Her Husband's Hands and Other Stories

Pieces of Ethan

Ethan’s condition swallowed him whole on the day of his sixth birthday. You could say that he was dead from that moment on, though he lingered for many years afterward, dragging all of us into the same black hole with him. Maybe we were entitled to hate him for what he became, and what that did to us: but how was he entitled to feel about us, the ones who would go on after he was gone?

It happened at the place on Sunny Creek where the river turned wide enough and calm enough and deep enough to become our natural playground on those days when the afternoons were more generous with hours than chores. This was of course still many years before that creek was dried to a fraction of its former glory by the dams greedy developers constructed upstream in order to turn our little valley from a refuge on the edge of wilderness to yet another overcrowded place for city folks to breed their litters of vacant-eyed suburban tots. We could splash around in our underwear or even outside of it without fear of offending neighborhood prudes or attracting neighborhood pederasts. Until that day Ethan changed we considered the site one of the great landmarks of our childhood, and I suppose we still did after Ethan, though what it meant to us had irrevocably changed by then.

I returned to the spot just once within the last couple of years, just to see if it had continued to get worse after Ethan died and our family moved away forever. I found rust on the rocks, stagnant water that stank of sewage, and abandoned crack pipes in the dirt. Highway traffic was audible over the trickle that remained of the waterfall. The ruination of our childhood playground made the lives we had lived before Ethan’s transformation look even more like what it was: an idyll we had known but lost.

But back then, it was still a family refuge beloved by all of us. And so Mom had felt no misgivings over asking me to take him there and keep him occupied until it was time to get him dressed for his party. He’d been driving her crazy for hours with his constant talk of the presents to come, and she needed him taken out of the house as acceptable alternative to strangling him. It was a choice between watching him or helping her clean the living room, so I agreed. She packed some sandwiches and sodas, and let me take Ethan and our middle sister Jean out to where the water was cold and white.

We enjoyed a few hours of innocent fun going over the falls and dunking each other under the water, before taking a break on the flat rocks that overlooked the pool so we could feel the droplets tingle as they turned to vapor on our skin. During those hours, the last unspoiled hours of our lives, I’d dared Ethan to jump from the highest cliff, something he hadn’t ever worked up the nerve to do before and might actually be able to steel himself to attempt some visit soon. I’d splashed Jean in the face and endured her promises to go running to Mom. I’d endured the inevitable payback in the form of the fistful of mud she’d mined from the pond bottom. We teased and played and pretended that time wasn’t passing at all as the sun rose high in the sky and started to sink again, changing only the pattern of the light that shone like diamonds on the rippled surface.

Many years later, I think about the first part of the day and reflect that if the bad thing hadn’t come along to ruin it we would now remember it as one of the perfect, transcendent moments of our lives; one of those days that we all keep as permanent snapshots in our heads, when we define what was best about our childhoods.

But then the bad thing did happen, and form a snapshot of a different kind.

I remember having nothing in mind but scaring Ethan silly with a cannonball landing, right next to where he paddled around in circles, wondering where I had gone. Grinning, I shouted Geronimo and leaped off the rocks twenty feet above him, striking the water with the kind of concussive force that made the impact feel less like a splash and more like an explosion. The bubbles rose all around me, like a fleet of spaceships taking flight. I hit the soft ooze at the bottom and pushed off, grinning, happy, in what I now recognize as the last uncomplicated moment of my youth.

I broke surface just behind Ethan, with a fine view of the back of his head. Jean was screaming. I didn’t know right away that this meant anything was wrong, as shrieking girls are just part of the fun of horseplay in water. But when I tracked the sound to Jean, who was paddling around in the water twenty strokes beyond Ethan, nothing in her face testified to play; she was pale, and wide-eyed, her lips peeled back as far as they would go in a grimace of horrified denial.

My first thought was that I’d just scared her more than I’d intended to scare Ethan. My second, more serious, was that some kind of animal had bitten her underwater and that I’d catch hell from Mom for not being sufficiently watchful.

Then she screamed, “It’s Ethan!”

The back of Ethan’s head looked the same as it had always looked. It looked like the back of any little kid’s head, jug ears and all. I figured it couldn’t be too bad, since he was still treading water just fine, but Jean was still screaming, so I grabbed his shoulder and pulled him toward me.

The only warning I had that I would not be seeing a human face where his should have been was a sudden shift of the bone where my palm touched his shoulder. It felt like the bulge of a rat scurrying around underneath a throw rug. It flattened and became something other than a shoulder just before Ethan completed his turn and blinked at me through the one eye that remained recognizable, an eye that had somehow migrated socket and all further down his cheek, and now blinked at me from the vicinity of his lips. That eye begged me for explanation. Then the skin on both sides of that eye rose up and swallowed it whole beneath a curtain of bubbling flesh.

I was away at University when word arrived that Ethan had taken a turn for the worse and that I needed to hurry home right away.

That was a hell of a way to put it. The phrase “taking a turn for the worse” implies that the state before it could be somehow counted as better. With Ethan, all developments were bad; some were worse than others, but every day brought a fresh nadir, a brand new visit to countries more terrible.

This was cram week, so it took me the better part of a morning negotiating with various academic offices before I could get a hardship leave that would allow me to postpone finals without flunking out or taking incompletes. I made sandwiches before I left, borrowed a junker from a friend in the dorm, and made it home in just over twenty hours, feeling like a failure as a brother whenever I had to stop to stretch my legs or fill up the gas tank or even take a shit. On the way back I got regular updates by cell phone. Ethan was awake and coherent now; he was asking for me. Then he was insane and ripping holes in the walls. Then he was flat on his back and gasping for air, unable to take in enough to feel anything but slow strangulation. Then he was expected to be dead within the hour. Then he was dead. Then he was alive again (or rather still, the half hour he’d spent mistaken as corpse now explained away as an understandable mistake, given that he’d been something nobody could bear to think of as alive).

Twenty hours, and then I pulled off the highway and into the cookie-cutter template the old neighborhood had become, rows and rows and rows of ugly houses without enough space between them to pass sunlight except as isolated stripes. As always after a long absence, I hated the families in all those houses, for what they’d done to the special place where I’d grown up. My folks might have still had a couple of dozen acres left over from the days when land was cheap, and they’d kept the original homestead inside it as pristine as possible behind stone walls crawling with ivy, but even as I pulled past the automatic gate, what I found past it no longer felt like a homey refuge on the edge of a forest, but rather the last threatened keep protecting itself from invaders who had ruined a once enchanted country.

It was a much smaller estate than it had been, once upon a time. Mother had been selling off our acreage, both to pay taxes and to support us when all her energies went to Ethan and no other form of income was possible.

I left the pavement of the hated outside, pulled onto the gravel of the family’s circular drive, and after another minute or so came to a stop behind a small fleet of parked cars clustered at the base of the wraparound porch. Jean, who’d been up all night providing intermittent companionship via cell phone, slammed the screen door and came running to meet me, her waist-length scarlet hair bouncing behind her like a banner. She was hugging me tight even before I was all the way out of the car.

Her voice broke as our cheeks touched and her tears mingled with mine. “Oh, Lawrence. It’s been so long.”

I knew she wasn’t talking about the months since my last visit home, but rather of these last days since Ethan started to fail. We’d lost our father to emphysema a couple of years back, and had learned back then what Jean and the rest of the family had been re-learning now; that deathbed vigils have a way of trapping time in amber, turning each passing tick of the clock into another slice of eternity.

I didn’t have to ask how bad it had been. Life with our afflicted brother had always been bad, but my sister’s beautiful green eyes looked like the last night, alone, had aged her twenty years. “I should have taken a plane.”

Had I been anybody else, Jean might have said, damn straight you should have taken a plane. But Jean had been with me the one and only time I’d been a passenger on a commercial aircraft, and knew that flying with me was a nightmare. I didn’t take well to enclosed places. “It wouldn’t have made a difference. Most of the time he wouldn’t have known you were here. You’re here for the end, that’s what matters.”

The screen door slammed again, and Mom appeared. She was tall, slender, an older version of Jean who had aged in the way most beautiful women hope to age, becoming more golden where others just become more lined. Unlike Jean, who had come at a run, Mom came at a measured walk: calm, regal, as measured in every movement as only a woman who had discovered her own iron strength could be. She wore her own long hair, as scarlet as Jean’s without a touch of dye, in a tight wrap behind her head, more for convenience than any aged dignity. Her tight-lipped, tired smile was as warm to me as any embrace. “It’s good to see you, Lawrence. You made good time. I was afraid that you’d have to stop in a motel for a few hours. Do you need to sleep before you see him?”

“No, I think I had about twenty cups of coffee on the road. I’m about to jump out of my skin. You’re looking good, Mom.”

“Nice of you to say. But I know I look like hell.”

This was both true and untrue. Physically, Mom had never come close to looking like what women mean when they say they look like hell. More than once, doing her grocery run in town, she’d been mistaken for Jean’s older sister instead of her mother; more than once, she’d received come-ons from young men who would have been mortified to find out just how old she was; more than once, she had admitted to being lonely enough to want to take them up on their offers, if only for a night of anonymous release. It hadn’t been loyalty to the memory of my father, or fear of our disapproval, that stopped her. It was the tormented presence in the upstairs room, the sense that allowing herself to take pleasure in anything outside the family, while he still lived, amounted to failing him.

As for the other part, the price taking care of a doomed boy enacts on the mother who loves him—well, in that sense, you could say that my mother looked like the hell she’d been through. She wore every moment of the last ten years on her face, and anybody with an ounce of sensitivity could see it. But again, on her, it didn’t mean what women usually mean when they say they look like hell. Hell hadn’t aged her. Hell had just brought out what she was. Hell became her.

She put her hands on my shoulders. “Whatever you say, I won’t have you driving yourself to exhaustion. You can bring your bag inside later. You’ll pay your respects to your brother, and then you’ll come downstairs for a hot breakfast, and then you’ll go up to your room and catch some of that sleep you’ve been missing. I won’t take any argument on this. Is that clear?”

I nodded, and then hugged her. “It’s good to be home.”

I could see how close she came to contradicting me, to saying that she knew damned sure it wasn’t—as it hadn’t been; being home wouldn’t be good as long as Ethan remained what he was—but she allowed the lie to stand, as she hugged me back and told me, as she told me out loud only in times of great celebration or sorrow, that she loved me.

There was no point in expending tears now, not with the sight of Ethan still ahead of me, and so I gave her one last squeeze and let her and Jean lead me into the house, where I nodded hello at the gathered forms of my cousins and uncles and aunts, all gathered out of grim sense of family duty for these last hours of the long vigil my mother had endured, almost without rest, for so many years. Then I went to the stairs, putting my hand on the polished banister that Ethan had once used to slide down with giggles, and holding on to it as I ascended toward the attic floor with the locked and soundproofed door that had never been able to cage the sound of splintering bones.

On the day Ethan changed, Jean had run home to get Mom and Dad while I stayed with him, watching him shift from one terrible shape to another, enduring the sounds his insides made as they fractured and reformed into new configurations. I shooed flies away from the lungs that had burst from his chest, glistening with blood and foaming with fugitive breath. I lied to him about everything going to be okay when his spine contracted like a salted slug and bent him over backwards, with the back of his head melting into the bare skin of his buttocks. I vomited with revulsion, for the first of what turned out to be many times in our relationship, when all his connective tissue dissolved and he became a mound of disembodied organs, pulsing on the rocks where a boy had been, with nothing but a boiling puddle of blood between them to identify them as parts of the same tormented body and not as separate butchered pieces of meat.

I had thought that nothing in my life could ever be as horrible as that half hour, and had gone away for a little while when Jean returned with our parents and a plastic tub to carry our brother in. I surrendered myself to shock and catatonia as the three of them helped me collect Ethan’s pieces, as we squared him away in an upstairs bathtub, and as we called the family physician, Dr. Zuvicek.

My ability to form new memories went away for a while. I know what happened intellectually. I suppose you can even say I remember it, in the way one remembers a favorite movie. But in another way it never really happened to me. It never recorded. I can’t really call forth anything else until much later that day, until Dr. Zuvicek trudged down from upstairs to enter a living room still festooned with multi-colored balloons and HAPPY BIRTHDAY banners.

Zuvicek’s status as our family doctor bore a double meaning, since he was related to us via some arcane spiderweb of genealogy that had always escaped me and frankly always would. I knew little else about him except that he specialized in treating members of our family, and in fact traveled throughout our region to pay house calls on those who had settled in the six closest states. He was broad-shouldered and thick-armed and wore a sculpted red beard with silvery flares at the pointed tips. Today he had pieces of bloody Ethan tissue on his sideburns and glistening patches of worse things on his conservative black suit. He looked colorless, which for him was like being another person, since Zuvicek had always been one of the ruddiest men I’d ever known.

As he entered the living room, he put his big black bag on the coffee table and faced my sister and myself with a look of almost infinite pity.

Jean, who was still young enough to seek hope even in hopeless situations, said, “Is he going to be okay?”

He rubbed at his dark eyes with one gloved hand. He always wore black gloves, even indoors: something to do with a skin condition that made his fingers sensitive. “No.”

“Is he gonna die?”

“Yes,” Zuvicek said, with a sharpness that surprised me. “But that’s true of you and me as well. It might happen tonight and it might happen fifty years from now. Your brother, I think he’ll still be with us for another few years yet.”

I heard in his voice the admission that this would not be good news for us. “But what’s wrong with him, exactly?”

We heard footsteps on the stairs, and Zuvicek said, “Your father will wish to speak to you on this, I think.”

Unlike my mother, who would remain youthful even after years of fighting for her damaged son, my father looked like he had aged four decades in as many hours. Ethan’s plight had ripped a hole in his life, one that had already leeched the color from his skin and the spark from his eyes. In the short time he had left, before daily existence in the same house as my damaged brother put him in his grave, he’d age still more, developing a stoop, a lingering wheeze, and a patina of exhaustion that turned every breath he took into a fresh burden he only shouldered out of habit. But on that day, as he came down the stairs, there was still some of the man he’d been left on his bones, and as he lowered himself into the overstuffed armchair that had always been his alone, it seemed less the attitude of a man without strength to stand than that of a father who now had to address his two undamaged children from across a common table.

Father massaged his temples with forefinger and thumb. “I am sorry. In any other family, you would have been able to live your entire lives without seeing this.”

“Seeing what?”

“This… curse,” he said, spitting the word as if he would have liked to wrap both his hands against the disease, and strangle the life from it, if he could. Then he heard himself, seemed to realize that anger at the fates would only frighten us, and softened. “This disorder. It is known to our family, from the old country, but it is very, very rare. Most of us have lived entire lifetimes without ever hearing of a case, except in old stories. A distant cousin you have likely never met had a child with the condition, about twenty years ago. Your grandmother, may she rest in peace, once told me it had happened to a grand-uncle of hers, when she was a girl even younger than Ethan is now; and a hundred years before that it happened to some other poor child, whose name and exact relationship to us have been lost to history. Records only go back so far, but it has always been the hidden devil inside us, the one that slept for generations.”

I had been learning genetics in my science classes. “You’re talking about a recessive trait.”

My father looked blank for a moment, as if I’d just tossed a few words of quantum physics into the conversation.

Zuvicek answered for him. “You are a smart boy. Yes. That is exactly what your father is talking about.”

“And… it only happens to our family? To no one else?”

“As far as I know,” Zuvicek said. “There are rumored to be other families who suffer something like it. But they may be obscure offshoots of our own. There are, as I say, few records. In the old country, these things were always kept private.”

Jean shivered and hugged herself, which was not just a fearful gesture, since she had donned her clothes while still wet and had caught a chill running back from the creek. “Why would anybody even want to be part of our family, then? Why would anybody in our family ever have children, if this could happen to us?”

I saw pain and anger flare in my father’s eyes, reactions he tried to hide by looking away. Years later, I still wonder if that was the moment when death first planted its terrible seed in him. Maybe. It still feels like the moment when it was first planted in me.

But Zuvicek was patient. “I understand that you are upset. I don’t expect you to take much comfort in this right away, but every family in the world has a history of increased susceptibility to one ailment or another. To compensate, they also all harbor areas of high congenital resistance. In our own family’s case, the childhood cancer rate is much lower than the norm, and the same can be said of our personal incidence of epilepsy, diabetes, and degenerative muscle disease. Nor is that all we have to be thankful for. There are many things we have to worry about less, that are much more important in the scheme of things, than this one ailment that almost never happens.”

Jean was not mollified. “Are we going to get it?”

My father was even more stricken by this question than he had been by her last one, but Zuvicek was firm. “Absolutely not. You are already older than you would be if you were ever going to get it. As are you, Lawrence. This ailment only attacks very young children, most of them infants or toddlers; tragically, Ethan was himself almost old enough to be considered out of danger. It is next to certain that your own children, should either of you have children, will also never have to worry about such a thing. All you have to worry about now is your poor brother… and how much your poor mother and father will now depend on you, to help take care of him. It—”

Ethan screamed. The inhuman sounds from upstairs, which would never stop in the long years that followed, had been audible since long before Zuvicek came down. But most of them had been cracking and grinding noises, as well as sudden exhalations, that had not sounded like anything in particular and had been almost impossible to identify as product of any particular little boy’s voice.

This shriek was Ethan’s voice, returned to him: a cry of almost unimaginable pain that would not have been inappropriate coming from a boy set on fire, or one swarmed by hornets, or one simply locked in a cramped black place along with the sound of vicious things scrabbling in the dark. There was no sanity in it, or hope. But it was, for a second, recognizable as Ethan’s voice. I suddenly remembered that it was my little brother we were talking about, and half-stood, determined to race up the stairs to his side. But then the sound of his pain changed to something far worse, something with barbed wire and broken glass in it, and all my instinctive protectiveness fled, replaced by paralysis and shame as a stream of warm piss ran down my leg.

My father saw it. So did Jean, and so did Zuvicek. Not one of them blamed me. They had all heard the same thing I’d heard, and may have come close to the same involuntary release.

In the end, Zuvicek could only finish the sentence he had started before Ethan’s scream.

“—will not be easy for any of you, I’m afraid.”

Now I was an adult, home from the University my mother had insisted I leave home to attend, as inured to horror as only one who had lived his life steeped in horror could ever come to be.

I stood at the locked door of Ethan’s room, gripping the deadbolt, closing my eyes when one of the wet sounds from within reminded me of rending flesh.

As always, standing at this threshold felt like facing a long drop into formless darkness. Even if I’d taken the next step on more days than I could count, even I knew from long experience that I’d survive an encounter with my brother, there was no way of quantifying how much it was going to hurt. The only certainty was that it would.

As always, I waited for the first cry that sounded recognizably human before I peered through the spy hole.

Even allowing for the distortion of the panoramic lens, Ethan’s room no longer looked like the toy-strewn sanctuary decorated with spacemen and superheroes that it had been on the day of his sixth birthday. The colorful boy-sized bed frame and desk and toy chest had not long survived his illness unbroken; they had been removed, and replaced with padded walls and a steel trunk equipped with padlock and air holes, for those times when only absolute confinement would be enough. The padding covered walls that had been rebuilt to cover what had once been windows open to morning light, with a fine view of the trees at the edge of our backyard forest. Now the only light was a circular fluorescent ring within a reinforced cage. One of its segments flickered and one of the others gave off a dim glow brightest at the center, like the sun trying to break through a blanket of clouds. Stains of various colors, some recognizable as the things that come out of a human body, and some not, streaked from the ceiling and puddled on the knit seams between the padded places on the floor.

It was, I knew, impossible to keep the room looking or smelling like anything but an open sewer. By its very nature, Ethan’s disorder meant that he leaked. Sometimes, when he transformed into whatever he became next, he reabsorbed whatever he’d spilled last. Sometimes he didn’t. It was the only consistent way to tell the difference between what was part of Ethan and what was just his waste fluids.

It took me a second or two to find the twitching, half-melted form, like a man wrenched into a Moebius strip, that bubbled at the room’s farthest corner. Even as I watched, it tried to grow spikes, but they deflated with a hiss. The shape softened, becoming as close to the shape of a human boy as Ethan ever got anymore: a lot like a plastic army man that somebody had melted on a hot stove and then allowed to cool.

I threw the bolt and entered, wincing as always at the sheer stench of the place. My mother and father had installed a state-of-the-art air-filtration system early on, using what would have been Ethan’s college fund, but the atmosphere in here was always like a deep whiff of a sweaty sneaker that had been allowed to marinate in rotten bananas and then soaked in a puree made from the contents of a rancid diaper.

It was as impossible to get used to the stench as it was to get used to the things Ethan changed into, because fresher and more offensive perfumes were always being added to the soup. You can get used to living inside an open sewer, if you have to. Your sense of smell adapts, if only by turning off. But if shit is only the least offensive of all the possible things you have to wade through, and everything new that comes dribbling down the pipes attacks some remaining vulnerability in your gag reflex, then adaptation doesn’t work. There’s nothing to get used to.

I had lost one of my college girlfriends because our evening walk had taken us past a golden retriever who’d been split open by a passing car. It was still alive, and whining, even as its parts leaked from its flattened belly. The septic release of its split bowels made the site of its imminent death like the inside of a toilet. My girlfriend vomited out the General Tso’s Chicken I’d just paid for and later called me cold and inhuman because the sight of the poor pooch had left me unaffected. I hadn’t been able to explain to her that I’d long since grown used to obscene sights and smells like that, because my little brother spent most of his life as obscene sights and smells like that.

Now, fighting back the nausea I hadn’t been able to feel then, that Ethan could still wrench from me, I padded across the sodden canvas to the place where the throbbing shape lay, trying to grow a face. Dark patches that could have been embryonic eyes, a nose, and mouth, as captured in a drawing by an ungifted first-grade cartoonist, appeared just below the thing’s semi-liquid chest, and seemed about to congeal into something capable of speech… but then they faded, leaving only an oozing green patch, like a gasoline spill on a driveway.

Ethan quivered, that little failed attempt at coherence exhausting him utterly.

My vision blurred. “Hey, kid. I drove a long way to get here. Can you spare a little hello for me?”

He gurgled like an infant, and exploded.

There’s a certain sight popular in Hollywood comedies: the hapless character who gets drenched by something slimy and malodorous—shit or fertilizer or paint or, in gooier fantasies, alien bodily fluids that have never been included in the usual list of substances produced by the human body. The victim’s eyes always blink multiple times in the middle of a face otherwise obscured by muck, eloquently communicating an offended dignity that encourages the ticket holders in the audience to howl in disgust and delight.

Ever since Ethan turned six, my family no longer considers that kind of scene funny. We’ve all been through it too many times.

This time I was lucky; not only did none get inside me, but what got on me decided that it didn’t want to stick. The layers of little brother flowed off my skin like quicksilver, forming another queasy puddle at my feet before pieces of him became the snout of a rat, the leg of a dog, the cock of a stallion. Two beautiful cat’s eyes, with irises of green and gold, blinked on his surface, communicating a calm amazement that could have meant anything I wanted it to mean; then they disappeared and—in what I could only think of as a little miracle—the vomitous ooze congealed, forming an oversized, bodiless portrait of a little boy’s face.

“Hello,” he said.

It was the first coherent word my little brother had spoken to me in three years.

He looked like he would stay this way for a while, so I touched him on his oversized cheek. My hand looked like an infant’s against that larger-than-life canvas.

A lump formed in my throat. “Hi, kid. How’s it going?”

He gulped, a gesture more about seeming to swallow than actually swallowing, as his big face fronted no throat and no gullet. “That’s a fucking… stupid question, Lawrence. You know… how I’m doing.”

“I know. I’m sorry.”

“Fuck your sorry.” He coughed, struggled for voice, moaned with a supreme effort of will as his mouth tried to go away. Several seconds later he managed to bring it back, but by then his eyes had dropped several sizes and assumed normal human dimensions, which made them comical on that oversized face already beginning to run like wax at the edges. “Fuck you. Fuck Mom. Fuck Dad. Fuck Jean. Fuck all of those fucking vultures downstairs. Fuck your pity in your fucking ass. I hope your fucking kids get what I fucking have. I hope you have to fucking watch them live with this. I hope you have to fucking hope for them to die. I fucking wish it had been you all along. I fucking wish I could look down at you the way you’re looking down at me. I fucking wish I could piss on you. I fucking wish you’d get cancer. Fuck you. Fuck you. Fuck you. Fuck you. Fuck you.”

He tried to say more, but his moment of coherency was done. His body was too busy becoming a succession of specific things, all of them terrible. A bloody Jesus, writhing on the cross. A burned man, crawling across an expanse of broken glass, his trail marked by the pieces of himself he left behind. A little girl having her eyes gouged out by hooks. A dog trying to crawl on the bleeding stumps of amputated legs. A pregnant woman giving birth to a spiked asterisk of a thing, all bristling needles and barbs, that crawled from her bloody womb only to sink its claws into her flesh and drag itself up her body, so it could force itself down her throat and enjoy being born a second time. A little boy paddling around a favorite swimming hole on his birthday, and beaming with an innocent delight that was about to be ruined, forever, by the terrible fatal flaw that cruel nature had built into him.

None of them surprised me.

They were all things that I’d seen him become before.

I left Ethan’s cell after another half an hour, feeling as unclean as I always felt, whenever I visited my little brother. It never mattered whether I’d managed to avoid getting any of him on me. I was contaminated by the sight of him, sometimes the very idea of him.

I took a shower with the water hot just a sliver short of scalding. I let it burn. There was no stain of Ethan on me—that quicksilver retreat of his flesh from my skin a measure of insufficient kindness in a visit that had otherwise afforded a full measure of his condition’s cruelty—but I still stayed beneath the spray, enduring its punishment, until I was reddened and raw and able to feel scoured of every part of him.

I crawled into bed and slept, enduring the usual Ethan dreams of my bones twisting into razored shapes inside me.

When I woke, the afternoon light was fading. I got dressed and went downstairs, finding much the same assortment of cousins and aunts and uncles, their positions on the family couches unchanged. I endured the usual questions about anything but Ethan, questions that ranged from whether I was seeing anybody special to whether I’d decided what I was going to do after graduation but somehow never touched on how much I was suffocating. I asked where my mother was, and was informed that she and Dr. Zuvicek were both upstairs with Ethan, who had taken yet another in a long series of turns for the worse and was hardly changing at all, which an elderly aunt who had researched the condition told me was a sign that his remaining lifespan could now be measured in hours.

After that I endured the usual half hour of well-meaning family blather about everything but the crisis at hand; the cousin who had gotten married, the uncle who had moved to another state, the relative of uncertain provenance who had done something even more uninteresting that I was expected to note and file away as vital genetic intelligence. Somebody was doing well in business, somebody else was failing, a third had had fallen out of touch, and a fourth had committed sins that the aunt reporting them considered scandalous enough to impart in shocked whispers. I nodded and pretended to care and then watched as the subject inevitably circled back to Ethan, and how sweet a little boy he had been.

When I finally made my escape I stepped out into the afternoon’s fading light and found Jean on the porch swing, smoking a cigarette. I hadn’t suspected her of picking up the habit, but she didn’t know I had either, and as I sat down she just handed me the butt without making eye contact. I took a single drag deep enough to make the paper sizzle, then put it out and sat down beside her, watching the sun turn to bright red shrapnel behind the sheltering trees.

“So?” she said, without looking at me. “Ready to leave yet?”

I nudged the porch with my toe to make the seat rock. “Pretty much.”

“And you’ve only been back for a few hours. Try it when it’s just you and Mom sitting on opposite ends of the same couch, night after night, trying to find things to talk about in between Ethan noises.”

I held up my hands in a gesture of abject surrender. “You win.”

She glanced at me out of the corners of her eye, searching for signs of mockery. After a second or two she came to the reluctant decision that I wasn’t offering any, and looked away, her anger still burning but unsatisfied by any fit place to put it. “I’m sorry. You offered to stay, too.”

That I had; though I’d offered only token resistance when Mom insisted that I had a life to live, that I needed to see to my own future while my poor brother burned through what little was left of his. Give her credit, she hadn’t tried to inflict any guilt when I let her win that argument… or when I chose a faraway school that would keep me from having to come home and help out on evenings and weekends.

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.

Sometime in the hours between midnight and dawn, they were all gone: all except Dr. Zuvicek, who sat with us on the living room, his own piece of Ethan sealed in a little jar beside his chair.

The house seemed emptier than the mere departure of our extended family could account for; it was as if the great family grief that had laid claim to our home for so long, so vast in its scope that the walls had seemed to creak and warp with the strain of containing it, had left only a void. Mom sat holding a teacup in both hands, staring at the tepid drink as if expecting to find some answers there; Jean and I shared the opposite couch, looking anywhere but at the sealed jar containing our own last piece of our doomed little brother.

Zuvicek had just finished saying that he was going to bring his own piece of Ethan back to the old country, where the farmland once owned by our great-grandparents and still likely our property—that being difficult to determine, so many wars and governments later—had grown wild and been reclaimed by forest primeval; he believed he could identify the spot where the old mansion had stood, and bury his piece of Ethan there. “After I’m done,” he said, his eyes far away, “I think I’ll do a little wandering before my return to these shores. I know I will never again have another patient quite as difficult as this one, but I have still had enough of sickbeds and death vigils for the time being; it is time to… re-grow myself.”

“Good luck with that,” Mother said.

Zuvicek must have detected the bitterness in her voice. “You should do the same thing. It is a shame that your dear husband,” he hesitated, and looked at us, “your father, did not live to enter this time of healing. And a shame that the rest of the family can only help you so much, that the final step can only be completed by parents and blood siblings. But once you are done with that duty, you should not be afraid to embrace life again. As soon as it is decent, go somewhere fun and do something stupid. Remind yourselves who you are, when you don’t have such a terrible thing hanging over you.”

Mother covered her eyes. “I’m not sure I remember anymore.”

“I understand. But you are still a young woman, with many years of life left to you. And you have two fine healthy children who will help you remember, with their own lives, and someday with the blessing of healthy grandchildren. Remember that.” He grabbed his hat and his bag and his piece of Ethan, and stood before us hesitating, searching for the words that would define the moment with as much gravity as it deserved. “You should all move away, when you are done. This has become a bad place for you.”

“I know,” she said.

Zuvicek bade farewell, accepted our thanks, and departed.

The three remaining members of our immediate family sat in silence for several seconds, neither enjoying nor understanding the sudden emptiness of a home that had until now been driven by the engine of unrelenting pain.

For lack of anything better to do, Jean surveyed the detritus of Ethan’s deathwatch: the dirty glasses on their coasters, the plates stained with the remnants of condiments or cake, the extra chairs hauled up from the basement that would need to be folded up and put away. “We’ll help you clean up.”

“That can wait until morning,” Mom said. “We have to say our own goodbyes.”

I said, “I’m not sure I’m ready for that.”

“Neither am I. But he was your brother, my child, our blood. We owe him our strength.”

Mom meant that, of course, but we all knew the other thought that had to cower behind the one she could bear to speak out loud. And besides, this needs to be over. He needs to be gone. This house needs to be quit of him.

I grabbed the vase. “Right. Might as well get this over with.”

The three of us went outside, the screen door slamming behind us. The driveway, all but abandoned by the cars of family members, now only bore my borrowed junker and Jean’s secondhand Yaris, each resting part on gravel and part on lawn. The stars above us were few, thanks to light pollution from the new houses that had come to crowd our beleaguered estate, but the few I could see were bright, distant points of fire that still seemed sharp enough to burn.

The moon was just a waning crescent, points curving upward like the grin of the Cheshire cat. It might have been more appropriate full, of course, but if Ethan’s life story had any moral at all in the context of our family, it was that nobody can control everything, and that some of us are damned to control less than others.

We went together into the backyard, which was still enclosed by the stone wall and protected by what remaining forest the advancing suburbs had left.

Just before I took the stopper off the urn, its contents shifted with a perverse suddenness that startled me and almost made me drop it. The ceramic rang like a bell, and the grisly contents shifted again: willful, insistent, helpless, defiant, and angry.

My voice cracked. “Oh my God, he’s still moving—”

Then the jar lurched again. This time I dropped it, enduring the century and a half it took to hit the ground, feeling myself break even as it broke, releasing what was left of Ethan to explode like a balloon of blood. In the moonlight it looked black and shiny, a lot like an afterbirth. Something like an eye floated to the surface and then popped, leaving ripples that smoothed over and became a surface as placid as any mirror.

I said, “He’s alive—”

Mom put a hand on my wrist. “Lawrence. Stop putting this off.”

“Mom, it’s not over, he’s moving—”

Her fingernails dug into my flesh, drawing blood.

I gasped and looked her in the face, expecting anger but seeing only an ethereal calm.

“It’s over,” she said.

Behind me, Jean had already taken off all her clothes, her breasts hanging pale and white beneath the slivered light. It wasn’t just the change. Even before the fur started to sprout from her cheeks, she looked taller than she had in years, more beautiful, more at peace, and more defiantly free.

“Like you said inside,” she reminded me, her soft voice turning coarse as her jaw began its transformation to elongated snout. “Let’s get this over with.”

By then Mom was midway through her own change; not into the common vulpine creature my sister could become, but into the thing that had never borne a name in any human tongue, the thing that had drawn my father to her in the old-country revels. Our extended family has a saying that we each choose our other skins, and what Mom had chosen, in her youth, was broad and powerful and wrapped in a snow-white mantle that glowed with inner fire.

Watching, I could only wonder how many years this self had been lost to her; how many years she’d been condemned to a life of nothing but dull humanity, as she cared for the child whose body had been incapable of making the permanent choice all of our bodies had made.

I decided. Mom and Jean were right. It was time.

I peeled off my shirt, before it could be damaged by the emergence of my girdle of arms. Then we dropped to all fours, lowered ourselves to our departed blood, and began to feed.