(Laurel) Hell Is Real

For Robin. We’re still alive.

A dybbuk is a ghost. Rex isn’t the kind of Jewish that’s Jewish off paper, not since her

bobe died, so she doesn't know much about dybbuks. But she knows that they’re restless spirits

that sometimes sneak into the living to talk in their voices and walk in their bodies. It’s a

possession without demons - only terrible, strange people. When she tells Cherise that, her

stepmother’s nose wrinkles in grim sympathy.

“Oh, I get that,” she says. “The feeling of having a stranger inside you that makes you do

and say things you never would is something awful.”

“I bet,” Rex says. “I don’t know how they get into people. Or what makes them do that.”

“I bet most dybukks would go away with some divalproex.” Cherise chops another

carrot. “Where did you learn that word?”

Cherise knows from where. Rex yanks at a strip of peeling fake linoleum on their kitchen

counter. “Bobe,” she says, stiffly, determined to drop dead before she mentions Naomi Haddid.

The secret in Naomi’s blue cursive coils inside her, toying with her stomach. It isn’t pleasant. All

the antsiness that rattled her body from the minute she woke up today snakes back in. Naomi’s

gaunt face haunts every ray of shadow.

Maybe this is what a ghost oozing in feels like.

Cherise ties her bandanna tighter over her thinning blonde hair. She hums. That means

she’s judging Rex but won’t say anything. Rex hates that; Rex loves it. Cherise sweeps aside a

pile of sliced carrots in a wave of finger tattoos: blurring Roman numerals that Rex barely
understands more than Hebrew. Lovebugs and sunshine crawl along their trailer’s stretch marks.

Rex and Cherise have been living in a collapsing skeleton since the tornado, but neither of them

mind.

“You could always look those words up in the library,” Cherise says, “or ask the rabbi

about it.”

Rex shakes her head. It may be summer, but if anyone caught her with a book like that,

she would start ninth grade with sausage shoved in her locker. She’s not that kind of curious

anymore. And Rabbi Ironson buys matches and cereal from the grocery store they do, but he

mostly sticks to the synagogue where the Haddid family goes, so both options are off limits.

“I don’t care enough to look it up.” Rex is disgusted when she registers she isn’t lying.

Bobe would be sad. “I’m going to go fishing.”

Cherise elbows her when Rex reaches over to grab a styrofoam cup of worms.

“Don’t fall off the bridge, kiddo,” she says.

###

Talking about ghosts seems to summon them.

It’s an hour after Rex left home. She is fishing off the concrete bridge outside Slocomb.

Nothing is biting. Fish of all frames loiter in the swamp, unmoved by the trucks that occasionally

rattle by. A turtle pesters Rex’s bobber. Maggots froth on a nearby floating boar carcass. The

swamp, a tangle of decay alongside asphalt, reeks of exhaust and petrichor. Decomposition

feeding germination. Rex is studying the way the boar carcass rotates, wondering if the maggots

will finish growing up before it sinks, when a ghost - not a dybbuk, just a ghost - emerges from

the weeds.
 Ripples announce the ghost’s arrival first. Algae distorts. The Spotted Gar gliding around

the swamp, bony ancients longer than Rex’s calf, knife through the green depths and disappear.

The turtle vanishes. All the bluegills helping themselves to the maggot lace on the boar flee. Tin

cans floating on the swamp bob; the spanish moss draping the horizon sways.

Rex stares as Naomi Haddad lurches into the sunlight, knee deep in water.

“Naomi?” she says.

It’s mindless. She hasn’t seen Naomi since eighth grade ended a couple months ago.

Since before then. High school is coming and Naomi still dresses in straw flip flops and

rhinestone-studded shorts fit for a little girl. One of those flip flops must be floating elsewhere.

Naomi’s left foot, dark brown against the pallid mud, is bare. Her face isn't a skull anymore.

“Hi, Rex,” Naomi says.

The sun breaks around her hair in blue shimmers. It’s ratty: a stiff mess that comes from

being wet and drying that way. The hoarseness in Naomi’s voice scares Rex. The detachment

scares her even more.

Rex drops her bamboo pole to pace along the concrete. Her sneakers leave plastic

smudges alongside the cigarette butts and mirage waves.

“I haven’t seen you in forever.” Naomi’s sunburn darkens with shame. She stands

unmoving in the swamp.

“How did you get down there?”

As Rex says that she knows she must’ve jumped. Circling around the bridge and

descending the shore choked in kudzu, nail-ridden telephone poles, and twisted laurel walls

would have shredded Naomi’s legs, yet only one scrape mars her skin.
 Rex thinks of the alligator she glimpsed sunning in the shallows last week, and the

cottonmouths crawling in the underbrush, and starts choking on her heartbeat.

“I didn’t think you’d be fishing here today,” Naomi says.

The cicadas scream in the magnolias as Rex begins running back and forth on the bridge

more than pacing. When the dead raccoon pancake nearby catches her sandal, she boots it aside.

She wishes she had a cellphone. She wishes someone else would pass in a sagging pick-up truck.

“I’ve been here a while.” Naomi links her fingers together. Dragonflies zip by her. “I

thought Cherise grounded you.”

“Naomi, please, shut up. Whether my stepmom grounded me or not doesn’t matter right

now.”

“Sorry.”

It’s so easy to make Naomi sound subjugated. Small. Rex would know. She’s done that

far more times than she’s wanted to. That apology hurts so much it halts her. She braces her

elbows on the bridge, ignoring the sizzle of skin. Raccoon teeth crunch under her heel. Naomi

hides her face.

“Don’t you dare say sorry,” Rex says.

“Sorry. Oh.”

Naomi sinks. Silt cradles her ankles. Rex can’t be sure how many of her blood blisters are

mosquito bites or ticks. The periwinkle camisole Naomi has on looks liquid. Her training bra

may as well be made of tissue. Bleached reeds cling to her legs like so many dislodged ribs.

Rex, safe above in her cotton t-shirt and shorts Cherise cropped for her last week, fights

the urge to puke. She can’t even smell the boar rot wafting up and she wants to puke. It’s the

same feeling she had when she stuffed Naomi’s letter into the garbage disposal.
 “I’m going to get you out of there,” Rex says, “okay?”

Naomi’s hands don’t move. Rex bets her thick eyebrows, which already dry in all kinds

of star whorls and all kinds of galaxial shapes after they’ve been mussed, are a disaster. Rex

doesn’t have the right to lick her thumb and fix them anymore. She’s not sure she wants to.

“I don’t want you to help me,” Naomi says, with sullen venom Rex understands, “if

you’re going to be mad at me afterwards.”

Rex starts considering if she’ll break her leg by descending the embankment.

“Of course I’m going to be mad, you jackass! I’m scared. I’m always mad after you scare

me.”

Naomi huffs.

“Stop being scared for me, then,” she says. “I’m tired of everyone being mad at me. If

that’s what they do when they worry I don’t want anyone to worry anymore.”

“Is that why you jumped?”

Clouds of mud explode around Naomi’s legs as she whirls, splashing through the swamp,

fumbling, tripping over herself to claw into the weeds.

“Wait!” Rex cries. “Naomi, wait!”

Naomi only does because she’s on her knees, coughing. All Rex can see is her hair and

knobbly back. It’s impossible to tell if the wetness to her voice comes from the swamp invading

her mouth or her.

“I would rather die than let you help me again,” Naomi says. “I would rather die than let

you help me again and then ignore me.”

“I’m sorry.”
 Maybe, Rex thinks, she could walk on a broken leg. Maybe it’s worth it. She scrambles

onto the bridge railing. Her dark arm stings; blood drips from her elbow. It doesn’t matter. She

fears losing sight of Naomi without an advantage if there’s another wild dash. Vertigo squeezes

her vision. Cherise would be screaming with worry if she could see either of them right now. She

can’t remember the sort of thing Bobe would say.

“You didn’t come to my bat mitzvah,” Naomi says.

“I know.”

The water lurks far below.

“You stopped sending me back postcards while I was at the get-better camp for psychos,”

Naomi says. “That’s because Cherise saw one and made fun of you, isn’t it?”

“Cherise wouldn’t ever.” Rex’s throat burns. “You’re not a psycho, Naomi. My stepmom

isn’t either. Don’t use that word.”

“You’re avoiding the question.”

“Everyone made fun of me. That didn’t stop me.” Rex finds it difficult to breathe. “I

stopped sending postcards because your letter terrified me. You talked like you had already

killed yourself. I didn’t know what to do. You were there, but I didn’t know where to find you. I

wasn’t brave enough to look.”

Yellow Warblers shoot by overhead, chattering. Naomi fumbles. Turns around,

wallowing in algae. Her cheeks are wet.

“So all this because I said the dybbuk thing in my letter from camp,” she says. “I can lie.

I can pretend I don’t love you.”

“No, Naomi. It’s okay.” Rex trembles on the apex of the bridge. “Don’t pretend. I love

you too. I don’t know if it’s the same way, but I do.”
 “I’m scared. I don’t know how to get out of here.” Naomi sniffles. “I don’t want my

parents to know what I did. They’d cry. Again. I don’t want to hurt them anymore. I want to go

back to when I wasn’t broken and you liked me.”

A tremendous, dizzying pressure builds in Rex. The kind that made her drive Cherise’s

car down Hanner’s Road at 2 AM to look for her stepmom when she could barely reach the

pedals. The one that vaporizes consequences.

“Naomi. Don’t look,” she says. Naomi scrunches her eyes shut.

Rex jumps.

She lands near the boar, sending maggots flying; lily pad roots and bottle caps and water

entangle as they crash through the air. Rex cannot breathe in the sunfish-dappled underworld, but

then she surfaces, gasping, and swims until she can trudge to Naomi instead. Naomi sobs as Rex

and her cloak of disturbed silt halt before her. Offer her a willing back.

“Come on, Mimi,” Rex says. “Let’s go.”

Naomi towers over Rex. She piggybacks on Rex, feather-light, as they wade ashore.

Tadpoles flee Rex’s feet. Water cascades from her shorts in crystalline fringe.

Rex’s pulse screams as she looks at the fortress of thorns and lavender blooms above her.

She won’t emerge whole from this. Naomi won’t either. The sickly aroma of marzipan knits with

the rancid sweetness of the boar. Death clogs Rex’s nose. Her already bleeding elbow drips onto

a blossom. It sucks the blood in. Egrets laugh in the distance.

“Rebecca. I’m so sorry,” Naomi murmurs. “I didn’t think about this when I jumped.”

“You’re a blockhead. The bridge is fifteen feet high. What did you expect to happen?”

The rustling laurels speak for Naomi instead.

“I’m glad it wasn’t higher,” Rex says.

 Naomi’s grip tightens around her, strengthened by reawakened dedication and nothing

else. Rex looks into the labyrinthine perfumed hell, Naomi’s hair embracing her neck, trust and

need weighing on her fifty times heavier than Naomi is. Beyond the laurels, the road simmers

under a blue line of sky.

“Mimi.”

“Yes?”

“What did you mean in your letter?” Rex cradles the bony bend of Naomi’s knees.

“When you wrote that I made you into a dybbuk.”

Naomi’s nails press into her shoulders in little crescents of pressure. Rex feels the agony

she’s pushing out of her throat. It wafts against Rex’s nape, denser than any exhale.

“That’s one of mom’s favorite movies. The Dybbuk,” Naomi says. “When I watched it

with her before they sent me away, I knew Khanan was me. I’m dead with a lot of feelings. And

you’re so…” She sniffles. “I wanted to marry you. I wanted to be inside you and hide from

everything terrible. But that’s how Khanan killed Leah, even though she wanted him. That’s

what monsters do.”

“You’re not a monster, Mimi. You’re maybe the best person I know.”

Naomi heaves.

As she flattens against Rex, showering the swamp water between them with tears, Rex

reaches into the laurel matrix of spines. Her hand clamps around a slender branch. A thorn finds

her lifeline. Blood squirts from her palm. Rex muffles a hiss. Pain lances her hand. She pauses to

let it wash over her. Neither she nor Naomi can go to Hell. It isn’t real. Bobe told her that. But

they will die. They must always think, and choose. The laurels whisper thirstily. Naomi sobs, and

sobs, and sobs.

 Khizki ve'imtzi, Rex thinks, remembering how Cherise went back to work with her head

high after a week of manic floundering in front of everyone, remembering how an ill Naomi

wrote ‘I love you’ while not knowing if Rex loved her at all. Be brave. No one will do it but you.

She starts climbing.