Neighborhood Watch (v5.0)

by Cammie McGovern

  “You talked about it with him?”

  “Sort of, yes. We told him we were here if you needed anything.” She looks at me carefully. “I don’t think he knew all of it, Bets. I don’t know if he ever saw you sleepwalking.”

  “But you did?”

  She nods and closes her eyes. “Twice. Once at about midnight. You stood on your lawn, in your bare feet. Earlier that day you’d been having one of your spells so I watched for a while. You looked so vulnerable I wanted to help, but then you went back inside. The next day I almost said something, but you seemed fine. Back to yourself.”

  I don’t understand this. Why didn’t she speak up sooner and tell Franklin? He spent weeks trying to find someone to testify to recent sleepwalking episodes. “And the second time?”

  “The other time. Yes.” She looks down and fidgets with a ring. “I think you remember what happened the second time.” Her eyes narrow in my direction.

  “Yes,” I say, nodding, after a painful silence. “I suppose I do.”

  I’d been praying for a miracle of absolution, that there might have been another episode of harmless night wandering that she’d borne witness to. But no. Before she even begins, I know the night she’s referring to. The time I woke to discover myself in Roland’s basement sitting on a tattered sofa in the corner, him leaning toward me, offering me a warm mug of peach tea.

  “Nothing happened,” I say simply. “He woke me very gently, made me some tea, and I went home. I’m not sure why I knocked on his door. I probably saw the light on and went toward it without thinking. He was kind about it. I don’t think it bothered him.”

  “Still.”

  “Yes.”

  “You can understand why I worried. A woman in a nightgown knocking on doors in the middle of the night.”

  “Yes.”

  “We thought you needed help, Betsy, but none of us knew what to do. When you were fine, you were so efficient and in control. And Paul didn’t want to say too much. He told us you’d had more miscarriages than anyone realized. He also said you had premenstrual dysphoria—that it was related to hormones and was a severe form of PMS. He said it usually passed within a few days.”

  During the worst times it felt like being pulled into a vortex, spinning without bearings, washing ashore on a beach I didn’t recognize. Though it happened often enough that I took medication, it still usually took me by surprise. One day I’d be fine and the next I’d stop moving altogether. I lost time, I know. Sometimes whole days. I’d disappear and reemerge having to ask Paul what day it was, and what had happened in my absence. It’s hard for me to think about those days of torpor, when lassitude filled my limbs with sand and my mouth with cotton wool. It wasn’t that I couldn’t speak during those times; I was paralyzed by a fear of what I might say if I did. I lived in fear of my old selves emerging—as if I might suddenly become the high school malcontent again, or the college freshman party girl. Were those old episodes due to hormonal surges or the exhaustion of watching everything I said? I never knew really.

  I learned to anticipate a few of the warning signs—a headache that started in the back of my neck, blurriness on the periphery of my vision. Sometimes Paul would pick me up at work and we’d tell people I had the flu. Having grown up with my father, I should have known such secrets aren’t kept for long. People know even as they collude in a show of not knowing. I understood this as a teenager, every time the guidance counselor asked, as if she didn’t already know, whether I had any “issues I was worried about at home.” She knew my childhood secrets, just as my neighbors knew far more than they ever let on.

  Back then I believed only Viola and Paul knew about my spells. Even Jeremy, to whom I’ve told as much truth as I know how, doesn’t know that I used to have blackouts during the day and unexplained episodes of lost time. The first time I saw Paul after my arrest, we talked about how much we should tell a lawyer. It wasn’t a long conversation. We didn’t have much to debate—the sleepwalking was enough of an explanation, we agreed.

  Now I understand that my memories aren’t wholly reliable. If the world saw me as fragile and troubled, then every story I recall of myself functioning normally is a lie. During the weeks and months I thought I was fine, I was a far cry from it apparently, being held aloft by an elaborate charade being played out by everyone I knew.

  Marianne is also right about this—the worst of the episodes began after my first miscarriage. After the later ones, it varied. Sometimes it happened right away. Sometimes I’d be fine for three or four months and then I’d start having dreams about babies left in a car or locked in a closet. I’d be at work and think, Where is he? I have to find him! I hope I never said this out loud, but how much was I able to control? My heart would race with crazy fears—My baby might be dead!—and then I’d remember. That’s right. He is.

  Can I be blamed for this surfeit of unexpressed feeling? When there is no funeral, no ceremony, no condolence cards to mourn the loss of an unborn child? When we have no language beyond salvos of superstition and the terrible suggestion to try again? I stopped telling anyone when it happened. The first time Marianne talked to me about forming a Neighborhood Watch group for the block, I’d had a D & C only a few days before. The pad in my underpants was soaked with blood and the sound of the procedure, the vacuuming slurp, still echoed in my head and made my stomach clench. “Think about the things you don’t want to lose,” Marianne had said, meaning of course our stereo, our TV. I thought of the only thing I cared about: the stain on our mattress. The closest thing I had to a picture of a baby.

  I want to tell Marianne that she doesn’t need to worry about these episodes happening anymore. In prison I learned not to shut down the way I once did. There, such incidents meant you were strip-searched and put on suicide watch in an isolation cell with a mattress on the floor and a toilet without a seat. In my first year, two women committed suicide while on suicide watch using bedsheets tied around air vents. If you felt like killing yourself, I discovered, that cell where you might go four days without speaking to a doctor was the last place you should be. When I felt the grip of a dark episode coming on, I rode it out as unobtrusively as possible. I found routines and stuck to them. My library job was an unsupervised blessing. I could sit in the dark if I needed to for hours at a time. If anyone asked, I talked about my troubles as if they were in the past—I was feeling a little blue, but I’m fine now. After a while I didn’t lose myself in dark patches.

  I discovered that in a place where the appearance of normalcy mattered so little, I stopped feeling oppressed by it, and after a few years the darkest parts of those moods faded away. I still got depressed, of course, but I managed to get by. My psychiatrist said I was integrating my personality, taking ownership of all aspects of it, which felt like an apt enough description. In the last five years I haven’t experienced the immobilizing waves that used to take hold and close me off from the world. Now I understand the factors that caused it—the stress of keeping up appearances, of trying so hard to seem fine to the world. Maybe I even knew what I was doing, making it clear in some subconscious way: I’m not fine.

  I also remember that the episodes usually passed as mysteriously as they arrived. One morning I’d wake up able to feel my skin again, taste the coffee Paul had made, read more than a headline of the newspaper. Invariably, I’d look around, giddy with relief, and wonder how much I’d missed. The morning after I found myself on Roland’s basement sofa in the middle of the night I awoke even more exuberant than usual. I didn’t remember right away where I’d been or what had happened, only that I felt free, as if a silence had been broken. I kissed Paul right on the lips, which must have taken him by surprise because for two days I hadn’t dressed or left the house. I remember clearly how breathless and full of optimism I was.

  “Hello!” Paul gasped, when I finished kissing him. “Feeling better?” We used euphemisms as much as possible. “Yes!” I said. “Much better. Sorry about all that.” Force of habit by then—I al
ways apologized after an episode. Not a real apology (it was too large, and too inexplicable, to tell him how truly sorry I was). This was more of an acknowledgment; as if I’d been late or had burned the dinner I was serving. I hadn’t yet remembered the night before, only that I’d been in the throes of a bad episode and now it was over, the heavy weight in my heart replaced with elation.

  Later that morning, almost like a movie playing in my head, I saw it all: where I’d gone, how Roland invited me inside his apartment and made me tea. He became the first neighbor ever to ask me, directly, what was happening with my pregnancies. Some neighbors knew parts of it—they knew we were trying; that I’d miscarried once or twice—but with Roland alone, I told the whole story: “I’ve had five pregnancies in four years and lost every one. The doctors say my womb isn’t hospitable, but no one says why. They don’t know.”

  I told him that one baby held on for almost five months.

  That time, I started bleeding at night and the baby came out a few hours later in a bath of blood. He was the only one I got to see and touch, his little webbed fingers and toes, the nub of genitals, the great dome of head. I could have made a footprint—I’d heard of a mother doing that with her twenty-week miscarriage—but I didn’t. I held his tiny hand and it wasn’t nearly as sad as you might think. He was real, and there, the size of my palm. We kept him in a Tupperware bowl and carried him the next day to the doctor.

  I also told Roland something I’d never told Paul, that I’d been pregnant once in college and had an abortion. “I’ve always felt like that time was different. Like that baby would have lived.” In the end, I explained what had precipitated all this. I’d been to the doctor. He told me my body couldn’t take any more, that I’d have to give up.

  For a long time, Roland didn’t say anything, and then his hand moved over to rest on top of mine. His palm was warm and dry. “I’m just so sorry,” he said. “About all of it.”

  I leaned back, meaning to close my eyes and catch my breath. It was dizzying to be there, to realize everything I’d just spoken aloud. Instead of calming my nerves, I fell into the crook of Roland’s shoulder, felt my cheek against his chest. I allowed the storm of feelings kept at bay for so long to rise up and began sobbing into his shirt. “Shhh,” he kept saying, touching my face and my neck. “Shhh.”

  After some immeasurable length of time, I stopped crying and looked at him. I understood that I’d humiliated myself beyond any normal measure. I didn’t know how I’d ever face him again. Then I let myself look into his face and saw his genuine sadness and something else in the way his eyes moved around my face, as if he were trying not to get away but to remember this moment. “I want to kiss you,” he said. “But I don’t know if I should.”

  “You can,” I said, grateful for the prospect of something to balance our evening’s embarrassments. Yes, I thought, kiss me. And he did. A minute later, we were stretched along the length of the sofa, our bodies pressed together. It was lovely and frantic and a little overwhelming. When we came up for air, his glasses were skewed.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, sitting up and speaking quickly, as if finishing a conversation. “I want to move out. Make this situation clearer.” He pointed above him, meaning his home, his marriage. He took off his glasses and held them in one hand, pinching the bridge of his nose with the other. “I feel—ah! I don’t know.” I thought for a moment he might be crying. “Tethered.” He turned and looked at me for a long time—just my face, taking it all in, as if he already knew that what had just happened couldn’t be repeated. “I wish I felt free to make my own choices, but I don’t.”

  That was it. That was all he said.

  “I should go, then,” I said, pulling my nightgown back into place. Maybe we were both relieved at the prospect of escaping our swan dive into madness.

  Back home, I lay in bed and thought over the simple truths we’d each revealed. I was barren; he was unhappy. If I had exposed myself, he had, too. Though we never repeated that night, I never forgot it. Sometimes in prison when I got tired of imagining a life with the children I never had, I’d go back to that night and remember as much of it as I possibly could. His drawings spread out on the table in front of us, his soft hands, the blue faded T-shirt he wore, the way he tried at the last minute to rectify things by grabbing my hand and saying, “You can come back, you know. Anytime you want.”

  Now Marianne studies me with an expression that suggests she knows more about all this than she’s ever let on. That maybe she’s kept up a friendship with me for reasons that have more to do with keeping enemies close than with compassion. I don’t know. Maybe inviting me to live here was a test of some kind, of Roland’s loyalty, or of mine.

  Later that night, I call Paul, who says I shouldn’t read too much into anything Marianne says or does. “She’s always been a little strange. Maybe you’re forgetting.”

  Just hearing his voice makes me a little emotional. I want to ask if what Marianne implied was true—if being married to me felt like a burden. “She said the whole block used to worry about you, the way you had to take care of me sometimes.”

  “She said that?”

  “She said everyone knew.”

  He seems to think this over. “We took care of each other, Bets. That’s what married people do.”

  “I wonder why Marianne invited me here at all. I keep thinking maybe she knows something and feels guilty that she didn’t come forward during my trial.”

  “Knows what?”

  “I have no idea. Something about that night. About who else might have done it. She keeps saying I shouldn’t talk to any of the old people from the block. If you think about it, wasn’t it strange that none of them were at my welcome-home party?”

  “They all moved away.”

  “But we were friends, weren’t we? I talked to Helen, who lives an hour away. She says she would have come but she never heard about it. Why wouldn’t Marianne have wanted Helen to come?”

  “I don’t know. Marianne and Roland always had their own things going on. To be honest, I never liked the idea of you staying there. Going from prison to their house. I just never thought it was a good idea.”

  He may not have liked it, but he never offered his own place. He still doesn’t. “I don’t know how long I’ll last here,” I say.

  Then he surprises me with an idea I hadn’t thought of. “Maybe you should get out. Meet some of the new neighbors.”

  I know what he means, but isn’t saying. He wishes he could help me more, in the ways I need most, but he can’t because doing so would send us both back in time to the fragile house of cards that was our marriage, filled with so much sweetness and so much disappointment. “Maybe I’ll do that,” I say.

  CHAPTER 14

  “Hello!” Finn says, when I knock on his door. It’s strange to stand here, on Geoffrey’s old porch. Finn is wearing jeans, holding a cup of coffee. “Did you want to hear more stories about Bill’s bad old days at prep school?”

  “No.” I smile. “I have a favor to ask. I’m wondering if I might borrow your computer for a little while to do a little research. Marianne has a personal safety seminar she’s getting ready for. I’m just trying to get out of her way.”

  “Oh, of course,” Finn says. “Come in, come in. I almost forgot—she invited us to that, where everyone gets to try out Taser guns.”

  “Something like that.”

  He says I’m welcome to stay as long as I’d like, that I can even spend the night if I’d like. They have a guest room finished for Bill’s mother, who was going to move in and never did. “She has a hard time staying here and pretending Bill isn’t gay, I guess.”

  I ask Finn if he knows how I might find some of the old neighbors online if I have no idea where they live now. “Do they have search engines where you can look by names and ages? Something like that to narrow it down?”

  “Oh, please,” Finn says. “Wait’ll you see what we have now.” He tells me to write down a list of names, wh
ich I do. A few minutes later, he has found the first name: Baylor, B. and K., in New Haven, Connecticut.

  Barbara Baylor was the closest thing we had to an eyewitness at the trial. She took her dog for a walk from 10:00 to 10:20 the night Linda Sue was murdered and reported seeing no one on the street. She walked past Linda Sue’s house and heard no voices, nothing resembling a fight, which the prosecution took to mean that it couldn’t have been a domestic dispute if Linda Sue was killed at 10:50.

  “Oh, Bets. I just never expected to hear from you is all,” Barbara says when I tell her who it is. She sounds a little breathless, as if I’ve caught her in the middle of something. “Kevin is out of work these days. I didn’t recognize your number on the caller ID. I was hoping it was one of those headhunters he’s waiting to hear from.”

  When we knew them, Kevin worked on Wall Street and they were the first family to put a two-story addition on their house, which at the time we thought was a little ostentatious. “It’s been terrible,” she says. “He hasn’t worked in three years and we had to move down here to a smaller house. I know I shouldn’t complain compared to your life. Never mind all that. How are you doing?”

  “I’m all right.”

  “It must be strange, I guess. Being back on the block.”

  I tell her it is, and ask if she’d mind answering some questions about what she saw the night Linda Sue died. It’s awkward. She repeats exactly what she said at my trial—that she saw and heard nothing—but she speaks slowly, as if she were weighing her words. When I ask if there was anything that she didn’t tell the police, she doesn’t answer right away. Then she says, “It wasn’t related to the murder. It wouldn’t have helped your case or anything.”