Chapter 9
Lila
Iwake up in my own bed with someone else's flannel and a pilot program, and downstairs, before coffee, before consciousness fully boots, I catch myself humming.
"We don't hum," I inform the coffee maker.
FILTERS ARE NOT OPTIONAL, LILA, the coffee maker replies, as it has replied for fourteen years, and I stand in Bee's kitchen humming and grinning at a fire-hazard appliance like a woman in a shampoo commercial, and this is what's become of me.
Nineteen days. The town saint took nineteen days, and the flannel isn't even a good flannel, it's work-worn and it's enormous on me and it smells like cedar, and I have zero intention of giving it back, ever, and that's the whole diagnosis right there.
Here's what the week looks like, since the group chat is going to reconstruct it anyway.
Mornings, coffee gets handed over the fence.
Whoever's up first walks it over — his tar, my cider abomination, the treaty's only stable clause.
Days, we build separately, doors closed, because the cold war is still officially scheduled for November first and neither of us has the paperwork to end it.
Evenings — evenings are a jurisdictional mess I decline to map. His kitchen. My porch.
The night it rained again, nobody's kitchen at all.
That one deserves a line in the record, actually, because it's Tuesday, and I'm crossing the yards at nine with a sample of scrim under my jacket for his opinion, strictly professional, and the sky just opens.
No warning, no preamble, October dumping a full reservoir on Foxglove Lane, and I make his porch at a dead sprint, soaked in eight seconds flat, and he opens the door already laughing at me — openly, the real laugh, spending it like he's rich now — and I say something extremely dignified like don't, and he says come here, and we do not make it past the hallway.
The scrim sample dies for the cause. My jacket hits the floor, his shirt follows it on grounds of fairness, and he presses me up against the wall between his level pictures with rain hammering the porch roof and his mouth hot on my cold-rain skin, and it's nothing like the first time.
The first time was careful, a man reading a gauge.
This is two people who know exactly what they're doing and exactly what it costs and have decided, mid-hallway, wet through, to pay it: his hands and my hands in a fast unlaughing negotiation, my leg hitched over his hip, his breath gone rough at my ear saying my name and hold on in the same sentence, and I hold on.
And when he lifts me, both hands, no ceremony, my back flat to the wall and my ankles locked behind him, the rain on the roof is the only thing in the world louder than us.
It builds fast and breaks harder, his forehead dropped to my shoulder and my fingers buried in his wet hair, the two of us laughing and not-laughing into each other's necks.
We come together right there against the wainscoting he definitely installed himself, urgent and gasping and gloriously undignified, and one of the pictures ends up crooked, and afterward, wrapped in the blanket off his couch with my chin on his chest and the rain still going, I look at that one tilted frame for a long, satisfied while.
"Leave it," I tell him, when he follows my eyes. "One degree. It's the only honest thing on the wall."
He leaves it. As far as I know, it's crooked still.
And the whole time, the front lines stay active, because we are still us.
Monday I wake to find Gary and the troops re-staged on my lawn — not spelling anything this time, arranged into a museum-quality tableau of skeletons playing poker, with the face-down defeated one dealt in and visibly losing.
Tuesday I retaliate by breaking into nothing, touching nothing, merely rotating his dragon's head nine degrees so that from his kitchen window it appears to be watching him eat breakfast. Wednesday the poker game on my lawn has been joined by a plastic flamingo wearing a tiny witch hat, origin unknown, and the group chat holds a naming vote. Carla wins. It's not even close.
"You understand this is the weirdest courtship in town history," Frankie says, Thursday, over the register. "Denise is archiving it. There's a folder."
"It's not a courtship. It's a ceasefire with benefits."
"He gave your skeleton a flamingo."
"Carla is a shared custody situation—" and I hear it, I hear it as it exits my face, and Frankie doesn't even have to say anything, she just pulls my maple foam with the serenity of a woman who called the whole thing from her counter in week one.
"For the record," she says, sliding the cup across, "I've watched every October of that man since he moved here.
Big builds, bigger crowds, smiles for everybody, and the whole time it's like watching someone host a party at a house they're renting.
This year he looks like he lives somewhere.
" She rings me up. "That's you, dummy. That's all I'm saying. Tip jar's for the wedding fund."
"Whose wedding?"
"Anyone's," Frankie says serenely. "It's a communal fund."
The redesign happens on Thursday night, and like all my best ideas, it starts as a complaint.
I'm on the porch after dark with a clipboard, running through the build punch list for the judges' preview — six days out, all of it achievable, that's not the problem.
The problem is I keep looking at the séance parlor, my good, scary, beautifully engineered séance parlor, and feeling like I'm reading someone else's handwriting.
Beetlejuice sits beside me on the step, following my eyes, seeing nothing wrong. He loves the parlor. It's full of velvet. He auditions for it nightly, sitting dead center among the fled chairs with his eyes shut, twenty-two pounds of ambiance, and honestly he's the best actor on the payroll.
"Be honest with me," I tell him. "Who's it for?"
He has no answer. Neither do I, which is the problem.
I know who the séance is for. It's for the judges, and it's for the town, and underneath all of that, poured right into the foundation where you can't renovate it out, it's for her.
Look, Bee. Look what I can do. A room where the dead come back — I built my grandmother a machine for coming back, and I built it out of her own techniques, WWBD on every page of the binder, and she is not coming back, and every night I light it up and ask an empty chair to be impressed.
The clipboard ends up on the porch floor.
I sit there a long while in the cold, with the cat, in front of the best work I've done in years, understanding with terrible clarity that it's a dead end.
Not a bad build. A dead end. Dottie's committee wall flashes through my head, Bee in eleven photographs, and it hits me that in every single one, every one, her eyes go past the camera, past the build, straight to the crowd.
At the people, mid-delight. Forty-one years, and the woman never once built for the dead.
She built for whoever was walking up the lane in the dark, cold-fingered, needing somewhere warm to be scared.
"Okay," I say, out loud, unsteady, to the cat, to the yard, to whoever's listening from whatever chair. "Okay. New show."
Not a séance. A homecoming.
Same bones. I'm a professional, I'm not throwing out a forced-perspective room six days before judging.
But the room turns. The parlor becomes a lit doorway, a hall, a long table with dinner steaming, and the ghosts aren't summoned anymore.
They're arriving. Up the front walk, in from the dark, luggage in hand, translucent and hurrying, a whole family of them coming home for the holiday, and the house is glad.
Warm windows. A door that opens by itself, not scary — welcoming, which done right is scarier, and then not scary at all, and then it puts a lump in your throat, which is the actual target, because the last thing you see leaving the walk should be the table, set, waiting, one chair pulled out.
For whoever's next. For whoever hasn't made it home yet.
I sketch until two in the morning, fast and bad, the way the real ones always come, and at the top of the first page, where four weeks of build sheets have said WWBD, I write it, cross it out, and put down the new load rating.
WWLD.
What Would Lila Do. It's terrifying up there. It looks like a blank check.
Beetlejuice walks across the sketches, sits on the ghost family, and purrs like a compressor, and for once I take it as the review it is.
Friday, Grady comes to my house for dinner and I feed him my one recipe, and he eats three helpings of it like sworn testimony, and I show him the sketches because apparently the pilot program includes this now, showing someone the work while it's still wet.
He goes through the pages the way he goes through everything. Slow. In order. Jaw doing the thing.
"You're re-skinning the whole parlor in six days."
"Five, but keep going."
"The ghost family walk cycle. Projection on scrim?"
"Double scrim. Parallax. They'll hold up from the sidewalk and dissolve if you walk into them, which children will, so they're also the burglar alarm."
He gets to the last sketch — the table, the pulled-out chair — and he stops. He looks at it a long time, longer than a man looks at scenography. His thumb moves once across the corner of the page, careful of the pencil, and when he looks up at me, whatever's in his face has fog in it.
"It's her," he says. Not a question. Rough.
"The whole thing. It's—" and he stops, closes it down, reroutes so fast I almost miss it, and something small and cold files itself away in me even as his hand closes around mine on the table.
"It's the best thing anyone's ever staged in this town.
She'd—" He clears his throat. "Anyone who ever missed anybody is going to lose it on your front walk. "
"That's the budget line," I say. "Making the town cry. Frankie approved it."