Chapter 31
31
Afterward, Jonathan asks for space.
He promises, with red-rimmed eyes, that he isn’t angry—that it’s just a lot to take in, and he needs some time to think, to process. He walks Ezra to the door and kisses him goodbye.
So Ezra goes home.
Sappho greets him with a full-body slam as soon as he comes through the door, slobbering all over his face. Ezra sits down hard on the floor to let her climb into his lap, and spends a solid few minutes just holding on to her, being showered with unconditional affection and drool.
He recognizes the pattern of Ollie’s footsteps even before the floor creaks beside him. “So,” Ollie says. “Long night?”
Ezra muffles an exhausted, soul-weary laugh into Sappho’s fur. Ollie puts a hand on his back, half a rub and half a shake, rough and affectionate and entirely unromantic. “Thanks for watching my dog.”
“Team effort,” Ollie says. “I’m glad Becca’s okay.”
“I haven’t talked to her today.”
“She’s back on Instagram.” Ezra picks his head up, hopeful. Ollie already has his phone out, Becca’s account open on the screen. Her latest photo is a selfie, still in her hospital bed, giving the camera a wrinkle-nosed, unapologetic smile.
@becksandcall F in kitchen safety. A+ in unkillable bitch. CHECK YOUR STOVE KNOBS, KIDDIES
Ezra lets out a laugh, damp and relieved. That’s his girl.
“So. At the risk of sending you running, you really look like you could use someone to talk to.”
Ezra takes a deep breath. “No more running,” he says. “And…talking would be good.”
“Oh.” Ollie looks surprised. “Gotta be real, I was kind of expecting more of a fight.”
“I know.” Ezra hesitates. “I’m sort of done fighting, too.”
“Yeah?” Ollie raises an eyebrow. “?‘Done fighting,’ like, going to actually let someone help you ‘done fighting’?”
“Yeah,” Ezra says. “Like that.”
Ollie exhales and leans over to knock their foreheads together. “Good,” he says. “About time.”
Over the next few days, Ezra talks more than he has in years.
He tells his roommates everything. About the QCC furloughing half their staff, about going to work for the Chapel for the money rather than a streak of filial altruism. About Jonathan. About the ghosts— all of the ghosts, the dead and the living.
They take it…much more calmly than he expected. But then, Lily and Noah had asked him his sun, moon, and rising signs before they’d let him move in, and Ollie’s been obsessed with paranormal investigation podcasts for years, and Max never makes any decision bigger than choosing a takeout option without pulling at least one tarot card.
Maybe he shouldn’t have worried after all.
“You know,” Max says thoughtfully when Ezra’s voice finally runs dry, scratching Sappho behind the ears, “this explains so much about you. I know some jumpy people, but you are so twitchy.”
“I actually don’t know if that’s ghost related,” Ollie says, because he’s an ass. “I think he’s actually just like that.”
“Rude,” Ezra says, but he’s smiling.
Lily props her chin in her hand, her eyes curious and considering. “Okay, ghost boy,” she says. “So what’s your game plan with all of this? I don’t think running a haunted bake sale is going to save your family business.”
Ezra shakes his head. “It’s definitely not,” he says. “And honestly, I don’t want to spend any more time there than I have to. The QCC’s supposed to be back up and running in a few more weeks, and I want to get back to my actual job.”
“We all want that for you,” Ollie says, patting his arm. “You weren’t designed for a paperwork job. You hate math.”
“I hate math so much,” Ezra says.
Lying on the floor with his legs propped on the couch, Noah tilts his head back to look at him. “Do you even want to help? It kind of seems like you’d be a lot better off emotionally if you just burned the rest of the place down and took your chances with the insurance.”
Lily leans over to grin at him. “Not a ghost person?”
“Hell, no.” Noah shoots Ezra an apologetic look. “Not saying I don’t believe you, just, you know. I’ve seen enough movies to know that hanging out in the haunted building literally never works out for anyone.”
“All buildings are haunted,” Ezra tells him. “Including this one.”
Noah makes a face. “Please don’t remind me.” He sighs. “It’s too bad, you know? I liked Ben. Shame we’re gonna have to exorcise him.”
“We’re not exorcising anyone,” Ezra says, alarmed. Sappho, as if sensing his tone, rolls out of Max’s lap and pads over to shove her head into his chest. He scratches her behind the ears.
Noah gives him a thumbs-down. Lily rolls her eyes at Noah, nudging him with her toes. He bats her away, wrinkling his nose, and says, “So then what are we doing?”
Ezra hesitates, rubbing his hand over Sappho’s ears. “I have an idea,” he says.
The next part is what catches in his throat. He swallows around the knife of it. “I’m just going to need some help.”
—
Three days later, he has breakfast with his siblings.
Becca still looks exhausted, circles under her eyes not quite covered by her makeup. But she’s steady on her feet, and she hugs Ezra fiercely when he picks her up at Mom and Judy’s condo, where she’s been staying since she was discharged from the hospital.
“It’s weird,” she says, sliding into the passenger seat of his car with only a slightly pained tightening around her eyes as she settles her head back. She’s gotten a haircut, the burnt ends trimmed away, healthy auburn curls loose around her shoulders. “But it’s not bad, I guess. Mom’s been trying really hard.”
“You know you can say the word and come stay with me,” Ezra reminds her, not for the first time, as he pulls away from the curb after an extra check of his mirrors. He can drive the route to IHOP on autopilot, at this point, but he always drives more carefully with Becca in the car. “My roommates wouldn’t mind.”
“I know,” she says. He has his eyes on the road, but he still catches the look she shoots his way. “I made the executive decision to give you a break.”
Ezra sniffs. “You have a concussion,” he says. “Who can trust your decision-making, anyway?”
Aaron meets them at the restaurant, dressed down in jeans and a flannel despite it being a workday. He folds Becca into a squeezing hug as soon as she gets out of the car—“Ow,” she protests. “You hit your head, not your ribs,” he says, not loosening his grip. “Suck it up.”—and then hugs Ezra as well, tight and firm, like he’s trying to get a point across.
“Okay,” Ezra says when Aaron lets him go, looking away with deliberate casualness as Aaron clears his throat and swipes a hand over his eyes. “Pancakes?”
“Oh my God,” Becca says. “Yes please .”
It’s the first time the three of them have been together since the fire. With Dad’s time taken up dealing with the insurance and the contractors coming in to repair the damage to the house, Aaron has taken over most of Dad’s work. Even though there’s only a hallway between them, they’ve barely had time to exchange more than a few words, and most of those about accounts or invoices or contracts or a request for Ezra to change into his suit to help with a service. Aaron tells them about the house as they give the menus their unnecessary skim, waiting for their waitress to come back with coffees and waters. They’d gotten remarkably lucky—other than the damage to the kitchen, the house is mostly unscathed, and the inspectors have already cleared them of any structural damage.
“You could almost say we were supernaturally lucky,” Aaron says when he finishes, picking up his coffee and leering at Ezra over the rim.
“At this point, I wouldn’t rule it out,” Ezra says. Becca’s hands are folded in her lap, and he nudges her under the table with his foot. “Hey,” he says. “It’s going to be okay.”
She perks up somewhat when their food arrives, falling onto the pancakes and waffles with her usual enthusiasm. Ezra watches with affectionate horror as she pours enough syrup to induce a sugar coma onto her red velvet pancakes.
“Please slow down before you choke,” Aaron says, Ezra’s own affectionate exasperation echoed on his face.
“ You slow down,” Becca says, her mouth unapologetically full. Ezra raises his eyebrows at her, and she rolls her eyes but slows her pace from college students descending on free food to a slightly more civilized lions discovering a freshly killed antelope .
As they eat, Ezra lays out the fragile outline of his plan.
The Chapel, he explains, is in trouble. It was never intended to be a moneymaker, but there’s a difference between not making bank and not paying the bills, and they hover too close to the latter. Without Zayde’s extra accounts, they’d already be out of business.
A lot of that is Dad’s insistence, whenever they can manage it, to keep prices as low as possible—if not lower. For him, it’s about doing a service, not selling a product. Making sure everyone in their community who wants a Jewish burial can have one without their family going into thousands of dollars of debt.
So if it’s going to be a service, then, Ezra reasons, it should be a service.
“A nonprofit funeral home,” Becca says, frowning at the proposal Ezra slides across the table. He’d worked on it with Lily and Noah late into last night, Lily scouring state business statutes and Noah taking Ezra’s ramblings and turning them into something visually brilliant and somewhat coherent. “Do you think Dad would go for that?”
She’s devoured a plate of pancakes and all of her hash browns, and has made a dent in Aaron’s. Ezra catches her eyeing his, and while he loves her to death, he pulls his plate a bit closer. “Which part?”
“I don’t know, he’s…You know how into the whole doing-Zayde-proud thing he is.” Becca beams at Aaron when he flags down their waitress and orders another two sides of hash browns, looking only mildly pained about it, and then turns back to Ezra. “It wouldn’t be a family-owned thing anymore, right?”
“Right,” Ezra confirms. “But there are co-op funeral homes all around the country, and it’s not like he’d have to totally stay out of it. The name could probably stay. He’d just be—I don’t know, the executive director instead of the owner, or something like that.”
Aaron looks thoughtful, flipping through the pages. “Someone would have to underwrite this, though, right?”
Ezra nods. He’d talked to Nina about it last night, and she promised to help him research. “There are definitely foundations we could look at.”
Aaron winces. “None of us are grant writers.”
“No,” Becca says slowly. “But Judy is.”
Ezra blinks at her, surprised. That’s been one of the logistical areas he hasn’t been sure how to work out. “Seriously?”
“I thought she was an art professor,” Aaron says, frowning.
“She is, but she does grant writing on the side. I guess she started by doing some work for her department at RISD, and then it turned into a whole hustle?” Becca studies the shared plate of blueberry pancakes in the center of the table, preparing a plan of attack.
Aaron turns the plate so that the side with the most blueberries is closer to her. He tousles her hair gently, cautious of the bandage still taped to her brow, and sits back against the booth. “I guess she does owe us,” he muses.
“True,” Ezra says. He takes the papers when Aaron passes them back. “Do you think she’d go for it?”
Aaron nudges Becca. “What do you think?”
Becca puts her fork down, considering. “I think she would,” she says at last. “Especially if Mom asked.” She smiles, small and rueful. “Between the two of them, they have enough guilt to probably do just about anything we ask them to for the next…I don’t know, twenty-five years?”
“I’ll take one year of free fundraising,” Ezra says. He tucks the printouts back into their folder, then, after a moment’s hesitation, slides them back to Aaron. His hands shake, and he hopes no one notices. “Will you look these over again and help me figure out how to bring Dad in?”
Aaron looks surprised as he picks up the folder. Surprised—but pleased, too, and another knot of tension loosens in Ezra’s chest. “Of course,” he says. “We’re going to have to move pretty quickly, though. I caught Dad with Caroline’s business card on his desk the other day, and it looked a little too worn-out for him not to have been playing with it for a while.”
That…is not a great sign. But also—
“Sorry,” Ezra says before he can stop himself. “Since when is she Caroline ?”
Aaron abruptly closes the folder with a cough. “We should plan to talk about this whole thing after work. Maybe grab a drink?”
“Aw,” Becca says, propping her chin in her hand and smiling at them. “Bros night!”
It’s not subtle, and they’re definitely coming back to this later, but Ezra decides to let him get away with the subject change. “You have syrup all over your face,” he tells Becca instead, and can’t help but laugh when she sticks out her tongue.
Ezra and Aaron linger in the parking lot for a few minutes after Becca leaves, catching a ride to class from a friend. Ezra’s about to crack, to apologize for how he acted at the hospital—he knows Aaron’s never done anything but try his best, and it’s not his fault that their parents defaulted to the expectations they had—but Aaron beats him to it.
“I talked to Jonathan yesterday.”
Ezra doesn’t drop his phone, or even fumble it, but he does nearly lose his grip on his keys. “You did?”
Aaron nods, leaning against his car. “He told me you guys talked.”
He doesn’t know whether to be grateful or not that Aaron and Jonathan are…whatever they are. More than colleagues. Probably closer to friends. “He asked for some time.”
“He told me that, too.” Aaron looks at him, arms crossed and eyes thoughtful. “If it’s any consolation, I don’t think he’s angry anymore.”
“What makes you say that?”
Aaron shrugs. “The way he talked about you.”
Ezra blankly stares at him.
Aaron huffs a laugh. “Look. I spend enough time talking to mourning people to know when they’re trying to find excuses to stay angry and leave someone behind and when they’re not. He’s hurting, yeah, and probably freaked, but”—he shrugs again—“you two are going to be fine.”
Ezra puts his hands in his pockets, phone and keys and all, because he doesn’t trust his fingers to stop trembling enough to keep his grip. “I don’t know,” he says, and it comes out rougher than he wants it to, tinged with a bitterness he doesn’t feel. “I don’t know if we should be.”
Aaron frowns, brow furrowed. “Why?”
“I just—” Ezra looks down at the cracked pavement of the parking lot. There’s a cluster of dandelions trying to force their way through the concrete, a bright little burst of sunshine resilience. “I don’t deserve another chance with him, you know? Not after this. I owe it to him to tell him everything I can, to do everything I can, but—”
“Whoa,” Aaron interrupts, firm enough that Ezra makes himself look up to meet his frown. “We’re talking about the same guy here, right? The one who needs to be triple reassured that someone’s gotten home safe if he’s the last person to see them before they get in the car? The one who I’ve personally seen you talk down from, like, three different panic attacks after a taharah hit him too hard? The guy who’s so wrapped up in feeling shitty about his husband that I, a licensed death professional, have had to tell him more than once he needs to hang out with some living people ?”
Ezra opens his mouth, a defense already on the tip of his tongue, but Aaron just crosses his arms. “Plus I’ve seen him microwave the same cup of coffee four times in a row instead of making a new pot, which honestly should be a crime. The point is, he’s a person, Ezra, not a saint, and he’s not any less screwed up than you are—but at least he’s trying . So why would you not deserve this?”
He’s given Ezra this pep talk before, when he was sixteen and crying into a pillow because Kelsey Becket turned him down for homecoming because she was straight and he was, for all she knew at the time, not a boy. It had a lot more weight back then, when he hadn’t actually done anything wrong. “I’m self-aware enough to know I’m a lot to deal with,” he says. He doesn’t mean it to be self-deprecating, but just…it is what it is. There’s a reason people leave him.
He thinks, without really meaning to, of Ben, the way he watches Jonathan with so much regret in his eyes, the way he reaches out but can never touch. Ezra feels guilty every time Jonathan’s fingertips brush his, each point of contact a reminder that he’s here and Ben isn’t. And he should be.
Jonathan deserves to have Ben with him, but he’s got Ezra instead—nosy and neurotic, a shade too psychic for his own good but not enough to be useful. He still doesn’t understand what makes Jonathan look at him with those eyes and smile at him in a way that he doesn’t smile at anyone else, crooked and sweet. Jonathan could have anyone. Why the hell would he want someone like him?
Aaron has been studying him. When Ezra gives up on explaining, all but ready to try to make some kind of awkward apology and suggest they make their way back to work, Aaron pushes off his car and steps forward, putting a firm hand on Ezra’s shoulder. He gives him a little shake, like he wants to be sure he has Ezra’s attention, then exhales hard.
“All right,” he says, and his eyes are steady and calm, the way he only is when he’s instructing an intern or talking a grieving widow off a metaphorical ledge. “I’m only going to say this once and I need you to be cool about it and not brush it off like I’m joking. I know how you get with stuff like this, but I need you to listen. Okay?”
Ezra blinks, not sure if he should be confused or alarmed, but shrugs his free shoulder and nods.
“Thank you.” Aaron looks at him, firm and unblinking and absolutely serious. “You are,” he says, with incalculable slowness, “one of the best people I have ever known. You have taken so much shit it’s not even funny, and you throw it back at people as something good . You take care of people. You’ve taken care of me, more than you ever should’ve had to. You taught me how to make people feel like they matter.”
He squeezes Ezra’s shoulder tight enough that Ezra almost wonders if it will bruise. “You’re one of the best men I know. I am so proud of you. And I’m sorry I’ve never said that before now.”
Ezra gapes at him. His ears feel stuffed with cotton.
His voice cracks, just barely. His eyes sting. “Um,” he tries.
Aaron sighs, long-suffering but so fond it almost hurts to hear, and pulls Ezra into a hug. It’s tight and fierce and Ezra feels pleasantly smothered, and wonders if maybe he’ll go out like this, lovingly crushed to death in his older brother’s arms.
It’s not a bad way to go, honestly. If they didn’t have shit to fix, he’d be tempted.
Still, he brings his arms up to hug Aaron back, smushing his face into his shoulder. He smells like diner coffee and the same cologne he’s been wearing since his bar mitzvah. It’s horrifically comforting.
“Thanks,” Ezra says.
Aaron knocks their foreheads together. “Any time.”