Neighborhood Watch (v5.0)

by Cammie McGovern

  I tried to blame the boys’ suite across the hall. We talked about putting an alarm on the fridge. But I had enough evidence—greasy smudges on my sheets, vile stomachaches all day—to know that I was the culprit we were trying to catch, and that if it came out, it would be no laughing matter. It was unheard of and disturbing, a window to the possibility that I didn’t just grow up in the disturbing presence of my father’s unhappiness but contained the possibility for it somewhere inside of me.

  I kept going because Geoffrey was laughing hard by then. “I had developed a thing for greasy raw meat, apparently. It was like I had the opposite of anorexia. I begged the school doctor for prescription sleeping pills and that seemed to do the trick. I’m the only person who’s ever lost five pounds in a month by staying in bed.”

  Now I study the book that I’ve just pulled down from Trish’s shelf. As if it were not disturbing enough that Geoffrey was pretending to have read this as a teenager, I remember him inscribing a copy of his favorite Ken Kesey book to me with the exact same closing: Friends Always (I hope). I was thrilled with the sentiment, the vulnerability I read into the parenthetical add-on.

  I try to imagine what this means. I don’t remember ever seeing Geoffrey and Trish together or hearing him mention her. I tell myself, If he was writing about a teenage girl, it wasn’t preposterous for him to befriend one. I dig through Trish’s desk drawers crammed with notes and old school papers to see if I can find any more evidence of his presence in her life. At the bottom of the deepest one, I find a dog-eared blue spiral notebook with DIARY KEEP OUT! PRIVATE! written across the front.

  It’s so old I can’t imagine finding any real secrets in here. She couldn’t have been more than thirteen when she was keeping this diary, full of complaints about her brother, John, and a surprising number of mentions about our neighbors. On the second page I find Helen Baker-Harrison’s name, with a story about her dog. And then one about Barbara Baylor, who apparently offered to buy some of Trish’s “specially written poetry.” There’s even a mention of me, whom she’d seen that day at the library. Mysteriously, it says: “She seems better these days, which is nice.”

  It worries me to read this, but it also reminds me of the Trish I knew. The perky, happy girl. The friendly teenager, waving from the bus stop and starting conversations. “I like the new bush you planted, Mrs. Treading! I told your husband!” she’d say. What other teenager offered such comments unsolicited? I had no children for her to babysit, no money to pay her for chores, yet she seemed eager to talk, and noticed the little things you assume teenagers don’t. Once I passed her as I walked to work wearing a new winter coat and she clapped her hands and said, “Oh, it’s nice, Mrs. Treading. A lot better than that old one!” I could hardly believe it. It was better than my old one. In fact, I’d spent an hour in the store trying it on. I fell in love and spent too much. “I’ll wear it for the next fifteen years,” I promised Paul when he saw the price. Money had become a point of contention between us after we figured out that our mortgage payments took more than half of our paychecks. Hearing her say this made me think it was all worth it.

  Trish wasn’t perfect, of course. I saw her once smoking a cigarette at the bus stop, and thought: She’s a girl with secrets. She smiled and waved, folding her cigarette into the palm of her hand. “Hi, Mrs. Treading! How’s the library? Anything new?”

  “Fine,” I said, crossing my arms over my chest. “You know, the usual.” Did she want to hear that I’d been put temporarily in charge of the mystery/suspense section? Did she pretend to care so she could laugh at me later with her friends? Sometimes she was impossible to figure out.

  “I was thinking about coming down there for a book.”

  What else could I say? “Oh, good! What book?”

  “I don’t know yet.”

  Should I tell her I could see the lit cigarette inside her cupped hand? That it wasn’t so long ago that I’d done a little smoking myself? She looked at me that way sometimes: as if she wanted to be my friend.

  Now it breaks my heart to remember how much I liked Trish and how I tried not to let that show, limiting our conversations, ending them before anyone saw us. How did such a girl fall out so grievously with her parents? In her diary, the closest I can find to a clue is this: Mom is making more rules about who I’m allowed to invite home. No one from school, no one from the neighborhood. She says they need to be home anytime someone from outside the family is here.

  In my own family, I was the one who cut us off from the prying eyes of the outside world. By the time I got to junior high I lived in fear of anything that might draw attention to my home life, the silent dinners we ate, the ubiquitous TV. By ninth grade, there was evidence of my father’s strange temper—holes kicked in the walls, covered with LOVE! posters that made our house look like it was wearing Band-Aids. I thought it was imperative to keep people away.

  As I keep reading her diary, I give Trish credit for having the bravery I didn’t in the face of odd parents. By December, she’s turned thirteen and smoked pot with Alan, who rides on her bus. By February she’s gone home with Tommy, a greasy-haired viola player who asked her if she would mind taking off her shirt.

  I waited until my freshman year in college to embarrass myself in such stupid, self-destructive ways. I arrived an innocent eighteen-year-old, and within three months I was passing out regularly in lounges and dorm rooms I didn’t recognize. I put on the performance of a wild girl for seven months, dancing on coffee tables, inviting boys I’d just met back to my dorm room because its sterile plainness was a thrill—Look around, go ahead! There’s nothing to see! In March of that year, I sobered up quickly when I discovered I was pregnant and had no idea who the father was. At the time I thought of it as a humiliating wake-up call. The school doctor knew, but no one else had to, I decided. I told him I’d be fine going into Stamford alone for the procedure. I took a bus and brought a backpack full of textbooks. Afterward, I lay on the gurney and read my Japanese history book. In the years that followed, whenever I thought about those first months away from home, I felt a wash of embarrassment and, frankly, relief that I hadn’t paid a steeper price. I didn’t know, of course—it never occurred to me—that there might still be a price to pay.

  Trish’s worst year started with her suspension for a cafeteria incident that she never describes. I flip ahead in the diary to see how much more I can bear:

  Guess what! We have new neighbors across the street.

  The woman is a professor (really pretty!) and the man is a published writer. So far I’ve only talked to him. She’s not around that much. Today at the bus stop he introduced himself. He told me he wanted to talk to me about what books

  I read and what I like to do. He said he’s writing about a teenage girl and needs to do some research. I didn’t tell him I want to be a writer, too. Maybe I won’t tell him at all. I’ll just write my book and when it’s done, I’ll show him.

  She must have been fourteen by this point, the same age I was when my father checked himself into the hospital and I spent the next year wondering what our future would be like. It was a lonely, heightened period in my life, the last year when I remember everything that happened with perfect clarity. After that, small holes began opening up, things I either tried not to remember or simply couldn’t.

  CHAPTER 7

  The next morning I walk into the kitchen to find a bowl of batter and a waffle iron on the counter. “Roland,” Marianne says, shaking her head. “He usually eats downstairs but every Sunday he comes up here, makes a mess with his waffles, and goes back downstairs.”

  I try to keep the shock out of my voice. “Roland still lives here?” He made no appearance at the party yesterday, there’s no car in the driveway, no visible sign of him.

  “Oh, sure.” She waves her hand. “Where else would he be?”

  “Why didn’t he come up last night?”

  She shrugs. “Roland’s never liked my parties. He thinks people ask about his work and then
don’t care about the answer. You know Roland,” she says, which makes me blush self-consciously. I wonder if she suspects that I did know him once, better than most people realized.

  I can see that Marianne doesn’t want to dwell on the subject of her husband.

  Last night, Jeremy only stayed at the party for about a half hour, but before he left, he took me aside and said that while I was here I should poke around and see what I could find. “This is the house where those meetings were, right? Where Linda Sue made her scenes?” I nodded and wondered what he thought I might find. “Maybe Marianne has a list of people who attended. It would be nice to find out who might have been there and gotten angry at Linda Sue.”

  Marianne pours us coffee and I ask her what became of the Neighborhood Watch group after I left. “I tried to keep it going, but it didn’t work. People wouldn’t even put out their signs.” She shakes her head as if this has been the whole problem: people refusing to acknowledge danger. She thinks she has a list, she says, and an hour later she miraculously produces it. A yellow sheet torn neatly from a legal pad, covered in signatures. I stare at it and wonder if modern science can draw DNA from pen ink or the ancient cells deposited from the hands that brushed over this page.

  “Wow,” I say. There are seventeen names on the list, though in my memory more people were there that last night. When I point this out, Marianne says, “Some people didn’t sign in. Linda Sue never would.” She sighs as if, even in death, Linda Sue’s arbitrary stances could be annoying.

  I read down the list of names and see ones I don’t recognize and others I’ve so long ago forgotten, I can’t put a face to them. At the bottom Trish Rashke is printed out in bubbly teen-girl handwriting. “Trish was there?” I say. “I don’t remember that.”

  Marianne looks over, reading with her bifocals. “I suppose she was. Those were the days when I tried to include her in things so she wouldn’t sit in her room, listening to music that made her want to kill herself.”

  This is as close as Marianne has ever come to mentioning Trish’s problems. I don’t know if she doesn’t talk about it, period, or if she keeps her silence on this subject with me in particular, sensing my old feelings, that I was more interested in Trish than I probably should have been. I wonder aloud about contacting some of the people on this list. “I don’t have any phone numbers for them. It’s not like anyone kept in touch.” Marianne seems to have a point she’s trying to make. This was hard on everyone, not just you.

  Except for Paul, there was no one from the old neighborhood at the party last night. But surely they haven’t all moved that far away. If strangers have been following my story, I have to assume my neighbors have, too. So why wouldn’t Marianne have called them up? When I press the issue, she finally admits, “I tried a few. They all said they were sorry but it would just be too painful to come back.”

  I served twelve years in prison for a murder I didn’t commit, and coming back here would be too painful for them? Marianne waves away whatever she’s just implied. “Everyone just feels terrible that they didn’t do more for you back then. They don’t know what to say.”

  Maybe they feel guilty because one of them is.

  Later that morning, after Marianne’s gone out to the grocery store, I poke around the house, though I don’t go near her office. If she’s using this outing as a test, she’ll know if I go through her papers, and I can’t risk that just yet. I notice a tray of mail by the front door and something odd in it—an envelope addressed to Alocin Bell at C.L.E.E.R. Enterprises in Alabama. It’s hand-typed with this address. It must have something to do with John, who lives in Alabama. I don’t move it or touch it (amazing how aware of fingerprints one can be after leaving too many at a crime scene). Instead I go through the kitchen through a doorway that matches one I remember in our old house. There’s a dark wooden set of stairs and no light so I hold fast to a splintering rail on one side and make my way slowly. At the bottom, there’s a cement landing, and somewhere straight ahead a door to the finished apartment. “Hello?” I call, and then louder, “HELLO?”

  The door opens a crack and light spills in a line across the floor. “Yes?” I hear a low voice, disembodied and male.

  “Roland, it’s Betsy. I wanted to say hello.”

  Is this strange that I’ve been here for a day without saying hello, or stranger that he hasn’t come up himself? The door opens wider, and there he is. After all these years, my breath catches for a moment in surprise, but of course time hasn’t stopped for him, either. His thick hair is mostly gray, his narrow face lined. The glasses are the same, as is the slight stoop of his shoulders and the gentle smile. “Betsy. My God. Look at you.”

  “It’s nice to see you again, Roland.”

  In truth, this isn’t the first time I’ve been down here to visit Roland. The first time I came innocently enough to ask about his work because I was interested in solar panel heating for our house. I’d had three miscarriages at that point and was looking for explanations: The heat when it first came on in the fall smelled funny to me, full of chemicals. I’d gotten pregnant in the late summer twice, and both times lost my babies after the first freeze. Our ducts were full of toxins, I decided. Our furnace was a laboratory of poisonous chemicals. “I don’t want to go another year with this heating system,” I said to Paul, who looked aghast and asked if I realized how much solar heating cost.

  In prison, when I told Wanda some of these stories, she always laughed. “Shit, honey, I used to know ladies like you. High maintenance, we call them.” I always defended myself. “It wasn’t me I was thinking about, it was the babies, my children.” I don’t know if she believed me but it was true. I didn’t want material goods, I wanted a house full of children and their distractions. Wanda had three children, grown by the time she came to prison. “You don’t know what it’s like to never have one,” I told her.

  It was January when I first knocked on Roland’s basement door. It was cold and I was surprised to find him in sweatpants and a T-shirt, as if I’d just woken him up. “Oh, wow,” he’d said, running his hands through his hair. “Sure, yeah. Come on in.”

  I’d never been in his basement workshop before, but it was just as I’d imagined: crowded with bookshelves and worktables cluttered with rolled-up drawings and designs, notebooks propped open, covered in illegible handwritten notes—data, I assumed, and diagrams that looked a little bit like the electrolytic converter I’d once made for my ninth-grade science fair.

  “So what are you thinking about?” He looked around sheepishly at the mess. Shoes and socks on the floor, a comforter balled up at one end of the sofa. For the first time, I wondered if he slept down there.

  “Well, solar, of course,” I said. “I was thinking about the panels you have on your roof. Maybe we could start with something like that.”

  He was surprised by my interest and a little stumped, too. As it turned out, Paul was right—it was a costly investment and, even Roland had to admit, a little unpredictable. “You still need your backups. We go weeks without sun here.” His panels heated water and not much else. “Solar works better in Florida, to be honest. Here, winter is tough.”

  “Isn’t this what you do, though, Roland? You work for this company, right?” I held up the catalog he’d given me from Sunburst Enterprises.

  “Right. Sort of. I’m a consultant on some research and design projects they have. I’m not a great authority on what’s happening right now. Our system, for instance, doesn’t work that great. We get maybe ten gallons of hot water a week. If that.”

  He stood in front of me, barefoot and handsome, with a five o’clock shadow. It was hard to imagine him doing a worse sales pitch. “There’s a lot of kinks to get worked out with solar. The longer I look at it, the more I think these panels are inefficient, the recovery problematic. Sure, it’s renewable, but waste gets created. No one wants to talk about the panel disposal problem.”

  “Roland.”

  “What?”

  “Are y
ou saying I shouldn’t look into it at all?”

  He leaned closer, weighing his words, as if he were not sure he should say them. “There are other things out there,” he finally said, staring hard. “If you’re interested.”

  I didn’t look away. “Like what?”

  “I’d have to lay it all out if you want to hear more.”

  “Yes,” I whispered, a little breathless. “What is it exactly?”

  He smiled and wiggled his eyebrows at me. I’d never seen him flirt like this before. “Cutting-edge stuff. The energy future. Just this last year there’s been some breakthroughs—I shouldn’t say too much.” I tried to imagine what he was implying. “It could be life-changing, though.”

  Life-changing?

  He wouldn’t say any more than that. He couldn’t, he said.

  There’d been a rumor around the neighborhood that Roland was applying for a patent. In the last few months there had been more cars in their driveway and delivery trucks. The week before I’d seen him, barefoot on the lawn, arguing with an older man beside a Lincoln Continental parked in the driveway. We could tell something was happening, but we knew enough not to ask.

  “I have some information that I’m not supposed to tell anyone,” he said. I noticed his eyes, brown with green flecks, almost hazel. “But I trust you. You and Paul.”

  He said no more. He asked me not to mention it to anyone besides Paul. “It’s still experimental.” He held up his hands, like two stop signs. “If too many people know, it could blow up in our face.”

  “Okay,” I whispered.