Chapter 7
7
It’s strange, being back here.
Growing up, he’d been constantly in his parents’ way, possibly a subconscious attempt to punish them for making him spend so much time surrounded by the cold, tingly feelings that came along with everything he couldn’t talk about. He might have been the only one aware of the ghosts, but everyone seems conscious of the other specters in the air—the decisions made based on what Zayde would have wanted, the looming pressure of being his legacy, the weight of thirty-six murdered family members none of them had ever met lingering like smoke from an ill-kept fireplace.
By the end of the first week of fitting himself uncomfortably into his mother’s shoes, Ezra’s bracing for a crash. It’s not just about the cold spots and crawling chills that let him know something is there that shouldn’t be, the effort of remembering to keep an impassive face when he sees something no one else will notice—it’s knowing that he’ll have to provide constant, unending availability to Dad and Aaron. When he was younger, Ezra was the go-to for complaints and venting and airing of grievances, about working with each other and working with clients and the emotional weight of the world. He can’t imagine it’ll take long before he’s back there again.
Nina tells him he has a miserable case of chronic Eldest Daughter Syndrome, and that’s why he can’t tell them to manage their shit themselves like grown men should. “It transcends gender,” she’d said dryly when he narrowed his eyes at her the first time she threw out the term. “If you were raised the eldest daughter, you’re stuck with it for life.”
In the end, he’s half right to expect it. The barrage of texts he’s used to getting daily from Aaron turn into near-hourly visits to Mom’s office, Aaron dropping into one of the chairs across from Ezra’s desk that are meant for clients and promptly launching into a tirade about whatever’s driving him up a wall, regardless of whatever Ezra’s working on at the time.
He’s working through Mom’s giant inbox and trying not to spend too much time glancing up at the clock as it ticks closer, closer, closer to five, flying high on feeling halfway competent and the absence of a single ghost sighting all day, and is thinking about the possibility of another cup of coffee when someone raps at the doorframe of the office.
“Ezra?”
A zing of recognition flashes through him before he looks up. That’s…more than a little embarrassing.
I’ve met this guy three times, and I already like how he says my name. Ezra clears his throat. “Hey.”
“Hi,” Jonathan says, leaning against the doorframe, all long limbs and broad shoulders and warm eyes. “Do you have a minute?”
The to-do list Ezra started this morning has doubled since he got to his desk, with only about a third of the tasks crossed out. “Yes?” he offers.
“You sound very confident about that,” Jonathan says, mouth quirking slightly at the corners.
His hair is doing something different today, more of a sweep of dark curls over his forehead rather than the combed-back style that Ezra assumed was his usual. It makes him look a little younger, a little softer. Ezra slams the door to that thought shut and swallows the key.
“I’ve got a minute,” he says. “What’s up?”
Jonathan’s easy smile falters into something almost chagrined. “Is there any chance you have time to help with a taharah?”
Ezra blinks. “What?”
“I hate to ask,” Jonathan says, and sounds like he means it. “But I can’t get a fourth member of the chevra out here for another hour, and we’re supposed to be starting in”—he checks his watch and makes a face—“twenty minutes. We can manage with three, but I really prefer a full four. Normally Aaron or your dad would fill in when we need an extra set of hands, but they’re both running ragged. Which you probably knew.” He gives Ezra a small, hopeful smile. “Aaron said you’d done it before and I could ask you, but he mentioned you weren’t super into it. I won’t be offended if you say no.”
“Oh,” Ezra says. He and his siblings had been taught the traditional pre-burial practices when they were in high school. The sex-segregated nature of the rituals meant that Ezra had learned from his mother, caught between discomfort and wonder, watching her maneuver rigid limbs with the same tenderness she used to brush the hair from his forehead.
It wasn’t until he put two and two together in college, finally having the space for his gender identity to puzzle into place the way he’d never been able to put into words, that he realized it wasn’t the ritual that had made him uncomfortable. It had been doing it for women, who were only supposed to be seen by other women. Some secret, hidden part of him had known he didn’t belong.
“I might need a quick refresher,” he says. “But I can do it.”
Jonathan’s face is like the sun breaking through a fog. “ Thank you, ” he says, so emphatic that red starts to creep up Ezra’s cheeks again.
“No problem,” he says quickly. “I mean, I’ll have to finish, like, two quick things here, but—” A thought occurs to him, an obvious thought. “Oh—hey. Um, there’s one thing.”
This never gets easier.
“I’m trans,” he says. Jonathan’s face doesn’t change, so Ezra pushes on before he can lose momentum. “Which you probably picked up on, but if it’s going to be an issue, like, on the religious side—”
“Oh.” Jonathan looks alarmed. “Oh my God. No. Of course not. Sorry, I should have— Sorry. Let me back up.” To Ezra’s surprised amusement, he literally takes a step back out into the hall, gives himself a little shake, clears his throat, and steps into the room again.
“Thank you for telling me,” he says, looking Ezra in the eyes with a kind of steady sincerity that Ezra doesn’t know what to do with. “I’m sorry you felt like you had to— That’s fine. We wouldn’t— It’s gender identity that matters. I wouldn’t have pressed you.”
“…Oh.” That damned earnest look. Ezra wants to wave off the whole conversation and hide under his desk to avoid it. He takes the easy route. “I’m happy to help, then.”
“Thank you,” Jonathan says, his warm, open face flooding with relief—and is he flushing a little? What the fuck, Ezra thinks. Jonathan’s hands twitch slightly at his sides, and Ezra catches the motion as he turns his wedding ring around his finger, a nervous little fidget Ezra recognizes from all his partnered friends.
“You’ll probably want to change, too,” Jonathan adds. Ezra raises an eyebrow, and Jonathan motions to his own casual clothing. “We’ll be dealing with a lot of water.”
“I remember,” Ezra says, wincing. “I keep some stuff across the yard at my parents’ house, I’ll grab something. I’ll meet you downstairs in twenty?”
“Fifteen, if you can swing it,” Jonathan says, and gives him a quick, grateful wave.
—
By the time Ezra makes it down to the preparation rooms, his dress pants swapped out for a pair of threadbare jeans he’d found in the back of his closet, Jonathan has been joined by two men Ezra doesn’t recognize. One looks to be in his late forties, the other older, closer to Dad’s age. They both shoot him slightly curious looks, but Jonathan does a smooth round of introductions, presenting Ezra as “Leo’s younger son” as if it’s obvious who he is, and the other two men seem to take it in stride, shaking his hand and giving their names, which Ezra does his best to commit to memory.
Jonathan passes him the taharah handbook outside the door, a slim booklet stapled with the chevra kadisha’s logo stamped on the cover. “That refresher you wanted,” Jonathan says, giving him a wink. “The text is still taped to the walls inside if you need a quick reference. I’m going to go check supplies, and we’ll get started when you’re ready, okay?”
Ezra spends the next several minutes frantically attempting to re-memorize liturgy while the other two men talk a few feet away and Jonathan rummages around on the other side of the door, silent except for the occasional sounds of a wheeling cart and rustling fabric. There’s a girl sitting shmira in the nook at the end of the hall, reading quietly aloud from a battered copy of The Many Adventures of Winnie-the-Pooh, her voice a gentle murmur. As if sensing Ezra’s presence, she gives him a small smile.
A daughter or granddaughter of the deceased, probably, going by her age. Ezra wonders if she volunteered for this, or if, like him, it never occurred to her to say no. He looks away.
When Jonathan pokes his head out again and cocks an eyebrow at him, Ezra musters a thumbs-up, handing the booklet back and rolling up his sleeves.
Like nearly every other Jewish practice, taharah starts with a handwashing, a ritual pouring of water without any soaping or scrubbing. Jonathan slips his wedding ring off and tucks it into his pocket before he puts his hands under the water, and Ezra catches the flash of sorrow that crosses his face before he smooths his expression back to something carefully neutral and calm. He glances around a moment later, as if to make sure no one noticed, and Ezra quickly looks away.
Hands washed and aired dry, they enter the room in traditional silence.
It’s cool inside, the only sound the soft hum of the cold storage unit across the hall. The telltale shape of a body lies flat on the table, covered by a plain white sheet. Moving with practiced ease, Jonathan picks up a box of matches and lights the candle waiting for them. He blows out the match and gestures for them to put on their surgical gowns and gloves, and then begins laying out the burial garments in their careful order. Ezra helps the other men prepare the casket, surprised to find that his hands remember the order of the work, laying out the lining cloth and the simple tallit. He runs his fingers over the tzitzit, arranging them carefully, and uses a pair of scissors to cut one down, rendering it unusable for prayer.
The movements come back to him with an ease he doesn’t expect, the liturgy even more so. He recites the words like it’s been days and not years since he’d last done this, the familiar phrases of blessings and psalms—prayers for the burial society, for the dead man’s forgiveness, for the blessing of the dead.
Jonathan uncovers the body with steady hands, and they begin.
Taharah is at once an intricate and simple process, somewhat modernized but relatively unchanged over centuries of practice. One area at a time, the body is uncovered and gently cleaned using lukewarm water and soft cloths. Then the ritual washing begins, the pouring of water over the body, carefully placed and timed to ensure an unbroken flow, simulating immersion in a ritual bath for purification.
The pouring is repeated three times, and then the body is dried and dressed before being placed with care in the coffin, wrapped in the tallit and then the sovev, the lining cloths. Pottery shards are laid over the eyes.
Ezra finds himself moving through each step as if he’s underwater, the light and sound of the world falling away into muted silence. The usual urges to look constantly over his shoulder disappear, leaving him almost buoyant.
The room is quiet, the murmur of voices blending into the rippling flow of the water. Ezra lets his hands move the way they will, at once disconnected and more present than he’s felt in months. He follows the cues of the other men, goes where he’s directed, lifts limbs and pours when his turn comes around again.
He can’t quite stop his eyes from drifting, time and again, to Jonathan.
If Ezra is moving mostly on muscle memory—not without care, but not with deep spiritual investment, either—then Jonathan moves with absolute intention. His eyes are simultaneously focused and soft above his mask, an absence of the subtle lines of tension at their corners that Ezra realizes he’s grown used to seeing. His gloved hands are tender as he touches the met, an elderly white man with hair gone pale with age and a face etched with deep lines, and Jonathan handles him the same way Ezra might handle a newborn baby, with reverence and care.
The man is a still, linen-wrapped form when they finish, anonymous and silent, but to the young woman reading as she sits shmira in the hallway, to the people who will come to his funeral early tomorrow morning—he was known, loved.
More than a body.
More than a ghost.
—
Afterward, Ezra finds himself unable to shake off the silence, even after they take off their gloves and complete the final rounds of handwashing, one just outside the taharah room for sanitation, the other at the sink outside the funeral home itself, accompanied by a quiet series of verses. The last washing is done with cold water, and Ezra shivers slightly in the cool late afternoon air, sitting on the steps outside the back door.
He’s alone. The sun has crept lower in the sky, and Ezra lets the wind ruffle his hair. Something in him needs this quiet calm, to sit in silence as the last remaining water droplets shrink and vanish from his skin. Normally he’d have his phone in his hands, scrolling for the sake of scrolling, but it’s as if all the parts of his psyche that bang against the cage of his ribs have washed away, out to sea, with the tepid water.
The door behind him creaks open and then closes with a soft click . “Hey,” Jonathan says quietly. “Mind if I join you?” Ezra shakes his head, and Jonathan sits on the step beside him, drawing his long legs up to rest his elbows on his knees. The posture makes him look younger. “You did a good job in there.”
“Thanks.”
“Sorry.” Jonathan laces his fingers together loosely. “I know it wasn’t your first time, or anything, but—”
“It’s okay, I know what you meant.” He does. There are people who hold it together during taharah and then break down afterward, people who can’t handle performing it at all.
Ezra never had the option to fall apart.
“You’re still quiet,” Jonathan observes. “I know we don’t know each other that well, but I don’t get a sense that quiet is your baseline.”
Ezra will give him that one.
“Want to talk about it?” Ezra raises his eyebrows, and Jonathan shrugs. “It can be a lot. The first one. Or the first one back, after—after a break.”
Something flickers across his face, soft and wistful, and Ezra thinks, without meaning to, Oh, there it is, there’s your trauma. I was almost worried that you were too good, that you didn’t have any, that I was going to ruin you.
It’s a shitty thing to think, and he shoves the thought away before it can slip any closer to the front of his mouth. Jonathan’s a sweet guy who’s had a horrible loss, and he doesn’t need you taking advantage of him for trying to be nice , he tells himself, channeling his mother’s stern tone. Then, before he can stop himself, he lets out a half-hysterical bark of laughter, because wow does that tone lose its moral weight when she’s just flounced off with another married woman.
Jonathan says, a little nervously, “You okay?”
“I’m going to hell,” Ezra says automatically, and then, when Jonathan looks alarmed, adds, “Oh, fuck, no, not for anything in there, just with—” He gestures vaguely at himself in a way he hopes conveys all of this; from the immediate bloom of understanding and the wry, generous smile that curves Jonathan’s mouth, the message gets across. “No. Sorry. Do you ever have an internal monologue that just gets away from you and you kind of want to just, like, take yourself directly to church?”
“We’re Jewish,” Jonathan says.
Ezra waves a dismissive hand. “And yet.”
Jonathan laughs. It’s not a sound Ezra’s heard from him before—it’s a full-throated, open sort of laugh, warm and genuine and slightly too loud, that lights up his whole face, and Ezra pushes his hair off his forehead, wrapping his arms around his knees and pillowing his cheek on his arms to watch him. The soft gold of the sunlight shines on the lighter strands in his dark hair, and Ezra says, the words slipping out in the unfiltered rush he thought he had figured out how to dam up, “You have a good laugh.”
“Oh, God, I really don’t.” Embarrassment flushes across Jonathan’s cheeks. “I used to get picked on as a kid for being so loud.” Ezra gives him an incredulous look. “Seriously! Well—okay.” He ducks his head, still grinning. “I used to snort a lot more. I grew out of that. Mostly.”
Ezra tries to picture him as a little kid, chubby-cheeked and chortling, snorting with every giggle. His own mouth turns up at the corners. “Still sounds cute.”
“I’ll let the kids at my high school know,” Jonathan says, dry but still smiling.
They spend a few minutes in an oddly comfortable silence. Ezra feels acutely aware of the distance between their shoulders, close enough that he can just feel the warmth of another body next to his. Jonathan has put his wedding ring back on and is toying with it again, twisting it around his finger, and Ezra is glad to see it—it’s a reminder that Jonathan’s a safe guy to look at, to flirt with a little, but that he still deserves better than Ezra’s haunted baggage.
Finally, Jonathan sighs, glancing at his watch. “I’d better get back inside. There’s another taharah scheduled in half an hour and I need to get the room reset and update the supply lists.”
Ezra shoves down a small flare of disappointment. “Need any help?”
“No, I’ll be okay. Besides, if I keep you too much longer, your brother will never let me hear the end of it.” Jonathan gets to his feet, brushing himself down, and then pauses. He looks down at Ezra like he wants to say something and isn’t sure how, that faint flush back on his cheeks, and Ezra feels, suddenly, pinned down.
There’s uncertainty to it, but a little bit of heat, too, and Ezra thinks, Oh, fuck, because he knows what’s coming, and that sucks, because now he’s going to look like an asshole .
“Listen,” Jonathan says. “I’m sure you’re busy, with everything going on, but I really appreciate the help today. Could I take you out to coffee or something? As a thank-you?”
And there it was. “I…don’t think that’s a good idea,” Ezra says, praying the reluctance he feels doesn’t show up in his voice. “Like you said, there’s just— There’s a lot going on right now.”
Jonathan’s glasses aren’t as thick as Mom’s, amplifying every trace of expression by ten, but he doesn’t seem to have much of a poker face, either. Ezra can see every emotion as it flickers rapid-fire over his features, disappointment-embarrassment-calm, before settling into a grin that’s so obviously a mask it almost hurts to look at it.
“Fair enough,” he says, easy, like it’s nothing. “But really. Thanks for your help.”
Nothing like a weird rejection to ruin a good vibe. Ezra plasters on a smile. “You got it,” he says. “See you around.”
Jonathan’s smile turns a little more genuine. “We do live in the same building,” he says, dry but good-humored. “It seems pretty likely.”
Ezra waits another five minutes before he follows Jonathan inside, just long enough to hopefully make sure they won’t run into each other in the hallway. The main floors of the Chapel are kept at a comfortable seventy degrees year-round, but the basement level is cooler for obvious reasons, and Ezra shivers slightly as he lets the door close behind him.
It’s only a few degrees of difference from the air outside, but it’s enough that Ezra doesn’t notice the tickling sensation at the back of his neck until he nearly walks past the ghosts.
There are two of them, standing by the girl sitting shmira outside the cold storage room, so still and half shadowed that Ezra almost doesn’t see them.
One is the man whose taharah Ezra just finished. He looks different in movement—they always do—and Ezra sees that his eyes are a lively blue, cloudy with age, and the lines around his face are from smiling, creasing as he watches the young woman read. A grandfather, Ezra thinks, or a well-loved uncle. He wonders what’s making him stay.
Maybe he just wants to hear the end of the book. Sometimes it really is that simple.
Ezra looks at the second ghost—and freezes.
He recognizes this one, too. He’s seen him twice. In two different places, which has never happened, not in all the years that Ezra has been seeing the dead. With everything that happened the night of the seder, the unexpected sighting had nearly slipped from his mind.
This makes three. Three buildings. One ghost. Tall and handsome and with eyes so sad that it cracks something in Ezra’s chest, for he seems so whole and solid he might still be breathing.
The ghost glances up and acknowledges him with the barest tilt of his head.
Ezra stares, unmoving, rooted to the floor.
“?‘And how are you?’ said Winnie-the-Pooh. Eeyore shook his head from side to side. ‘Not very how,’ he said. ‘I don’t seem to have felt at all how for a long—’ Oh!” As if sensing Ezra’s presence, the girl breaks off her reading, looking up at him with wide eyes. “I’m sorry—am I in the way or something?”
Ezra shakes himself back into reality. “No,” he says quickly. “No, sorry, you’re fine, I—”
Just thought I saw something, he almost says, but then remembers that that’s the worst possible thing to say to someone in a funeral home. “Just zoned out a bit,” he finishes instead. “Sorry, it’s been one of those days.” He tries to muster a smile. “Are you okay here? Can I get you anything?”
She returns the smile, small and a little sad. “I’m okay, but thank you.”
He leaves her with an awkward little wave and carefully doesn’t react as the two ghosts turn, as one, to watch him go.
Pages rustle behind him as she opens her book again, the sound of her voice following him down the hallway.
“?‘Not very how,’ Eeyore said,” she reads, a murmur that echoes on the tiled floor. “?‘I don’t seem to have felt at all how for a long time.’?”