Thy Neighbor

by Norah Vincent

  I stood there fiddling with my keys, waiting to know what to do. It was late. Very late, I thought. Maybe close on dawn. Who knew?

  I shoved the keys in the front pocket of my jeans and lumbered up the stairs. Just inside the basement door my eyes fell on the flashlight that I keep on the shelf there. I picked it up and switched it on, then off again. Not bright, but bright enough.

  I took it, closed the basement door behind me, hustled through the hall and out the front door. It was still pitch outside, but warm. My guess was four o’clock, but it might have been three, or even earlier. It didn’t matter. There was time.

  Yes, I thought, this night is like any other night in the middle of the night. And it was, surely, but somehow it seemed more replete than all the others I had known. More potent, like something my father would have enjoyed and acted in or on, energized by the passivity of the dark. In the dead of night he had been a different man, a bolder man.

  I would be a bolder man, too. I would act. Now. Here. I would stop thinking. I tapped the keys in my pocket. I felt the weight of the flashlight in my hand.

  Barefoot, I made my way down my lawn to the side of the house, over to the property line, and across to Gruber’s backyard. I stepped in a cold, wet pile and felt it paste thickly across my instep. I knew what it was by the stink of it, but I turned the flashlight on anyway and shined it on my foot. I swore disgustedly and turned out the light. When I got to Gruber’s patio, I scraped my foot against the edge of one of the stones, smeared the rest on the grass, and kept on toward the back door of the garage.

  I fished my key ring out of my pocket, separated the subset that was Jeff’s, and fiddled with each key until I found the one that fit. I eased open the door, slid inside, and closed it behind me.

  I put my palm over the flashlight and turned it on. I let the light leak through my fingers as I scanned the space; then I trained the full force of the beam on what I couldn’t quite see.

  Gruber always parked his cars in the driveway, and now I saw why. He used his garage as a workshop, mostly for carpentry, from the look of it. There was a sawhorse in the middle of the space, with an electric circular saw perched on top of it and a long, wide piece of lumber half cut. There was sawdust and discarded trimmings all over the floor radiating outward from the horse. Beyond that, each on its own island of newspaper, lay various pieces of furniture—bookshelves, side tables, coffee tables—that Gruber had stained and varnished and set aside to dry.

  I threaded my way through these obstacles, careful not to upset anything, and stopped at the inside door to the house. I stood for a few moments, listening for any hint of motion inside. Nothing.

  I waited a moment longer.

  Once you do this, I thought, you’ll have to take what comes. There will be no going back and no reprieve. If Gruber catches you, you’re dead, right here and now. Suicide by Gruber, I whispered and smiled. He won’t miss.

  Was that why I was here? Or was this just the most reckless thing I could think of? No, I hadn’t thought. I hadn’t planned. I had no idea what I was doing here or what I would do once I got inside. I had made a right turn out of my door. I had the keys to this house by accident, and now I was here by accident. What other accident was inside?

  And then, strangely, I was hearing my father’s words, like an incantation in my head, the words that I had read so many times, for so long thinking they were mine, and then had read and reread many times again in the last forty-eight hours, knowing they were his.

  I possess this quiet place and all its houses.

  At night, I am the dream of stealth to all my silenced people.

  A sort of god, unknown.

  It was true. So, so true. As I slipped the key in the lock I felt exactly what he had described. All of it. The potency of the transgression, the terrible possession of people and places that are emptied yet filled by sleep, the power of quiet violation. I felt immensely dulled by it, drugged, so oddly calm in this invasion of someone else’s home.

  He was right. It was unmistakably sexual, a predatory high that was bound to be addictive to almost anyone who could take that first breaching step over the threshold. But it was something else as well, something cozier, cleaner, like love.

  A tongue of silent invitation.

  Each dear, dear nesting thing.

  And somehow doing this to Gruber, of all people, made the thrill of it that much more intense and immediate, like ramming my buttered fist right up his hard-walled ass.

  I opened the door and went in.

  I stood in Ellie’s country kitchen looking at the flaxen-haired stuffed dolls in overalls perched on the glass-fronted crockery hutch. I looked at the painted wooden sign on the wall that read, GOD BLESS THIS HOME, and the dwarf bonsai in a pot by the sink. I listened to the fridge humming and tinkling, and I stared at the blue-white light of the digital clock on the stove. I watched several minutes pass. I took my pulse. Not bad. Sixty-five.

  I wasn’t frightened at all. In fact, as I stood there observing the clock, watching the two dots between the numbers tick the seconds off—bip . . . bip . . . bip—feeling the soft drumming of my heart on my fingertips, and listening to the hum of the refrigerator in the kitchen of a house I had just broken into, I realized that I was more relaxed, more at peace—actual peace—than I had been since early childhood. I felt engulfed by an ameliorating sense of fate that seemed to say: What you do or do not do now will make no difference. It will all just unfold.

  Believing this, I felt an immense relief. I was not responsible. I was not in control. I was in the picture and the picture was whatever it would be. I thought of what Mrs. Bloom had said about the night Karen died. That release. The worry gone.

  I felt the lightness of indifference.

  I walked into Gruber’s study and turned the flashlight on full beam. The guns were on the wall, the pencil sharpener was on the desk, the red chair was pushed in, and Iris’s cage was in the corner, covered with a brightly multicolored beach towel.

  * * *

  “Jesus Christ,” I said, clutching my chest. “You scared the living shit out of me. What are you doing here?”

  Miriam was standing under the apple tree, picked out, a shadow among shadows.

  “What are you doing here?” she said smartly.

  “It’s my house.”

  “So?”

  “So? I live here. You don’t.”

  “I know,” she said, dropping her chin. “But still.”

  She was right. But still. It was the middle of the night and I had come across the back from Gruber’s to stand in my own backyard and do what?

  I softened my tone.

  “Miriam, how many times have you done this?”

  She blinked innocently.

  “Done what?”

  “Been here in the middle of the night?” I said firmly.

  She crossed her arms over her belly nervously, clutching her elbows with her hands.

  “This is the first time.”

  “Are you telling the truth?”

  “Yes.”

  “Honest?”

  She stamped her foot in protest.

  “I swear.”

  “Okay, okay. So what are you doing here tonight?”

  She looked at the ground, frowning, trailing an exploratory toe back and forth across the grass.

  “Can’t sleep.”

  It was a better excuse than mine, and I understood it, given what I’d seen transpire between Dorris and Jonathan of late, and what Jonathan had said about his extra pair of eyes and ears tailing Miriam. Did Miriam know or sense she was being followed? Was she still? Or was it just the operatic custody battle resuming at home that had left her unable to sleep? I knew all this, but I said the chiding parent’s stock phrase anyway.

  “You should be home. It
’s not safe—really not safe—for a girl your age to be out on her own in the middle of the night. Don’t you know that?”

  “I know.” She dropped her arms to her sides and looked off longingly into the dark. “It’s just that . . .”

  I know, I thought, and looked out, too, in the same direction, toward the main road behind my house, and the flaw in the fencing that led to it, all quiet, enchanting, the way out and the way home again, and yet the backdrop to so much pain.

  Let her tell you about it then, I thought. Just let her say.

  “It’s just that what?” I said, leadingly.

  She shrugged.

  “I feel better here.” She considered this briefly, then added, “Safe.”

  “But you’re not safe. I’ve just said that.”

  She scowled woundedly and said nothing.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean . . . Go on . . . What do you mean by safe?”

  She took a long time to answer, swallowing hard, determined to hold back a show of emotion that she was too proud to show.

  “I don’t know,” she said, haltingly. “Like I belong. Like all this stuff”—she indicated the village—“is a place for me. And you’re here, too, and I don’t feel lonely.”

  It was simple and beautiful and true, what she’d said, more so than she could know or I could tell her. It was more than I’d thought she was capable of, and I didn’t know how to answer.

  It was how I felt, too. We’d made a secret world—as a man and a girl we had made it—and it wasn’t wrong, and in it—I could sense this now myself—the dark held you and hid you from everything that was wrong in the real world, and it was precious for that reason.

  Carefully, respectfully, I sat beside her on the ground and took a long look around at our creation, or what I could see of it in the dark. And as I looked, and thought and smiled proudly, I felt myself soften to the idea of her and the intimacy we had shared in this place, an intimacy that was in no way shameful or base or to be defended against, but something, on the contrary, that I could recognize as my own. I had felt this before, in the distant past, as a child myself playing with other children, and until this moment I had forgotten how full and wide open a feeling it was, how freeing and—Miriam was right—safe it seemed, even, or perhaps especially in the middle of the night.

  “Me, too,” I said thickly, my voice swelling unexpectedly with tears.

  “Really?”

  I put my arm around her shoulders and squeezed.

  “Yeah, really. Building this with you has meant a lot to me. I didn’t know it until just now, but it has. A lot. You have no idea.”

  She smiled up at me, pleased, but not quite understanding.

  I slid my arm off and away from her self-consciously and replaced it at my side.

  “When you get older,” I explained, “you don’t do things like this anymore. You forget or you don’t have time or nobody brings it out in you, and it just goes away. And you miss it. Only you don’t know that you’ve been missing it until you have it again. Like now. Do you know what I mean?”

  She nodded.

  “Sort of,” she said.

  “It’s like what you said,” I went on. “A feeling that everything’s okay and that all the hard things about the real world don’t exist. Nothing exists but this. And it’s how you want it to be.”

  She nodded again, more emphatically.

  We sat silently for several minutes then, looking at the sky and the dark houses and the empty street, and listening to the soft breathing of the trees. I was on the verge of telling her about the shape of my sleeping giant in the growth of leaves above the Blooms’ house, but then I wondered if it would seem too strange to her. I thought better of it and didn’t. I plucked a fat spear of grass and wound it around my finger and began tying it in knots. It broke and I threw it aside.

  Abruptly, there was the sound of her voice.

  “Do you . . . love . . . me?” she said.

  She said it so haltingly that, at first, I thought I had misheard.

  I waited, watching her face, half pleading for an escape.

  Had she said it? Had she meant it? That way?

  Please don’t have, I thought. Not that. Not now. Not from her. Not that same question the other way around. But she had said it, and meant it. She was waiting for an answer.

  But what answer?

  Don’t do this to me, kid.

  It was there, as always, so quickly—my father’s longed-for voice saying the thing he had said to me once so long ago in response to this same question?

  Yes, it was his voice, not mine. And memory’s.

  Dad?

  Silence.

  Dad?

  Do you love me?

  Silence.

  Then:

  As your mother says, love is not had as a gift . . .

  No, no, me. Not her. Please. Not that. Me. Just answer me.

  More silence.

  Long, grueling silence.

  Then, sighing, at last:

  Don’t do this to me, kid.

  Yes, he said it just like that.

  I do remember.

  And now I know why.

  I have known why before, but now I am on the other side of it, and I know it more completely, more painfully, in a way that explains the anger he felt.

  Because I feel it, too.

  Because the real answer, my answer, is this:

  I do not love you, kid. I’m sorry. I’m so very sorry, but I do not love you.

  You are too plain. Not mine. Just . . . just not enough, and I’m sorry.

  But it is not my fault.

  And it is not your fault, either.

  And goddamn it why am I in this position?

  Why?

  Because it is the other side and it hurts, too.

  You see?

  Not to love hurts, too.

  To be on the other side of love,

  not loving,

  hurts, too.

  Now you know.

  And what’s worse,

  now you have to lie about it.

  Or don’t.

  Lie to a child about love,

  or don’t lie and rip her

  as you yourself were torn

  by the wrong words.

  Don’t do this to me, kid.

  I straightened stiffly and coughed.

  “Miriam, listen,” I said, too loudly.

  She started at the resolve in my voice.

  “This is very important,” I said, more softly, “and I want you to hear this, really hear this, okay?”

  She made no sign that she had heard, except the sign of not making a sign.

  She was hurt already.

  “Okay,” she murmured, too late and too timidly to sound sure.

  I touched her arm.

  “I mean it.”

  “Okay,” she said, pulling away. “I said okay.”

  I pulled up more grass and began to twine it nervously around my fingers.

  “Love is a strange and complicated thing,” I said, wincing at the tiredness of that phrase. I was going to flub this and I knew it.

  “Just to say the word ‘love’ isn’t enough,” I added firmly, wincing again.

  I checked her face. It was still closed and wounded.

  “A lot of people will do that, and they won’t mean it, and it will hurt you in the end . . . It will . . . because, you see, love is not just something you say. It’s something you do. Love is easy to say, and very hard to do. Do you see?”

  Again she made no sign of recognition.

  “So people say it a lot, and then they don’t do it, and that’s worse than not saying it at al
l.”

  I paused clumsily.

  This wasn’t going to work. I could see that. The damage had been done, the desired answer not supplied. Nothing else would penetrate. Still, I couldn’t stop myself from trying. The guilt was too strong.

  “I know none of this makes much sense now, but it will, which is why I want you to remember it.”

  “I’ll remember it,” she said flatly, standing fastidiously and brushing off her shorts with hard smacking motions on her rear. “I’ll always remember it.”

  She barreled past me and sprang across the yard to the mock village. When she’d reached it, she turned to shoot a last punishing look in my direction—she had Dorris’s flair down pat—then she turned back and with all the willowy force her small body could command she kicked down the gazebo and stomped on it. It made a light whiffing sound like a house of cards collapsing, and then a mild series of cracks as she trampled it. Unsatisfied, she dropped to her knees and tore out the tea party with her hands, flinging dirt and leaves and litter all around her like a panicked bird wrecking a nest. She stood again to destroy the cemetery and the streets, but I caught her in time, grasping her roughly by the shoulders.

  “Stop,” I shouted, shaking her. “Don’t do this, Miriam. Please.”

  “Let go of me,” she screamed, her voice slicing through the night air.

  It was a terrifying sound. I dropped my hands at once and stepped back.

  She lowered her voice, but only slightly, to a half-stifled sob.

  “You’re a liar and I hate you.”

  She turned and flew out of the yard, her arms and legs flailing furiously, her body thrashing from side to side like a kite whirled in an angry wind.

  I followed her as far as the end of my drive to be sure she wasn’t going anywhere but home.

  She ran down the property line her accustomed way and across the street to her house. She had left a front window ajar on the ground floor, her way out, presumably. She lifted it higher, pulled herself through to the waist, toppled inside, and shut the pane behind her.

  I turned and picked my way back to the house, shaking and wiping the cold moisture from my face.