Neighborhood Watch (v5.0)

by Cammie McGovern

I didn’t tell Paul. I liked the secretive aspect of it all and for days I tried to imagine what he’d discovered. I even did research at work so I could ask Roland smart questions when I finally got the courage to stop by his basement again. I thought maybe I’d stumbled onto what he was talking about when I read about plans in the works for whole communities structured around net-zero free-energy models, where they produced all the energy they used with geothermal heating and solar photovoltaic cells. There were models already in existence and visionary future ones, incorporating an electric car in the purchase price of every house. The very idea amazed me. People coming together in the service of a larger good, not by real estate happenstance, but joined on a mission. Then I ran into Marianne in the grocery store and told her I’d been talking to Roland a bit about his work. “It sounds exciting,” I said.

  She rolled her eyes and reached out for a box of crackers. “Roland always thinks he’s just invented the new lightbulb,” she said, studying the ingredient list on the side of the box through her bifocals.

  I knew they’d met when they were both at Texas A&M, that they’d been in the same department. I figured that she must have had at least some idea about his research. “It sounds like something completely new.”

  She looked at me over her glasses. “Is that what he told you?”

  Was I saying too much? Had he shared information with me that he hadn’t even told his wife yet? “I mean, that’s all he said. He didn’t get very specific.”

  “No. Roland never does.” She shook her head and smiled, a little weary, like the mother of a younger child who was precocious and exhausting at the same time. “Get specific, I mean.”

  I couldn’t understand what she was saying. What about the FedEx trucks driving up to their house? Or the oversized cars parked in their driveway?

  “I’m afraid Roland has gotten in over his head with a few investors who want their money back,” she said, still studying her cracker box.

  By the way she spoke I understood this was part of something larger that she couldn’t talk about here. That if we occasionally imagined Roland surprising us with a patent that won him money and fame, it wasn’t likely to happen anytime soon. If he wasn’t crazy exactly, he also wasn’t someone I should take very seriously. He was Marianne’s burden to bear. I felt embarrassed by my own gullibility and the time I’d spent researching at the library.

  A week passed, then two. When I saw Roland again, it was from across the street, our lawns and sidewalks stretched out between us. He was bent over his hose spigot. I was guiding a wheelbarrow of fertilizer toward another dead patch that had recently opened up on our lawn. Our eyes caught each other’s and stayed. For a moment, I couldn’t move. Well? his face seemed to say. I tried to put on an expression that said, I’ve talked to Marianne. I understand a little better now. I didn’t want him to feel bad, but I also didn’t want to get caught up in a conversation that would embarrass us both. I pointed down to the wheelbarrow as if it contained some urgent business I had to get back to. It was weeks before I approached him again, and by that point I’d planned what to say: I’ve talked to Paul and he wants to stay with what we have for now.

  In the end, it was easier than I expected. “That’s perfectly fine,” Roland said when I told him. “I understand.”

  Now we stand for a long time, me in the dark, him in the light. Both of our hands, I imagine, equally damp. Once, in prison, I saw a movie with an actor who looked so much like Roland, I thought for a moment it actually was. He played an awkward high school friend visiting the movie heroine, whose gay brother calls him “possibly the saddest person on earth.” Roland only looks like that actor. He isn’t sad, nor is he particularly awkward, given the fact that he lives like a hermit here, underground.

  “Welcome back,” he says, smiling shyly and stepping aside for me to come in. The apartment looks unchanged from my last visit. “I wanted to come up and say hello. Then I heard the stream of visitors and I didn’t think you needed all that plus me.”

  He is exactly how I remember him, honest and sweet. “I would have rather seen you, Roland. Your first day out of prison is an odd time for making new friends.”

  He smiles at my joke but doesn’t laugh. “Can I make you some tea?”

  He made tea, I remember, the last time I came here. A fruit tea, I think. Peach. “That sounds nice.”

  He moves between his sink and his hot plate filling a chipped blue copper tea kettle, then sets out cups and stringed bags of tea. As crowded and unkempt as the space seems, his notebooks have a tidy order to them. Note cards are pasted across pages as if he were getting ready to write a research paper. As he pours water for tea, I read one: On cells L3 and L4, we note a chemical reaction involving Pd that would correspond to about 3.5kJ of heat. This is to be compared with the 3M—1,000 times greater—of “excess heat” observed, so such excess could not possibly be of chemical origin.

  “It was Marianne’s idea to invite you back here. I didn’t even suggest it.” He’s got a playful smile on his face, as if together we’d pulled something off. He’s always been this way with me—so warm and cordial, I never understood why he didn’t come out more and charm the rest of the world. “I said, ‘Of course, Marianne. You do what you want.’ She said it felt a little funny to have you in Trish’s room—”

  My breath catches for a second. Did she guess the fantasy I used to have—that Trish was mine? “I’m grateful to you both. I didn’t have too many options.”

  “Really? You’re such a—” He looks around, searching for the right word. “Well, a celebrity now. I’d have thought everyone wanted you.”

  “No. Surprise, surprise. But no.”

  We stand across from each other, the silence between us filled with everything we might say and don’t. Finally, he says, “How has this all been? Getting out and all that?”

  “A little overwhelming, I have to admit. Everything’s different now. There’s so many gadgets—everyone uses cell phones. I’m not used to all that.”

  “Me neither.” He smiles. In his own way, perhaps, he’s as locked up as I’ve been.

  “Betsy,” Roland says, holding out his hand as if he wants to take mine. He’s remembering the other time I came down here. What precipitated it all—how I opened myself up once and, doing so, couldn’t stop. I can’t tell him what I’m thinking now. I can’t look at him or return the gesture.

  Just standing here makes me think about everything I’ve been working so hard trying to forget.

  CHAPTER 8

  In prison, where sex is far more prevalent than most people realize, I was the only teetotaler I knew. Mostly for obvious reasons. I was older than the others. I didn’t cut necklines out of my state-issue clothes or roll my pants down to where my underwear showed. I considered myself a role model and tried to act accordingly. I watched the other women get caught up in their dramas dating men from the prison across the highway. I’d roll my eyes and listen to their stories about the inmates who came to fix toilets and shovel sidewalks after it snowed. Though the men weren’t allowed to talk while they worked, looks got exchanged, as did surprisingly long and florid letters. I admit, I sometimes felt jealous. Dear Beautiful, one of Wanda’s read. I think about you all the time and can’t wait to see you again. Next time the flakes fly, look for me.

  Twice a year, our facility hosted a Family Days picnic using the men’s yard, which meant, for a few hours at least, they were allowed to join us. For some of my fellow inmates, it was a wrenching conundrum—whether to be with their children, who they never saw enough of, or the men they’d been waving at through windows for the last three months. Usually they gave their mealtime to the children and their afternoons to the men.

  Except for the early years when Paul came, I never had any visitors on Family Days. I usually spent the time on a blanket in a shady spot watching the games and imagined the brood I kept alive in my mind playing water balloons and soccer. By that time, I’d given each of them a name and a personali
ty. Shy Benjamin was my oldest, sweet-hearted but unathletic. Shannon came next, a tomboy who could hit farther and run faster than her brothers. Peter, the middle one, was the funniest and maybe even my favorite. How could I not have a special spot in my heart for the only baby I’d held, the one who’d come the closest to being real? I kept Charlotte and Henry, my youngest two, on a blanket beside me. They were lap snugglers and hand holders, the ones who answered other adults by moving behind my legs, whispering into the folds of my clothes.

  Though it might have looked otherwise, for me Family Days weren’t sad or uneventful. Only once did I feel unsettled by the reminder that I was spending it, by all appearances, by myself. That was the time Leo came over and asked to share my blanket. I looked up at him and blinked, the sun so bright I could hardly see his face, though I recognized him as a member of the maintenance crew. His hair was sprinkled gray and very short. He wore glasses, which was unusual. “Every year I see you sitting here by yourself and every year I say I’m going to talk to you and then . . . I don’t know.” He dropped one hand around the back of his neck and shook his head. “I chicken out.”

  I shrugged and slid over. I’d started loosening up more, having some of these exchanges for the sole purpose of laughing about them later when the girls back on the block sat around and made fun of the men. “Sure,” I said. “Sit.”

  He had the build of a carpenter and the soft, gentle face of an office worker or accountant. Because this was a medium-security facility, I knew that plenty of white-collar criminals were shuffling through their time for tax evasion. I assumed he was one of them. “So you’re the librarian,” he said.

  There were five hundred men living in this facility and seventy-five women in ours. It was easier for them to keep track of us than it was for us to remember them. “That’s right,” I said, and then, because we were smiling at each other, I added, “Why? Are you looking for a book?”

  “Maybe,” he said, laughing. “Do you have any recommendations?”

  “What do you like?” It made no sense, the way we were grinning at each other.

  “Guess.”

  “True crime? Ann Rule?”

  He shook his head.

  I raised my eyebrows. “Danielle Steel?”

  He laughed and I did, too. I didn’t sound like myself. I sounded like Wanda, who flirted with everyone and tried to get a marriage proposal by the end of every Family Days picnic. “Nah, probably not,” Leo said. “I just finished something called The Mill on the Floss. Interesting book. I liked it a lot.” I turned and looked at him square in the eye. A man spending his prison time reading George Eliot? “Have you ever read that one? I had a few problems with Tom Tulliver, of course.” He caught my eye and smiled. “Any man would. I’m thinking about trying Virginia Woolf next. What book of hers do you recommend starting with?”

  Was he serious? I stared at him for a while. “Who are you?”

  “Leo Rankin.” He held out his hand. “I was an English teacher before I came here. I’m trying to use this time to fill in my reading gaps. In college, I’m afraid I slid by on CliffsNotes and smart girlfriends. Somehow I never read any Woolf.”

  As the afternoon wore on, he told me he’d graduated from Brown with a double major in English and psychology. He didn’t start teaching right away. Instead, he went into advertising, which he hated, though the girlfriend he was obsessed with at the time begged him to stay with it. “She wanted us to be one of those glamorous married New York City couples.” He laughed and shook his head.

  “So what happened?”

  “We got married and I stayed in advertising. I guess it worked out until I developed a little drinking problem. The truth is, I don’t remember a lot of that time.”

  It was all a little disconcerting: a man who read George Eliot with a history of memory lapses? He told me more: His marriage dissolved, which gave him the freedom to do what he’d always wanted to do—teach high school English. All a dream come true except for the alcoholism. “Certainly wish now I’d left that behind with the wife.” The more he talked, the longer I let myself look at him—his kind face, the way his eyes crinkled in the corners.

  “And what brought you here?” I asked, because it seemed as if we could joke about anything now, even our crimes. Too late, I remembered Wanda once saying you should never ask a male inmate this question, that it made them defensive and a little crazy. I worried that I’d ruined the nice time we’d just had.

  “Manslaughter,” he said softly. “Vehicular homicide. Two kids and their mom.”

  What could I say? If he knew that I was the librarian, he also knew my crime. I didn’t need to tell him, I know how you feel. I have blood on my hands, too. Guilt like ours was dark and private.

  “I should go,” I said. They were packing the vans that would take us back across the highway.

  “Yep.” He stared down between his knees and held a flat hand up. “Sure thing.”

  “It was nice talking to you.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “No, really. It was.”

  “You’ll probably make fun of me back on the block.” He looked up at me and smiled. “Right? Isn’t that what today is all about? You ladies come over, prance around our yard, get us acting like fools, and then you go back home and laugh about it?”

  Though I hated to say it, the answer was yes. “How about this?” I said, leaning close enough to smell the sweat coming off his T-shirt. “I promise I won’t do that.”

  “Aw.” He smiled, and for a second I thought he might touch me. “That’s nice. Then what will you talk about tonight?”

  “I’ll do what I always do. Roll my eyes at everyone else.”

  Why was I leaving, I suddenly wondered, when we still had forty minutes before we had to be back? Sitting so close to him for so long—almost two hours when I looked down at my watch—had scared me. It reminded me of Wanda’s strategies for the day, how she liked to target certain men, spend the morning flirting, then by the afternoon be in the bushes with them. What if he was this type, I thought, with a time-table in his head and a goal for the day?

  Then he surprised me. Three days later, I got a letter from him, delivered by Sasha, who worked in the laundry facility we shared with the men. She was a regular conduit of mail and got paid in favors for her work; luckily for me, she was also one of the girls I’d tutored to pass her GED. She liked me enough to pass this on:

  Dear Lovely Lady [We couldn’t risk using names. If the letter was found, we’d both get in trouble],

  I just wanted to say that I enjoyed our conversation at the picnic very much. In a bleak time of very few memorable highlights, for me that has been one. I shall remember it for some time even as I also remember the skeptical way you regarded me through most of it. I will also remember the thrill it was making you laugh, how you looked like a teenager when you did. And then, when you walked away from me—too soon, I’m afraid, earlier than you had to—how the sun glanced off your hair and your arms and I honestly thought you looked like an angel. To me, you are that beautiful. And now I wonder if I might have permission to write to you and if you’ll indulge me a little and write a line or two back?

  I’ve never done this before so I’m not sure exactly what the protocol is.

  Love,

  Your Book Buddy

  I felt like I was in high school. I showed it to Wanda, who memorized enough of it to recite lines aloud to half of our cell block. When I wrote him back, I tried to preserve some semblance of distance even as I drafted the thing four times:

  Hello Book Worm,

  Technically, to be classified as a book lover, you have to start reading the unabridged editions of the American classics.

  Those are the ones without pictures or questions at the end of every chapter. I suspect you know what I’m talking about.

  This is just to say that yes, I very much enjoyed talking to you as well, and believe it or not, I liked your letter even more.

  You’re welcome to write me
whenever you’d like and I will do my best to respond, within the confines of my busy social calendar, of course.

  Best,

  LL

  P.S. The word around here is that not one but two of my fellow residents have noticed you in the past and think you’re “cute.” Though I won’t share names, of course, you’d be well advised to examine all your options before settling on this—how else can I put it?—more experienced member of the crowd. Up to you.

  I’d included the P.S. because it was true and because I didn’t feel particularly threatened by my competition—two younger women, both former heroin addicts who’d lost most of their teeth. I liked the way it made me sound casual but might also elicit a protestation of some sort. I wasn’t disappointed.

  His next letter read,

  Please, my dear,

  I didn’t look across the highway from this place with the hope of shopping for a girlfriend. Give me some credit, I beg of you.

  Not that your suite mates aren’t a lively bunch, I’m sure, but

  I’ve had my head bent down for so long that it startled me to look up and notice you. And when I did, I sensed something right away: that we are both locked in these places for reasons that have as much to do with our innate decency as they do with our failures. I suspect we have both lived lives that appeared to have serene surfaces and were, for both of us, hollow and impossible to sustain. I am here because I was too cowardly to find another way to escape the life I never wanted in the first place. I don’t know if it felt that way for you.