The New Neighbor: A Novel

by Leah Stewart

  “I’m so sorry,” Megan says. “How awful for you.” She puts a gentle hand on Jennifer’s back, keeps it there as they walk.

  “Somebody at the bar told Tommy about a meteor shower, so he got Milo out of bed to show him. It was supposed to be a ‘rare and magical experience.’ He just wanted Milo to see.”

  Now Megan stops walking; now she turns Jennifer toward her and embraces her. There is no choice, is there, between steeling yourself and sobbing. Jennifer steels herself. There’s no way to feel just a little bit. “You poor thing,” Megan says. “You poor, poor thing.”

  She could tell the story, the whole story. Megan would understand.

  Wouldn’t that be a magic trick.

  We’re all a little morally ambiguous, Megan. Maybe, as it turns out, even you. We all have a little dark flame. Ah, but that doesn’t mean we understand each other. We do bad things and yet think of ourselves as good. Fundamentally good, you see, despite a slipup or two. Other people, though. When they do a bad thing, we tend to think they’re bad.

  Megan pulls back to look Jennifer in the eye. “I’m glad you told me,” she says. “Because that’s a miserable thing to go through, and I can’t imagine you’re not still coping with it. I want you to know that I’m always here to listen.”

  “Thank you,” Jennifer says. “I appreciate that.” She turns toward the Cross, which is looming now, enormous and white, so much bigger than she expected it to be. “Almost there,” she says, attempting a smile.

  So now she’s told that story and can’t take it back. Exhibit A. Offered as defense in advance of the trial, she supposes, because surely she’d never have told it if Milo hadn’t let Carrasco slip, if her secret hadn’t been momentarily exposed. She walks fast and Megan does, too, and she hopes by the time they reach the overlook she’ll have thought of something sprightly to say, so that Megan feels like it’s okay to resume normal conversation, to break the melancholy silence of sympathy.

  Here is what Margaret might now know: That Tommy died of a painkiller overdose. That Zoe went to the police. My mother killed him, Zoe said. My mother wanted him dead. She cheated on him. She lied. My father loved me too much to take his own life. My father was a wonderful man. Reasons to investigate, the police said, and the newspaper repeated, and after that how they all looked at her! Her daughter, her mother-in-law, everyone she knew, thinking murderer, murderer, murderer, even after no charges were brought, so loud they should have just chanted it. Zoe Eleanor Carrasco. Her daughter. She went to the police. She gave quotes to the newspaper. That’s how sure she was.

  Pretty damning, wouldn’t you say? For the woman’s own daughter to be that sure? Even a teenager loves her mother.

  The last time Jennifer saw Zoe, she showed up at her parents’ house, Tommy’s mother, Caroline, in tow. “We want to see Milo,” one or both of them said. Jennifer stepped back to let them in, and yet still felt as though they’d forced their way inside. As if they’d shown up with a warrant, banging on the door. Milo was playing in the living room. They dropped to the floor beside him and checked him over: Zoe touching his little hands, Caroline tilting his head back to examine his face. Caroline—who’d always taken Jennifer’s side, who’d tried to tell Tommy he drank too much. How could she imagine Jennifer would hurt her little boy? Before they left Zoe told her that Caroline had been to a lawyer to talk about custody, Caroline herself lingering behind with Milo, hugging him even as he squirmed, hugging him like she wanted to lift him up and carry him away. Zoe said more, but Jennifer wasn’t listening. Jennifer was listing in her head all the things she’d need to pack. She’d planned her departure, then hesitated; now it was time to go. So her son would never look at her the way her daughter did. So her son would stay safe in the enchantment of early childhood, where incomprehension is a blessing, where memory is a rushing stream. So her son would stay hers.

  If Margaret knows, what will happen next? Will she have told Sue the librarian? Probably not, from what Jennifer knows of Margaret. She’ll hoard the secret. She’ll retreat with it to her castle in the woods. And then what?

  Two Girls

  Kay and Maggie Jean, they lived in a world of knowing nothing. Not the language. Not how long before they’d move again. Not whether the person they were talking to would be alive the next day. Not even, sometimes, where they were. A field. A building. Sometimes that was the best they could do.

  They moved. It rained. They moved again. Every day they seemed to sink deeper into the mud. They waded through it up to their knees, stood in the shower with their feet in a thick pool of it. Their pants were splattered with it, their boots caked with it, the unrelenting, unending mud.

  Let me tell you something I remember, something I’ll never forget. Oh, Jennifer, wait, stop—I already told you. There’s no way to count the things I forget, but I do remember telling you now. About the dress that came to me in a pasture in France, the dress from my old life, and how Kay insisted I put it on, and we danced in the grass while men sang and played their helmets like drums. Heaven should be your happiest memory. Heaven should be that memory, forever, with just enough bittersweet to make it matter, to make it hurt.

  I tried to protect her, I really did. I pretended she had a fever, once or twice, when she was laid up. I carried things for her. I got her pain medication on the sly. I tried. That’s why she wasn’t with me the night I got loaned out to another hospital—they’d asked for two nurses, and we were both supposed to go, but when the jeep came I got in by myself and told the driver I was all the chief nurse could spare. There was artillery fire up ahead and the sky lighting up a sick green as shells exploded. He took me to a filthy hospital—it’d been occupied by the Germans—and I didn’t like being there. I was worried about Kay, lying in a fetal position on the hard ground in our tent. I was tired. I didn’t like being in a strange place alone. I tore a German sign off the wall and crumpled it in my hands.

  I don’t remember the first part of my shift, before they brought the boy in. And I don’t remember what exactly his injury was. You might argue that I don’t want to remember, and you might be right. He was young, a teenager. A French civilian, a boy who should have been in school. Maybe he had a brain injury. Maybe he was gut shot. What I remember is the screaming. My God, he screamed. It was the most desperate sound I had ever heard, like you might imagine people scream in hell, if you believed in hell, which I don’t. Hell right here. That’s what I believe in.

  The doctor on shift was young, too, and green as grass, and in the way people often do, he tried to make up for inexperience with arrogance. He wanted me to hold the boy down so he could do something—if I remembered the nature of the injury I might remember what the something was—and I tried, but the boy screamed and writhed as though my hands were branding irons. I remember the feel of his shoulders, the way even his skin seemed to shrink from me, the sharpness of the bone.

  “He needs morphine,” I said.

  “What?” the doctor said. He couldn’t hear me over the screaming.

  “He needs morphine,” I shouted. I felt like I was going to faint, although I knew I wouldn’t. Whatever his injury was I’d seen as bad or possibly worse. But the screaming affected me physically. The screaming was inside my body, it was in my brain, it was moving under my skin.

  “Let’s get him stabilized,” the doctor said, or words to that effect. I’m guessing here, because all I remember for certain is that I kept shouting that the boy needed morphine and the doctor kept ignoring me—entirely, I believe, because he didn’t want to be bossed by the nurse—and the boy kept screaming and he screamed and screamed and screamed until he died.

  When he died, it was like the whole world went quiet. Of course most of the patients on the ward were pretty bad off, but they were conscious, some of them, and one of them had even started yelling along with the boy, no more able to bear the sound than I had been, I suppose. But when the boy stopped screaming all sound stopped. No one moved. No one breathed. I think I know what
we all felt. We were glad he’d died. We were glad he couldn’t scream anymore. Maybe we thought, Thank God, and then we realized, a moment later, that we were thanking God for killing him. I don’t know if the men felt bad about that. I don’t know what brutalities they’d seen or committed, in thought or deed, how far they’d gone from their original notion of themselves. For me, thinking, Thank God, when that boy died—I’d go farther, but I didn’t know that. Then, that was as far as I’d gone.

  When sound came back, it was the doctor talking. That stupid goddamn doctor. “Nothing we could have done,” he said.

  I looked at him. Nothing we could have done. Can I remember what he looked like? He wore glasses, I know. I would have liked to slap them off his face. “Morphine,” I said. I shook my head. I felt like I was choking. “That’s what we could have done.” I turned away, before I did slap him.

  I went about my rounds, checking vitals and so forth. I was even more gentle, more solicitous, than usual, trying to make up for it, I guess. For what I’d thought. Orderlies came and took the boy—the body—away. The doctor—who knows what he was up to. But I can tell you that I’d not quite finished checking vitals when he came up and planted himself in front of me.

  “Nurse,” he said.

  “Lieutenant Riley,” I corrected. I didn’t look at him.

  He ignored me. “We need clean needles and syringes. Go to central supply.”

  Oh, I know exactly why he did it. It’s an easy one, psychologically speaking. I’d been right, he’d been wrong, he and any of the patients conscious enough to pay attention knew it, and now he wanted to reassert his dominance, because his need to be in charge was so great it was the reason he hadn’t eased the suffering of a dying boy.

  Now I did look at him, the arrogant little punk whose face my memory has erased. “I’ll do that,” I said, “when I’m through here. And I’ll do that,” I said, “when you address me as ‘Lieutenant Riley’ and when you say please.”

  He stared at me for a long time, no doubt weighing his options, whether he’d look more foolish if he did as I asked, or if he got in a public fight with me, or if he went to central supply himself. He was a young kid, too, when you think about it, and no doubt terrified underneath it all. You could feel sorry for him, if you wanted to. But I don’t. He let that boy scream himself to death, and I hope wherever he is he hasn’t forgotten that to this day. And if he’s dead I hope it was one of the last things he thought about. This is vengeful and it’s unkind and it’s the truth. I hope he has his prisons, as I have mine.

  “Lieutenant Riley,” he said. “Please go to central supply for needles and syringes as soon as you are able.”

  “As soon as I am able, I will,” I said. I nodded at him, curtly, dismissing him. Get out of my sight, I wanted to say.

  I took my time about finishing up my rounds, but I have to admit it was a relief to get off the ward, to walk quickly down a long and empty hallway, as fast as I could go without running. The trouble was, I realized after a few minutes, that I had no idea how to find central supply. The second I walked off the ward that hospital turned into a maze. How had I found the shock ward in the first place? You know, I can’t remember. I picture myself walking there alone but someone must have shown me the way. At any rate, there was no one to show me now, and I walked down that first hall and turned and walked down another, and then I went down a flight of stairs, and before too long I couldn’t even have found my way back to the starting point.

  I poked my head through several doorways, only to find empty wards, or piles of bloody linens. I was having a hard time staying calm. The last thing I wanted was to give that horse’s ass of a doctor an opportunity to criticize me, but more than that I was developing a panicky conviction that I’d never find the right place. I couldn’t seem to find anybody to ask, either. At the end of a hall I thought I heard voices behind a closed door, and so I opened it.

  But nobody was talking in there. The first thing I noticed, when I pushed open the door, was the smell. I knew that smell, of course, but it took me a moment to place it, because my mind could absorb neither the evidence from my nose nor the evidence from my eyes. Bodies. Bodies upon bodies upon bodies. I saw a foot. I saw a hand. Was this what the Germans had done? Or was it what we had done?

  And then I saw the boy atop the pile, like an answer to that question. Flung there, it looked like, the way his arms were splayed. His eyes still open. His mouth still screaming. He’d died brutally, and this, too, was a brutality, that he’d been flung atop this pile of corpses like so much junk. Did it matter, now that he was dead? It was hard to know what mattered anymore.

  Somebody touched my shoulder. It startled me, but I made no sound. I turned to see a corpsman. He said, “Ma’am, you don’t want to see that.”

  “I already saw it,” I said.

  “They’ll be buried eventually,” he said. “When there’s time to stop and identify them. This is temporary. Come away, now. You don’t want to see.”

  But I’d already seen. There was no making the best of that. There was only looking, and then looking away.

  “Come away now,” the corpsman said again, and I was all docility. I let him pull me away. I let him shut the door. I asked him, very politely, to take me to central supply.

  I remember taking the needles and syringes back to the doctor, and I remember that when he took a syringe from me—snatched, more like—I snapped, “What do you say?”

  “Thank you,” he said, like a scolded little boy.

  Later it was midnight, mealtime, and a corpsman was telling me I was in for a treat.

  “We’ve been eating well,” he said. “The Germans left behind some beef.”

  He offered me a plate. I looked at the slab of meat upon it, and I didn’t think, Flesh and flesh and flesh. I sat down and ate it, like I was starving. I ate it all.

  A jeep dropped me off. It had started to rain, and by the time I climbed out of the jeep it was pouring. I ran for our tent, and just as it came within view I tripped over a tent rope and went flat. I was covered in mud. I found Kay awake inside the tent. She didn’t sleep well anymore, from the pain. “Should we start building an ark?” she asked, then, “What happened to you?”

  “It’s only mud,” I said.

  “Do you want to clean up?”

  “Why bother? Why not just stay covered in mud all the time? Simpler.”

  “Not terribly sterile, though,” Kay said. She’d been rummaging around while I’d been talking, and now she unearthed a towel, sniffed it, made a face, and handed it to me with a shrug.

  I mopped at my shirt, took it off, mopped at my skin. Though we’d put Vaseline on the tent seams in an effort to keep them from leaking, water still ran down from the spots we’d missed or hadn’t been able to reach. I hunched under one of these trickles and did my best to pretend it was a shower. I kept seeing that room, that boy. His open mouth. I felt like I could no longer bear it. And by “it” I mean life, I mean everything.

  “Much more of this rain and we’ll just float out of here,” Kay said.

  “I’m going to give up this futile effort, then,” I said. “I’ll just lie down and wait for the floods to cleanse me.”

  “Of mud and sin,” Kay intoned.

  “Of mud and sin,” I repeated, more grimly than I had intended to.

  There in the dark, where it was sometimes okay to ask such questions, Kay said, “Do you think you’ve sinned?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I feel bad about something.”

  “What?”

  “I don’t know,” I said, not wanting to tell her. Not wanting her to know. “Maybe it’s something I haven’t done yet.”

  “I forgive you now,” she said. “Ahead of time.”

  I lay down, then sat right back up, yelping. Something had pricked my shoulder, something that left it throbbing with pain. A bee. A bee had stung me.

  “What happened?” Kay asked.

  “A bee, Kay. Oh my Lord. I got st
ung by a bee.” I noted with detachment a certain hysteria in my voice. “I’m plagued, I’m plagued, I’m plagued.”

  “Shhhh,” Kay said. She got out her flashlight and checked my wound. “The stinger’s still in there,” she said. She found some tweezers and removed it. She touched the throbbing spot lightly with her finger and for an instant it seemed to cool. What a good nurse she was. I wanted to talk to her like the boys on the tables talked to me. I wanted to say she made me feel safe; I wanted to beg her not to let me die.

  “I’m going crazy,” I said.

  “I’m not going to let that happen,” she said. “I’m not going to let anything happen to you.”

  I believed her. I remember that I really did believe her, though it made no sense. She sat next to me, our shoulders touching, and we listened to the rain. She told me I was lucky I wasn’t allergic to bees.

  I said, “I am lucky,” and she said, “You are lucky.” She picked up my hand and wove our fingers together. I looked at our hands. Flesh and flesh and flesh. I looked at her face. She looked back at me. And then I kissed her.

  It wasn’t a long kiss. It was just a little kiss, a closed-mouth kiss, on her lips, and though I felt an answering pressure, her mouth against my mouth, she pulled back almost immediately. That was the end. That was all. So many things happened because of that kiss. But it barely existed. It could so easily have been erased.

  And I don’t even know, Jennifer, if it meant what you doubtless think it means. You probably think I’m lying when I say this, in this age when all love must be neatly categorized. But I’m not lying. I don’t know, Jennifer. I just don’t know. I’d been so shaken, so upset. That boy, the screaming. I did love her. But I don’t know what kind of love it was.