Chapter 13
13
Despite Ben being just one in a long line of ghosts Ezra’s seen throughout the years, part of Ezra still expects something to have changed after putting the puzzle of his identity together. Some epiphany, a new understanding, a lightbulb moment.
But nothing changes. Life goes on.
Mom texts him constantly, asking for advice on the emails she’s crafting to the rest of the family. He’s also ended up on the permanent phone tree for Jonathan’s chevra, and as much as his no-longer-a-mystery ghost makes him want to avoid Jonathan like the plague, he still says yes every time he gets a message asking for taharah volunteers. It’s the way Jonathan performs the ritual, the look of absolute peace that settles over him, his focused tenderness.
He’s just trying to help, he tells himself, tells Aaron, too, when he gives him those knowing looks every time Ezra and Jonathan pass his office.
He tries not to notice the way Ben appears almost constantly now, especially in the taharah rooms, always there at the edge of Ezra’s vision as they wash and pour water and prepare the bodies for burial, watching them—no, watching Jonathan —with those soft, sad eyes. Sometimes Ezra catches his gaze, and when he does, Ben looks back and inclines his head.
His expression is always the same. A silent, unspoken I see you.
Ezra doesn’t know what to do with that. He looks away first.
Becca
I love you so much but I am BEGGING YOU to stop sending me clips from the Sixth Sense
Ok but consider: u do see dead people
also i use humor to cope and i feel like u shouldn’t be able to judge me for how i respond to U LITERALLY SEEING DEAD PEOPLE
…can you at least maybe limit to one a day
no promises
—
He has all the best intentions to leave work early on Wednesday for Roommate Family Dinner. He has grand plans to stop at Bottles on his way home for wine—and may or may not have snooped through the communal wine rack in the living room, googling labels on his phone to discern everyone’s tastes (with the exception of Ollie, who’d drink shoe polish if it came in a nice enough bottle)—and then get home with time to shower, change, and help cook.
Instead, he finds himself on the floor of the break room, Jonah’s youngest daughter in his lap while the older two girls sprawl out with a set of coloring books Ezra unearthed from the depths of his mom’s filing cabinet.
“I’ll be ten minutes, tops,” Jonah had promised, pushing the baby and the diaper bag into Ezra’s arms while his phone rang. “If I don’t get this livery guy on the phone before the end of the day, coordinating the routes tomorrow is going to be a shit show—”
“You said a bad word!” Shuli chirped gleefully. “I’m telling Mom!”
Jonah looked pained. “Go,” Ezra said, taking pity. “We’ll be fine.”
Famous last words. He’d forgotten that girls under the age of ten are the most terrifying creatures on the planet. Case in point, the delicate flames Shuli is adding to the castle she’s coloring, and the hopefully made-up song Alma is singing under her breath about a horse that eats children.
At least the baby’s content to let Ezra feed her a bottle, but she’s probably plotting world domination. Knowing her sisters, he wouldn’t put it past her.
He looks up at the sound of voices in the hallway, half hoping to hear Jonah coming back, but it’s Aaron, Jonathan at his heels. “I’m just saying you could consider it,” Aaron is saying. “Not that we’re not happy to have you, but you’re going to get sick of spending all your time here eventually.”
“I like spending my time here,” Jonathan retorts, and then nearly runs into Aaron, who’s stopped short to stare at the mess of small children, coloring books, and Ezra clustered on the floor. “Oh. Hey there.”
“Hey,” Ezra says. He hopes he’s managed to catch all of Maisie’s spit-up on the cloth haphazardly draped over his shoulder. “Jonah had to call Denny,” he adds to Aaron.
Aaron winces. They’ve been using the same livery company since Zayde was alive. They’re prompt, professional, and well organized, but the dispatch manager is hell to get hold of. “Say no more.”
“We’re drawing dead people!” Shuli announces. “Want to see?”
“Um, sure?” Jonathan crouches to look at her picture. “Wow. He’s…on fire?”
“It’s a ritual cremation,” she says, with the kind of solemnity only the six-year-old child of a funeral director could muster. Alma uses her temporary distraction to steal her red crayon.
Jonathan tries to smother a laugh. “Of course it is.” He glances up at Ezra. “So you do babysitting, too?”
“Only under duress.” Maisie blows a spit bubble at him from the crook of his arm.
Aaron snorts. “Don’t listen to a word he says. Ezra loves kids. That’s why he works with babies when we’re not making him work here.” At Jonathan’s curious look, he adds, with an unexpectedly proud note in his voice, “He’s a doula.”
“Oh.” Jonathan blinks. “Cool.”
“Which I still find terrifying, by the way. Like, you have to stay calm if something goes wrong but you aren’t actually trained if something does go wrong, so you’re just…” He waves his hands dramatically.
“Things don’t usually go wrong,” Ezra says. Not at any of the births he’s attended so far, thank God. He’s been hired specifically for miscarriage and stillbirth support, and those days are always awful, but it’s an expected sort of awfulness, something he knows how to prepare for and recover from. “And there are actual medical professionals around if something happens.”
Jonathan looks interested. “Have you ever had to catch a baby?”
“Only once.” It had been his client’s fourth, and none of the hospital staff had listened when she told them that her labors were fast and furious. The memory still makes him cringe. “Hopefully never again. My job is only supposed to be above the waist.”
“Still cool,” Jonathan says earnestly, and that familiar heat creeps up and over the back of Ezra’s ears, staining them red. “It’s an awesome job. I bet you’re really good at it.” Jonathan smiles at him. “You’ve got a good energy. You make people feel settled.”
He holds Ezra’s gaze as he says it. For a moment, Aaron and the girls and the baby in his arms seem to fade away, leaving just the two of them, alone in a quiet room.
And then Jonathan looks away, their connection broken. “I have to head out. Aaron, can you call me when you hear back from the suppliers?”
“Sure,” Aaron says. He’s looking at Ezra, not at Jonathan, and Ezra does not want to hear anything that’s about to come out of his mouth. “I might have Ezra call you, if things get busy.”
Traitor, Ezra mouths at him over Jonathan’s shoulder.
“Great,” Jonathan says. “Keep up the great art, girls.”
“Thanks,” Shuli and Alma chorus.
Jonathan shoots Ezra a last wave—Ezra refuses to be grateful that he’s sitting on the floor and therefore totally unaffected by the way his legs feel suddenly like jelly—and leaves, the carpet muffling the sound of his footsteps as he walks away.
There’s a beat of silence, broken only by Alma’s newly resumed humming.
“Wow,” Aaron says.
Ezra groans. “Please don’t.”
“That was rough .”
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
“I have never,” Aaron says gleefully, “seen you turn red like that.”
“Hey, girls,” Ezra says. “Wanna help plan a murder?”
Jonah does come back eventually, though not before his daughters have spent ten minutes coloring a remarkably tolerant Aaron’s fingernails with a set of highlighters. Ezra’s running late for dinner, making the world’s fastest trip to pick up a bottle of wine and pointedly ignoring the specter of an old man who keeps pointing insistently at a pinot grigio that’s about four times Ezra’s budget.
The look the ghost gives him when Ezra picks out a ten-dollar bottle of chardonnay could rival Mom’s for withering disappointment.
He’s sweaty and flustered by the time he gets home, almost tripping over his shoelaces as he comes through the door. There’s music playing from the wireless speaker on the counter, bright and bouncy and maybe in Korean, drowning the solemn conversation Max and Noah are having over the rice cooker. Sappho, to Ezra’s utter lack of surprise, is sitting squarely between Ollie’s and Lily’s feet as they dice vegetables at the table, watching them with eager eyes and clearly hoping for scraps. She doesn’t so much as twitch her ears in Ezra’s direction as he approaches, but Ollie looks over, his face lighting up.
“Hey,” he says, putting his knife down. “We were beginning to think you forgot.”
“I got held up at work,” Ezra says. It’s not like he could have forgotten, with the way the group chat has been loud the last few days while everyone else planned the dinner. But they all seemed to have such an easy connection that he felt clumsy and awkward even over text, so he’d just added the occasional thumbs-up and kept the chat on mute.
Ollie, who hasn’t lost his ability to read Ezra like a book, softens slightly. “I think we’ve got dinner prep taken care of,” he says, gentle in the way he always is when he can tell Ezra’s contemplating running for the hills. “And I took Sappho for a quick walk earlier. Do you want to shower, and I’ll make sure there’s some wine for you when you get out?”
“I love you,” Ezra says, meaning it, and Ollie snickers.
“Love you, too,” he says. He gestures toward the hallway with his knife. “Go bathe.”
Ezra goes, pausing to wave to everyone else and lean down to kiss the top of Sappho’s head. She acknowledges him with a single wag of her tail but otherwise doesn’t take her eyes off Lily’s cutting board.
It’s not as transformative as a nap, but he feels miles better after a shower and a change of clothes. He makes his way back to the kitchen once he’s dressed, still scrunching product through his hair to try to tame his curls into less of a tangled mess. As promised, Ollie has a glass of wine waiting for him, and Ezra takes it gratefully as he slides into the seat across from him, peering at the ingredients scattered across the table and trying to remember the different recipes that had popped up in the group chat over the past week. “What did you guys decide to make, anyway?”
“Sundubu jjigae,” Ollie says, and then, grinning at whatever Ezra’s face is doing, clarifies, “Spicy tofu stew. With a few tweaks in the recipe because we didn’t want to burn your taste buds off.”
“I’m good with spice,” Ezra protests, putting his wine down. Ollie gives him an Are you, though? sort of look, and Ezra concedes, “Okay, not, like, spicy spice, but I can handle heat!”
“You are so cute,” Lily says, plopping back into her chair, having apparently just delivered her mushrooms to Noah and Max in the kitchen. She levels a perfectly manicured finger at Ollie. “Korean,” she says, then points to herself—“Indian”—and then, gesturing into the kitchen—“New Orleans and Jamaica. The spice heritage in this house is at a level you have not achieved.”
Ezra can’t argue with that. “Fair,” he admits, because he’s had enough meals with Ollie’s sisters to know how willing they are to use chili oil as a hazing tool. “Can I do anything to help?”
Lily picks up a bundle of scallions. “Wanna do garnish?”
Having something to do with his hands is a relief, and Ezra gratefully accepts the knife and cutting board Ollie slides him. The work goes quickly, and before he knows it the five of them are gathered around the table together and he’s burning his tongue off with all the grace he can muster. After too many days of tension and silence and grief, it’s a sweet breath of air to be surrounded by laughter and warmth and the easy camaraderie of people who know one another well, who are happy to be in the same room.
By the time they’re cleaning up, he has to admit to himself, finally, that he likes being here. He likes the energy that resonates through the room, working around one another with comfort, banter flying between the kitchen and the table, playful but never unkind. It goes against all his instincts to relax into this, but he makes himself do it anyway.
If he keeps his head down and doesn’t do anything weird, maybe he can bask in this, just a little longer. It helps that Ollie keeps topping off his wineglass— Ha, ten-dollar chard is a hit. Take that, judgy liquor store ghost —because he’s an asshole who knows that Ezra can hold just about any kind of liquor and stay fully even-keeled, but that wine turns him loose-limbed and relaxed like a cat in a sunbeam.
“Hey!” Ezra says, batting him away when he goes to do it again. “No! Shoo!”
“I’m helping!” Ollie protests.
“Do you think they broke up because Ollie has no respect for boundaries?” Max says in a terrible attempt at a stage whisper, her head lolling into Noah’s lap.
“We broke up because we’re sexually incompatible, ” Ollie says, enunciating in the way he only ever does when he’s drunk-quoting his therapist. Ezra kicks him in half-hearted objection, because hey, but Ollie just absently pats his leg, easy and affectionate. “In that Ezra likes sex and I don’t.”
“Hey,” Ezra says, out loud this time.
Ollie wrinkles his nose. “Sorry. In that Ezra likes sex but has issues about it, and I like sex very rarely but have issues about it, and for two people with our self-esteem problems and undiagnosed anxiety, that wasn’t really a recipe for a successful relationship in the long run.” He picks his head up off the armrest and looks at Ezra. “Right?”
Ezra shrugs, a little surprised at how much it doesn’t sting to hear it. “Not wrong.”
Lily props her chin on her hand, her wineglass dangling from her fingertips. “I had been wondering,” she says, thoughtful. “You don’t give off angry-ex vibes.”
“If they gave off angry-ex vibes, we wouldn’t have let Ezra move in,” Noah points out. Max nods, waving a finger around in a clear Cosigned, and Noah pats her shoulder.
“Not angry,” Ollie confirms. His words are sad and soft and kind. “Just, you know.”
Ezra nudges him with his foot again, more gently this time. In some ways, it’s the best breakup Ezra’s ever had—no hard feelings or harsh words. But it’s miserable in other ways, to be in each other’s inescapable orbit, close enough to touch but never in alignment. They were only hurting each other by the end, though, only coming together at their most jagged edges.
They’re better as friends, anyway. They were friends first, and are friends now. Ezra hangs on to that, when he’s lonely, wallowing, and eight months deep into Ollie’s Instagram feed.
“Ooh, he’s sad again,” Lily says. “Ollie, wine him.”
Ollie perks up, reaching for the bottle of merlot on the coffee table. Ezra puts a protective hand over his glass. “ No, ” he says, and Ollie pouts, putting the bottle back down. “Safe word. Go away.”
Noah squints at them. “Your safe word is ‘safe word’?”
“No,” Ollie says, grinning in a way that has never once been good news for Ezra’s dignity. Ezra considers the space between the couch and the coffee table to see how much room there is, decides it’s worth the risk of a head injury, and kicks Ollie off the sofa.
Ollie lands on the carpet with a thump . “Rude!”
To Ezra’s immense relief, the conversation shifts away from their relationship—or lack thereof—and over to Noah’s. Ezra hasn’t met Noah’s girlfriend yet, but he’s heard enough secondhand stories and seen enough pictures to know that she exists at that terrifying intersection of gorgeous, talented, and genuinely nice, which he’s always found unfair. Apparently, they’ve been talking about moving in together, which would probably mean Noah moving out. Everyone has an opinion. Max seems to have about six. Ezra lets himself drift to the sound of Lily lobbying for Noah to convince Grace to move in with all of them instead of the two of them finding their own place, only vaguely aware of Sappho climbing up to take Ollie’s place on the couch and flopping against his side.
He’s abruptly brought out of his comfortable, dog-covered reverie by Ollie announcing, “I think we should ask Jonathan if he wants to come over.”
Ezra doesn’t spill his drink everywhere when he startles back to alertness, but it’s a close call. “What?” he demands, trying to rapidly catch up with whatever he’s just missed. “Why?”
Lily sits up straighter, her eyes bright and delighted. “We should absolutely do that,” she says. “Oh my God. Two birds! One stone!”
“What birds?” Ezra asks, alarm mounting. “There are no birds!”
“No, no, no, no, Oliver is right, we should totally invite him up,” Max says, earnest in the way that only someone who has unexpectedly found themselves on the drunk side of tipsy can be. “He’s all alone down there! Which—sad! No one likes a sad gay, Ezra, you should know that.”
“I’m bisexual,” Ezra points out.
“It’s an umbrella, ” she says, waving a hand and nearly knocking Noah’s beer out of his hand. He jerks it out of her reach at the last second, making a face. “And you’re single and depressed, and he’s single and depressed, and you’re constantly talking about him in the group chat—”
“I am not —”
Lily already has her phone out. “Would you like me to read you the receipts, or just start forwarding them back to you?”
Ezra changes tack. “He’s not single and depressed,” he says, trying to keep the desperation out of his voice. “He’s widowed, and mourning, that is not the same thing. “
“Everyone’s gotta get back on the horse sometime,” Noah says mildly.
Ollie reaches up from the floor and pokes Ezra in the thigh. “You’re the horse in this scenario,” he says, sotto voce . “Or I guess he could be the—”
“I regret ever meeting you,” Ezra tells him.
“Lies,” Ollie says smugly, proving that Ezra has never had good taste in men ever in his life. Maybe he should take Nina up on her offer and they should just get married, IVF a bunch of kids, and move to a gay farming commune in Vermont.
No, it would never work out. Nina would be a terrible farmer. She’d break one nail and they’d be relocating to Brooklyn faster than it takes to milk a cow. Probably. Not like Ezra knows how long it would take to milk a cow. He takes out his phone to google it and pauses at the notification from Dad, already there on his lock screen.
He knows what it’s going to say before he opens it.
Dad
Don’t forget to count the Omer. Yesterday was day 22.
It’s a rule Ezra hadn’t known before he actually started counting this year, that you weren’t supposed to get an alert for the night you were actively counting, because that defeated the purpose of mindfully counting. Apparently it’s kosher to get a reminder of what you counted the night before, though, hence Dad’s go-to reminders.
Ezra texts back a guilty Thank you, then sets an alarm to remind himself to count later, because he’s one thousand percent sure that if he slips away to do it now, he’ll come back to find Jonathan standing in the middle of his living room.
Max’s phone chimes with an incoming message, just as someone knocks at the door.
“What,” Max says, all innocence. “Was I not supposed to text him?”