7.
Dusk, or not quite dusk. That cadaverous hour approaching dinner—doom.
Lisa sits at the kitchen table. She is hungry, and the smell of chicken and rosemary and onions makes her hungrier. Before her, a cantaloupe half rests on a plate in a pool of its own brine, its middle molten, like a geode neatly cracked. She has only to dig the seed tangle from the melon’s center, but the spoon in her hand feels small, the task too much.
Richard should be back by now.
The windows are dirty, and she rises to wipe them. She unlatches a window, opens it. The lake’s gone gray. The boats are gone.
Wind hits the window screen and dislodges a beetle—emerald husk, legs like twigs. The screen is red with rust. She can’t remember the last time the windows were cleaned. She can’t remember the last time she or Richard dusted or mopped the kitchen floor. Neglect might mean they don’t deserve the house. No matter. Soon, they’ll have no house to come to and not clean.
On the sill, the insect reclines abdomen-up, an accusation. Thunder rattles the window in its frame, and at least this gives her something useful to do.
She gathers the household rain buckets and sets them in place, handles tipped like smiles on their sides. One bucket catches drips from the roof’s peak, the other from a large, tarantula-shaped water stain.
All rot, the inspector said, descending the ladder from the roof. Lisa worried the sale might not go through, but the buyers didn’t flinch. Which is when she knew they weren’t here for the house. In a week, her life’s best decades will be bulldozed into dust.
Never again will Lisa see Thad’s little butt cheeks gallop haphazard through the house (there’d been a toddler streaker phase). Or watch Michael heft a catfish, tail flapping, up the hill. Or study a kingfisher, its punk-rock crest and heavy bill, from her back porch.
Nor will they navigate the mountains, years from now, and find the driveway, ring the bell. “We used to live here,” they won’t say, hoping for a tour of the updated kitchen or rescreened porch. Because there will be no kitchen, no porch. Or, there will be, just not theirs. Their house will be gone, something preposterous and glamorous in its place.
Why, then, these buckets? Why not let the water stain the floor?
Because the house is hers. It’s hers a few days more, and Lisa cares for what is hers.
She has only to cancel the closing, has only to say no. But that is the one thing she cannot do. A sacrifice is required. Except, a sacrifice to whom? For whom? In the name of… what?
But these are the wrong questions. One might as well ask who owns our grief, who strips the incandescence from the matchbook of our days?
The first time Lisa made love was to a boy named Nick. The year was 1978. She was a college junior, twenty years old, and they did it in her ’71 Chevy Vega. Two years later, she met Richard. Soon after, she married him, at which point she insisted they sell the car. Richard pushed back. The car was fine. If she hated the Vega, she could drive his Dart. But she wouldn’t have it. She refused to watch Richard drive the car or ride in it. Sex meant too much to her. Sex branded everything it touched. So the car was sold. And if this house wasn’t where Richard had trespassed, it’s where she’d waited, last summer, while he did. It’s the house to which he returned from his convention, bow tie askew, and she knew another woman’s hands had touched his neck. His laundry, when Lisa did it, smelled like her.
No, the house must go, the crooked page made straight, spine of their days reset.
There will be a winnowing, followed by a relocation: new state, new house, new birds, new friends, new lives. It isn’t the only way forward, except, having made up her mind, it is.
She adjusts the rain buckets. It’s a job she’s done a hundred times, but there’s a comfort in rituals like these, security in the knowledge that, if nothing else, what rain comes will be caught.
8.
Thad drags a croquet mallet across the yard, over anthills, unmown grass. A red ball lounges tumorous beside a wicket, and he bends to excavate it from a dandelion patch.
The day before, his father pulled the set from the garage, unboxed the mallets and affixed wickets to the lawn, though no one got around to playing. Not that they’ve ever played properly. Their family version of croquet involves balls whacked at random and however many points per wicket they’ve agreed to for that game. Official rules grace the back of the box, but Thad’s never read them. Arguing the finer points of croquet sounds to him like some fucked-up Tom and Daisy shit. His parents may own a lake house, but that house is still a trailer, a double-wide in disguise, purchased before word on Christopher, North Carolina, got out and the Home Depot guy bought up half the lake.
That Thad’s father would break out croquet, of all things, is confirmation of a growing fear: his parents intend to resurrect the whole world in a week, everything they love about this place. Every boat ride and fishing trip. Every picnic. Every entertainment—horseshoes, lawn darts, cards. A forced march down memory lane.
Jake loves the lake house games, loves competition. Whatever spring winds the clockwork of Thad’s father winds Thad’s boyfriend, as well. For Jake, life is art and sex and games. That, or art and sex are games. The way Jake does them, all three feel competitive.
A rumble drifts polyphonic over the lawn. The croquet balls glow in the gloaming. Thad pulls his Moleskine from his pocket, but he has no pen. He could go inside, but he doesn’t want to deal with Jake.
Glow in the gloaming. And he calls himself a poet. Bullshit.
He unfastens the wickets and returns them to their bag. He’s found one mallet, and one’s in the box. Two to go. He wanders the yard, praying against snakes, until he finds the third mallet in the grass. It’s beat-up, the knocker gouged.
When Dad wasn’t looking, Thad’s brother used to hammer slugs. The Slug Hunter 3000, Michael called his favorite croquet mallet. He’d raise the mallet, give a Mortal Kombat cry of “Finish him!” and bring the hammer down. What remained was magic, a glistening, mercury-leavened pool. Once, Michael malleted a snail, which, he reasoned, was just a slug with a hat. But the accompanying crunch was too much. Michael threw up. Thad cried. They never killed a slug or snail again.
The storm is close, Thad’s shadow lengthening across the lawn. Cloud bottoms brighten overhead. He finds the last mallet and returns it to the garage just as the rain arrives.
The garage, detached, was never a place for cars. Now it bulges with everything that once filled the house. Boxes tower and jostle, the uniform tan of U-Haul cardboard. Not one is labeled, which is just like his parents. The absentminded professors. But it’s not moving boxes Thad’s after. The boxes he wants are long and white.
In middle and high school, he collected comic books. College, too, before he dropped out. The collection was X-Men, mostly, though he abandoned his beloved mutants once Matt Fraction’s run ended and the X-Men stopped making any sense. He still picks up an issue here and there. In the latest, Gambit and Rogue, the will-they-or-won’t-they Ross and Rachel of the superhero team, finally tied the knot, a development that would have thrilled him twenty years ago. These days, he’d trade the couple for a few gay X-Men in any story central to the plot.
Most of his comics made it from Ithaca to Jake’s place, but, because Thad spent summers at the lake, the rest are here. He’s no completionist, but with every series interrupted by gaps in any given year, it would be nice to reunite the books. He could take some time, reread the best runs. Maybe eBay them. He isn’t sure what they’re worth. A few thousand dollars, probably. Enough to get him through a couple of months in the event that—