Chapter 5
5
Ezra wakes up with a pounding headache, a nose full of dog fur, and his phone trilling in his ear. He groans and smashes his face into his pillow, which turns out to be less his pillow and more Sappho’s neck, and gropes around for his phone to try to turn it off before the shrillness of it makes him throw up. It stays infuriatingly out of reach, and he forces his head up, squinting against the too-bright sunlight streaking through the curtains Cait had left on the window.
SUNRISE YOGA CLASS IN 1 HOUR!!! the notification tells him helpfully, and Ezra groans, jabbing his thumb against the screen to cancel it. He thought he’d deleted all his recurring class alarms in a fit of petty stress last night, but apparently he managed to miss the one set for six in the morning .
His reflection stares back at him from the blank screen, bleary-eyed and pale. He looks like roadkill—light brown curls smushed up to one side, clinging to the remnants of the product Becca had scrunched through them last night, the hazel eyes he normally actually likes shadowed with dark purple circles.
At least his skin is still clear—a hard-won victory over the second puberty his testosterone prescription had slammed into his pores.
Sappho snuffs at the side of his face. “Yeah,” he sighs. “All right. Okay.”
He starts a pot of coffee in the kitchen as a favor to his post-dog-walk self while Sappho noisily inhales her breakfast, and then forces himself to slog through two laps around the block in the early morning damp. Sappho gives him a resentful look when they turn toward the house, and he scratches her ears apologetically. “I’ll take you for a better one in the afternoon,” he promises. “Since apparently I don’t have anywhere to be.”
Steve the Pride Gnome is propping open the apartment door again, and the murmur of voices reaches Ezra well before he hits the landing. Sappho’s entire body goes rigid with excitement at the sound of potential people to pet her, tail wagging so hard he genuinely worries she might sprain it, and he barely manages to wipe her paws off on a towel and unclip her leash before she goes racing inside, all skittering claws and delighted panting.
Ezra shakes his head after her, then startles at the unexpected eruption of greetings from the living room. Rounding the corner, he finds Noah and Max at the kitchen table and Lily passing a mug of coffee to Ollie where he’s sprawled across the couch. They’re in various states of readiness for the outside world considering it’s barely six-thirty on a Monday, Max’s paint-splattered, oversize RISD T-shirt and apparent lack of pants looking far more appropriate for the time than Lily’s neat dress and an intricate fishtail braid.
“Look what the dog dragged in,” Lily says, as Ezra gives them a bemused wave, shuffling over to pour himself a cup of coffee. He’s suddenly glad he thought to make a full pot. “I thought you were going to be gone for a few more days.”
“Change of plans,” Ezra says. He joins them in the living room, lifting a socked foot to prod pointedly at Ollie’s hip until he moves over on the couch to make room for him. Getting a rideshare after midnight on a weeknight in Providence, especially one that was willing to take a dog, had been a pain, and he’d spent half an hour sitting on the porch of his parents’ house waiting for the car to show up. It was worth it to not have to wait for Aaron to sober up enough to drive him home—he hadn’t wanted to spend any more time in the cloud of tension and fury that hung over the house than he had to. “Family drama happened. I staged a strategic retreat. Got home at, like, one.”
Ollie, who has never in all the time Ezra has known him been a morning person, snaps his head up from where he’d been listing into his steaming mug. “Friedman family drama? And you didn’t text me?”
“I will reiterate,” Ezra says dryly, “that it was one in the morning.”
“Time is fake,” Ollie says. “Spill.”
“You might as well,” Max adds, reaching over to pluck a slice of avocado off Noah’s plate. He wrinkles his nose at her but doesn’t try to take it back. “You know he won’t stop nosing until you do.”
Ezra does, unfortunately, know that.
He gives them the highlight reel of last night’s seder from hell. Ollie does an actual spit take when Ezra tells them about Mom and Judy’s mid-seder bombshell, the story briefly derailing while Ollie chokes and sputters and Lily has to go get him a towel.
“Jesus,” Noah says when Ezra stops talking. It’s only the second time Ezra’s met him in person, and Ezra can’t help but think that no person should look that good this early in the morning. Like Lily, he’s dressed for work, though more casually in jeans and a button-down with sleeves rolled up to expose the tattoos that run from his wrists to his elbows. His tight, dark curls are swept up into a loose messy bun, drawn back from his face with a yellow headband that makes his deep brown skin and eyes pop. The black polish on his nails is enviably unchipped. He looks like he rolled out of a magazine shoot, not a bed he probably crawled into at two in the morning. “I want to start coming to your family dinners. Mine are boring as hell.” Lily, coming back from the kitchen with her own coffee, smacks Noah’s arm. “Ouch! What? What did I say?”
“He’s having a crisis, ” Lily says, taking her seat and reaching down to pat Sappho’s head. “Don’t be insensitive.”
“No, he’s right,” Max says idly. “I’d go to Ezra’s family dinners. You need a date for your next one?”
Ezra cocks an eyebrow. “Are you willing to put up with a lot of invasive questions about your willingness to convert?”
“I could be!”
Noah holds out a hand. Max slaps it.
“Okay, but wait,” Ollie says. “Can you go back to the part where you’re going to be doing your mom’s job?”
“That’s a good point, actually.” Lily props her chin in her hand. “What about your actual job?”
“I’m a doula,” Ezra says. “It’s not exactly a nine-to-five anyway.”
Max leans forward, interest sparking on her face. “Wait, that’s so cool.”
He never knows how to respond when people say that. He loves it, but it’s just his job—it’s not any cooler than anything else. “Thanks.” He clears his throat, carefully avoiding Ollie’s eyes. It feels wrong to lie to them, not when they’ve only been good to him in the tiny amount of time he’s known them, but the idea of telling them everything makes his stomach flip in a way he knows has nothing to do with his lingering hangover. He goes with a half-truth instead. “I teach yoga on the side, but I’ve been wanting to scale that back and do something a little more stable anyway, and someone has to do her job while she’s—doing whatever she’s doing. So it’s a win-win.”
“Right. Except that you’ll be spending all your time there,” Ollie says. “Which you hate.”
“Ooh, insider info.” Max tries to take another piece of Noah’s avocado. This time, he pulls it out of her reach. She sticks out her tongue at him, then turns hopefully back to Ollie. “Say more!”
“Do not say more,” Ezra says before Ollie can open his mouth. “And I don’t hate it. It’s just complicated.”
He does hate it, and Ollie knows he hates it, because he’s been on the receiving end of Ezra’s rants about it for years. Ezra meets his eyes over the edge of his mug and tries to pour every iota of Please don’t make this a thing he can muster into his face.
Ollie frowns at him, but he doesn’t push.
That was the thing with Ollie, though. He never did.
—
Ezra spends most of the day on Nina’s couch, texting his siblings and pretending he’s not avoiding his own apartment.
Becca had managed to talk a friend into picking her up shortly after Ezra left last night and hasn’t been home since, and has been alternating choppy single text messages with paragraph-length dictations. That’s baseline for her in the initial aftermath of a crisis. Her crash always comes a week or so later, when she’s run out of steam and inevitably breaks down.
Aaron confirms that Dad is functioning, albeit in something of a daze—at least enough to handle the immediate calls that are coming in, since even though funerals don’t take place on chag, death doesn’t stop just because it’s a holiday. They’ve been staying in their respective offices for the most part, and Dad has been communicating only through their work email server.
Mom, evidently, left with Judy last night, and no one seems to know where either of them went.
if it turns out they have a secret love nest somewhere, Becca texts at one point, i will riot. shit will burn
Ezra can’t say he blames her. He texts back another reminder that he loves her, that she should remember to drink some water and not just stress-chug energy drinks all day, and tries to remember that she’s old enough to not need him hovering over her to make sure she’s okay. In his head, she’s the kid who called him every single night his first month of college to ask when he was coming home, even though he’d gone to school only fifteen minutes away.
He starts and deletes about fifteen messages to his mom, chewing the inside of his cheek until he starts to taste copper and Nina takes his phone away. “Unless you’re going to go track down your mom or haul your dad out of his office, you’re just stressing yourself out,” she tells him.
“But—”
“No buts. You can have this back when I think you’ll be responsible with it. Now, come snuggle and let’s watch some terrible reality television.”
They spend a few lazy hours watching old episodes of The Bachelorette, Sappho snoring contentedly on the floor beside them. Ezra inches his way closer on the couch until Nina finally rolls her eyes and slings an arm around him to pull him against her side, and something animal and unsettled inside him quivers and then goes limp and loose at the touch.
He puts his head on her shoulder, feeling suddenly exhausted. “Thanks,” he mumbles.
It’s quiet enough that it’s almost swallowed by the sound of the television, but Nina shifts to look at him, one brow cocked. “For what?”
He shakes his head, not knowing how to put it into words. Normally his family would be having their second seder tonight, just the five of them. It doesn’t feel right to be somewhere they’re not, somewhere he can’t make sure they’re okay, especially when he knows they’re not. The rational knowledge that there’s nothing he can do to fix any of this doesn’t make the clawed scratchings of useless, useless, useless at the back of his head any easier to bear.
None of that is her problem. “I don’t know.”
Nina gives a little sigh, tinged with fond exasperation, and slides a hand into his hair, stroking through the longer, messier curls at the top of his head. She’d been the one to finally haul him out of his dorm room freshman year, insisting he do something other than talk to his baby sister. She knows all his bad habits by now, and has her own opinions about how often she’s willing to let him get away with them. Tonight, she seems willing enough to give him a pass. “You’re staying over?”
“Can I?”
It comes out more hopefully than he intended, but she smiles. “Not like it’s the first time. Besides, you’re the only guy in my life who doesn’t steal the covers.”
Her smile softens the words. Ezra gives a noncommittal hum and drops his head back onto her shoulder. There’s still a jittery, anxious energy under his skin. Maybe Nina wants her bookshelves dusted? Everyone’s bookshelves can use dusting.
“I know that look,” she says, and nudges him off her. “The last time you looked like that you got rid of half my closet. It did not spark joy.”
“You said you wanted a capsule wardrobe.”
“In theory, not in practice. You know I’m a maximalist at heart.” She gets to her feet and pulls him with her. “You need to relax. Go take a bath.”
He grimaces. “You know that’s not really my thing.”
“You can turn the lights off.” She gives him a pointed shove down the hallway. “Go. Put some music on, drop in a bath bomb, try not to give in to the temptation to drown yourself. It’ll be good for you.”
Ezra gives up. It’s not like he’s ever won an argument against her anyway. “Can I at least have my phone back?”
She purses her lips but hands it over. “For ambience only, ” she says. “I’ll send you a playlist.”
He salutes her, then heads off down the hall.
Ezra doesn’t take baths often. It’s a long time to spend naked and alone with his body, and while there are plenty of things he doesn’t mind doing with his body—even plenty of things he doesn’t mind doing with his naked body—there’s something about the length of a bath and the heat and stillness of the water that reminds him of being suspended in time. But sometimes, when his brain is fussing and fidgeting and too much, and he doesn’t have it in him to quiet everything down enough for a yoga session, heat and stillness are the best he can do.
Turning the bathwater to somewhere between Fires of Mount Doom and Fire Cannot Kill a Dragon, he crouches down to poke through Nina’s box of spa supplies where it’s tucked under the sink next to the sharps container for her estrogen injections. He chooses a candle that claims to smell like grapefruit, peach, and hydrangea, a stick of jasmine incense, and a bath bomb labeled Deep Sleep. The clear water fizzes into a milky foam of violet blue when he drops it into the tub, swirling like a galaxy. Ezra tests the temperature and sighs softly in relief when his fingers all but vanish beneath the surface, the water satisfyingly opaque. When he turns off the light, leaving only the soft glow of the candle he places on the rim of the tub, he can see the level of the water and the outline of his body but not much more than that, and he’s glad for it.
It’s easier when he doesn’t have to see .
He undresses, piling his clothes on the closed toilet seat. He’s careful to fold his packer securely into his underwear—the last thing he needs is a repeat of the time it fell out on the way from the bathroom to Nina’s room, and he still has nightmares about her throwing it none too gently at his head with a yell of “Stop leaving your dick in public places, Ezra!,” which would have been mortifying even under the best of circumstances. Laying his binder on top of the pile, he runs absently through a few stretches, rolling his shoulders and neck as he turns the water off and climbs in.
It’s…nice. Between the dark room and the violet water, his only awareness of his body comes from what he can feel, not anything he can see. The tub isn’t that big—one of Nina’s biggest complaints about her apartment is never being able to submerge her nipples and her knees at the same time, but then again, she’s a lot taller than he is—but he doesn’t mind exposing his knees to the cooler air if it means his chest is fully under the water.
His phone vibrates on the edge of the tub, nearly falling in before he catches it with his elbow. He gropes for a hand towel, dries his fingers, and picks it up, then nearly drops it again at the sight of Dad’s name. It’s a new group chat, Ezra realizes, just his dad and siblings, Mom’s number conspicuously absent.
Dad
Omer starts tonight. Don’t forget to count.
Well. It’s proof of life, at least. Ezra looks at the message, thumbs hovering over his keyboard, suddenly sweaty in a way that has nothing to do with the bathwater.
He’s never done the nightly counting that tracks the seven weeks from Passover through Shavuot, despite his dad’s repeated attempts. He’d tried, once, after he first came out, to prove that he wasn’t abandoning their customs just because he’d rejected the name they chose for him for the one he chose. He had taken away their oldest daughter, sure, but he wasn’t erasing the rituals they’d raised him with, the practices they’d worked so hard to teach him to love.
He’d given up somewhere in the third week. It had felt hollow, more recitation than ritual. Now he wishes he’d tried a little harder.
He’s waited too long to reply. Ezra sighs and unlocks his phone again, the screen gone dark while he drifted, lulled into memory by the water and the subtle scent of jasmine in the air.
Thanks:)
It doesn’t feel good to make it seem like he’ll be practicing this year, but at least it lets Dad know he’s there on the other end of the line. Ezra waits until Dad texts back a thumbs-up, then a few more seconds to see if he’ll send anything else. When he doesn’t, Ezra chews his bottom lip, tapping a finger against the side of his phone, then gives up and calls Aaron.
Aaron picks up on the first ring, sounding simultaneously wired and exhausted. “Hey.”
“Hey,” Ezra says. “How’s Dad?”
“Avoiding me. I was about to go lurk outside his office to make sure he was still breathing.”
“He’s not talking?”
“You know how he is. Earlier I asked him if he wanted to have dinner together since obviously we’re not doing a seder, and he told me he was going to catch up on paperwork. That was”—there’s a pause—“five hours ago.”
“Oh.”
“Yep.” Another pause. Ezra knows the next question before it comes. “Have you talked to Mom at all?”
“No.” He knows that if any of them are going to, it’ll be him, but he just…doesn’t have it in him yet. Out of pure blind hope, he tries, “You?”
Aaron lets out a humorless laugh. “You don’t want me talking to Mom right now.”
That’s…true, probably. Aaron’s far better at managing his temper than Dad, but he’s still twice as quick to snap or yell as Ezra. “I’ll call her tomorrow.”
“You don’t have to.”
Of course he does. “I want to.” The lie rolls off his tongue, practiced and smooth. “It’ll be fine.”
“If you say so.” He can hear rustling, the quiet clatter of dishes.
Good, Ezra thinks. At least he’s eating.
Aaron clears his throat, too loud over the line. “So—hey. About Mom’s work, at the Chapel—I know we didn’t really talk logistics—”
Ezra sighs, tilting his head back against the tub. In truth, he’s been regretting his promise to help ever since he’d impulsively offered it last night, but the hope in Aaron’s voice kills any chance of him backing out now. “I’ll come in early tomorrow.”
Aaron’s sigh rushes through the line, thick with a desperate sort of relief. “Thank you.”
Ezra tucks the naked gratitude in his brother’s voice away, so he can find it again the next time he’s aching under the weight of memory that clings to the Chapel’s haunted halls, ghosts both literal and emotional lingering in every room. They had all grown up there, surrounded by death and ritual and strangers, but only Ezra could see the faces of the dead.
The Chapel was Aaron’s birthright. It had been Ezra’s playground, until it became his haunted house. He’d left as soon as he was old enough to run. He’d hoped it would feel better, to be going back by choice, but there’s only that old anxiety, tight and hot and prickling across his skin.
“I’m happy to help,” he says.
He expects the acoustics of the room to amplify the words, make them flow and echo off the walls. Instead, they slip out, too quiet, too heavy. They leave him in a murmur and sink beneath the water like a stone.