The People Next Door (29 page)

Three of the four underwater lights were burned out, and in the twilight he hadn’t noticed her until the delicate splashing
sounds cut through the drone and fade of traffic on Jay Road. She was performing a series of lazy laps, her lithe figure slipping
like a pale otter, twirling and pushing off with her feet when she reached the end. She had the body of a nymphet, with small
hips and buoyant buttocks, the long squid of her black hair bunching and trailing with each stroke. He watched her make three
end-to-end turns without raising her head, and on the fourth he realized she still hadn’t drawn a breath.

He sat up straighter in the window, sure he was mistaken. But she continued through five more laps – her pace steady if not
exactly qualifying for the Olympics – without drawing a breath, and he knew she hadn’t for the entire nine or ten, because
he had been trying to get a look at her face all along. The pool was only thirty feet long, but this seemed rather unbelievable.
She either had a massive set of lungs in that small body or …

At last she coasted, rolling onto her back, eyes turned
to the dusk’s first stars. He was staring at her small breasts, trying to come to terms with the absolute lack of areolae
and the smooth, featureless delta between her thighs, when she rotated her chin and looked up at him in the window.

He did not hide or look away. For a moment she only floated, arms wide, her expression neutral. Eventually she kicked herself
to the shallow end and climbed the steps, dripping on the slate border. There were no towels or clothes waiting for her. She
twisted her black hair in a rope over one shoulder and water pelted the lawn. With her hair aside, he noticed a thick vertical
line running the length of her spine, stark white against the rest of her already pale skin, the scar of a major back surgery.

Cassandra Render, was his guess. Amy must have told her to help herself to the pool, but didn’t they have one of their own?
And would Amy really approve of this sort of baiting? Then again, he was a dog to her now. Maybe she had even put the neighbor
up to it, yank his chain a bit. No, Amy wasn’t the type to play kinky games. If anyone was tempting him, it was Vince.

She turned and walked toward the pool house, watching him until she disappeared beneath him. He assumed she was going home,
but a few seconds later the guest house’s french doors opened with a sweep of rubber insulation against the tile floor. As
softly as possible, he set his beer down on the window sill, hoping she would go away. Seconds ticked by. Water dripped.

He headed toward the stairs and stopped short, unable to descend. The stairway ended at a ninety-degree turn,
with only the small square landing serving as the final step into the main room, and it was here, a few seconds later, that
her arm appeared, then one leg, then her full profile, turning on the landing. She was a wet shadow and looked very small
down there, naked. He could not read her face, only the contours of her pale form.

‘May I come up?’ Her tone was more polite than seductive.

Mick swallowed. ‘What for?’

‘I want to help you.’

‘With what?’

‘Vincent said you were injured.’

So, she knew they knew each other, and probably something about what he and Vince had been through together. Vince had put
her up to this.

‘No. That’s not necessary.’

She smiled, her teeth white in the dark space. She began to climb, one hand on the rail.

‘This is …’ But he didn’t know what this was.

‘Turn around,’ she said.

Feeling ridiculous and not a little frightened, he did.

She took more stairs. ‘Lie down.’

‘On the floor?’

She didn’t respond, so he went to the cot and sat. She reached the top of the stairs and plucked a concert T-shirt from one
of the boxes. She worked her arms and head through, but not before he caught another glimpse of her frontal anatomy. To his
relief, there were actual nipples, though too pale and smooth to register as more
than drawings. His eyes moved down, to the place all heterosexual men’s eyes must fall when chance allows, but the shirt fell
to her thighs before he could determine its character or any new details, and that was just as well. He looked away, ashamed.

‘Are you all right?’

Mick laughed.

‘I can help,’ she said.

‘The injuries were minor. I feel fine.’

‘No. Inside of you.’ This wasn’t shaping up to be the seduction he had imagined. She had a nurse’s clinical but human aura
of duty and it filled the room, changing the air, loosening something in him that the beer hadn’t been able to reach. ‘I can’t
fix it unless you tell me first.’

He leaned back against the wall and laughed softly. ‘I’m numb. I can’t feel anything and I can’t stop watching my family fall
to pieces.’

‘Lie on your stomach.’ Her voice was firm and he found himself obeying, the cot protesting beneath his weight. ‘Tell me what
you want,’ she said. ‘Don’t think. Just tell me what you really want.’

His chin hung over the edge of the cot. ‘I want my life back. I want to kill your husband.’

‘Sometimes I do too.’

He didn’t hear her feet come closer but soon her hands were on him, soft and pleasingly cool. First gliding around his lower
back, barely grazing, then under his shirt. He remembered he was filthy and decided it did not matter. He closed his eyes.
Pressure was applied. His
lower back cracked and popped several times, to great relief. She worked the tissue upward, on the sides of his vertebrae.
Her palms seemed to press into his kidneys. No other part of her body touched him.

‘Why did you come here?’ he said. ‘What do you want from us?’

Her voice quieted, the conversation taking on a new kind of intimacy. ‘Life.’

‘Why do you think we can give it to you?’

‘Because of the things that happened. I know about terrible things,’ she said. ‘Things people don’t talk about. You are not
alone.’

Her hands continued working their magic on him. Smooth cloth sliding against his skin. She pressed and throttled the neck,
ground into his shoulders, thumbed under his arms. He realized his shirt had come off, though he did not remember lifting
to remove it. She moved down, thumbs grinding into his ass cheeks and the back of his pelvis, which also popped, and down
his bare legs. His jeans were gone too, as if dissolved. For some reason this did not disturb him. A great warmth had flooded
his body, despite her cold hands. She massaged knots from his calves, pushed the pain up out of the arches of his feet. He
felt soft everywhere, the blots of pain he had been ignoring blazing and fading like dying stars.

‘The truth scares you,’ she said. ‘You’re afraid to be yourself.’

‘I don’t know who that is any more.’

‘You are not in touch with your body’s changes. You
cannot ignore its needs. The mind is powerful enough to fool itself.’

‘I’m sorry,’ he said, but he didn’t know for what, to whom.

There was an intake of breath, his or hers, and she leapt, landing somewhere above and behind him, balancing in such a way
that the cot did not tip or buckle or even make a sound. Her hands continued to walk the paths of his body, out along his
arms, and the air moved between them, suddenly warmer, hot as the summer night and heavy, and then she was pressed to him
from foot to breast, aligned, her weight sinking into him, compressing him, her skin bare all along his back, the surface
they shared pliable.

All energy in him drained out, his body relaxed utterly, and he was not so much aroused as happily melted. He could no longer
determine where her body began and his ended, there was just this weight and its energy moving through him. It was better
than any drug and his mind allowed it in, pooling with the absence of thought, until he was in a place far away, resting on
a beach of moist packed sand, the sun radiating through him while the sound of waves lapping in a perfect rhythm caressed
and pulled him deeper within himself, beyond himself, to a state of pure and innocent sensuality he had never known.

We were in an accident
.

He lay there in this foreign land, wrapped in warm penetrating sun and the hiss of water reaching up the shore, for a long
time, hours or days, it did not matter, he
was only healing in her light. He was comfortably lost – and then awoken by a pang of worry that he could not afford to be
lost, other people depended on him, his family needed him. He opened his eyes and sat up, blinking into the sun.

He was on a beach. Before him stretched a plate of sea so bright blue and sparkling it hurt his eyes. The cove of black rock
and white sand and rubbery-leafed plants arced to either side and no one shared this beach with him. To his left, some fifty
yards away, tucked under a leaning palm, were three lounge chairs of blue-and-white striped canvas. A battered red cooler,
towels hanging from a branch. Something bit his leg and he swatted his skin, wiping red ants away.

Where did they all go?

He stood and walked toward the chairs, then followed the footprints up the white-sand tide line, into the vegetation which
quickly turned into a low, dense kind of jungle. There were three sets of footprints, one small and two medium-sized – his
wife and children’s. Where had they wandered off to? His son was probably chasing iguanas again.

The iguana
.

He remembered how they had seen the lizards sunning outside the villa this morning, and later on the side of the road, on
the way to the beach, and the boy had gone wild in the backseat of the rented Jeep. It was an underdeveloped island, a place
where wild horses walked the beach and goats loitered in the road. There had been little traffic on the single lane leading
to the
beach, but the few cars they passed going the other way had been driving recklessly, too fast and down the middle, so that
whenever they crested a hill, he had to ease far onto the shoulder while his stomach knotted and he prayed no one came over
the rise.

His son had been leaning between the front seats, watching through the windshield, counting peacocks and lizards. They rode
in the heat, windows down, smiling and laughing, until he spotted the iguana up ahead. It was staggering in jerking circles,
damaged, all equilibrium lost. He knew immediately the animal was injured, had been swiped by another car very recently. One
of its hind legs had torn loose and dragged uselessly, its tail twisted at a cruel angle, and yet it veered from one side
of the road to the other in manic confusion, unable to decide in which direction cover lay.

He told his wife to put the boy back in his seat, but it was too late. The boy was already crying. And then their daughter
saw it and she made a miserable sound. Do something, his wife commanded, but they were moving at almost forty miles per hour
and it wasn’t safe to stop here. The road ran in a straight shallow dip for a few hundred meters but jungle crept right up
to it on both sides. The humane thing to do would be to run the iguana down, put it out of its misery, but he couldn’t do
that with them in the car. He began to slow anyway, telling them, yelling at them not to look. But of course his son had to
look and was scrambling around in his seat.

The iguana was a magnificent adult, easily five or six
feet from nose to tail, thick as a house cat, the dorsal spines a bright shade of tangerine with black bands around the whipping
bent tail. It was a small dinosaur, and dying.

The battered Suzuki Samurai came rising over the next hill at nearly double their speed. He veered onto the shoulder that
did not exist, branches and thick banana leaves slapping the hood and windshield. He braked and the vehicle stalled. His wife
screamed and his son was thrown against the door. His side mirror missed the Suzuki by a hand’s width, and then he was watching
in the small oval, a sickness in his belly as the beautiful lizard tumbled under the Samurai’s chassis like a rolling log,
skin flapping. Oh my God, his daughter wailed, and then the three of them were crying and he barked at them to calm down,
he would fucking deal with it.

He got out and slammed the door, heading back to the roadkill, a simple trip to the beach ruined, everything sweaty and itchy,
the tiny black gnats flitting at his eyes as if they wanted the moisture inside. Fucking family vacations. They should have
stayed home, saved the ten grand. Everything was a headache now, and he needed a beer to quell the tequila hangover from last
night. Late night on the villa’s terrace, the couple in the next villa, Bob and Jenny or maybe Bill and Sarah, he couldn’t
remember, but nice people, and fucking alcoholics at that. Smokers from Ohio. The wife had looked good though, hard with big
brown eyes, her sunburned and sun-spotted chest sweating in that little halter
thing she had been wearing, and had she been looking at him? Laughing at his jokes and shooting him glances when her husband
got up to use the can every fifteen minutes because his prostate was already turning into a walnut? Maybe, you never knew.
The tropics did things to people, even the conservative ones from the midwest.

He looked both ways before leaving the relative safety of the shoulder. There were no cars now. The Samurai hadn’t even slowed,
probably a local, the people down here used to mowing down lizards like long-haul truckers pasting bugs and skunks. Well,
he’d drag this one off the road just so the kids didn’t have to see it again. He could tell his son he’d done something for
it, even though the thing was finish—

The lizard was still alive. It was lying on its side, two-thirds of the tail severed and twitching over in the sand shoulder,
the coarse pebbled scales of the rib cage flexing rapidly. Left front appendage shredded, lesions along the plated head and
leathery back and nearly white stomach, the blood thin, dripping quick like iodine. The black pupil inside the golden ring
oscillating, watching him like a dog on the vet’s table.

Help me, the damn thing was telling him. Eat me, release me from this, whatever this is. Just get it over with.