Chapter 8
8
After that, Ezra stops trying to ignore the ghosts.
It’s not hard to find them. He may have left, but they were always here.
Most of them are fleeting. Their bodies are here, waiting for burial, so they hover—in the little family rooms, in the preparation rooms, drifting, listless, uncertain. Many are peaceful, old men and women who died of failed hearts or lungs or a stroke or any of the other tiny events that add up to natural causes on the death certificates it’s Ezra’s job to hunt down. Others are too young, and furious about it, whatever futures they had planned forever out of reach.
Once they’re buried, most fade. Some attend their own funerals, where Ezra lingers in the wings, bottled water and extra tissues at the ready, a ghost himself.
Worse are the ghosts that stay. Shades he remembers from childhood, most of their names long forgotten, some of them—maybe most of them—dead before he was even born. Others are family, like Uncle Joe’s first wife, Maddie, who worked in reception until Ezra was ten, when her second breast cancer diagnosis came too late, and still lingers around the offices, her brow furrowed when the phone rings too long without an answer.
Then there’s Zayde, who’s everywhere.
In the days and weeks after his grandfather’s death, Ezra avoided the Chapel with a desperate stubbornness. When he reluctantly went back, Dad all but ushering him across the yard to help with gathering up discarded programs and emptying trash bags between one service and the next, Zayde was there, too, with his dark suit and mournful eyes, watching with that familiar critical frown as the chairs were reset and tissue boxes arranged.
Except for the silence, it was almost as if he hadn’t died at all.
Ezra couldn’t understand it. At first, he thought that maybe Zayde was angry with him, and that explained his refusal to respond when Ezra tried day after day to talk to him. He would reach out to try to touch his grandfather’s hand, to hold it the way he used to on their morning walks, but it always felt like plunging his fingers into icy water, a feeling so cold it burned.
After a month, his parents sat him down and told him, gently but firmly, that he was too old for imaginary friends. That talking to the empty air was confusing Becca, and his insistence that the empty air was their grandfather was making it worse. That they understood he missed Zayde very much, they all did, but there were better ways to grieve than pretending he was still there.
“It’s time to be a big kid,” his mother said, not unkindly, as Ezra chewed the inside of his cheek until his mouth tasted salty and sharp. “No more imaginary Zayde. Okay?”
“But—” Ezra started to protest, and then, catching the brimming ferocity around his mother’s eyes, thought better of it. It was fine, he thought, even though his chest felt hot and tight. He could pretend. “Okay.”
—
Zayde is in the chapel and in the offices, in the taharah room and the supply closets. He hovers on the fringes while Ezra cleans the caskets in the showroom, running spectral fingers over the pine and flicking the lingering specks of sawdust. He’s at the edges of services and on the periphery of intake calls, and follows every processional to the very edge of the door, watches as every hearse drives away.
This morning, he’s standing over Ezra’s desk like a shadow. Ezra tries to ignore him, still sorting through the mess of Mom’s inbox, but then Zayde’s leaning turns into lurking.
“Can I actually help you with something?”
Zayde straightens up. In Ezra’s memory, he’s large and imposing, but seeing him now, he’s slender, the gaunt memory of starvation permanently etched into the shadows of his face. He tilts his head toward the open door, and Ezra frowns.
“What?”
Another significant look. Bemused, Ezra gets to his feet and follows his grandfather down the hall and down the staff stairwell into the basement where the prep and taharah rooms are, shivering at the familiar drop in temperature from one floor to another. Trailing in the wake of Zayde’s steps, it’s hard not to feel like Ezra’s doing the haunting. He touches his fingers to the wall to feel something solid beneath them, reassurance that he’s there, that he’s real, that he’s breathing.
Zayde stops outside the closed door of the taharah room. Crossing his arms, he looks at Ezra again, then at the door.
Then he’s gone.
Ezra stares at the empty spot of floor. As though if he stares long enough, he can see the echo of footprints there, proof of presence.
The hallway is quiet, empty of murmuring voices—the funeral directors coordinating their schedules, members of chevrei kadisha beginning or concluding a taharah. A quick check of the sign-in sheet on the wall shows no rituals until the afternoon, the most recent one scheduled to have ended an hour earlier. There’s no sign of disarray, nothing he can think of that would warrant his grandfather’s summoning.
On the other side of the taharah room door, someone hitches in a breath, then goes quiet. The universal sound of bitten-back tears, of not wanting to be heard crying, even alone, even in an empty room. It’s not an uncommon sound in these halls, and for a moment, Ezra hesitates, reluctant to intrude on someone’s grief.
He also knows, with an exhausted surety, that if he goes back upstairs, it’ll be less than a minute before Zayde is glaring at him again.
Ezra taps his fingers on the door. There’s a startled gasp on the other side. “Sorry,” he says. “I’m just— Is everything okay?”
There’s a beat of silence, the familiar quiet of a person collecting themselves. He’s not expecting to recognize the hesitant voice that says “Ezra?”
Ezra opens the door.
Jonathan looks young and small, sitting on the floor with his knees drawn up to his chest. He’s pushed his glasses up on top of his head, holding his hair back from his brow, and he blinks up at Ezra with damp, red-rimmed eyes. “Hi,” he says, his voice cracking on the word. “Sorry. I was trying to be quiet.”
“You were,” Ezra says. He steps into the room and closes the door, careful not to let it slam. “I just happened to be down here. Are you okay?”
Jonathan gives him a watery smile. “Fine,” he says, and if it’s a false answer to a foolish question, Ezra can’t object. “Just.” He nods his head toward the table. “It was a hard one.”
Ezra follows his gaze to the closed casket, still and silent with a candle flickering at its head.
It’s a very, very small box.
“Oh,” he says.
Jonathan lets out a trembling breath. “Yeah.”
It’s not the first Ezra’s seen, or even the smallest. But it cracks something in him all the same. It’s a too-sharp reminder that he’s miles away from his doula work, from spending his time in breath and life.
So far, he’s been lucky. He’s terrified of the day he won’t be.
He sits beside Jonathan on the floor, just close enough for their shoulders to touch. He remembers Jonathan’s tenderness when he’d handled the old man’s limbs, the softness of his touch.
Every death leaves a void, but these are different.
The phones are probably ringing upstairs, and Ezra doesn’t want to think about his inbox, so he doesn’t. He deepens his own breathing, slow inhales and slower exhales, and eventually Jonathan matches it.
There isn’t anything he can say that will fix this, nothing to make it easier, but he can sit here, and breathe, and be proof that the world spins on.