The New Neighbor: A Novel

by Leah Stewart

  Zoe

  I always see the skull beneath the skin.

  —P. D. JAMES

  Life Story

  In Zoe’s oldest memory her father is singing. She doesn’t remember what, only that it was something sweetly melancholy, and that she was in his lap and he was rocking her and she was very, very upset. She no longer knows why. She was holding a doll with a tear-shaped stain under one eye, and she remembers believing that both the doll’s tear and her father’s song expressed the depths of her own sorrow.

  Her father! He was a wonderful man. If she were to list her top five memories, it would be tough to include one that didn’t feature him. If she were to then arrange those memories chronologically, as a version of her life story, it would look like all that had mattered in her life so far was the time they spent together. Lying on her bed in her dorm room, staring up at her roommate’s stupid posters, she can picture this timeline. Like the ones she used to make in elementary school, with photos and dates and titles for the appropriate milestones—My First Birthday, My First Dance Class.

  They wouldn’t be milestones, though. Not on this timeline. Never mind the clichés. No birthdays, no tutus, no sitting on Santa’s lap. What should matter isn’t what’s supposed to matter but what does. At nineteen Zoe already knows how much of experience loses substance in your mind, grows foggy, fades and vanishes. From solid to smoke. What matters are not the times when you took lots of pictures. What matters are the times when you felt something so strongly it overrode the automatic delete. The memories that stay in your mind like a program you can run. Like a dream you can reenter. Like a hologram. Time in a bubble. There’s a reason you see so much of that stuff in sci-fi. Everybody wants it to be real.

  “See there?” the film studies professor who tried so hard last semester might say. “You do have a topic you can write about.”

  Would she rather her brain was a projector, and she could play scenes on the wall, watch them like a movie? Or would she prefer a virtual reality machine, letting her live her memories again? Maybe she’d like to have both capabilities, so she could switch between them at will. Sometimes she’d watch. Sometimes she’d live.

  Zoe’s childhood, which she thinks of as a fairly standard American middle-class one, took place in Clovis, New Mexico. In fact most of her life to date took place there, excepting a few vacations, until she came to college here. To people here, in Michigan, New Mexico is exotic, but this is beyond ridiculous. She spent no time at all roaming the mountains, learning Native American wisdom. We’re talking small-town Americana, people. A town with strip malls and housing developments, sitting in matter-of-fact exposure on the flat-ass plains. There’s nothing exotic about a pickup truck.

  Zoe exists in a condition of irritable sorrow. Her grief is a secret to the people around her. Her irritability is not. At least she thinks her grief is a secret. Some of the adults—that film studies professor—treat her with a compassion that suggests they can spot it. Her peers mostly leave her alone, and thus she lies on her bed in her dorm room on a Friday night, while the rest of the world makes merry. She would not like anyone to know it, but she has cried about this. And yet the people who try to reach her—she pulls back from them with all but an animal snarl.

  She was not always like this. Once she had many friends, she had an openness to joy. What her father taught her in childhood was how to welcome the world, to seek out delight. Her mother, her wary, closed-off mother—but she will not think about her mother now. Her father once showed her a video of her mother dancing. Zoe was little, five or six. Her father whispered, “Don’t tell her I showed you this,” even though her mother wasn’t there to hear. It was hard for Zoe to understand that the dancer on the stage was her mother, even though of course she looked like her. But she was so abandoned. At that age Zoe wouldn’t have used that word. But she recognized what she wasn’t yet able to describe: her mother not just abandoned to beauty, but making the world more beautiful, all by herself. Her mother summoning joy. Zoe’s eyes filled with tears, watching.

  “Oh, look at you,” her father said, pulling her onto his lap, wiping her eyes with his fingers. “Look at you, sweet pea. Are you happy or sad?”

  “Why?”

  “Why what, sweet pea?”

  “Why can’t I tell her?”

  Her father watched the video. She could see he was thinking about what to say. “Sometimes we don’t like to remember when we were happy.”

  “Why?”

  “Because remembering makes us miss it, and then we feel sad.” He kissed her head. “But I wanted you to see how your mother could dance.”

  “Could I dance like that?”

  “You’re her little girl,” he said. “I bet you can.”

  Zoe closes one eye and then the other, watching how her roommate’s poster shifts from side to side. It’s a Doctor Who poster—her roommate is a major fangirl. Zoe, never having heard of the show, did ask some polite questions in the beginning, but she found her roommate’s eager complicated explanations hard to follow, and then when the other girl offered to show her some episodes Zoe said no. Now her roommate has found a crowd of like-minded people, and they wear catchphrase T-shirts they find on the Internet and buy advance tickets to midnight openings of fantasy movies. Zoe probably could have belonged to this group—maybe quite happily, as she has no objection to nerds or their enthusiasms—if she’d just that one time said yes. She could be with them right now, doing whatever they’re doing—her roommate doesn’t bother to tell her anymore. Sure, let’s watch one. Would that have been so hard?

  Yes, that’s the trouble. Yes, it would’ve been.

  So that’s one memory. Is that really a top five though? What criteria is she applying? Does top mean favorite, or just unshakable? She remembers sitting on the stairs until her leg fell asleep, and how scary and weird that was, because it had never happened to her before, and it hurt but it didn’t, and she couldn’t walk on it, numb and then prickly prickly prickly, and she cried. Who came running when she cried, that time? She doesn’t remember. Maybe no one. Does that count as a top-five memory? Does she have to be crying in all of them?

  And so we move through childhood into junior high and high school, and there are birthdays, and tutus. She insisted on taking dance classes, though her mother was reluctant at first. She took them all through elementary school. Then, after the end-of-year recital in seventh grade, her mother was in tears, and Zoe stormed away, certain they were tears of disappointment, and her mother caught up to her and squeezed both of her arms and said, “For God’s sake, Zoe, I’m crying because you were wonderful!” The next year, when her mother said, “So I’m signing you up again, right?” Zoe said, “No, I don’t want to do it anymore.” Her mother opened her mouth to argue. But then she just closed it and walked away.

  That was her mother. They never talked about it again.

  She walked away from most fights with Zoe, her face set, her mouth thin, everything about her a refusal. She was willing enough to scream at Zoe’s father, though. If the fight was with Zoe’s father, she was perfectly willing to freak out.

  High school was high school: classes, friends, dating. Learning to drive. A baby in the house—that was a striking development. And seeing your mother in a movie theater with some guy, performing a confident hand job. There’s one that stays in the brain. She’d like to have seen the teacher’s face if she turned in a timeline with that on it. But that happened before high school—she’s jumbling everything up. That happened around the time she decided to quit dancing.

  She has good memories from high school. She and her father chase Milo in the backyard. He’s wearing a little yellow sweater. He laughs his delighted baby laugh. Her father catches him and throws him in the air and Milo screams with joyful terror, and then her mother pokes her head outside and says, “Be careful,” and they all stand very still, like deer, until she goes back inside. “Baby catch!” her father says, and tosses Milo to Zoe, and she catches him with
a hand on either side of his solid little torso and he looks at her with a face that says yes yes yes, a face full of trusting happiness, and she kisses him on his little nose and then turns him around and tosses him back to her father.

  But this is stupid, this has always been stupid. Listing her memories, marking off her life. It’s all a lot of blah blah blah. She did this, she did that. Time progressed, like it does.

  And then she walked into a room in search of a hairbrush and found her father dead.

  What People Do

  Last night I had a dream that I’d gone to an enormous building, where all the surfaces were shiny, the floors were enormous conveyer belts, and everywhere I went someone gave me exactly what I wanted. I carried a cup that was repeatedly filled with silver liquid, like mercury.

  I don’t know what this means. Maybe that’s my odd little notion of heaven. It was one of those dreams so vivid they compete with actual events in your memory, insisting on their realness. I look down and feel faintly surprised not to see that cup of mercury in my hands.

  An actual memory: When I was small I spent some weeks quarantined in my room, sick with a fever. In the morning I listened as my father left the house and at night I waited to hear him return. My mother said that after I got better I started telling everyone, “I go to work someday,” which, depending on your point of view, was either a shocking or an amusing thing to hear a little girl say. You might wonder if I became a nurse because I’d once been ill, but there’s no need to apply psychology to that particular decision. There weren’t many careers open to women back then.

  The reason I didn’t join the army right out of school is because my father kept telling me to wait. He’d been in the First World War. There was a framed picture of him on his study wall, shaking hands with some general, and the look on his face, of joy and admiration, was not one I ever saw in person. I told him I wanted to enlist long before I did it. Wait, he said, wait. He wrote, This war is going to last a long time. He said, and he was right, that I didn’t have the remotest idea what it was going to be like. I was so innocent. Or dumb. I was still in nursing school then, and it really was like a convent. All you did was you got up and you worked and then you went back to the dormitory and you had to study, because you had classes, and then you went to bed. You didn’t go on vacation, take trips, go abroad. You didn’t do any of that stuff, because you didn’t have any money, but it didn’t matter because what did you know of another way of life? We scrubbed furniture and soaked linen. We had two weeks’ annual vacation, and other than that not a single day off in three years. We had to get written permission to be out past ten o’clock. We got five dollars a month.

  When I graduated, they kept me on at Vanderbilt. My friend Grace and I rented a furnished apartment with two other girls. It was so small Grace and I had to share a bed, and we took turns sleeping on the lumpy side. It’s funny to think about people who were once the same as you. Grace stayed stateside. While I was overseas she got married and moved to Montana, where all manner of things doubtless happened to her. At Vanderbilt, I worked on the medical ward, although I would rather have been on the surgical one, where Grace was. There, nurses shaved skin for surgery, prepared recovery beds, changed dressings, wished people well and forgot their names. It felt like progress. People on the medical ward had diseases, cancer and pneumonia, and so many of them just wasted away.

  Every day on the way to work I saw the same recruitment poster, with a nurse gazing down at her patient like she was about to kiss him, and lettering that said, SAVE HIS LIFE AND FIND YOUR OWN—BE A NURSE. I didn’t feel like I was saving anybody’s life. Maybe good nursing care did save the pneumonia patients, like the head nurse said, but I always felt like their recovery had more to do with natural resilience, and the healing properties of time. Ever since Pearl Harbor, I’d been living in one of those dreams where you know you’re supposed to be somewhere but you just can’t get there and time speeds by while you stand at the mirror, trying to pin up your hair. Every time I got on the bus to go to work, especially if I was late and had to dash for it and climb aboard disheveled with my cap bag swinging in my hand, and all those people looked at me, I seemed to hear what they were thinking: there I was, still in Nashville, unable to even make a bus on time, when I should have been at war.

  Then one day in 1944 I stumbled off a train into the near dawn of Fayetteville, North Carolina. The platform was deserted and dark, my bag was heavy, I was supposed to get to Fort Bragg. I’d expected someone to be there to meet me, but no one was. I’d expected that person to tell me where to go. I considered sitting down on my bag and crying, until I imagined the look my father would give me. So I didn’t cry, I didn’t wait for someone to show up to rescue me. I dragged my bag across the street to the Fayetteville Hotel, a tall building with a single dim light in the window, and pushed through the lobby door. And there she was, Marilyn Kay, my fellow soldier. Waiting for me.

  Lucy called yesterday. Fairly early in the morning, considering she’s on California time.

  “Hello, darling,” I said, so pleased to hear her voice.

  “Hi, Margaret,” she said. “How are you?” There was a hitch in her tone, a slight formality, that told me what I didn’t want to know. She could have hung up without another word and I would’ve known she wasn’t coming. We had to play out the conversation anyway, because that is what people do.

  “How are you?” she asked.

  “I’m lonely,” I said.

  “Oh, Margaret, I know, I’m sorry,” she said. “And I can’t come see you any time soon, and I’m so so sorry about that. I really wish I could.”

  She sounded weary and sad about it, and I believed she was. I was angry at her anyway. “All right,” I said.

  “Is there any chance you could come out here?”

  “It’s been a long time since I traveled.”

  “I know.”

  Then we both were silent. Maybe I could go out there—clear it with my doctor, pack my bags. The thought is terrifying. I was upset that she’d suggested it. I don’t like to be reminded that I’ve lost my taste for adventure.

  “I really would like to see you,” she said. “I love you, you know.”

  “That’s easy to say,” I said, though I of all people know it isn’t. “If you really loved me, you’d come.” Then I hung up.

  Don’t think I report any of this with pride.

  As for Jennifer, she meant what she said: no more unburdening. She’s come three times since she made that decree, and every time I thought she might relent, but she didn’t, and trying to think how to compel her I was so tense and unhappy under her hands that I felt worse after the massage than I had before. So I said we’d take a break from that, too. Instead of looking sorry she said, “All right,” and told me to call her if I changed my mind.

  I have thought ever since about changing my mind.

  It is easier to be alone when you’ve been a long time used to it. When you’ve forgotten the other possibility. But I don’t want her to come if she doesn’t want to come. That has been my position all along. The paper with Zoe’s number is still right here on the desk. I took the paper from Jennifer’s house even though she might’ve noticed it missing. Perhaps I wanted her to notice. But I shouldn’t call. I know I shouldn’t call.

  I’m lonely, I said to Lucy. It strikes me that I’ve never said that aloud before. How very sad it is to be honest only when I want to hurt someone.

  I don’t know why I did it. I tried to ignore the idea. I wrote down that I shouldn’t do it, like that would vanquish the urge. I made some tea and drank it. I made many valiant efforts to read my mystery. But the mystery I really want to solve is not in the pages of that book. I want to know whatever it is Zoe knows. That must be why I dialed the number, pressing each big button on my old phone slowly, as if to give myself time to change my mind. One ring, then two, and the girl answered. Her hello was abrupt, clipped, reluctant. Or did it just sound that way to me? At any rate, whateve
r I might have said snagged on its way out. I breathed into the phone, and then I hung up. I sat for a moment with my hand on my heart, like a startled old lady on a TV show. When the phone rang shrilly a moment or two later, I’m glad no one was there to see me jump. I answered. I tried to say hello, but I hadn’t spoken a word aloud since I talked to Lucy yesterday, and the sound emerged a whisper.

  “Hello?” an answering voice said. The girl’s voice, of course. I can’t really say more about it than that—not the sound of it, not her tone as she said the word—because I noticed little beyond my own confusion. “Is someone there?”

  I didn’t speak, but neither did I hang up.

  “Who is this?” the girl, Zoe, asked. “The least you could do is say something.”

  I hung up.

  Sometimes I forget the basic facts of what the world is now. Of course I know that there is no longer such a thing as an anonymous phone call. Of course she’d seen my number on her telephone. I should have anticipated all that. But many things have been true and then no longer true in the years that I’ve been alive. The years and years, the many, many years. Surely it’s no wonder I sometimes forget.

  She called back. I didn’t answer. My answering machine picked up—a robotic voice, announcing my number. A beep. Her voice: “Pick up.” A silence. Then: “I just got a call from this number. Is anyone there?”