Devil’s Lake

Nothing stays alive at the third house from the end of the street, the grass brown, the trees rotten, the streetlamp burnt­out, and a baby died there once, it fell and split its head on the bathroom floor and after its parents moved away, already ghosts, trailing off to haunt whatever was left of themselves, there was an older man by himself who sat out nights in a lawnchair drinking Schnucks brand gin and you never quite saw his face, the shadows playing impossible angles so all you caught as you rode past on your green Huffy was the echo of a face like words murmured in a stone room, and the slow rise of his arm for a wave that felt like you’d been marked, smudged with ash, and when he stops appearing your mother says “he died sweetie, an ambulance came to take him away” but you know better, you know he’s there, lying in the basement, not dead but something like it, and resting in his arms a still and silent baby with a broken skull, and if you snuck down there and shined a flashlight onto him there would be no face, only shadows, and the baby’s eyes slide open, and the house goes empty for years.

Whatever, every neighborhood has one. Casey wraps a dish towel around his fist and punches through the back door window. The girls are named Sara and Lillian but I can’t remember which is which. The one with the unibrow says “cool” like she’s never seen a drunk kid punch through a window before. Which I guess she hasn’t. That's why they’re here with us.

Casey reaches in the punched­out window and unlocks the door and I take another swig from our plastic pint of whiskey and the girl with the unibrow says “so what like someone got murdered here?”

“No,” I say, “but a baby died.” The other girl has these weird eyes, not like they give off light but like they’re sucking it up from the air around her so the eyes are all you can see. I decide she must be Lillian.

Lillian giggles and Casey says “that’s funny?” Lillian says “maybe.” Casey looks at me and I know that he wants me to say something else, he wants me to freak them out, Casey says if you mix fear and whiskey and weed at just the right alchemical measure you get head. But the house is just an empty house, the night is warm and smells like pollen, I’m young and drunk. There’s a low buttery calm in me. I want to kiss the side of Lillian’s mouth.

The back door opens onto a kitchen, we slip in, the floor is that sad vinyl stick­on tile, peeling up at the edges, our shoes leave prints in the dust. The moon is doing this pretty blue thing through the window where it fills the emptiness with more emptiness, like the answer to a riddle, and as we pass through the kitchen into a hallway I realize this house is built in the same layout as mine. I know this house. I have lived here. Casey lights a blunt, his arm is wrapped around Sara’s waist and he catches me staring and gives me a look like I dunno, it just got there. I turn to find Lillian and she’s right behind me, so close our heads almost knock together. Her breath smells like breath, clean and sour, it makes me think of all the parts inside of her pumping and opening up and keeping her alive. “Tell us about the baby,” she says. “Yeah,” says Casey. “Tell us about the dead baby.”

I know that if we walk to the end of the hall there will be a master bedroom on the right. And maybe that’s where they decided let’s do it, let’s have a baby. Or maybe not. Maybe they bought the house after she got pregnant, they laid nights in that room talking over names, private school, there’s a window in there that looks out onto the backyard and they thought about dogs, a swing­set, orange autumn evenings with the big tree setting its leaves everywhere.

And off of the master bedroom is a small bathroom.

And to our left is another bedroom, ten by ten, where they put up blue and white wallpaper with baseball players rimmed around the ceiling, wallpaper the boy can grow into, blue carpet, the room isn’t big but it’s got hiding places, it’s got enough space for secrets. It can fit a life. I know that years from now, or years ago, the boy learns to slip the screen off of the window and climb out, has his friends meet him down the street, they break into an empty house, they’ve got booze and cigarettes, girls sometimes, and his parents pretend to be asleep when he climbs back in, they give him those nights, they know he’ll come back safe.

There’s a living room behind us. There’s a basement door.

The steps that lead down to the basement are steep, the older man takes them slowly, drunk, the floor is cement and there are corners that no light ever seems to touch. Being down there scares him in a way he’d forgotten he could be scared. He thinks of a story from many many years ago, a man with shadows for a face who takes babies apart with his bare hands, he peels the flesh off in neat strips, he presses with both thumbs into their soft skulls until they burst. One day he won’t be able to get back up the basement stairs, he’ll be stuck down there on his hands and knees until there are no lights left.

That’s what you want to tell them but there is no way to tell it, about this twinning, everything layered atop everything else, the baby is the boy and the boy never was, but the boy is right here, this empty room was your room, it fit your life, emptiness filled with more emptiness, and if you were to step outside you could wave to yourself passing on a green Huffy, and if you were to step forward you could kiss the side of Lillian’s mouth, but instead you’ll take her hand, you’ll pull her along the hallway and it’s dark but you don’t need to see, you know this house, the hallway to the living room to the basement door, it’s never locked, and the blackness down there is so complete that it throbs, it moves like bad water, and when Lillian giggles it makes sense to you, you know what she means. Your life is just a shred of snagged cloth, and then it rips free.