Page 32 of The Boo Next Door

Chapter 13

Lila

Islept four hours in my clothes, and I wake on Halloween to a world with no fence in it.

I see it from the kitchen window with the kettle in my hand, and I put the kettle down, carefully, the way you set down anything expensive when the floor moves. The fence is gone. The property line is gone. My yard and his yard are one long lawn, and down the middle of it, where sixty years of boundary used to run, there's a pole, and riding over both rooflines at the top of the pole⁠—

The moon.

I go out the back door barefoot. October bites straight through and I don't register it until later, finding the bruise-cold on my soles like evidence of someone else's walk. The grass is dressed in cable runs, dressed properly, dressed the way I'd have specced it, and my ghost family is back. Not my rebuilt scrim ghosts. The originals I never met and knew instantly — the bride at the head of the walk with her veil re-wired, floating on a lift I watched Bee draw in a binder, leading five luggage-laden travelers up the path toward my table, my door, my pulled-out chair. The crow tree is over the door. The storm lanterns run the walk in a sequence I know in my body before I know it in my head, green to gold, cold to warm.

Coming home. She lit them in arrival order. He knows the arrival order.

The dragon — the dragon that ate my October, the two-story reason for everything — sits folded at the north edge with its head down and its wings furled, off center stage entirely, turned outward. Guarding the walk. Demoted to gargoyle at the peak of its career, by its own builder, in the dark, in one night.

And under the moon, in the middle of the one lawn, in yesterday's soot with a casserole dish of what appears to be someone's apology sitting on my sawhorse table, stands Grady Ellis, holding an envelope, looking like a man awaiting sentencing and intending to plead accurately.

I cross the grass. Stop the regulation eight feet away. The moon hangs over both of us, and its chipped smile catches the early sun, and it's crooked, I notice. One degree. On purpose. The observation goes through me like a nail.

"Before anything," he says. His voice is sanded down to the grain. "Two sentences I owe you from a month ago. Everything I'm about to hand you was never mine — I was the shed, not the heir. And the reason you never got a letter in March is that she didn't leave yours to the lawyer." He holds out the envelope. "She left it to me, with a condition, and I have been too much of a coward to earn the condition until last night."

The envelope has taken the shape of wherever it's lived, soft at the corners like something handled and handled and handled. One word on the front, in barbed wire pulled straight.

Lila-bug.

My knees find the cold grass without consulting me, and I sit down under the moon in my pajama pants on the first of the frost, and I read my grandmother's last letter with the whole town's ghost family watching over my shoulder.

Lila-bug.

If you're reading this, two things are true. I'm gone, which is a bore, and you've built something that's yours, which is the condition I set for delivery. I told him: the day her work stops looking like mine. If he's jumped the gun, be gentle, he rigs like an angel but he reads like a Presbyterian.

Now. The ledger's probably surfaced by now, so let's have it out. Yes, I gave him the props. All of them, even the moon, even knowing what the moon is to you. Here is the arithmetic, and I'll thank you to check it before you grade it: you were a thousand miles away becoming the thing I built you to be. Was I supposed to interrupt that? Call you home to watch me get smaller? You'd have come. That's exactly why I didn't call. Don't you dare do the math on those fourteen months as if love was the missing variable. I had your postcards. I had the county paper the time your yeti made the wire services. I kept the coffee filter note up because it made me laugh, not because I was keeping score. There was never a score, Lila-bug. You were never once losing.

The boy next door is a different sum. He arrived here with nothing but load ratings where a life should be, and I needed hands, and he needed somewhere for his heart to report for duty. So I trained him. Don't be jealous of the letter I left him; it's a work order. Yours is the love letter. Notice which one you're holding.

The props were always coming home to you. He was just the shed — a good shed, mind, watertight, better organized than mine — but a shed. If I judged him right, and I judged him right about everything except his coffee, then by the time you read this he'll have handed you the whole kingdom and be standing there in the wreckage of his own October, waiting to find out what you'll do.

What you'll do is up to you. But I'll offer one professional observation, builder to builder, from whatever chair they've given me: I spent forty-one years making this town scream and then laugh. The scream into the laugh, that's the whole machine, you know that better than anyone alive now. And that man's whole life has been the scream with the laugh withheld. You have the tools. You've always had the tools.

The house is yours. The shed is yours. October is yours now, Lila-bug. Face it toward the porch.

So I can see them from my chair.

— B.

I don't cry pretty. This has been documented since childhood; there are photographs; Frankie keeps one in her phone for leverage. I cry on the frost-stiff lawn like a drain unblocking, fourteen months and a funeral and a fuse box of a chest all letting go at once, ugly, loud, out loud, on the front lawn, the way this town does everything, and the ghost bride floats over me on her morning test cycle, and somewhere in the middle of it Grady Ellis crosses the eight feet and kneels down into the wet grass and I grab the front of his filthy shirt and pull him the rest of the way in.

He holds me like rigging. Like something rated for it, load-tested, stamped, the arms not moving even when the whole weight shifts, and I finally understand what his ex never did, standing inside the answer: the wall was never the problem. It was just waiting for something worth bearing.

"You lied to me," I say, eventually, into his collarbone, which smells like smoke and paste and the whole night's work.

"Yes."

"For a month. To my face. In my bed."

"Yes."

"You're going to spend an insulting amount of time making that up to me. Seasons of time. I'm talking about a grovel with infrastructure."