Chapter 7
Lila
Three hours of daylight, Dottie said, and the sky gives us ninety minutes.
I'm on my porch fighting forty yards of velvet drape into submission when the first real gust comes down Foxglove Lane like a plow, and the séance parlor inhales.
That's the only way to describe it. The whole forced-perspective room takes a breath it was never engineered to take, and my medium — my beautiful medium, four days of sculpt work, her face finally just dead enough — leans hard against her guy wires and looks at me like, well?
"Okay," I tell her, hauling the ratchet strap tighter, one professional to another, because we've been through a lot together, she and I, and most of it was my fault. "Nobody dies tonight. Again."
Beetlejuice has been recalled indoors under emergency powers, and he protests this from the kitchen window with his whole body, a black smear of outrage against the glass.
"You're a house cat now," I yell at the window.
"It's a storm. Read the room." He yells back something I'm glad I can't translate.
The rain arrives sideways. Not autumn rain.
Ocean rain, cold as a lawsuit, and the light drops out of the afternoon all at once like somebody billed the sky.
I get the drapes lashed, get the table lift dropped to its lowest position and pinned, get the skeleton troops flat in the grass in a formation Gary would call cowardice and I call load management, and I'm actually winning, that's the thing, I'm two straps from done — when I hear it.
A sound like a ship coming loose. From next door.
I look over the fence, and the dragon is trying to fly.
The tarp Grady rigged over the wing frames has torn loose at one corner and turned into a sail, and it's pulling against the winch line with every gust, and the whole two-story skeleton is rocking on its base like a thing deciding.
And Grady's up the ladder in the rain at the shoulder joint, fighting the shackle one-handed, and the math is right there for anyone who's rigged a show outdoors: the next big gust takes the tarp, the tarp takes the wing, and the wing takes the ladder, and the ladder has a person on it.
I don't decide anything. That's the truth of it, whatever I said later. My body is over the fence gate with a ratchet strap while my brain is still doing paperwork.
"Left tie-down," I yell up through the rain. "Give me your slack and stop fighting the tarp. Cut it. It's just plastic, let it go."
"It's holding water off the servos—"
"It's a sail, Grady. Your servos can dry out. Your skull can't. Cut it."
A beat. The wind leans on both of us. And then his knife's out and the tarp goes, whipping off into the dark like a ghost quitting the business, and with the sail gone the dragon stops fighting, and I get my strap on the low anchor and crank it while he re-shackles the wing, and between the two of us the skeleton sits back down on its base like nothing ever happened.
He comes down the ladder soaked through. Looks at the strap. Looks at me — drowned, furious, trespassing.
"Your porch," is all he says, and we both go.
Because it's my turn. The wind's swung again and the séance parlor is inhaling harder now, one of my anchor points tearing free of the rotten fascia he warned me about, the whole drape wall bellying like a lung, and I grab the flapping strap while he does the thing I couldn't have done — puts one boot on the porch rail, goes up the corner post bare-handed in the rain, and pins the failed anchor with his whole weight until I can re-route the strap to the good post, the one with the longer lag bolt, the one I mounted where he told me to.
"Left cleat," I call, and he's already on it. "Other left."
"This is the other left."
"Stage left. Everything in my yard runs stage left, it's a whole discipline—" and the wind takes the rest, and it doesn't matter, because his hands are already where the words were going, which is the entire month in one image, and the strap comes tight, and holds.
The parlor stops breathing. The medium settles. Somewhere behind the drapes the table lift, pinned and safe, gives one small mechanical sigh, and the two of us stand in the ruin of my lawn in the roaring dark, chests going, absolutely destroyed, four hands on the same strap.
Across the street, with a rip we can hear over the wind, the Hendersons' reaper achieves independence.
It goes over their fence still inflated, nine feet of billowing polyester death, and proceeds down the middle of Foxglove Lane at a stately pace, scythe first, like it has a meeting.
We both watch it go. Neither of us moves.
There's a version of us from two weeks ago that lets it fly to Vermont out of spite, and a version from some future I'm not examining that sprints after it in the rain, and tonight, soaked and shaking, we are exactly in between.
"Storm can have that one," Grady says.
"Agreed. It's the storm's problem now."
The reaper rounds the corner by the green and is gone, off to frighten a different zip code, and I'm still laughing when the streetlight explodes.
Not dramatically. Transformer somewhere up the line, one blue flash over the hill, and Foxglove Lane goes dark from end to end.
His floodlights die. My porch light dies.
The whole grid of our little war just — out.
Nothing left but rain and the Hendersons' reaper across the street, deflating in the wind with a sound like a whale's last opinion.
"Shed," I hear myself say. "It's closer than either house and I'm not doing your kitchen right now."
He doesn't ask what's wrong with his kitchen. There's nothing wrong with his kitchen. There's just something about it being his that I can't do while soaked, in the dark, with my hands shaking from cold or whatever I'm calling it.
The shed door sticks the way it's stuck since nineteen eighty.
You lift, then push. He watches me do it — lift, push, like a combination, like a family recipe — and something crosses his rained-on face too fast to read in the dark, and he follows me in out of the roar, and pulls the door shut, and the storm goes from everywhere to outside, and it's black as a pocket, and it smells like her.
Lavender and sawdust and machine oil. Fourteen years of Halloween in one lungful. I hear myself take the breath and hold it.
"Okay?" His voice, low, close, careful.
"I haven't really been in here yet." My hands find the workbench in the dark, the vise, the dish of screws exactly where the dish of screws lives.
"I opened the door my first week and shut it again.
It's the last room that still — she's still in the air in here.
That's insane. Don't tell anyone I said that. "
"It's not insane." A rustle; his phone light comes up, low, pointed at the floor like he's decided full light would be rude.
And there it is around us, her whole kingdom in the little glow: the cord wall, coiled and labeled by length.
The paint shelf, every can dated in marker.
The blanket on the stool — the good blanket, the horrible crocheted one, orange and purple, the one she made the year she learned to crochet and refused to learn any further.
He takes the blanket off the stool and puts it around my shoulders, and I let him, which tells you what kind of night it is.
"You're shaking," he says.
"I'm cold. It's October and I dressed for Florida again. It's a lifestyle."
"Mm." He doesn't believe me, and he's right not to, because it's not the cold, or it's not only the cold.
It's the shelf by the door, where her gardening gloves are still shaped like her hands.
It's the pegboard with the outline of a hammer that's in my kitchen drawer now, so the outline just hangs there empty, like the shed is still expecting her.
Fourteen months I planned to come visit and didn't, because the park had me building a coaster queue in Ohio, because October was our season, ha, because there was always going to be another October.
"Hey." Low. He's watching my face in the phone glow. "Where'd you go?"
"Ohio," I say, which makes no sense to anyone but me, and he doesn't ask.
He just stands there being warm eight inches away, a man-shaped woodstove, patient as furniture, and the rain hammers the roof, and he doesn't move away.
In a shed this size there's not much away to move to.
The rain hammers the roof in sheets, and his phone light throws the two of us up the wall in one shadow, and I should make a joke.
This is where I make a joke. I've got four loaded: the shed's occupancy limit, the blanket's crimes against color theory, the fact that we just saved each other's armies like idiots and the committee would need a whole new clipboard—
"Why'd you come over the fence?" he asks.
Quiet. Real question. No jaw thing. His face in the up-light is all attention, rain still running out of his hair, and I hear the honest answer coming and cannot stop it any more than I stopped the tarp.
"Because you were going to lose it," I say.
"The dragon. And I couldn't stand it. Which makes no sense, because that dragon is the whole thing between me and my roof, and for one second tonight the wind offered to solve my entire October for free, and I said no.
I jumped a fence in a nor'easter to save the competition.
" The laugh that comes out of me has no floor under it.
"I'm going to lose this contest because I like your stupid dragon, and I need you to know I find that unforgivable.
I find you unforgivable. You show up with fuses and cat beds and you coach youth soccer, and I had a plan, Grady.
Hate the neighbor. Win the money. Fix the roof.
It was a clean plan, and you've been sanding the edges off it since the day I got here, and—"
"Lila."
"—and now I'm in my dead grandmother's shed wearing a crocheted crime, monologuing, in the dark, which is somehow still not the most embarrassing thing about tonight—"
"I haven't been fighting you," he says, and it stops me like a wall, because his voice has no flat left in it. "I want that on the record. Whatever it's looked like. I've been fighting how much I look forward to you. There's a difference. I lost track of it around the cat."
The rain hits the roof. The blanket's wool smell mixes with cedar and fog fluid and him, and the two feet between us stops being a distance and becomes a question.
"That's a lot of words at once," I whisper. "From you."
"You asked for the data."
I kiss him. Or he kisses me. The report will never establish which, and the report can go home, because his hands come up under the blanket to the sides of my waist like I'm something he's about to lift carefully — and then not carefully — and I've got a fistful of soaked flannel and the workbench edge is against my back and fourteen years of coiled extension cords watch me kiss my rival like the storm is billing us by the hour.
He makes a sound low in his chest, half word, maybe my name, and the careful goes out of both of us at the same time.
His mouth is rain-cold and coffee-warm, and he kisses the way he does everything, no wasted motion, devastating margins, one hand flat on the bench beside my hip caging nothing, asking everything.
The other hand leaves my waist and travels — slow, deliberate, up the soaked line of my spine to the nape of my neck, and when it closes there, gentle as a clamp set to exactly the right pressure, my whole body reports for duty in a way it has not done in years, possibly ever, possibly this is new equipment.
I arch into him and hear the dish of screws skate somewhere it'll take me a week to find, and I do not care.
He lifts me onto the bench edge without breaking the kiss, one motion, like I weigh what the cat weighs, and my cold hands find their way under the hem of his shirt to the furnace of his back and he shudders, the whole rated structure of him, because my hands are cold, because my hands are mine.
His mouth drops to my jaw, my throat, the cold-burned skin under my ear, unhurried and devastating, reading me like a cut list. I hear myself say his name in a register I don't recognize.
His teeth graze where my pulse is making a scene, and the blanket slides off my shoulders, and neither of us moves to catch it, and his laugh against my throat when the shiver runs through me is a whole new problem, because it's the real one, the four-times-a-year one, and it's mine now, I made it happen—
Every light on Foxglove Lane comes back on at once.
The grid returns like a parent flipping the switch on a basement party.
His floodlights, my porch light, the work light in the shed window we never turned off — all of it, blazing, and the two of us are lit up through the little window like a diorama.
Exhibit: Local Rivals, Entangled. The Hendersons' reaper re-inflates across the street with a long rising whine like a witness climbing to its feet.
We break apart. The blanket has somehow migrated to his shoulders, which is the single funniest thing I've ever seen and I am too compromised to enjoy it.
On the workbench, my phone starts buzzing like a hornet in a jar.
I grab it on pure reflex — and it's the group chat, forty-one messages deep, and my whole nervous system braces for a photo of the shed window before my eyes catch up.
Power's out at the Hendersons. Power's back on Maple.
Denise has lost the reaper. The reaper is on the green.
THE REAPER IS AT THE CHURCH. Somebody's posted a picture of nine feet of polyester death pinned against St. Brigid's doors by the wind like it's seeking asylum, and not one message, not one, is about us.
The town's cameras were all pointed at a runaway reaper. We're the only two people in Hollow Creek who know what just happened in this shed.
I don't know what my face does with that information, but it must be complicated, because Grady looks at me, at the phone, back at me.
"So," he says. The blanket is orange and purple. His chest is going like a bellows underneath it. "Power's back."
"Yep." My voice comes out scraped. "Great news. For the servos."
"Lila—"
"This changes nothing." I'm already at the shed door, lift, push, cold air like a slap, and it's not him I'm running from, it's the size of it, the whole size of it, everything the kiss just told me that I have nowhere to put.
I stop in the doorway because I owe him one true thing back before I go barricade myself in the house to panic with my cat.
"I'm still going to destroy you. Three weeks. On the merits."
And Grady Ellis stands in my grandmother's shed in her horrible crocheted blanket with his mouth still wrecked from mine, and he smiles like I've just promised him something romantic.
The horrifying part is, I think I have.