Chapter 16
16
On the night of Zayde’s tenth yahrzeit—ten years of hauntings, of constantly looking over his shoulder, of second-guessing everything he sees until he knows for sure it’s real—Ezra writes down the rules.
The logic is this: The illusion of control is better than chaos. After ten years with no mystic revelation, no sudden understanding of the whys or the hows, all he can do is draw a box around the ghosts. So he writes the rules down and keeps them in his wallet. A reminder and a talisman.
First: The ghosts can’t move.
Or rather: The ghosts are static, in one way or another—tied to a place, or a person, or an experience. In the early years, Ezra assumes that it’s the body itself that holds the ghosts in place: He sees them in the funeral home, wandering the halls or sitting in the chapel or following their mourners through the showroom as if they could give their opinion on a casket, and with the exception of Zayde, who always seems to be there, Ezra never sees them once they’re in the ground.
But then he gets older, and the ghosts multiply. At recess, he sees a woman with graying hair and horn-rimmed glasses keeping a watchful eye on the playground, and matches her face to the portrait of the founding principal that hangs proudly in the lobby. In high school, three weeks into his first year of choir, Ezra realizes that the pale boy two rows over, whose knit beanie never attracts a dress code violation, isn’t singing too quietly to be heard—he’s no longer capable of sound.
Wives who outlive their husbands last longer than the other way around, but he watches his grandmother fade in the years after Zayde’s death. She calls him her beshert, her destined other half, and there are times when Ezra thinks she’s nearly as haunted by his memory as he is. He talks to Zayde’s ghost about her, when he’s alone in the halls, not sure if he’s convincing his grandfather or himself that it’s only a matter of time until they’ll be together again.
She dies in her sleep on a clear December night. Ezra sees her in the kitchen the next morning as if it’s any other Tuesday, standing by the kettle, as though she can’t understand why she can’t make her morning tea. When she meets his eyes, her face fills with a strange, distant understanding. Ezra, relieved in a way he doesn’t understand, tells her that Zayde is just a backyard away, that he’s waiting for her, that all she has to do is follow him.
He makes it all the way to the front door before he realizes she’s stayed behind.
It’s only then that he realizes that Zayde never leaves the walls of the funeral home. That the yard that separates the house from the Chapel may as well be an impossible rift, that the space between his grandparents, even in death, is a cruel permanence.
Ezra refuses to attend a single service for a full six months after that, no matter how much guilt his mother layers on. His relationship to prayer has always been shaky at best, but for this, even rote recitation of words of prayer makes him feel like he’s choking on dust.
Second: The ghosts can’t speak.
He had talked to Zayde, in the first days after his death, following him through the Chapel’s halls the same way he had when he was alive. He got used to Zayde listening in silent amusement while Ezra chattered absently to him about whatever came to mind. It took him almost two weeks to realize that Zayde never answered.
Before, he would have pulled on Zayde’s sleeve to get his attention. After his death, he frowned at him, repeating “ Zayde, Zayde, Zayde, ” until Zayde finally looked down at him with exasperation, as if to say, Well, what?
He was a soft-spoken man, but never a silent one.
“Oh,” Ezra said.
Zayde’s eyes softened in apology, and Ezra sat down heavily on the Chapel floor.
Until that moment, with Zayde still right there in front of him, he hadn’t grasped that he’d never hear his voice again. Ten minutes later, when Bubbe leaves the murmuring crowd in the upstairs chapel to come looking for him, Ezra was still crying.
And finally: The ghosts can’t hurt you.
They don’t touch him. They never touch him. They look at him, sometimes pleading, sometimes with eyes so utterly heartbroken he wants to claw his own out. But no matter how angry they look, how much their faces twist into silent screams, they don’t even try.
They can’t hurt you, he tells himself, year after year, nightmare after nightmare. They can’t hurt you.
It’s not until Ben that he remembers: There’s more than one kind of hurt.