“You ruin everything,” Eliza says.
It isn’t until both women are escorted away that the band director notes that the pig, while cowering in the corner, has done its business on square A1.
Derek Williams is the big winner.
Elizabeth DeWitt Hansen
26
Our house is a combat zone; neither my husband nor I risk spending much time there. I take a job working nights, and Greg keeps irregular hours. I can’t bring myself to leave our son with a babysitter. We fight, and I mean really fight, over who will give a little: We yell, we cry, we cuss, we break dishes, we blame each other’s upbringing, we question each other’s moral character. We resolve nothing.
Our two-year-old latches onto the chaos. He upends a box of Cheerios onto the kitchen floor. He pulls the pots and pans from the cupboard, moves around the house clanking them against each other. He fills the cat’s bowl until it’s spilling over. He empties the silverware drawer, a cymbal crash on the floor. He does this all quickly, with more speed than I would have thought possible. When I catch him, he’s reaching for the drawer that houses the kitchen knives.
BREAKING DOWN
After the Pig Plop, a singular energy charges through Beth. She doesn’t know what to do with it, so she goes on a weeklong cleaning binge, scouring the house in the evenings after work, staying up long after her kids have gone to bed. She shampoos rugs, clears cobwebs, scrubs mildew from grout, bags up most of her father’s clothes for charity, repaints the kitchen cupboards from an old can she finds in the basement. The entire time she works, she imagines violence inflicted on the Thurber house: tornadoes hitting it, the siding peeling off one slat at a time, the roof torn away. She imagines fires blazing through, leaving nothing but a charred skeleton.
She’s ashamed of her public display in the park last week. In the aftermath, she has even less desire to show her face in public, so instead she will see to it that her house is in order; she’s claiming the space for herself, ensuring that she has room to exist outside her own head. She knows the house needs repairs that are outside of her budget or her DIY skills, but she will do what she can. When the house is as clean as she’s ever seen it, she falls into the recliner in the living room.
Her kids come home, and she follows them into the kitchen, where they’re already rummaging through the newly painted cupboards.
“Want me to make you a snack?” she says, and Jeanette looks at her like she’s lost her mind.
“We got it,” Dan says.
She wants them to notice how clean the house is, to comment on it, but they don’t. They pull together cheese and crackers, Faygo RedPop, and head upstairs to do homework in Dan’s room. From the bottom of the stairs, she can hear them talking. About her.
“She’s acting so weird,” Dan says.
“She’s lost it,” Jeanette says.
Her kids are wary of her. Even Steve has cooled. They didn’t meet this week; instead, he said he had a big job a few towns over and wouldn’t have time to see her. Which is probably good.
With the house clean, there’s only one thing left to do. Beth gives her father a bath. Around seven-thirty, as she is tucking him into bed again, she hears Jeanette making dinner.
“Go,” Eliza says, and for once, Beth obeys. When the sun goes down, she takes a walk. Before she realizes it, she finds herself walking south, past the Thurbers’. Until today, she has worked very hard not to see the house; whenever she drives by, she looks away. Now she stares. Studies. It’s still as derelict as ever, the front porch heaped with junk—broken appliances and boxes and clothes and tools—piles stacked so high they’re pushing against the screen, poking holes.
She’s disappointed to find it in one piece. Outside, the house looks much the same as it did in her memory: the same blue paint with green trim, the same pink gingerbread near the roof. The roof itself has visible holes. Several of the windows have been smashed. When she enters, she finds the walls molded, draped in cobwebs so thick they look like Spanish moss. It smells like mushrooms, but then it always smelled like mushrooms. Mushrooms and cigarettes. But the cigarettes have faded, replaced with the scent of old leaves.
She knows coming here isn’t healthy.
The interior of the house has been demolished. Someone took a crowbar or something to the walls, and smeared God knows what—mud? feces?—on them, acts of violence that suggest the Thurber family had no hand in it. This is a different kind of anger, and it enters Beth like a virus. It invades, multiplies. Her body blooms with rage.
She returns to the porch, finds a pipe wrench. With a good swing, she lodges it into the living room wall. It takes a while to work the wrench back out, but then she slams it again and again into the wall. She’ll finish the work someone else started. She feels connected to this house’s demolitionist in a way she hasn’t felt connected to anyone in a very long time.
She whacks the slats of the staircase railing, takes out the banister, smashes through the closet door—the same closet where she hid all those years ago. She wrecks the bedroom door, the bathroom door. In the basement, she dents the pipes until they drip stagnant, rusty water. She breaks windows from the inside. She’ll dismantle the house, inch by inch, breaking down its darkness. She rips up carpet like an animal digging in the earth. She shatters mirrors, light fixtures, bathroom tile; she tears up linoleum. Her fingers bleed, but she has work left to do.
“Hands where I can see them. Drop your weapon.”
The wrench clunks on the floor.
“Are you alone?”
“Yes.”
“Turn around. Slowly.”
When she turns, a flashlight hits her face. She’s dazed out of the darkness. It takes a moment for her eyes to adjust, and then she sees his outline, his arms stretched out before him, wrists crossed, one hand holding the flashlight, the other holding the gun, both pointed at her. Her heart stops for a moment, then kicks into overdrive. She tries to tell herself she’s okay, but he’s a police officer. He has a gun on her. She moves her hands up in increments. Her eyes adjust slowly to the light; she squints, and is just able to see him, his dark hair and darker eyebrows. Mikey.
She knows him, but she also doesn’t.
“Now you’ve done it,” Eliza sneers at her.
“I’m okay,” Beth whispers. “I know him.” She’s trying to convince herself as much as Eliza. She takes a deep breath. It’s okay. She’s okay. She can hear cars on the next street over. She smells the mushroom and leaf scent of the house. The night air coming in through the smashed window is cold on her face. She’s okay.
“Eliza?”
“Yes,” Eliza says. Beth lets her surface. This is what Eliza is good for: being calm, complacent. Compliant.
He lowers the light, and after a moment’s hesitation, he lowers his gun. Eliza blinks the water from her eyes, trying to adjust to the light once more.
“Well, I’ll be,” he says, and holsters his gun. “I heard you three houses down. Come on outside.”
She can’t make her legs work, though. She stays rooted in place, staring through the busted window. A streetlamp outside makes the yard shadowy, but it lets in enough light that she can see him now, his face and dark eyes. Mikey Hudson and Eliza DeWitt, in the same house where they first met as children. Glancing out a side window, she can see her house next door, her own bedroom, and she catches movement at the darkened window. She knows Jeanette is there; she must have heard the ruckus. She must have gone looking when she called Beth for dinner.
“Can you tell me where you are?” Mikey stands at a distance, moves slowly, as if Eliza were armed and dangerous. He’s wearing a coat, and his hands hover by his belt.
“Where are you, Eliza?”
“The Thurber house.”
She wishes he’d move his hands away from his gun.
“That’s good,” he says. “And do you know what yo
u were doing here?”
“I was wrecking up the place,” she says simply.
He laughs. “Yes. Yes, you were. You really were.” His hands relax.
“Are you going to arrest me?”
“No. I’m not going to arrest you. But you have to promise me you’ll stay out of this house. I can’t have people trespassing, even if it is to destroy this place. It’s condemned for a reason. It isn’t safe.” He looks around, at the damage that’s months old.
In the pale glow of the streetlight, she can see his face. Drained of detail by the dark, he’s the spitting image of the boy she remembers.
“You know he’s gone, right? In prison? He’s doing life in Chicago.” His hands are hovering again, shaking a little, but away from his gun. He’s reaching for her.
“Yeah, I’d heard,” she says, taking a step away.
“So you can go home, okay?”
His face, still pudgy after all these years. How did he do it? How did he stay in this town and not let it break him? He’s a cop, and a good one from the looks of it. At least he didn’t shoot. Elizabeth DeWitt didn’t become one more statistic, one more news report.
Beth wants to finish her work here, to raze the house until there’s nothing left but glowing cinders. She wants to wreck it all night and into the morning; she wants to burn it down. Anything rather than going home and explaining to her daughter what she was doing. Even more, she wants to understand how Mikey is still whole. She begs Eliza to ask him.
“What about you?” Eliza says.
He seems caught off guard by the question. His hands are still shaking, down by his sides. They stand in silence, in darkness, long enough to feel truly awkward. Then Mikey leans down, picks up the wrench Beth had dropped, and walks to the front door, where he pauses, then drives the wrench, just once, into the wood. It splinters, a chunk landing at his feet. Then he nods, drops the wrench, and walks out the door, leaving Beth alone.
After a time, Beth goes home, dragging her feet. She’s so tired. When she walks in, Jeanette doesn’t comment on what she must have seen, doesn’t even look at her mom; she just says, “Dinner is ready.”
“It smells great,” Beth says, and watches her daughter, until Jeanette turns to meet her eyes.
Elizabeth DeWitt
27
I’m seven months pregnant with our daughter, and my belly is so big it looks like I’m lugging a garbage bag in front of me. My husband cowers from the excess. I hate him for making me feel like I’m too much. He comes home later and later, sullen, a presence that feels like an absence. Our daughter is born in one of those absences, and she fills the void with her howls. She screams my heart out; all the words I’ve kept inside for decades come pouring from her in that eerie music that predates language.
As I suspected, my husband can’t take her raw emotions. He won’t wake in the middle of the night to comfort her, he barely wants to hold her. He comes home even later from work. Then, one night, he doesn’t come home at all.
The next time I see Greg in person, we sign divorce papers. I slip back into my old name, and with it, every moment assigned it in the past: the violence, the anger, the humiliation, the damage. My name is a garbage bag, tied around my head. If I am to ever breathe again, I must begin the slow work of ripping it wide open.
FLOOD
It’s the first Thursday in April, and the sky has been dumping rain on River Bend since Monday morning. The St. Gerard River has swollen and stretches out past its banks. Around midday, the rain lets up, though low, dark clouds still crowd the sky. Birds hunker in trees, wishing they had stayed south a little while longer.
Dan Hansen and Kelli Brody are playing hooky. Figuring the rain is finally done, they ride their bikes to the abandoned River Bend Casket Company down by the river. The stone houses near the old factory are listing and falling; moss grows on their sides, their roofs sag, their yards are full of puddles. Inside the factory, the building echoes, cold and dark; the floor is dirty with rodent and pigeon droppings. The windows are small, meant to keep workers from getting distracted by the world outside. The glass has been smashed out of them.
Kelli and Dan sit with their backs against a wall, its surface cold through their tee shirts. Kelli has an arm around Dan, who pulls a book from his back pocket. He reads while Kelli watches dark clouds lowering the sky.
She won’t date him. First of all, her mom would kill her. And if not her mom, then Mandy would; Dan broke up with Kelli’s sister only a few months ago. Worse still, Kelli couldn’t face her friends, the way they would make fun of her if she was dating an underclassman. They already tease her for how much time she spends with him. But what they don’t understand is that Dan is comfortable to her in a way that nobody else is. She doesn’t feel as if her energy is drained by him, doesn’t have to recover after spending time with him. She doesn’t have to try to be someone she isn’t when she’s with him. She can just sit in an old building and listen to the water dripping from the trees outside, watch the spiders creep across the ceiling. The thrill of skipping school is augmented by the weather—the rich earthen smell of almost a week of rain, the danger hanging in the air.
Dan reads with his face close to the page. He seems oblivious to the risk. His eyes are so dark, so serious, he looks like he’s scowling. She likes to watch him read, likes it when he leans against her, likes scrubbing her fingers over the lamb’s wool of his short-cropped hair. Just last month, their mothers had fought each other in the park with the entire town crowded around, bearing witness. Kelli avoided Dan for a week afterward. Something about their mothers’ fight had seemed personal to Kelli, almost like she and Dan had had the fight. Now Kelli wants to talk to him, wants to see if they are okay, but she isn’t even sure how she feels—she doesn’t understand what the fight was about. All she knows is her mother told Beth to leave her family alone.
Dan reads on languidly, tucking his finger behind the page long before he has to turn it.
Kelli breathes deep. The winds out of the south carry the smell of the pig farms outside town. She doesn’t mind. It smells like country air, like home. When the rain starts back up, at first it’s only a spritzing; Dan doesn’t even notice. Kelli watches the windowsills go damp, the water beading on old wood. The factory roof is leaky, and a small drip splashes on Dan’s head. He still doesn’t notice. What she wouldn’t give for his focus. She has a terrible time paying attention in class. Her mom wants her to go to college, but her grades aren’t good enough for the kinds of scholarships she would need.
Dan notices only when the leak gets going for real, when his book is wet. The rain has gone from spritzing to spilling, like from an upturned bottle, or an open spigot. Soon, water runs into the building from the sidewalk outside, and as Kelli and Dan race to their bikes, the rain comes harder, lashing against their faces, turning their fingers numb. On their bikes, they pray no cars come every time they approach a stop sign; their brakes have given up. They fight through the slashing rain, and when their skin is stinging, when they pass over the bridge into town and see the St. Gerard River rising, they make the unspoken decision to go to Kelli’s house because it’s closest. There are no cars in the driveway, but Kelli peeks inside to make sure nobody is home before she lets Dan in.
* * *
• • •
School gets out early because of flood warnings, and Jeanette arrives home soaked through, looking as though someone tried to drown her. She stands at the kitchen sink and upends her book bag to pour out the water.
“Guess I can’t do my homework,” she says when her mom comes in the kitchen. Jeanette lays the sodden papers on the counter.
Beth still hasn’t showered, has her hair up in a scarf like her mother always wore. She hopes Jeanette won’t comment. “Where’s your brother?”
Jeanette shrugs without looking at her mom. It’s the shrug that means I’m not telling instead of I don’t kn
ow.
In the dining room, Ernest lives a life of stasis, of waiting for what comes next, unaware of his surroundings, of the torrential rain, unaware even of Linda sitting beside his hospital bed, dozing in a recliner. Ernest is dreaming of powerful steam-driven engines, of machinery, of industry, of progress. Linda has a book open in her lap, and when Beth shakes her awake, she, too, looks completely unconcerned about the rising water.
“Have you heard from Dan?”
Linda has not.
“I’ve called him twice now.”
“Don’t worry,” Linda says. “It floods like this every few years. The water’s not going any higher.” She stands and smooths Ernest’s hair along his forehead. His hair is oily; it will need another dry shampooing soon. When she rolls him over to check his diaper, Beth turns away.
Maybe this is why you find someone to love, someone to love you, someone to live with: so your own daughter won’t have to change your diapers.
Beth calls her son again. This time, he picks up.
“Where are you? Are you okay?”
“I’ll be home soon,” he says. He sounds breathless.
“It’s raining too hard. I’ll come get you.”
“It’s okay,” he says. “I’ve got my bike. I’ll be right home.”
He hangs up before she can argue. A few minutes later, her phone rings.
“My gears are locked up,” he says.
“Where are you?”
He takes a deep breath. “Kelli’s.”
* * *
• • •
Beth is soaked before she gets into the car, her shoes sloshing on the accelerator. Jeanette shivers beside her in the passenger’s seat. Beth has a hard time keeping control of her car, the water is so high in the street. At the river, the dam is holding, but the St. Gerard is marching over its banks and rising up to lay siege to River Bend. By the time Beth knocks on the Brodys’ door, she’s freezing. Her clothing sticks to her skin; her hair has gone curly under her scarf, even though she pressed it just yesterday, using plenty of oil. There are no cars in the Brody driveway.
The House of Deep Water Page 25