Cammie McGovern

by Neighborhood Watch (v5. 0)

For her part, Trish seems quiet but fine, unaware of the commotion she caused. At one point, she tells everyone that she left so early in the morning because she was trying to get there by seven, before morning meditation started. “That’s my favorite part and I didn’t want to miss it. After that is chanting, which I don’t like as much.”

  The police fiddle with their belts, Roland scratches his knee, and then, as if a rash were spreading, his ankle. Trish explains the blood in the bathroom with a shrug, saying she cut her leg a few days earlier and the scab opened up again when she was standing in the dark. She didn’t think she was leaving that much of a mess, but she also hadn’t turned on the light to look. Everyone nods uncomfortably and looks at the door. Before we leave, Trish asks if she can talk to me alone for a second.

  “Of course,” I say, following her up to her room.

  When the door is closed, she turns around. “The blood wasn’t just from a scab.”

  “I guessed that.”

  “I tried to kill myself that night. It was terrible. Like the walls were pressing in on me. All the secrets my parents kept.”

  I try to think of the most reassuring thing I can tell her. “They aren’t doing it anymore. Keeping secrets, at least.”

  She looks up, surprised. “Do you know what my parents do?”

  I nod.

  “Did you know they’re still at it? They’ve moved the lab but they’re still doing it.”

  “They are?”

  “That night I spent here, after you’d woken everyone up, my mom left the house. She went into the woods beyond the cornfield, and I followed her to this place that looks like a metal storage facility. It’s hidden away. You can’t see it from here. But that’s where they’ve moved their lab.” She tells me she knew about their cold fusion work for years before Marianne told her. It wasn’t that hard to figure out. She knew it had to be something important because of the people who drove out to the house and talked to her parents in the basement. She listened in on a few conversations, went to the library and looked up some words. “You helped me once, I remember.”

  I did?

  “I was looking for the difference between fusion and fission. You found it.”

  I shake my head in wonder. I remember the impossibly difficult reading she did as an eight-year-old. How we all assumed she was an odd child, a little troubled maybe, but no one considered this: Maybe she understood everything. Maybe she saw it all better than we did.

  “My mother didn’t talk to me about it until I was fifteen, and by then she’d decided it was never going to work. That the reaction they were getting was chemical, not nuclear, because they’d never found any measurable radiation. Low levels of radiation are almost impossible to measure, and are usually inaccurate when you do. She said if they’d really been achieving fusion all along, their own bodies would be a barometer. They would have had side effects and they didn’t.”

  “What would the side effects have been?”

  She looks away from me. “Cancer, infertility.”

  What is she trying to say?

  “But it wouldn’t necessarily affect everybody. It just increases your chances. What my mom never knew is that John and I found the lab when we were kids and we used to steal beakers and pour them on people’s lawns. We thought it was funny, coloring the world brown in the middle of the night. Killing all the gardens, one plant at a time. I laughed about it until I was thirteen, and then I realized it wasn’t funny. Our parents had no idea how powerful this stuff was.”

  When her mother finally told Trish about her work, she was convinced that her detractors were right all along. “She kept insisting that they hadn’t created any significant energy. They’d stumbled on nothing more than a chemical reaction that wasn’t nuclear. She said they could drink the stuff and be fine. I wanted her to know that there must have been low levels of radiation because we’d seen the evidence in everyone’s gardens. But before he moved away, John made me promise I’d never tell anyone what we’d done. Then I read about the explosion in Santa Clara. A year later, there was another explosion, two people doing cold fusion in Japan. Everyone was trying to push the bar, get bigger reactions and higher temperatures. I was scared that my parents were going to kill themselves. That’s when I poured out all of their work and called the Hazmat people. I wanted my parents to see what this stuff did. There were eighty beakers and I dumped all of them. In four hours, every blade of grass was dead.”

  I think about our gardens, and the mysterious battles we all waged to defend our lawns and save our plants. Were we all out there digging in dirt that was killing our babies? Or us? I put together the pieces of the timeline in my mind. This must have all happened after my last miscarriage, when I was told to stop trying. When I was here but I wasn’t, sitting alone in my darkened house oblivious to any crisis beyond my own. This was also when Marianne arranged our final meeting and brought Gary in. That must have been Trish’s last night at home. After that, she moved out.

  Then something else occurs to me.

  “What happened to the cat?”

  “He came over while I was dumping the stuff out and drank some of the water. I knew I should push him away and I didn’t. My mom liked the cat and I wanted her to see. She’d said it wasn’t harmful, that it wasn’t even working, and I wanted her to see . . .” Trish is crying now. “I wanted the cat to get sick so I could say, Look, Mom. Look. It does work.”

  “Did you?”

  “No. I ran away that night and when I saw them again I was pretty messed up. They put me in the hospital and I didn’t come home again until after I’d had my baby.”

  How could I forget? She was pregnant during all this. “What happened with your baby?”

  “He was okay. I’ve seen him a couple of times.”

  It’s impossible to imagine. “How is he?”

  “He’s twelve now. His mother writes me letters on his birthday. I could see him more if I wanted to but I don’t.” She shakes her head. “It’s hard.”

  Henry, my youngest, would be twelve, too, though I’ve kept him five years old in my mind because I want someone who still needs uncomplicated comforts: hot dog dinners and sleeping in my bed with me. It’s frightening to imagine meeting a twelve-year-old boy who is five in my mind.

  I’ve always tried not to idealize my imaginary children too much. The key to parenting, I believe, isn’t avoiding problems but handling them when they arise. I try to be as matter-of-fact as possible. I tell them the truth, even the parts that are hard for me to talk about: I was never in love with your father the way parents are meant to be, though I always liked and respected him very much. He is a good and decent man, I tell them, but love is harder to define. I’ve learned this much: Love has more to do with the person you become in its presence than it does with anything else. You must always be yourself, honest and true. I was never that with your father, which isn’t his fault. I didn’t understand what it meant until I felt the other, the relief of being wholly straightforward.

  I go over to the bed where Trish is sitting, shoulders slumped, hair hanging down over her face as if her body has lost its ability to hold itself up. “You were brave about a lot of things, Trish. Braver than the rest of us.”

  “I don’t think my parents see it that way.”

  I fear she might be right that her single act of validation and defiance has probably been misread all these years. I suspect she meant to say, Look, Mom, it works. Now stop. I don’t think she meant to destroy a lifetime of work. Nor did she mean to hurt anyone or their pets. And yet that’s what happened.

  CHAPTER 35

  Leo and I sit on two folding chairs he’s set up in Finn and Bill’s backyard, drinking iced teas. It’s evening but the sky is still purple, bright with the reflected glow of distant city lights. I’ve explained as much as I can to him, what I’ve learned about my past over the last three days. All of us carried secrets inside of us, ticking like bombs waiting to detonate. We isolated ourselves, retreated too much, eve
ryone terrified of getting caught in lies.

  “So who did it? Who killed Linda Sue?” He takes my hand and holds it flat, between his.

  When I called Jeremy to tell him that Trish was back, he updated me on the status of the testing. So far, three more names had been cleared: Marianne, Roland, and Trish Rashke. “They may know more than they’re telling us, but their hair wasn’t in her blood, nor was their skin under her fingernails.”

  I’m not surprised. Now I understand that Trish would never have gone back to Linda Sue’s that night. If Marianne or Roland had, Linda Sue wouldn’t have opened her door and offered them tea.

  This is the piece that has never made sense: She invited the person in. She was happy to see him or her, which wouldn’t have been true of the other women on the block—Helen or Barbara or Kim. “They try too hard,” she once told me. “Have you ever noticed how they always want to make suggestions?”

  It was true, they did do that because we all did: You should try seltzer and salt on red wine stains. Have you heard about putting eggshells on rosebushes? Just trying to help, we thought.

  This was a few weeks before her death, when I’d started to see our world differently and seek out Linda Sue more. During that time, I began noticing things about her. She talked to the mailman, Walt, who the rest of us had never acknowledged beyond the Christmas cards we gave him every year. Sometimes he stood on her porch for ten minutes, their laughter so loud I could hear it across the street. She also had a roofing crew there once and I watched them eat lunch, gathered in a circle on her porch while she joined them to smoke. She enjoyed men’s company, she told me. “It doesn’t mean I want to sleep with them. It means they’re less complicated than women.”

  I remember something else she said: “These neighborhoods are built for women, because all of us like looking in mirrors.”

  I laughed and then saw she wasn’t joking. She started to say more—to explain, perhaps—and then stopped herself. For years I wondered what she was about to tell me. This is why I own no mirrors at all, why I broke them all and glued the pieces to my clothes. Was this why we all hovered near her and then stood back? Because we wanted to see ourselves, to catch a reflection of different possibilities? Linda Sue couldn’t have been killed by a woman. We were too scared of her to get close enough.

  No—it was a man who knocked that night. One she saw as harmless, maybe Walt the mailman, or one of her roofer friends. She’d had a long day full of fights she didn’t resolve and dramas she probably didn’t understand. First Trish, then me, then Roland and Marianne, and somewhere in there Geoffrey came over, bearing his necklace. Whoever knocked late must have seemed innocuous and simple—someone who wanted nothing from her but to pass a bit of time.

  “We should go inside,” Leo says.

  We are spending tonight here in Finn and Bill’s guest room and tomorrow we will go to Leo’s apartment in West Hartford. I have told him I am not going to move in with him yet. That we need to take our time with this, which he understands. Standing here, though, the night alive with the cicadas’ song, I see something, as if it’s been there all along—in some corner of my brain: Our garden with no pet fence, no toys, nothing but the patchy grass and a person standing on it.

  It’s just a flash, a splinter of memory, but I know in that instant who I’m seeing.

  CHAPTER 36

  “Paul,” I say when he answers the door. I’ve asked Leo to wait in the car but keep an eye on us and come in if it looks like I’m in trouble. “I need you to tell me what happened.”

  He nods and steps aside, looking over my shoulder at Leo in the car. “I think I remember more,” I say, which is only partially true. My memories are images, shadowy and indistinct. “You followed me outside that night, didn’t you?”

  “I didn’t follow you,” he says. “I woke up and you weren’t there. I went out to find you. I thought maybe you’d gone back to Linda Sue’s house. I saw her lights on so I went over and knocked on her door.”

  This must have been earlier in the evening when I was over at Roland’s. “Linda Sue said she hadn’t seen you but she asked if I’d mind coming in and sitting up with her for a while. She said she’d just had a terrible evening and needed some company.”

  I can picture all of this. Paul was always amenable. He liked being needed, craved it even. “What happened when you went inside?”

  “She was upset about Geoffrey. He’d been over to her house, proposing marriage and she wasn’t sure what to do. She didn’t think she was in love with him.”

  I think about the time when Paul and I stood on her lawn and watched Geoffrey standing behind her, that moment of intimacy that took our breath away. How could she not have loved him? Neither of us can imagine it.

  “She called him a fake. She said she was sick of people pretending to be something they weren’t.”

  But we all did that. I think about Helen with her faux finishing business, painting new chairs to look old. About Marianne hiding a career—and her brain and intelligence—for twenty years, believing that if it showed, people would come after her. Did Linda Sue die because she wouldn’t let us all keep up our illusions?

  “Did that make you mad?”

  “No. I felt bad for Geoffrey. I knew he was in love with her—”

  Not once in our marriage did I ever see Paul raise a hand in anger. Yes, I saw him be surprisingly sarcastic about people at work. I saw him retreat at times, into his own world. I saw flashes of what I suppose now was anger though I used to think of it as something else: an impulse to express what could never be said aloud. When he stood beside me peering in through Linda Sue’s window, when he drove, mute with grief, home from the doctor. I married him because I understood those silences. Or I thought I did, anyway.

  “Linda Sue invited me upstairs to show me something. I don’t know why I followed her. I wanted to see what her secret was, why everyone was so fascinated by her.” His voice cracks and it’s hard to understand him though I think I know what he’s not saying: I wanted to see why Geoffrey picked her. “I wanted—” It’s happening again, his words breaking off, his eyes focused on something within. “Then she turned on the light and I saw the nursery.”

  All this time, I thought I understood him but why didn’t I see this? A man can feel this loss as much as a woman.

  “I assumed she was pregnant, but then she told me no, Trish was. That they’d made all the arrangements for her to adopt it. She said she’d been on the phone that morning with a lawyer and it was all set.” He shakes his head as if, after all this time, he still can’t fathom the injustice of Trish picking such a woman to mother her child. “I didn’t mean to hurt her. It was an accident.”

  Beating her with a lock? Crushing her skull? “Tell the truth, Paul. It’s better.”

  “I just kept thinking it wasn’t fair. When we were right here and so ready for it.”

  I remember during our one pregnancy that made it past the first trimester, we once let ourselves spend a Saturday afternoon shopping for cribs. I can still see Paul: how serious he was the whole time, pressing each mattress with his hand, testing the railings. He spent three hours in the store and two more at home, reading Consumer Reports. “It’s our most important purchase,” he said when I tried to make a joke, something about it being just a crib. Somewhere deep inside of me I must have understood then what this said about Paul and about our marriage. In picking me, he’d made a choice. He’d denied one part of himself because he wanted this other thing even more: to be a father. Maybe I shouldn’t have been so surprised. He’d been parented in a confusing mixture of good intentions and self-absorption by a mother who gave and withdrew her love. He wanted what I did: the chance to do it over, right this time.

  He shakes his head now. “I just envied her. That’s all.”

  I don’t tell him we all did. Nor do I tell him it’s going to be all right. I know too well it won’t be. And then something else occurs to me: Is it possible I’ve known this all along? That
I cleaned up twelve years ago not for one friend but for another?

  “When I got home that night you still weren’t there, so I showered and waited. When you finally got home, I told you what happened.”

  He did?

  “You thought of the idea. You said, let me do this. Let me do this my way.”

  I don’t remember saying this but I think about my father and the nights when he put me through one unwelcome revelation after another. I never told anyone because this was what I learned from my parents—that love meant keeping such silences.

  “I never believed you’d get convicted,” Paul says. “Everyone said there was no way. Geoffrey promised me it wouldn’t happen.”

  “And you believed him?”

  He nods. I shouldn’t blame him, I know. We all believed Geoffrey. “Did he know the truth?”

  “He might have suspected it. I don’t know. He moved away so soon after that I wondered sometimes.”

  How has he done this? How has he lived with himself all these years? Maybe this is the answer: He hasn’t. “Did you write the cat letter?”

  He nods. “For so long I looked for an explanation that wouldn’t implicate either one of us. I wanted to be here, to take care of you when you got out.”

  Absurd logic, though I recognize it.

  “Then I finally realized, maybe you weren’t consciously making this decision anymore. I thought you should have a choice. That if you could get out, you should be able to.”

  “But why the cat?”

  He looks up, surprised, as if I should know this. “That’s what made me so mad. When I followed Linda Sue upstairs, she came out of the bedroom holding this cat. That’s what she wanted to show me. She said it was about to die and she asked me to take it over to Trish before it did because she didn’t want a dead cat on her hands. My seeing the nursery, hearing about the baby, all that was an afterthought.”

  “What did you do?”

  “I told her she should take the cat to the vet. She said she didn’t have the money and it wasn’t hers so why should she pay for it. I couldn’t believe it. Here she was, about to get a baby, but she wouldn’t take care of an animal that was dying . . .”