Cammie McGovern

by Neighborhood Watch (v5. 0)

  Henry and Charlotte. They’re alive in their own way.

  I’ve figured out one part of the mystery already. I don’t know what Trish would have been doing inside Linda Sue’s house, only that she must have been there that day, hiding somewhere, like the cat.

  Maybe she was the reason Linda Sue was so nervous.

  I remember standing at Linda Sue’s door that afternoon, how she looked—what was my first thought?—relieved to see me. As if I’d interrupted something when I knocked. “What are you doing here?” she said. Did she look behind her? Am I imagining that?

  It was three days after our last Neighborhood Watch meeting and Marianne had come over to my house that morning with a catalog of personal security devices from a company called Safe-T-First. “I’m worried about Linda Sue,” Marianne had said, her voice low. “I believe she’s in danger. She needs to start protecting herself.” She wanted me to show Linda Sue one product in particular: an inflatable doll that looked like a man, with lifelike hair and real clothes. The idea was to prop him in a chair by a window with a newspaper in his hands. “The best crime deterrent is a house that looks full,” she said.

  I tried not to sound cruel. “I don’t know, Marianne. This doesn’t look like something Linda Sue would go for.”

  “You have to convince her.”

  The more I resisted, the more insistent Marianne became. “She needs to install her lock right away. She might laugh all she likes, but she won’t after she’s attacked.”

  She made me promise I’d go over that afternoon. “This is too important to play around with,” she said.

  I wanted to ask her then: What is it, Marianne? What’s made you so afraid? I didn’t know how to tell her that Linda Sue didn’t need a fake man to sit in her living room, that she already had a real one.

  “She likes you, Bets. You have things in common.”

  I didn’t say anything because I knew what Marianne meant but wasn’t saying. Linda Sue had lost babies, too. The first time she told me, I held my breath and prayed she wouldn’t say more. I was superstitious and believed in the power of suggestion, that it might be contagious. If I heard her sad stories, my body would discover new ways to break its own heart. A few weeks earlier, when the doctor told us I wouldn’t survive another try at pregnancy, Paul and I drove home forty minutes without speaking a word. Once home, I got out of the car, crossed the street, and knocked on Linda Sue’s door. I wanted a cigarette, I told myself. I wanted to dull my senses and my nausea, the feeling that I had driving home, both ironic and true: Grief moving through a body feels like pregnancy.

  I wanted Linda Sue to tell me how she went on. For so long, Paul and I circled around this subject and never discussed it. We always said, We’ll try again, or, We’re good at getting pregnant. Never once had we said, What if it never happens? I had to ask someone: How do you go on after you know this?

  Then I stepped into the emptiness of Linda Sue’s house with its stale cigarette smell and began to weep. For a minute I couldn’t speak at all, couldn’t form a single word. She found me a paper towel in the kitchen. “Here, take it,” she said, her voice impatient, as if I were not the first person to stop by and cry in her foyer that day. “I don’t know. Sometimes it seems like everyone here is so sad.”

  I have a reason, I wanted to say. And we share it. But I couldn’t catch my breath. I couldn’t speak. Finally, after she’d brought me water in a plastic cup, I managed to say, “Sometimes I think I’ll die living here.” I meant to add, without children, without a reason for all this.

  “Yeah,” she said. “I can see why.”

  Later, when I explained—I can’t have children, I just found out—she looked flustered, as if my revelation had no connection to her life.

  “I don’t know,” I told Marianne as she pressed me to take the catalog. “I don’t think Linda Sue likes me very much.”

  “Please,” Marianne said, her voice grave. “She’s in danger. This is important.” She leaned forward, as if she were afraid of being overheard. A day later, when her paranoia looked like prescience, I wondered what Marianne would say when I saw her. I assumed she’d blame me because the visit had gone so badly and I forgot to tell Linda Sue to install her lock.

  But I did go over. I stood on Linda Sue’s porch, holding the catalog upside down so she wouldn’t read it too quickly and know what this was all about. “Can I come in? Marianne wants me to show you something,” I said.

  I knew Linda Sue didn’t like having people inside, but she turned around and stepped away from the door. “Sure. Come on in.”

  “We wanted to find out if everything is all right.”

  She shrugged. “I guess.”

  Suddenly, standing in her living room, empty except for three canvas folding chairs circled around an ashtray, I felt scared for Linda Sue in a way I never had been before. She no life, no belongings, nothing except for Geoffrey. “I’ve noticed Geoffrey’s been over,” I said carefully. She nodded and looked away. “I didn’t know you two had become such good friends.” If she broke down and told me she loved him, I decided, I would tell her it was okay, I knew how she felt. Maybe I’d even joke and say, Join the club. If she cried, I wouldn’t be embarrassed. I would cross the room and put my arms around her. I would tell her love is hardest when it feels the most real. But instead she shrugged and said, “Not really. I think his writing is a rip-off.”

  “You do?”

  “I don’t know.” She lit a cigarette. “It’s just pretty unoriginal.”

  “What do you mean?” I said, though of course I knew what she meant. I’d spent the last three days at the library defending him with clumsy, far-fetched arguments about how his admitted act of plagiarism wasn’t really his fault. “It was only a problem on two stories, the shortest and the weakest ones in the book. It doesn’t mean he can’t write, it means he was stupid.” Even as I said this, I knew it was hopeless. Why had he been so stupid? Why steal stories that weren’t as good as your own? “We know Geoffrey pretty well, Linda Sue. He has a good heart but he also has weaknesses. Impulses I don’t think he can really control.”

  “Did he already tell you?”

  “Tell me what?”

  “Oh, skip it. Never mind.”

  For a minute, I couldn’t breathe. “Tell me what?”

  She didn’t say it out loud, but I saw it on her face. We’re having a baby. Then she cleared her throat. “We’re having a baby, okay?”

  I didn’t say anything. I was terrified I might throw up right there.

  “What was it you wanted to show me?” she finally asked.

  I held up the catalog that had gone damp in my hands. “Marianne thinks you should get a blow-up man doll.”

  She laughed as if I’d made a joke. “Seriously?” I nodded and she shook her head. “Marianne’s got problems. I’m sorry, but maybe she needs a blow-up man.”

  “She has Roland.”

  “Oh, right. I forgot.”

  In that moment, I saw it all. Our pity for Linda Sue had been misplaced. Marianne was right, everything she said was loaded with judgment. She didn’t come to our meetings to participate but to make fun of us all. We were a joke to her, a reminder of the life she’d happily left behind along with the husband she never mentioned. She hated us and lived here to remind herself why this was so. Now she was going to take Geoffrey for herself, the one thing that made my life bearable. I turned around and started back toward the door.

  “Wait, Betsy. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t be like this. You’re not like those other women. Geoffrey always says that.” I stopped but didn’t turn around. “He’s not sure he would have stayed here if it hadn’t been for you. He thinks of you as one of his best friends.”

  Was this true? Geoffrey knew certain things about me but suddenly it seemed as if he knew nothing that mattered, nothing about the babies I’d lost, or the infants that lived on in my mind. “I should go,” I said.

  “Yeah, okay. I probably won’t see you again because no
w—what? You hate us, right? I don’t know what to say about that. I’m sorry, I guess.”

  I did hate her then. As much as I’d ever hated anyone. “Don’t be,” I said. “I wish you good luck. You’ll need it. I’m afraid Geoffrey is going to disappoint you.” It was the meanest thing I could think of to say.

  She walked back to the folding card table where she kept her cigarettes, pulled out a fresh one, and cupped her hands around the end to light it. I thought about snapping the cigarette from her lips. I thought about taking a drag, blowing smoke in her face, and saying, That’s how a baby in utero feels when his mother smokes. I thought about saying something so bitter and inappropriate it would be talked about for years. Women like you don’t deserve to get pregnant. But as I gathered my courage, the expression on her face caught me off guard. There was no look of triumph.

  Now that I’ve known plenty of bad mothers—ones who’d been criminally negligent, who’d left babies alone in apartments to go out to buy drugs—I know that it eats at one’s soul to fail at this. I’ve sat in therapy groups where everyone talks about the school meetings they missed and the beatings they delivered. Children’s lives may be destroyed when mothers abandon them, but no one ever talks about this: The women are ruined, too. Doomed to obsess over their failure every sober moment of their lives. Even back then, I knew this.

  Suddenly, instead of resenting Linda Sue, I felt sorry for her.

  Maybe she had succeeded in fertilizing a viable egg, but what else could she offer this child? She had no job or source of income that anyone knew of. The father of this baby was a long shot at best. Even I had to admit that in the two years he’d lived here, Geoffrey had gone from seeming like a celebrity in our midst to a question mark. (Had anyone ever seen him writing? Was he really working on anything beyond expanding his female friendship circle? I never thought these things, of course, but I knew people who did and recently I’d begun to see their point.)

  “I know you’ve had miscarriages,” Linda Sue finally said. The daylight was draining out of the sky. “I have, too. Three altogether.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  I could barely see her face but I remember every word she said. “No one understands, do they? They never let you grieve for those babies. You go in for your D & C on the obstetrics floor next door to women delivering healthy newborns. No one thinks about what that does to you.”

  That had happened to me once. I wasn’t sure if she knew that and was pretending to understand or if it had happened to her, too.

  “I named all my babies,” she kept going. “You have to, I think. You go crazy otherwise. You have to acknowledge it. God, otherwise you walk around all day with everyone telling you it’s a blessing since the baby was probably disabled anyway.”

  This was true and it was excruciating. To see it on someone’s face, to know they were about to say it: Usually those babies are pretty disabled. Maybe it’s a blessing. Was it crazy to want to say once for all the world to hear: It’s not a blessing. Say whatever else you’d like, but it’s not a blessing . My throat hurt so much I wasn’t sure if I was talking or if she was simply saying everything I’d felt. “No one understands how awful it is.”

  Was she crying? I couldn’t tell. I couldn’t see her face.

  Finally I said, “I named mine, too. And I think about them sometimes. I imagine this life where they’re all with me.”

  “Yeah,” she said softly. For a long time neither one of us said anything. Finally she asked, “What are their names?”

  And I told her. Ben, Shannon, Peter, Henry, and Charlotte. I kept going, told her more about each of them, what they were like.

  “That’s good,” she said. “That’s really good.”

  After I got to the end, she asked me if I’d like to see something upstairs. I followed her, past a pile of flattened boxes and a trash bag full of Styrofoam peanuts. “This way.” She opened the door at the end of the hallway. When I looked inside, my heart moved into my throat. There it all was, exactly as I’d imagined it. Ceiling stars, yellow walls, and gingham curtains with little ribbon ties. A white crib stood in the corner with a mobile above it of black-and-white clowns. The baby nursery I’d dreamed of setting up, the one I’d planned for and once got close enough to that I let myself buy three cans of yellow paint. My palms went slick.

  She wasn’t even showing that I could tell. Didn’t she know what could happen? That setting all this up was like arranging a wedding before you had a groom, and if no one arrived, you’d have this as a testament to your heart’s folly forever? I’d only ever decorated rooms in my mind, and still, they were there. “Linda Sue—” I said.

  Before I could get my thought out, she snapped off the light. “Don’t say anything.” She kept going with the tour as if I’d come up to see the master bedroom and bathroom suite identical to my own. “Here’s . . . whatever. My bedroom. The bathroom. The vanity.” Her bedroom was as sparsely furnished as downstairs. A box spring and mattress, a sheet and thin spread. “Wait here a sec,” she said, and disappeared down the hall.

  I walked over to her side table, picked up the book lying open, Your Pregnancy and You: A Month-by-Month Guide. I don’t know how to describe my feelings except as a complicated mix of pity and envy. I understood that she had something I did not: access to her real feelings, and the freedom to make choices based on them. She had no husband or money, but she was better off than all of us, anyone could see it. I moved over to the bathroom, out of curiosity, I suppose—all bathrooms hold secrets, don’t they?—and that was when I saw the pink box with the white stick lying on top of it. A pregnancy test with a plus sign on it.

  According to the trial record, I touched other items in her bathroom and beside her bed. My fingerprints were found on a glass, her tissue box, and a pencil, for some reason. The prosecution pointed out that a house tour doesn’t usually involve examining personal items on a bedside table. “Nor does a murder,” Franklin said, but his delivery was off. One juror rolled her eyes.

  At my trial, the prosecution argued that I began, right then, to disassociate. They said I went home and sat alone in my darkened living room for close to six hours to plot my revenge on my neighbor, who had both the man I loved and a child on the way. They said I waited for Paul to return late from work, eat dinner, and fall asleep before I let myself go back across the street. They said I didn’t bring a weapon with me, because my intent, when I went there, was not to kill Linda Sue but to push her down the stairs and cause a miscarriage.

  “Five miscarriages,” the DA repeated for the jury, not once but twice. “Elizabeth Treading had had five miscarriages and wanted Linda Sue Nelson to know how it felt to make assumptions, to plan too far ahead, to have her heart broken by a baby who didn’t come.” For my defense, Franklin saved our only piece of surprise evidence for his cross-exam of Geoffrey. We intended the moment to turn the tide of the trial, expose their scenario as a house of cards built on a fabrication. He asked if Geoffrey had seen the results of Linda Sue’s autopsy report.

  “Yes,” Geoffrey said.

  “Do you know what the results were?”

  “Blunt-force trauma to the head. Intracranial bleeding,” Geoffrey said. We’d heard the injuries described in detail; no one was surprised.

  “Anything else?”

  Geoffrey shook his head.

  Franklin asked, “Did you know there was no evidence of a pregnancy?”

  At the very least, this fact altered the story the prosecution had painted against me: that I was an infertile woman in love with Geoffrey, blind with anger at Linda Sue’s good fortune not only in winning Geoffrey but in defying her own body’s long odds and getting pregnant as well. Here was Franklin’s point: It wasn’t that simple. Linda Sue wasn’t pregnant and Geoffrey must have known this. Everyone was keeping secrets. No one could be trusted. Then we all watched Geoffrey’s reaction on the stand. First he looked around the courtroom, his eyes darting from one face to another, as if he were hoping to find
Linda Sue in the gallery. As if he needed an explanation himself, because we could all see, from the way his face went pale and tears formed along the bottom of his eyes, that this was news to him, too.

  Watching a man weep soundlessly before a courtroom of spectators convinced everyone there of one thing. Geoffrey knew nothing about Linda Sue’s deception. In no time, the prosecution recalled enough witnesses to establish the illusion of pregnancy. The decorated room, the books beside her bed, a positive pregnancy test in the bathroom. How did a woman infertile from endometriosis accomplish that? No one could say.

  In the end, the information clouded the story but not the case against me. Yes, it was unclear why she’d perpetrated such a fraud, but wanting a baby wasn’t a crime. Murder was, the DA reminded the courtroom.

  CHAPTER 20

  In the car driving to Trish’s reading, I think about how best to approach this situation. Surely Trish must have been in Linda Sue’s house the same time I was on the day of the murder. She overheard our conversation, the only time I spoke the names of my children aloud. If Trish didn’t kill Linda Sue, she must know who did. And whoever wrote me the note knew her pen name and was trying to point me in her direction.

  As we drive, I avoid all this by getting Finn to tell me about his childhood spent in Oklahoma. How he joined the Cub Scouts and 4-H Club trying to fit in but it never really worked. Going away to college—even to Norman, Oklahoma—was such a relief, he pierced both ears the first week and started wearing eye makeup the second. “I was trying for a David Bowie thing, but I was about eighty pounds too heavy. In the end, I looked more like Jimmy Osmond wearing mascara.” When he finally moved to New York, he realized he was more like his small-town, aging parents than he’d thought. “I kept falling in love with all these boring, clean-cut men who reminded me of my father.”

  I almost interrupt to defend Bill—He’s not that boring—when he clarifies his point. “Bill came much later. He was wearing a kilt when I met him. Very cute. He turned out to be a balance between the two.”