Neighborhood Watch (v5.0)

by Cammie McGovern

  “I thought I saw one that day when I was in her house, looking around.” I don’t need to clarify this—the day Linda Sue died. With Marianne I seem to leave as much unsaid as possible. I’ve always wondered if Marianne knows more about that night than she’s told me. If she’s visited me in prison out of some complicated sense of guilt. Not that she knows who killed Linda Sue, but I’ve wondered if she knows something. Once, in the buildup to my trial, Paul remembered a detail I’d almost forgotten: The day after Linda Sue’s murder, Marianne and Roland weren’t around at all. Several of us tried calling, but hung up, unsure of what sort of message to leave. When they finally heard the news, they seemed genuinely shocked and then preoccupied by other matters the rest of us knew nothing about. They’d always been like that—a family with secrets the neighbors didn’t pry into.

  Sitting in her car now, headed to her house to live with the husband she may or may not be separated from, it occurs to me how little I know about this woman. For many years she never worked beyond projects like me and Neighborhood Watch. Recently, she’s parlayed her old safety obsession into a part-time business of selling personal security devices out of her home. We used to joke about this before Linda Sue was murdered. Then, of course, we stopped and wondered how prescient she was.

  For now, Marianne says she doesn’t recall any cat. “Of course I was never inside her house, though. You remember how funny she was about that. She wouldn’t let anyone in. I tried,” she says, as if even after twelve years she were still a little hurt by it.

  I was inside Linda Sue’s house twice and it looked just the way we imagined it might from our glimpses through her window. Empty. It’s hard to guess what she was afraid we’d see. “She probably felt a little self-conscious. She didn’t have much furniture.”

  Marianne looks at me. “What was I, Martha Stewart? Did I go around telling people they had to buy sofa sets and matching curtains?”

  “No.”

  “She thought I didn’t like her. I did, though. I was interested in her. We were all interested in her.”

  Marianne is right. We were all interested in Linda Sue. We drive for a little while in silence. “So, no, she never mentioned a cat to me.”

  She’s already told me there’s a party waiting for me back at her house. “Just a few of your old friends,” Marianne says, which makes me more nervous the closer we get. Which of the many friends who never wrote or visited me in prison will be there? Which of my coworkers whose testimony helped to convict me? The potential for awkwardness is so rife I turn and stare at the draining light of day. In twelve years, I’ve ridden only in the back of a Corrections Department van, ankles shackled, going to and from the courthouse. Now I’m surprised by odd things. The cars on the highway seem bigger than I remember. Twice, we pass people talking on the telephone as they drive, which I’ve never seen before. It’s dark by the time we get to Juniper Lane and I can’t see much on the block except that the trees are taller than I’d even imagined.

  Inside about half of the twenty people gathered shout “SUR-PRISE!” when we walk in; the rest look confused and surprised themselves. Jeremy warned me to expect this because the news coverage of my case still runs twelve-year-old photos. “Some people won’t recognize you. They think hair dye might have been available in prison.”

  Before I left CCI, I used a staff bathroom and saw myself in a full-length mirror for the first time in more than a decade. I examined the ways I’d aged—the lines around my eyes, my new hair so short and white I almost look blond. But the biggest change was in my body. I am thinner now, with muscles in my arms and legs. Even the features on my face look more pronounced, my eyes bigger, my jawline sharper. For twelve years I’ve exercised two hours a day because Wanda insisted it would stop the suicidal thoughts, and to some extent she was right. She taught me the art of exercising in a tight space, calf raises and isometric pulls. Even as we bent over and coughed for strip searches we made ourselves stronger, and here is the proof: I look like a different person. “You’ll dye your hair tomorrow,” Wanda whispered last night, after my haircut. “And buy some makeup.” It was her only acknowledgment that I was going somewhere, with such possibilities.

  My old boss, Viola, is the first person I recognize, though she looks thirty years older, her shoulders stooped, her head hanging forward as if the thin bun of white hair on top of her head were weighted somehow. She puts a papery, cool hand in mine and squeezes. “It’s good to see you, dear.”

  “You look well. Very fit.”

  Behind her, I see Kathy from our AV department, the only person from the library who wrote to me in prison to say she was sorry the others hadn’t been in touch, but no one knew what to say. She smiles now and gives me a hug. “You look wonderful, Betsy. Maybe we should all go on a prison diet.” She means this as a joke, but now I remember how awkward Kathy could be, how no one ever wanted to take their lunch break with her.

  In the corner, I see Paul standing with an older woman who seems to be making an argument by stabbing the air with her hands. In the old days, Paul always got caught in conversations like this. He isn’t striking like Geoffrey. He’s smaller, softer, his hair and skin paler, but I always thought he was handsome and I’m happy about how he still looks like his old self. He peeks up at me and waves with the tips of his fingers. I wave back.

  I met Paul in my senior year in college, three months before our graduation at an annual party called SOMF—Send Off the Month of February—which culminated in a fraternity tradition of creating snow sculptures and watching while fraternity members urinated on them. “I don’t get it,” Paul said, standing beside me as we watched.

  “It’s symbolic,” I explained. “They’re going to the bathroom on winter.”

  Neither of us was even a little drunk. We smiled at each other and shook our heads, adults in the presence of children. Later we sat down on a stone wall and he told me he hadn’t been to too many parties. I’d spent four years of college going to all of them, afraid that if I didn’t I might miss something. When I asked what he’d been doing instead, he answered seriously, “Going to the library mostly. And labs. I’ve taken a lot of labs. They eat up the afternoons so I have to study at night.” We started dating after that, at a different speed than I’d ever gone before. He was sweet and gentle and hesitant in ways I’d never seen a boy be before. We went out on coffee dates, then lunches, then finally a movie date I ended by asking if he ever thought about kissing me. “I mean, sure,” he stammered. “I’ve thought about it.”

  Eventually I had to tell him that, yes, boys occasionally slept over in the suite I shared with five girls. In fact they slept over most nights, I wanted to say, but didn’t for fear of shocking him. I loved him for knowing less about the ways of the world than I did, and for being the first boyfriend I didn’t feel panicky around. When I was with him, a calm settled over me and, for the first time in my life, I took charge of things. We decided we’d stay in the area for grad school, live together to save money, and get married the following year, all before we’d known each other six months.

  When I asked him for a divorce two years after my conviction—two years of visits spent going over the mistakes we’d made in my trial—I said it was for him. I wanted to give him a chance to have a real life, by which I suppose I meant to have children with someone else, but I was thinking of myself, too. I wanted to leave the past behind. When he resisted, as I knew he would, I told him I was tired of focusing on my case. “Don’t you see I won’t have a life if I do that?”

  He stared at me. “You want a life in there?”

  It broke my heart, all that we weren’t saying. “Yes, Paul. I want a life.”

  Though he wrote a few letters, he didn’t come again after that. Seeing him now, I feel a strange mixture of sadness and relief. We have so many touchstones in common. He knows the details of my case better than I do, and the way our life before the murder might have looked fine from the outside but wasn’t always. He knows the secrets we
tried to keep. The ones we’re probably both thinking of now. When he finally comes over, it’s nice to hug him. “It’s good to see you, Bets. You look great.”

  “So do you,” I say.

  I ask if he’s held on to the old documents and transcripts from the trial. “Oh, sure,” he says. “Why? What’s up?”

  “Do you remember anything in there about Linda Sue’s cat?”

  He narrows his eyes slightly. It’s as if we’re picking up on our conversation exactly where we’d left off ten years ago. Here’s another detail we shouldn’t forget, another possibility. “There was a cat in her house that day. I saw it when I went over. About three years ago, I got a letter from someone who knew about it.”

  “Maybe they meant the stray? The gray calico with the fluffy tail—you remember that one?”

  Now that he’s said it, I do remember that cat. For about six months, he became a fixture on our block. He’d appear around dusk and follow someone home or pick a porch to sit on. Some of us fed him, some didn’t, but I don’t think he went a night without a house to sleep in and never the same one twice in a row. In the evening he was very affectionate, winding himself around legs and purring, and then in the morning he’d slip out the door and disappear the first chance he got. Barbara once said he reminded her of a few old boyfriends she’d had in college.

  I ask Paul if he ever saw it after Linda Sue died. He considers for a minute and shakes his head. The more I think about this, the more significant it seems. Not the cat but the fact of this letter, the directive tone, the circumscribed admission, as if someone were weary of sitting on his guilty secret and now wanted to get it out in the open. Think about the cat, you nitwit. I had for years and still couldn’t say what it meant. Did the cat walk through the blood and carry off some vital piece of evidence?

  “Do you think Geoffrey might have written it?” I ask tentatively.

  “No.” I’ve always wondered what Geoffrey was doing in the lead-up to my trial. He’d left the neighborhood but had still, in mysterious ways, made his presence felt. I know he called people, told them certain things. “No,” Paul says again. “Geoffrey didn’t know anything about the cat.”

  This seems odd. A minute ago, Paul didn’t either. “You talked to him about it?”

  He leans toward me to explain. “It was in the files of discovery. There was a cat food dish and litter pan.”

  “So you did know about it?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “Because I didn’t think it meant anything. I thought it meant, you know, she had a cat. But I asked Geoffrey about it once and he said no, she hated cats.”

  So he’s thought about this, too, and puzzled over it. Maybe he doesn’t want to get caught up in a small matter the way we did before my trial when we dwelled obsessively on inconsistencies that took up all our time and got us nowhere. A muddy footprint on her porch; a phone call Linda Sue made that morning to a lawyer in Hartford. Every revelation felt like a breakthrough until it wasn’t: The footprint belonged to a carpenter who’d worked on her roof the week before; the lawyer didn’t recognize her name. Whatever she was calling him about remained as mysterious as the message she didn’t leave. “I never knew what to think,” Paul says. “Except maybe she was cat-sitting.”

  Marianne pulls me away from Paul to introduce me to a couple of Court TV fans who apparently have been following my case from the beginning. They tell me they saw the problem with my nightgown right away and they never liked the DA’s explanation for the sandwich. It’s disorienting to have people know so much about me and nothing really. When we finally exhaust the topic of my trial, there is nothing left to say.

  Marianne steers me from one group to another, people who all smile and ask if it feels good to be out. “Oh, yes,” I say, wishing it were possible to tell the truth: It’s a funny mix of feelings. The only new people I like arrive toward the end, a gay couple living in Geoffrey’s old house who seem to appreciate the oddity of the situation. They look about ten years younger than I am and tease each other like new lovers.

  “Bill wants the sordid details of your prison life,” Finn says, smiling at his boyfriend.

  “I do not,” Bill says, blushing. “Oh, all right, sure. I’m curious, but only because I went to a boarding school that always felt like prison and I wondered if that’s true.”

  I smile and wrinkle my nose to suggest that I can recognize a joke. “Probably not,” I say. “Did you have a rule against caffeinated coffee?” He shakes his head. “There you go, then. Prison was probably a little worse.”

  Finn tells me he’s a fact checker and researcher for magazines, the sort of job reference librarians wish they had when they get tired of dealing with the crazy public all day. When I tell Finn this, he says, “I actually wanted to be a librarian. I’m one of those people who overromanticize that job.”

  “People do,” I say.

  Before they leave, Finn surprises me with a question no one else has asked. “Is there anything you’ll miss about prison?” Every article I’ve read about myself assumes this has been a decade-long nightmare, that all of this time has been stolen from what should have been my rightful life on this block alongside these neighbors. I’ve never admitted the more complicated truth: that my stolen years came earlier and my real life, in many ways, began only recently. I know this much: Disguises are a kind of a prison, as is the pretense of being something you’re not. In prison I found a life that was full and rich with people who depended on me, real friendships, real lives I made a difference in. Here that was less true. So yes is the answer, though I don’t say all this. “The mashed potatoes,” I say, and everyone laughs.

  Before he leaves, Finn tells me he works at home during the day and I’m welcome to stop over anytime I’d like. He leans closer so he’s not overheard. “You know, if being here starts to feel a little weird.”

  “Thank you,” I say, wondering if he can tell it’s already feeling a little weird.

  After everyone leaves, Marianne’s nervous energy seems only to intensify. I sit on the sofa watching her straighten two piles of magazines. “I don’t know why I invited Jean,” she says. “She’s never been a very sensitive person and she certainly proved that today.” Was Jean the woman who asked if prison had made me an angrier person? I don’t remember.

  “I liked Bill and Finn,” I tell her.

  “Did you?” She looks up hopefully. “Yes, they’re very sweet.”

  I can see that her pale cheeks are flush, her forehead damp, evidence of the effort this day has been for her. Roland never appeared at the party, which I assume means they’re separated and he’s no longer around. By the time I left, Roland spent the bulk of his days and nights in the basement, where he kept a workshop filled with design plans for solar-powered water heaters and fuel cells that never seemed to work as well as they should. At least according to Marianne, who rolled her eyes about his work and pointed to the sky. “Solar’s always going to have problems. Like how it’s not always sunny.”

  We also knew—for all of her attempts to dismiss his work—that it wasn’t insignificant. Roland worked for an alternative energy company and sometimes groups of people came to his house for meetings, most of them well dressed and driving tiny cars that looked as if they’d been tooled by hand from thin sheets of steel. Through Roland, we learned that green energy development wasn’t just for hippies and counterculture aesthetes. There was money in those minicars lined up along the street, money in the layers of peasant clothes they wore. Once I saw a man in cowboy boots and a bolo tie clasped with a fist-sized disk of turquoise step out of a limousine and walk around the house to Roland’s basement door. We assumed they would explain it sooner or later—he’s from Texas, an investor, a crazy old coot—but Marianne never mentioned it and neither did Roland.

  It’s been a year since the last time Marianne mentioned Roland’s name, and I haven’t got the heart to ask where he lives now. For all her buoyant enthu
siasm over my release—the balloons, the cake, the WELCOME HOME banner hand-painted and strung on one wall of the living room—there is a sadness about Marianne that isn’t hard to see.

  “What’s happened to the old neighbors?” I ask, trying to make the question sound casual. I need to find these people and talk to them, the sooner the better.

  “Well, the Baker-Harrisons moved to New Jersey. But a nice part. Montclair, I think. I don’t know if Helen still has that faux-finishing business. And Wendy Stubbins died from something. Brain cancer, I think.”

  Wendy Stubbins was one of the young mothers on the block. Once I saw her walk up the street carrying a trike in one hand and her toddler by his overall straps in the other. “You’re not listening,” she hissed as she walked past, her child’s limbs pinwheeling through the air. I remember so many snapshots like that, so many times I wondered: Would I do that? It was easy to believe I would have made a firm but fair mother, one who could discipline with one throat-clearing sound and a narrowing of the eyes. “Wendy’s dead?” I say in disbelief. Her son couldn’t be more than fourteen now. I always feel a pang when I hear about motherless children. As if there should be a way to match us up, a dating service of some kind.

  “I don’t know if Jim ever remarried. He was a little bit of an alcoholic even before she died. I don’t know what happened with that.”

  He was? For the umpteenth time I wonder how much I witnessed and failed to see in those days of watching so much on our street.

  After we’ve cleaned up, Marianne leads me to Trish’s old bedroom, apologizing along the way for the state it’s in. “I haven’t done much with it,” she says, which might be an understatement. Apparently, in twelve years she’s done nothing at all because it still looks like a little girl’s room. In one corner there’s an empty hamster cage, in another a dollhouse with one door hanging loose. The twin beds are covered with throw pillows and stuffed animals.