Chapter 24
24
When Ezra was eleven, his parents had left him and Aaron in charge of Becca for the day while they went to a conference in Boston. Becca had been nursing a fever for three days, and Mom had needed to pry her off her legs in order to leave, giving Ezra half-distracted instructions for administering Tylenol as she stepped into her shoes, Dad yelling a reminder from the doorway that they were going to be late. After they left, Becca had hidden under her bed and cried herself to sleep, refusing to come out no matter how much macaroni and cheese or television Ezra tried to bribe her with.
Then, two hours later, she’d woken up screaming.
Ezra doesn’t remember much of that afternoon. He remembers trying to call their parents, only to have his calls go straight to voicemail. He vaguely remembers trying to reach Uncle Joe, but Aunt Maddie had been in chemo that weekend.
He doesn’t remember the decision to take Mom’s car keys and try to drive Becca to the nearest hospital themselves, but he does remember talking Aaron—still six months away from his learner’s permit—out of calling 911 instead because their parents had been worrying about money again, preoccupied to the point that they hadn’t even noticed him listening at the kitchen door during one of their many arguments, and he was old enough to know that ambulances were expensive .
Melissa caught them trying to bundle a crying, vomiting Becca into the car on her way to the parking lot outside the Chapel. She’d taken one look and snatched the keys out of Ezra’s hand.
It was probably sheer dumb luck that she took speed limits as suggestions more than rules. They might not have made it to the hospital before Becca’s appendix burst if she hadn’t.
“What on earth were you two thinking ?” Melissa had asked, sitting with Aaron and Ezra in the hospital after Becca had been rushed into emergency surgery, waiting for their parents to join them.
“I was just trying to help,” Ezra said. He wiped his eyes. He was too old for crying. “Please don’t tell Mom about the car.”
“Sweetheart,” she said, sympathetic. “Why didn’t you call an adult?”
“We tried,” Aaron said, more defensive than Ezra would have been. “They didn’t pick up.”
“Why didn’t you come across to the Chapel and get one of us?”
Ezra looked at Aaron. Aaron looked back blankly. “You were at work,” Ezra said, and hated how small his voice sounded. “And I was in charge.”
Melissa glanced at Aaron, one eyebrow raised, and frowned at his answering shrug. There was something more careful in her voice when she asked, “And that means you couldn’t ask for help?”
Ezra swallowed. He didn’t like what he saw in her face. “Am I in trouble?”
Melissa regarded him for a long moment, and then sighed. “No,” she said. “But next time, maybe consider phoning a friend before you jump right to grand theft auto.”
She smiled as she said it, like that would lessen the sting. Melissa hadn’t told his parents, but Ezra had still known. He’d been given a single job, and he’d messed it up.
And now, years later, he’s about to do it all over again.
You’re the only person I have.
The words sink into him, stones in still water. He’s been the only person for most of his life, but it feels worse, somehow, to be a dead man’s last hope.
—
Ezra spends three days dragging his feet and moving through his work like a zombie, too distracted by Ben’s voice in his head to do anything other than act on autopilot. It’s a relief when Becca ambushes him in the staff room, catching Ezra while he’s trying to convince the ancient printer to stop choking on any document longer than a page and a half.
“Subtle,” Ezra says, taking in her body language and deciding there’s no point in trying to talk his way out of whatever she’s about to hit him with.
Becca points at the table. “Sit,” she says tartly. Ezra cocks an eyebrow at her, because he didn’t spend ninety percent of his life parenting her just for her to start ordering him around, but he pulls out a chair and drops into it. Becca plops down across from him. “Were you and Aaron just not going to tell Dad about the bank account thing?”
Ezra opens his mouth, considers twenty or so possible answers to that question in order of pettiness, and then closes it. “It’s on the to-do list.”
It’s not high on the to-do list. But it’s on there.
Becca folds her arms across her chest again and scowls at him. “Aaron told me Mom gave you all the records and everything. I don’t get why you haven’t told Dad about it. When it was just mystery deposits, fine, whatever, but now you’re just doing the same thing Mom did, and I don’t get how that’s better .”
He and Aaron had been going in circles about it since Mom sent over the paperwork that put the accounts in Aaron’s and Ezra’s names, along with all of her records and notes. She’d been meticulous and consistent, calculating the cash flow shortfall twice each month and transferring over just enough to cover it, attaching the deposits to client invoices with no actual client records. To Ezra’s surprise, she’d been transferring money into the accounts as well, a percentage of the money from the rare months when they pulled in a profit, supplemented with a portion of her own paycheck, because she was smart enough to notice that, generous as those accounts were, they weren’t going to last forever.
He and Aaron had spent most of a day barricaded in Mom’s office, going through the records with a fine-tooth comb to try to get a handle on just how bad the situation was and just how fucked they’d be if the accounts suddenly ran dry. It didn’t seem like they were in any danger of doing so immediately. Most of Zayde’s assets had, it turned out, gone right into them when he died. But like Mom said, they weren’t a permanent solution. By Ezra’s math, if nothing changed, they’d have two years left. Three, if they were careful.
But without that money, they were several thousand dollars in the red more often than they broke even. They’d need to bring in four or five more clients a month in order to even out over a year, and while they had the advantage of name recognition and fairly good standing in the community—or they did, before everything with Mom and Judy came out; Ezra’s honestly got no clue what their reputation is like now, though it’s not like things have been quiet —there are only so many people around to die in a given month.
And Ezra really doesn’t need the kind of karma that comes with hoping a few more people drop dead just so they can make payroll.
“It’s not exactly an easy conversation to have,” he says at last.
Becca looks at him for a few seconds, like she’s trying to read his thoughts through the lines of his face, and sympathy wins out over frustration.
“You know the longer you wait, the worse it’s going to be.”
Ezra realizes, in a heartbeat of horrible comprehension, that she’s not just talking about Dad. For all the pieces of himself he tries to hide, to spare other people the worry of seeing him, his siblings have always known him better than almost anyone else. He looks away from her.
“Ezra,” she says, softly now.
“I know.” He doesn’t need her to say anything else. “I just…I need to find the right time. The right way to say it.”
Becca squeezes his hand. “Have you figured anything else out? About why he’s still here?”
You’re the only person I have, he’d said, like that was supposed to be a comfort. But Ezra can’t stop thinking of that first night on the steps of the porch. The way Ben had looked at him, almost imploring.
Fix it.
Like Ezra knows what that means, when Ben couldn’t be more mixed up in the mess of Ezra’s life, between Jonathan and Judy and his own time, apparently, at the Chapel. There are more things to “fix” than Ezra can even wrap his head around. He swallows. “No.”
“You’ll figure it out,” she tells him, with a surety Ezra wishes he could channel. “You always do.”
He doesn’t have her confidence, but he turns his hand to squeeze hers back anyway. “Thanks,” he says. “So. What are we going to do about Dad?”
She lets him get away with the subject change, and he loves her for it. Her lips twitch, and she lets him go, sitting back. “We could try to figure that one out together, I guess,” she says. “At least we can all see everyone involved in that mess.”
“Charitable of you.”
“Is that Becca?” Aaron pokes his head into the room. “I thought I heard you. What are you doing here?”
“Interrogating me about why we haven’t talked to Dad about Mom and Zayde’s secret banking habits,” Ezra says. “Thanks for spilling the beans on that, by the way.”
Aaron salutes him with the coffee mug he’s carrying. “You’re welcome. And I had an idea about that, actually.” He makes a face that hits somewhere between a smile and a grimace. “I don’t think you’re going to like it. But it’s an idea.”
“Solid start,” Becca says. “Really getting a confident vibe here.”
“Lag BaOmer is later this week,” Aaron says. “I’m pretty sure Dad’s still planning to do a fire, and since I’m pretty sure he’s going to want to burn a bunch of shit down when we tell him about this anyway, we might as well, you know”—he shrugs—“two birds, one stone.”
Ezra considers it. It’s one of the few ritual holidays that he’s always liked celebrating at home, mostly because their family observance has always been a backyard bonfire and staying up past bedtime, rather than putting on nice clothes and sitting politely at the table for fancy meals, which always made Mom stressed and Dad irritable. He’d been assuming it was off the table this year, given everything going on, but if it wasn’t…
“It is one of his favorites,” he says slowly.
Becca looks just as thoughtful, drumming her nails on the table. “I like it,” she says. “What if we asked Mom to come?”
Ezra snaps his head around to look at her. “What?”
“No way,” Aaron says at the same time, his voice mingling with Ezra’s in a jumbled mess.
“No, hear me out,” Becca protests. “It’s Mom’s mess, first of all, and she owes it to him to be the one to tell him and apologize, not have you guys doing it for her. And it’s always been, like, one of the only holidays where they don’t freak out at each other at least once. Maybe it can be, I don’t know, an olive branch kind of thing.”
“Shouldn’t she be the one extending olive branches?” Aaron asks, flat and dry.
“It was just a suggestion,” Becca says, but something about her seems almost deflated, and Ezra’s never once been able to handle that look on her face.
“Let’s ask Dad,” he says. Both his siblings stare at him, and he shrugs. “It should be up to him if he wants her there. If he does, we’ll invite her and tell her she needs to come clean. If he doesn’t”—he grimaces, already scripting in his head; even if Mom did agree to come, at some point he’ll end up taking over the conversation to keep it from going to hell, so it probably doesn’t make a difference—“I’ll do it, I guess.”
Becca chews her lower lip. “Mom should do it, though,” she says.
Story of my life, Ezra doesn’t say, and gets up to wash the coffeepot so that they won’t see the look on his face.
—
Dad, to no one’s surprise, doesn’t want Mom coming to the bonfire.
He stares at Ezra and Aaron like they’ve grown second heads when they ask him, thick eyebrows raised all the way up over the rims of his glasses. It reminds Ezra of being sixteen and asking to go to a coed sleepover, as if the sheer concept of the proposal was so absolutely absurd that his father couldn’t believe he was being asked. It’s almost reassuring to be on the receiving end of this again, a little spark of normality amid the mess of the last month and a half.
“So that’s a no, then,” Aaron says at last.
“That’s a no,” Dad says. “Is there a reason you two look ready to throw yourselves in the bonfire?”
“No,” Ezra says. Probably too quickly. He clears his throat. “Do you need us to bring anything?”
The look Dad gives him suggests that he doesn’t trust a word coming out of Ezra’s mouth, but he seems willing to give him a pass for now. “No,” he says, and then, considering, “You could invite Jonathan, if you’d like.”
Ezra freezes. “I—” he says. He looks at Aaron for support—he gets absolutely nothing back—and manages an articulate, only slightly strangled “Why?”
Dad sits back in his chair, the imposing desk that used to be Zayde’s stretching out in front of him. He steeples his fingers, eyes twinkling with amusement, which would be a relief to see if Ezra weren’t currently drowning in empathy for every deer that ever stepped out onto a highway with no idea what was about to hit them.
“He mentioned once that he enjoys the holiday,” he says. “No other reason. Unless there’s one you think I should know about?”
“You’re not as funny as you think you are,” Ezra says, crossing his arms over his chest.
Dad chuckles. “Blame Melissa,” he says. “She’s the one who apparently caught you two—how did she put it?—‘necking in the parking lot’?”
“Oh my God,” Ezra says, dropping his face into his hands. “That wasn’t— We weren’t necking —”
“In broad daylight, too,” Aaron says, clicking his tongue. “Where’s the professionalism?”
Ezra’s phone chooses that moment to ring, and he’s never been so grateful to have a client go into labor in his life.
Broad-shouldered and bearded, Ryan hadn’t made a secret of being perversely grateful to have spent most of the last several months getting side-eyed for his beer belly rather than dealing with invasive strangers commenting on his pregnancy. He has the personality of a field general, decisive and commanding, and Ezra thinks that’s probably why he’s gotten through this pregnancy with as much ease as he has. He’d gone the single-parent route deliberately, deciding at thirty-seven that if he wasn’t partnered yet, he wasn’t likely to be in a co-parenting position on any kind of timeline he felt good about. When he hired Ezra four months ago, he’d told him point-blank that he wasn’t interested in the “gooey hippie” parts of doula services; he just wanted to make sure he had one guaranteed person in the room with him who wouldn’t fuck up his pronouns.
“You’d be surprised how many people default to ‘You got this, Mama,’?” he’d told Ezra dryly during their last pre-labor meeting, breathing hard through his teeth while Ezra showed him an acupressure point, pressing firmly against his lower back. “I figure you have more empathy than most people would, considering. Ow, mother fucker, are you sure this is helping?”
“No pain, no gain,” Ezra said, and met Ryan’s scowl with a grin.
Practiced confidence or not, sixteen hours of active labor is enough to crack anyone’s calm. Marcie, Ryan’s midwife—who has, to her credit, not misgendered him once—assures them both that the baby’s tolerating the contractions just fine, but Ryan’s energy is flagging and he’s been stuck at nine centimeters for an hour.
“This was the stupidest thing I’ve ever done,” he pants, leaning hard on Ezra’s shoulder to steady himself on the birthing ball. “What was I thinking?”
“You were thinking you’re going to be an amazing parent,” Ezra tells him, firmly keeping any kind of pain off his face even though he’s sure he’ll have finger-shaped bruises tomorrow. “Which you will.”
“I’m going to be the kind of parent who reminds their kid how long labor took for their entire life, ” Ryan grits out. “Son of a— Fuck .”
“Oh, that’s promising,” Marcie says brightly, pulling on a new pair of gloves. “Let’s check your dilation again.”
They hadn’t planned on a water birth, but Ryan latches on to the offer of the tub as soon as Marcie makes it. He relaxes slightly when he sinks into the warm water, but Ezra catches the lines of pain and anxiety on his face. “Hey,” he says, crouching down beside the tub. Ryan’s on his knees, tall enough for his shoulders to be out of the water as he rests his arms on the ledge for support, his hands digging into opposite elbows. “You’re doing great, okay? You’re almost done. One more hard part, that’s it.”
Ryan laughs, tight and pained, and drops his head onto his folded arms.
Marcie meets Ezra’s eyes over Ryan’s shoulder and inclines her head pointedly. It’s just the three of them in the room. Ryan’s been pointedly reticent on his reasons for not wanting any family or friends with him, and it’s not Ezra’s job to pry, but it means he’s not getting the partner or family support Ezra’s used to supplementing, not providing completely. Marcie’s look is clear: Step it up. She radiates a no-nonsense competency that makes her both excellent at her job and terrifying to work with. Ezra takes the hint.
“Ryan, hey,” he says. Ryan opens his eyes, looking young and scared and uncertain, his teeth digging so hard into his bottom lip that Ezra’s a little worried he might bite through it. “Hey,” he says again, and puts his hands on Ryan’s shoulders. “You can do this.”
Ryan shakes his head. “I can’t,” he says, and then drops his forehead back onto his arms with a shuddering groan.
“You can,” Marcie says, her tone firmer than Ezra’s but no less gentle. “It’s time to push, hon. You can do it.”
“I should have waited,” Ryan says, not picking his head up. “I should’ve— I can’t do this by myself. I—”
He breaks off at another contraction, and Ezra grips his shoulders through it. He catches Marcie’s frown—she’d never do it if Ryan was facing her, Ezra’s worked with her enough to know that, but he can see the concern on her lined, kind face. “Ryan,” he says, squeezing his arms. “Hey. You’re not by yourself, okay? We’re right here with you.” Ryan shakes his head again.
Ezra thinks, Okay, well, fuck it, and says, “Do you want me to get in with you?”
Ryan’s trembling stills, and then he looks up.
His nod is tiny, but it’s there.
Ezra takes the time to kick off his shoes, but Marcie’s quick, jerking nod is enough confirmation that they don’t have time for him to go change into scrubs. He climbs into the tub fully clothed, the water sloshing at the introduction of another body. As if on instinct, Ryan shifts around until his back is pressed to Ezra’s chest, and Ezra holds on to both his hands, biting back a swear when he feels the bones in his fingers shift under Ryan’s grip. “You’ve got this,” he says. “Okay? You can do this.”
“I can do this,” Ryan echoes.
“That’s what I like to hear,” Marcie says. “Next contraction, you push.”
When Ezra did his doula training, he had an instructor who insisted that at some point they’d attend a birth that felt different from anything they’d been at before. One that changed something fundamental in the way they worked, the way they felt.
“You might know it when you’re there, you might not,” she told the room. “But it’ll settle in your bones, in your hands, and you’ll remember it. The body always remembers more than you think.”
He feels this one in his bones.
The water clouds with blood, but it never feels dirty, never feels wrong. The weight of Ryan’s back against him means that he feels the ripple of feedback when Ryan passes the baby’s head, then its shoulders. And then Marcie is scooping a wriggling infant out of the water, a wail escaping the tiny face as soon as he breaks the surface, and Ryan is crying and Ezra is crying, and it’s the whirlwind of skin to skin and third-stage labor and a transition out of the water, the birth center staff and nurses filtering in and out of the room to help.
It’s chaos, noise and movement, and the buzz of voices and bodies and life . Ezra feels more alive, more present, more himself, than he has in weeks, and through all of it, he doesn’t once think of ghosts.