Thy Neighbor (30 page)

“No,
you
. It's on
you
. All of this is on you. Every part of it. And me? I know exactly what I've done. And the only thing I regret is having to watch you snivel over a bird. A fucking talking bird.”

He still had the gun pointed at Gruber, but he had loosened his grip on the butt. Now he let it slip from his fingers onto the desk. He placed his hand over it.

Monica turned to me, her eyes frightening.

“Which door did you use to get in?”

“What?”

“Over there.” She pointed at the monitor. “Which door did you use? Back or front?”

“Back,” I said. “Through the garage. Why?”

She turned and bolted out of the room. I could hear her stomping up the stairs and across the foyer. I heard the front door slam open wildly against the coat closet wall. I lurched to follow her, tossing my body up the stairs as fast as it would go. I came out the front door just in time to see Monica disappearing around the back of Gruber's house.

I slowed, as if momentarily confused about which way to go, except that that wasn't the confusion. The dawn was coming up, soft and gray, but yet strangely sharp as well, picking out the edges of things, layering the contours of depth and width and breadth contiguously. The space before me seemed to stretch by halves again as long, and bend into looping pools of light and shadow. I had been staring at the monitors so closely—the flat, square, flickering view—and now I was running in round dimensions.

I was moving as fast as I could, and yet it felt as though I was running in deep sand. I shouted aloud in frustration, growling to push myself on, yet Gruber's house seemed to be receding atop a scrolling belt of grass. There was a loud, dizzy shushing in my ears and a cool weightlessness in the back of my head, as if someone had left open a door to my skull. As I ran, seemingly in place, I heard again those freeing words that I had heard in Gruber's kitchen an hour before, words that now came down on me like a trap:
What you do or do not do now will make no difference
.

I heard the shot as I rounded the side of the house and I fell into the cool wet receiving grass.

25

I never lost consciousness as far as I know. And yet the gap in time between falling down and seeing Mrs. Bloom's face hovering not two feet above my own cannot be accounted for. Was it five minutes? Ten? Or was it only two?

I don't remember thinking anything. I don't remember knowing why I was lying on the lawn, or where I had been going when I fell there. Not at first. I knew only that Mrs. Bloom was kneeling beside me, looking down at me with those serene, pale, pale blue eyes and smiling a paper-thin smile of relief that I wasn't dead.

“You're all right,” she said. “You're all right.”

The palm of her hand was on my chest, pressing gently.

“How do you know?” I said, teasingly. I don't know why.

She slid her hand across and up and down my torso.

“Well, let's see,” she said gamely. “No holes. Do you hurt anywhere?”

I shook my head.

“Nick,” she said, very seriously, “I thought I heard a loud bang.”

Then I remembered.

“Yes,” I said. “I was running.”

She looked puzzled.

“I was watching, and then I ran—”

I bolted up. “Monica—”

“Okay, wait,” she said, placing one hand on each of my shoulders. “I've called the police.”

“Yes, but—” I tried to get up again. “Has there been another shot?”

“No,” said Mrs. B. “Nothing.”

I looked toward Gruber's house.

“There?” said Mrs. B.

“Yeah,” I replied. “One of Gruber's guns.”

She nodded worriedly.

“Who is Monica?” she asked.

“A friend. She went into the house. I was coming after her.”

“Why, for heaven's sake, would your female friend be going into Edward's house at five in the morning?”

“Because of the gun,” I said, without thinking.

Mrs. B. frowned and fell back on her haunches. She dropped her hands to her sides and let them trail helplessly in the grass. She was looking at Gruber's house.

I let my eyes wander to the morning sky behind her head, the horizon going rose, touched with salmon in the west, and tracers of clouds, blue-gray. I was thinking how calm it seemed, the facade of our cake-decorated world, how dreamy drawn in crayon, and simple, like a first grader's rendition of where he lives. The house, the chimney, the sun in its sky, the green grass, the brown tree, the lines of behavior all distinct, yet softly realized in wax. Here is our neighborhood, our neighbor. See? You can touch the child's drawing and feel paper. You can see what he wants you to see. And there will be no more to go on. This is what you get. By way of view and by way of warning.

When I looked back at her, Mrs. B.'s face had transformed. The concern and strange jocularity of our exchange had given way to a much stronger emotion. Her eyes had gone glassy with horror and amazement. She had risen on her knees and her back was rigid with alarm.

I turned to see what she was seeing.

Gruber had emerged from his house through the front door. He was walking very slowly toward us across his front lawn. His bright white undershirt was stained with patches of bright red blood. His face, grooved and sunken above the sharp border of his shirtfront, was like a peach pit, slimed with sweat and tears. He was carrying Monica in his outstretched arms.

I could not look at her.

I looked at Gruber instead.

I watched the banded muscles of his thighs strain beneath the ruined skin, poking as incongruously as his head, from the starched white of his undergarments. The boxer shorts hung loosely beneath the belt of Monica's body, pulling and wrinkling with each step. Gruber's left knee kept banging against Monica's dangling left wrist.

I looked back at Mrs. Bloom. She had raised her hands to her mouth, as I had seen her do when overcome before. Her breath drew in sharply, hissing, the nostrils sucking tight around her outstretched fingers. The fingers themselves were raw and cracked and only partially extended, the swollen, angry joints having wrenched and wrangled the digits into a claw.

I thought again of the power animal. No power at all. A meerkat or a prairie dog, upright, gnawing its nails in fear.

Gruber strode purposefully to where Mrs. Bloom and I were sitting, knelt beside us, and laid Monica on the ground. Her knees, still bent, fell to the side away from us, one on top of the other, slim as fence posts, and the wet white rubber bottoms of her Keds flashed up at us like fish. Her head rolled to the side facing us, and at last I could look. The eyes were open, the mouth closed.

I thought once again of the walnut ivory crucifix in the hall upstairs. The one where Mom had taught me to pray. The position of the knees to the side like this, the head turned the opposite way, so pale against the dark wood. The Christ, she called him.
The
Christ. Like an object:
the
. An object for the eyes to worship, but so powerless, so beaten, the knees to the side, piled, and the head the opposite way. The torso twisted open. Like this.

“My God—” said Gruber. “Anita, I didn't know. I didn't know she was . . .”

Mrs. Bloom's hands strayed across the surface of Monica's jeans from the ankle to the waist, the V of the bent knees, the Braille of the rough, faded seam.

“I know, Edward,” she said softly. “I know. It's not your fault.”

She moved her hand to Gruber's own and took it, holding it up and tossing it lightly as if to feel the weight.

“She came running in,” Gruber said. “I don't know how—I couldn't believe it was— And Jeff had the gun in his hand. She went right for the bird and—he'd fired before he even knew who or what—”

Mrs. Bloom put up her hand to silence him.

“Edward, please. It's over now.” She looked for the first time into the dead familiar face. “She's gone. She's finally really gone.”

She turned to me.

“Is this your Monica?” she said.

I nodded.
This
, she had said. Not she, but this. Is
this
your Monica?
This thing of darkness I acknowledge mine
. Yes. This was mine. My mistake. My illusion. Yet another. My Monica who was no Monica at all.

“How—?” I began, but she interrupted.

“How could you not have known?” she said.

I nodded again.

“She's changed,” she said, brushing the hair back from the forehead. “More than I would have thought.”

“How do you mean?” I asked.

Mrs. Bloom let her eyes linger lovingly on the face. She looked up at Gruber.

“Wouldn't you say, Edward?”

Gruber was slow to reply. When he did, his voice was thick with tears.

“I would have known her anywhere.” He cocked his head to the side. “That face.” He swallowed hard. “That face,” he said again.

Mrs. Bloom shook her head.

“So much like Karen.” She sighed. “Astonishing.”

She clucked disapprovingly and frowned, as though a trick had been played on her in bad taste.

“That is who I see,” she said. “I see Karen. That awful, late, late, ravaged Karen, who came home that day to abandon her baby.”

She gasped sharply, as if startled, offended again by the memory.

“God, that day,” she said. “She was dead already when she came to us. Her skin was the color of old washing. Her face was the face of someone drowned, and I tell you, Edward, I would not have known her anywhere. Had she not been standing on my doorstep calling me Mother, looking out from behind the . . .” She searched for the word. “The accident . . . of herself, I would not have believed that this was my child. I would not have believed that this empty, senseless, bedraggled thing was something I had loved into being.”

She reached down and touched the cool cheek, which was not ravaged or drowned at all, but startlingly clean and blameless and young and beautiful.

“Like this,” she said. “She looked just like this.”

She ran her thumb across the brow several times, above the plane of the dead eye, but she did not close the lid.

“Do you know?” she went on. “That day, she hadn't even named her. A year old and she hadn't named her.”

Her thumb came to rest on the bridge of the nose.

“And I just thought that was the most terrible, haunting thing I had ever heard. A baby with no name. It made me sick to think of it.”

She let her index finger trail to the lower lip and beneath it, tracing the neat bow shape.

“I wanted to erase that memory,” she said, her voice abrupt with sudden anger. Then soft again. “I wanted to give that child the most hopeful, living name I could think of.”

Her eyes drifted to mine, gently intense, straining for connection, some catch of understanding.

“Your first robin of spring,” she said. “You know it?”

I nodded encouragingly.

She smiled gratefully and looked back at the upturned face beneath us.

“When you see your first robin of spring you know that the dark, cold shutting in of winter is almost over and your heart leaps a little bit every time.”

Her eyes checked me again.

I blinked slowly in reply.

“And then you tell someone. You say—I saw my first robin of spring today. And your heart leaps again.”

“Yes,” I said. “Yes.”

She paused.

“Well, I wanted this girl without a name to have that leaping heart, that sign of an end to darkness and cold and shutting in. That's what I wanted. That's really all I ever hoped for.”

“And she did have it,” I said. “She did.”

“And yet—” She shrugged toward the body lying on the ground. “Here she is with another face and another name in the same place, practically on my doorstep. Isn't that something?”

She looked toward her front door and then back again to the spot on the grass where Robin lay.

“Just steps apart,” she said. “And so many years between—so much running and struggling and trying to get away, and all only to come back to this same place.”

“No,” said Edward mournfully, but neither of us acknowledged him.

“People say that time passes,” Mrs. Bloom continued. “But it doesn't.” She considered this, then added, “It bends.”

She made an awkward S shape in the air with her gnarled hand.

“And sometimes, I think, when it bends, things that were far apart pass close together, and you can see the resemblance.”

She reached in front of her, as if to touch Edward's hand again, but mimed the action instead.

“And you can almost reach out and touch something that happened twenty-four years ago, or something that will happen twenty-four years from now—and when you do, you realize that they are part of the same event. How strange. Back then, I was looking forward at this”—she emphasized the strange name—“this . . .
Monica's
face, and now I am looking back at Karen's.”

“You saw a ghost,” I murmured.

“Yes,” she agreed. “And I am seeing one now.”

“That's exactly how I feel,” I said. “She was right there in front of me all the time, and I didn't know it. And now that I do know it, she's gone.”

Mrs. Bloom peered at me quizzically.

“That part I still can't understand. Why pull you into this? Why haunt you?”

I shrugged.

“It's complicated.”

“Of course it is,” she said knowingly. “But that's something I would have expected to say to you. And yet, it was you—”

I didn't wait for her to finish.

“Listen. What I said the other day—”

She cut me off.

“Was confusing,” she said. She sat up straighter. “What did you mean when you said I never meant harm to come to her, and yet it did?”

“I was upset. I was embarrassed that you found me that way. I didn't mean anything.”

“But you did. You said it meaningfully. You were referring to something in particular.”

“Let's not—you said it yourself. It's finally finished.”

“No,” she said through her teeth. “If you are accusing me of something, then do it directly. I deserve that”—she laughed, remembering our pact—“discourtesy.”

“I'm not accusing you.”

She leapt on this.

“Then she did.”

“Yes,” I conceded. “She did. But I think she was wrong.”

“That's not for you to decide.”

“Maybe not,” I said.

Grimacing at the arrogance of that, I added:

“No. You're right. It's not.”

There was no way to get out of it now. Why, anyway? All of my secrets had turned out not to be secrets, had turned out not to be mine at all.

Yet I hesitated still. It all seemed too public. Too exposed for this disclosure. Gruber was still kneeling there in the grass across from us, his massive chest and arms defeated, his army-tidy whites now bloodied so starkly, all of him redundant, ridiculous in this disaster. But even he knew, even he had grieved. He was part of this, too, and had been during every one of the last thirteen years, carrying his piece of this alone, unknowing, to place it now on the table in its empty fitting spot. The odd shape snapping into place. He, too, was standing on the other side of an event, and marveling at the proximity.

“Dr. Cunningham didn't die in his sleep,” I blurted nervously.

No one spoke. Gruber was scratching his forearm anxiously and working his wrist in tight circles, as if to massage an injury. The wrist cracked loudly and he stopped. Mrs. B. touched his thigh consolingly and moved it away again. She hadn't taken her eyes off my face.

“I saw him the day he died,” I told her.

I paused, measuring the words.

“He told me about seeing Robin. What she had wrong with her, and what it meant.”

I paused again. Could I drive this home?

“After he told you, he never said anything to anyone. Ever. Until me. That day. And it killed him. It was killing him his whole life and then it finally did kill him. The whole time we were talking, he was holding this box—a pillbox—and it must have been full of whatever he took.”