After the Pig Plop, a singular energy charges through Beth. She doesn’t know what to do with it, so she goes on a weeklong cleaning binge, scouring the house in the evenings after work, staying up long after her kids have gone to bed. She shampoos rugs, clears cobwebs, scrubs mildew from grout, bags up most of her father’s clothes for charity, repaints the kitchen cupboards from an old can she finds in the basement. The entire time she works, she imagines violence inflicted on the Thurber house: tornadoes hitting it, the siding peeling off one slat at a time, the roof torn away. She imagines fires blazing through, leaving nothing but a charred skeleton.
She’s ashamed of her public display in the park last week. In the aftermath, she has even less desire to show her face in public, so instead she will see to it that her house is in order; she’s claiming the space for herself, ensuring that she has room to exist outside her own head. She knows the house needs repairs that are outside of her budget or her DIY skills, but she will do what she can. When the house is as clean as she’s ever seen it, she falls into the recliner in the living room.
Her kids come home, and she follows them into the kitchen, where they’re already rummaging through the newly painted cupboards.
“Want me to make you a snack?” she says, and Jeanette looks at her like she’s lost her mind.
“We got it,” Dan says.
She wants them to notice how clean the house is, to comment on it, but they don’t. They pull together cheese and crackers, Faygo RedPop, and head upstairs to do homework in Dan’s room. From the bottom of the stairs, she can hear them talking. About her.
“She’s acting so weird,” Dan says.
“She’s lost it,” Jeanette says.
Her kids are wary of her. Even Steve has cooled. They didn’t meet this week; instead, he said he had a big job a few towns over and wouldn’t have time to see her. Which is probably good.
With the house clean, there’s only one thing left to do. Beth gives her father a bath. Around seven-thirty, as she is tucking him into bed again, she hears Jeanette making dinner.
“Go,” Eliza says, and for once, Beth obeys. When the sun goes down, she takes a walk. Before she realizes it, she finds herself walking south, past the Thurbers’. Until today, she has worked very hard not to see the house; whenever she drives by, she looks away. Now she stares. Studies. It’s still as derelict as ever, the front porch heaped with junk—broken appliances and boxes and clothes and tools—piles stacked so high they’re pushing against the screen, poking holes.
She’s disappointed to find it in one piece. Outside, the house looks much the same as it did in her memory: the same blue paint with green trim, the same pink gingerbread near the roof. The roof itself has visible holes. Several of the windows have been smashed. When she enters, she finds the walls molded, draped in cobwebs so thick they look like Spanish moss. It smells like mushrooms, but then it always smelled like mushrooms. Mushrooms and cigarettes. But the cigarettes have faded, replaced with the scent of old leaves.
She knows coming here isn’t healthy.
The interior of the house has been demolished. Someone took a crowbar or something to the walls, and smeared God knows what—mud? feces?—on them, acts of violence that suggest the Thurber family had no hand in it. This is a different kind of anger, and it enters Beth like a virus. It invades, multiplies. Her body blooms with rage.
She returns to the porch, finds a pipe wrench. With a good swing, she lodges it into the living room wall. It takes a while to work the wrench back out, but then she slams it again and again into the wall. She’ll finish the work someone else started. She feels connected to this house’s demolitionist in a way she hasn’t felt connected to anyone in a very long time.
She whacks the slats of the staircase railing, takes out the banister, smashes through the closet door—the same closet where she hid all those years ago. She wrecks the bedroom door, the bathroom door. In the basement, she dents the pipes until they drip stagnant, rusty water. She breaks windows from the inside. She’ll dismantle the house, inch by inch, breaking down its darkness. She rips up carpet like an animal digging in the earth. She shatters mirrors, light fixtures, bathroom tile; she tears up linoleum. Her fingers bleed, but she has work left to do.
“Hands where I can see them. Drop your weapon.”
The wrench clunks on the floor.
“Are you alone?”
“Yes.”
“Turn around. Slowly.”
When she turns, a flashlight hits her face. She’s dazed out of the darkness. It takes a moment for her eyes to adjust, and then she sees his outline, his arms stretched out before him, wrists crossed, one hand holding the flashlight, the other holding the gun, both pointed at her. Her heart stops for a moment, then kicks into overdrive. She tries to tell herself she’s okay, but he’s a police officer. He has a gun on her. She moves her hands up in increments. Her eyes adjust slowly to the light; she squints, and is just able to see him, his dark hair and darker eyebrows. Mikey.
She knows him, but she also doesn’t.
“Now you’ve done it,” Eliza sneers at her.
“I’m okay,” Beth whispers. “I know him.” She’s trying to convince herself as much as Eliza. She takes a deep breath. It’s okay. She’s okay. She can hear cars on the next street over. She smells the mushroom and leaf scent of the house. The night air coming in through the smashed window is cold on her face. She’s okay.
“Eliza?”
“Yes,” Eliza says. Beth lets her surface. This is what Eliza is good for: being calm, complacent. Compliant.
He lowers the light, and after a moment’s hesitation, he lowers his gun. Eliza blinks the water from her eyes, trying to adjust to the light once more.
“Well, I’ll be,” he says, and holsters his gun. “I heard you three houses down. Come on outside.”
She can’t make her legs work, though. She stays rooted in place, staring through the busted window. A streetlamp outside makes the yard shadowy, but it lets in enough light that she can see him now, his face and dark eyes. Mikey Hudson and Eliza DeWitt, in the same house where they first met as children. Glancing out a side window, she can see her house next door, her own bedroom, and she catches movement at the darkened window. She knows Jeanette is there; she must have heard the ruckus. She must have gone looking when she called Beth for dinner.
“Can you tell me where you are?” Mikey stands at a distance, moves slowly, as if Eliza were armed and dangerous. He’s wearing a coat, and his hands hover by his belt.
“Where are you, Eliza?”
“The Thurber house.”
She wishes he’d move his hands away from his gun.
“That’s good,” he says. “And do you know what you were doing here?”
“I was wrecking up the place,” she says simply.
He laughs. “Yes. Yes, you were. You really were.” His hands relax.
“Are you going to arrest me?”
“No. I’m not going to arrest you. But you have to promise me you’ll stay out of this house. I can’t have people trespassing, even if it is to destroy this place. It’s condemned for a reason. It isn’t safe.” He looks around, at the damage that’s months old.
In the pale glow of the streetlight, she can see his face. Drained of detail by the dark, he’s the spitting image of the boy she remembers.
“You know he’s gone, right? In prison? He’s doing life in Chicago.” His hands are hovering again, shaking a little, but away from his gun. He’s reaching for her.
“Yeah, I’d heard,” she says, taking a step away.
“So you can go home, okay?”
His face, still pudgy after all these years. How did he do it? How did he stay in this town and not let it break him? He’s a cop, and a good one from the looks of it. At least he didn’t shoot. Elizabeth DeWitt didn’t become one more statistic, one more news report.
Beth wants to finish her work here, to raze the house until there’s nothing left but glowing cinders. She wants to wreck it all night and into the morning; she wants to burn it down. Anything rather than going home and explaining to her daughter what she was doing. Even more, she wants to understand how Mikey is still whole. She begs Eliza to ask him.
“What about you?” Eliza says.
He seems caught off guard by the question. His hands are still shaking, down by his sides. They stand in silence, in darkness, long enough to feel truly awkward. Then Mikey leans down, picks up the wrench Beth had dropped, and walks to the front door, where he pauses, then drives the wrench, just once, into the wood. It splinters, a chunk landing at his feet. Then he nods, drops the wrench, and walks out the door, leaving Beth alone.
After a time, Beth goes home, dragging her feet. She’s so tired. When she walks in, Jeanette doesn’t comment on what she must have seen, doesn’t even look at her mom; she just says, “Dinner is ready.”
“It smells great,” Beth says, and watches her daughter, until Jeanette turns to meet her eyes.