Tonight the mother reads the little boy the story of Harold and the Purple Crayon. They lay side-by-side in his bed, and when she finishes, when she snaps shut the book, he asks her to stay a little longer. “To cuddle, Mama.” She tells him no. She has to go. He has to sleep. “Just for a minute,” he says. “A mini-minute,” she says and remains curled up by him for a few breaths before climbing out of bed, pulling the covers up to his chin. “Don’t leave,” he says and she says she has to and kisses his forehead and lets her lips linger there another moment before she snaps off the light, says goodnight, closes the door.
He s not scared of the dark. He’s not worried about monsters beneath his bed or aliens at the window. It’s his mother—whose eyes are redrimmed, whose hair is going gray at the roots because she hasn’t been to the beauty parlor in months—who worries him. He hears her crying through the walls. He hears her on the phone: “We’re underwater,” she keeps saying, along with that word, foreclosure. They are going into foreclosure.
One night he asked her where it was, foreclosure. “I’m sorry?” she said and he said, “We’re going there. You keep saying we’re going there. Foreclosure. Her lips flattened and her eyebrows came together and she asked him if he wanted to watch cartoons—would he like that?
He has heard at Sunday school the story of Noah and the ark that survived the great flood. And he has seen on the news the waters that rose up from a river to swallow towns in a place called Iowa. This is what his mother is worried about, he feels certain. This is why she is packing all of their things into boxes, suitcases. A flood. A flood is coming. And its waters will be black and roiling with terrible fish, their eyes white, their fangs thin and crooked. He imagines the first wave of the flood surging along the street, splashing against the side of their house, foaming and reeking of the terrible fish that wait outside, gnawing at the wood. The water will seep under the doors and lick its way down the hallway, rising, rising.
He needs to work quickly. And he knows his mother might notice the light under his door, so he pulls the shades instead, allowing the moon into his room, its light silvering over his walls. Slowly he slides open his closet. From a shelf devoted to art supplies he pulls a box of crayons
and fumbles through them until he pulls out one he thinks to be purple, though it could just as well be black in the uncertain moonlight.
And there, on the wall, he begins to draw a boat, one big enough for the two of them, to cany them away to foreclosure.
7.
The neighborhood is empty, it has always been empty. It was built by a custom homebuilder that has developed subdivisions in thi ee diffei ent states. Since the market crashed, the company has laid off most of its employees in its building and land development divisions. It is working with financial advisors and legal counsel on vendor payments and othei cash obligations.
Construction has stopped. All the signs and sales trailers have been hauled away. No sod has been laid; the yards are made of mud. The farther you travel into the neighborhood, the more unfinished it becomes. Houses that are naked of siding—the sheets of felt paper stapled to their exterior coming loose to flap in the wind like rotten skin. Houses that are missing windows and doors. Houses that are nothing more than a skeletal frame and lots that are nothing more than an excavated hole, a muddy cavity collapsing inward.
The neighborhood runs up against a pine forest. And it isn’t long— after the payloaders and bulldozers and trucks stacked high with lumber grumble away—before the animals begin to creep from the shadows, to explore the houses and consider them a kind of nest or burrow.
A great horned owl sails into an attic—through the octagonal hole cut for a gable vent—and makes it his roost. Crows blacken the rafters of an unfinished frame. A black bear claws aside the latticed frame of a porch and roots and burrows beneath it. Feral cats wander the streets. Wasps and swallows mud over the eaves.
Beyond the subdivision’s river-rock entryway—Swan Hollow, the gold lettering reads with etched cattails rising around it—stands a model home, a design known as the Apex IV, with its 2900 square feet, its hardwood flooring and enameled woodwork, its formal and informal dining rooms, study, great room and a kitchen bigger than most restaurants’ with granite countertops, a center island, and custom maple cabinetry throughout.
Months ago, a realtor left the back door unlocked, and tonight it comes unstuck when a hard wind sucks it open. It groans and swings
on its hinges, as though beckoning the forest. And the forest answers. From between its trees, like shadows come to life, steals a pack of coyotes that noses through the door and into the kitchen, where they pause and lick their chops and sniff the air. No one has been here for a long time: the house is theirs. They yap and growl and set off through the many rooms, their paws thudding across the carpets, clicking across the tiles and hardwood. They pee in the corners. They gnaw at the legs of the dining room table. They leap onto the beds and leather couches and snap playfully at each other.
One day a teenager in a Ramones T-shirt with nothing better to do hurls a bnck through the Apex IVs picture window. It shatters, crashing inward, leaving behind a square shadowy mouth framed by fangs of glass. The teenager stands in the front yard, grinning widely, pleasuring in the music of destruction, the crash and tinkle of broken glass still biting the air, soon replaced by snarls and yaps that come from inside the house and that come together into a terrible howling, the howling of a dozen coyotes, growing louder and louder like a siren that sends the teenager stumbling back, into the street, where his bike lies on its side.
He pulls the bike upright and climbs onto it and kicks at the pedals to get them turning, to get the bike moving, just as the pack of coyotes pours through the broken window, a surging gray wave of them, all jabbering and clacking their teeth as they pursue him for his trespass.