So the two of them—the boy and the girl, brother and sister, homeless for more than two years after running away several times from foster care—they steal the clothes from the edges of the closet, the backs of drawers. They pawn the jewelry and cameras and DVDs. They slip money—just a few bills, not enough for anyone to notice unless they were really looking—from wallets and purses. They walk on the sides of their feet so that they don’t leave tracks in the white carpet. They hide from the maid when she comes, on Mondays and Thursdays. But mostly they just hang out, watch television, raid the fridge for treats.
One morning, they are in a master bedroom with a vaulted ceiling, a four-poster king-size bed, and two walk-in closets, each of them bigger than any bedroom they’ve ever called their own. An archway leads into the bathroom, where the toilet rises up on a pedestal and the counters are marble and the shower is surrounded by glass bricks and the tub is a deep cauldron with two dozen jets.
The sister rummages through the closet and climbs into a suit seven sizes too big, while the brother pulls on a black cocktail dress that won’t zip up his broad back. A flat-screen television hangs on the wall. They punch through the channels, finally settling on VH1—a best of the eighties countdown—and leap from one side of the bed to the other, playing air guitar, yowling along with the hair bands.
They are laughing, hitting each other with pillows, when the screen goes dark and the music silences. They stand in a mess of sheets, breathing heavily. A man is watching them. His face is a severe shade of red. He has small eyes and a pinched mouth. He is as tall as a doorway. They recognize him from the photo albums shelved in the living room and the wedding photo hanging in the hallway.
The brother and sister look at each other—neither of them knowing what to do. He is blocking the door. And the nearest window drops twenty feet into a thorny hedge, a broken leg.
“Who are you,” the man says, not yelling, not yet, “and what are you doing in my house?”
In another story, they might have told him their names. They might have told him about their father running off, their mother drinking heavily—the social workers with their tired eyes and sleepy-sounding voices, the cat piss–stinking foster homes decorated with crosses and strangely colored paintings of Jesus petting sheep. And the man might have listened. His eyes might have softened. His posture might have relaxed. He might even have smiled briefly when they told him about the week they spent living in a Walmart.
And when they finally said, We’re sorry. We’ll leave now, he would have shouted, No!, his arms outstretched to block their way. No, he would say, his voice softer this time. Stay. Please. And the brother and sister would shrug at each other when he motioned them downstairs, when he led them to the kitchen, where they would make turkey sandwiches and pour tall glasses of milk and eat together in the nook that overlooked the green expanse of lawn that ran into a pond with a concrete swan spitting an arc of water in the middle of it.
When they were finished eating their sandwiches, when they had licked their lips and settled back in their chairs, he would look out the window and quietly ask if they would like to stay. They would say no, they couldn’t, they had to move on, and he would say, Stay, really, I mean it—and they would know that he meant it, that he wasn’t going to trick them and call the police, that maybe the house felt a little too big for him, that maybe he needed them as much as they needed him, and they would all smile as they finished their glasses of milk.
But that is another story.
4.
There is a knock at the door. At first Paul doesn’t hear it because of the TV—the game show that doesn’t require talent, only luck, the contestants choosing among the fifty beautiful women who stand onstage holding silver briefcases full of money. Paul is yelling when he first hears the knock, throwing up his arms and condemning the greed of the man who could have gone home with a hundred grand but decided to keep playing. “The idiocy,” Paul says. “The fucking idiocy people are capable of.”
The knock sounds again and Paul mutes the volume and goes to the door, wondering vaguely who it might be, maybe the Jehovah’s Witnesses he saw prowling the neighborhood earlier? Or Papa John’s? Had he ordered a pizza? He had, hadn’t he? It is so hard to remember anything anymore, every day bleeding into the next, a weekday the same as a weekend, night no different from day, ever since he lost his job.
Two men stand in the yellow cone of his porch light. They wear black boots and black jeans and black T-shirts. Their hair is buzzed. Their shoulders are humped with muscle. Behind them stands a cop—black windbreaker with a yellow star on the breast. A woman, he realizes, only when she speaks, when she hands him a piece of paper. A repossession notice, she explains.
He looks at the paper, but doesn’t really read it. The men shoulder their way past Paul, while the woman tells him they are here to retrieve the fifty-five-inch HD plasma he bought on an installment plan at Best Buy. He was one thousand dollars into his three-thousand-dollar payment plan when he lost his job as a financial consultant at Wells Fargo. He has not, as he has advised so many others to do, nested away his money. For the first three months he lived off his severance pay. He sent out queries for jobs that did not exist. He has not applied for unemployment. He has not asked his parents for help, has not even told them he lost his job. He has not written a check in six months, doesn’t answer the phone when the creditors call, will not listen to the messages that go from stern to condemning.
The woman remains on the porch as the men approach Paul’s television, which rests on a two-tiered glass console with black metal legs. One of them hits the power button and shoves the remote in his pocket. Then they rip the wires from the wall and wrap them around their fists. They station themselves at either side of the television and say, “Ready?” and lift it without any trouble. It ought to weigh more, Paul thinks, considering how much it cost. He is folding the repossession paper in half and then in half again, and then again, making a tiny square he can close his fist around. He does not feel much of anything. These past few days he has spent mostly on the couch, his mind empty except for simple needs, the next diet soda he will drink, the next program he will watch.
Their invasion of his condo does not bother him, not particularly, even though they act like the television is theirs, like their employer is a parent and they are its vengeful children. He is too tired to care. It isn’t until one of the men bumps into him and says, “Move, loser,” that something sparks inside him, something electric, as he remembers the weight of his manager’s hand on his shoulder—the sad smiles of his coworkers when, in a daze, he packed up his desk—the Walmart bag he found on his front porch the next day, full of the things he left behind, his Trail Blazers coffee mug, his calculator from college, the M. C. Escher calendar.
On the coffee table sits a half-empty bottle of Budweiser. The glass is warm in his hand when he picks it up. The men are not looking at him. They are looking at the open doorway, taking baby steps toward it, taking care not to trip over a magazine rack, to knock against the edge of the coffee table. And the cop is already gone, walking toward the black sedan parked in the street.
Paul doesn’t say anything when he approaches the men, doesn’t release the scream he feels building inside him. He simply snaps his arm—and sends the bottle spiraling through the air and into the gray eye of the television, shattering it.
5.
Mr. Peterson has taken a job in Seattle with a software company. As part of the hiring bonus, if the house doesn’t sell within the next two months, the company will offer him x amount of money and assume the title.
The Petersons try. Some of the neighbors will admit to that—they do try. They install new countertops, new carpeting, new sinks and faucets. They brush paint on the walls. They remove all of their family photos and hide all of their toys so that the house could belong to anyone, so that the couples who follow high-heeled, lipsticked real-estate agent through the rooms, up and down the stairs, their fingers lingering on the railings and d
oorknobs, can imagine the house as their own.
They list the home for $599,000—a fair price, everyone agrees. A price that will reflect well on the neighborhood. But the months pass without an offer. And the Petersons’ garage fills steadily with cardboard boxes sealed with tape. And then one day the Bekins trucks pull up to the curb and the movers—the sweating, thick-waisted men with goatees—leap out to haul away all of the furniture and books and wedding china. They leave the house vacant of everything except the window treatments and the dimples the couches crushed into the carpet.
Now the original real-estate sign comes down and another one goes up listing the house at $399,000. The neighborhood, red-faced and narrow-eyed, hates the Petersons for this. Over the past few years they have watched property values climb—doubling, tripling—and they have counted on that equity. They believe in their houses as investments more than as places to live. So they scowl at the empty house as if it is to blame. They call the agent—they call the Petersons—to express their outrage. They encourage their dogs—their yellow Labs and golden retrievers and Siberian huskies—to shit in the front yard. Someone spray-paints FUCK YOU in big black letters across the garage door, but the next day it is painted over. Someone rips the real-estate sign from the front yard and shoves it into a nearby storm drain, but the next day it is up again—and within a week it is topped by a red banner that reads sale pending.
In this neighborhood, a subdivision called Swan Hollow, no one can paint their houses anything but earth tones. Nor can they plant vegetables or store play equipment in their front yards. They cannot park RVs and boats in their driveways for more than twenty-four hours. And when you live in a neighborhood like this, there are certain expectations of you. There are rules you must abide by, and now the rules have been broken.
So they wait until it is night. The streetlamps buzz to life. The garage doors roll open. People collect red three-gallon jugs of gasoline and carry them sloshing down the block and gather in the driveway of the house, the empty house. There are twenty people altogether, mostly members of the neighborhood association. Others watch from their front porches. The moon is out, and its reflection glows in the living room window like a spectral eye. The siding is vinyl and the porch boards are made of recycled plastic and nobody knows how well these will burn. They want inside—they want the house to burn from the belly up.
They try to kick open the front door, but it is dead bolted and no one can make it splinter inward like on the cop shows on TV. So they circle the house and try the windows and find one of them unlocked and rip off the screen and boost a middle-aged woman named Susan Pearl through it so that she can unlock the front door and allow them to rush inside, to splash gasoline along the walls, to soak pools of it into the carpet and waterfall it down the stairs. Their eyes tear over. The fumes make them dizzy. They cough and laugh at once.
They make a trail of gasoline—gasoline they would have otherwise used to power their riding lawn mowers across lawns of Kentucky bluegrass—they make a trail of gasoline down the porch, along the pebbled path, to the driveway, where Susan sparks her pink rhinestone Zippo and lights a menthol cigarette and takes a deep drag off it and flicks it in a sparking arc.
Her lipstick has made a red collar around the filter that matches the red ember at its tip. It spins through the air and bounces off the cement and comes to a stop in a pool of gas that ignites with a huff. A tongue of blue-and-orange flame licks its way speedily toward the house.
It isn’t long before the windows explode and the flames rise through them and the siding around them blackens and buckles and melts and runs like tears. Sparks swirl up into the night, lost among the stars. The roof is replaced by a crown of flame. The street appears sunlit. The heat is tremendous. Everyone staggers out of the driveway, into the street, the shadows playing across their faces making them appear as strangers to one another.
6.
Tonight the mother reads the little boy the story Harold and the Purple Crayon. They lay side by side in his bed, and when she finishes, when she snaps shut the book, he asks her to stay a little longer. “To cuddle, Mama.” She tells him no. She has to go. He has to sleep. “Just for a minute,” he says. “A mini-minute,” she says and remains curled up by him for a few breaths before climbing out of bed and pulling the covers up to his chin. “Don’t leave,” he says and she says she has to and kisses his forehead and lets her lips linger there another moment before she snaps off the light, says goodnight, closes the door.
He’s not scared of the dark. He’s not worried about monsters beneath his bed or aliens at the window. It’s his mother—whose eyes are red-rimmed, whose hair is going gray at the roots because she hasn’t been to the beauty parlor in months—who worries him. He hears her crying through the walls. He hears her on the phone: “We’re underwater,” she keeps saying, along with that word, foreclosure. They are going into foreclosure.
One night he asked her where it was, foreclosure. “I’m sorry?” she said and he said, “You keep saying we’re going there. Foreclosure.” Her lips flattened and her eyebrows came together and she asked him if he wanted to watch cartoons—would he like that?
He has heard at Sunday school the story of Noah and the ark that survived the great flood. And he has seen on the news the waters that rose up from a river to swallow towns in a place called Iowa. This is what his mother is worried about, he feels certain. This is why she is packing all of their things into boxes, suitcases. A flood is coming. And its waters will be black and roiling with terrible fish, their eyes white, their fangs thin and crooked. He imagines the first wave of the flood surging along the street, splashing against the side of their house, foaming and reeking of the fish that wait outside, gnawing at the wood. The water will seep under the doors and burble its way down the hallway, rising, rising.
He needs to work quickly. And he knows his mother might notice the light under his door, so he pulls the shades instead, allowing the moon into his room, its light silvering his walls. Slowly he slides open his closet. From a shelf devoted to art supplies he pulls a box of crayons and fumbles through them until he chooses the one he thinks to be purple, though it could just as well be black in the uncertain moonlight.
And there, on the wall, he begins to draw a boat, one big enough for the two of them, to carry them away to foreclosure.
7.
Her hearing isn’t what it used to be, but Gertie can still hear the knock at the door, even from upstairs. She doesn’t like to be bothered, likes to keep to herself. When the phone rings, she lets the answering machine pick up. And at church—her only destination these days besides the doctor’s office—the First Baptist Church, where she serves as a deaconess, where she has hardly missed a Sunday in fifty years, she shakes hands during the sharing of the peace and lingers afterward for coffee, but doesn’t go out of her way to say much except “Lovely day,” or “Lovely to see you.” So when she hears the knock at the door, she goes to the window of her bedroom, pulls aside the lace curtain, peers down at the front porch.
Nobody knows about her troubles. Nobody asks how she is getting along, and even if they did, she likely wouldn’t tell them. She has never been one to complain. Not about the arthritis chewing at her fingers and not about the cataract that fogs over her left eye and not about how badly she misses Harry, how empty the house feels without him. And not about the crooks—though she’d like to give them an earful, maybe crack them over the head with a can of soup—who convinced her to take out a thirty-year, 6.4 percent mortgage for thirty seven thousand dollars, along with a ten-thousand-dollar line of credit.
She and her husband have owned the home since 1951, raised their son here, his height still faintly sketched in the kitchen cupboard door, the pencil marks the same gray as the broken blood vessels that trail down her legs. She couldn’t keep up with the payments. Over and over the writs of possession have been posted on her door. Over and over she has ripped them down and placed them at the bottom of her garbage can, as i
f the dark truth contained in them might decompose along with the coffee grounds, dissolve like a communion wafer on her tongue and absolve her.
On the porch stands the policeman—no, a woman, Gertie realizes, when the figure moves into a slant of sunlight—peering into the living room through the bay window, a big woman with the haircut and bowlegged stance of a man. She knows Gertie is home—her Buick is parked in the driveway. The policewoman isn’t going away this time. She isn’t going to post another notice and clomp down the porch and zip away in her unmarked car. She hammers at the door again and then tries the knob, so that Gertie imagines she can feel the force of the hand on her, shaking her, strangling her.
Gertie withdraws from the window and the lace curtain falls gently into place like a spiderweb. Her husband is dead. Her son is dead too. So many of her friends and neighbors. Everyone is dead. She says this out loud—“Everyone is dead”—her voice a metallic rasp as she pulls open the drawer of the night table and pulls out the revolver, the .357 her husband kept around the house for security. It is heavy—she holds it in a two-handed grip, the muzzle drooping, aimed at the floor between her legs. She sits on the edge of the bed. The springs moan. The policewoman hammers at the door again—and then yells something, Gertie doesn’t know what.
She can’t recall if Harry ever took the gun to the shooting range or out to a gravel pit to blast pop bottles. As far as she knows, it has never been fired. She wonders vaguely how old the bullets are, whether they can expire, when she brings the muzzle to her breast—not her mouth, that would be too much trouble to clean up, too much ugliness to look at for whoever found her—and pulls the trigger.
8.
The neighborhood is empty. It has always been empty. It was built by a custom-home builder that has developed subdivisions in three different states. Since the market crashed, the company has laid off most of its employees in its building and land development divisions. It is working with financial advisers and legal counsel on vendor payments and other cash obligations.
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