Thy Neighbor

by Norah Vincent

  “I’m sure the family wouldn’t hold that against you,” I said. “You didn’t hold it against me.”

  “No.” She sighed. “You’re right. I’m sure they wouldn’t.”

  She looked away again distractedly.

  I wondered if she was thinking about Robin. I was surprised by her lack of curiosity on the subject of our recent contact. I had spent so much time thinking about what to tell her and what not to tell her, about protecting her from painful knowledge or false hope, but none of that turned out to be of the slightest importance now. I was all wrong again in my assumptions. She, too, the simplest of women, or so I had assumed, knew more than I did, and might well have laughed at my naïveté or manipulated it.

  She wasn’t grieving the death or disappearance of a child, after all. That was for storybooks. She was grieving the survival of a child, the separate, rogue survival of a child. Was that it?

  Dr. Cunningham had said as much himself. It wasn’t the fact of a life. It was the quality of that life, the tenor of it, its reach and ambient effect. Mrs. B. had made Robin sound like a noxious presence in the world, a nuclear accident or a plague, not a sweetheart abducted and mourned. Yet surely she was that, too, the girl the construction worker had made the bracelet for, the girl Gruber, of all people, had doted on so fondly.

  I knew from my own experience what Robin had become: bitter, vengeful, self-righteous. I knew how she could bleed into and poison her surroundings.

  But—

  There was still a but.

  An extenuation of memory, an ideal that I held on to.

  “Has Robin been in touch with you?” I asked, pretty certain I knew the answer already.

  “Oh, yes, yes,” she said. “All along.”

  She waved her hand dismissively.

  “Robin made sure I knew where she was, or where she’d been. She knew enough to conceal her whereabouts. She had no intention of being found or of coming home. That was clear. She was teasing. I got postcards from all over. Gag postcards usually, as if she were on vacation and it was all a big joke. It was her way of letting me know how angry she was.”

  So much for a mother just knows, I thought. So much for that light in the window. Robin had been manipulating this from day one. The punishment, the revenge, had started early. There was no mystery at all, and the only loss was of trust and innocence. Mrs. Bloom’s as much as Robin’s.

  She turned to me abruptly.

  “Nick,” she said, breathlessly. “I’m frightened.”

  She covered her mouth with her palms and clenched her eyelids, as if shutting out an ugly sight. A tear rolled out of each eye and pooled on her fingertips.

  “I’m so frightened—” She gasped.

  I took hold of her wrists, gently guiding her arms to her lap and taking her hands in mine.

  “Mrs. B., what is it?” I asked. “What are you so frightened of?”

  She raised her eyes to me slowly, puzzled.

  “Of her,” she whispered. “Don’t you see? Of what she’ll do.”

  She was trembling.

  “Something must have happened,” I said. “Something that made you worry so much now, after all this time. What was it? What’s changed?”

  “The postcards,” she said, as if the revelation had just come to her. “She stopped mailing them.”

  “And you think that means something has happened to her?” I asked.

  “No, no,” she cried, frustrated by my lack of understanding. “I’ve still been getting them, just not through the mail.”

  “I don’t understand,” I said, even though of course I did. I wanted to see if she did, too.

  “She’s been here, Nick,” she said. “She’s been delivering them herself in the mailbox by hand.”

  Yes, I thought. She’s been making the rounds.

  For once, I was the one who sounded informed.

  “Yeah, I know,” I said. “No postmark.”

  “So that’s how she’s reached you?” she said.

  “That and online. She found me on Facebook. Do you know about Facebook?”

  She frowned searchingly.

  “I’ve heard the term, or I’ve read it somewhere, but it doesn’t mean anything to me.”

  “It’s a way to find long-lost friends.” I chuckled bitterly. “Among other things.”

  “So she sent you some kind of message on this Facebook?”

  “Well, that, and she’s been leaving me notes in the mailbox, too. Same as you.”

  She squinted thoughtfully.

  “But what would she have to say to you?” she asked.

  Catching herself, she added:

  “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean it like that. But you didn’t know her, did you? Not really.”

  “No. Not really. Mostly through my mom. And yeah, I thought exactly the same thing. Why me? Why now?”

  “And?” she said.

  “And what?”

  “Why you? Why now?”

  “I have no idea,” I lied. “I thought you were going to tell me.”

  I pushed my chair back, its legs scraping painfully on the linoleum, and went to the fridge for another Gatorade.

  “Hell,” I said, yanking one from the shelf in the door and wrenching off the cap, “I didn’t even know until now that you knew she was alive. That’s how stupid I am. All this time I thought you were grieving for her, hoping, waiting for her to come home, or for someone to find her, and instead the opposite is true. You’ve known all along and you’re terrified of her coming back.”

  I kicked the refrigerator shut. It sealed with a loud suck.

  “It’s not the opposite,” she said firmly.

  She paused, checking my expression, then resumed more gently.

  “That’s wrong . . . It’s both . . . It’s all . . . I have grieved and I have been afraid. I have worried and I have longed for her . . . But I have also wished that she would stay away.”

  She paused again.

  I could feel myself getting angry. I’m so tired, I thought. Tired of this convoluted past and its sick characters that just won’t die or conform or stop. I turned toward the sink, my back to her, and took a long, sloppy drink. I wiped my mouth with the back of my hand and belched loudly.

  “Victims are not saints,” she added sharply, as if in retort.

  “Yes,” I murmured more tamely. “I’m aware.”

  This was my territory now. On this I could well instruct.

  “The things that have happened to you,” I announced sarcastically, “are just the things that have happened to you. They don’t make you who you are.”

  I turned to face her.

  “They don’t make you special or entitled or excused or fucking good,” I spat, furiously.

  “Nick,” she cried. “I didn’t mean—”

  “I know, I know,” I shouted, turning away again. “You never meant any of it.”

  I hurled the half-filled Gatorade into the sink. It bounced out of the basin, threw a jet of purple Riptide Rush against the backsplash and the window, skidded across the counter spewing as it went, and spiraled onto the floor, where it came to rest on its side beneath the cupboard overhang.

  Mrs. Bloom gasped disapprovingly.

  I gripped the sides of the sink, enraged.

  “You never meant for harm to come to Robin. You never meant for harm to come to Karen. But it did, didn’t it? It did. And now what you did or didn’t mean doesn’t matter anymore, and the little girl that everybody loved to love and loved to give things to, she’s a barking freak coming in for a landing at home sweet home. So deal with it. Finally fucking”—I choked—“deal with it.”

  I leaned down and vomited into the sink. The heave itself was silent, just an effortless pouring forth, but
the viscous gush of syrup and bile that came out of me landed against the flat stainless steel of the basin with a horrible, thick smacking sound and slithered with a half-muffled screech down the drain.

  I ran the water for a moment and put my head under. I laid my head on my arm and draped a dish towel over it. I stayed that way for a long time, breathing as deeply as I dared and waiting for the wherewithal to move.

  As far as I could tell, Mrs. B. didn’t stir. She didn’t make a sound. I might as well have been alone except that I could feel her woundedness pulsing behind me like something I’d run over in the road.

  When I raised my head at last to look at her, she was sitting with her hands folded loosely in her lap. Her eyes were closed. She opened them hesitantly and let them drift to my face, slowly, exhaustedly, as if she were looking out of obligation at something gruesome or pornographic that she did not wish to see. I suppose she was.

  “You see,” she said resignedly. “She has ruined this already. And we had only just begun.”

  She stood to go.

  I didn’t try to stop her.

  She was right and I knew it.

  But I would make an effort to minimize the damage.

  “Look,” I said. “Don’t be hurt. That anger is for her, not you. It’s just that she isn’t here and—”

  She cut me off.

  “Yes. That’s always been it. What she leaves you. You have to work with what she leaves you. And what she leaves you is always broken and sharp and impossible to pick up without cutting yourself. That has always been her gift. She puts an obstacle in your way so that you have to move it. You have to grapple with it, and when you do that you hurt yourself, and then she has what she was after all along.”

  I pushed myself away from the sink. Bolstering myself with one hand, I made my way around the U of the counter toward where she was standing.

  “We don’t have to let her win,” I said. “Not entirely.”

  She shrugged meekly and turned away.

  “Let me at least walk you home,” I insisted.

  She walked through the doorway into the hall.

  “If you like,” she called back, with just the barest hint of a lilt in her voice.

  I smiled. She was forgiving me already. By this evening she would have left this behind, sloughed it off with the other detritus of the day and the hours and the years. It just wasn’t important.

  That, anyway, was how I imagined her mind working: like a drive-through car wash, or one of those newfangled, self-cleaning lavatories, a stainless pod with a door to let experience in and a spray to wash it away again. A remarkable fluidity.

  She had come to me for solace, and I had failed her, even confirmed her worst fears. Okay. So she would let it go and move on, slide into the next moment clean, and me with it, waiting for what would happen next and showing up. Nothing more.

  Nothing more complicated than that.

  I followed her to the front door, opened it for her, and made a show of offering her my arm.

  She smiled warmly.

  “You,” she said, nudging me.

  “I know, I know.” I laughed. “But here we are.”

  “Indeed,” she mused, taking my arm. “Here we are indeed.”

  We walked in silence across my neglected front lawn, across the empty street, glazed and sleepy with the afternoon sun, and down the gentle slope of her own lawn, where an undefiled little girl had once sat reading Dante and Frost and Hopkins, and taught it all to a bird.

  When we reached Mrs. B.’s doorstep and turned to say good-bye, I said:

  “Mrs. B., can I ask you something very personal?”

  “Of course you can, Nick.” She nodded her assent. “Please.”

  I hesitated, looking up toward the house, puzzled.

  “That light in the upstairs window. The one you light and put out every night and morning. I always thought it was for Robin.” I paused, scowling into the sun. “But it’s not, is it?”

  She scanned my face, surprised and, it seemed, slightly disappointed.

  She shook her head.

  “Oh, no, dear. No.”

  I waited, but she said nothing more. She, too, was looking up at the house, at the place where the light would appear this evening.

  “So then,” I said at last, “who is it for?”

  She put her palms together in a prayer position in front of her chest and brought her fingertips to her lips. She raised her eyes to my face.

  “Dear boy,” she whispered.

  She leaned in slowly and deliberately and kissed me very softly on the cheek. As she stepped away, she raised the back of one hand and lightly brushed the place she had kissed.

  “Why, it’s for you, of course,” she said. “It has always been for you.”

  She smiled sadly, turned quickly, went into the house, and gently closed the door behind her.

  I turned and crossed her lawn again, thinking this time not just of Robin’s past, but of my own, and of how Robin had said the two overlapped. “The same thing that happened to you,” she’d said. What happened to me is the same thing that happened to you.

  I stopped on the easement to collect my mail. When I got back inside, I set the mail on my desk and went through it. There was all the usual junk, which I threw directly into the bin on top of my soiled T-shirt. There was a small package, a yellow bubble mailer with my name written on it in black marker, but no address, stamps, or postal marks. I tore it open immediately and a single old Maxell sixty-minute microcassette tape fell out.

  Robin had been by.

  Among the junk in the bin I could see my copy of that week’s Pelsher County Gazette partially folded back on itself. I fished it out and flipped to the obits page.

  It was the only picture on the page, and she was right. It was old. Soft-focused and forgiving. The face hopeful and bland. Nothing like the man now. Beneath the photo the listing read:

  Dr. Simon T. Cunningham, beloved and venerated pediatrician and long-standing pillar of his community, died Tuesday at his home in Twin Pines. He was seventy-two. The cause of death has not yet been officially determined, his daughter Joclyn said, though he was found lying comfortably in his bed, and by all indications appears to have died peacefully in his sleep. Apart from his daughter and his three grandchildren, Dr. Cunningham is survived by his wife, Lelah, and his sister Rose.

  23

  At nightfall, the light went on in Mrs. B.’s window. Hours and hours later, I was still sitting at my desk thinking about Doctor Cunningham, wondering if there was a code phrase in obits for suicide, and if so, was it “died in his sleep”? Or, more to the point, “appeared to die in his sleep”?

  Life just wasn’t that neat. It didn’t wait for you to make your confession on the off chance the right confessor would show up, and then check you out that same night, done deal.

  I kept thinking of that lacquered box. Now that was something he could have waited for, or waited with, grasping it in hand, as he had done (firmly enough to leave a mark), then popping it open for the last. I saw it in his face, his whole body—the resignation, the relief. He was done. As soon as he said those words—“You must stop this now”—he was done. And that box, or what was in it—it could have been anything; he was an MD—was his ticket, his door out.

  Good for him. He had had the courage to do what I could not. And despite everything that’s said about suicide and cowardice, and everything we boast about our unbelief, at the end, when we are alone with an irrevocable choice, we are all afraid to be so insolent in the face of the unknown. It takes courage.

  Robin. There was chaos in her wake all right. A cluster of harm, and now death. It was enough to make you believe in spells. No wonder Mrs. B. was so afraid. I was afraid now, too, and exhilarated in a way that I didn’t trust. I didn’t want to be alone
, either.

  I wanted Monica with me. I wanted to hide myself in her presence and stop thinking or feeling anything except the most primitive impulses—hunger, fatigue, desire—and the satisfaction of all three with her. I’d never felt the need so strongly before. I wanted to rush down to the Swan in the hope of finding her there, or of finding someone who knew where she might be. But she didn’t have any friends. She didn’t have any acquaintances. Just her so-called partner, Damian, and me.

  Damian. He at least had a phone.

  I dialed his number and left a message. Have Monica find me. It’s important.

  I went to the front door and unbolted it, in case I was passed out when she arrived. I left it open most nights for the same reason, which is how Mrs. B. had found it this morning when she’d sauntered in unannounced.

  I made my way down to the basement for the first time in I didn’t know how long. I’d lost track of time and everything except Robin and her goose chase. I hadn’t even thought of Dave or Jeff or Dorris and the rest. My own life had grown up around me, even if still in a virtual world, online, in the past. What did it matter? I was alive again, immersed, and not in someone else’s life, but my own. Someone else’s life as my own. The same thing.

  What did that mean? The same. Robin and I did not have the same past. Did we? And yet I could hardly deny it. Even Mrs. B. seemed to think so. What else was that light in her window but an apology? Or a small cheer from the side of the course that says, “Come on. Almost there.” I hated that idea. Mrs. B. cheering. Hurrah for the chin-up cripple, who runs in his special race.

  The basement seemed like a foreign place now, though it had been only—what?—a few days? I wasn’t sure. All the usual markers had fallen away, and my thoughts had stretched across the emptiness.

  I went to open the locks on the monitor room door and stopped. I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t bring myself to go in there and shame myself again with all that I would see or try to see. For the first time the distraction felt too heavy, too tedious to carry out. The unlocking of the door, the powering up, the scanning for movement, action, argument. It had become like everything else: routine. I was dulled finally to its shock. I had developed a tolerance to this drug, too.