Neighborhood Watch (20 page)

But was this why Marianne remembers my bad episodes so well? Because Geoffrey gave her details? Is this why everyone I talk to sounds so nervous to hear from me? It’s certainly possible. It’s hard to blame Paul, whose face wears the terrible weight of these misguided efforts. “It wasn’t your fault, Paul. When I look back, I see how Geoffrey manipulated all of us.”

“I know he did,” Paul says softly. “Still, I can’t help it—sometimes I miss him, don’t you?”

I think about the way Geoffrey listened to my stories, how powerful that was. I know this much: We were both in love with him. Paul for a lifetime, me for a year. Strangely, it wasn’t a source of tension between us. It gave us something private that we shared, though we never discussed it. Even as I remember this, I think:
Maybe Paul, in his own way, has been a truer friend than I realized
. We shared certain truths we couldn’t speak of aloud. We respected the privacy we each seemed to need.

“All this time I’ve wondered if Geoffrey killed her. If maybe I turned myself in and confessed in some unconscious, complicated act of friendship.”

“No, Bets, I wouldn’t have let you do that—”

“It turns out he didn’t do it, though. He took a DNA test; it wasn’t him.”

Paul must know this already because he nods. “I knew he couldn’t have. He loved Linda Sue. In a way I’d never seen in him before.”

“So where does that leave us? Who
was
it, then?”

Instead of answering, he hands me another file, a report from a blood spatter expert, saying it was possible that Linda Sue coughed the blood up the wall, that the spray hadn’t necessarily been caused by repeated blows to her head. It takes me a minute to realize what it says, and the difference this could have made if it had been included in the trial. It would have at least introduced the idea that her death was not a bludgeoning but a possible accident. “If the blood spatter could have come from her coughing, did anyone say she might have just fallen down the stairs?”

“Unlikely, given the fingernail scrapings and the hair in her blood.”

“But it’s possible, right? Maybe someone was there, maybe they struggled before she fell, but this person isn’t responsible.”

“I tried. After I read that blood spatter report, I sent it to three experts. Two out of three ruled out accidental death. They pointed to the bruising on the neck as evidence of intent. Whoever it was tried to strangle her and couldn’t manage it. Eventually the fight came to the top of the stairs, where she was struck in the head and forced down.”

“What did the third expert say?”

“The third said it was remote, but accidental death was a possibility.”

For a long time, neither one of us speaks. “It could have been an accident, Paul. That’s what I’ve always thought. But who was there with her?”

It wasn’t Corinne, she was in Princeton. It wasn’t Gary the burglar, who had an alibi. Who was Linda Sue happy enough to see that she invited him or her in, put on a kettle for tea, then went upstairs and ended up getting killed? One of the other women on the block? I go through all the names—Helen, Barbara, Kim, Marianne. “She didn’t like any of them. If they showed up at her door she would have done what she always did with me, stepped out on the porch and smoked a cigarette so the conversation could end when the smoke did. So who did she invite in?”

I haven’t mentioned this new idea I’ve only just hatched: that Trish could have been there, somewhere inside the house. Paul’s already dismissed Trish as a possibility and I don’t want to lose my focus.

To my surprise, Paul hardly seems interested in going over the list of suspects. Instead, he seems determined to dwell on the mistakes and what went wrong twelve years ago with my defense. “I wish I’d done a lot of things differently. Starting with Franklin. Boy, if I could go back in time, I never would have chosen Franklin.”

“I was there, too, remember? Making the same mistakes.”

“I should have seen things clearer. You were sitting in jail, how could you judge? I was weighing everything, getting advice, and still I managed to screw it up.”

He turns and looks at me, his brown eyes soft. He’s a sweet man, and well meaning. It doesn’t surprise me that he’s kept blaming himself for what happened. I wish we had a different history. I wish I could ask him if he’s fallen in love or if his current life is less lonely than the one we had together, but I can’t. There are some questions I simply can’t ask out loud.

I
nstead of going back to Marianne’s house, I stop by Finn’s and ask if I can borrow his computer again. Typing in Trish’s pen name leads me to a Web site designed for young readers to talk to other fans of her books. Currently posted are two weeks of messages, about twenty in all.

I went to prison just as the Harry Potter craze was beginning and I missed what I imagine has been an exciting phenomenon. Trish’s books seem to have attracted an equally loyal, albeit smaller, fan base. One girl writes to complain that there hasn’t been a new book in a year and a half, which means she’s had to reread her three books over and over.

I can’t get over the casual way everyone talks about the characters:

Henry and Charlotte. They’re alive in their own way.

I’ve figured out one part of the mystery already. I don’t know what Trish would have been doing inside Linda Sue’s house, only that she must have been there that day, hiding somewhere, like the cat.

Maybe she was the reason Linda Sue was so nervous.

I remember standing at Linda Sue’s door that afternoon, how she looked—what was my first thought?—
relieved
to see me. As if I’d interrupted something when I knocked. “What are you doing here?” she said. Did she look behind her? Am I imagining that?

It was three days after our last Neighborhood Watch meeting and Marianne had come over to my house that morning with a catalog of personal security devices from a company called Safe-T-First. “I’m worried about Linda Sue,” Marianne had said, her voice low. “I believe she’s in danger. She needs to start protecting herself.” She wanted me to show Linda Sue one product in particular: an inflatable doll that looked like a man, with lifelike hair and real clothes. The idea was to prop him in a chair by a window with a newspaper in his hands. “The best crime deterrent is a house that looks full,” she said.

I tried not to sound cruel. “I don’t know, Marianne. This doesn’t look like something Linda Sue would go for.”

“You have to convince her.”

The more I resisted, the more insistent Marianne became. “She needs to install her lock right away. She might laugh all she likes, but she won’t after she’s attacked.”

She made me promise I’d go over that afternoon. “This is too important to play around with,” she said.

I wanted to ask her then:
What is it, Marianne? What’s made you so afraid?
I didn’t know how to tell her that Linda Sue didn’t need a fake man to sit in her living room, that she already had a real one.

“She likes you, Bets. You have things in common.”

I didn’t say anything because I knew what Marianne meant but wasn’t saying. Linda Sue had lost babies, too. The first time she told me, I held my breath and prayed she wouldn’t say more. I was superstitious and believed in the power of suggestion, that it might be contagious. If I heard her sad stories, my body would discover new ways to break its own heart. A few weeks earlier, when the doctor told us I wouldn’t survive another try at pregnancy, Paul and I drove home forty minutes without speaking a word. Once home, I got out of the car, crossed the street, and knocked on Linda Sue’s door. I wanted a cigarette, I told myself. I wanted to dull my senses and my nausea, the feeling that I had driving home, both ironic and true: Grief moving through a body feels like pregnancy.

I wanted Linda Sue to tell me how she went on. For so long, Paul and I circled around this subject and never discussed it. We always said,
We’ll try again,
or,
We’re good at getting pregnant
. Never once had we said,
What if it never happens?
I had to ask someone:
How do you go on after you know this?

Then I stepped into the emptiness of Linda Sue’s house with its stale cigarette smell and began to weep. For a minute I couldn’t speak at all, couldn’t form a single word. She found me a paper towel in the kitchen. “Here, take it,” she said, her voice impatient, as if I were not the first person to stop by and cry in her foyer that day. “I don’t know. Sometimes it seems like everyone here is so sad.”

I have a reason
, I wanted to say.
And we share it
. But I couldn’t catch my breath. I couldn’t speak. Finally, after she’d brought me water in a plastic cup, I managed to say, “Sometimes I think I’ll die living here.” I meant to add,
without children, without a reason for all this.

“Yeah,” she said. “I can see why.”

Later, when I explained—
I can’t have children, I just found out
—she looked flustered, as if my revelation had no connection to her life.

“I don’t know,” I told Marianne as she pressed me to take the catalog. “I don’t think Linda Sue likes me very much.”

“Please,” Marianne said, her voice grave. “She’s in danger. This is important.” She leaned forward, as if she were afraid of being overheard. A day later, when her paranoia looked like prescience, I wondered what Marianne would say when I saw her. I assumed she’d blame me because the visit had gone so badly and I forgot to tell Linda Sue to install her lock.

But I did go over. I stood on Linda Sue’s porch, holding the catalog upside down so she wouldn’t read it too quickly and know what this was all about. “Can I come in? Marianne wants me to show you something,” I said.

I knew Linda Sue didn’t like having people inside, but she turned around and stepped away from the door. “Sure. Come on in.”

“We wanted to find out if everything is all right.”

She shrugged. “I guess.”

Suddenly, standing in her living room, empty except for three canvas folding chairs circled around an ashtray, I felt scared for Linda Sue in a way I never had been before. She no life, no belongings, nothing except for Geoffrey. “I’ve noticed Geoffrey’s been over,” I said carefully. She nodded and looked away. “I didn’t know you two had become such good friends.” If she broke down and told me she loved him, I decided, I would tell her it was okay, I knew how she felt. Maybe I’d even joke and say,
Join the club
. If she cried, I wouldn’t be embarrassed. I would cross the room and put my arms around her. I would tell her love is hardest when it feels the most real. But instead she shrugged and said, “Not really. I think his writing is a rip-off.”

“You do?”

“I don’t know.” She lit a cigarette. “It’s just pretty unoriginal.”

“What do you mean?” I said, though of course I knew what she meant. I’d spent the last three days at the library defending him with clumsy, far-fetched arguments about how his admitted act of plagiarism wasn’t really his fault. “It was only a problem on two stories, the shortest and the weakest ones in the book. It doesn’t mean he can’t write, it means he was stupid.” Even as I said this, I knew it was hopeless. Why
had
he been so stupid? Why steal stories that weren’t as good as your own? “We know Geoffrey pretty well, Linda Sue. He has a good heart but he also has weaknesses. Impulses I don’t think he can really control.”

“Did he already tell you?”

“Tell me what?”

“Oh, skip it. Never mind.”

For a minute, I couldn’t breathe. “Tell me
what
?”

She didn’t say it out loud, but I saw it on her face.
We’re having a baby.
Then she cleared her throat. “We’re having a baby, okay?”

I didn’t say anything. I was terrified I might throw up right there.

“What was it you wanted to show me?” she finally asked.

I held up the catalog that had gone damp in my hands. “Marianne thinks you should get a blow-up man doll.”

She laughed as if I’d made a joke. “Seriously?” I nodded and she shook her head. “Marianne’s got problems. I’m sorry, but maybe
she
needs a blow-up man.”

“She has Roland.”

“Oh, right. I forgot.”

In that moment, I saw it all. Our pity for Linda Sue had been misplaced. Marianne was right, everything she said
was
loaded with judgment. She didn’t come to our meetings to participate but to make fun of us all. We were a joke to her, a reminder of the life she’d happily left behind along with the husband she never mentioned. She hated us and lived here to remind herself why this was so. Now she was going to take Geoffrey for herself, the one thing that made my life bearable. I turned around and started back toward the door.

“Wait, Betsy. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t be like this. You’re not like those other women. Geoffrey always says that.” I stopped but didn’t turn around. “He’s not sure he would have stayed here if it hadn’t been for you. He thinks of you as one of his best friends.”

Was this true? Geoffrey knew certain things about me but suddenly it seemed as if he knew nothing that mattered, nothing about the babies I’d lost, or the infants that lived on in my mind. “I should go,” I said.

“Yeah, okay. I probably won’t see you again because now—what? You hate us, right? I don’t know what to say about that. I’m sorry, I guess.”

I did hate her then. As much as I’d ever hated anyone. “Don’t be,” I said. “I wish you good luck. You’ll need it. I’m afraid Geoffrey is going to disappoint you.” It was the meanest thing I could think of to say.