5

DEATH AND HORSE-SIZED LOBSTERS

WHEN THE twins finally arrived back at the house, Rosemary didn’t ask them where they’d been all night, because Rosemary wasn’t there. Their father, Peter, heard their footfalls and called up the stairs, but they didn’t answer him. Esther sent him a note down the dumbwaiter. Most kids would get in trouble for ignoring their parents, but it wasn’t like Peter was going to come out of the basement anytime soon to discipline them.

A few years ago, Eugene had devised a series of trials to try and draw Peter out of his burrow and proceeded to spend the next week:

- Setting the fire alarms off and pretending to choke on smoke at the top of the basement stairs.

- Cooking several dozen slices of bacon and leaving the plate at the top of the basement stairs.

- Dropping stink bombs down the basement stairs.

Alas, Gollum remained in his cave, and the Solar children no longer feared parental retribution from either side.

What they lost in Peter Solar: a man who loved hiking and poetry and taking his children to the zoo, where he explained to them, in detail, each conservation project being undertaken. A man who took them to yard sales and bought them binoculars and went on weeklong birdwatching expeditions. A man who taught them how to play chess and read to them at bedtime and sat beside their beds and stroked their hair when they were sick.

Peter Solar. Their father. That’s who they lost.

Eugene took a blanket into the backyard and rested in what little sunlight filtered through the oak trees, his sleep fitful. The creatures that came for him in his dreams hated sunlight, he said, so whenever he did sleep—which wasn’t often—it was usually in the sun. Esther napped in her bed, slipping in and out of that heavy, sluggish haze that comes with sleeping during the day, the kind that made you think that Jonah Smallwood (red love heart) had sent you a message asking what navarrofobia was.

JONAH SMALLWOOD :

What’s navarrofobia?

Esther sat bolt upright. Jonah Smallwood had, and was reading, her semi-definitive list of worst nightmares.

Before she replied, she went into her contacts and deleted the stupid heart from next to his name.

ESTHER:

JONAH:

You really afraid of all these things? Some of these are pretty stupid. Who the hell is scared of moths?

ESTHER:

JONAH:

Fine, fine. I’ll drop it by tonight.

ESTHER:

JONAH:

I glanced. Couldn’t help it.

To which Esther sent five rows of angry emojis before going back to sleep.

•   •   •

ROSEMARY WOKE THEM UP in the afternoon and took them to visit their grandfather, Reginald Solar, at Lilac Hill, a building that looked like it may have once been a prison, but now smelled faintly of cheese and strongly of death. If Tim Burton and Wes Anderson had a love child, and that love child grew up to be an architect/interior designer that focused solely on constructing/decorating sad nursing homes, then Lilac Hill Nursing and Rehabilitation Center would be that kid’s magnum opus. Glossy, olive green floors, orange pleather chairs, and wallpaper with tiny pink lobsters all over it, despite the fact that a) the town was an hour’s drive from the seaside, and b) most of the residents couldn’t take a lobster in a one-on-one fight to the death.

Reginald Solar, in his prime, could’ve kicked the crap out of a horse-sized lobster, but that was before the dementia snuck up on him in his sleep. (He maintained that it never would’ve been able to sink its claws into him if he’d been awake.)

They walked through the too-bright halls toward Reg’s room, Eugene quietly sliding from window to window in case there was a sudden power outage. In his hand, as there always was in untrustworthy buildings (i.e., buildings that didn’t have the light switches taped in the on position, and a generator, and a backup generator), was a flashlight, the same industrial black and yellow flashlight Peter used to take with him on house calls when he still left the house.

The hall was lined with shucked shells in the shape of people, all of them hunched over in wheelchairs and looking fuzzy somehow, like spiders had already started spinning webs in their hair.

“I could rule this place with a small lobster army,” Esther muttered to herself. “Thirty, forty lobsters, tops, and I could be queen.” The more she thought about them—their beady eyes, their abundant legs, the way they moved, how much their claws would hurt—the more uncomfortable she started to feel. If Jonah hadn’t stolen her semi-definitive list of worst nightmares, she might have added lobsters to the roster, just in case.

Then there he was, Reginald Solar, once a hardened homicide detective, now the owner of a nonoperational brain inside a paper-skinned body. Esther was always shocked by how much worse her grandfather looked every time she saw him. Like he was a clay statue left outside, and every time it rained, more and more of him washed away, leaving deep grooves all over his body and a puddle of everything he used to be at his feet. He wore a red cap—the last one her grandma had knitted for him before she died—and was sitting in his wheelchair in front of a chessboard, playing (and losing) a game with no one.

“Hey Pop,” said Eugene, sliding into the empty chair across from Reg.

Reg didn’t say anything, didn’t acknowledge their presence, just stared and stared at the chessboard until he made the only move he could make: the one that would lead him straight into checkmate. “You always win, you old bastard,” he mumbled to Eugene. Reginald was, technically, still alive, though his soul had died several years earlier, leaving behind a thin cadaver to be dragged slowly and messily toward the grave.

“Tell us about the curse,” Eugene said as he reset the chessboard. Despite everything else that had roared out of his head like a landslide, Reg could still describe the handful of times he’d personally met Death with perfect clarity, so that was the only question Eugene ever asked.

“The first time I met the Man Who Would Be Death . . .” he began, his speech slurred, his voice rasped, his eyes far away. The story was a mechanical thing now, no longer recalled with flair and passion as it once was, though the nurses said it was a miracle he could remember anything at all. “The first time I met him,” he said again, trying to form his lips and tongue around words his brain no longer recognized, “was in Vietnam.”

Reg spent the afternoon slowly recounting the story with as much detail as he always had—the humidity of the jungles, the bright colors of wartime Saigon, the sweetness of the Vietnamese hot chocolate, and the Man Who Would Be Death, a younger man with a pockmarked face, as war weary as the rest of them. Eugene rested in a chair by the window, his thin eyelids closed against the sun. Esther was on the floor, her head on a pillow, her body wrapped in a cloak of falcon feathers because today she was the Valkyrie Freyja, Norse goddess of death.

These are the things she remembered about her grandfather as he spoke:

- The way the rest of the world had seen him as a hard-assed homicide detective, but she’d only ever known him as Poppy, the man who grew gardens of orchids and let her pick the flowers even when no one else was allowed to.

- The way the only animals he’d ever liked were birds, until Florence Solar rescued a puppy (that Reg very much didn’t want to keep). The way the puppy would follow him around the greenhouse as he tended to his orchids, and the way he pretended to hate that the dog was obsessed with him. The way the dog remained nameless, and the way he only referred to it as “Go Away,” yet let it nap on his knees when he watched TV and sleep at the foot of his bed every night.

- The way he laughed. The way he’d tip his head back when he found something particularly funny. The way he’d wipe his right eye with his index finger as the laugh subsided, whether he’d been crying happy tears or not.

The memory of the laugh was perhaps what made Esther most sad. She had no recordings of the sound, and once Reg was gone, it would survive only as a snippet in her imperfect memory, where it could be distorted or forgotten altogether. As a tear slipped from her right eye, she used her index finger to wipe it away, and replayed the fragment of her grandfather’s laugh again, already unsure how true it was.

When the story was done she stood and stretched and pressed her lips to Reg’s waxen forehead, and he asked her if she was an angel or a demon come to reap his soul, and that was when they left him.