. Fleayoncé slalomed in and out of her feet. It was a little girl’s room. Almost shockingly so. There were fairies on the duvet cover, a large dollhouse built by her grandfather, and a basket of toys, mostly Barbies and baby dolls, things that she’d already started to feel far too old to play with when her mother made her leave them. There were fur cushions on her bed and several posters of “Love Story”-era Taylor Swift on the walls and a scattering of clothing that was both so tiny and so pink it was hard to believe she’d ever worn them.

What made her breath catch, though, was the photograph on her bedside table, and the hand-drawn card that sat beneath it. Esther wiped the thick coat of dust from the frame. She was in the middle, freckled and pale with a firestorm of red hair atop her head. Hephzibah was to her left, as faded and ghostly at eight as she was now. And to her right was Jonah, smiling cheekily. They all had their arms around each other’s shoulders.

The card was as she remembered it: two crudely drawn pieces of fruit that could’ve been apples or grapes or perhaps even avocados. We make the perfect pear, said the writing beneath them.

Maybe Rosemary had been right. Maybe there were ghosts upstairs after all.