that, hadn’t they? Loretta and the inhabitants of The Breviary. That’s why they’d left her this bloody present. That’s why they’d asked her about Saraub; they’d wanted to make sure she was alone. That’s why they’d let her live here for so cheap, and why Edgardo was missing: he’d warned her.
Aren’t you tired of fighting? No one else has had to work so hard for so little. You deserve this. Build the door, and you can rest. Momma will take care of you.
Audrey looked at the cardboard construction and realized that it was wrong. Too perfectly flat, too sturdy. It didn’t adhere to The Breviary’s skews. Just like her dream of Clara’s door, it would fall apart as soon as it opened. It needed curves, and functional chaos. It needed an architect instead of an opera singer, or a snotty author of personal histories. She smiled when she understood that 14B had picked her because it meant she was the most special girl.
Audrey hoisted the heavy rebar. The image zoomed closer. Ants scurried. Offscreen, an infant squawked, as if being burned. Betty’s face sagged. Her eyes turned black. Something was inside her, wearing her skin like a coat.
Do it now, Audrey. There’s not much time. Even buildings have their beginnings and ends.
Audrey blinked. Looked out the window at the driving rain. At her hands, full of tiny cactus wounds. Remembered the dream she’d had the night Betty died, “Better run, Lamb.” And those red ants in Hinton, she’d forgotten them, but they’d been real. They’d come out from a nest beneath the floor. Maybe it was even true that they’d followed Betty to every town, because not everyone is lucky enough to be born whole. Maybe some demons are real.
I got tired of fighting, Lamb, the note had read.
She understood then that this thing was not her mother. Nor was it Clara, or the tenants, or even Schermerhorn. This thing that called to her was The Breviary. But there was something The Breviary didn’t know because she had not guessed it herself, until now.
She hated Betty Lucas. She wanted her dead. She’d always wanted her dead. Some nights in Yuma, and Hinton, and even Omaha, she’d imagined shoving a pillow over her Betty’s mouth while she slept. And every time she’d smoked a joint, or gone for a long walk, or gotten drunk, or cleaned a room twenty times, or even sliced her own skin, it had not been out of self-loathing, but to calm her own red ants, so she didn’t lose her temper and shove a knife through Betty’s throat.
She lifted the rebar. Her blood ran hot in her veins as she swung. “I!” The rod reverberated in her hands. The wires encasing it twanged against her palms, but her calluses were so thick they didn’t cut. She swung again: “Hate!” Swung again: “Ughhh! You!” Her whole body slammed, and then shivered along with the rebar. She swung again: “I hate you!” Again. Again. Again. “I hate you! I hate you! I hate you! I don’t want to go back. I don’t want it fixed. It’s over. It’s dead. Why aren’t you?”
She chopped Betty Lucas’ face. Her black-and-white-film-still eyes bugged in wild surprise. The image bled the color black down the side of the door. As it pooled to 14B’s floor, it turned to red. The red turned to tiny, pinching ants that marched down into the rotten hole, and inside the walls of The Breviary. The line thinned as Betty’s blood drained dry.
“Hu! Ha!” she cried, as the last of the boxes fell. “Bye-bye!” Wolverine made a clump as he hit the ground. The hot-water faucet rolled lopsidedly from point to point, and her shouts became grunts, and sounds without meaning. And then simply gasping.
All her life, she’d dreamed of raising her voice at Betty. Screaming. Reciting any one of the thousand speeches she’d memorized. Or simply asking, “This life you put me through, have you really convinced yourself that you did it because you love me?” But always, she’d stifled herself. Always, she’d let Betty run the show. Until now.
She kept pounding until the boxes were tiny pieces on the floor that mixed with her clothes and stuck to the reopened and bloody wounds of her feet like homemade Band-Aids. Panting, too tired to strike one more time, she dropped the rebar.
The door lay in a pile.
“Fuck you,” she called to her mother, and 14B, and The Breviary, and even God, who ought, once in a