Page 28 of The Boo Next Door

Lila

Devil's Night, I stand guard until the fire radio takes my sentry away, and then the town takes everything else.

We'd planned it like adults. Porch shifts. His yard has floods and a pressure mat; mine has a motion camera Frankie loaned me that mostly films moths. At nine, we're on my steps under one blanket drinking cider gone cold, watching the street like a western, and Beetlejuice patrols the rail with his tail up, the meanest deputy in the county.

At nine forty, Grady's radio goes off on his hip.

Structure fire, the dispatcher says, out past the orchard, mutual aid, all hands. He's up before the sentence ends — it's a whole transformation I've never watched from this close, the easy gone out of him between one heartbeat and the next, replaced by something older and squarer — and he stops halfway down my walk, torn visibly in two directions.

"Go," I tell him. "It's a real emergency. This is a lawn."

"Lila—"

"Go. I have a cat and a camera and the moral high ground. We're heavily armed."

He goes. The engine screams up Route Nine minutes later, and the whole street exhales — porch lights clicking off up and down Foxglove as the show ends — and I take the watch alone.

I last until eleven. That's the confession. Eleven o'clock, cold to the marrow, cider gone, cat asleep in the blanket like a bag of warm sand, and the street so quiet it feels solved, and I do the thing every horror movie screams at you not to do. I go inside. I make tea. I answer three of Frankie's texts.

Twenty minutes. That's what it took, the reconstruction will show. Twenty minutes, no engine noise to cover them, just kids and a truck and a Devil's Night tradition, and when I come back out with the tea, my yard has been harvested.

The scrim walls are slashed — not artfully, nothing personal, just fast, the way you'd open boxes. The ghost family is gone entirely, all six figures, ripped off the cable run; one suitcase lies in the middle of the lawn like the aftermath of an abduction. The long table is on its side, the place settings stomped into the flowerbed. The door that opens by itself, my glad door, my best trick, hangs off one hinge, and it keeps trying to run its cycle anyway, wheezing open and shut on a bent track, welcoming nobody, over and over, like something that doesn't know it's dead.

I stand on the walk with a mug of tea in my hand, in the ruin of six days and forty-one years, and the strangest thing happens.

Nothing.

No tears. No screaming. The professional walks out of the smoke instead, cold as a claims adjuster: scrims are replaceable, eleven hours of sewing; the figures were cast foam, molds still in the garage, pull new ones by tomorrow afternoon; the table's pine, pine forgives; the door needs a track and a hinge and I know a man with a garage that has everything, organized, in descending size order.

It's midnight before judging. It's salvageable. It's all salvageable, if I start now, and the man with the garage is at a fire, and he would want — he'd say it in that flat voice, take whatever you need, and the side door's always unlocked, I've watched him not lock it for a month, a man who padlocks the big bay every night like a bank vault and leaves the side door open because this is Hollow Creek.

So I cross the yards, and I let myself into Grady's garage for a hinge.

The overheads come on, banks of them, surgical, and the first thing I register is that the big tarp is gone from the back wall, and the second thing is what the tarp was hiding, and my brain, which has been running cold and fast and perfect for twenty minutes, hits the input and just — stops accepting new work.

The bride.

The bride is eight feet tall and she floats on a rig I know before I can stop knowing it, a cam-and-cable lift Bee designed in nineteen ninety-six, and she's clean, restored, her veil re-wired, staged. Behind her the pirate cannon, barrel re-papered, staged. The maze panels, mended, staged. Shelf above them: the fog urns, the storm lanterns, the crow tree, staged, staged, staged, all of it laid out in build order down the back wall with cut sheets clipped to each piece in blocky lettering, a museum of my grandmother in an order that means one thing to anyone who has ever loaded in a show, and dead center, on its own cradle, cleaned and re-papered and lit by the overheads like an exhibit⁠—

The moon.

The chip in its smile. My whole childhood, that chip. I am seven years old and it's August and she's letting me sand the patch and telling me a moon should look like it's been places.

Given. Given. Given. Forty-one strikes of a ruler in a dying hand, and one smudged name, and I stand in the enemy's garage at midnight before judging, surrounded by my inheritance in perfect working order, staged in build order under his lights, and the hundred explanations finish burning down to the one.

He has it. He's had it. He's had all of it, all along — the ladders, the fuses, the treaty, the pilot program, there you are — and in fourteen hours the town walks past our two yards and votes, and Bee's entire arsenal is sitting in his hangar, cut-sheeted, ready to fly.

The side door opens behind me. Boots. The smell of smoke off turnout gear.

"Lila." Careful. So careful. The voice you use in a room with a gas leak. "It's not⁠—"

"Tell me the part where it's not." I don't turn around. I'm looking at the moon. "Take your time. I want the engineering. Because from where I'm standing, the load path runs one way. My grandmother's life's work is staged for a show in your garage, Grady, tagged and sequenced, the night before judging, and the only paper in my shed says given, and I have spent a week — a week — handing you doors. The moon. Your first build. Who asked you. And every single time, you looked at me, in my house, in my bed, and you picked the lie."

Silence. The overheads hum. Somewhere back on my lawn, my broken door wheezes through another cycle.

"She gave them to me," he says, low. "Three years ago. When she couldn't run the big builds anymore. It wasn't — I wasn't going to run them tomorrow, Lila, they were never for tomorrow, I've been restoring them to give back to⁠—"

"To give back." I do turn around now. He's filthy, soot to the jaw, helmet under his arm, and even now, even here, some traitor sub-basement of me clocks that he came straight from the fire without washing, that he must have seen my wrecked yard and come looking at a run. Good. Let him have seen it. "When, Grady? Which day? You've had a month of days. You had the shed, in the storm. You had the gym. You had my kitchen table Wednesday when I asked you point-blank who drafted you, and you said neighbor, needed a hand, like she was a lawn to mow, like she wasn't—" my voice goes somewhere I can't follow it, and I haul it back by the collar. "So when?"