Thy Neighbor (27 page)

She shook her head.

“Oh, no, dear. No.”

I waited, but she said nothing more. She, too, was looking up at the house, at the place where the light would appear this evening.

“So then,” I said at last, “who is it for?”

She put her palms together in a prayer position in front of her chest and brought her fingertips to her lips. She raised her eyes to my face.

“Dear boy,” she whispered.

She leaned in slowly and deliberately and kissed me very softly on the cheek. As she stepped away, she raised the back of one hand and lightly brushed the place she had kissed.

“Why, it's for you, of course,” she said. “It has always been for you.”

She smiled sadly, turned quickly, went into the house, and gently closed the door behind her.

I turned and crossed her lawn again, thinking this time not just of Robin's past, but of my own, and of how Robin had said the two overlapped. “The same thing that happened to you,” she'd said. What happened to me is the same thing that happened to you.

I stopped on the easement to collect my mail. When I got back inside, I set the mail on my desk and went through it. There was all the usual junk, which I threw directly into the bin on top of my soiled T-shirt. There was a small package, a yellow bubble mailer with my name written on it in black marker, but no address, stamps, or postal marks. I tore it open immediately and a single old Maxell sixty-minute microcassette tape fell out.

Robin had been by.

Among the junk in the bin I could see my copy of that week's
Pelsher County Gazette
partially folded back on itself. I fished it out and flipped to the obits page.

It was the only picture on the page, and she was right. It was old. Soft-focused and forgiving. The face hopeful and bland. Nothing like the man now. Beneath the photo the listing read:

Dr. Simon T. Cunningham, beloved and venerated pediatrician and long-standing pillar of his community, died Tuesday at his home in Twin Pines. He was seventy-two. The cause of death has not yet been officially determined, his daughter Joclyn said, though he was found lying comfortably in his bed, and by all indications appears to have died peacefully in his sleep. Apart from his daughter and his three grandchildren, Dr. Cunningham is survived by his wife, Lelah, and his sister Rose.

23

At nightfall, the light went on in Mrs. B.'s window. Hours and hours later, I was still sitting at my desk thinking about Doctor Cunningham, wondering if there was a code phrase in obits for suicide, and if so, was it “died in his sleep”? Or, more to the point, “appeared to die in his sleep”?

Life just wasn't that neat. It didn't wait for you to make your confession on the off chance the right confessor would show up, and then check you out that same night, done deal.

I kept thinking of that lacquered box. Now
that
was something he could have waited for, or waited with, grasping it in hand, as he had done (firmly enough to leave a mark), then popping it open for the last. I saw it in his face, his whole body—the resignation, the relief. He was done. As soon as he said those words—“You must stop this now”—he was done. And that box, or what was in it—it could have been anything; he was an MD—was his ticket, his door out.

Good for him. He had had the courage to do what I could not. And despite everything that's said about suicide and cowardice, and everything we boast about our unbelief, at the end, when we are alone with an irrevocable choice, we are all afraid to be so insolent in the face of the unknown. It takes courage.

Robin. There was chaos in her wake all right. A cluster of harm, and now death. It was enough to make you believe in spells. No wonder Mrs. B. was so afraid. I was afraid now, too, and exhilarated in a way that I didn't trust. I didn't want to be alone, either.

I wanted Monica with me. I wanted to hide myself in her presence and stop thinking or feeling anything except the most primitive impulses—hunger, fatigue, desire—and the satisfaction of all three with her. I'd never felt the need so strongly before. I wanted to rush down to the Swan in the hope of finding her there, or of finding someone who knew where she might be. But she didn't have any friends. She didn't have any acquaintances. Just her so-called partner, Damian, and me.

Damian. He at least had a phone.

I dialed his number and left a message. Have Monica find me. It's important.

I went to the front door and unbolted it, in case I was passed out when she arrived. I left it open most nights for the same reason, which is how Mrs. B. had found it this morning when she'd sauntered in unannounced.

I made my way down to the basement for the first time in I didn't know how long. I'd lost track of time and everything except Robin and her goose chase. I hadn't even thought of Dave or Jeff or Dorris and the rest. My own life had grown up around me, even if still in a virtual world, online, in the past. What did it matter? I was alive again, immersed, and not in someone else's life, but my own. Someone else's life as my own. The same thing.

What did that mean? The same. Robin and I did not have the same past. Did we? And yet I could hardly deny it. Even Mrs. B. seemed to think so. What else was that light in her window but an apology? Or a small cheer from the side of the course that says, “Come on. Almost there.” I hated that idea. Mrs. B. cheering. Hurrah for the chin-up cripple, who runs in his special race.

The basement seemed like a foreign place now, though it had been only—what?—a few days? I wasn't sure. All the usual markers had fallen away, and my thoughts had stretched across the emptiness.

I went to open the locks on the monitor room door and stopped. I couldn't do it. I couldn't bring myself to go in there and shame myself again with all that I would see or try to see. For the first time the distraction felt too heavy, too tedious to carry out. The unlocking of the door, the powering up, the scanning for movement, action, argument. It had become like everything else: routine. I was dulled finally to its shock. I had developed a tolerance to this drug, too.

I stood there fiddling with my keys, waiting to know what to do. It was late. Very late, I thought. Maybe close on dawn. Who knew?

I shoved the keys in the front pocket of my jeans and lumbered up the stairs. Just inside the basement door my eyes fell on the flashlight that I keep on the shelf there. I picked it up and switched it on, then off again. Not bright, but bright enough.

I took it, closed the basement door behind me, hustled through the hall and out the front door. It was still pitch outside, but warm. My guess was four o'clock, but it might have been three, or even earlier. It didn't matter. There was time.

Yes, I thought, this night is like any other night in the middle of the night. And it was, surely, but somehow it seemed more replete than all the others I had known. More potent, like something my father would have enjoyed and acted in or on, energized by the passivity of the dark. In the dead of night he had been a different man, a bolder man.

I would be a bolder man, too. I would act. Now. Here. I would stop thinking. I tapped the keys in my pocket. I felt the weight of the flashlight in my hand.

Barefoot, I made my way down my lawn to the side of the house, over to the property line, and across to Gruber's backyard. I stepped in a cold, wet pile and felt it paste thickly across my instep. I knew what it was by the stink of it, but I turned the flashlight on anyway and shined it on my foot. I swore disgustedly and turned out the light. When I got to Gruber's patio, I scraped my foot against the edge of one of the stones, smeared the rest on the grass, and kept on toward the back door of the garage.

I fished my key ring out of my pocket, separated the subset that was Jeff's, and fiddled with each key until I found the one that fit. I eased open the door, slid inside, and closed it behind me.

I put my palm over the flashlight and turned it on. I let the light leak through my fingers as I scanned the space; then I trained the full force of the beam on what I couldn't quite see.

Gruber always parked his cars in the driveway, and now I saw why. He used his garage as a workshop, mostly for carpentry, from the look of it. There was a sawhorse in the middle of the space, with an electric circular saw perched on top of it and a long, wide piece of lumber half cut. There was sawdust and discarded trimmings all over the floor radiating outward from the horse. Beyond that, each on its own island of newspaper, lay various pieces of furniture—bookshelves, side tables, coffee tables—that Gruber had stained and varnished and set aside to dry.

I threaded my way through these obstacles, careful not to upset anything, and stopped at the inside door to the house. I stood for a few moments, listening for any hint of motion inside. Nothing.

I waited a moment longer.

Once you do this, I thought, you'll have to take what comes. There will be no going back and no reprieve. If Gruber catches you, you're dead, right here and now. Suicide by Gruber, I whispered and smiled. He won't miss.

Was that why I was here? Or was this just the most reckless thing I could think of? No, I hadn't thought. I hadn't planned. I had no idea what I was doing here or what I would do once I got inside. I had made a right turn out of my door. I had the keys to this house by accident, and now I was here by accident. What other accident was inside?

And then, strangely, I was hearing my father's words, like an incantation in my head, the words that I had read so many times, for so long thinking they were mine, and then had read and reread many times again in the last forty-eight hours, knowing they were his.

I possess this quiet place and all its houses.

At night, I am the dream of stealth to all my silenced people.

A sort of god, unknown.

It was true. So, so true. As I slipped the key in the lock I felt exactly what he had described. All of it. The potency of the transgression, the terrible possession of people and places that are emptied yet filled by sleep, the power of quiet violation. I felt immensely dulled by it, drugged, so oddly calm in this invasion of someone else's home.

He was right. It was unmistakably sexual, a predatory high that was bound to be addictive to almost anyone who could take that first breaching step over the threshold. But it was something else as well, something cozier, cleaner, like love.

A tongue of silent invitation.

Each dear, dear nesting thing.

And somehow doing this to Gruber, of all people, made the thrill of it that much more intense and immediate, like ramming my buttered fist right up his hard-walled ass.

I opened the door and went in.

I stood in Ellie's country kitchen looking at the flaxen-haired stuffed dolls in overalls perched on the glass-fronted crockery hutch. I looked at the painted wooden sign on the wall that read,
GOD BLESS THIS HOME
, and the dwarf bonsai in a pot by the sink. I listened to the fridge humming and tinkling, and I stared at the blue-white light of the digital clock on the stove. I watched several minutes pass. I took my pulse. Not bad. Sixty-five.

I wasn't frightened at all. In fact, as I stood there observing the clock, watching the two dots between the numbers tick the seconds off—
bip . . . bip . . . bip
—feeling the soft drumming of my heart on my fingertips, and listening to the hum of the refrigerator in the kitchen of a house I had just broken into, I realized that I was more relaxed, more at peace—actual peace—than I had been since early childhood. I felt engulfed by an ameliorating sense of fate that seemed to say: What you do or do not do now will make no difference. It will all just unfold.

Believing this, I felt an immense relief. I was not responsible. I was not in control. I was in the picture and the picture was whatever it would be. I thought of what Mrs. Bloom had said about the night Karen died. That release. The worry gone.

I felt the lightness of indifference.

I walked into Gruber's study and turned the flashlight on full beam. The guns were on the wall, the pencil sharpener was on the desk, the red chair was pushed in, and Iris's cage was in the corner, covered with a brightly multicolored beach towel.

“Jesus Christ,” I said, clutching my chest. “You scared the living shit out of me. What are you doing here?”

Miriam was standing under the apple tree, picked out, a shadow among shadows.

“What are
you
doing here?” she said smartly.

“It's my house.”

“So?”

“So? I live here. You don't.”

“I know,” she said, dropping her chin. “But still.”

She was right. But still. It was the middle of the night and I had come across the back from Gruber's to stand in my own backyard and do what?

I softened my tone.

“Miriam, how many times have you done this?”

She blinked innocently.

“Done what?”

“Been here in the middle of the night?” I said firmly.

She crossed her arms over her belly nervously, clutching her elbows with her hands.

“This is the first time.”

“Are you telling the truth?”

“Yes.”

“Honest?”

She stamped her foot in protest.

“I swear.”

“Okay, okay. So what are you doing here tonight?”

She looked at the ground, frowning, trailing an exploratory toe back and forth across the grass.

“Can't sleep.”

It was a better excuse than mine, and I understood it, given what I'd seen transpire between Dorris and Jonathan of late, and what Jonathan had said about his extra pair of eyes and ears tailing Miriam. Did Miriam know or sense she was being followed? Was she still? Or was it just the operatic custody battle resuming at home that had left her unable to sleep? I knew all this, but I said the chiding parent's stock phrase anyway.

“You should be home. It's not safe—really not safe—for a girl your age to be out on her own in the middle of the night. Don't you know that?”

“I know.” She dropped her arms to her sides and looked off longingly into the dark. “It's just that . . .”

I know, I thought, and looked out, too, in the same direction, toward the main road behind my house, and the flaw in the fencing that led to it, all quiet, enchanting, the way out and the way home again, and yet the backdrop to so much pain.

Let her tell you about it then, I thought. Just let her say.

“It's just that what?” I said, leadingly.

She shrugged.

“I feel better here.” She considered this briefly, then added, “Safe.”

“But you're not safe. I've just said that.”

She scowled woundedly and said nothing.

“I'm sorry,” I said. “I didn't mean . . . Go on . . . What do you mean by safe?”

She took a long time to answer, swallowing hard, determined to hold back a show of emotion that she was too proud to show.

“I don't know,” she said, haltingly. “Like I belong. Like all this stuff”—she indicated the village—“is a place for me. And you're here, too, and I don't feel lonely.”

It was simple and beautiful and true, what she'd said, more so than she could know or I could tell her. It was more than I'd thought she was capable of, and I didn't know how to answer.

It was how I felt, too. We'd made a secret world—as a man and a girl we had made it—and it wasn't wrong, and in it—I could sense this now myself—the dark held you and hid you from everything that was wrong in the real world, and it was precious for that reason.

Carefully, respectfully, I sat beside her on the ground and took a long look around at our creation, or what I could see of it in the dark. And as I looked, and thought and smiled proudly, I felt myself soften to the idea of her and the intimacy we had shared in this place, an intimacy that was in no way shameful or base or to be defended against, but something, on the contrary, that I could recognize as my own. I had felt this before, in the distant past, as a child myself playing with other children, and until this moment I had forgotten how full and wide open a feeling it was, how freeing and—Miriam was right—safe it seemed, even, or perhaps especially in the middle of the night.