Free Vampires in the Lemon Grove by Karen Russell Page A

the last real action she had taken; she’d been on their couch for three months now and counting. Gradually she began to lose her old habits, as if these, too, were a uniform that she could slip out of: she stopped cooking entirely, slept at odd hours, mummied herself in blankets in front of their TV. What was she waiting for? There was something maddening about her posture—the way she sat there with one ear cocked sideways as if listening for a break in the weather. Nal had been forced to forfeit his deposit at Lake Marion and interview for a job behind the register at Penny’s Grocery. He took a pen to the Help Wanted ads and papered their fridge with them. This was back in April, when he’d still believed his mom might find another job in time to pay the Lake Marion fee.
    “Mom, just look at these, okay?” he’d shout above the surf roar of their TV. “I circled the good ones in green.” She’d explain again without looking over that the whole town was against her. Nobody was going to hire Claire Wilson
now
. All these changes came about as the result of a single failed mainstay. The windows at Paradise were supposed to be fitted with a stop screw, to prevent what the Paradise manual euphemistically referred to as “elopement.” Jailbreak was another word for this, suicide, accidental defenestration—as Nal’s mom put it, many of the residents were forty-eight cards to a deck and couldn’t be trustedwith their own lives. With the stop screws in place, no window opened more than six inches. But as it happened, a stop screw was missing from a sixth-floor window—one of the hundred-plus windows in Paradise—an oversight that was discovered when a ninety-two-year-old resident shoved it open to have a smoke. A visitor found the old woman leaning halfway out the window and drew her back inside the frame. The visitor described the “near fatal incident” to Nal’s mother while the “victim” plucked ash from her tongue. According to Nal’s mom, the Paradise administrators came to the sudden agreement that it had always been Claire Wilson’s responsibility to check the window locks. She came home that night babbling insincere threats: “They try to pin this on me, boys, you watch, I will quit in a heartbeat.” But then the resident’s daughter wrote a series of histrionic letters to the newspaper, and the sleepy Athertown news station decided to do an “exposé” of Paradise, modeled on the American networks, complete with a square-jawed black actress to play the role of Nal’s mother.
    Only Nal had watched the dramatization through to its ending. They’d staged a simulation of a six-story fall using a flour sack dummy, the sack splitting open on the gates and spilling flour everywhere, powdering the inscrutable faces of the stone angels in the garden below. Lawsuits were filed, and, in the ensuing din of threats and accusations, Nal’s mother was let go.
    Nal had expected his mom to react to this with a froth and vengeance that at least matched his own, perhaps even file a legal action. But she returned home from her final day at work exhausted. Her superiors had bullied her into a defeated sort of gratitude: “They said it was my job, who knows? I’m not perfect. I’m just glad they caught the problem when they did,” she kept saying.
    “Quit talking like that!” Nal moaned. “It wasn’t your fault,Mom. You’ve been brainwashed by these people. Don’t be such a pushover.”
    “A pushover!” she said. “Who’s pushing me over? I know it wasn’t my fault, Nal. I can’t be grateful that nobody got killed?” She described the “averted tragedy” in the canned language of the Paradise directors: the chance of one of her charges flailing backward out the window and onto the gate’s tiny spears. In her dreams the victim wasn’t a flour sack dummy but a body with no face, impaled on the spikes.
    “That’s your body, Ma!” Nal cried. “That’s you!” But she didn’t see it that