Chapter 5 - The Margin of the Law
The house on Glenwood Avenue did not have its amber light on when the transport van pulled up on Tuesday morning, exactly one week after the brick had hit the concrete step. The porch was dark, the windows covered with thick, yellow plastic sheets from the county health department that kept the rain from entering where the police had kicked out the basement panels during the search.
The hostas in the garden were dead now, their large leaves turned to gray paper under the weight of the police boots and the oil that had leaked from the utility truck during the long night of the depositions.
I sat in the front seat of Wyatt’s truck, my head resting against a small down pillow he had brought from the apartment. The titanium pins in my jaw didn't throb anymore; they had settled into a cold, metallic ache that stayed steady whenever I kept my head turned toward the window. My left eye was open three millimeters now, enough to see the gray silhouette of the chimneys against the Columbus sky.
Arthur Vance stood by the picket gate, his gray overcoat open to the wind, his leather briefcase sitting on the mailbox post.
"The state took the registry this morning, Sadie," he said as Wyatt rolled down the passenger glass. "The whole title has been transferred to the county probate court under a protective receivership for your grandfather. He's at the convalescent center in Upper Arlington now. They have him in a room with a window that looks out over the rose garden."
"The will," I said, my voice clearer now that the surgeon had adjusted the tension on the alignment wires. "What happens to the house?"
"The house is going to be demolished by the end of the month," Vance said, his hand reaching out to touch the rusty latch of the gate. "The foundation walls are split from the gully erosion, and the city building inspector logged twenty-four distinct structural violations before they took the plastic off the windows. There's nothing left inside but the old paper and the boxes from the railyard."
A white car turned the corner from High Street—not a police cruiser, but a standard grey sedan from the county sheriff's civil division. A woman in a dark blue uniform got out of the driver's side, carrying a heavy iron clipboard and a roll of red plastic tape that read STATE SEIZURE: NO ENTRY.
She didn't look at us. She walked up the three concrete steps, her thick-soled shoes making a heavy, flat sound against the cement where my blue dress had turned purple seven days before. She didn't look for a key; she took a short, iron pry-bar from her belt, slipped it between the wood of the door and the frame, and threw her weight against the iron.
The door cleared the jamb with a loud, splitting shriek that sounded exactly like the one I had heard when my father stepped into the light.
"Sadie," Wyatt said, his hand coming over mine on the dashboard. "Let's go back to the library. The branch manager called this morning. She said they saved the rare editions from the third floor vault for you to catalog when the bandages come off next month."
I looked one last time at the third window on the second floor. The gray lace curtain was gone, replaced by a sheet of clear plastic that reflected the gray movement of the clouds over the Norfolk Southern lines. Behind the plastic, there was nothing but the dark timber of the lath boards and the white plaster dust that had settled over the floorboards when the county workers took the wrapper down.
My father was in the correctional facility in Lucasville, waiting for the federal magistrate to sign the transport log for the transfer to the penitentiary in Pennsylvania. My mother was sitting in a cinderblock cell in the county jail, her hands finally out of her pockets as she signed the disclosure forms for the six bank accounts she had hidden under her sister's name in Toledo. And Melanie was in a juvenile shelter in Delaware, her pink nails cut down to the quick so she couldn't scratch the vinyl on the dayroom chairs.
"Sadie?" Wyatt asked again, his thumb smoothing the linen of my sleeve.
May you like
"Turn the truck around, Wyatt," I said, my face remaining deadpan, my right eye fixed on the blue star he had drawn on the dashboard with his yellow carpenter's pencil before we left the apartment. "The light on this street is done."
The engine started with a low, clean growl that drowned out the sound of the train whistles from the south yard. Wyatt shifted the heavy transmission into reverse, his foot coming off the brake with that slow, deliberate precision he used when he was clearing the foundation trenches before the city was built. We moved backward down the cracked asphalt of Glenwood Avenue, leaving the blue house and the red brick dust behind us in the rain, moving toward the open highway where the new state concrete was already dry.
