“Got a funny way of showing it.” He ran his fingers over the pearls at her neck. “You stand out in a crowd. People look at you everywhere you go.”
“Yeah, but they don’t see me when they look at the costumes. They see a historical figure or a cartoon character or whatever.”
“I see you.”
Esther laughed. “No, you don’t.”
“Yeah I do.”
“Then you see way too much.”
“You wanna see what I see?”
“What are you gonna do, draw me like one of your Optimus Primes?”
“Why not?” he said, and then he stood and disappeared through the Death door into the dark house. “Close your eyes,” he said a few minutes later. There were footfalls, a door closing, the sound of something heavy scraping against the wooden floor. “Okay, open.”
Esther opened her eyes. Jonah had set up an easel in the corner of the room and draped it with a sheet so that she couldn’t see the size or shape of the canvas.
“How long will it take?” she said. “Can I move?”
“I’m thinking it’ll take a while, so yeah, you can move.”
A little girl wandered out of the house then—Remy, she assumed—and came to sit on Jonah’s lap while he painted. She looked so much like him: warm black skin, dark hair, full lips, wide brown eyes that made her kind of appear like she’d been drawn for a Disney movie. Remy giggled as she looked from the canvas to Esther. Jonah put his finger to his lips—not shushing her, but asking her to share the secret—and she grinned widely and slipped out of his fingers and went into the backyard to play. Esther cocooned the blanket around herself and sat in a chair by one of the screens and leaned on the sill and watched Jonah’s sister, as quiet as she’d ever heard a child play.
She wondered how he’d paint her. As Eleanor Roosevelt? As a ’60s flight attendant? As Little Red Riding Hood? Optimus Prime with gills? And then she started to worry. What if the version he painted was not how she thought of herself at all? Worse yet, what if he painted her exactly as she thought of herself, all freckled and awkward and anxious about everything? In truth, she wanted to see what Jonah saw, because she didn’t know anymore. She didn’t know what was left under the costumes she wore every day.
It was a short session, only twenty minutes, because the front door slammed and a light turned on in the belly of the house and the sound of heavy footsteps came from the hall, which made Jonah jump and say, “You should probably leave.”
“Can I see it?” Esther asked as he dumped all of his paints and brushes in a corner and covered them with a sheet.
“It’s not finished yet.”
“When will it be done?”
“When you’re ready to see it.”
“You’re so cryptic.”
The storm had long passed and their clothes were almost dry, so she shrugged off the blanket and snuck out the back door with him. Remy watched them go. Esther waved good-bye. Remy didn’t wave back.
“Wait for me at the end of the street,” Jonah said when he let her out the side gate.
Esther wandered in the warm, damp evening, her jacket slung over her shoulder, and watched as the clouds peeled back in strips to reveal the stars. Then she stood under a streetlamp, walking in slow circles around the perimeter of light. Occasionally she let her fingertips drift out into the darkness, to see if she could feel what Eugene felt in the shadows.
They weren’t empty, he said. There were things that moved in the dark that only he could see. Only he could hear. Terrible, thin creatures that lurked in the dim corners of his bedroom, waiting for him to fall asleep. And right at the moment he couldn’t keep his eyes open anymore, that’s when they came for him. Sometimes he saw them, watching him. Sometimes he felt them resting heavily on the end of his bed, even when the lights were on. Crawling up his body. Sitting on his chest and draping their long black hair over his face.
Eugene said it was sleep paralysis. A trick of the mind. Esther knew it was the curse.
A dog barked down the street. Esther snatched her hand back, afraid that something would clamp down on her fingers and drag her into the abyss.
“Scared the dark will bite you?” Jonah said from behind her, and she jumped.
“Don’t do that.” She looked back at his house. “Why are we sneaking around like the von Trapp family fleeing Austria?”
“Give me the list.”
She did. Jonah tore off 49. Moths, struck a match, and set the little piece of paper alight in his hands.
“Not gonna eat it this time?”
“It occurred to me after I ate it that that paper was super old and probably nasty as hell. If I die of Ebola or something, I’m coming back to haunt you.”
“I don’t think you can get Ebola from eating paper.” 49. Moths burned, flickered, turned to ashes in a couple of seconds. Esther felt herself being released from her fear of moths. They both watched the particles drift into the night sky, and she thought, for the first time, that this might actually work. “So, when do I get to see the footage from today?”
“In about forty-eight weeks.”
“What?”
“That’s the deal. You don’t get to see the rest of my genius filmmaking skills until the end. I need some kind of bargaining chip to keep you coming back every Sunday, Solar.”
“Why are you even doing this? I mean, what do you get out of it?”
Jonah seemed to think very carefully about his answer. “You’ve seen my house. I know what it’s like to live in fear. I can’t help my sister, not yet, but I can help you.”
That was just about the best reason Esther could think of.
They walked back to the now-closed butterfly farm and Jonah drove her home in the muggy nighttime.
“See you on Sunday,” he said when he parked in front of her house, which was bright as ever on the dark street.
“Sorry. I’m busy this Sunday. I have to urgently deface public property.”
Jonah grinned. “I’ll believe that when I see it.”
Esther went inside, and even though every light was taped on, and even though Peter was a pasty basement dweller, and even though Rosemary was at the casino and wouldn’t be back for hours, and even though Eugene said there were demons waiting in the dark for all of them, and even though Fred the rooster was in the kitchen pecking at ants and screeching at the rabbits because he was terrified of them, and even though the upstairs was blocked with shopping carts and furniture and there was potentially a vengeful ghost up there, she felt safe. She didn’t fear the slam of front doors or the sound of heavy boots, and despite how weird her family was, she’d never really stopped to appreciate that before.
That night, she only checked that all the doors were locked five times before she went to bed.
12
THE STORAGE KING
HEPHZIBAH HADID, as previously mentioned, had been Esther’s best friend since elementary school. How does a selective mute make and maintain a friendship? Well for starters, she picked the weirdest kid in class with a severely overactive imagination. At six years old, Esther Solar had only three things on her mind:
Building a giant castle fort from sand and filling the basement of said fort with money printing machines, thus beginning her ascent to Emperor of the World.
In the event that the fort couldn’t be built, she was happy to settle for a small, candlelit pit under her grandparent’s house. She drew up plans and even started digging it herself. Apparently she was easily appeased.
Becoming a Jedi.
Esther didn’t have a very firm grasp on reality, so accepting that Heph was her imaginary friend wasn’t outside the realm of possibility for her at the time. By the time she found out Heph was, in fact, a real human being, she’d grown too attached to her to be mad that they’d accidentally become friends.
So how
does a kid become a selective mute? Esther had looked it up on Wikipedia, and found out that selective mutism was a social anxiety disorder. Now, you might be thinking, “Well, Hephzibah obviously had a traumatic childhood, that’s why she doesn’t speak at school.” Alas, you’re wrong. Kids with selective mutism aren’t more likely to have suffered trauma than kids without it, and they’re almost always self-confident in other situations (i.e., at home). Besides, Heph’s parents were pretty awesome, even if they did float around the house like tall, airy ghosts, just like her. The most traumatic experiences they’d inflicted on their child were naming her Hephzibah (which, admittedly, was probably pretty traumatic) and letting her dress herself (again, quite traumatic). But apart from that they were solid folk and Heph was normal and happy.
After she discovered other people could also see Hephzibah, Esther invited her over to her house in the afternoons after school, and since they couldn’t really communicate, they played lots of computer games and watched movies. Esther had to credit Heph with sparking her obsessive love of costumes. This was back in the late ’00s, so people still bought these archaic shiny disc things called “DVDs.” If there’s one thing the rise and rise of Netflix had negatively impacted, it was the abundance of DVD extras, including but not limited to director and actor commentaries and interviews with costume designers.
It was Heph who bumped the remote twenty minutes into a planned 653-minute Lord of the Rings extended edition marathon and switched the audio over to the commentary by Peter Jackson, Fran Walsh, and Philippa Boyens by accident, but the two were hooked. Almost eleven hours later, they emerged from a haze of orcs and a sugar high into the early morning sunlight and Esther knew she wanted to work in costume design.
By the time they were in high school, Heph had lost interest in movies and instead became fixated on Generation IV molten salt nuclear reactors (she was definitely going to be a supervillain) and becoming a physicist, so it was fair to say that their interests hit a fork in the road. The good thing about having a mute best friend was that she didn’t try and talk to Esther too much about uranium tetrafluoride, and Esther didn’t bug her about the latest outrageous costuming mistake in a period drama, so really, it was a perfect match.
So it was Heph who Esther messaged the Monday afternoon after 3/50 (which had been bridges, or more specifically jumping off bridges—Esther had ended up wet yet again) to come help her and Eugene clean out her grandpa’s storage space he’d rented when he moved into Lilac Hill. Esther wasn’t entirely sure what possessed someone with Lewy body dementia to rent a storage space for all their worldly possessions—the hope for a sudden and unexpected discovery of a cure, perhaps?—but that’s what Reginald had done, and now the prepaid rent had run out, and it had fallen to his grandchildren to sort through everything he saved from his life and decide what to keep and what to throw away, which was too depressing a task to consider doing without Hephzibah, and—she decided at the last minute—Jonah Smallwood.
• • •
STORAGE KING’S UNITS were housed inside a massive warehouse that had a Matrix kind of vibe. Each corridor was a bland copy of the one before it, a never-ending cycle of déjà vu. Reg’s rented space was so deep within the warehouse that Esther started to wonder if they’d ever be able to find their way out of the maze, but then there it was, the small blue roller door behind which he’d locked all the things he loved most from his life.
“This better not be like Silence of the Lambs,” Esther said. “I don’t think I can handle finding out that Pop’s a serial killer.”
“Not to mention a lotion-loving cross-dresser,” Eugene added.
“It’s the twenty-first century,” signed Heph. “Your grandpa can be a cross-dresser if he wants.”
“True that,” Esther said. “Well, here goes.”
Esther turned the key in the lock and rolled up the door, which was no easy task, because the Storage King, though a benevolent ruler, apparently didn’t believe in oiling the rails. Inside, the space was completely black. Eugene recoiled, slinking backwards down the corridor lest some unnamed horror leap from the dark to snatch him up. Esther fumbled around for a light switch and eventually found it and flicked it on, illuminating the small space, which was—apart from a little wooden box sitting on its side in the corner of the room—completely empty.
“Eugene, it’s okay,” she said, kneeling to pick up the box.
“What the hell?” Eugene said. Esther checked the key, but yes, it was the right one, they were at the right storage unit, the same one Reginald rented and squeezed all of his most cherished possessions into before he checked himself into his nursing home.
It had been a hard month, boiling down the contents of her grandparents’ home to the space of a 5 x 5 room. A prefuneral, of sorts, which was even more depressing than a postfuneral, because the soon-to-be-dead person was there, hovering over you, and you were expected to keep your shit together for their sake. Regardless, everyone cried a lot as they helped him sift through seven-odd decades worth of memories, deciding what was worth keeping and what wasn’t. Pretty damn tragic. They took a lot of stuff to their house, all the sentimental things they couldn’t get rid of, like photos and jewelry and knickknacks collected on vacations to far off destinations. Most of these things now resided in Esther’s bedroom. But cataloguing someone else’s life while they were sitting three feet away and being like, “Now, Pop, I know you love this old transistor radio and have listened to it every day for the last thirty years but we don’t really have a place for it in our house so it’s gonna have to go to Goodwill,” was the worst.
For starters, you felt like a carrion bird, swooping in and snatching up the best bits. Esther wanted (and got) her grandmother’s bracelet. Eugene wanted (and got) Reg’s coin collection. Their cousins were there smuggling pocket watches and old books and all of Florence Solar’s crystal champagne glasses. Uncle Harold (then still living) was into the liquor cabinet. Peter (then uninterred in the basement) had only one request: his father’s reading glasses, which he couldn’t have until the very end, because Reginald still needed them, or at least hoped he’d still be able to use them even though Esther hadn’t seen him read anything for at least three years.
Most of the furniture was sold to pay for Lilac Hill. All the cutlery and crockery that her grandma had loved was given to Goodwill, as were the suits Reginald wouldn’t wear anymore. The armchair he loved to sit in to read his terrible detective novels. The katana he brought back from Japan. All of it had to go, and so all of it went.
Day by day, room by room, they stripped back the house he’d lived in, raised a family in, watched his wife die in, until there was nothing left but pockets of old air bound up by walls. They stripped the wallpaper, tore up the carpet, replaced the light fittings, modernized the bathrooms, and then, when the house was bleached of everything that had made it his home, they sold the place to an investor from Greece, whose only stipulation regarding the property was that the orchid greenhouse in the backyard remain untouched and filled with flowers. The profits were split between Peter and his siblings, Auntie Kate and (the then still living) Uncle Harold, and Reginald checked himself into Lilac Hill to wait for the Reaper to come for him, which, he seemed to think, wouldn’t actually happen.
Esther went to speak to the clerk at the front of the warehouse, this burly dude with a goatee and trucker’s cap.
“Uh . . . we just went to clear our grandpa’s storage space but there’s nothing in there,” she said, sliding him the key.
“Let me check our system,” the guy said. He clicked and typed. “Okay, so someone came and cleared out the space this morning. We left you about a dozen messages, but no one ever got back to us—eventually the other key holder came in.”
“There was no other key holder,” said Eugene.
The guy rechecked his computer screen. “Sorry, but it looks like there was. Another key holder, registered at the s
ame time your grandpa first opened the storage unit.”
“Who has the key?” Esther asked. “Auntie Kate maybe?”
“I don’t have a name or any contact details, only that there was one and only that they cleared everything out today.”
“So what, this random person can just come in whenever they want and steal all our granddad’s stuff?” Eugene said.
“They didn’t steal anything, kid. They had a key. Your grandfather obviously doesn’t mind them being here.”
“What did they look like?”
“Lot of people come through here for a lot of reasons. You seen Breaking Bad? I try not to pay too much attention to our clientele. Plausible deniability.”
“Maybe this will help you remember,” Eugene said, sliding him a ten dollar bill.
The clerk sighed and pocketed the cash. “I honestly don’t remember. My memory of him is kind of . . . fuzzy. Little dude in a black coat. Bad scars on his face. Bit of a weirdo, but that’s not saying much in a place like this.”
Esther and Eugene looked at each other. They rarely had twin telepathy, but right now, she was pretty sure they were thinking the same thing. “Thanks,” she said. “You can close the account now. Everything’s gone.”
Outside, the four of them crossed the road and bought rocket pops from the convenience store. Then they sat on a patch of grass by the sidewalk, a tree shading them from the sun, the locked box in the center of them all.
“You heard what he said,” Esther said to Eugene. “Scars on his face. It has to be him.”
Eugene ran his fingertips over the box. “Anyone can have scars. It’s not like it’s the hallmark of the Grim Reaper or anything. Now, if the counter guy said he’d had a cloak and scythe and skeleton fingers, I’d be more likely to believe it was him.”
“Wait, you think because the dude had a scarred-up face, he was Death?” said Jonah. Heph nodded vigorously, having heard the story almost as many times as the twins had. “Did I miss something?”
A Semi-Definitive List of Worst Nightmares Page 9
