Don't You Cry(43)

The moon, a perfectly round sphere, ascends high into the nighttime sky as lazy clouds float by.

I run home first to grab some tools, and then from a distance appraise the house, trying to figure out the best way to get inside. I want to know who it is that’s living in there and whether or not it really is, as Pops thinks, a squatter. I bring with me some pastry I carried home from the café. A chocolate croissant, stuffed inside a pocket. Whoever’s living in there might just be hungry.

I cross the street and settle on the fragmenting sidewalk, seeing the names at my feet, names sculpted decades ago into the solidifying concrete, proof that someone once lived here. That this home wasn’t always abandoned.

It’s the blue hour, the time of day when the entire world takes on a navy hue, the derelict house becoming blue, too. A few of the windows have been boarded up with plywood, and so those entryways are out. I’m not about to wrangle with the plywood with my bare hands. It’s pinned to the window casement with rusty old nails so that I’ll probably die of tetanus if I touch the darn things. That’s not really something I want to mess around with—the spasms and muscle stiffness, the risk of death—and so instead I use the tools I brought from home, a Craftsman nail puller that belongs to Pops and a pair of industrial work gloves.

I slip my hands into the gloves and use the nail puller to pry the rusty old nails from a boarded-up, busted window—in the back of the house where I’m less likely to be seen—and remove the plywood from the yellow siding. I drop it to the ground. And then I rely on a stepstool I dragged along to climb inside, using the end of the nail puller to push out any remaining bits of broken glass so I don’t get cut. It’s getting dark out here—hard to see much of anything—and yet it’s as I’m climbing in that the moon’s glow hits the rear of the house and I realize it’s all been for naught, for less than ten yards away stands another window, plywood removed, glass already smashed. Squatters.

Inside, the ceiling caves right on in, hunks of drywall falling off, leaving the framework of the home exposed. It’s dark inside, but thankfully for me, I brought a flashlight, too. I feel a wall for the light switch, surprised—and yet not surprised—to find the home is without electricity, probably shut off years ago. Just means whatever illegal tenants have been camping out here also have their own flashlight, the light Pops and I spied radiating from the open window. On, off. A flashlight or a lantern. Maybe a candle.

Inside I discover that when the owners left, they left quickly. They didn’t take much with them when they went. But still, it’s been stripped of appliances, and furniture is missing, things other people could sell and profit from. What remains are the knickknacks and other novelty items, things with sentimental value but not monetary. A vase, a chessboard, a defunct clock whose hands will forever be stuck at 8:14. In time many of the utilities were shut off for nonpayment, the water only after the pipes froze and burst. The bank tried to sell the home at auction, but no one made a single bid. It wasn’t worth the cost to level it to the ground, and so instead the home remained. The neighbors had half a mind to light the thing on fire and watch it burn; wouldn’t be such a bad idea in my opinion. But no one wanted to mess with the ghost of Genevieve, a thing that doesn’t even exist.

Inside there is writing on the walls. Graffiti. Some kind of creeping vine grows right through the splintered walls and into the home. The lawn is a mess, overgrown shrubbery all but taking over the home’s facade. In the backyard, there are downed trees everywhere, their remaining stumps blackened with rot. Inside there are the oddly normal facets of life: a stack of melamine cereal bowls resting in the cabinet, covered with webs and rodent droppings. There are chunks of fallen drywall from where the roof sank into the room, the shingles of the roof exposed. An impromptu skylight. Insulation falls out of the walls like stuffing from a torn teddy bear.

What I expect to see as I tiptoe my way through the derelict home is a squatter, maybe even a small family of squatters, huddled together in blankets on the floor. Or maybe a bunch of teenage hoodlums, smoking pot where they don’t think anyone will see, or some hobo passing through town, looking for a warmer, dryer place to get some sleep beneath a somewhat intact roof.

But maybe I’m not as smart as everyone seems to believe, because it doesn’t ever cross my mind, not one time, that I might see Pearl standing there in the abandoned living room, but there she is. I spot her ombré hair, which falls in waves down her back, the redness that strikes her cheeks as if she’d been slapped. As I watch on, she presses her fingertips to those cheeks; I can tell they’re cold. Even inside, in the unheated home, with broken windows that embrace the autumn night, they’ve gone numb. Her eyes glisten, starting to water in the cold November air. Her nose does, too, as puffs of air emerge into the room from her salmon-colored lips, whitish-gray puffs like clouds.

And now, standing in near-darkness, out the open window, the bird—the grackle—again begins to sing, a creepy little elegy, and a plump full moon shines in through the barbed broken glass, and Pearl turns to me and smiles.

“Hi there,” she says. “I was wondering if you’d ever come.”

“What are you doing here?” I ask, and she says, her voice calm like a millpond, “The same thing as you.” Her tone is poetic, rhythmical, and as she says these words, she turns her small feet in my direction. “Just nosing around,” she says as her index finger traces a line of dust on the fireplace mantel, and she stares down at the filth on her skin before wiping it on the leg of her pants.