Chapter 11
ERIC
Mom called me at two, while I was out in the garage going through the extension cords, because Jenna wanted a spare in case the light pack died. I answered with the phone under my ear.
"Are you bringing the dress?"
"Ma."
"I'm asking a question. Are you bringing it."
"Why would we bring it?"
"In case she changes her mind." Very light, very pleasant, which is how I knew. "It's a long night, Eric. Those wings will get old on her by seven, and then she'll be standing in my kitchen in a harness with nothing to change into, and she'll be upset."
"She's not going to change her mind."
"Bring it anyway."
I stood there with a coil of orange cord in my hand. It was a completely reasonable request. There's nothing in bring it just in case you can point at and call a problem, and if you refuse it, you're the one being rigid about a garment bag.
So I made myself run the night out to the end, assuming I said yes.
We bring the dress. It's in the house, in the front closet, six feet from the kitchen.
Around eight, when the wings have gotten heavy, my mother mentions to Lucy that it happens to be here.
And Lucy's eleven, and tired, and she's been carrying three feet of wire on her shoulders for two hours, and my mother's face is right there.
"I'll bring it," I said.
"Good."
"I'll bring it, and I'm putting it in the back bedroom, and nobody's going to mention it to Lucy."
There was a pause on the line.
"That's a strange way to be about a dress."
"It's not about the dress, it's about who has to say no." I switched the phone to the other ear. "If it's out where she can see it, the person who has to say no is an eleven-year-old. I'm not doing that to her."
"Nobody's asking her to say no to anything."
"Ma, do you want the corn dish at five or not?"
"Five. Not five thirty. Karen's bringing her cider at four, and I'm not doing both at once."
"Then I'll see you at five."
"Eric."
"Five, Ma."
We hung up, and I stood in my garage with my heart going like I'd carried something up a flight of stairs.
Then I went up to Lucy's room to get it myself, so nobody else would have to handle it.
Her room's a disaster. It always is — three pairs of shoes on the floor, a math worksheet under the bed, the crown box open on the dresser with the crown out of it.
The crown was sitting on a stack of library books, because she'd been wearing it around while she did homework.
The dress had been hanging on the back of the door since Saturday, and she'd unzipped the bag partway so she could see it.
I zipped it up before I carried it out. I don't know why. It felt like the polite thing to do to a dress.
I hung it on the hook in the back of the truck cab and came in through the kitchen, where Jenna was working on the foil.
"Was that Mom?"
"She wants the dress brought over. Just in case."
Her hands stopped. "And?"
"It's in the truck. It's going in the back bedroom with the coats, and it's staying there." I got the salt down off the shelf for her, because she was reaching. "You won't have to look at it, you won't have to say anything about it, and Lucy's not going to know it's in the building."
She looked at me a second. "Okay," she said, and went back to the foil.
The rest of the afternoon was chaos in the ordinary way.
The corn dish went in at three thirty, came out at four fifteen, and had to be re-foiled twice.
Lucy couldn't find the black leggings that go under the harness, then found them, then decided against them, then went back to them; they'd been in the dryer the whole time, which is the one place nobody looked.
She also had the face paint redone twice, once because the green ran too far down her cheek and once because she'd rubbed the first fix off on a towel.
I laid a moving blanket in the truck bed, set the wings on it face up, strapped them at four points with the ratchets loose enough not to bite the wire, then drove eleven miles an hour to my mother's house with the hazards on like a lunatic.
Jenna followed with Lucy in her car. Lucy rode over in sweatpants with the harness in her lap.
Mom's street was already parked up both sides, because forty-three people were coming and most of them drive.
The garage door was up with the tables out, orange cloths on them, the plastic cauldron of cider on the folding table by the freezer, and the same fog machine my uncle donated in 2011 that has never once made fog for longer than four minutes.
I carried the wings in first, two hands, sideways through the storm door, past the cardboard cat.
Mom was in the kitchen. She looked at what I had and her face did nothing at all.
"There's a nail in the wall in the back bedroom," she said, "if you need to hang something."
"Thanks."
"Is that the — "
"It's the moth."
"Mm," she said, and went back to the oven.
That was the whole confrontation. She was cool with me all night in a way nobody else in that house would have caught.
She talked to me exactly as much as she talked to everybody.
She just didn't talk to me first about anything, which if you've been her son for fifty-four years is a very loud thing.
I went back out for the garment bag. Karen was on the front step with a slow cooker and watched me come up the walk with it over my arm.
"Oh, is that the princess thing? Mom sent me a picture."
"It's the princess thing."
"Where do you want it?"
"Back bedroom."
"You want me to — "
"I've got it."
I carried it down the hall past the bathroom and the linen closet, into the back bedroom where the coats were already piling up on the bed, and hung it on the nail. I looked at it a second — white bag, zipper closed, three hundred and forty dollars of it.
Then I shut the door.
A man shuts a door in a hallway. Nobody saw it. It took four seconds. It's the only thing I've ever done in that house that I'm actually proud of.
When I came back up the hall my mother was standing at the mouth of the kitchen with a serving spoon in her hand.
"You put it in the back."
"I did."
"With the coats."
"On the nail."
She looked at me. I looked at her. Somewhere behind her my aunt was asking loudly whether the cider had anything in it.
"There's ice in the cooler in the carport," Mom said, "if the front one runs out."
"Okay."
And she went back in.
So I did the ice, and the extra chairs out of the shed, and the thing with the extension cord where you tape it down across the doorway so nobody catches a foot in it. That one's my job every year. My aunt trips on it anyway.
Karen found me in the carport around ten of six.
"So what's going on."
"Nothing's going on."
"Mom's doing the thing."
"What thing."
"The thing where she talks to everybody equally." Karen's fifty-eight and has never once in her life pretended not to notice something. "She hasn't asked me one question about myself. She asked Doreen about her knee. She asked Rob about his job. She's got something going and it's pointed at you."
"Lucy's wearing the costume Jenna made."
Karen stopped with a bag of ice in each hand. "The green one."
"The green one."
"Huh." Then, after a second: "Good."
"Good?"
"Eric, that woman has been making costumes at that table since Lucy was in diapers." She shifted the ice. "I've been watching it. I go to that house."
"You never said anything."
"It's not my house." She headed past me toward the cooler. "Also I like Mom buying my kids stuff. Mine would go to school naked."
By six the house was full, and it's a small house, so full means people standing in the hallway, kids running the loop from the kitchen through the dining room into the front room and back around, somebody's toddler crying about a mask.
Rob had the real camera out, taking the same ten pictures he takes every year.
Jenna and Lucy went down the hall to the bathroom around a quarter after with the harness. I heard the door, then Lucy laughing at something.
I stayed where I could see that hall. That was the deal — I'd said I'd stand in the room, so I stood in the room, holding a plastic cup of cider I wasn't drinking while my sister asked me about the transmission on the truck.
Twice in that hour somebody went down the hall for a coat, and both times I went tight all over, because the coats were in the back bedroom and so was the bag.
Nobody said a word about it. Why would they?
It's a white garment bag on a nail in a room full of jackets, the most invisible object in the world unless you're the one who put it there.
I kept my eyes on the mouth of that hallway anyway.
If my mother had gone down it I'd have followed her; I'd decided that in the truck.
I wasn't going to stop her, and I wasn't going to argue with her in her own house on Halloween, but that bag was not coming back up the hall without me standing next to it.
She never went down it. Twice she came to the mouth of the hall and looked. Both times she turned around and went back to the oven.
Then a kid in the kitchen said, "Whoa," and the talking dropped off in a wave, front to back.
Lucy came up the hall sideways, because she had to turn her shoulders to clear the door frame, then straightened and stepped into the light of the kitchen.
Green, six feet of it tip to tip, the silver veining catching the overhead like frost on a windshield, those two long tails sweeping behind her heels, the plumed antennae bobbing above the headband.
She'd painted her face pale with a smudge of green at the temples, which was Jenna's idea from about three weeks back.
She stood in the doorway of my mother's kitchen with forty people looking at her.
Then she reached back with her right hand, found the switch through the fabric, and the eyespots came on.