Eminent Domain

 

Kathryn lovatt

The kids and I come out of the restaurant, Ella half asleep on my shoulder, and there she sits, the moon of old wives’ tales.

  “Look,” I say, but Mickle’s eyes drop to the pavement. Under this generous light, he hunts for treasure—stray coins, feathers, beads from broken earrings. I shift baby and diaper bag, fish keys from my pocket. “It’s magic, Sweetie. A moon like that.”

 The word magic makes Mickle’s head pop up. He nearly drops his leftover pizza. “Awesome,” he says, showing off his first-grade lingo.

 “It’s a harvest moon.” Two clicks, the doors unlock.

  “Or a vampire moon.”

 The closer Halloween gets, the more Mickle talks about vampires. Not ones in cartoons or on cereal boxes, but the blood-sucking type. My husband wants me to go to Target and buy black capes and wax teeth for all of us, including Ella.

 “He’s a big boy, Amy,” Jay says for his own benefit as well as mine. We’re seniors as parents go, a decade ahead of the median, old enough to know every blink wipes a second off the clock.

 I unfasten Ella’s arms from around my neck. She mews, but her eyes stay closed. I strap her in, kiss the pale down of her head, and turn to Mickle.

 “Amazon has a tinman costume. It comes with an oilcan.” Silence. “I’ll be Dorothy.”

 “You’re too old.” Mickle puts his pizza box on the floorboard and climbs in. “You should be the witch.”

 “I’ll be the witch then, and you play Dorothy.”

 “Mom,” he says in a cast iron voice. “A boy can’t be Dorothy.”

 I stretch to check his seatbelt, double-check Ella as I pull back.

 Outside, the air is cool and deeply cedar. Under my foot, a leaf crackles. The way autumn stirs everything from the bottom up always makes me Hank Williams lonesome.

 “You could dress like a pirate again. Some people like being the same thing, over and over.”

 “Bor-ing,” he sing-songs and knocks his feet against the back of the passenger seat.

 “Don’t.” A touch of my finger starts the car.

 Mickle’s raised foot holds a testy second before kicking empty air. “Why can’t I

 be a vampire?” he demands.

 You, Lawson, that’s why.

 Every year, you smeared clown-white on your face and donned the black satin mantle your mother ordered from a catalogue. Every year, you added something new: enamel fangs, claw-like nails, the Morticia wig that dipped like a curtain across your brow. This one spectacular look carried you through all our serious days of trick-or-treating, whereas I fell victim to fad or whim. The year I wore a hoop skirt and Derby hat, you traded your Butterfingers for my Sweet Tarts. That’s when I knew you liked me, because who makes a deal like that?

  “Hey!” Mickle’ shouts suddenly, startling Ella awake. “You went too far.”

 Damn, I say to myself because the road ahead is a mess and there’s no turning around. Ella bleats. “See if she’ll take her binky.”

 My mirror frames the neat, natural part that runs through the thick blonde weight of Mickle’s hair. The children look alike, a lucky mix of Jay and me—his solid chin and grey eyes, my straight nose and peaked lips.

 Mickle runs his hand like a feather over his sister’s arm, tempts her with the plug. The sucking sound Ella makes with the pacifier switches to her Om-like hum as she drifts back off.

 Everything about the kids astonishes me. Who could have fathomed such a thing, Lawson, that our cat’s veterinarian would coax me back to life, that I’d marry again, have honeybees, a house with even heat, and children—really good ones, too?

 Although, at this moment, Mickle, a boy who likes to keep to the plan, is unhappy.

 “We’re going to worry Daddy,” he tells me. “We’re going to worry him to death.”

 “He’s still making rounds at the shelter. He’ll call once he’s done.”

 “Can I be the one to answer?”

 I hand back my cell. There’s not even a hump where the railroad tracks used to run.

 “Guess what Connor Baker’s going to be for Halloween.”

 “Superman?” Mickle shakes his head. “Batman?” A bigger shake.

 “Give up?” He doesn’t wait. “The devil. He’s going to have a tail and pointy ears and a pitchfork.”

 “Wow.”

According to his mother, who came in the shop for candlesticks and left with grapefruit spoons, Connor will be a pack of M&M Peanuts, his little brother, M&M Plain. They’ll trunk-or-treat at the Methodist church, the same kind of party we ditched for a trip to your lake house.

  At seventeen, you could reach the key over the doorframe without stretching. We let ourselves inside, held hands as we followed a loop of music meant to discourage intruders. In the dark and cold, we shivered out of our clothes and crawled into a single bed. How young we were and shy, how green. Our bodies, still a mystery to us, bristled with secrets and longing.

 That memory recedes in the chaos of our neighborhood. I knew what was coming, but a fresh sense of loss surprises me. Safety cones stand like soldiers along West Main.

 “A big road will go here,” I explain to Mickle. “All these houses will be torn down.”

 “They should blow them up,” he suggests. “That would be amazing.”

 Without flipping on my signal, I barrel into our driveway and plow through the yard.

 “What happened?” cries Mickle. “Did we wreck?”

 Ella doesn’t stir as the car jerks to a stop.

 “Nothing happened.”

 “Did you get us lost?”

 “I know exactly where I am.” My headlights shine across the porch and quiver in the waves of irregular glass. The moon, higher now, veiled with a cloud, has lost some shine, but there’s ample light. “I used to live here.”

 “Before me?”

 “Way before.”

 “It’s old.”

 “I like old things. That’s why I sell antiques.”

 He shifts and looks around. “I like where we live better.”

  “I’m still sorry to see this old girl go.”

 “How come you moved?”

 “Because,” I say with the voice of experience, “a house like this is hard to keep up.”

 The four years you and I lived here, we scraped a century of paint from the front door. We stripped wallpaper, faced perils of mildew, corroded pipes and horsehair plaster. We filled dents and chinks and gathered up crumbs of enchantment.

 “I know why you left,” Mickle says with such intensity, my heart skips. “This house is hunted. Hunted by ghosts.”

 “There’s no such thing, Sweetie.” I unsnap my seatbelt and offer him my I-pad. “Mind if I look around?”

 Mickle tucks the phone in his jacket and swipes to a game before my feet hit ground.

 “I’ll be there.” I point to the porch. “Where you can see me.”

 “It’s ok.” The luminescence of the tablet gives his face an eerie glow. “Ghosts are afraid of vampires. Everybody knows that.”

 No vestige of sidewalk remains. No azaleas grow by the steps. The barbed creepers of Smilax shoot along the rails to the second story windows. One with a lightning bolt crack sucks me inside.

 Our bedroom walls were a battered blue, rattled and veined by winds and a fragile foundation. We weathered storms on the coil mattress of our yard-sale bed: carved headboard of blooms, footboard of vines. If I let myself, I could squeak open medicine cabinets, count the black-and-white tiles checker-boarding the kitchen floor. I could hear Suzy sharpening her claws on the Persian runner.

 I tried in vain to stay: padlocked the shop, slept here through spring. When I woke, you were cracks on the ceiling, creaks in the floorboards. My father came.

 “Baby,” he said, crying himself, “you can’t make chicken salad out of chicken shit,” and he packed me and Suzy up and brought us away.

 The house took this to heart and looked abandoned, as it was. Although the grass stayed mowed and lights came on, clapboards wouldn’t hold paint; the roof threw off shingles. I returned Sundays, watered plants, fluffed pillows, dusted shelves, but a smell of mice and gloom fouled the air. The taps spit yellow water. A house needs to be lived in or it falls apart.

 The furniture sold a stick at time, everything, that is, except for the rococo lounge you and Albert hauled from the Atlanta market. I considered shipping it to you, a reminder of the weekend you first brought him and Walt, his carpet of a dog, to meet me. That visit, and all those after, Albert hijacked the kitchen.

 “Lawson,” he said one evening, “I believe Walter’s sweet on Amy.” You laughed, and Albert, as tall but not so handsome as you, flared. “The boy is positively love-struck,” he huffed. “He can’t take his eyes off her.”

 I yawned, sleepy from too much wine and not enough food. “How can you tell?”

 “Don’t be fooled by the fringe,” said Albert, rising to check his leg of lamb. “Walt sees all.”

 The two of you exchanged a glance, the glint of privacy, but I got it. Finally.

 The day you left you said, “I love you,” as I cursed you down the steps. You kept going. You’d found someone you couldn’t live without. For so long, I believed that person was me. I know I thought I couldn’t live without you. But I did. I have.

 You travelled light, signing over business and house, leaving me and Suzy to grieve on a sofa built for extravagance rather than comfort, one that proved too heavy to shove to the curb, a bitch to chop apart. I used its legs as kindling, fed the fire photos and letters, the pieces of my life I couldn’t sort from the pieces of yours. This crooked little house where I slept in that top left bedroom, slept beside you, was the one thing that survived.

 A pine cone hits the ground, then another. I listen for the deer we used to feed and the possums, but, instead, I hear Ella. Mickle can cross his eyes and make her laugh.

 “Hello, you,” I say when I get to her. She smiles with her goofy teeth. “What’s this?” I tickle her foot. One of her slippers, a grey cat with pink whiskers, is nowhere to be found.

 “Mickle, have you seen Ella’s shoe?”

 He looks under his bottom and by his feet.

 “Never mind. I bet it’s at the restaurant.”

 The waitress will tag the shoe with my name or with Ella’s and tuck it under the counter. That’s the plus and minus of a small town, everybody knows everybody. Everybody knows everything.

 “Yight.” Ella points to the square glow above her.

 “That’s right, light.” She’s so smart. I give her two Arrowroot cookies, one for each fat little hand.

 “How come you didn’t go in?” asks Mickle. “You never even went on the porch.”

 “I saw enough.” Ella holds one of her cookies to my mouth. I nibble. “Besides, Daddy will be home soon.”

 Mickle bends his head and looks over the house again. “Did you live here by yourself?”

 “I had a cat. And for a while, somebody else lived here, too.”

 “Who?”

 “His name was Lawson.”

 I close Ella’s door.

 The temperature is dropping, but the inside of the car is warm.

 “When we were kids, Lawson and I went trick-or-treating together. He had the best costume ever—a vampire costume—and if there was a contest, he won every time.” I twist around so we can talk face-to-face. “One time, he won a huge box of licorice cats. Licorice, like those black jelly beans Grandpa buys.”

 “I know what licorice is.” Mickle sounds offended.

 Below us, down on the narrowed street, cars creep around barriers.

 “Well, according to Lawson, vampires are allergic to licorice, especially licorice cats. He fed his to a neighbor’s Irish Setter. That dog loved Lawson till the day he died.”

 Mickle flinches. “Lawson died?”

 Oh, I wished you dead. I certainly did. Wished you’d broken your neck the time you jumped off Pillow Rock and the water was low. That a truck had hit you on your bike instead of running over my cousin. I dreamed up plenty of ways for you to go, and always, we were young, the best of our times together behind us. We would never have to know that.

 “No, honey, the dog. The dog died.”

 “What happened to Lawson?”

  “He moved,” I say. “And then I moved.”

 “And then you got married and you had me and then you had Ella and for Christmas, we will get a gerbil.”

 Gerbils and vampires: Mickle is no quitter.

  “What do you think happened to Lawson’s costume?” he wonders.

 “He grew too big to fit into it. But I think I could find you one of your own, if that’s still what you want to be.”

 “I do, I do!” Mickle begins to bounce. “I want the best costume ever.”

  “Know what? I have a secret formula for blood.”

 “Real blood?”

 “Nah. Even better—play blood.”

 

 What a mess the two of us made, a couple of kids with a quart of corn syrup and a bottle of red food coloring.

 “I need a lot,” Mickle tells me. “A whole lot.”

 “What about Ella then? What can she be?”

 “Something with wings.” He pats her arm. “She would look so cute with wings.”

 I can’t tell if traffic’s improved, but I turn and head toward the road anyway “Ready to go home?”

 “My middle name is ready.” Jay and Mickle never tire of saying this.

 The gray moon seems so small and spent now, it could hide behind my turned-up thumb. The night begins to swallow everything as we drive away. I tilt my side mirror. The fretwork is already indistinct. Before we reach Main, where, I hope, some kind soul lets us in, the long bones of our house will dwindle to silhouette.

 In its last days, this place fell to good renters and bad, survived the tail of a tornado and summers of torrential rain, but it will not stand in the way of progress. These lesser homes of downtown—the honeymoon cottages and old maid bungalows—will be sacrificed to a bypass. Ours will collapse to rubble. Even the perfume that surrounds it-- old clay bricks and acorn hulls, blue juniper and primal dirt—will be lost to tar and exhaust fumes. But I will remember how it was once, and maybe, Lawson, you remember, too.