I just hadn’t considered the pressure my absence would put on Jean during her own last two years of high school. Two years of always having to rush straight home to help Mom with Ethan. Two years of never being able to spend time with friends, of never being able to go to parties, of never being able to fumble in back seats with boys. Two years until graduation and then two more years of putting her own future on hold, so Mom would not have to deal with our family nightmare alone.
And I had to admit to myself: that was bullshit, too. I mean, that I hadn’t considered it. Of course I’d considered it. I’d considered it, taken the offer of freedom from Ethan, and fled while there was still something left of me to flee with.
I wanted to say I was sorry, but that would have been an insult, so I said nothing.
She studied the fading light. “It’s not even you I’m mad at. It’s them. All those sanctimonious assholes in there. All those covered casseroles and cold cut platters; everybody bringing the same things, every day. Making a big show of being there for Mom, when for all these years it was hell getting any one of them to spare an afternoon or an hour to watch him so I could take her out of the house for a while. When Ethan was just this thing that was never going to end, they were all just fine with letting her live like somebody who had to be chained to one spot. They wanted nothing to do with us. But now that’s he’s almost gone, they’re back, wanting back into our lives. It’s like… Ethan was never anything but a stigma. And once he dies, we’ll all be clean again.”
“Maybe we will,” I said.
I expected anger, but got something worse, a pathetic little half-smile of the sort an adult offers to a child who has not yet learned the ways of the world and who has said something adorable and precocious and sad and naïve. “Will we? Is that even possible now? After everything we’ve seen?”
“Of course it is. I promise you: when this is all over, we’ll all go somewhere for a while and figure out how.”
A terrible warbling sound erupted from the house. It was less a scream than a chorus of them, all erupting from a throat that now came equipped with a multitude of voices. They all cut off in mid-howl, replaced with something bubbling and liquid that invoked the image of a room of bound captives trying to breathe through slit throats.
One of the distant cousins, a stranger to me, burst from the house, fell to his knees, and vomited on our front lawn. It took him several minutes to empty, and even once he did, he remained on hands and knees, trembling, preferring that spot and the view of his own stomach’s contents to the prospect of returning to the house inhabited by the family obscenity.
Jean rested her head on my shoulder. “You better keep that promise, bro. I’ve never even been to Disney World.”
It was five hours later. We were back inside, drowning in more premature condolences, when the low hubbub of empty conversation went away all at once. At first I thought it was just one of those awkward conversational lulls endured by all families who have ever endured an extended death watch, but then I registered the gaze of an aunt frozen in the act of dipping a cracker into a bowl of salsa, the identical look on the face of her fat husband who’d been napping on and off between forced reminders of her own deep empathy, and the relief on the faces of almost everybody else, as they reacted to something over my shoulder. I turned around and saw Dr. Zuvicek, who had stopped midway down the stairs and now faced us all, looking grim and professorial and older than his years. He had washed up and changed into a new black suit, one unsullied by the various explosive effluents of time spent with Ethan; he had slicked back his hair and resculpted the flared lines of his beard and transformed himself back into the buttoned-down man of medicine, but the ordeal of the last few hours had still taken a lot out of him, and he wore the pain of it on his face and on the shoulders.
He faced us all, and announced, “Ethan’s gone.”
One of the distant aunts broke the silence with a tremulous, “Are you sure?”
“He is dead now,” Zuvicek said, putting a slight emphasis on the word now. “There is no respiration, no movement, no reaction to stimulus, no sign of additional transformation. For the last four hours he has done nothing but cool. It is safe, as safe and as decent as it ever could be, to now declare him gone and go on with our lives. We may say goodbye to him.”
Our distant aunt valued being part of the drama too much to do the sensible thing and just keep her mouth shut. “But are you sure?”
Zuvicek just raised an eyebrow at her and let the silence grow teeth.
I hugged Jean and considered how easy and how terrible it would have been for Ethan’s disorder to strike either one of us instead.
“Almost free,” she whispered.
“Just a little bit longer,” I assured her.
I endured a shoulder squeeze from one of the many cousins jingling car keys and thanked the handful of others who offered spoken condolences. Most couldn’t wait to rush outside, to retrieve the funeral urns they had brought. Jean and I were not so lucky. We had to follow Zuvicek upstairs, and aid my mother in parceling out Ethan’s pieces.
This was the last necessary duty we’d spent so many years dreading. The very nature of Ethan’s curse is that he changed. He changed without purpose and he changed without limit and he changed without end. It had taken him years of changing from one foul thing into another to finally change into something without breath, without heart, without voice, without any signs of whatever life meant if you were talking about something like Ethan: something that seemed content to remain what it was and could therefore be considered dead enough for a funeral.
But we couldn’t afford to just bury, or even cremate, him. Unlike the more limited shape-changers of the old horror pictures, Ethan had not been granted the dignity of being restored to humanity as he lay dying. He’d remained whatever he was at the moment he stopped moving, and there was no way to know for sure that his corpse was anything but another cruel transformation, one that wouldn’t decide, an hour or day or a decade later, that it was just another transition state to be abandoned as soon as it could change back to something alive.
Nor would it have helped to cremate him. After all, so many of the things he’d turned into, over his tormented lifetime, had been on fire. He’d been ashes several times, and had always turned back to living tissue.
There was no way to be sure. There never would be.
So his only funeral was a diaspora. His pallbearers all climbed our stairs bearing empty urns and all descended with full ones, each heavier than its mere weight could account for. They piled into their respective cars and made their way back to homes in fourteen states and three foreign countries, burying his pieces in desert sands or sinking them in wetland ooze. They fed pieces of him into raging furnaces and tossed other pieces of him over the railings of cruise ships. They left pieces of him in landfills and in the concrete foundations of office buildings, pieces of him broiling in the world’s sun-blasted deserts or forming ice crystals beneath permafrost.
Nobody was going to be half-assed enough to dispose of their pieces of Ethan in any location too close to anybody else’s; they’d all heard the terrible sounds from upstairs, and knew that they did not want to be responsible for the pieces of Ethan ever finding each other, congealing, and coming back. So notes had been compared, and maps consulted.