The Show House

by Dan Lopez

  “The regular shutters are fine,” she said.

  “Fair enough.” With a click the shutters retreated. Steven stood on the far side of the living room. “Something to consider,” he said, an awkward smile fixed on his face. “No pressure.”

  With the return of the light, Laila recognized a shift in his demeanor—a tightening of the muscles, a compression of the features of the face. It was as if she were staring at a hollow shell. In that moment she realized that she wasn’t interacting with a salesman at all, but rather the idea of a salesman, a mask—an effigy—ginned up in haste under the scrutiny of a public performance. What had been uncovered in that brief darkness? The possibilities sent a shiver through her.

  “Thanks, but I prefer the standard ones.” And, she thought, I’ll be getting new locks installed as soon as the closing papers are signed.

  Now, as she maneuvers a telescoping aluminum ladder into position beneath her bedroom window, Laila wonders if she made the right decision back then or if she allowed fear to distract her from the utility of the upgraded storm shutters. It was partially a financial decision, her stubborn thriftiness winning out over reason. After all, what’s a few thousand dollars amortized over the course of a mortgage? Well, she could quote an exact number, but the financial account never considered the urgency of this moment versus the smug frugality of that earlier negotiation. There’s something to be said for emotion as the volatile driver of economics. Take, for instance, the present: it’s nearly dark with a hurricane approaching and she has yet to shutter her bedroom window because of an aversion to heights. How much would she be willing to pay right now for safety at the push of a button?

  She dismisses the thought.

  That kind of thinking is a distraction and she’s waited as long as she can. A feeder band passed through a few minutes ago. Another one won’t be far behind. Then Natalie herself will blow in with the force of the inevitable. What was once some windblown sand off the coast of Africa has grown into a massive weather system destined to pummel America until it exhausts itself somewhere along the banks of the Mississippi. Retribution comes to mind, Mother Nature invoking a righteous correction to the Middle Passage. Yet a more direct image takes precedence for Laila Morales. When she and Alex were children their father would joke that a hurricane brought him to Orlando. “It plucked me off the shore”—not beach, because with his accent that word always came out sounding like bitch—“and dropped me here. You can imagine my surprise.” Laila, of course, was too old to believe the story, but she went along with it, partly because she wanted to preserve something of the gullibility of youth even while ensconced in the nihilism of adolescence, and partly because Alex believed the tale and was terrified of it and she liked to terrorize her baby brother.

  Even a hurricane doesn’t seem powerful enough to bring Alex home tonight, though. It was silly to expect him. Ever since their father died he’s been unreliable, bullheaded, and contrary—worse still in the face of expectations. Viewed this way, his text this morning wasn’t vague; it was a code she failed to decipher. It really read: You’re on your own. Stupid her for expecting otherwise. Esther’s unspoken accusation nags her as, grimacing, she clamps her sweaty palms to the legs of the ladder and hesitantly begins to climb; each step is agony. Alex is her responsibility now, whether she likes it or not. And what if he’s out there doing something stupid? She flashes to the scene at Cocoa Beach and the reckless storm chasers. He wouldn’t be that senseless, would he?

  The ground below her is wet, the air chilled. To her right lies the long, curvy street running from her town house to the development entrance. Among the houses lining it only hers remains vulnerable to the storm. At least three of her neighbors opted for the automatic shutters, she notes while steadying herself on the fourth rung. Her palms sweat. Her knees shake. Until the age of thirteen she’d enjoyed heights. The year she was born her father had planted a tree in the yard. The sapling took nearly a decade to mature to the point where it could accommodate her weight. By the time Alex showed up, it had become her refuge, her secret lair, even if the spindly branches and thin leaf cover provided little privacy from Esther’s hawklike gaze. Still, it was hers, but then Alex ruined everything, like he always does.

  “I wanna climb, too!”

  His whiny voice pierced her solitude. It was summer and hot, and all she wanted was to get away for a moment, to go up somewhere shady and cool—somewhere above this strange new family that insisted on claiming her as its eldest child. Alex tracked her across the yard. He bolted toward her as she negotiated the familiar curves and flexible branches of the young tree. He tried to squeeze between her and the thin trunk. He couldn’t stand to be apart from her, and even at three he was fearless. But fearless or not, Laila knew better than to let a toddler climb a tree.

  “No, Alex! You can’t come up here. Get down. Your mom will see you.”

  “I don’t care! I wanna climb!”

  “You can’t. I’m climbing it. It’s my tree. Papi planted it for me.”

  “No!”

  “Go ask him.”

  “Where’s my tree?”

  “You don’t have a tree.”

  “I want your tree!” he said.

  “No.”

  But he pressed on and they tussled. Using one hand to fend him off, she gripped a notch in the truck with the other. Despite her efforts, he managed a foothold. The exact order of events occludes in a fog of emotion, but the end result is crystal clear in her memory. She lost her grip attempting to extract him from the tree and fell backward, landing on the sharp end of a small spade their father had forgotten in the garden. Pain registered immediately, followed by a piercing cry.

  Esther rushed over to smother her with stepmotherly concern while simultaneously undercutting her. “What did you do?”

  Her leg felt cold. Blood stained her clothes and left a dark trail in the grass. The smell of iron and dirt suffused the air. Tears streamed down her face as the wound throbbed. She wiggled her toes. At least she wasn’t paralyzed.

  Esther kissed her forehead and brushed away her tears. “Tate quieto, it’s all right. Félix!” she shouted. “Ven acá. Laila hurt herself.”

  There was something delicate in the way Esther tried to mother her in that moment, a fragility born not of familiarity or love, or even duty, but rather of fear. The last three years had been rough between the two of them, with Laila sensing that Esther lived in terror of hurting Felix’s little girl, his princesa. The fall, then, provided Laila with an opportunity to scare her stepmother and she seized it.

  “I’m paralyzed! I’ll never walk again.”

  “Ay, Dios mío. Félix!”

  “Haha, Laila fell,” Alex taunted from the tree. He’d managed to make it up to the first branch, but when he saw the blood in the grass he, too, started crying.

  “You get down from there. Ahora mismo,” Esther shouted at Alex, but he refused to budge.

  The wound looked a lot worse than it was. Laila had grazed only her upper thigh, but she enjoyed watching the fear on Esther’s face too much to let on. “I was trying to climb,” she managed between crocodile sobs, “but he pushed me!”

  “Your brother se le antoja whatever you’re doing,” Esther said. “You know that.”

  So even though she was the one bleeding, Esther found a way to absolve Alex. It was somehow her fault that Alex pushed her off the tree because he wanted to climb, a tree that he had no business climbing in the first place.

  “You always take his side!” she shouted. “It’s not fair! I could be paralyzed and you’re still taking his side.”

  Félix emerged with a first aid kit in hand, and as soon as Laila spotted him, she pulled away from Esther and thrust herself into her father’s arms, forgetting that she was supposed to be paralyzed.

  “Come on, no need to cry.” Her father soothed her as he cleaned the wound, a small puncture on the upper thigh. “You’re a big girl. Y mira, it’s nothing. You’ll be fine. I have to be more
careful about where I leave my tools, that’s all.” With a smile he handed her a bandage to apply.

  “I’m not saying it’s your fault,” Esther said, as she marched to the tree and plucked Alex from the branch like an apple. When Alex protested, she silenced him with a stern look. “Your brother is three years old. He doesn’t know better. You have to protect him.”

  But who protected her? Alex got whisked to safety, not a scratch on him, while she bled through her favorite jean shorts. Where was her mom to swoop in when danger came near?

  Within twenty minutes, she was back in the yard playing... by herself. She gave Alex the cold shoulder for a week. She never did attempt to climb that tree again. And now the county says that tree has to go.

  Six rungs up and the physics of her situation loom large. She is a lever that could topple the ladder with a small application of force in the wrong vector. But she’s close now. Only a couple more rungs and she’ll be in position. She braces herself against the stucco, which is damp from rain but still warm from a sunny day. The irony of hurricanes is that perfect weather always precedes the storm. Touching the house infuses her with confidence. There’s a purpose to being up here and it’s to ensure her house survives intact. She can do this!

  Only she can’t.

  When not in use, the shutters fold up at either side of the window, compressed like an accordion. In theory, she need only unfurl them along the track and turn the lug nut a few times to secure them in place. In reality, the situation proves more complex. Take, for instance, what happens to metal and plastic bearings in a warm, damp climate. Things that should slide easily seize. Things that should endure are made brittle by the sun. But here, too, physics applies. If she can exert enough force in the right direction the accordion will unfold, but what if the platform from which said force is to be applied is an unsteady ladder supporting a terrified homeowner?

  “Fuck,” she mutters to herself. “Fuck!” again when she makes the mistake of glancing down.

  She closes her eyes and takes a deep breath. The smell of honeysuckle floats in the breeze. A gust tickles her neck. Central Florida is a flat place; when she opens her eyes she can see a long distance. Uninterrupted sight lines are what she used to love about climbing. Perhaps they’re what drew her to a town house with a bedroom on the second floor. She likes to survey, to get a lay of the land. From the top rung of the ladder, she can see all the way to the leading edge of the next feeder band sweeping in from the east.

  “Fuck.”

  She needs to move quickly, but trying to force the shutters closed from the ladder is a nonstarter. In a flash of inspiration, she conceives of another option. She can shut them from inside the house. She’ll still have to secure the lug nut from the outside, but the brute force of muscling the shutters closed can be done while leaning out a window, with relative safety.

  Down she goes as fast as she trusts herself to move. She grabs a can of lubricant from under the sink, then charges up the staircase.

  She opens the window. A few quick squirts into the track followed by a firm tug, and the accordion begins to unfold. Before she can congratulate herself, though, she hits a snag. One side flattens without incident, but the other side refuses to budge. Something appears to be jamming the track on the top, but she can’t quite make it out from inside the bedroom. She rattles the shutters to see if that removes the obstruction. A thin, armored body with long wings and a stinger emerges from the accordion. Wasps. The obstruction is a nest.

  “Shit!”

  In a fraction of a second, she slams the window shut and slides down onto the carpet. Two wasps alight on the pane, their stingers scrape the glass. Several more swarm around the disturbed nest. Her knowledge of wasps is limited to topical ointments and epinephrine, but she suspects that the wasps are disinclined to move house in advance of the approaching feeder band. Ordinarily, she’d call an exterminator for something like this, but nobody is going to come out tonight and it’s not like she can just leave her bedroom window uncovered—especially with wasps. What if her window breaks and they decide her mattress or her closet are safer places to ride out the storm?

  What she needs is pesticide. She rushes downstairs. Under the sink, behind the dishwashing detergent and the borax, she finds an old bottle of weed killer. It’s not ideal, but once when she was in high school, Félix took down a pretty beefy rat ensconced in their garage with a bottle of roach spray and a shovel. Weed killer should be enough for a few wasps. Still, she’s not about to face off without some added protection. She dashes back upstairs in search of a jacket. Buried in her closet is her dad’s old yellow rain slicker. It’s several sizes too big but the heavy plastic fabric covers all her exposed skin.

  Fingers of pink and umber color an otherwise indigo sky as she creeps back onto the patio. Two wasps remain on the windowpane like sentries. The rest appear to have returned to the nest. Mentally she rehearses the plan. Step one: douse the nest in poison. Step two: knock it loose from the track. Here her plan stalls. How is she supposed to remove it? A broom handle seems the obvious choice, but the last thing she wants is to start whacking at a nest of angry, intoxicated wasps while standing on a ladder. The trick is to remove and contain in one motion, preferably from a safe distance. Knocking the nest into a garbage can might work, but she worries that the can would provide an ideal environment for the wasps to regroup and plan a counteroffensive when she removes the lid—as she must eventually do. Additionally, that plan requires a degree of skill and agility she’s not sure she possesses, especially decked out like the Gorton’s fisherman. No, a better choice is to suck them up with a vacuum cleaner. It’s quick. It’s safe—she can extract them from a distance. And, best of all, she can leave them trapped in the bag until they die, even if that takes months or years.

  The yellow slicker weighs her down and her hands disappear inside the sleeves, making it difficult to dig through the hall closet to unearth the vacuum, which is shoved in the corner beneath a pile of winter coats. Considering the dismal state of her bedroom carpet, the vacuum doesn’t get much use in the Morales household. She resolves to redouble her tidying efforts when this is all over. Hurricane Natalie will be the new leaf she turns for a life of orderliness and cleanliness.

  She returns to the patio, dragging the vacuum behind her with one hand and clutching the weed killer with the other. The sentries continue to circle, hovering above her for a moment before alighting once again on the window. The wind had picked up while she was inside. Any minute now the rain will start. She considers changing the theater and mounting the assault from the safety of her bedroom, but that poses an unacceptable threat to the homeland. Should anything go wrong, an angry colony of wasps would inevitably invade her bedroom. No, better to maintain the envelope of the house secure, which means the ladder, a vacuum cleaner, and a rain slicker. Dammit, she thinks for the thousandth time. Where the fuck is Alex?!

  She switches on the vacuum and begins to climb.

  The ladder shakes under her tentative steps, but the heavy plastic dulls her senses, easing her fears the way blinders calm a horse prone to spook. Her focus remains on the two sentries circling the hive. With the nozzle of the vacuum in one hand and the weed killer in the other, the best she can do is gesture toward a firm grip. Gravity keeps her body in contact with the angled ladder. She climbs higher, regaining some of the confidence of her tree-climbing youth. A gust rustles her hood. The air chills her back. Time is running out. She shuffles up the ladder quicker than before, taking risks that earlier would’ve been paralyzing to consider.

  Before long, she’s perched within striking distance of the adversary. Below, the vacuum rumbles, the nozzle sucking steadily in her hand. The sentries swoop in a modified Delta pattern, but she stands firm. Fear will not win the day. They pull back at the final moment. Perhaps it’s a defense tactic: warning her off before an attack. Or perhaps they, too, sense the coming storm and are hesitant to travel far from the nest. Either way, their retreat provides th
e perfect window to take her shot. But she hesitates. How long has this nest been here? Is it possible that these two wasps—that all these wasps—grew up in her house? That they’ve never known fear of humans and have lived perfectly admirable wasp lives? And these sentries, they could be young kids out on the front line for the first time, subsisting on adrenaline. They must be afraid.

  She levels the weed killer on the target. The first squirt will kick off panic in the nest. The sentries will attack; reinforcements will swarm, so it’s important to strike with the vacuum at the same time as she begins spraying. The vacuum, she trusts. The weed killer is unproven, a wild card, but the vacuum will not fail her.

  The first volley of rain from the quickly advancing band begins pelting shutters down the block, and she tugs on the drawstring of her hood to create a seal against the rain.

  It’s time.

  She pumps the weed killer with a mad fury, atomizing the poison into a cloud of unrelenting shock and awe. She brings down a hard rain of her own against the nest. The first sentry drops from the sky immediately. She stabs at the second with the vacuum, but she loses sight of him in the confusion of the moment. He retreats, beelining back to the nest and disappearing inside. Her first sally and she’s beaten the foe into retreat. A primordial scream emerges from her now as she continues pumping the bottle, drenching the nest in weed killer until the muscles in her forearm give out. The wet, glistening thing hangs before her a lifeless catacomb. Her work is done. All that remains is to clean it up. Just as she’s preparing to jab at the nest with the vacuum the feeder band arrives. And her ladder shakes.