Thy Neighbor

by Norah Vincent

  “I’m sorry,” she said gently. “I lost my temper. I shouldn’t have said anything.”

  “No, no. It’s good. I’m glad you did. You told me what I wanted to know. It’s what I’ve always wanted to know, and I feel like I’ve been asking you to tell me this in a hundred ways since we met. That’s what was always behind your moods, and I knew it.” I put up an appeasing hand. “Sorry, more self-pity.”

  “Oh, forget it,” she said, batting my hand away. “Just forget it. Who am I to say anything to anyone?”

  “Someone who’s been through a lot, I think.”

  She smiled sadly.

  “Maybe I just read all that in a book.”

  “Well, it doesn’t matter. It’s true and you were right.”

  “All right. If you think so.” She put a heavy hand on my back. “Now maybe we should just leave it at that.”

  “Yeah, okay,” I said, forcing a squelched laugh. “Just give me a sec.”

  She smiled again, and moved her hand along my spine.

  “Sure.”

  It wasn’t very long before I had the impulse to move, or maybe I was just lost in the echo of all that she’d said. Replaying. I was sitting on top of the pit, she’d said, watching it all obscenely.

  So I was, I thought, so I was. So come and see.

  “Come on,” I said, standing awkwardly. “I want to show you something.”

  I led her to the basement steps.

  “You want to see something really criminal?”

  I turned and barreled down the stairs without waiting for a reply. Monica followed slowly. By the time she had gotten down the stairs, I had the locks and the door to the control room open and I was powering up the system. The screens blinked into life, revealing mostly empty or darkened rooms. A light had been left on in Dorris’s bathroom, but nobody was there.

  I pointed to that monitor.

  “This is Dorris Katz’s master bath.”

  I pointed again.

  “And this is her bedroom.”

  Monica squinted and leaned closer.

  “And these two,” I said, indicating, “are Dave Alders’s bedroom and bath. Too dark to see much.”

  I moved to Gruber’s basement, where the light was on as usual, even though Eric wasn’t in the crate.

  “This is Gruber’s basement,” I said. “His youngest son’s a bed wetter, and every time he has an accident, he has to sleep in that crate for a month straight without incident before he can go back upstairs.”

  Monica’s brow furrowed.

  “Man,” she said, shaking her head.

  I pointed to the next monitor.

  “This is Gruber’s living room—also dark at the moment, unfortunately—where his wife spends her life watching TV. And this is . . .”

  The light was on in the study.

  Jeff was sitting in Gruber’s chair.

  “What is he . . . ?” I blinked and touched the screen. “Uh . . . and this is Gruber’s middle son, Jeff.”

  I tapped the screen gently with the nail of my index finger.

  Monica pulled my hand away to get a better look.

  “What is he doing?” she said, squinting again.

  “Your guess is as good as mine,” I replied.

  “You were just there, weren’t you?”

  “Yeah, but he wasn’t.”

  “He wasn’t home?”

  “He wasn’t awa—” I stopped and corrected myself. “I didn’t see him.”

  She turned back to the screen.

  “He wasn’t awake?” she said.

  “Well, he sure as shit wasn’t in that chair.”

  “Do you think he could have seen you?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe. If he was hiding.”

  She grasped my shoulder and shook it, turning me toward her.

  “Nick, what did you do over there?” Her eyes were wide and piercing. “Tell me.”

  “Nothing,” I said testily, wrenching free of her grasp and turning sharply back toward the screen.

  “You went into the house and did nothing?” she said flatly. “Riiight.”

  I didn’t reply.

  I was looking at Jeff. He had something lying on the desk in front of him, but the angle of the camera made it impossible for me to tell what it was. It was a blurry mass in the foreground, the focus of his gaze. His face was blank, without expression, as serene as I had ever seen it.

  Gruber’s voice came booming from behind the camera. He must have been in the doorway.

  I jumped.

  “What in God’s holy name are you doing in my study, boy?” Gruber shouted.

  Jeff looked up calmly, but said nothing. His eyes fell again to whatever was on the desk.

  Gruber must have looked, too.

  “What—?” Gruber said, panicked.

  His hands came into view from the top of the picture, reaching across the desk, taking up the thing that was lying there, and raising it closer to his face to get a better look.

  “I told you never, ever to go near—”

  Jeff’s eyes were locked on Gruber’s face.

  “What?” he cut in, curiously.

  “I said,” Gruber began, but Jeff interrupted triumphantly.

  “I heard what you said.” Then, acidly, he added: “It’s too late. You’re too late.”

  Gruber said nothing. Jeff was still watching him intently.

  “What did you really think was going to happen?” Jeff said. “Something had to. Eventually.”

  This was already beyond what Gruber could do. This wasn’t going to be a conversation. But then, it was clear that Jeff had never intended it to be.

  This was bolder than Jeff had ever been, something planned and reckless at the same time, and I wondered if I had pushed him to it. Maybe after all the beatings and humiliations and hard treatment, a kiss had finally ruptured the torpor that had held him in check for so long. He’d chosen his mother’s way, fitting oblivion around him like a drug and taking the bruises less brutally as a result. But now he was wide open, and everything inside was coming out.

  Monica was standing beside me as shocked as I was and feeling the same mute tension of something terrible impending. But she seemed more thrilled than concerned, hunched and greedy for the reveal, as if this really were just happening on television as entertainment and she was the riveted audience, willing the plot to resolve.

  I started to ask if she was all right, but she waved me away impatiently.

  “Shhhh.”

  Gruber was still looking at the thing in his hands.

  Jeff saw this with satisfaction, then dropped his eyes thoughtfully and began to speak.

  “All this time . . .” he said calmly. “All this time I thought so much about how to be your son.”

  His voice broke slightly, and he paused to gather himself, swallowing and breathing through his nose.

  “I tried so hard for so long to figure out how to please you . . . And, you know, all I ever did was fail. Always—fail. And you hated me. You hated us all. Still. The same as ever.”

  His face took on the puzzled expression of a person saying something aloud for the first time and experiencing his own words as a revelation.

  “So then I thought, okay, this is never going to change. This is the sentence. Do the time. Just survive . . . And, you know, I thought that would be enough. I’d make it through, leave, and never come back—start again somewhere else and spend the rest of my life free. There has to be a better life out there, I thought. I’ll find it. And this place—you, all of it—will just go away.

  “But then somewhere along the way I realized that that wasn’t true. The world isn’t really a better place at all, and just surviving isn’t enough.” />
  He sighed heavily.

  “Because you take it all with you. No matter where you go, or who you’re with, the world you walk into always has you in it, and you’re not just some easy guy who did his time and shook it off and kept on going. You’re the kid who grew up in your dad’s house.”

  He looked up accusingly at Gruber, his brow contorting fiercely.

  “And you know who that guy is? That guy’s a really pissed-off, broken-up son of a bitch who takes after the old man.”

  He stopped, checking Gruber’s face again for recognition, or the progress of an emotion he had sought to provoke.

  “And that’s why, if you want to know,” he said, nodding at what Gruber still had in his hands. “Because I can’t have a better life. I can’t get out. I’m stuck here with you no matter what I do . . . and while I am . . .”

  He was struggling through a sob.

  “I’m going to get you back, you rotten scumbag piece of shit, and I’m going to keep on getting until you die of it or you kill me . . . Yeah, that’s right—until you kill me, if you even have the balls. I’m not afraid of that anymore. Go ahead.”

  He gestured at the guns on the wall.

  “Take your pick.”

  Gruber didn’t move or say anything.

  Jeff swiveled in the chair, raised his right leg, and kicked his foot through the glass display case. He kicked three more times around the edge of the first point of impact, and the whole of the left pane came down in pieces to the floor. He reached in, picked out one of the pistols, and sat back in the chair, holding the gun loosely in his lap. He lifted it limply.

  “I thought about using one of these to do it,” he said, glaring into Gruber’s face. “But I wanted—I wanted to feel it, you know? I wanted to feel the life going out of her . . . I wanted to feel her heart stop beating and her whole body go slack. I wanted to squeeze and see if she would fight or if she would know what was coming. I wanted to look into her eyes and see if she was afraid, or if something there would go blank when her neck snapped.”

  Gruber roared, “Noooooo.”

  “Oh, Jesus,” I said, moving to flip the switch. “I’m turning this off.”

  Monica grabbed my wrist. “Don’t touch it,” she snapped.

  Her eyes were hard on the monitor.

  Jeff was smiling thinly, his eyes shadowed with satisfaction.

  “Does it hurt?” he said. He seemed to be asking Gruber, but then he answered as if to himself.

  “I don’t think so. Maybe I should have done something that hurt. Slowly. Maybe the vice in the woodshop? Would that have worked?”

  Gruber made a lunge forward with one arm, but Jeff pointed the gun toward him.

  “Ah, ah. Take it easy, old man. Back off.”

  Gruber pulled back slowly. Still cradling Iris in his left hand, he brought her body to his cheek, held it there, and closed his eyes.

  “Oh . . .” He moaned. “She was inno—”

  Jeff reared up out of the chair.

  “Innocent?” he screamed. “Is that what you meant to say? Fucking innocent? Well, guess what. So was I. So was Mom. So were all of us, father . . . But somehow you couldn’t feel for us what you felt for her, could you? You couldn’t protect us and pet us and baby talk to us, could you? You couldn’t bathe us and feed us by hand? You could hardly bear to be in the same room. Why was that?”

  He paused, rhetorically, reading Gruber’s face and the truer signal of his hands, which had begun shaking violently.

  “You know, I thought about that, too, when I was killing her.”

  Gruber moaned again, and pressed Iris closer.

  “Well, right before, actually. I thought, what is it about her that he loves so much? That he can love? So damned much. And I couldn’t get an answer. I couldn’t figure it out.”

  “You have no idea what you’ve done,” Gruber said, his voice now shaking, too. “You have no idea.”

  “I’ve done what I meant to do,” Jeff hissed ecstatically. “And maybe a lot more, which as far as I’m concerned is a bonus.”

  “You—” Gruber began, but Jeff cut him off, screaming again, his voice breaking hoarsely with the effort.

  “No, you. It’s on you. All of this is on you. Every part of it. And me? I know exactly what I’ve done. And the only thing I regret is having to watch you snivel over a bird. A fucking talking bird.”

  He still had the gun pointed at Gruber, but he had loosened his grip on the butt. Now he let it slip from his fingers onto the desk. He placed his hand over it.

  Monica turned to me, her eyes frightening.

  “Which door did you use to get in?”

  “What?”

  “Over there.” She pointed at the monitor. “Which door did you use? Back or front?”

  “Back,” I said. “Through the garage. Why?”

  She turned and bolted out of the room. I could hear her stomping up the stairs and across the foyer. I heard the front door slam open wildly against the coat closet wall. I lurched to follow her, tossing my body up the stairs as fast as it would go. I came out the front door just in time to see Monica disappearing around the back of Gruber’s house.

  I slowed, as if momentarily confused about which way to go, except that that wasn’t the confusion. The dawn was coming up, soft and gray, but yet strangely sharp as well, picking out the edges of things, layering the contours of depth and width and breadth contiguously. The space before me seemed to stretch by halves again as long, and bend into looping pools of light and shadow. I had been staring at the monitors so closely—the flat, square, flickering view—and now I was running in round dimensions.

  I was moving as fast as I could, and yet it felt as though I was running in deep sand. I shouted aloud in frustration, growling to push myself on, yet Gruber’s house seemed to be receding atop a scrolling belt of grass. There was a loud, dizzy shushing in my ears and a cool weightlessness in the back of my head, as if someone had left open a door to my skull. As I ran, seemingly in place, I heard again those freeing words that I had heard in Gruber’s kitchen an hour before, words that now came down on me like a trap: What you do or do not do now will make no difference.

  I heard the shot as I rounded the side of the house and I fell into the cool wet receiving grass.

  25

  I never lost consciousness as far as I know. And yet the gap in time between falling down and seeing Mrs. Bloom’s face hovering not two feet above my own cannot be accounted for. Was it five minutes? Ten? Or was it only two?

  I don’t remember thinking anything. I don’t remember knowing why I was lying on the lawn, or where I had been going when I fell there. Not at first. I knew only that Mrs. Bloom was kneeling beside me, looking down at me with those serene, pale, pale blue eyes and smiling a paper-thin smile of relief that I wasn’t dead.

  “You’re all right,” she said. “You’re all right.”

  The palm of her hand was on my chest, pressing gently.

  “How do you know?” I said, teasingly. I don’t know why.

  She slid her hand across and up and down my torso.

  “Well, let’s see,” she said gamely. “No holes. Do you hurt anywhere?”

  I shook my head.

  “Nick,” she said, very seriously, “I thought I heard a loud bang.”

  Then I remembered.

  “Yes,” I said. “I was running.”

  She looked puzzled.

  “I was watching, and then I ran—”

  I bolted up. “Monica—”

  “Okay, wait,” she said, placing one hand on each of my shoulders. “I’ve called the police.”

  “Yes, but—” I tried to get up again. “Has there been another shot?”

  “No,” said Mrs. B. “Nothing.”

  I looked
toward Gruber’s house.

  “There?” said Mrs. B.

  “Yeah,” I replied. “One of Gruber’s guns.”

  She nodded worriedly.

  “Who is Monica?” she asked.

  “A friend. She went into the house. I was coming after her.”

  “Why, for heaven’s sake, would your female friend be going into Edward’s house at five in the morning?”

  “Because of the gun,” I said, without thinking.

  Mrs. B. frowned and fell back on her haunches. She dropped her hands to her sides and let them trail helplessly in the grass. She was looking at Gruber’s house.

  I let my eyes wander to the morning sky behind her head, the horizon going rose, touched with salmon in the west, and tracers of clouds, blue-gray. I was thinking how calm it seemed, the facade of our cake-decorated world, how dreamy drawn in crayon, and simple, like a first grader’s rendition of where he lives. The house, the chimney, the sun in its sky, the green grass, the brown tree, the lines of behavior all distinct, yet softly realized in wax. Here is our neighborhood, our neighbor. See? You can touch the child’s drawing and feel paper. You can see what he wants you to see. And there will be no more to go on. This is what you get. By way of view and by way of warning.

  When I looked back at her, Mrs. B.’s face had transformed. The concern and strange jocularity of our exchange had given way to a much stronger emotion. Her eyes had gone glassy with horror and amazement. She had risen on her knees and her back was rigid with alarm.

  I turned to see what she was seeing.

  Gruber had emerged from his house through the front door. He was walking very slowly toward us across his front lawn. His bright white undershirt was stained with patches of bright red blood. His face, grooved and sunken above the sharp border of his shirtfront, was like a peach pit, slimed with sweat and tears. He was carrying Monica in his outstretched arms.