The New Neighbor: A Novel

by Leah Stewart

  “Yes,” I said aloud to the machine.

  There was a long, whirring silence. Then she said, “Mom? Is that you? I don’t know why you would call me if you didn’t want to talk to me.” Then she hung up.

  Dear girl, I don’t know why either.

  I thought that would be the end of it. But she called again. This time she didn’t wait for the machine but hung up midring. Silence. The clock ticktocking. Then she called again. This has gone on ever since. The phone is a live creature. I have woken a beast.

  Now it rings again. The persistence of this girl, the utterly terrifying persistence. Is it anger or desperation that drives her to insist again and again on my attention? If I were indeed her mother, and if I were to answer, what would she want me to say?

  Why did I call her? I’d be hard-pressed to explain my behavior, even if you put me on the witness stand and I swore to tell the truth. Which I’d take seriously, as my civic duty, and not because I think there is a God to help me.

  We all want to satisfy our curiosity, and the little voice that tells us it’s wrong to peep and pry is one trained into us from childhood, and nothing natural about it. We will all satisfy our curiosity when we can, which is any time we think no one will catch us.

  The phone rang for the last time at midnight, but I can’t sleep. I just lie here, waiting for it to come again and break the silence.

  Mountains

  Suspended animation. That was her condition. And then the phone call woke her up. It’s not particularly rational to feel that way, Zoe knows that. And it certainly wasn’t rational to call back so many times. Sometimes Zoe is glad she has no friends, as she’d hate for anyone to be paying attention to some of the shit she does. It could’ve been a wrong number. But then wouldn’t the person have just said so when she called back? Instead of breathing in a frightened way and refusing to speak? There was too much weirdness for a simple mistake. Also in favor of Zoe’s theory is the pure clarifying conviction she feels. In the grip of it she couldn’t stop herself from calling again and again.

  There you have it, folks. Zoe’s private, personal craziness, from which she’s spared you, her resolute unfriendliness a kind of martyrdom. Even without evidence, she is certain that it was her mother who called. Her mother has never tried to contact her before, not since Zoe moved in with her grandmother in the wake of her father’s death. After Zoe went to the police, she heard nothing from her mother. No accusations, no self-defense. No apologies. She saw her only the time when she and her grandmother came by to see Milo. Then her mother and Milo vanished.

  But now: a phone call. And a refusal to speak, which must be proof of guilt, or if not that then some other strong emotion. An irresistible longing. An unvanquishable loneliness. Proof of something her mother feels. Proof that her mother feels something. She realizes now that this is what she’s been waiting for.

  She has dance class today. An exercise class is among the college requirements, and she thought she might as well take something she could manage to pass fairly easily. Do the minimum has been her philosophy, but today she flings herself into every kick and turn. It feels good, she has to admit. To let her movement meet the music, to get those kicks up high, to sweat. Halfway through the class she notes the teacher watching her with barely repressed astonishment. But she pays no attention. She is not dancing for the teacher. She is just dancing.

  After class the teacher comes up to her and says, “Zoe, I feel like I’ve never seen you before.”

  “I’ve been here.”

  “No, you haven’t.”

  Zoe can’t really argue with this. “Well,” she says.

  “You have enormous natural ability. Has anyone ever told you that?”

  Zoe shrugs. Yes, they have, but it seems obnoxious to say so.

  “And this is your first class? It’s a shame you didn’t start training earlier.”

  “I danced when I was little. It’s just been a long time.”

  “Well, those fundamentals don’t go away. You must have had good teachers.”

  “My mother was a dancer,” Zoe says. And then she claps her hand to her mouth.

  If the teacher notes how very weird this is, she’s too polite to reveal it. “You’ve just been taking this for your phys ed requirement, yes? Come talk to me. I’d like to tell you more about our program.”

  Zoe says that she will, and she thinks she might even mean it.

  She has resolved not to call the number again, at least not today or tomorrow. Just in case it was a misdial. She doesn’t want to stalk a stranger. But underneath that reason is another, truer one: she hopes if she gives her mother a day or two to think about it, a little silence, her mother will call her back. Zoe does her best to ignore this reason because it creates a prickly anticipation that the phone will ring, which is a little hard to live with, moment to moment, even as it’s strangely invigorating. Since she got out of bed this morning, she hasn’t gotten back into it once. She hasn’t even been tempted.

  She goes back to the dorm after dance to shower, and when her roommate comes in later, opening the door quietly, as has become her habit since Zoe rose balefully from the bed and snapped at her one afternoon, Zoe is sitting at her desk, reading about the area with the 931 area code. “Oh!” her roommate says, and Zoe pivots in her chair and says hi. Her roommate looks astonished, not even trying to hide it. That’s the second person Zoe’s astonished today. It’s making her realize just what a walking corpse she’s been, the same way everybody remarking on the weight you’ve lost makes you realize how fat they used to think you.

  “I’m out of bed,” Zoe says, because that’s so obviously what her roommate is thinking.

  “Yeah,” her roommate says. She tosses her backpack on her own bed, then leans over Zoe’s shoulder, tentatively, for a closer look at the screen. Zoe has pulled up a photo of mountains with a white scud of cloud racing along their peaks. She resists the urge to cringe from her roommate’s nearness, to snap the laptop shut.

  “Pretty,” her roommate says. “Very Lord of the Rings. Where is it?”

  “Tennessee.”

  “Are you going there or something?”

  “Maybe,” Zoe says, though the idea had not yet occurred to her. “Maybe spring break.” She adds, because she can’t help it, “My mother is there.”

  “I didn’t know you had a mother.”

  Neither did I, Zoe thinks of saying, but that would be inviting questions and she’s not in the habit. She says lightly, “Did you think I sprang from the head of Zeus?”

  Once again, she has managed to astonish her roommate—let’s just say her name, which is Anna—but this time Anna recovers quickly. “That’s exactly what I thought,” she says.

  Zoe could probably think of something else funny to say, but Anna steps back as if the conversation’s over—maybe, to be fair to Anna, because Zoe’s never given her much reason to think she’d want to talk.

  Anna goes over to her dresser and starts opening and closing drawers. Zoe returns to clicking through mountainscapes, trying to picture her mother in that environment, flown from the brown flat land to hide among the trees, with Zoe’s baby brother who has turned four without his sister. It’s amazing how you get used to living with a stranger, how you learn to ignore each other in such a tiny space. She hears the noise Anna’s making, primping to go out or whatever she’s doing, choosing a different T-shirt, but she’s also removed from it, as though Anna were doing these things on a television Zoe wasn’t watching.

  After a while, Anna heads for the door. “See you later,” she says. Zoe senses a brief hesitation, as if she’s debating asking Zoe whether she wants to come along. To the coffee shop, the club, the movie, the apartment shindig. But she doesn’t ask. She goes. The trouble with pushing people away is sometimes they don’t come back.

  Zoe sits at her desk, imagining mountains, waiting for her mother to call.

  Wrong Number

  Today is my birthday. I was sure Lucy would call.
I’ll get back to you, she said. But no. I was waiting but pretending to myself that I wasn’t, sitting in my armchair beside the table that holds the phone, it and my detective novels and my old Rolodex and a notepad and a jar of pens and a lamp. I had a book but the book wasn’t holding my attention—I could guess who the killer was, and my ability to guess filled me with a disproportionate despair. Even at this late date I still want to be surprised.

  “Oh, hell,” I said, and I picked up the phone to call her. But I was stopped by something that was either anger or grief. Or pride. I can’t keep begging. Why do I have to beg? Just because she owes me nothing. Just because there’s nothing I deserve. I sat with the phone in my hand until the busy signal began to sound.

  The instant I hung it up, it rang, startling me. Pleasing me, too, because I was sure it would be Lucy—that as reward for resisting the urge to call her, she’d called me. But after I said hello, I heard what I thought was Jennifer’s voice, except that her hello came back in a tone of wary confusion.

  “Jennifer?” I asked.

  A startled, indignant no. Then a long pause. “I’m actually calling for Jennifer. Does she live there?”

  “No one lives here but me,” I said.

  “But someone called me from this number.”

  “Not I,” I said hastily. I don’t know if it was the right course to lie. Given time to think, perhaps I would have told the truth. Every locked door has a key that will open it—sometimes it’s a lie, sometimes a lie’s opposite. It’s perhaps the most valuable skill a detective has, knowing which to employ. This according to the books I read.

  “When you picked up you said Jennifer,” she said.

  “You sounded like someone I know.”

  “Someone named Jennifer? Jennifer Carrasco?”

  “Jennifer Carrasco?” Lie or truth? It was so hard to decide. “I think you mean Jennifer Young.”

  “Jennifer Young.”

  “Yes.”

  “Young’s her maiden name.”

  “Well, that’s what she goes by now.”

  Silence. “So you do know her.”

  “Yes,” I said. “She gives massages.”

  “You’re one of her clients?”

  “That’s what I am. And who are you?” Though of course I knew.

  “I’m Zoe,” she said. “Jennifer Carrasco is my mother.”

  It was an odd way to put it. Most people, I think, would’ve said, “I’m her daughter,” but maybe that’s a title Zoe is reluctant to claim. “Hello, Zoe,” I said. “I’m Margaret Riley.”

  “You’re sure we’re talking about the same Jennifer?”

  “I’m sure.”

  “So she told you she’d changed her name. Why would she change her name and then tell people?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “What else does she tell people?”

  I said, carefully, “I’m not sure what you mean.”

  But she didn’t respond to that. “She must have called me from your house. Why would she call me from your house?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Sometimes I doze off after a massage, and she waits for me to wake. Perhaps she did it then.”

  “I guess,” Zoe said.

  “Is it so strange for her to call you?”

  “You don’t know how strange,” Zoe said. Oh, the sorrow in that last sentence! I was expecting anger in this girl. A righteous indignation. A crusader in a vengeful fury. In response to her sorrow I didn’t know what to say.

  “I’m sorry I called so much,” she said. “I thought it had to be her number. I hope I didn’t freak you out.”

  “Of course not, my dear. I didn’t hear it. Sometimes I turn off the ringer. Telemarketers.”

  “Oh,” she said.

  “They’re so insistent.”

  “Is this your cell or a landline?”

  “This is my home telephone,” I said, and then she began to tell me about the Do Not Call Registry, which she said I could join very easily online—this girl who rang my phone off the hook, telling me how to stop other people from calling. I interrupted to say that I didn’t have a computer and shocked her into silence.

  “I’m old,” I said.

  “My grandparents have computers.”

  “I’m older than your grandparents.”

  “How old are you?”

  “Ninety-one,” I said. As of today, I didn’t add, so as not to oblige her to acknowledge my birthday.

  “Wow” was her response. “That’s impressive.”

  “Don’t give me too much credit,” I said. “All I’ve done is not die.”

  “Still,” she said. Perhaps I imagined the melancholic note in her voice. Thinking about Zoe, I have failed to consider the grief she must feel about her father. The grief we feel when someone dies. The grief and the blame and the guilt. To tell the truth, which I’m trying my best to do if only in these pages, even now grief and its fellows are hard for me to think about.

  “Well, thank you,” I said. “I’m glad you approve.”

  “Could you tell my mother . . .” She paused. “Could you tell her not to call me again?”

  “If I see her,” I said.

  “I don’t want to talk to her,” she said.

  But of course that was a lie.

  Oh, Zoe, I know your longing. I recognize your need. I know you’d like to kill it, but you can’t. They say there’s peace if you can relinquish desire. For me desire’s absence has only ever left a dull persistent ache. An insistent humming insectile silence. A lonely house in the woods. But perhaps the lesson is that I never relinquished desire, and that’s why there’s been no peace.

  What Zoe Did

  She was looking for a hairbrush. That was all she wanted. She couldn’t find her own. The door to her parents’ room was closed. Her mother was at the mall with Milo, so she assumed her father was in there. She knocked. When there was no answer, she thought maybe he was napping, so she opened the door quietly. In the dim light she saw his figure on the bed, lying on his back, propped up on two pillows, with his injured ankle elevated by a third. Her poor father. That ankle had given him so much trouble, and her mother was a bitter, reluctant nurse. His head was turned to the side, away from her.

  She crept past him slowly. Her mother kept her hairbrush on the sink in the master bath. There it was, where her mother always put it—and why don’t you have a place for your own things, Zoe, so you don’t keep having to borrow mine? Zoe brushed her hair, a bit hurriedly, as she didn’t want to wake her father or have her mother return unexpectedly to criticize. Her hair got staticky, long blond strands floating around her, sizzling. She put the brush back in place, went to the door, thought again, went back and pulled all the hair from it, balled the hair in her hand, and shoved it in her pocket so her mother wouldn’t find it in the trash. Her hair was exactly the shade of her mother’s, but still this precaution was necessary, as her mother cleaned her brush every time she used it. Every single time. She replaced the brush, moved it a few degrees to the right, looked at herself in the mirror, and, satisfied, turned to go.

  What was it that told her he wasn’t just sleeping? She’d tiptoed past his bed, almost to the door, before the bad feeling hit her. He was too still, maybe. Or she registered, subconsciously, that she didn’t hear him breathing. She hasn’t been able to figure it out, though she’s returned again and again—without meaning to, without wanting to—to that moment and its question. How did she know? As if the key to the whole mystery lies in that.

  First, she said, “Dad?” She said it quietly, like you do to test whether someone’s sleeping. She didn’t yet believe what she knew. Second, she said it again, this time louder than normal speech. She moved closer to the bed. “Dad?” Third, she put her hand on his shoulder, and felt no answering movement in his body. The phrase as still as death came into her head. She put her other hand on his other arm and she shook him; she said, “Dad, Dad, Dad, Daddy, Daddy, Daddy.” Her voice rose and rose. His head lolled as
she shook him.

  Fifth, or sixth, or seventh, she put her head on his chest and sobbed. She kept feeling his chest with one hand, as if she’d find his heartbeat if she just kept searching for it. A calm voice in her head said, “You need to make a call.” After a time—who knows how long a time—she said, “All right,” out loud. She stood and straightened her clothes and walked around the bed to her mother’s side, where the phone was. She turned her back on her father while she dialed 911. Talking to the operator, she lowered her voice, because she didn’t want to embarrass him.

  Now she was supposed to wait. It was dark in the room. When the people came they wouldn’t be able to see. She went to the light switch and flipped it. She saw her father on the bed and flipped it off again. She put her hand to her mouth and made an animal sound. She stood there in the dark, shaking. There were pill bottles on the bed. She hadn’t noticed them before, though she must have jostled them when she tried to rouse her father. She flipped the light back on. It would be terrible for the people to see the pill bottles. What would they think? Her father would be mortified.

  Once she’d come home from a date to find him passed out in his truck in their driveway. She’d helped him inside the house; he was barely conscious enough to register she was the one supporting him. The next morning, she woke to an angry exchange between her parents, her mother spitting words like daughter and ashamed, and then her mother slammed out of the house with, it turned out, Milo. Her father came into her room and pulled the desk chair over to her bed and sat there with his head bowed in the early morning light and he cried and cried.

  “Oh, Daddy,” she was saying as she gathered up the bottles, hastily, dropping one and picking it up again. “Oh, Daddy, don’t worry, it’s all right, it’s all right.”

  I’m a bad father, he’d said, that time, and she said, “You’re not. You’re a wonderful father. You’re doing the best you can.”

  I love you so much, he’d said, and she said, “I know you do. I love you, too.”