by Hugh Sheehy
I wouldn’t have an answer for years, until I came home from college, twenty-one years old, full of bravado and little else. I hadn’t thought of Ellie in many months and was sitting with my father in the living room when we saw her Rollerblade past the window.
“I see Ellie’s still keeping herself fit. Good for her,” I said. At that age I spoke to adults as if I knew all about their pain. “But she never remarried. That’s a real shame.”
My patient father peered through his bifocals after her and said, “That woman has had her heart broken more times than anyone can count.”
“She used to tell Henry and me that she’d given up on men.”
My father chuckled. “They haven’t given up on her. You think a woman like that can live in the suburbs, single, and not be asked on a date whenever she leaves the house?”
When I asked my mother why Ellie hadn’t been over to say hello, she shrugged and looked over the boiling pots on the stove. She was canning frozen berries, and empty mason jars lined the countertop of her small kitchen. “She’s going through one of her down periods. She’ll be around when she’s feeling better.”
When I said that I remembered none of these “down periods,” she gave me a long and skeptical look. “You really think you had any idea about what was going on in this neighborhood when you were a boy? Your father and I, we kept you good and ignorant. We wanted you to get out of this city.”
When Ellie did stop over to say hello, she seemed anxious and distracted. She’d just finished running, but she smelled good when she came over and planted a kiss on my cheek. When I hugged her I was aware of her lithe back and the curve of her waist and that her perspiration had plastered single black hairs to her temples.
Her body grew rigid in my arms, and when we’d released each other I glimpsed a look of discomfort passing between my parents. When Ellie looked up at me again the friendly, open expression I had relied on as a child had been replaced by a look of courteous distance. I’d noticed this look in other women. She turned to my father and began to talk about the houses for sale on the street.
I didn’t get to know Ellie as an adult, and when I visited my parents after that, she and I spoke less and less to one another. This last time I’d just seen her once, when she came home from grocery shopping while I scraped ice from my car’s windshield. We’d limited the pleasantries to a wave. I was relieved when she didn’t cross the snowy yard and ask about my misfortune. I glanced up as she was letting herself in through her front door, and in her self-conscious concentration on her keys, she seemed to soothe herself with the same thoughts.
Even so, she was my eternal next-door neighbor. Right up to the day when her body was found, I thought of Ellie Pardo whenever I saw an attractive older woman.
6.
Henry and I wound up in a sports bar with false wood walls that had framed hockey jerseys hanging on them. It was early and the place was deserted. The bartender, a young woman with a friendly round face, was playing a trivia game at the end of the bar.
Henry disappeared into the bathroom to clean up his face and straighten his suit. After fifteen minutes he still looked like he’d crawled out of a grave. His shirt was torn and a bruise grew under his right eye where the cop had hit him. He didn’t say a word about the fight, and when we took seats at the bar, he asked the bartender to tune the television to a local channel. The story about Ellie’s murder was broadcast on all the city’s stations, and the grimness of jumping from channel to channel made us drink fast. Once the news stories began to echo each other, I went to the pay telephone near the bathrooms and called my house.
My father answered, speaking in the quiet tones he used at the end of a long day. He asked, “Do you really want to know what happened?”
“Yes.”
“You can’t just go telling everyone this, you know.”
“I know.”
As he spoke I didn’t hear another sound in the room, because I could see everything that had happened in Ellie’s house, except I saw it happen in reverse, the order in which accounts of murders are told. Ellie had been dead for at least a day. An intruder had tied her up and held her prisoner in her basement rumpus room for perhaps twenty hours. There was speculation about what had gone on during that time which, once I’d heard it, I knew I would never repeat it, because I believed in Ellie’s dignity. The police had named no suspects, and they theorized that the murderer was not someone from our community. They were watching the highways, shining lights in the forests, at that very moment.
When I returned to the bar, editing my father’s story for Henry and the bartender, who by now shared our obsession, it occurred to me that over the past two days I’d stopped in my driveway and looked at Ellie’s basement windows. In fact I had stopped each time as I passed them, to look at my reflection in the dark glass. I had done it out of nostalgia, remembering summer days I had used that glass as a mirror. I’d stand in front of those windows, flex my biceps, and imagine I saw growth. While she lay tortured or dead in her basement, I’d faced the window to where she lay, considering my teenaged narcissism. I concluded that Ellie must have laughed back then. Now it wasn’t funny any way I looked at it.
The bartender poured all three of us shots. Henry questioned me relentlessly, as if he were examining me on the stand at the trial of his career. His intensity made the bartender uneasy, and after a while she left us to do something in the bright kitchen beyond a pair of swinging doors. When she’d gone, Henry questioned me even more aggressively. I swore to him that he knew as much as I did.
“Fuck, I want to know who did this,” he said. “I’m not a violent man, Nolan, but if I get the chance I will kill this motherfucker.”
I was surprised by the fervor of his feelings for my neighbor, but I also respected them. I remembered how she’d doted on him, spooning him red sauce from a pan, asking him for suggestions to improve the flavor. She never saw the boy who’d just ruthlessly killed as many as eleven birds and rabbits (we kept records), and tossed them one by one into a mass grave. Henry came from a nice-enough family, but when Ellie touched him on the head and said sweet things to him, his dreamy smile made it obvious that no one else treated him that well.
He revealed more after hours of drinking, after we’d staggered through the dark lot to his car. Inside we waited for the heater to work and watched our breath rise through the air. Henry switched on the dome light and turned to me. Even in the shadows I could see the drunken agony in his face. “I can’t drive right now, but we got to go somewhere. I got something I got to tell you.”
“What’s that?”
“I loved her.”
“Sure you did. I loved her, too.”
“No. No. I loved her, loved her. I dated her. She used to stay at my house.”
I stared at him, feeling betrayed, unwilling to believe. Ellie had been in her fifties. She had still been remarkably attractive, but she was only about ten years younger than my parents, whom middle age had molded into brittle likenesses of more vigorous people. Despite his small stature, despite her enduring fitness, Henry struck me as too hard-bodied and athletic for someone like Ellie.
“It wasn’t a secret,” he said. “She wanted to keep it quiet, but people knew. Everybody knew. I’m surprised you didn’t. I guess you were gone.”
“How long?” I asked. “When did this happen? How could you? She was like a guru to us. How can you sleep with a guru?”
“It went on for like ten months. Three years ago. It just happened. We saw each other at a church festival, and we knew. Things happen, man.”
I didn’t know what to tell him. I wanted him to take back what he’d said, to admit that he’d told a tasteless joke. I wanted things back the old way, where I had been between them. Instead we drove around the city and drank a case of beer. We had nothing to say to one another that we had not said in high school, so we drove to the shore and climbed the off-limits hill where kids broke their legs and wrists sledding each year. A sheet of gray i
ce covered the lake, and the stars flared in the mute black sky. Behind and around us, families slept in old farmhouses. We drank and pitched our cans at them, pretending we threw bombs that traveled far and destroyed.
“I don’t have anything of hers. Just the stuff she gave me,” Henry lamented. “I wished she’d left a single bra or something. Even a comb with some of her hair would be something.”
At the time he told me this, my level of intoxication made me incapable of answering. But I understood, and to show this I nodded and then put my forehead on his shoulder.
I woke up later, realized I’d passed out, and saw us speeding toward a wall of plowed snow in a deserted parking lot. Beside me, Henry slurred a statement, then punched on the brake and spun his wheel. The car seemed to turn in slow motion. Dark sky rotated over icy lot. We came to a stop and rested. Henry lifted a hand and pointed. A police car was coming across the lot. He moved his mouth a few times before words came out. “We’re fucked.”
The car door opened, and Officer Candy got out. I was relieved but Henry didn’t appear to care. She leaned in through his window and looked at the empties in the backseat. “What the hell are you guys doing?”
Henry let his head fall against the headrest. “We’re looking for the killer.”
Candy made us leave the car in the parking lot and drove us to Henry’s in her cruiser. Once we’d helped Henry to his bed, I made a spot for myself on the couch with some blankets and a throw pillow. I was awake now, and Candy was in no rush to go back out into the cold. It was five in the morning, and she doubted anything would happen for a few hours. She said most of the troublemakers had passed out or decided to stay in by four. She’d only picked up the shift because she thought police would be out looking for Henry.
“He’ll have to watch himself for a while,” she said, rocking slightly on the edge of a blue recliner. “But this will pass over.”
I enjoyed sitting in the heat with Candy, looking at the law titles in Henry’s bookcases, and I began to regret that I did not grieve for my neighbor more than I did. There were too many years missing for me to say I knew her any longer. I asked Candy, “Are you worried?”
“About what?”
“That you’re in here with us, and there’s a killer out there?”
Candy looked at me the way a big sister might her naïve little brother. “No. Not unless he’s the sort of killer who kills indiscriminately. There aren’t many of those.” She stretched her feet and formed a smile faintly manic from staying up for too long. She settled into the soft recesses of the chair and raised her girlish eyes to the ceiling.
“Did you know Ellie?”
She shook her head.
“Are you sad?”
She thought this over for a while, and then she said, “Disturbed. I’m disturbed.” Then she looked at me and shrugged. “I’m a cop. It’s my job to be disturbed.”
7.
A few days later, the police had not arrested anyone. I watched every edition of the news and absorbed all of the details printed in the newspapers. I was sleeping poorly, wakened by creaks and winds. My heart beat rapidly, and I could read signs from great distances. Nervous energy set my fingers in constant motion, and my mind tuned easily to the demands of any task. I completed crossword puzzles and did chores my parents would never do themselves, like organizing the basement and garage. It snowed, and I shoveled driveways for ten bucks a job, which was less than I could have charged but which was an even trade for the effort it required. I needed something to do, people to speak with. Candy and Perzik had to work shifts, and Henry had no time between working with clients and privately grieving.
Beside ours, Ellie’s house was a constant reminder of the gruesome crime. When I could stand it no longer, I slipped under the yellow tape and entered the house through the back door. It was cold inside. Someone had turned off the heat before the cops left, and I guessed that sometimes the mind turns to practical thought when nothing good can come of a situation. The kitchen was immaculate, but the dining room table lay overturned. I went downstairs and saw where they’d outlined her body on the carpet, over the massive brown stain, the part of her the police and medics could not remove. The shape in which she’d lain reminded me of the slumped body of a rabbit, and I was sorry that the woman had seen me walking around with a gun. I tried to imagine Ellie’s final hours, the view of my parents’ driveway and me intermittently, smiling down. It was possible that she’d decided to hope to be saved, and then optimistically put herself to sleep. I hoped she got that small mercy. I walked around the basement, looking into closets and corners. Of course the place was empty and my actions were unreasonable, but it made me feel a little better, knowing I was alone in there.
I heard someone upstairs, someone with my mother’s heavy breathing. She called, “Nolan?” She stopped at the top of the steps and would go no further. “Come up out of there and come home.”
When I reached her in the hallway, she was nervous that we would be caught inside Ellie’s house and entangled in the police’s business, but once we were outside she sighed and looked across the snowy yard to the gray, leafless trees. “I never thought I’d have to be afraid here,” she said.
“Don’t be,” I said. “There’s the police. There’s Dad. There’s me.”
She took little comfort in these words and told me to go ahead and walk back in my original footprints. There was only one set, meaning she must have taken long strides for a woman her height. When I looked back, she was bent over, using her winter hat to fill in the impressions of my shoes.
8.
Eight days after they found Ellie, although the police knew nothing and it seemed as if we’d wait forever for the murderer’s capture, the community held an Italian supper in the dead woman’s honor. They rented a hall in town and threw a party. My parents wouldn’t have missed it for the world. Community parties were customary for their generation, which had grown up on city blocks and come of age at the right time to attend Woodstock.
My mother bought a new dress, and my father had a suit dry-cleaned. I was less dressed up than they, letting my button-down shirt hang over my belt, and felt surprised to see them so dressed up, though what amazed me was the collage they carried downstairs together. My mother had bought a piece of poster board and covered it with photographs from over the years. I charted Ellie’s changing personal style over three decades, from plainly dressed city girl to middle-aged beauty in a cocktail dress.
“She’s been working on this since it happened,” my father said, a little proud.
“I think she’d have liked it,” said my mother.
They were so excited over this touch of junior high sentimentality that I could do nothing but agree with them.
The reception was a hit. The Italian American Society provided checkered table cloths, a traditional Italian ensemble, and a delicious spaghetti dinner. The tickets sold out in advance, but when a crowd gathered outside the hall, the people at the door started taking donations. There weren’t enough seats, so people stood around, twirling pasta on forks, munching on garlic bread, drinking cheap red wine. Music played, Ellie’s friends gave speeches, people bawled and held each other.
I leaned against the bar with Henry, Perzik, and Candy. We drank beer and didn’t say much. It was really a party for older people. I was happy with the turnout and the event and was glad to see my parents enjoying themselves. They stood holding their collage and told stories that accompanied the pictures.
Henry was getting drunk, complaining about the dinner. “These people didn’t know her. What a lot of bull. They went on living their lives while she sat in that house by herself.”
Perzik put his arm around Candy and stared down at Henry with stony disdain. “Cut it out. This is really nice. Look at that collage that Nolan’s mother made. Show a little respect.”
“Shut the fuck up, Perzik, you meatcart.”
Candy took Henry’s hand. “Hey, take it easy.”
I gave Perzik a
frown, entreating him to be patient since there was more than he knew to our friend’s anguish. He whistled a brief note and walked away.
Henry ignored his departure. He glared at Candy, who playfully mocked his grimace. Henry wasn’t laughing. He said, “We should be out picking the houses to pieces, looking for the guy. He could be in this room right now. I can’t stand it.”
“But this is a great thing, what the community’s doing,” said Candy. “You know?”
“I’m going,” said Henry. He walked away from us toward the door and knocked his shoulder against an unwitting man in a fire department T-shirt. The fireman looked up, startled, and laughed at the receding smaller figure.
I sympathized with Henry. He’d loved Ellie Pardo, and it hadn’t worked out, but I guessed he’d gone on hoping that it might. The things that surrounded me, the dinner, the music, the reminiscences, held nothing for him. I asked Candy to tell my parents that I had a ride home; then I hurried out after him.
9.
A few nights earlier I’d gotten out of bed, thirsty for cold water, and found my father standing at the sink in the dark kitchen, looking through the window at Ellie’s house. I joined him, and he accepted my company without a word, stepping aside to give me room. In the moonlight the house looked like the closed face of a man buried to his neck. The yellow Caution tape shimmered in the wind. We could see the basement window, where for a certain amount of time we might have seen her in her distress, had we put our faces to the glass.
“Just watching for punk kids.”
“There’s nobody out there.”
