Neighborhood Watch (21 page)

She walked back to the folding card table where she kept her cigarettes, pulled out a fresh one, and cupped her hands around the end to light it. I thought about snapping the cigarette from her lips. I thought about taking a drag, blowing smoke in her face, and saying,
That’s how a baby in utero feels when his mother smokes.
I thought about saying something so bitter and inappropriate it would be talked about for years.
Women like you don’t deserve to get pregnant
. But as I gathered my courage, the expression on her face caught me off guard. There was no look of triumph.

Now that I’ve known plenty of bad mothers—ones who’d been criminally negligent, who’d left babies alone in apartments to go out to buy drugs—I know that it eats at one’s soul to fail at this. I’ve sat in therapy groups where everyone talks about the school meetings they missed and the beatings they delivered. Children’s lives may be destroyed when mothers abandon them, but no one ever talks about this: The women are ruined, too. Doomed to obsess over their failure every sober moment of their lives. Even back then, I knew this.

Suddenly, instead of resenting Linda Sue, I felt sorry for her.

Maybe she had succeeded in fertilizing a viable egg, but what else could she offer this child? She had no job or source of income that anyone knew of. The father of this baby was a long shot at best. Even I had to admit that in the two years he’d lived here, Geoffrey had gone from seeming like a celebrity in our midst to a question mark. (Had anyone ever
seen
him writing? Was he really working on anything beyond expanding his female friendship circle? I never thought these things, of course, but I knew people who did and recently I’d begun to see their point.)

“I know you’ve had miscarriages,” Linda Sue finally said. The daylight was draining out of the sky. “I have, too. Three altogether.”

I didn’t say anything.

I could barely see her face but I remember every word she said. “No one understands, do they? They never let you grieve for those babies. You go in for your D & C on the obstetrics floor next door to women delivering healthy newborns. No one thinks about what that does to you.”

That had happened to me once. I wasn’t sure if she knew that and was pretending to understand or if it had happened to her, too.

“I named all my babies,” she kept going. “You have to, I think. You go crazy otherwise. You have to acknowledge it. God, otherwise you walk around all day with everyone telling you it’s a blessing since the baby was probably disabled anyway.”

This was true and it was excruciating. To see it on someone’s face, to know they were about to say it:
Usually those babies are pretty disabled
.
Maybe it’s a blessing.
Was it crazy to want to say once for all the world to hear:
It’s not a blessing. Say whatever else you’d like, but it’s not a blessing
. My throat hurt so much I wasn’t sure if I was talking or if she was simply saying everything I’d felt. “No one understands how awful it is.”

Was she crying? I couldn’t tell. I couldn’t see her face.

Finally I said, “I named mine, too. And I think about them sometimes. I imagine this life where they’re all with me.”

“Yeah,” she said softly. For a long time neither one of us said anything. Finally she asked, “What are their names?”

And I told her. Ben, Shannon, Peter, Henry, and Charlotte. I kept going, told her more about each of them, what they were like.

“That’s good,” she said. “That’s really good.”

After I got to the end, she asked me if I’d like to see something upstairs. I followed her, past a pile of flattened boxes and a trash bag full of Styrofoam peanuts. “This way.” She opened the door at the end of the hallway. When I looked inside, my heart moved into my throat. There it all was, exactly as I’d imagined it. Ceiling stars, yellow walls, and gingham curtains with little ribbon ties. A white crib stood in the corner with a mobile above it of black-and-white clowns. The baby nursery I’d dreamed of setting up, the one I’d planned for and once got close enough to that I let myself buy three cans of yellow paint. My palms went slick.

She wasn’t even showing that I could tell. Didn’t she know what could happen? That setting all this up was like arranging a wedding before you had a groom, and if no one arrived, you’d have this as a testament to your heart’s folly forever? I’d only ever decorated rooms in my mind, and still, they were there. “Linda Sue—” I said.

Before I could get my thought out, she snapped off the light. “Don’t say anything.” She kept going with the tour as if I’d come up to see the master bedroom and bathroom suite identical to my own. “Here’s . . . whatever. My bedroom. The bathroom. The vanity.” Her bedroom was as sparsely furnished as downstairs. A box spring and mattress, a sheet and thin spread. “Wait here a sec,” she said, and disappeared down the hall.

I walked over to her side table, picked up the book lying open,
Your Pregnancy and You: A Month-by-Month Guide
. I don’t know how to describe my feelings except as a complicated mix of pity and envy. I understood that she had something I did not: access to her real feelings, and the freedom to make choices based on them. She had no husband or money, but she was better off than all of us, anyone could see it. I moved over to the bathroom, out of curiosity, I suppose—all bathrooms hold secrets, don’t they?—and that was when I saw the pink box with the white stick lying on top of it. A pregnancy test with a plus sign on it.

According to the trial record, I touched other items in her bathroom and beside her bed. My fingerprints were found on a glass, her tissue box, and a pencil, for some reason. The prosecution pointed out that a house tour doesn’t usually involve examining personal items on a bedside table. “Nor does a murder,” Franklin said, but his delivery was off. One juror rolled her eyes.

At my trial, the prosecution argued that I began, right then, to disassociate. They said I went home and sat alone in my darkened living room for close to six hours to plot my revenge on my neighbor, who had both the man I loved and a child on the way. They said I waited for Paul to return late from work, eat dinner, and fall asleep before I let myself go back across the street. They said I didn’t bring a weapon with me, because my intent, when I went there, was not to kill Linda Sue but to push her down the stairs and cause a miscarriage.

“Five miscarriages,” the DA repeated for the jury, not once but twice. “Elizabeth Treading had had five miscarriages and wanted Linda Sue Nelson to know how it felt to make assumptions, to plan too far ahead, to have her heart broken by a baby who didn’t come.” For my defense, Franklin saved our only piece of surprise evidence for his cross-exam of Geoffrey. We intended the moment to turn the tide of the trial, expose their scenario as a house of cards built on a fabrication. He asked if Geoffrey had seen the results of Linda Sue’s autopsy report.

“Yes,” Geoffrey said.

“Do you know what the results were?”

“Blunt-force trauma to the head. Intracranial bleeding,” Geoffrey said. We’d heard the injuries described in detail; no one was surprised.

“Anything else?”

Geoffrey shook his head.

Franklin asked, “Did you know there was no evidence of a pregnancy?”

At the very least, this fact altered the story the prosecution had painted against me: that I was an infertile woman in love with Geoffrey, blind with anger at Linda Sue’s good fortune not only in winning Geoffrey but in defying her own body’s long odds and getting pregnant as well. Here was Franklin’s point: It wasn’t that simple. Linda Sue wasn’t pregnant and Geoffrey must have known this. Everyone was keeping secrets. No one could be trusted. Then we all watched Geoffrey’s reaction on the stand. First he looked around the courtroom, his eyes darting from one face to another, as if he were hoping to find Linda Sue in the gallery. As if he needed an explanation himself, because we could all see, from the way his face went pale and tears formed along the bottom of his eyes, that this was news to him, too.

Watching a man weep soundlessly before a courtroom of spectators convinced everyone there of one thing. Geoffrey knew nothing about Linda Sue’s deception. In no time, the prosecution recalled enough witnesses to establish the
illusion
of pregnancy. The decorated room, the books beside her bed, a positive pregnancy test in the bathroom. How did a woman infertile from endometriosis accomplish that? No one could say.

In the end, the information clouded the story but not the case against me. Yes, it was unclear why she’d perpetrated such a fraud, but wanting a baby wasn’t a crime. Murder was, the DA reminded the courtroom.

I
n the car driving to Trish’s reading, I think about how best to approach this situation. Surely Trish must have been in Linda Sue’s house the same time I was on the day of the murder. She overheard our conversation, the only time I spoke the names of my children aloud. If Trish didn’t kill Linda Sue, she must know who did. And whoever wrote me the note knew her pen name and was trying to point me in her direction.

As we drive, I avoid all this by getting Finn to tell me about his childhood spent in Oklahoma. How he joined the Cub Scouts and 4-H Club trying to fit in but it never really worked. Going away to college—even to Norman, Oklahoma—was such a relief, he pierced both ears the first week and started wearing eye makeup the second. “I was trying for a David Bowie thing, but I was about eighty pounds too heavy. In the end, I looked more like Jimmy Osmond wearing mascara.” When he finally moved to New York, he realized he was more like his small-town, aging parents than he’d thought. “I kept falling in love with all these boring, clean-cut men who reminded me of my father.”

I almost interrupt to defend Bill—
He’s not that boring
—when he clarifies his point. “Bill came much later. He was wearing a kilt when I met him. Very cute. He turned out to be a balance between the two.”

So why did they want to live in suburbia, in this neighborhood, on this block?

“That’s a good question. I thought it seemed like a simpler life than the city. I wanted that. We had enough that was complicated.”

“Are you happy?”

He turns and gives me a look. We never asked questions like this back in my day. I don’t think it occurred to me before Linda Sue came along saying and asking anything. Now I want to know. “I think so, yes. Most of the time.”

I feel nervous before we even get inside the bookstore. I haven’t planned what I’ll do if Trish doesn’t want to talk to me. Then she stands up, looking surprisingly like her old self, except now she’s not wearing black rings of eye makeup or holding a cigarette cupped in her hand. Her hair hangs softly down to her shoulders, and I realize she looks not so much like an older version of the girl I remember but a happier one.

After she’s introduced, she steps up to the podium. “Hi, everyone, thanks for coming—” She stops talking when she sees me. “Oh, my gosh! Mrs. Treading! I can’t believe you’re here!” I know she’s had twelve years to practice not letting on what she knows about Linda Sue’s death, and I expected her to put on a show of politeness, but I didn’t expect this: unmitigated delight.

She turns to the audience. “This is my old librarian, everyone. It’s so funny to see her because I always think of her when I do a reading. She was the only librarian I ever knew who read chapter books to preschoolers. I still remember one about a witch who rode on a vacuum cleaner with a cat who could fit in one of her pockets.”

I can hardly get over her saying all this, though I remember the book—
The Wednesday Witch
by Ruth Chew. A favorite from my childhood that had fallen out of print.

“Mrs. Treading was the first adult I knew who took children seriously as readers.”

I was?

“She read books that she loved and passed along that passion. I’ve always wanted to thank her publicly for opening the world of books to me. I came from a house that favored science over fiction and I don’t know if I would have been a writer if it hadn’t been for her.”

The crowd—now around thirty—applauds politely, and after an awkward moment where it’s unclear if I’m meant to say something or not, she continues with her reading. It’s from her newest book, in which cousins from England are introduced, a girl named Grace and a boy named Thaddeus. She reads their dialogue with an English accent, then laughs self-consciously, tucking hair behind her ear.

Afterward, Finn and I get in line to get books signed. I’m grateful to him for buying two copies of each book. “My treat,” he whispers, handing them to me, and I wonder if he knows how much this means to me. I want to take them home and read them, sleep with them at night, wake up with them lying next to me in bed. I want my own copies but of course I have no money.

“Thank you for what you said, Trish,” I say when we get to the table where she’s signing books. “I was very touched by that.”

“It was all true.”

After we’ve talked for a few minutes, managing to avoid all the loaded topics like my incarceration and the characters she’s named after my imaginary children, I invite her to join us for a cup of coffee, which she seems happy to do. At a table in the café section of the store, she starts to look more nervous than she did in front of an audience. After we order drinks, Finn asks why she chose to write for this age group.

“I’m not sure. Someone once said you write for the age you remember being the happiest. Ten was probably my peak. Things went a little downhill for me after that. I’m not sure, maybe you heard.” She peeks up at me. “I did some stupid things.”

“Like what?”

“I don’t know. I got in trouble. I went home with guys I shouldn’t have. They’d ask if I wanted to hear the new Pink Floyd album and the next thing I knew I’d be in some fat boy’s bedroom taking my shirt off.”

It’s hard to know what to say. Finally Finn leans over and pats her hand. “I did that, too. Only I was the fat boy and we listened to the Electric Light Orchestra.”