Chapter 12
12
When Ezra finishes talking, his siblings stare at him.
“Sorry,” Aaron says at last. “I’m going to need you to go over this again.”
Ezra had intended to spend today’s breakfast telling them about Mom and Judy and everything that had come up in that shit show of a conversation. Instead, as soon as their waitress had left with their menus, he blurted out, “I’ve been seeing Judy’s kid’s ghost everywhere, and he’s breaking the fucking rules, ” and everything had promptly gone to hell.
Honestly, he’s a little impressed that they’re taking it as calmly as they are, but then again, neither of them are really the type to make a scene in the middle of an IHOP. Once they’re back in the car, all bets are probably off.
“Okay,” he says, wrapping his hands around his coffee mug to hide their shaking. “What do you want to know?”
“How about we start with why you never told us about the you-can-see-dead-people thing,” Aaron says. “And go from there.”
Ezra looks down. “I couldn’t.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know.” It’s half the truth. There was never a conscious decision not to tell anyone—and by the time he realized it, he’d wrapped himself in too many layers of No, sorry, just thought I saw something, corner of my eye, and I’m just talking to myself, and It’s nothing, it’s nothing, it’s nothing. The idea of undoing it all, of picking apart every moment he lied or pretended or pushed someone away, felt like throwing himself into the ocean and waiting to drown.
He’d tried, once. His first girlfriend in high school had loved ghost stories, loved mysteries, believed in the supernatural with all her heart and soul. If anyone was safe, he’d reasoned, it would be her. Instead, she burst into tears on the spot and accused him of making fun of her, of thinking everything she believed in was a joke. Ezra still remembers the way she looked at him, tear-streaked with betrayal. She’d never spoken to him again.
“I’m sorry. I just…”
Aaron makes a frustrated sound. “Did you think we wouldn’t have believed you?”
“ Would you?” Aaron might be the most religiously observant of the three of them, but he’s always been a skeptic when it comes to believing in anything he can’t see, rolling his eyes when Becca does tarot readings or refuses to make decisions when Mercury is in retrograde.
Aaron purses his lips. “Maybe not right away,” he admits. “But you said this has been going on since we were kids?” Ezra nods, reluctant, and Aaron spreads his hands, the universal Well? “I would have believed you then. I believed everything you said when we were kids. You were the boss, remember?”
Aaron’s steady and mature now, but growing up, he’d been a hurricane. Ezra was five when Mom first said, “Kids, be good. E—, you’re in charge,” when she left them to play together. Aaron was four years his senior.
“I didn’t know how,” Ezra says. That, at least, is the truth.
“That time in Mom’s office,” Becca says suddenly. She hasn’t said a word since Ezra started talking when they sat down, her face pale and shocked. “When I was thirteen, and you—you screamed —”
Aaron gives her a bewildered look. “What are you talking about?”
Becca ignores him, looking at Ezra, so focused it feels like she’s stripping back his skin. “You remember, don’t you? You were telling me about how stressed you were with school, while I was freaking out about my bat mitzvah studying, and then you just went”—she lets out a sharp, bitter laugh—“you went white as a ghost —”
Ezra knows. He remembers his senior year of high school as a blur of college applications, homework, anxiety, and kissing people who turned out to be assholes in the way all seventeen-year-olds are assholes, but that day stands out in vivid Technicolor. He’d been strung out on energy drinks, annotating a copy of Orlando while half-heartedly babysitting Becca in Mom’s office, when the ghost appeared. Becca’s right, he had screamed—it was a girl, no older than Ezra, blood-drenched and blank-eyed, her neck bent at an angle that no neck should be.
She’d settled into normality half an instant later, soft brown eyes and a tumble of dark curls, but that split second of horror had been enough to scare the hell out of Becca.
“You told me you were just letting out your energy, ” Becca goes on. “And then you told me I should try it, too. That it would make me feel better. And it did, but then Dad yelled at us because there was a service going on and they could hear us down the hall. You told him that it was your idea, so I shouldn’t get in trouble, and he grounded you for like a month . You had to miss homecoming!”
“I wouldn’t have gone to homecoming anyway,” he says, but he knows that’s not the point. Not when she’d tiptoed into his room that night and given him a tearful hug, thanking him in a whisper for giving her a few precious minutes to let off steam. Now here he is, years later, stomping on the memory. Her momentary lifeline, that bright spark of connection, reduced to a diversion. “Becca, I’m sorry.”
She glares at him—and then, unexpectedly, it drains away. “You must have been so lonely .”
Yep, he’d have been more comfortable with their anger. The way they’re looking at him now—Becca heartbroken, Aaron caught somewhere between bewilderment and hurt—is so much worse. “It was fine,” he says. “I mean, it wasn’t, like, tragic. Just weird.”
Aaron narrows his eyes, his expression shifting to something calculating, almost thoughtful. “Is this why you started hating the funeral home?”
“I don’t hate it.”
Becca snorts. “Hard false.”
Aaron ignores her. “You used to love hanging out there when we were kids. And then all of a sudden you just stopped . Mom and Dad had to start dragging you over when they needed help with stuff. Was it because of the ghosts?”
One ghost, really, Ezra wants to say, but doesn’t. If he starts talking about Zayde now, he won’t be able to stop. And he’ll probably cry, which he refuses to do in public at seven-thirty in the morning. It’s bad enough that the ghost of a middle-aged woman in a waitress’s uniform has drifted from behind the counter to the booth next to theirs and is listening with interest; Ezra doesn’t need their actual living waitress to follow suit. “I guess. It wasn’t just the ghosts, but…I guess. Yes.”
Becca looks like she wants to ask him something else, but Aaron clears his throat. “So why are you telling us now ?”
“It just seemed too— With Mom, and Judy, and now I’m seeing him everywhere, I just—” He swallows. “There were too many connection points. And if he’s sticking around because of something they did—because he died when Judy was supposed to…It’s not like I’m used to them being vengeful, but what if…”
The more he talks, the more absurd it sounds.
“So he’s just…what?” Aaron leans back in his seat. “Breaking all your ‘rules’?”
He adds the air quotes but manages not to sound sarcastic as he does it. Ezra had stumbled through an explanation of what he’s gotten used to from the ghosts he sees and how Ben has ignored just about everything Ezra thought he knew about how they worked. “Basically.”
“Well, there has to be some kind of reason.” Aaron looks like he’s grappling with a nasty crossword puzzle, the last traces of hurt dropping off his face. Ezra relaxes slightly. Aaron moving into logic mode doesn’t necessarily mean Ezra’s not going to get a guilt-tripping meltdown later, but it’s a good sign all the same. “Maybe it’s, like, an emotional resonance kind of thing.” Becca raises an eyebrow, and he says defensively, “What? I can come up with ghost ideas, too.”
Ezra lets that go. “It makes a lot more sense now that I know who he is. The Chapel, our house—if he did chevra work, it makes sense he’d have an attachment.”
Becca reaches for her abandoned plate. “What about at your apartment?”
Ezra shrugs. “Jonathan lives downstairs.”
“Which is absurd, for the record,” Becca says dryly. “There’s It’s a small gay world after all, and there’s literally moving into the same house. Is New England queer geography challenging Jewish geography now? I just need to know if I should brush up on my six degrees of separation.”
“Becca,” Aaron chides, but there’s a hint of a smile tugging at his mouth as he shakes his head. “She’s right, honestly. It is weird. And what are you supposed to do, anyway? Help him stop haunting shit?”
“Trust me, if I knew, I’d be doing it.” Ezra considers telling them what Mom said, about Judy being the person who should have been driving the night Ben died, but something stops him. If he knew more, maybe…He eyes the half-empty plates across the table, then dismisses them. His appetite has shriveled in his stomach. “I mostly feel like an idiot for not putting it together sooner.”
“In your defense,” Becca says, “there were one or two other things going on.” She nudges the remainder of her waffle closer to him. “What are you going to do about Jonathan?”
Ezra pokes reluctantly at the waffle with his fork. “What do you mean?”
She gives him a pointed look. “The part where you could cut the sexual tension between you two with a knife?”
Ezra opens his mouth, then snaps his head around to scowl at Aaron, who has the decency to look sheepish.
“In my defense,” he says, “I had to tell someone .”
“Jail for you,” Ezra tells him. “I don’t know. I don’t know! What am I supposed to tell him? Hey, you’re cute, and I’m possibly the first person you’ve flirted with since your husband died, but by the way, your husband’s ghost is in the corner ? I don’t see that going over so well.”
“Valid,” Becca muses. “Could be a mood killer.” She props her chin on her hand, eyes thoughtful. “So, what, you’re dead in the water? Horrible pun not intended. Does the husband-ghost thing just squash it for you?”
Ezra takes a too-large bite of waffle to avoid answering. If he were a better person, the answer would be that of course that squashed any likelihood he had of acting on his attraction to Jonathan, and even if it hadn’t been an issue, he was a mess, and he wasn’t about to ruin Jonathan’s first venture back into the dating world by being…well, himself.
Unfortunately, he’s probably not a better person, no matter how much he wishes he was.