Tell Me One Thing

by Deena Goldstone

  Fred, from the safety of his living room, shakes his head. What a stupid thing for her to do. She could get into a lot of trouble.

  Trudy stands with her back against the front door, package in hand, and surveys the living room. Her heart is pounding away in her chest, bombarding her with what she assumes is terror but could also be excitement.

  What she sees is a long, narrow room that fits horizontally across the front of the house. There’s a fireplace against the street-facing wall and sliding glass doors on the opposite wall out to a U-shaped patio. The furniture is all oversize, as if giants lived there—a huge leather couch that would swallow Trudy up if she deigned to sit in it, her feet not even hitting the floor, and two high-backed armchairs appropriate for a nineteenth-century gentlemen’s club. The furniture is grouped to face the fireplace. The rest of the room is empty except for small oil paintings of common scenes—apple picking, sailboats on a choppy sea, a farmhouse—positioned high up on the wall. Only the giant rodent can see them, Trudy thinks as her eyes scan the room, a cold and sterile space, no warmth or bright colors or pillows on the sofa, or even rugs on the floor, but nothing out of the ordinary. She’s not going to learn anything by standing in this room.

  Trudy knows she should back out, put the package down on the front doorstep, and walk quickly back to her house, but she can’t. She needs to see the boys’ bedrooms. Seeing where they sleep will give her vital information, she’s sure of it.

  It looks like the bedrooms are off to the left, in their own separate wing. She crosses the living room and makes a right turn into a hallway. Now she’s really done it. There is simply no explanation for being so far into the house. If one of them comes home and finds her, she’s done for. But that doesn’t stop her. She feels her eyesight sharpen. She knows that’s impossible, but that’s what it feels like. And her hearing gets more acute. Everything feels like it’s happening on another planet, one where the elements in the atmosphere combine differently and all objects are more sharp edged and all sounds explode into her ears. There’s something thrilling about it.

  She opens the first door she finds, and it is definitely one of the boys’ rooms. There are bunk beds on the far wall, complete with Spider-Man sheets, and a desk against the window with drawing supplies—Magic Markers and stickers and sheets of faintly brown drawing paper—and the requisite electronic equipment—a laptop, an iPad. There’s a wall of cubbyholes stuffed with essential boy paraphernalia (Trudy remembers them all from Carter’s childhood): a baseball mitt, a bike helmet, a terrarium that now holds pieces of Legos, a deflated basketball, a board game called Tsuro with an elaborate dragon on the lid, and a whole colony of plastic dinosaurs arranged with infinite care into groupings of like kinds. Trudy remembers Carter’s dinosaur phase, which lasted well over a year. Apparently nothing much has changed in that regard. Dinosaurs march in battalions across the wall of cubbies. What she has in front of her is a room any seven-year-old could live in happily. It tells her nothing.

  She backs out and tries the room next door. This must be the younger boy’s room, Aidan’s, because there are more remnants from toddlerhood here—a couple of dirty stuffed animals sitting lopsided on top of a bookcase, a brightly colored plastic dump truck filled with tennis balls, a mural of a rainbow painted on the wall above the bed with a leprechaun at the end who looks a lot like Aidan.

  Trudy is disappointed and relieved at the same time, relieved that it all looks so normal, disappointed that she hasn’t found any evidence to bolster her belief that something heinous happens in this house. If she’s going to do something, if she’s going to try to help these boys, she needs evidence. And she realizes as she steps back out of Aidan’s room and closes the door that this is exactly why she entered the house in the first place.

  There’s one more door in the hallway and it’s closed. She assumes it’s the rodent’s bedroom and she’s tempted to take a look. She contemplates the door, moves toward it, her hand extended, when she hears, “What are you doing?” and she nearly jumps out of her skin.

  Fred stands in the hallway, frowning.

  “You scared the bejeezus out of me!” Now Trudy can be furious instead of terrified. It’s only Fred.

  “You deserve it. What are you doing in here?”

  “Something awful happens in this house and I need evidence.” This is said as righteously as Trudy can manage.

  Fred doesn’t even answer her. He takes her by the upper arm—she looks down in astonishment at his hand on her biceps—and leads her out, through the living room, the front door, and onto the porch. Next he takes the package from her hands and puts it down on the Doyles’ doorstep. Then he marches her smartly and quickly down the driveway, his grip on her arm tight and insistent.

  “There,” he says as he deposits her on her own front porch. In his mind the matter is finished. He turns to the sawhorse he set up that morning and begins to prepare another slat for the fence.

  Trudy is left feeling as if she’s been chastised and rescued at the same time, but, true to form, she allows her anger to flood any gratitude she might feel.

  “If well-meaning people turn their eyes away when they know something evil is happening, well then … then”—she sputters for a moment and then finds her footing—“then we have the Holocaust!”

  Fred, head down, continues to work. He says nothing, hoping Trudy will go into her house and leave him alone. No such luck.

  “Children need to be saved. Sometimes even from their own parents.”

  “The man yells at his kids. It’s too bad. But there’s nothing you can do.”

  And that attitude spins Trudy into overdrive. So cavalier! So unfeeling! So cowardly!

  “Don’t you tell me to just sit tight and put up with it!” She’s fairly yelling.

  Fred shrugs. He’ll be damned if he’s going to say another word. He takes the cedar plank off the sawhorse and begins to nail it to the supporting crossbars. He hammers longer and harder than he needs to. Trudy stands at his back, fuming, when, above the hammering, they both hear the blasting music of a car radio and turn to see Kevin Doyle speeding up his driveway, the top of his convertible down as always, the cell phone plugged into his ear, of course, the cigar clamped in his yellow teeth and its putrid aroma wafting after him.

  Fred turns and eyes Trudy. There is no need for him to say—Look what I just saved you from. And she doesn’t have the good grace to thank him. She simply turns on her heel and stomps into her house, angry still.

  She paces around the house, stirred up, agitated. Through the living room, down the hall she goes, then into the small dining room where she no longer eats, and out the kitchen door. Oh, why isn’t Brian here when she needs him? She’d rail and rant and he’d listen and she’d figure out this whole mess! She looks around the heavenly backyard, this place where she feels Brian most fully. It shelters her and surrounds her and protects her from the rest of the whole ugly world.

  Help me, she says, not sure whether she’s spoken out loud and now not caring. She’s calling up something—Brian’s spirit or his love for her or something. Help me. And Fred, in the driveway, measuring another plank, hears her because Trudy has pleaded aloud.

  Here’s the issue, Trudy explains to Brian, making sure now that it’s only thoughts she’s sending forth and not words, how can what I saw inside that house be at such odds with what happens every day outside of it? Brian, everything inside seemed so ordinary. It could have been Carter’s room when he was a child.

  She paces on the patio, trying to sort this all out on her own. If you saw those boys’ rooms, you’d think nothing was wrong. And then a thought occurs to her that makes her stop moving and sink into a patio chair. Is this a normal family? Could the yelling and demeaning simply be ordinary life for some people?

  Oh!—and here Trudy sucks in her breath realizing suddenly—isn’t that worse? That those boys think ordinary life always contains such ugliness. Trudy’s heart is suddenly breaking. “Oh, Brian,” she vo
ices into the quiet backyard air. “Oh no.”

  Fred, carrying two more slats of cedar over to the sawhorse, hears the lament. He puts the wood down and stands motionless for a minute, paying quiet attention to the two factions wrestling within him.

  Trudy, in the backyard, leaning forward in her chair, forearms on her thighs, her head in her hands, hears, “I talk to my dead wife, too, but she never answers me.”

  Trudy doesn’t move. She knows Fred is standing there and she understands his presence is a compassionate gesture. She just doesn’t know whether she can accept it. Finally she says, “Maybe she’s had enough of you,” without raising her head.

  And although Trudy can’t see it, Fred begins to grin. His face cracks open into a genuine smile and he lets out a sort of guffaw that could be taken as a laugh. Trudy hopes it is a laugh.

  “Maybe so,” he agrees.

  ON THE FIRST TUESDAY OF DECEMBER, as it nears five o’clock, Trudy tidies up the library. She is always scrupulous about opening and closing the building on time. From the end of the front desk counter, she retrieves the protest petition. There are pages and pages and pages of signatures, hundreds of them, she is very quietly proud to notice.

  As Clemmie gently shoos the last people out of the library, Trudy gathers her sweater and petition and keys to lock the library. The two women walk out together, stop on the sidewalk for a moment before Clementine heads to her car and Trudy walks the four blocks home. The sun is almost down now that it’s winter and the air is chilly. There may be frost on the lawn tomorrow morning.

  “What’s going to happen tonight?” Clementine asks.

  Trudy shrugs. “I’ve never been to a city council meeting before, I have no idea. I’ll hand over these,” she says as she indicates the well-thumbed pages bursting from the clipboard.

  “And will you say something? Like a little speech?”

  “What for? It’s all here.” The thought of having to speak in public sends a spike of irritation through Trudy. Of course not, she tells herself, nobody wants to hear me speak. Clemmie doesn’t know what she’s talking about. But Trudy, in a rare show of discretion, refrains from telling her so.

  “Seven o’clock, then.”

  “Are you coming?” Trudy is surprised.

  “I love the park, too. I thought you knew.” Clemmie says this softly, without rancor.

  “Well, of course. Who wouldn’t love this park?” And the two women look out over the gray green oaks and the winding paths and the gentle hillocks that form the edges of the sunken park.

  AT SIX FORTY-FIVE THAT EVENING, Trudy closes and locks the front door of her small house and stands for a moment appreciating the six-foot-tall, meticulously crafted cedar fence along her property line. It is almost finished. And then, as she diagonally crosses Lima Street, she is surprised to see Fred Murakami waiting patiently on the sidewalk in front of his house.

  “I thought I would go with you,” he says when she nears.

  She shrugs. “It’s a public meeting.”

  The two small people fall into step beside each other, their strides matched effortlessly, a serendipity Trudy isn’t used to. At six foot three, Brian was over a foot taller than she, and his legs seemed to take up most of that difference. When they walked anywhere together she had to hurry quite a bit and he had to consciously slow down.

  “The fence is coming along,” Trudy says as they reach the end of their block and cross the street.

  “Yes. Almost finished now.”

  “I feel better—not seeing them.”

  He knows she means the Doyles, but particularly the giant rodent as he now thinks of the father.

  “Ah, that’s good then, isn’t it? The fence will serve its purpose.”

  “Exactly!” Trudy is cheered that Fred immediately understands what she means.

  WHEN THEY REACH THE Sierra Villa Elementary School auditorium, Fred opens the heavy door for Trudy and they are presented with a room crowded with residents. Someone has set up two long tables, end to end, at the front of the room, below the stage, with a microphone and a name card identifying each of the five city council members, one at each seat. The burgundy upholstered seats, bolted to the floor and worn from generations of proud parents watching their children’s plays and graduations, are split into two sections by a narrow aisle. It is there that a podium with a microphone attached to the lip has been placed for residents’ comments.

  People are milling about, talking to each other, yelling across the rows of seats to neighbors they haven’t seen in a while. Children are darting up and down the aisle and across the stage. The hubbub of so many voices bounces off the walls.

  Trudy is taken aback. “Is it always like this?” she asks Fred.

  He shakes his head. He has no idea. He’s never been to one of these meetings in his life. He hates crowds—they make him feel small and mean and anxious—but he’s there tonight because Trudy is presenting the petition.

  They take seats close to the front and on the aisle so that Trudy can easily reach the podium microphone to present her signed petition pages. But first they have to wait through the reading of last month’s minutes and discussion of new business: whether the bike lane should be extended along Foothill Boulevard, whether a building permit should be granted to turn the empty Southern California Credit Union building into a homeless shelter. There is vigorous debate on both sides of the issues, taking up the better part of an hour.

  Trudy tries to be patient, but she finds all this less than compelling. Extend the bike lane, okay, fine, what could be wrong with that? Biking is healthy. Brian would sometimes take out his bike to run an errand or two. He would have liked more bike lanes. And the other issue—of course they should build somewhere for homeless people to sleep. A slam dunk. All those nervous Nellies afraid of people down on their luck should just shut up.

  When are they going to get to the park situation? She turns to Fred and whispers the question into his ear. He shrugs and can feel Trudy bristle with irritation. She wanted more than a shrug from him, but too bad. How should he know when the issue of the park will be brought up?

  Trudy watches Candace Voltaug, the city council president, shuffle papers as she allows the homeless-people debate to continue. She is just the sort of woman Trudy doesn’t like—self-possessed, self-important, and well dressed. She’s maybe in her late thirties, Trudy guesses, and her hair is colored a startling shade of blond. She’s wearing very high heels, so high they tip her hips forward when she stands. Her finely tailored black suit fits her perfectly and her nails are impeccably manicured. Trudy casts a glance at her own irregularly shaped nails on her small, stubby fingers and looks away quickly—one more thing she never finds time to do: file her nails.

  Candace Voltaug has never set foot in the library as far as Trudy knows, and since she almost never misses a day of work, she can be fairly confident in her judgment that this is not a woman who values reading for herself or her children. The longer Trudy sits there and ruminates, the more ironclad the case against the woman becomes in her mind.

  Finally, Scott Thurston brings up the issue of the park. And immediately Trudy gets to her feet. She doesn’t even wait to be called upon. She marches to the podium, clipboard plastered across her chest like body armor. She can talk to Scott. She knows him. From time to time he and Brian would stand outside their house and talk about baseball—how the Dodgers were doing—or politics. But no, it’s Candace who is in charge. It’s Candace who won’t relinquish the microphone.

  “Identify yourself, please,” Candace demands as if Trudy were some sort of alien life-form that has to be classified.

  “Trudy Dugan. I live on Lima Street and I’m the librarian at the La Cruza branch.” Trudy finds it difficult to keep her voice on an even keel—could she be nervous speaking to all these people? Ridiculous, she tells herself, buck up.

  “The Story Lady!” a child’s voice rings out from the crowd, and there are a few chuckles from parents.

  Tru
dy ignores all that and continues on. Usually she enjoys being identified as the Story Lady, especially by the children who come to hear her, but now she is on a mission and she won’t be sidetracked. She holds up the clipboard. “I have twenty-one pages of a signed petition from the citizens of Sierra Villa who want to preserve the park, who think the idea of a condo development on that land is …” and here Trudy pauses and searches for the absolutely correct word, “an abomination!”

  Now she must be talking too loudly or too stridently, something, because all at once it’s completely quiet in the room—no one rustling about in their seat, no whispering or talking on cell phones.

  “What you are proposing is an affront to everything we hold dear in this community!” Trudy is surprised at how angry she is as she stands there. Her legs are shaking.

  Candace Voltaug struggles, but she can’t keep annoyance off her face. The last thing she wants is to raise the temperature on this debate, and here’s this angry, little, badly dressed woman stirring things up even before the city council can present their point of view.

  “Mrs. Dugan,” she says as calmly as she can manage, “you haven’t even heard the very good and cogent reasons for our consideration of the developer’s offer.”

  “There is nothing he can say that would justify destruction of that beautiful park.”

  “Perhaps there is,” Candace says through clenched teeth. “Perhaps you might learn something from listening first.”

  “Perhaps you would learn something from reading the hundreds of signatures I have here,” and Trudy walks swiftly forward and plunks the clipboard on the table in front of the city council president. And now the two women are eye to eye, both far too angry for the content of their conversation.

  “Take your seat, Mrs. Dugan.” This is said as punitively as Candace Voltaug can muster.

  “I’m not finished,” Trudy finds herself saying. Where are these words coming from? She has no idea, but she seems to be on some sort of wild ride. She won’t back down, and so she skates ahead on the current of anger that is propelling her.