The Woman Next Door

by Barbara Delinsky

  “I’ll jump if you come,” Jordie called.

  He didn’t mention using the gun. That was good.

  She couldn’t see him now. He was on the other side of the tower. Increasingly, between the rain and dusk, she had trouble seeing even the rocks above. She could feel them, though. Her hands led the way.

  She raised her left foot to the next stone, found rocks to grasp with her fingers, climbed up. The incline of the tower gave her help with gravity. Her right foot found the next step. Her palms closed over rocks to the right and left. Heart racing faster with each step, she rose higher.

  “Amanda?” Jordie called, sounding as though he wanted to know where she was and couldn’t decide whether he was frightened or angry.

  “If you jump,” she called back, “I’m apt to fall, in which case my death will be on your conscience.” She was apt to fall anyway. The ground was growing farther and farther away. The thought was chilling.

  “If I’m dead,” he charged, “it won’t matter.”

  “You don’t want to die.” She had to believe that. “There are too many things in life you love.”

  He didn’t respond.

  Taking shallower breaths, ignoring the fear she felt, she kept climbing. Oddly, the higher she went, the easier the stones were to find, but that was part of the lore. The tower gods hooked you and pulled you up, it was said, and Amanda was ready to believe it. Her foot slipped as it had below, only she was higher now, making it more dangerous. She cried out, braced herself for a fall, miraculously found her footing again. Several more steps, and she nearly slipped again when, groping for a hold, her shoe knocked out a rock. She didn’t fall this time, either. But she did hear the dislodged rock tumble over stone to the ground. The sound was not reassuring.

  About halfway up, she reached the point of no return, where, according to legend, she couldn’t have gone back down if she’d tried. Reaching it now, she wasn’t sure whether it was the cutoff between further adventure or sheer terror. She certainly felt the last. She didn’t look down, didn’t look up other than to search for handholds. Gripped by that terror, she told herself she was an imbecile—told herself she should have waited for the rescue squad— told herself that she was absolutely, positively going to die. But Quinn was dead, and Jordie was up there with a gun, and even if she had wanted to turn back, it was too late. Physically, she couldn’t do it. She had no choice but to keep going, finding one foothold after the next, climbing higher and higher.

  “Jordie?” she called in a shaky voice when she sensed she was nearing the top. She refused to think of how high she was, refused to think of how far she would fall. “Are you still there, Jordie?”

  The derisive sound he made came from a spot not much higher. “Where would I go?”

  Like his threat to jump rather than shoot, the self-derision was telling. She wanted to think he realized that he’d made a mistake but didn’t know how to right it.

  She continued to work one foot after the other until her hands reached open space. Her stomach dropped at the void. For a split second, she was dizzy. She may have even whimpered, though the sound of the rain swallowed it up.

  “You’re crazy,” Jordie said.

  Climbing a step higher, Amanda said a high-pitched, “You and me, both.” Bracing her hands on the top circle of stones, she had moved her feet high enough so that she could bend over that top row and rest her legs, but, for the life of her, she didn’t know what to do next. Her knees were shaking. Her stomach was twisting. She was calling herself every kind of fool for having done this.

  Jordie must have heard the element of panic in her voice, because he said, “There’s a ledge to stand on about two feet down on the inside.”

  She eased a leg over and groped blindly—lower, then lower— until her shoe touched the ledge. It didn’t feel any too wide to her, but it did seem sturdy. Carefully, she slid the other leg over. She held on for a minute, bent over the top. Gingerly, she inched sideways until she reached Jordie.

  He was soaking wet. Though the light was dim, she could see that—and the fact that he was no longer holding the gun. That was some relief, along with the fact that visibility was so poor now that she couldn’t make out the area below the tower. Pretending that they were only three feet off the ground, she carefully slid a leg over and straddled the rock.

  “Graham’s going to kill me,” she said, because it was the first thought that came to mind. “These stones are treacherous. I’m not good at treacherous things.” With a bit of leftover breath, she asked, “Where’s the gun?”

  Jordie didn’t answer.

  “I don’t want it accidentally going off.”

  “I know how to use it.”

  “I’m sure you do,” she said. What she didn’t say was that any moron could point a gun at his heart, pull the trigger, and make his point. She wasn’t giving him any ideas.

  “You shouldn’t’ve come up here.”

  There was a cracking sound, then the thudding of another rock as it careened down the tower’s side. Imagining that if enough stones fell out under their weight, the tower might just crumble and bury them alive, Amanda said in a mildly hysterical way, “I didn’t want you feeling lonely.” She repositioned her hands, one in front and one behind her. They were less than cemented to the wet granite, but the bracing made her feel marginally more secure.

  “How do you know what I’m feeling?” Jordie asked. “You’re not me.”

  “No. But this is what I do.”

  “Read minds?”

  “Feel.” She let that sink in for a minute. “Is it Quinn?”

  Silently, he looked out into the rain and the fast-falling darkness.

  “Quinn needed help,” she said.

  “I helped him,” Jordie muttered bitterly. “I gave him the vodka. He said he wanted it for a party. I thought he meant a weekend party. I thought it’d be cool to go. So I told him my dad had a stash in the basement and wouldn’t miss a bottle. I brought one to school.”

  “And you feel guilty about that.”

  In a rush of angry words, Jordie said, “If I hadn’t given him the stuff, he wouldn’t have been caught drunk, and if he hadn’t been caught drunk, he wouldn’t have been punished, and then there wouldn’t have been anything in the paper, and he wouldn’t have killed himself.”

  “Oh, Jordie. It wasn’t just the piece in the newpaper. It was other things.”

  “Yeah. Like his parents. At least they were together.”

  She couldn’t miss his meaning. “Your parents are together.”

  “Barely. They fight all the time. If that’s what together means, I don’t want it.”

  “All marriages have rocky times.”

  He looked at her then. Even as dim as the light was, she could see his incredulity. “They hate each other.”

  Amanda felt shades of the familiar. Years of agonizing over her parents’ relationship hadn’t produced any answers. She had finally learned to let it go, though that was more easily done intellectually than emotionally. “Whether or not they do, they love you kids. Do you doubt that?”

  Jordie didn’t answer. Instead, turning half around in anger, he blurted out, “Why was he with Gretchen?”

  There was a grating sound from below, a minuscule shudder, the clatter of what sounded like a cluster of small rocks tumbling down the side of the tower.

  Amanda held her breath, didn’t move, didn’t say anything until the sound died without follow-up. In the aftermath, she imagined she and Jordie hurtling down the tower, bumping against the side just as the rocks had done.

  Where is Graham? she cried silently, feeling like a coward but not caring a bit. What was taking him so long?

  “You’re not answering,” Jordie taunted.

  “I didn’t know he had been with Gretchen,” she managed. “Are you sure about that?”

  “It won’t have been the first time he’s cheated on my mom. And don’t tell me I’m wrong. I hear them fighting. I’ll give you names if you wa
nt.”

  “Did he say he was with Gretchen?”

  “No, but my mom thinks he was. She gets so angry, she scares me.”

  Amanda imagined she felt a tremor under her, a tiny aftershock, the resettling of the stones. Feeling an incipient nausea, she said, “I worry about that gun, Jordie. If you’ve stuck it in your waistband and it goes off by accident when these rocks shift again, I’d hate to think what it’d hit.”

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  “It does,” she insisted. Focusing on Jordie, because he was a more stable point of reference than the darkness behind her lids if she closed her eyes, she took a slow, deep breath. She needed to keep Jordie talking until help arrived. “How does your mom scare you?”

  “She’s someone else when she talks to him. I don’t care what you say, she hates him, and it’s Gretchen’s fault. She should’ve moved away when Ben died. She didn’t have any cause to stay and if she did, she should’ve taken care of herself, instead of letting my dad and Graham and Russ fuss over her. If she hadn’t lured them in, none of this would’ve happened.”

  “None of what?”

  “My parents’ fights. There were fights before, but they were okay before this.”

  “That’s like saying Quinn killed himself over the newspaper article. It’s too simplistic an answer.”

  Jordie sat there with his jaw tight, seeming to resist until the words just spilled out. “So why did he kill himself?”

  “He was deeply troubled. He didn’t have anyone to talk to. He felt pressure to succeed. It was just too much.”

  “Everyone feels pressure to succeed. That’s what getting grades in school is about.”

  “He felt pressure to be at the top.”

  “Because of his brothers?”

  “Possibly.”

  “But he was at the top.”

  “He felt pressure to stay there. The pressure grew. He wanted to succeed. He pretended to be confident and self-assured, when inside he wasn’t feeling that at all.”

  Jordie thought for a moment. “So he killed himself because he wasn’t perfect? How does that make the rest of us feel? We aren’t anywhere near being perfect.”

  “And Quinn wasn’t anywhere near perfect either. But he felt such pressure to achieve perfection that he became helpless and gave up. His biggest problem was that the helplessness took away all his strength. But you’re still strong, Jordie—you’re still fighting. Quinn gave up. He wasn’t strong.”

  “He was so. He couldn’t have been all the things he was if he wasn’t strong.”

  “Class president? Starting pitcher? Mr. Congeniality? Life is full of choices, Jordie. None of those things involved tough ones. The one time Quinn faced a biggie, he did it wrong. Death is not a good choice. Not when you’re young and healthy. Not when you have potential. Not when people love you.”

  “It isn’t that simple,” Jordie muttered and looked quickly back toward the path.

  Amanda heard the same sound he did, the thud of approaching footsteps. Seconds later, the beams of large flashlights converged on the ground below.

  “Shit,” Jordie muttered.

  “Amanda?” Graham called around the ground level. “Amanda?”

  “Up here,” she yelled down. The only thing she could see of him was the yellow rain slicker he had put on, and that, only as the beams of other flashlights crossed his body. Suddenly, all of those beams were aimed up, hitting their eyes. Instinctively, she put a hand up to shield hers from the glare, but the movement caused a shift in the rocks. Grasping them, she screamed, “Lower the lights.”

  The lights lowered, forming a network on the ground.

  “Jordie?” Karen called, clearly frightened.

  Lee’s voice followed. “What are you doing up there, Jordie?”

  “Come down,” Karen urged. “We can talk. We can work everything out.”

  There was more thudding from the woods, then another voice. “The squad’s on its way.” It was Russ. “Hang on, Jordie. They’re coming.”

  “Amanda’s up there with him,” Graham said. “I’m going up.”

  “No,” Amanda cried. “No, Gray. It isn’t stable. Rocks were falling out when I climbed. If many more fall, we’re in trouble.”

  “I’m in trouble anyway,” Jordie muttered.

  Amanda grabbed his wrist. “If you go, I go.” She didn’t care whether he was mortified, having everyone he cared about down below. She wasn’t having him die of embarrassment. Not on her watch.

  “You don’t get it,” Jordie cried in a hoarse whisper. “I can’t go down. They’ll kill me when they find out what I’ve done.”

  “The vodka? No one’s going to blame you for that. You didn’t make Quinn drink it.”

  “Not the vodka,” he said in a panicky way. “Gretchen.”

  That quickly, something clicked in Amanda’s mind. She saw the marks of a knife, forming the shape of words that might have been her parrot’s favorite: Fuck it. “The painting.”

  “Yes,” Jordie hissed. “I can’t stand that painting. I can’t stand her. I just want her to leave. My parents would be okay if she left.”

  It wasn’t as simple as that. Amanda knew the havoc that distrust had wreaked between Graham and her, and there had been no cause. In the case of the Cotters, there was. Lee was having an affair, if not with Gretchen, then with someone else. His marriage had been in trouble before Gretchen arrived. Chances were that it wouldn’t improve if she left.

  At the clatter of more rocks, Amanda felt those under her shift. Her pulse raced. She waited for more movement, but there was none.

  Down below, Graham swore.

  “She was right,” Russ told him, his voice just barely carrying up to the top. “Stay down. It’s not safe.”

  “Gray?” Amanda called.

  “I’m okay,” he grumbled, but her attention swung right back to Jordie.

  “I shouldn’t’ve done it,” he muttered in the same desperate way. “I was just so angry, and the phone calls didn’t scare her off.”

  “Phone calls?”

  “Just enough to spook her, only they didn’t. It was stupid of me. Stupid. Stupid.”

  She could feel the tension that radiated through his body in the wrist she held. She gave it a sharp shake. “Not stupid. Angry, yes. But anger’s okay. You have a right to be angry, though not at Gretchen. You can be angry at your parents, because they’re struggling to work some things out, and they’re upsetting you. I’ve been there. I know how that is. I went through the same thing with my parents. I kept telling myself that I couldn’t say anything, because that would only make things worse. So I drew into myself and was silent and moody, which made them more unhappy, and me angrier. It took me years to realize that I had a right to be angry—took me years to give myself permission to be angry.”

  In the rain, he was listening. “And then what?”

  “I expressed the anger. I said what I was thinking.”

  “Did it make things better for them?”

  “No. But I felt better.”

  There was more action below, the beams of floodlights, the approach of more people.

  “Half the town’s here,” Jordie said in dismay.

  “No. Probably just four men. They need that many to carry a ladder long enough to reach us up here.”

  “They’ll put it in the paper, just like the stuff about Quinn.”

  “All they’ll know is that we climbed up here and got stuck.”

  “I’m not going down. I can’t. I know the insurance people were at Gretchen’s. If they don’t come after me, the cops will.”

  Relieved that help was at hand, Amanda spoke more calmly. “They won’t. We’ll work something out.”

  “Like make Gretchen forget her picture’s ruined?” Jordie sneered.

  “No. But it could be she’ll understand what you’re about, and why it happened.”

  “The cops are already involved.”

  “They won’t be, if she refuses to press cha
rges.”

  He snorted. “So then I just have to answer to my parents.”

  “And they won’t feel even a little bit to blame? Think about it, Jordie. Think about what you felt with the vodka and Quinn. Your parents are going to be thinking the same way, once they get over their initial anger. You have to talk to them. You have to tell them what you’re feeling. It may help them, Jordie. Think about that for a minute.”

  There were voices far below, the scrape of aluminum on stone, the extension of the ladder. There was a jiggling, a ratcheting, more scraping and squealing, until the top of the ladder settled against the stone on the other side of Jordie. Amanda held her breath, half expecting the top of the tower to fall inward under the weight. But it held.

  “You have nothing to be ashamed of, Jordie,” Karen called. “Absolutely nothing. Things sometimes happen that aren’t your fault.”

  “We all make mistakes,” Lee said.

  But it was Graham’s voice, spoken with greater quiet and extraordinary intent, that spoke to Amanda. “Hold on, babe. Hold on for me.”

  Her heart swelled and clenched. Somewhere through the rain she felt the warmth of tears in her eyes, but there wasn’t time to dwell on that emotion. With a final creaking as the ladder took on weight, the first of the rescue team started up.

  “What do I do?” Jordie asked Amanda.

  “They love you,” she said, holding his wrist as tightly as ever.

  The ladder creaked; its extension pulleys jangled.

  “Are you going to tell them we talked at school?” Jordie asked in a rush.

  “No,” Amanda answered, feeling an urgency to seal the deal before their time alone was done. “I told you that was confidential. Besides, you’ve told me much more up here than you ever did there. That’s the stuff you need to share with your parents.”

  “About Gretchen? They’ll go apeshit.”

  “Not if you tell them why. Not if you explain.”

  “That’s easy for you to say.”

  Yes, it was. It struck her just then, with help fast approaching, that lately she hadn’t done a very good job sharing her own feelings and thoughts. She was a fine one to talk.