Neighborhood Watch (17 page)

“Gary is enrolled in a rehab program that provides supervised housing in exchange for participation in community outreach groups. Gary has graciously agreed to share his life story with us and answer any questions we might have.”

Linda Sue put her hand up.

“Later, Linda Sue. After he’s spoken.” Silently I prayed Linda Sue wouldn’t use this as an opportunity to pick another fight. In the month since we followed Linda Sue and Geoffrey home after Helen’s party, I’d been watching from my window for any sign of a repeat visitation. The night after we saw them standing together in her living room I slept maybe an hour or two at best. I woke early enough to make coffee and sit all morning watching Linda Sue’s yard, waiting to see Geoffrey walk across it. He never did. When I finally had to leave so I wouldn’t be late for work, I found him outside on his driveway, lying on the rolling board he used to work under his car. I was fully prepared to walk past him when he called out, “Bets!” and slid over to the grass strip that separated our driveways. “Quite a party last night, wasn’t it?” he said, smiling. I could hear the teenage joke he wasn’t saying:
NOT
.

“Helen’s work might take a little getting used to,” I said diplomatically.

He asked when I wanted to get together to talk more about
Anna Karenina
. I tried to remember which one of us had suggested this book and why. Why had he put me in this position of knowing so much about him and yet nothing that mattered? He acted so cordial and so
normal,
asking me what page I’d gotten to, when I was off work, if I’d be ready this afternoon to talk about our book, that I began to wonder—honestly—if I’d imagined the scene at Linda Sue’s house the night before.

“I’m a little busy this week,” I said, shaking my keys as if to prove I had a real job here, with responsibilities.

“Okay,” he said, pushing himself back. “Maybe this weekend?”

“I don’t know, Geoffrey,” I said. “Maybe you should spend time with Corinne. You said you hadn’t seen much of each other recently.”

“Hmm.” He nodded. “She’s away this weekend, actually. At a conference.” We usually knew ahead of time about the weekends Corinne wasn’t around. We always had him over for dinner at least one of the nights, sometimes both.

“I didn’t know that.” I let the silence open up, with no mention of dinner.

“Well, then.” He pushed himself as far away as he could. “Let me know when you want to talk about the book.”

I didn’t say any of the things that crossed my mind.
I never want to talk about this book with you. You shouldn’t be sleeping with Linda Sue. She’s vulnerable and strange and not worthy of you.
Or what I was finally beginning to feel
: You manipulate all of us, Geoffrey. You listen to our sad stories and then you tell your own and you get all of us to excuse you for your bad behavior
.

When he didn’t show up at the library that day or the next, or anytime at all the following week, I knew something was different. It became a mystery and I watched Linda Sue’s house more. Anytime I wasn’t at work or obligated to attend to Paul in some way, I stood at the kitchen window with the clearest view of her yard. I never saw Geoffrey go in or come out. What did it mean? A few days later, I called to tell him that some things had come up at work and I wouldn’t have time to read our book. “It’s a little too much right now,” I said, hoping he’d get the gist of my meaning—the book was about an adulterous affair that didn’t end well.
I know what’s going on,
I wanted to yell over the phone.
You weren’t exactly subtle.
But the problem was that I
didn’t
know. I didn’t understand—what did he and Linda Sue have in common?

“Okay,” he said, as if the enormity of what I was saying—
I don’t want to read with you anymore—
meant little to him
.
For the next week at work, I watched the library door and waited for him to come. Some days I felt the buzz of expectation, an electric tingle in my neck, and I’d think,
Yes, he’s coming today
. I couldn’t explain it except to say that I felt like a child, left behind by the first real friend I’d ever made. I lurched between moods, one minute sad, the next irritated by the endless demands of patrons, always looking for something slightly different than what we had on the shelf. Large print, paperback, a different translation. Once I actually snapped, “What difference does it make?” to an elderly woman looking for an edition of Emily Dickinson that she remembered as having a
yellow
cover. After that I went into the bathroom and sat inside a toilet stall for the better part of an hour.
Calm down,
I told myself.
Just calm down
.

I thought about calling Geoffrey and saying,
I never wanted to sleep with you, you know,
which sounded adolescent even though it was true. I didn’t. Why would I want stolen kisses and hand-holding when we had topics to discuss and ground to cover?

I was beginning to understand that the end of a friendship could break your heart as cleanly as the end of a romance. Maybe I did behave like a teenager. Paul implied it more than once and we started bickering more. “I don’t understand you,” he said one night over a dinner I’d thrown together, a box of macaroni and cheese with sausage cut up into it. We both lifted the tasteless food into our mouths. I narrowed my eyes at him as if to say,
Oh, don’t you?

 

 

Though presumably Gary’s life of crime was behind him, he began his speech in an unsettling present tense. “Okay, so. Let’s say I’m out, looking for a house. I want one that looks vulnerable, right? Windows half-open, no screens or bars. I also look for blinds closed all the way. That means when I get in I can do anything, look for the jewelry, find the silver. What have you.”

Marianne’s smile looked like it was caught on her teeth. “You
used
to do this.”

“Right,” he said, nodding.

Gary was a dreadful speaker. He blinked nervously and picked at his teeth. Later, he talked about looking for jewelry in a bathroom and touched his zipper. To conclude, he hiked up his pants and said, “I forget what else. “When Marianne asked for questions, we sat in silence. He might have been reformed, but he was a sad sight and no one wanted to drag this out. Except for Linda Sue. “Do you mind telling us what jail is like?”

He seemed game enough to answer the question, but Marianne stopped him. “That’s not what we’re here for, Linda Sue. This is about
preventing
crime.”

“It seems like it’s been more about glamorizing it. Isn’t that what he’s been doing all night?” She turned around and looked at all of us. No one said anything. “I feel like leaving here and becoming a burglar. We’ve just learned about twenty great tips for doing it. I think it’s worth his telling us a few reasons why we shouldn’t.”

Marianne fumed until Gary said he’d like to take the question. “Look, the thing about jail is—” He looked at each one of us, sitting with our notebooks open in our laps, pocketbooks tucked under our feet. “Don’t go there, okay? Seriously. Jail is like your worst nightmare times ten. It’s scum of the earth in your face all day and all night, sleeping on top of you, pissing on the floor. The reason I’m here tonight is I’d rather do
anything
—I’d rather do
this
—than go back to jail.”

We shifted awkwardly in our seats at the unkind implication he’d made about our gathering. Only Linda Sue laughed at the answer, so hard I feared she might lapse into a choking fit. “Thank you,” she finally said, catching her breath.

Because it was our final meeting, Marianne had planned a party with a rum punch, crystal cups, and a handwritten folded sign that warned: ALCOHOLIC! She laid out her spread and disappeared into the kitchen. After a few minutes, I went to check on her and found her standing alone with tears in her eyes. There was no point in pretending I hadn’t walked in. “Are you okay, Marianne?”

“I’d just like to know why she moved here.”

For weeks I’d been asking myself the same question. “I wish I knew,” I said.

“Helen keeps saying she’s harmless, but I don’t think she is.”

I hadn’t dared articulate such a thought, but the minute Marianne said it, I knew what she meant. “It’s like she watches us,” I whispered. “And judges everything we do.”

She looked up and caught my eye.
“Exactly.”

This wasn’t fair. Even as I said it, I knew I was wrong. I’d stood with Linda Sue at three parties now, had walked home with her twice, and I knew the simple truth: She didn’t think about us nearly as much as we thought about her. The real problem with Linda Sue’s cavalier jokes and laughing with a felon about our gathering was the kernel of truth that lay behind it. We were a joke. We favored practical hairstyles and dressed in bright pinks and greens that made us look like an army of cautious women trying to look cheerful. We kept conversations light and on predictable topics. If one expected anything more interesting—like the conversations I’d had with Geoffrey all spring—one would only be disappointed coming to this group.

Marianne wiped her nose with a paper towel. “Part of me thinks she needs our help, and part of me wishes she’d just
leave
.”

I thought about my own contradictory impulses—offering to help with her curtains one minute, peeping in on her private life the next. In the other room, I could hear Linda Sue’s voice above the others. “Look, I never even lock my door. If anyone wants to rob me, they can.”

Standing in the dark kitchen, I surprised myself: “She’ll leave soon, Marianne,” I said. “She’ll be gone. I know she will.”

A
fter I hang up with Paul, Finn appears with a pitcher of something he calls “sun tea,” which he tells me is made by putting a pitcher of water in the sun all day with tea bags floating in it. “It’s one of those things gay men who work at home do with their extra time.”

I laugh as he pours me a glass. He’s been so helpful and reassuring, I hardly know how to properly thank him.

“Oh, please.” He sticks a sprig of mint into my glass. “You’ll need this,” he says, pointing to the mint. “Otherwise it just tastes like brown water. That’s the problem with sun tea. It doesn’t really work.”

I ask if he knows any way to look up old police reports about an accident that would have happened more than twelve years ago.

“Hmm. That might be tricky, but we can try.” He takes me into his office, where two computers sit on desks facing opposite walls. As he works on finding police files online, I ask about the other names on the list and point to the two that I wrote down at the bottom: Trish Rashke and Alocin Bell, the name I saw on the envelope at Marianne’s house. “Nothing so far, but I’m going to work on Trish Rashke next. I remember her and I’ve got some ideas about how to find her.”

“You
knew
Trish?”

“She lived here with her parents when we first moved in. We hired her to walk our dog for a while. She was always very sweet with him. She bought him toys and came over to visit with him. Then the dog died suddenly and we hardly saw her after that.”

“How did he die?”

“A kidney infection. It happened so fast the vet thought maybe he ate some pesticide. We never knew exactly what happened.”

 

 

That evening Marianne starts her Personal Safety Seminar by asking everyone to say their name and what they currently use for personal protection. A woman in the front goes first. “Sharon. Mace spray.” Her sister, beside her, is next. “June. Brass knuckles.” No one makes the joke I would have expected. C
ondoms sometimes, diaphragm occasionally.

There are more people here than I ever remember at our old Neighborhood Watch gatherings. She keeps going around the room until finally one woman admits that she doesn’t carry anything. “I don’t like thinking about this stuff.”

“What would be nice is not having to think about it at
all,
” Marianne says. I have to admit she’s pretty good. She doesn’t seem obsessive or disturbingly fixated on threats that don’t exist. She seems like a problem solver. “Look,” she says, holding up the pink Taser gun she’s laid out for demonstration. From far away, it looks small and harmless, like a fun grooming gadget. “No one wants to think about being attacked. No one is looking to be one of Charlie’s Angels.”

When the sample guns come out, Marianne demonstrates one, warning everyone about the sound it will make when it hits a target. “It’s like a bug zapper and it makes my skin crawl. You wonder if this thing is going to burn someone up. But I’m told no, that it feels like a very powerful jolt—painful, yes, but also temporary.”

After one woman volunteers to try first and hits Reynolds Wrap, as Marianne has named the foil-covered target, everyone lines up for a turn. Marianne calls out pointers: “Aim for his chest if he’s farther than forty feet, his jugular if he’s closer. Does everyone know what the jugular is?” No one answers because no one’s listening anymore. They’re waiting for their turn, wielding their gun. A commotion of laughter and applause erupts every time the target sizzles with a hit. I move to the refreshments table in the back. I realize that Marianne is so flush with the success of this event and the checkbooks already being pulled out that she probably won’t notice if I slip away.

Downstairs the door is open, almost as if Roland knew I might flee the party upstairs. “Hi, there,” he says. A bottle of wine sits open on the U-shaped plank of linoleum that serves as a makeshift counter. “Care to join me?” He holds up a glass.

I take it from him, careful not to let our hands touch, and take a sip. At the party on my first night home I didn’t drink anything, probably because Marianne never offered it. She must be worried about triggers for me and inadvertently unleashing my old black moods. Though why she thinks the gathering upstairs would be fine but not a glass of wine seems strange. “This is nice. Thank you, Roland.”