Let's Pretend This Never Happened (36 page)

And so that’s when I found myself convincing Victor that we should move to the country with a few acres of land, so Hailey could run, and explore, and experience a little of the fucked-up sort of rural life that had made Victor and me able to pretend to be comfortable in many different social circles without ever actually fitting into any of them. We’d both had fond memories of growing up in wide-open places, and I was shocked to
suddenly realize that now that I’d seen what it was like to live on the pleasant-but-boring “other side of the tracks,” the childhood of country life that I’d wanted to save Hailey from was one that I now treasured. The heat and wild animals and isolation had molded who I was, and I found myself proud of those bumps along the way that had shaped me. It seemed unfair to deprive Hailey of those same experiences, and moving to the country seemed like the perfect answer.

Hailey—discovering the joy of dirt.

West Texas had changed too much to feel like home, but we eventually found a house in the Texas Hill Country, an hour outside Austin. It was in a tiny town, thirty miles from the nearest grocery store, but it was quiet, and nice, and the house sat on a few acres of trees that drifted down to a pretty, open meadow filled with bluebonnets. I felt like I was home. Plus, my office was on the opposite side of the house from Victor’s, and both had doors you could actually close.

And there was sun:

As always when we bought a new home, Victor asked the questions about deed restrictions and taxes, while I asked the two questions I was
always responsible for: “Has anyone ever died in the house?” and “How many bodies are buried on the property?” I always assume real estate agents are honest on the first question, because legally I think they have to disclose that, but technically I don’t think they’re required to answer the second. I used to ask whether
anyone
was buried on the property, but I was afraid that real estate agents weren’t being honest with me, so I switched it to “
How many
bodies are buried on the property?” because then it makes it sound like I expect there are bodies buried because that’s totally normal, and so they’ll be relieved and casually let slip that there are only two and a half bodies buried there. Victor says that my asking those questions is actually doing just the opposite, and that I’m making everyone uncomfortable, and then I point out that I’m actually fine with bodies buried on the property, but that I want to know where they are in case of the zombie apocalypse. This is the point when most real estate agents excuse themselves. Probably because it’s boring to see couples arguing about the zombie apocalypse all the damn time. I expect this sort of thing is the downside to being a real estate agent.

Eventually, though, we bought the house and began the five stages of moving:

DAY 1:
Pack everything nicely with Bubble Wrap. Clean it all first so it’s fresh and ready to be unpacked. Label boxes on all sides.

DAY 2:
Start intentionally breaking things so you have a reason not to wrap and pack them.

DAY 3:
Find eighteen choppers in the kitchen drawers. Demand that Victor stop buying shit from infomercials late at night. Intentionally break seventeen choppers.

DAY 4:
Question why you ever started collecting little glass animals, and who allowed you to have fourteen hundred of them. Also, why do we have
three junk drawers? Is that a sign that we’ve finally “made it,” or a sign that we’re hoarders? Try to get on Twitter to ask your friends, but then realize that your husband has already packed your computer cords. Feel utterly and completely alone. Cry in the bathroom, but be unable to blow your nose because you can’t find the box you packed the toilet paper in.

DAY 5:
Set a large bonfire in the living room. Laugh maniacally as you push cardboard boxes into it.

This was all true except for the very last part. In actuality, my father-in-law (Alan) came on day five to help us throw everything into boxes, and to keep me from throwing choppers at Victor, who’d spent all four days “packing” the garage, which I was pretty sure contained absolutely nothing of value, and which I would have sold for twenty dollars on Craigslist if Victor had died. I’m not entirely sure why a man would need two cabinets filled with tools, when
I’ve
been able to make it through thirty-five years of life with just duct tape and one screwdriver. Victor says it’s because “people don’t rebuild carburetors with duct tape,” but I’m pretty sure that Victor just doesn’t know how versatile duct tape is.

After we’d packed up the moving van, we began our long ride to our new home. A few minutes into the drive, Alan cleared his throat and self- consciously pulled a baggie out of his front pocket. “Oh. By the way. I found some . . . uh . . .
crack
, maybe?” he said as he hesitantly handed me the Ziploc bag of crack. My first thought was that it was strange that my very conservative father-in-law would offer me crack, and I wondered whether this was some sort of test. My second thought was that although I’d never seen crack before, I assumed it was expensive, and this seemed to be
a lot
of crack to have at one time. Unless possibly he was selling it, which seemed strange, since Alan was a very successful businessman. Still, I was aware that he’d given up a whole day to come help us, so I tried to be nonjudgmental as I struggled to find a polite way of turning him down,
but then I recognized my handwriting on the baggie. I realized with relief that Alan must have found the bag when he was packing and was nice enough to bring it along for the ride. I laughed and explained, “Oh, this is not my crack. It’s Hailey’s,” and he looked a bit more nauseated, and then I explained that what I really meant was that it was Hailey’s
and
that it was not crack. It was a powder you can buy that explodes into fake snow when you add water. I explained that Hailey played with it every winter, since we didn’t get real snow in Texas, and it was reusable but that when it dehydrates it looks like crack. I threw a small crack rock into an almost empty water bottle, and it instantly filled with snow, and Alan sighed with relief. It was a little insulting that he’d found crack and automatically assumed it was mine, but I considered everyone else who lived in the house and instead gave him credit for knowing me so well.

Soon after we moved in, I started researching the history of the area and found that we now lived on the edge of “The Devil’s Backbone,” one of the most haunted stretches of land in Texas. I’ve always been fascinated with ghost stories, so it didn’t bother me until a neighbor came over and told me about the bodies buried down the road from us. “The
who
buried
where
?” I asked her. Turns out a family had been buried in what was then their backyard, but the wilderness had grown up around it, and now the graves were all but lost. It bothered me. Not that there was an impromptu cemetery down the road (dead neighbors make quiet neighbors . . . I think Robert Frost said that), but that there was a lost graveyard in our subdivision that no one could find. Had it been built over? Were the graves fresh? I’d been happy that we were so far out in the country and wouldn’t be attacked by the hordes of overpopulated city zombies, but it concerned me that if the zombie apocalypse came we might have homemade zombies planted nearby, and we had no idea which direction they might come from. I was concerned. So was Victor, who said he’d appreciate it if I’d stop talking about the zombie apocalypse in front of our neighbors. “She deserves to know,” I retorted, and I told Victor that we needed to find these graves, because I wouldn’t be able to sleep until I knew where they were.

“No,” he said firmly. “We’re not going traipsing around the woods, looking for bodies in the unlikely event that there is a zombie apocalypse.”

“CONSTANT VIGILANCE,” I (may have) screamed.
“I’m doing this for all of us, asshole.”
And I was. We had a zombie garden somewhere nearby, and I wanted to be sure that it was old enough that the zombies would be no threat. We fought about it for a few days, until finally he agreed to find out where the graves were, probably because he finally realized that there are some unpleasant things the protector of the house is responsible for. Or possibly because I continually woke him up every three hours to ask whether he heard something on the back porch that sounded “hungry and shuffling.”

Victor found a local guy who claimed to know where the graves were, and he said to just take the road at the end of the street. Except that there
wasn’t
a road at the end of the street. I pointed at two overgrown tracks in the grass. “I think that’s what he’s talking about.”

“That’s not a road,” Victor said dismissively, but there was nothing else there.

“I’m pretty sure it’s a road,” I explained. “You can tell because there’s a fire hydrant next to it.”

He stared at me in aggravation and clenched his jaw as he turned our car onto the road that wasn’t a road. Several minutes (and one dented oil pan later) we reached a dead end and Victor glared at me. Then something ran out from the brush and I screamed, “CHUPACABRA!” And then Victor slammed on the brakes and just stared at me like I’d gone insane. Probably because I’d been so flustered that I’d accidentally shouted, “CHALUPA!” which
I’ll admit
is disconcerting to have someone scream at you while you’re being attacked by a dangerous creature. In my defense, though, no one could be expected to communicate properly after seeing a vicious
Mexican goat-sucker monster running through the woods. Victor said he’d agree with me completely if the chupacabra hadn’t actually just been a small deer. It was disheartening. Not only were we living in a neighborhood littered with chupacabras
¹
who were great at impersonating deer, but also we never found the graves.
And
now I wanted a chalupa, and there wasn’t a Taco Cabana within sixty miles of us. It was a failure by any standard, but I consoled Victor by reminding him that at least we didn’t own any goats that we’d have to worry about getting sucked. Then Victor asked me to stop talking, and he told me (for the first of what would eventually be eight thousand times) that we had made a huge mistake in moving to the country.

I defended our new town and assured him we just needed to readjust, but he was right. Clearly we were in over our heads, and I felt it was just a matter of time until one of us got dysentery or yellow fever. Until then, though, we settled back, safe in the knowledge that in moving we’d somehow cheated death . . . certain that when the end came, it would not be from Victor and me stabbing each other from work-related stress, but more likely from the unchartered wilderness (and possible chupacabra zombies) outside our door. Victor and I were comforted in the knowledge that our offices were now far enough apart that we would be safe from each other, but still we were worried.

And we were right to be.