Malus Domestica (5 page)

Trying to visualize this, eating bacon for breakfast with her mother in their little kitchen, Robin saw two other little faces sitting at the table. Two quiet brown-faced children, wide-eyed

(my name is fisher and his name is johl but mama calls him jo-elle)

and spooked like baby owls. The knot inside her loosened, and her jaw tipped open in surprise. “I
do
remember you. It was the bacon that made me remember.”

Joel smiled and made a
Halleluah!
raise-the-roof motion with his hands. “Ain’t nothin in this world that good bacon can’t make better.”

“I’m sorry. They made me forget a lot. …The shrinks the state made me talk to.”

Joel glanced toward the kitchen—or perhaps it was the clock—and back at her, giving the pierced, scruff-headed woman an assessing look. Finally, he said in a tentative way, “That’s why I believed it when the rumor was goin around you said
witches
had something to do with it.”

Robin winced at that, but Joel was either oblivious or didn’t care. “Yeah. I told people that. But they didn’t believe me. That’s why I had to talk to the shrinks. They thought I had PTSD or something. They thought losing my mother drove me crazy.”

“You ain’t found em, has you? That’s what you been doin ever since the shrinks let you out. You been lookin for them witch bitches.”

She squinted out the window at the noonday sun.

Joel put both feet flat on the floor and stubbed out his cigarette, leaning on his elbows. He clasped his hands together and spoke around them. “So you for
real,
then. You doin this shit for real. How you make YouTube videos about this shit? Ain’t this incriminatin evidence?”

Robin’s fingernails dug into her palms. “You ever heard of Slender-Man?”

“Ain’t he that skinny dude with no face, wears a black suit and a red tie, got long arms, creeps people out?”

“Yeah.”

She did a search on YouTube for it and found the TribeTwelve channel, turning the Macbook around so Joel could see it. “There are half a dozen YouTube channels devoted to this guy Slender-Man. Each one chronicles a different group of people trying to figure out the mystery surrounding him…they’re all set up as if the events happening in the videos are real.

“But, of course, everybody knows they aren’t—wink-wink. They’re each a scripted and acted horror series made to look real. Like, you remember the
Blair Witch Project?
How it was designed and shot to look like somebody found it on a camera in the woods, basically started the found-footage genre?”

Joel nodded. “Yeah. And you doin somethin like that, but theirs is fake and yours is actually real? But you make it
look
like it’s as fake as theirs. Ah ha-ha. Reverse psychology up in this bitch.”

“Yes.”

“And instead of lookin for Slender-Man, you lookin for the witches that, uhh—”

“Yes.”

Another man came out of the kitchen. His hair was going gray and his drawn Latino face was a hash of wrinkles, but Robin recognized Miguel from the photograph behind the register. “Hey,” he called
.
“We got to get ready for lunch.”

“Untwist them panties, hero,” said Joel, grabbing at the air in a
zip-it
motion. “I’m just doin some catchin up.” He slid out of the booth and stood up, stretching. Up close in the window’s light, she could see that he was exquisitely chiseled.

“Who’s your friend?”

“Her mama used to babysit me and Fish when we was kids.” Joel coughed into his fist and took a bottle of hand sanitizer out of his apron pocket, squirting it into his palms and wringing his hands. “Robin Martine.”

Miguel’s brain seemed to hang like a busy computer program and then he subtly crumpled. “Oh.”

An awkward silence lingered between them, and then one corner of his bushy mustache ticked up in a wistful half-smile. “I remember hearing about, uhh…” His belly bobbed with one hesitant breath. “I’m sorry about your mother.”

Robin tried her best to be gracious, but didn’t know what to say, so she echoed his expression and dipped her head appreciatively.

“I didn’t really know her, but I heard she was a good person.”

“She was.” Robin’s hand had found its way around the can of coffee while she wasn’t paying attention, and now she drummed soft fingers against the aluminum. The two men watched her with expectant eyes, the quiet pause only scored by the sound of furious washing and banging in the kitchen.

Robin looked down at the Monster can. “Five years ago. I decided this year I would finally come back to Slade and visit her. This year I’ve decided I feel like I can finally…finally push through the dark and say the things I need to say to her. I guess.”

“Well,” said Miguel. “Welcome back, Kotter. Mi casa es su casa.”

Joel followed him back into the kitchen. “What he said.”

“Thank you,” she called after them, and put the prescription bottle back in her jeans pocket.

2

T
HE
HOUSE
WAS
A
two-story Queen Anne Victorian, an antique dollhouse painted the muted blue of a raincloud. A wraparound porch encircled the front, and the whole thing was trimmed in white Eastlake gingerbread. It was streaked with black like mascara tears, as if the house had been weeping soot from its seams. Empty sashed windows peered down at them like eyes, darkness pressing against their panes from inside.

“What did I tell you?” asked Leon. “Cool, right?”

The boy unbuckled his seatbelt and leaned up, pushing his glasses up with a knuckle. He gazed up through the U-Haul’s windshield at their new base of operations. “It looks like the house from the Amityville Horror or something.”

1168 Underwood Rd cut an impressively Gothic silhouette against the stark white afternoon sky. The neighborhood stretched out to their right, a mile and a half of red-brick Brady Bunch ranch-houses, double-wide trailers with toys peppered across their lawns, white shepherd-cottages, a few A-frame cabins lurking deep in the trees.

Across the road from 1168 was a small trailer park, eight or nine mobile homes marching rigid lockstep toward a distant treeline. Since his window was rolled halfway down, Wayne could hear the faraway mewling-seagull-cry of children playing.

His eyes broke away from the watchful windows, coins of white reflecting off his lenses. A grin crept across his dark face. “It’s
awesome.”

Leon beamed.

They got out of the box truck and clomped up the front steps. The porch was wider than he expected, four lunging steps across—wide enough to ride his bicycle up and down the length of the porch if he wanted to. Wicker chairs lined the wall underneath the front windows, and a swing was chained to the ceiling where the porch angled around the corner.

Click.
The portentous sound of his father unlocking the front door made him twitch. “It even locks with an old-timey key,” said Leon, showing Wayne the long, thin skeleton key. He pushed the door open with his fingertips.

Disappointingly, it didn’t creak open in that spooky, melodramatic way, but the doorknob did bump against the opposite wall. Leon winced and stepped inside, checking behind the door for damage.

Wayne went in behind him and stood there, turning in a slow circle, taking it all in. The thick, astringent smell of fresh paint cloyed the air. The front hallway was interminably tall—the ceiling looked like it was fifteen feet high—but it seemed cramped, with only enough room for maybe three men to walk abreast. He felt like he could lie on the floor and touch the walls with his feet and hands.

To his right, a doorless archway led into a small den. To his left, a stairway climbed to the second floor and a dark bathroom yawned at the foot of the stairs, dim daylight glinting from the teeth of its chrome fixtures. Dead ahead, the foyer hallway went on past two closet doors and opened into the kitchen, the floor turning into turtle-shell linoleum.

An intricate red carpet runner had been laid down by the real estate agent, new and clean. Regardless, every shuffling footfall, every little noise they made and word they spoke reverberated in short, hollow echoes throughout the house.

“Hello?” called Leon. With the lights off, his Jamaican complexion was dark enough that he melted into the shadows—a business suit and a grin. He was wearing a blue two-piece suit and a cranberry tie.

For a terrifying second, Wayne almost expected to hear an answer from upstairs.

He
loved
it. “Do you think it’s haunted?”

Leon tucked his hands in his pockets. “Who knows?”

The den was a cozy space, unfurnished as of yet with anything other than empty bookshelves and a cushioned reading nook in the front window. The walls were unpapered, painted the same rainy blue as the outside. A modest fireplace occupied one wall.

“I think I need to see if one of our neighbors might be able to give us a hand with the sofa.”

“I can help you.”

“I don’t know, it’s big. I don’t want to see you get hurt. We barely got it out of the apartment.”

They passed into the kitchen, where the walls had been wallpapered, and had been done so in yellow sunflowers that probably should have looked cheery, but were more forlorn and drab than anything else. The fridge was a new side-by-side slab of black humming efficiently in the corner, and the countertops were malachite-green marble over dark cherrywood cabinets.

Wayne decided that the kitchen would not be his favorite room. Leon went around to all the windows, parting the curtains and letting sunlight in. Dust satellited in the soft white beams.

The pantry was surprisingly large, a narrow ten-foot space lined with three tiers of shelving. He started to climb them to see what was on the top shelf, but his father shut him down with a hand on his shoulder. “Nope. Come on, let’s go look at the bedrooms.”

The stairs were steep and creaked as if they were made of popsicle sticks, groaning and cracking and thumping.

1168’s second story seemed somehow more spacious than the first. As soon as they stepped up onto the upper landing, a narrow T-shaped hallway led some twenty or thirty feet toward a window at the bottom of the T, flanked by a pair of doors. The right one opened onto the master bedroom, unfurnished, with a walk-in closet that stank of mothballs. The left went into a bathroom, with a claw-foot bathtub and a porcelain sink.

The bathroom’s wainscoting was done in rose-pink and teal tiles, but halfway up the walls and ceiling became painted sheetrock. Leon touched the wall. “I just realized—that sheetrock’s gonna be a bitch to keep mildew out of. I am
diggin
this pink, though.”

Wayne screwed up his face. A ring of metal was bracketed to the ceiling, and a diaphanous plastic curtain hung into the tub. “What kind of bathtub has
feet?”

Back in the hallway, he stood dejectedly with his hands in his pockets. “Where’s
my
bedroom?”

“Ah.” Leon searched the hallway, even looking out the window and peering into the master suite again. “I thought I forgot something. I guess you’ll have to sleep in the garage, chief.”

Wayne’s heart sank. “You’re full of crap.”

His father rubbed his goatee, then thrust a finger into the air and hustled away as if he’d suddenly remembered something. “There’s one last place we haven’t checked. There’s a closet out here on the landing you can sleep in, if you can fit.”

“A
closet?”

“Yeah, like Harry Potter.”

“Harry Potter lived under the
stairs.”
Wayne followed him in a daze back out to the end of the landing, then traced the banister down to a window that cast out onto the back of the house. From here, he could see a rickety tool shed and a huge back yard.

Next to the window was a door, which Leon opened to reveal a set of stairs leading up into soft sunlight and around a spiral, climbing out of sight.

Leon shrugged. “After you.”

Wayne set off up them, hitching his knees high, almost clambering up them on all fours. The stairs spiraled once and a half, opening onto a small room inside a dome of windows that made him think of the belfry in a church steeple. The room wasn’t a perfect circle but an octagon like a stop sign, with eight walls.

The ceiling was just high enough that his father didn’t have to stoop, but he stood there with his fingertips pressed against it as if he were trying to hold it up.

“It’s called a
cupola,”
said Leon. “What you think?”

The ‘cupola’ seemed small, but as Wayne went from window to window assessing the view, the room proved to be larger than he initially gave it credit for. Plenty of room for his bed and at least two dressers besides, and each of the four windows stood atop a small nook bench that folded open to reveal storage space.

Across the street, a long gravel drive snaked between a trailer park and a series of cottages, climbing a hill to a building that looked like pictures he’d seen of the Alamo. Mud-pink walls topped with Gothic wrought-iron teeth, a triangular facade front, brown clay roofing tiles. A man drove a riding lawnmower up and down the hill out front, cropping dull green grass.

“I like it,” said Wayne. To the south, he could see the tops of buildings in distant Blackfield, rising over the trees behind the house.

“Then welcome to your new Batcave, Master Wayne.”

“The Batcave is underground.”

Leon continued his Atlas impression, hands against the ceiling. “Work with me, here. I’m old and out of touch.”

“Batman’s older than
you
are.”

“Keep it up and I’ll make you sleep in the garage anyway!”

❂

As the afternoon wore on, Wayne and his father managed to get most of the boxes and furniture into the house, with the exclusion of the sofa and dining-room table. The most troublesome items by far were Wayne’s mattress and box-spring, which Leon could handle well enough by himself (with Wayne pushing helpfully from behind) until they got into the spiral stairway to the cupola. That became an arduous trial of swearing, sweating, and banging around in the stuffy space that left them flustered and irritated with each other.

To get the dining room table in, they carried the table up onto the front porch, then turned it on end like a giant coin and rolled it through the house. Leon ushered Wayne in ahead of the table, confusing him at first, but when his father started humming the Indiana Jones theme and pretending the table was the boulder from
Raiders of the Lost Ark,
he couldn’t help but run away from it in slow-motion.