Page 11 of The Boo Next Door

Six years, that house was quiet in the evenings. I hadn't noticed until it stopped. And Wednesday at dusk, because the forecast says still air and I believe forecasts like a rookie, I open all four zones for a full-system test.

Zones one through three perform beautifully.

Zone four performs a war crime.

The wind shifts out of the north — flurries have a way of lying and so does every weather app built by man — and my entire fog budget for the evening rolls off the property line in one slow, biblical bank, crosses her yard, climbs her porch steps like it's been invited, and pours itself through the window screen she's had propped open all week to vent paint fumes.

For one second it's almost beautiful. Her séance parlor, filling with real fog, drapes going ghostly, the wig-stand medium looming up out of the murk like the exact thing she's been trying to fake.

Then her smoke alarm goes off.

Then a second one, deeper in the house, joins in harmony.

Then twenty-two pounds of black cat comes out through the propped screen like a mortar round, crosses the porch rail, hits the lawn already at speed, and goes up the big maple on the property line so fast it looks like the tree absorbed him.

The porch door bangs. She comes out into the fog in the paint shirt, hair tied up in a bandana, yelling over the alarms, "Is the house on fire or is this you?"

"It's me."

"Great. Wonderful." She's scanning, head on a swivel — checking her build first, the professional — and then she goes still. "Where's the cat."

I point up.

Beetlejuice has stopped at the first big fork, twenty feet, and is gripping the bark in the drifting fog with the posture of a cat who has made a large decision quickly and is now living inside its consequences. He looks down at us. He makes a sound I have never heard a cat make. It's not a meow. It's testimony.

"Okay, buddy." Her voice drops instantly into the register you use for kids at bad accidents. "Okay. You're fine. You're so embarrassing. I love you." She toes off her shoes, actually toes off her shoes, and grabs the low limb, and that's my cue.

"No."

"He's my cat."

"It's my fog." I'm already moving. "And in about four minutes it'll be full dark. Two people in that tree in the dark is a run I've been on before, and it ends with a ladder truck and everyone on the group chat." I look at the fork, the branch loading, the approach. Solid maple, good structure. "I've got him."

"He doesn't like men."

"Nobody up a tree likes anybody. It's not personal."

I climb. It's easy climbing, honest limbs the whole way, and the fog makes it strange and quiet up there, streetlight coming through in bars. Beetlejuice watches me arrive at his fork with huge black-rimmed eyes, and I do what you do — come up beside, not underneath, give him my shoulder line, talk low. "Hey. Rough night. Fog's mine. My fault." He puts his ears back. Reconsiders. Smells my sleeve like a customs official.

Then he steps onto my shoulders like I'm municipal infrastructure, all twenty-two pounds, and settles across the back of my neck.

Below, on the lawn, in the fog, she's laughing.

Not polite laughing. Doubled over, hands on knees, wheezing, and the alarms are still going in stereo behind her and the medium is looming in the drape-glow and the whole scene is deranged, and her laugh comes up through it like the one thing that isn't. I come down the last limbs with a cat wearing me like a stole, and she straightens, breathless, cheeks wet from laughing or fog, and says, "The scarf really works on you. Very Parisian."

"He's heavier than he looks."

"He's exactly as heavy as he looks." She lifts him off my neck, and it happens — her forearms across my shoulder, cat transferring between us, her face two inches from mine in the drift, both of us fog-damp and stupid, and everything goes exactly as quiet as it shouldn't.

I know this feeling from the job. The pocket of still air inside a burning building. It's not safety. It's the opposite. It's where you're standing when the something happens.

Her smile goes uncertain at the edges. Not away — uncertain, like a door left off the latch.

The second smoke alarm chooses that exact moment to die of exhaustion with one long falling shriek, like a bagpiper going over a cliff, and the moment breaks. She steps back with the cat. I step back with nothing.

"Your fog is trespassing," she says, chin up, walls audibly re-stacking.

"Send it back over when you're done with it."