Thy Neighbor (26 page)

Her face clouded and she looked out the window again toward the sky. She squinted against the light.

“This morning it was very close to home,” she said.

“How do you mean?” I asked.

“Oh, I don't know. It's not just one thing. It's a lot of things. Little things. Things you'd easily miss if you weren't attuned to them. Things that build up and cluster at certain times, or have done over the years. Or maybe I'm just getting old”—she smiled, waving her hand to indicate her unsavory surroundings—“and smelling death everywhere.”

I smiled, too, sheepishly. The smell of my own accumulated sick in the morning, overpowering, and I wasn't even aware. That's when you know you've gone morbid—when your stink is completely undetectable to you and yet strong enough to draw the neighbors.

“I saw something in the paper,” she continued. “An obituary for an old family friend I haven't thought about in years. I saw the picture. It wasn't a particularly recent picture—he must have been at least five years my senior—so he looked much the way I remembered him. Startlingly so. Like someone who shouldn't have died. Like someone popped out of my memory as big as life, and there he was in a notice telling me he was dead.”

She sighed and patted my arm.

“When you get to be my age, Nick, this is what happens. More often than you'd care to acknowledge, you start seeing people you know in the obituaries column.”

She shuddered.

“And you feel a cold, sharp thrill go through you.”

She turned her gaze back to me and blinked concertedly, as if trying to bring me and this moment back into focus.

“Anyway, there he was, looking out at me, big as—well, big as death, I guess, and . . .”

She trailed off.

And when you thought of death, big as death, you thought of me, I thought. Thanks a lot. I'll just go over and see Nick, big as death over there, still clinging to life but barely. Practically putrid. Jeez, you can smell him from here.

So kind. Really, thanks.

“That's terrible,” I said at last, trying to sound sympathetic, and failing. “Is there going to be a service?”

“I expect so, but I couldn't go.”

“Why not?”

“It's complicated,” she said. “It's been far too long, for one thing. Far, far too long. I should have been in touch ages ago, I suppose.”

“I'm sure the family wouldn't hold that against you,” I said. “You didn't hold it against me.”

“No.” She sighed. “You're right. I'm sure they wouldn't.”

She looked away again distractedly.

I wondered if she was thinking about Robin. I was surprised by her lack of curiosity on the subject of our recent contact. I had spent so much time thinking about what to tell her and what not to tell her, about protecting her from painful knowledge or false hope, but none of that turned out to be of the slightest importance now. I was all wrong again in my assumptions. She, too, the simplest of women, or so I had assumed, knew more than I did, and might well have laughed at my naïveté or manipulated it.

She wasn't grieving the death or disappearance of a child, after all. That was for storybooks. She was grieving the survival of a child, the separate, rogue survival of a child. Was that it?

Dr. Cunningham had said as much himself. It wasn't the fact of a life. It was the quality of that life, the tenor of it, its reach and ambient effect. Mrs. B. had made Robin sound like a noxious presence in the world, a nuclear accident or a plague, not a sweetheart abducted and mourned. Yet surely she was that, too, the girl the construction worker had made the bracelet for, the girl Gruber, of all people, had doted on so fondly.

I knew from my own experience what Robin had become: bitter, vengeful, self-righteous. I knew how she could bleed into and poison her surroundings.

But—

There was still a but.

An extenuation of memory, an ideal that I held on to.

“Has Robin been in touch with you?” I asked, pretty certain I knew the answer already.

“Oh, yes, yes,” she said. “All along.”

She waved her hand dismissively.

“Robin made sure I knew where she was, or where she'd been. She knew enough to conceal her whereabouts. She had no intention of being found or of coming home. That was clear. She was teasing. I got postcards from all over. Gag postcards usually, as if she were on vacation and it was all a big joke. It was her way of letting me know how angry she was.”

So much for a mother just knows, I thought. So much for that light in the window. Robin had been manipulating this from day one. The punishment, the revenge, had started early. There was no mystery at all, and the only loss was of trust and innocence. Mrs. Bloom's as much as Robin's.

She turned to me abruptly.

“Nick,” she said, breathlessly. “I'm frightened.”

She covered her mouth with her palms and clenched her eyelids, as if shutting out an ugly sight. A tear rolled out of each eye and pooled on her fingertips.

“I'm so frightened—” She gasped.

I took hold of her wrists, gently guiding her arms to her lap and taking her hands in mine.

“Mrs. B., what is it?” I asked. “What are you so frightened of?”

She raised her eyes to me slowly, puzzled.

“Of her,” she whispered. “Don't you see? Of what she'll do.”

She was trembling.

“Something must have happened,” I said. “Something that made you worry so much now, after all this time. What was it? What's changed?”

“The postcards,” she said, as if the revelation had just come to her. “She stopped mailing them.”

“And you think that means something has happened to her?” I asked.

“No, no,” she cried, frustrated by my lack of understanding. “I've still been getting them, just not through the mail.”

“I don't understand,” I said, even though of course I did. I wanted to see if she did, too.

“She's been here, Nick,” she said. “She's been delivering them herself in the mailbox by hand.”

Yes, I thought. She's been making the rounds.

For once, I was the one who sounded informed.

“Yeah, I know,” I said. “No postmark.”

“So that's how she's reached you?” she said.

“That and online. She found me on Facebook. Do you know about Facebook?”

She frowned searchingly.

“I've heard the term, or I've read it somewhere, but it doesn't mean anything to me.”

“It's a way to find long-lost friends.” I chuckled bitterly. “Among other things.”

“So she sent you some kind of message on this Facebook?”

“Well, that, and she's been leaving me notes in the mailbox, too. Same as you.”

She squinted thoughtfully.

“But what would she have to say to you?” she asked.

Catching herself, she added:

“I'm sorry, I didn't mean it like that. But you didn't know her, did you? Not really.”

“No. Not really. Mostly through my mom. And yeah, I thought exactly the same thing. Why me? Why now?”

“And?” she said.

“And what?”

“Why you? Why now?”

“I have no idea,” I lied. “I thought you were going to tell me.”

I pushed my chair back, its legs scraping painfully on the linoleum, and went to the fridge for another Gatorade.

“Hell,” I said, yanking one from the shelf in the door and wrenching off the cap, “I didn't even know until now that you knew she was alive. That's how stupid I am. All this time I thought you were grieving for her, hoping, waiting for her to come home, or for someone to find her, and instead the opposite is true. You've known all along and you're terrified of her coming back.”

I kicked the refrigerator shut. It sealed with a loud suck.

“It's not the opposite,” she said firmly.

She paused, checking my expression, then resumed more gently.

“That's wrong . . . It's both . . . It's all . . . I have grieved
and
I have been afraid. I have worried
and
I have longed for her . . . But I have also wished that she would stay away.”

She paused again.

I could feel myself getting angry. I'm so tired, I thought. Tired of this convoluted past and its sick characters that just won't die or conform or stop. I turned toward the sink, my back to her, and took a long, sloppy drink. I wiped my mouth with the back of my hand and belched loudly.

“Victims are not saints,” she added sharply, as if in retort.

“Yes,” I murmured more tamely. “I'm aware.”

This was my territory now. On this I could well instruct.

“The things that have happened to you,” I announced sarcastically, “are just the things that have happened to you. They don't make you who you are.”

I turned to face her.

“They don't make you special or entitled or excused or fucking good,” I spat, furiously.

“Nick,” she cried. “I didn't mean—”

“I know, I know,” I shouted, turning away again. “You never meant any of it.”

I hurled the half-filled Gatorade into the sink. It bounced out of the basin, threw a jet of purple Riptide Rush against the backsplash and the window, skidded across the counter spewing as it went, and spiraled onto the floor, where it came to rest on its side beneath the cupboard overhang.

Mrs. Bloom gasped disapprovingly.

I gripped the sides of the sink, enraged.

“You never meant for harm to come to Robin. You never meant for harm to come to Karen. But it did, didn't it? It did. And now what you did or didn't mean doesn't matter anymore, and the little girl that everybody loved to love and loved to give things to, she's a barking freak coming in for a landing at home sweet home. So deal with it. Finally fucking”—I choked—“deal with it.”

I leaned down and vomited into the sink. The heave itself was silent, just an effortless pouring forth, but the viscous gush of syrup and bile that came out of me landed against the flat stainless steel of the basin with a horrible, thick smacking sound and slithered with a half-muffled screech down the drain.

I ran the water for a moment and put my head under. I laid my head on my arm and draped a dish towel over it. I stayed that way for a long time, breathing as deeply as I dared and waiting for the wherewithal to move.

As far as I could tell, Mrs. B. didn't stir. She didn't make a sound. I might as well have been alone except that I could feel her woundedness pulsing behind me like something I'd run over in the road.

When I raised my head at last to look at her, she was sitting with her hands folded loosely in her lap. Her eyes were closed. She opened them hesitantly and let them drift to my face, slowly, exhaustedly, as if she were looking out of obligation at something gruesome or pornographic that she did not wish to see. I suppose she was.

“You see,” she said resignedly. “She has ruined this already. And we had only just begun.”

She stood to go.

I didn't try to stop her.

She was right and I knew it.

But I would make an effort to minimize the damage.

“Look,” I said. “Don't be hurt. That anger is for her, not you. It's just that she isn't here and—”

She cut me off.

“Yes. That's always been it. What she leaves you. You have to work with what she leaves you. And what she leaves you is always broken and sharp and impossible to pick up without cutting yourself. That has always been her gift. She puts an obstacle in your way so that you have to move it. You have to grapple with it, and when you do that you hurt yourself, and then she has what she was after all along.”

I pushed myself away from the sink. Bolstering myself with one hand, I made my way around the U of the counter toward where she was standing.

“We don't have to let her win,” I said. “Not entirely.”

She shrugged meekly and turned away.

“Let me at least walk you home,” I insisted.

She walked through the doorway into the hall.

“If you like,” she called back, with just the barest hint of a lilt in her voice.

I smiled. She was forgiving me already. By this evening she would have left this behind, sloughed it off with the other detritus of the day and the hours and the years. It just wasn't important.

That, anyway, was how I imagined her mind working: like a drive-through car wash, or one of those newfangled, self-cleaning lavatories, a stainless pod with a door to let experience in and a spray to wash it away again. A remarkable fluidity.

She had come to me for solace, and I had failed her, even confirmed her worst fears. Okay. So she would let it go and move on, slide into the next moment clean, and me with it, waiting for what would happen next and showing up. Nothing more.

Nothing more complicated than that.

I followed her to the front door, opened it for her, and made a show of offering her my arm.

She smiled warmly.

“You,” she said, nudging me.

“I know, I know.” I laughed. “But here we are.”

“Indeed,” she mused, taking my arm. “Here we are indeed.”

We walked in silence across my neglected front lawn, across the empty street, glazed and sleepy with the afternoon sun, and down the gentle slope of her own lawn, where an undefiled little girl had once sat reading Dante and Frost and Hopkins, and taught it all to a bird.

When we reached Mrs. B.'s doorstep and turned to say good-bye, I said:

“Mrs. B., can I ask you something very personal?”

“Of course you can, Nick.” She nodded her assent. “Please.”

I hesitated, looking up toward the house, puzzled.

“That light in the upstairs window. The one you light and put out every night and morning. I always thought it was for Robin.” I paused, scowling into the sun. “But it's not, is it?”

She scanned my face, surprised and, it seemed, slightly disappointed.