A Crime in the Neighborhood (28 page)

But to lose a child—I don't know how anyone would ever get used to that. I don't think you are supposed to get used to it. Years go by and I forget about Boyd Ellison, but then something
will remind me and there it is, that hillside in July, afternoon sunlight hanging in the humid air like yellow gauze. It was so hot that day. It was such an ordinary day. Until that little cry reached a tired florist about to get into her car.

Once I've let myself venture that far I can't help but start wondering all over again. What if she had moved two steps to the left? What if she had worn her glasses that afternoon? What if she had listened harder, not been so preoccupied. I wonder if the florist herself still retraces those few minutes, if after all these years she still dreams of climbing the hillside, wading through broken bottles, locust husks, and creeper vines. Could she have done things differently? Could she?

But it wasn't until I found this notebook the other day, helping my mother move some old boxes out of the basement of her apartment building, that I started to wonder what had become of Boyd's parents. All I really know is that they moved to Virginia. Like Mr. Green, they got out fast, but not before they'd had to live through his arrest. Not before they'd had to live through thinking their son's murderer had been caught, that they might actually see the man who had taken everything from them, see that he was real, human, maybe even get to ask him the question that as the years went on must have haunted them—“Why?” they would ask, why? why?—only to find out that it was the wrong man, that their killer was still out there. I should have known all that. And yet until tonight, as I sat here turning the pages of this old notebook, I'd never realized how I must have hurt them, too.

It's funny, after all these years I'm still fascinated by how people hurt each other, why it happens, and by what makes people need to be cruel. But I'm afraid my interest nowadays has become practical. When I was a child, I was curious about the mechanics of pain. Now I want to understand for reasons of security. “Watch yourself”—it's still the best advice anyone ever gave me. Pain is always about to happen somewhere to someone I know and at times it seems that the best I can hope for is not to be the cause of it. In this way I guess I am a product of my generation, most of us anxious pragmatists and skeptics, who are less interested in the mysteries of human pain and cruelty than in how to avoid them.

Which is why, in a curious way, I've come to feel grateful to Mr. Green. Because when you have watched yourself do the worst thing you can imagine doing to another person, at least you know what you're capable of. At least you have the rest of your life to be more careful.

A child's body on a hillside in July. A woman reading magazines in the dark. A man standing alone in an empty street. Like images from a flickering projector, they appear, disappear, but they are always there. I don't want to be melodramatic, but they are what I have.

One of the last times I spoke to my father on the phone, not long before he died last May, I said: “I just want you to know. I don't hold anything against you.”

He sounded genuinely surprised when he answered, “Why should you hold anything against me?” Then, as if suddenly recollecting, he said, “It's been a long time, Marsha. I don't know how long you're supposed to hold onto something like that.”

“For as long as you don't understand it,” I shot back.

“I always loved you,” he said softly, breathing onto the phone receiver.

“Then why did you leave me?” I asked. And there it was. I had finally asked. I hadn't even known how much I wanted to ask him that question until I had done it, until that question whistled out of me like a cry.
Why did you leave me?

For quite a while he didn't say anything. I listened to him breathe hoarsely onto the phone and imagined him sitting alone in his little Cleveland apartment in his recliner, the window closed and locked beside him, one hand drifting through his thin gray hair. Outside, evening would be coming on, sharp light slanting along the sidewalk. At last he said regretfully, “I don't know. I'm sorry. I can't remember that well anymore.”

“That's all right,” I said, ashamed to find myself relieved. “Maybe we'll talk about it some other time.” But of course there wasn't another time. He died a couple months later, of a heart attack that nobody predicted. He was only sixty-seven.

I wasn't prepared for how it would be when he died. I had been living without my father for nearly a quarter of a century
and yet when Julie called to tell me that he was dead, suddenly there I was, ten years old all over again, and he had just left me, and the world was a wide place in the dark, and right then I understood as if for the very first time that nothing in my life would ever feel safe.

I would like to thank the National Endowment for the Arts and the Massachusetts Cultural Council for their generous support. I am very grateful as well to Marcie Hershman, Eileen Pollack, Marjorie Sandor, Alex Johnson, Jodi Daynard, Jessica Treadway, Phil Press, and especially Maxine Rodburg—all of whom read drafts of this novel and offered encouragement and advice. Many thanks, also, to my agent, Colleen Mohyde, and to my editor, Shannon Ravenel.

Published by
ALGONQUIN BOOKS OF CHAPEL HILL
Post Office Box 2225
Chapel Hill, North Carolina 27515-2225

a division of
WORKMAN PUBLISHING
225 Varick Street
New York, New York 10014

© 1997 by Suzanne Berne.
All rights reserved.

This is a work of fiction. All names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. No reference to any real person is intended or should be inferred.

Grateful acknowledgment is made to
Agni
, where an excerpt from this novel first appeared in slightly different form.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available for a previous edition of this work.

E-book ISBN 978-1-56512-689-3

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