The New Neighbor: A Novel

by Leah Stewart

  When you’re accustomed to shells coming in, you can tell by the sound whether they’re going to go over. You can hear them testing—the shells go too far one way, and then they try the other way, and then the third time they get you. “One,” I said out loud as I heard them go too far. “Two,” I said as I heard them go the other direction.

  “Don’t,” Kay said.

  Three, I said silently in my head. I waited. “Three,” I whispered. But nothing. I held my breath. I let it out. I could have sworn I heard Kay whisper, “Three.” But nothing came.

  Kay reached for my hand. She clutched it so hard I felt my bones give way, but I didn’t say a word to stop her. I said, “ ‘But death replied: “I choose him.” So he went, / And there was silence in the summer night; / Silence and safety; and the veils of sleep. / Then, far away, the thudding of the guns.’ ”

  “Jesus, Maggie Jean,” she said.

  “Siegfried Sassoon,” I said. “I had a patient, before the war, who used to quote poetry to me. Didn’t I ever tell you that? He’d been in the First World War, and I think he was hoping to persuade me not to join. Mr. Lewis. I can’t believe I never told you about him.”

  More shells. The first went past us again.

  “One,” Kay said.

  “He was dying,” I said. “Cancer of the neck. He was probably fifty. He was married, no kids, and his wife almost drove me crazy, because from the moment I saw him I knew he’d come to the hospital to die, and every day she’d come in and ask me didn’t I think he was better. He’d been an English teacher of some kind, high school or college, I can’t remember. The cancer had affected his voice, so that he spoke in this scratchy way that sounded painful. Must have been painful. But he was determined to talk. His whole life had been about talking and it was the last thing he’d let go.”

  I stopped talking for a moment and listened. Nothing. I went on. “The head nurse was a stickler when it came to pain meds, didn’t want us to up his morphine. I mean, was she afraid he’d carry an addiction into the next life, begging morphine from the angels? He didn’t complain, not Mr. Lewis, but when a patient’s on your ward long enough you learn to read him, and I could tell by his forehead . . .” In the dark I touched my own, picturing the tension in Mr. Lewis’s brow, the way the skin whitened around his mouth. “Once when I got near his bed I realized some sound I’d been hearing suddenly stopped. After that I started pausing a few feet away to listen to him. ‘Oh, oh, oh,’ he’d whisper, when he thought nobody was near. ‘Oh, oh, oh.’ ”

  I stopped again. “Go on,” Kay whispered.

  “I asked her—the head nurse—over and over to up his meds. She wouldn’t. So I went to the doctor. He not only upped the meds, he took her to task, let me tell you. She hated me after that.”

  Kay snorted. “I shouldn’t wonder.” She sounded a little more like herself. We heard a howling overhead. “Two,” Kay said.

  I listened hard. “That’s why I joined. Because Mr. Lewis died. I know that doesn’t quite make sense. But that’s why.”

  “You never did tell me that,” Kay said, and I wondered why there was sorrow in her voice. “But I’ve told you,” she said, “how my father didn’t want me to join.” Her shaking seemed to vibrate the floor. “He said I would shame him. He said if I joined I could forget coming home again.” She pulled her hand from mine.

  I swallowed. I didn’t want her to mean that I was part of that shame. I didn’t want that to be why she’d taken away her hand. “But where else will you go?”

  “I have shamed him, haven’t I?” she said. “He was right to try to stop me. I never should have come.”

  “Don’t say that.”

  “I’m sorry that I came.”

  “Don’t say that.”

  “We’re going to die right here, Maggie Jean. We’re going to die.”

  “We aren’t,” I said, and I took her hand and held it hard, as hard as she’d held mine earlier, trying to stop her shaking.

  We heard howling again, and this time it got louder and louder and failed to diminish. When would it diminish? “Three,” we said at the same moment, and then the shell hit. A life-altering sound. The walls quaked. Plaster rained from the ceiling. It felt like it was not just the building about to crumble around us but the entire world.

  A long time after the walls stopped trembling, we stayed in that corner. Kay shook and shook and I held her hand and listened to the both of us breathing.

  We waited. Nothing, and nothing. Then some distant shouting. “Is it over?” Kay asked.

  “Yes,” I said, as if I had any idea.

  “Help me up,” she said, and only then did I realize that her back was bad again. I helped her up, though my hands were trembling. And then we went to check on the patients, who were fine, or as fine as they could be, just white with plaster dust. A corpsman had died, but I didn’t know him, and his death isn’t why I tell this story.

  I tell it because of this.

  For a moment, before we went to check for damage, we stood there looking at each other, my hands on her arms as if to steady her. Her eyes were full of tears that I thought at first were from the pain and the fright. But that wasn’t why she was sad. She looked at me hard, like she was never going to see me again, like she was trying to memorize my face. And then she stepped back so that my hands fell away. That was the moment I really knew I’d lost her. I don’t know what I’d been hoping for, but that was when I knew I’d never have it, or if I’d had it, it was gone.

  The next night was when she went out with him. I remember she didn’t seem to want to go. I remember she said before she went, “I don’t know about him. He’s . . . pushy.”

  “So don’t go,” I said. “Stay here with me.”

  A strange look crossed her face then. Maybe it was the way I’d said the words. Or maybe it was just the way she heard them, that kiss, that goddamn kiss, changing everything. “I think I’ll go,” she said.

  And I put my face back in my book, without another word. That’s what I did, Jennifer.

  In the morning, when I asked how the date had been, she said it was fine, but she wouldn’t look at me. There was an angry scratch on her neck, a strange flatness in her voice. Do you understand, Jennifer? I didn’t myself, until later. I was there and I failed to see, and maybe that’s one reason why I did what I did, because in my own grief and resentment I’d failed to see. There are so many ways in which the world is terrible, sometimes you fail to spot them all.

  The Ones We Love

  This morning Jennifer yelled at Milo. She lost her temper—over a little thing, an everyday thing, his snatching the Cheerios box from her hand after she said no more cereal, spilling Cheerios all over the floor, then stepping on them, crunching them into a spreading dust. All of it, except the snatching, an accident. In return she grabbed his arm, pulled him close, smacked him, twice, on his behind. For a moment he looked mulish but then he burst into tears. “You spanked me,” he said, in tones of grief and wonderment.

  She knows it’s not rational to blame Margaret for this. But she is tense, she is so tense, and that is undeniably Margaret’s fault. Just tell me, she wants to demand. About Kay, yes, and the terrible world, and why you did what you did, and what you know about me. Unwrap the bandage. Hand me a mirror. “Do you understand?” Margaret asked, and Jennifer said, “I think—” but Margaret interrupted.

  “Don’t,” she said. “Don’t say it.”

  “You asked me,” Jennifer said.

  “So I did,” Margaret said. And then she abruptly changed the subject. “Are you still spending time with that professor friend?” Why would Jennifer have told her about Megan? But she must have, because then Margaret said Megan’s name. “Her husband’s a photographer, you said?”

  “Yes,” Jennifer said.

  “Maybe I should have one last portrait made. To go with this”—Margaret waved her hand at Jennifer’s notebook, on her face that look of disdain—“this thing you’re writing. Have you had
your portrait made?”

  “No,” Jennifer said. “Why would I do that?”

  Margaret looked at her appraisingly. “You wouldn’t,” she said with certainty, and then to Jennifer’s surprise she smiled. “I wouldn’t either, to tell you the truth.”

  Jennifer is reviewing this scene, thinking about Margaret, even though she’s out walking in an effort to shake her off. She’s on the Perimeter Trail, which encircles Sewanee—or the Domain, that humorously fantastic and yet appropriate name. She’s discovered, since Megan introduced her to this trail and the access point at the Cross, that she likes a solitary walk in the woods, likes clambering up a rock where the trees open out on a view of valleys and mountains and trees and trees and trees. She likes surveying an uninhabited world. When someone approaches on the trail—you can always hear them coming, their voices and their footsteps in the crackling leaves so wrongfully loud—she has to fight an urge to dart behind rock or tree and hide until they’ve passed. She forces herself to stay on the path, make eye contact, smile, say hi.

  “You and I,” Margaret said yesterday, “we’d both like to be invisible.”

  “What makes you say that?”

  “But then,” Margaret said, “sometimes we wish we weren’t.”

  Jennifer would’ve liked to deny this, but instead she looked down at the notebook, closed the cover on its words. Jennifer wishes Margaret didn’t know Megan’s name.

  Her phone rings in her pocket and she checks the screen and sees the number for Milo’s school. She pauses, panting a little from exertion, and holds on to a small tree. Right here the trail’s at the very edge of the bluff, and it’s a long way down. She makes herself wait one more ring before she answers, makes herself say a calm hello, as though to behave as if something bad had happened would guarantee it had.

  But something bad has happened. Milo is fine, Milo is fine, but he’s harmed another boy. “I don’t understand,” Jennifer says, after the first description, and so Miss Amber explains again. Her Southern accent has an edge during the second telling, sweetness that isn’t sweet. “But I don’t understand why he would do that,” Jennifer says.

  There’s a shrug in Miss Amber’s voice. “He says the other child took his toy, but of course that’s no excuse.”

  “Of course not,” Jennifer says blankly.

  “We’d like you to come pick him up,” Miss Amber says. “He’ll have to go home for the rest of the day. We don’t tolerate this kind of violence. That’s our policy.”

  Jennifer has an impulse to ask what kind of violence they do tolerate, but she doesn’t. She assures Miss Amber that she’ll be there soon, and then she stands there clutching the tree in a daze. What Milo did today was stab another child in the face with a pencil. “Thankfully,” Miss Amber said, “not in his eye.”

  Yes, thankfully not in his eye. But why at all? Why would her tiny child, her baby, her sweet, sweet boy, put a hole in another child’s face? Because she spanked him today? This is what she knows—she with her repository of secrets, her comforting, healing touch: that none of us is good, as much as we might want to be. And yet somehow she believed that Milo would be the exception. Now, like everyone else, he’s an inflictor of damage. He’s left a scar.

  When she gets out of her car in the preschool parking lot, Sebastian is a row ahead of her, getting out of his. She stops, surprised and unnerved, and hoping his presence doesn’t mean that Ben was the victim of Milo’s attack. Ben and Milo proclaim themselves best friends at every opportunity. Again and again Jennifer and Megan have shared affectionate smiles at the sight of the two boys whispering together, one with his arm around the other’s waist. If Milo had to stab somebody, she would rather it be Ethan, a pushy and obnoxious child who runs up to her at pickup for the sole purpose of giving her an animal’s predatory grin, baring his sharp and tiny teeth before darting away. She’d like to stand here a moment, let Sebastian walk into the school ahead of her, but that would be cowardly, and even if she waited chances are slim that she could avoid him completely in the narrow hallways, crowded with cubbies and bins of picture books. So she walks, at a normal pace, and before he reaches the gate into the playground he hears her footsteps and turns. Then she has to keep walking toward him, with him watching her, which she doesn’t like.

  “Well, this is a surprise,” he says, when she’s very close. “Was it Milo?”

  “Was it Ben?” she answers.

  “With the pencil in his face? Yes.”

  “I’m sorry,” she says.

  He shrugs. “You didn’t do it,” he says. “I assume you’re not at home doing weapons training with school supplies.”

  She smiles, against her will. “No,” she says. “But I’m still sorry. I can’t imagine why he’d go after Ben. He loves Ben.”

  “We hurt the ones we love,” he says. “Let’s go survey the aftermath.”

  Jennifer realizes, following him inside, that she’s relieved it’s Sebastian and not Megan who’s come to deal with this. She’s afraid Megan will be terribly upset, will take this as a sign that both burgeoning friendships should be quashed. Sebastian, though, seems calm. We hurt the ones we love. Maybe he takes that for granted.

  Sebastian walks right into Miss Amber’s classroom, but Jennifer puts her head in the door, trying not to feel like she herself is the guilty one. Milo isn’t in the room. Ben is playing trucks in the corner with another child, a Band-Aid cross high on his left cheek. Sebastian crouches next to him and picks up a truck. As far as Jennifer can tell he’s not asking about the incident. He crashes his truck into Ben’s, and then Ben crashes his into Sebastian’s. On the other side of the room Miss Amber is enmeshed in a hug from an adoring little girl. She looks up and sees Jennifer and her expression changes. As she comes over to Jennifer, her face is grave. “Milo’s in Miss Helen’s office,” she says. Miss Helen is the preschool director, a woman in her sixties who is either sweet or stupid or very cleverly disguised. “What happened?” Jennifer says, because it’s her obligation to know.

  Miss Amber holds up both hands as if to forestall attack. “I didn’t see it,” she says. “First thing I knew, Ben was crying and his face was bleeding. Milo says he did it but he won’t apologize. I’ve seen nothing wrong between them. They play a little rough every now and then, but that’s just boys. I’m surprised Milo would be so aggressive. Has something been going on at home?”

  Jennifer hates this question: the teacher’s polite way of asking how you’ve fucked up your child. She got it frequently with Zoe, who behaved and tested well but often half-assed her homework. Sometimes Jennifer suspected Zoe of doing it on purpose—her messy unfinished algebra or partially plagiarized essay on Huck Finn—so that Jennifer would have to have these conversations. So that again and again she’d have to lie. “No,” she’d say. “Nothing’s going on at home.” She says it now, and for once she’s not lying. “I don’t know why he’d do that.”

  Miss Amber makes a moue of sympathy, which may or may not be genuine. “Well, it’s probably just a one-time thing,” she says.

  “Either that or he’s a sociopath,” Jennifer says. Miss Amber looks like she doesn’t quite know how to respond to this, so Jennifer smiles, to signal that she’s joking, and Miss Amber makes a sound that gestures toward laughter, and Jennifer says she’ll talk to Milo and withdraws into the hall. Once, after Milo had been in the classroom about a month, Jennifer arrived unseen and heard Miss Amber saying to the children, “You’re killing me.”

  Inside Miss Helen’s office, Milo is slouched in a child-size plastic chair with his arms folded across his chest. Her baby, her boy-child. Her reward. He radiates defiance, and Jennifer can tell from the edge in the director’s voice that she’s been trying and failing to inspire remorse. “We’ve been talking about what happened,” Miss Helen says.

  “What happened, Milo?” Jennifer asks.

  “Didn’t Miss Amber tell you?” Miss Helen asks.

  “She told me what happened,” Jennifer says. �
��I was asking him why.”

  “Well, he hasn’t told us that. We’ve asked, but he refuses to say.”

  Milo slides from the chair to the floor and picks two cars out of a plastic bin. In an echo of Ben, he crashes the cars together. “Ow, ow, ow,” one car cries, and the other says, “Ha ha ha,” and smashes down again. She could tell him not to smash the cars like that, not to act out the infliction of pain. She could make it a permanent rule. But then he’d just do it when she wasn’t there to see. Is that all morality is? Concealment?

  Miss Helen stands up behind her desk as if to signal that she wants the both of them to get the hell out. “Milo has refused to apologize. I’ve explained we need to control our bodies. We need to be sorry when we’ve hurt someone.”

  “I’ll talk to him,” Jennifer says. Milo suddenly launches himself up from the floor and into Jennifer. He smashes his face into her leg and clings with both hands to her jeans. He growls. Jennifer steadies herself and puts a hand on his head. “I’ll talk to him,” she says again, and then she crouches and picks Milo up—awkwardly, he’s getting so big—and hustles him out of there as fast as she can. He’s still clinging, still intermittently growling. “Milo, Milo, Milo,” she says into his ear. “Why did you do it?”

  “I didn’t,” he says, ferociously, as if he believes it. Maybe he can persuade her to believe it, too.

  How could he stab his friend in the face, her sunny, innocent creation? How could he do that? Because he’s hers? What she should do is drive away from this Mountain, flee the scene. Now there’s not just her reputation to escape but Milo’s as well, and in the next place there will be no preschools, no lunches, no playdates, so that no one can know them. No one can ever know them.