Thy Neighbor

by Norah Vincent

  I could not look at her.

  I looked at Gruber instead.

  I watched the banded muscles of his thighs strain beneath the ruined skin, poking as incongruously as his head, from the starched white of his undergarments. The boxer shorts hung loosely beneath the belt of Monica’s body, pulling and wrinkling with each step. Gruber’s left knee kept banging against Monica’s dangling left wrist.

  I looked back at Mrs. Bloom. She had raised her hands to her mouth, as I had seen her do when overcome before. Her breath drew in sharply, hissing, the nostrils sucking tight around her outstretched fingers. The fingers themselves were raw and cracked and only partially extended, the swollen, angry joints having wrenched and wrangled the digits into a claw.

  I thought again of the power animal. No power at all. A meerkat or a prairie dog, upright, gnawing its nails in fear.

  Gruber strode purposefully to where Mrs. Bloom and I were sitting, knelt beside us, and laid Monica on the ground. Her knees, still bent, fell to the side away from us, one on top of the other, slim as fence posts, and the wet white rubber bottoms of her Keds flashed up at us like fish. Her head rolled to the side facing us, and at last I could look. The eyes were open, the mouth closed.

  I thought once again of the walnut ivory crucifix in the hall upstairs. The one where Mom had taught me to pray. The position of the knees to the side like this, the head turned the opposite way, so pale against the dark wood. The Christ, she called him. The Christ. Like an object: the. An object for the eyes to worship, but so powerless, so beaten, the knees to the side, piled, and the head the opposite way. The torso twisted open. Like this.

  “My God—” said Gruber. “Anita, I didn’t know. I didn’t know she was . . .”

  Mrs. Bloom’s hands strayed across the surface of Monica’s jeans from the ankle to the waist, the V of the bent knees, the Braille of the rough, faded seam.

  “I know, Edward,” she said softly. “I know. It’s not your fault.”

  She moved her hand to Gruber’s own and took it, holding it up and tossing it lightly as if to feel the weight.

  “She came running in,” Gruber said. “I don’t know how—I couldn’t believe it was— And Jeff had the gun in his hand. She went right for the bird and—he’d fired before he even knew who or what—”

  Mrs. Bloom put up her hand to silence him.

  “Edward, please. It’s over now.” She looked for the first time into the dead familiar face. “She’s gone. She’s finally really gone.”

  She turned to me.

  “Is this your Monica?” she said.

  I nodded. This, she had said. Not she, but this. Is this your Monica? This thing of darkness I acknowledge mine. Yes. This was mine. My mistake. My illusion. Yet another. My Monica who was no Monica at all.

  “How—?” I began, but she interrupted.

  “How could you not have known?” she said.

  I nodded again.

  “She’s changed,” she said, brushing the hair back from the forehead. “More than I would have thought.”

  “How do you mean?” I asked.

  Mrs. Bloom let her eyes linger lovingly on the face. She looked up at Gruber.

  “Wouldn’t you say, Edward?”

  Gruber was slow to reply. When he did, his voice was thick with tears.

  “I would have known her anywhere.” He cocked his head to the side. “That face.” He swallowed hard. “That face,” he said again.

  Mrs. Bloom shook her head.

  “So much like Karen.” She sighed. “Astonishing.”

  She clucked disapprovingly and frowned, as though a trick had been played on her in bad taste.

  “That is who I see,” she said. “I see Karen. That awful, late, late, ravaged Karen, who came home that day to abandon her baby.”

  She gasped sharply, as if startled, offended again by the memory.

  “God, that day,” she said. “She was dead already when she came to us. Her skin was the color of old washing. Her face was the face of someone drowned, and I tell you, Edward, I would not have known her anywhere. Had she not been standing on my doorstep calling me Mother, looking out from behind the . . .” She searched for the word. “The accident . . . of herself, I would not have believed that this was my child. I would not have believed that this empty, senseless, bedraggled thing was something I had loved into being.”

  She reached down and touched the cool cheek, which was not ravaged or drowned at all, but startlingly clean and blameless and young and beautiful.

  “Like this,” she said. “She looked just like this.”

  She ran her thumb across the brow several times, above the plane of the dead eye, but she did not close the lid.

  “Do you know?” she went on. “That day, she hadn’t even named her. A year old and she hadn’t named her.”

  Her thumb came to rest on the bridge of the nose.

  “And I just thought that was the most terrible, haunting thing I had ever heard. A baby with no name. It made me sick to think of it.”

  She let her index finger trail to the lower lip and beneath it, tracing the neat bow shape.

  “I wanted to erase that memory,” she said, her voice abrupt with sudden anger. Then soft again. “I wanted to give that child the most hopeful, living name I could think of.”

  Her eyes drifted to mine, gently intense, straining for connection, some catch of understanding.

  “Your first robin of spring,” she said. “You know it?”

  I nodded encouragingly.

  She smiled gratefully and looked back at the upturned face beneath us.

  “When you see your first robin of spring you know that the dark, cold shutting in of winter is almost over and your heart leaps a little bit every time.”

  Her eyes checked me again.

  I blinked slowly in reply.

  “And then you tell someone. You say—I saw my first robin of spring today. And your heart leaps again.”

  “Yes,” I said. “Yes.”

  She paused.

  “Well, I wanted this girl without a name to have that leaping heart, that sign of an end to darkness and cold and shutting in. That’s what I wanted. That’s really all I ever hoped for.”

  “And she did have it,” I said. “She did.”

  “And yet—” She shrugged toward the body lying on the ground. “Here she is with another face and another name in the same place, practically on my doorstep. Isn’t that something?”

  She looked toward her front door and then back again to the spot on the grass where Robin lay.

  “Just steps apart,” she said. “And so many years between—so much running and struggling and trying to get away, and all only to come back to this same place.”

  “No,” said Edward mournfully, but neither of us acknowledged him.

  “People say that time passes,” Mrs. Bloom continued. “But it doesn’t.” She considered this, then added, “It bends.”

  She made an awkward S shape in the air with her gnarled hand.

  “And sometimes, I think, when it bends, things that were far apart pass close together, and you can see the resemblance.”

  She reached in front of her, as if to touch Edward’s hand again, but mimed the action instead.

  “And you can almost reach out and touch something that happened twenty-four years ago, or something that will happen twenty-four years from now—and when you do, you realize that they are part of the same event. How strange. Back then, I was looking forward at this”—she emphasized the strange name—“this . . . Monica’s face, and now I am looking back at Karen’s.”

  “You saw a ghost,” I murmured.

  “Yes,” she agreed. “And I am seeing one now.”

  “That’s exactly how I feel,” I said. “She w
as right there in front of me all the time, and I didn’t know it. And now that I do know it, she’s gone.”

  Mrs. Bloom peered at me quizzically.

  “That part I still can’t understand. Why pull you into this? Why haunt you?”

  I shrugged.

  “It’s complicated.”

  “Of course it is,” she said knowingly. “But that’s something I would have expected to say to you. And yet, it was you—”

  I didn’t wait for her to finish.

  “Listen. What I said the other day—”

  She cut me off.

  “Was confusing,” she said. She sat up straighter. “What did you mean when you said I never meant harm to come to her, and yet it did?”

  “I was upset. I was embarrassed that you found me that way. I didn’t mean anything.”

  “But you did. You said it meaningfully. You were referring to something in particular.”

  “Let’s not—you said it yourself. It’s finally finished.”

  “No,” she said through her teeth. “If you are accusing me of something, then do it directly. I deserve that”—she laughed, remembering our pact—“discourtesy.”

  “I’m not accusing you.”

  She leapt on this.

  “Then she did.”

  “Yes,” I conceded. “She did. But I think she was wrong.”

  “That’s not for you to decide.”

  “Maybe not,” I said.

  Grimacing at the arrogance of that, I added:

  “No. You’re right. It’s not.”

  There was no way to get out of it now. Why, anyway? All of my secrets had turned out not to be secrets, had turned out not to be mine at all.

  Yet I hesitated still. It all seemed too public. Too exposed for this disclosure. Gruber was still kneeling there in the grass across from us, his massive chest and arms defeated, his army-tidy whites now bloodied so starkly, all of him redundant, ridiculous in this disaster. But even he knew, even he had grieved. He was part of this, too, and had been during every one of the last thirteen years, carrying his piece of this alone, unknowing, to place it now on the table in its empty fitting spot. The odd shape snapping into place. He, too, was standing on the other side of an event, and marveling at the proximity.

  “Dr. Cunningham didn’t die in his sleep,” I blurted nervously.

  No one spoke. Gruber was scratching his forearm anxiously and working his wrist in tight circles, as if to massage an injury. The wrist cracked loudly and he stopped. Mrs. B. touched his thigh consolingly and moved it away again. She hadn’t taken her eyes off my face.

  “I saw him the day he died,” I told her.

  I paused, measuring the words.

  “He told me about seeing Robin. What she had wrong with her, and what it meant.”

  I paused again. Could I drive this home?

  “After he told you, he never said anything to anyone. Ever. Until me. That day. And it killed him. It was killing him his whole life and then it finally did kill him. The whole time we were talking, he was holding this box—a pillbox—and it must have been full of whatever he took.”

  I turned to Mrs. Bloom.

  “That was your obit in the paper, the one you saw, and that was why it frightened you so much. You knew what it meant.”

  Mrs. Bloom lowered her eyes. I raised my voice.

  “You knew what he knew and you said nothing.”

  I let that fall on her, watching her face. Did she know this line of thinking? Was it hers? Was it worn and glazed with living, like someone’s name carved in a table? Or did it pinch like new?

  I leaned closer.

  “Is that what you’re worried about?” I asked. “Is that the accusation you expect? Well, sorry, but it’s not the news. It’s not the reason.”

  She looked up at me surprised, almost hopeful, as if the accustomed burden might actually fall away this easily.

  I leaned back from her, sighing loudly.

  “You’re just like everybody else in this. You know that? And, God, are there a lot of everybody elses. You weren’t kidding. Robin spread. She fucking metastasized. She had us all writhing and dying over our private crimes and our dreamed-up hidden loves for her, and all the time it was just the edge of it. We were all peripheral.”

  I laughed nastily.

  Gruber sneered in my direction, his eyes bulging with fury.

  “How do you like that?” I slapped my thigh inanely for emphasis. “Surprise! You are not important.”

  Mrs. Bloom flinched, but made no move to pull away.

  “You wanna know why she was after me?” I croaked. “You really wanna know?” I leaned in again for the blow. “Because my father was fucking her.”

  A large globule of my spit landed on Mrs. Bloom’s chin, and a smaller one on her cheek. Immediately, her hands went up to her mouth, as I knew they would, but they could not stop the sound. Mrs. Bloom screamed into her hands, low and throaty, and the cry was strangely alien and menacing, like the cheers of a stadium full of people heard from half a mile away, or the clamor of an insect colony amplified on the sound track of a film.

  “He was the one,” I shouted. “He’s the one who gave her that disease you didn’t want to know about. He’s what you would have found if you’d bothered to look. He’s what she was running away from—what she had to run away from—because nobody wanted to know enough to make her safe.”

  There. I’d done it. I’d pounded in the last stake, Robin’s coolie still, doing the small work delegated, and right on time. This is how it is in the hell of other people, I remember thinking. You have at each other, and then you eat. Tear each other to pieces with pettiness, and dull teeth.

  Gruber barked and swung at me, landing an awkward openhanded thump on the far side of my head. Mrs. Bloom threw herself on his arm screaming “No!” as he supported her weight over the body. She pushed away from him with both hands and let herself fall onto Robin’s chest, her face fitting neatly in the sleek exposed arc of the neck.

  She stayed there, howling. Gruber sneered at me over the pile of them, threatening what would come. Even through his mindless rage and his pulp-faced stupidity, I could see that he was horrified and shocked by what I had said about my father. I could see all of his thwarted animal affection for that once lost little girl who was now lying dead at his feet—all that affection thrashing into the fundamental baseness of his nature, violent as water. But for the bodies between us—the particular bodies that they were, each with a call on him, one cold and one begging—he would have come at me like nothing tame.

  I wish he had.

  The history of places, Anita had said, and futures, passed as close as trains. Which is moving and which still? Which now and which then? Which real and which illusion? We were looking across time both ways now. There could be no more separation.

  Over Gruber’s shoulder, just barely cresting the gentle rise of our street, I could see two police cruisers rolling into the subdivision, dreamily silent and slow, their blue and red beacons swirling weakly in the thin morning light.

  Mrs. Bloom had quieted. She was whispering into Robin’s ear a long string of words that I could not hear. It sounded like pages rustling. Gruber had placed his opened hand on Mrs. Bloom’s back, his massive palm and barreled fingers spanning her withered form.

  And that is how I left them. I stood slowly, mechanically, turned and walked across the lawns that had separated two gunshots by thirteen years. The stage of our tragedy, as usual, overdone.

  Does everyone have to die?

  I always wondered that as a kid when Mom took me to the theater to see the plays we’d been reading together at home. Hamlet especially, but the Greeks, too. Everybody fucking dies. It’s relentless. And when I said this to her afterward, when we were all shuffling out of
the theater like people who’d been beaten about the head and shoulders with a work of art, I’d say, “Isn’t it a bit unrealistic?” or “Why do you want to feel this way on a Saturday night?,” she’d always laugh at me a little meanly, and I knew she was thinking: What child of mine is this?

  But I meant it. And I still do. It’s too much. Why do we need it? Why do we seek it out even when life itself doesn’t supply it? Can’t we just enjoy simplicity? Kick back and do nothing extreme? Can’t we just have parents who die in their sleep, and doctors, too? Can’t we just have little girls who grow up smiling in their sundresses and throwing their arms around their fathers’ necks? Can’t we just have one major tragedy per acre in a generation? And otherwise, is it impossible to say, let’s just have a boring mothers knitting, children doing homework, dads coming home sober from a hard day’s work and eating dinner with the family kind of place. You know, a neighborhood?

  They exist, don’t they?

  In theory.

  Just not here.

  Yeah. Just not here.

  Gruber and Mrs. B. could deal with the cops, I figured. Send them over to me when they were done. They’d want to know why Robin had gone running into the house, and I’d tell them I didn’t know. That’s just how she was, I’d say, and shrug. Who knew why she did anything. Only she knew the real story, and she was dead. And Gruber and Mrs. B. were too tangled in their own dramas to wonder about mine. It was over. The details didn’t matter anymore, if they ever had to anyone but Robin and me. What could I tell them anyway? I was just Monica’s fuck buddy with a bunch of TVs that nobody knew about?

  Ah, right. The TVs. Didn’t want to be caught with those.

  They were foremost in my mind suddenly, or I made them be, because, as usual, it was better than thinking about and sorting through the endgame on the other side of the street. Just click into self-preservation practical mode and get rid of the evidence. No, not the evidence. It wasn’t evidence. It was garbage. I needed to take out the garbage.

  On my way down to the basement I stopped again at the shelf at the top of the stairs. There was a black rubber mallet lying there. It was Dad’s. It was one of his favorite tools. Came in handy for all kinds of things: pounding in dowels without leaving a mark, mercy killing chipmunks that got stuck in the glue traps in the garage meant for rats and mice, and, now, whirlwinding a tantrum over closed-circuit TVs. Perfect.