The tables had to be disassembled and packed, too, and the lights. All of the wiring that controlled them and the maze of pipes Louise had set up to drip-feed water to the plants. The monitoring sensors. The mattress. The horizon started to lighten and we tried to go faster, with me carrying bigger and bigger loads and Louise frantically trying to cram stuff into the truck. By the time we reachedthe bags of fertilizer in the garage, I was literally throwing them up to her and she was stuffing them into any available space.
We drove to the new place...but, as we arrived, I slowed to a stop in the street outside. “Here?”I asked, looking at the broken windows and holes in the roof. “Are you serious?”
“We’re growing in it,” she told me, repeating what I’d told her five months ago. “Not living in it.”
We parked the truck but didn’t unload it, yet. There was one more thing we had to do.
Back at the grow house, dawn was creeping quickly across the sky. Inside, I started carefully pouring gasoline in trails from room to room.
“You sure we have to do this?” Louise asked nervously, curling her hair around her finger. “There’s no other way?”
“However much we try to clean it up, we’ll leave a trace,” I told her. “Bits of leaf between the floorboards. Soil ground into the carpets. They’ll know we were growing here. Hell, they’ll know from the smell. This way, we get rid of everything.” I pulled out a box of matches. “Get ready to move,” I told her.
“Wait!”
I stopped.
She walked up beside me and held out her hand for the matches. “You’ve destroyed enough,” she said quietly. “It’s time for me to take some of this on.”
Just when I thought she was done surprising me, she found a new way.
I handed over the matches. She lit one and tossed it. There was a soft littlewumphas the gasoline caught and then a wall of heat hit us as the flames rushed outward.
We backed outside and hid across the street. We waited until we were sure the house was unsaveable, then called the fire department. Then we started banging on doors, making sure all the neighbors were out. The houses were spaced far enough apart that I was sure the fire wouldn’t spread, but we weren’t taking any chances.
When the fire service arrived, I told them a story about knockingover a can of gasoline in the garage and a lit cigarette. As I’d expected, once they’d triple-checked that there was no one inside, they didn’t risk sending in guys just to save a house that was clearly finished anyway. They damped down the flames from the outside as best they could but, by the time the realtor rolled up to inspect the place, it was a smoking pile of blackened wood.
“I can’t believe I just burned down a house,” Louise whispered.
“Don’t feel too bad. They were going to knock it down and sell the land anyway,” I told her.
As soon as we’d answered everyone’s questions, we headed over to the mansion. When I saw the interior for the first time, I dropped the fertilizer I was carrying.
“What do you think?” she asked nervously.
“It’s very...you,” I said slowly. “Especially the tree.”
She bit her lip. “Did I screw up?”
I grabbed her, picked her up and pulled her to my chest. After all the stress of the night, I even let myself laugh. “No! It’s great.” I shook my head, looking around. “Incredible.”
She nodded, relieved...but she still seemed too tightly wound, considering what we’d just pulled off. “Louise…”
She immediately hurried out to the truck. “Come on! We’ve got to get the plants back under the lights.”
I sighed and followed her. It took us most of the morning to get all the tables set up in the undamaged rooms and rig up the lights and watering systems. I carried the mattress upstairs—I figured we might as well use it, now wehadan upstairs—while Louise set up the monitoring sensors. When we were all done, I stood with her in the kitchen and looked at our relocated jungle.
“We did it,” she said, letting out a long sigh. But her face didn’t show any relief.
And that’s when, finally, I figured it out.
“Louise,” I said, barely wanting to form the words, “how did you pay for this place?”
She raised huge, scared eyes towards me.
“Oh Jesus,” I breathed.
“I didn’t have a choice!” she snapped, her fear coming out as anger. But her eyes were filling with tears. “We didn’t have any time left and I thought—I thought that if I told you, you’d talk me out of it and then we wouldn’t be able to afford a place and then...we’d have to abandon the whole thing and you’d walk away!”
