Neighborhood Watch (v5.0)

by Cammie McGovern

  There are more people here than I ever remember at our old Neighborhood Watch gatherings. She keeps going around the room until finally one woman admits that she doesn’t carry anything. “I don’t like thinking about this stuff.”

  “What would be nice is not having to think about it at all,” Marianne says. I have to admit she’s pretty good. She doesn’t seem obsessive or disturbingly fixated on threats that don’t exist. She seems like a problem solver. “Look,” she says, holding up the pink Taser gun she’s laid out for demonstration. From far away, it looks small and harmless, like a fun grooming gadget. “No one wants to think about being attacked. No one is looking to be one of Charlie’s Angels.”

  When the sample guns come out, Marianne demonstrates one, warning everyone about the sound it will make when it hits a target. “It’s like a bug zapper and it makes my skin crawl. You wonder if this thing is going to burn someone up. But I’m told no, that it feels like a very powerful jolt—painful, yes, but also temporary.”

  After one woman volunteers to try first and hits Reynolds Wrap, as Marianne has named the foil-covered target, everyone lines up for a turn. Marianne calls out pointers: “Aim for his chest if he’s farther than forty feet, his jugular if he’s closer. Does everyone know what the jugular is?” No one answers because no one’s listening anymore. They’re waiting for their turn, wielding their gun. A commotion of laughter and applause erupts every time the target sizzles with a hit. I move to the refreshments table in the back. I realize that Marianne is so flush with the success of this event and the checkbooks already being pulled out that she probably won’t notice if I slip away.

  Downstairs the door is open, almost as if Roland knew I might flee the party upstairs. “Hi, there,” he says. A bottle of wine sits open on the U-shaped plank of linoleum that serves as a makeshift counter. “Care to join me?” He holds up a glass.

  I take it from him, careful not to let our hands touch, and take a sip. At the party on my first night home I didn’t drink anything, probably because Marianne never offered it. She must be worried about triggers for me and inadvertently unleashing my old black moods. Though why she thinks the gathering upstairs would be fine but not a glass of wine seems strange. “This is nice. Thank you, Roland.”

  “You’re welcome. I imagine none of this is easy for you.” He rolls his eyes upward, meaning, I assume, this party.

  I tell him what Marianne said this morning. “She was awake when I came here in the middle of the night. She saw me crossing the street.”

  “She did?”

  “I told her nothing happened. That you were nice and made me some tea and that was all. I wondered if she ever said anything to you.”

  “No.” He looks down. There is more to say and I wait—to see if he’ll have the courage to start. Apparently not.

  “I’m sorry I never came back,” I say. “I wanted to, and then—I don’t know. I felt too self-conscious.” Though I’ve pretended not to remember that time, I do.

  “I’m sorry, too. I wanted to step forward during your trial, but I was afraid it would do more harm than good.” I look at his face, his eyebrows raised in lines of worry. For so long, I wondered about this. Before my trial, desperate to prove any recent episodes of sleepwalking, I gave Roland’s name to Franklin with the promise that he would testify to one episode. Two days later, Franklin returned empty-handed and said, “Nothing. The guy says he never talked to you in the middle of the night.”

  “I went to his apartment,” I told Franklin. “I woke up on his sofa, wearing my nightgown. He made me a pot of peach tea.”

  “That may be, but he denies it.”

  All these years, I’ve wondered what Roland’s denial meant. Was he embarrassed, or guilt-stricken, or just a terribly frightened man? I haven’t stayed angry for twelve years but I also haven’t forgotten.

  “I wanted to talk about that time your lawyer came,” he says. “I saw you sleepwalking, yes, but I also saw you wake up pretty easily when you heard my voice. I couldn’t even say you seemed disoriented or disassociated. You didn’t.” He has a point. Testifying to my episodes would have also meant testifying, Yes, she sleepwalks, and yes, she also wakes up easily. “I was scared I’d have to tell them what you’d told me about your miscarriages. I thought the prosecution would turn it into a motivation argument, saying you were jealous of Linda Sue.” He’s right. They would have. “If it would have helped you, I’d have told Franklin what happened that night. I hated lying—I did a terrible job of it.”

  I take another sip of wine. “I assumed you didn’t want Marianne to find out.”

  “No.” He starts to laugh, then stops himself. “No, that wasn’t the issue. The truth is—I thought about that night a lot. I kept hoping you’d come back. I left my light on for a long time so you could see your way if you needed to.” He looks out the narrow window that faces my old house, long enough for me to imagine him sitting here, watching my front door. “And then you didn’t.”

  “I wanted to.” For a moment, I consider telling him the truth: I did.

  “Yes,” he says and lifts his glass.

  It’s hard to imagine how important appearances seemed at the time, how I didn’t want anyone to think I was approaching another woman’s husband. Better to have them think it was Geoffrey rather than the one I really wanted. Something happened that night we peeked in and saw Linda Sue and Geoffrey standing in her living room, a tectonic shift in the focus of my longings. I no longer wanted him, I wanted that.

  Roland takes another drink and keeps going. “If I could, I’d do it all differently now. Back then, we were hearing so many different things. Geoffrey kept reassuring us that everything would be fine. He said he’d given the defense information that would guarantee you wouldn’t get convicted.” I remember what Helen said, how Geoffrey returned after my arrest and talked to everyone.

  “Do you remember what he said?”

  “He wouldn’t get very specific. He just kept telling everyone that it would work out fine and you wouldn’t get convicted. He was a little strange with me. I wondered if he knew what happened that night.”

  He’s asking as if, even now, the answer matters.

  “I never told him. I never told anyone.”

  Strictly speaking, this isn’t true. In prison, I once told Wanda who asked if I’d ever had a kiss that made me so dizzy I forgot to breathe. “Yes, I have,” I said, recalling my one night on the couch with this man who stands now an arm’s length away from me. Upstairs, we can hear the party breaking up. Sitting close enough to see the lines around his eyes and the way his hair has grayed around his ears makes me think of Leo. How I memorized these details about him and lay in bed at night going over all of them, laying claim to him in my mind.

  I look at the clock and realize it’s almost eleven P.M. Enough revelations for one day, I think. Enough truth and honesty and all the talk that goes with it. We all have mistakes and regrets, pieces of our past that don’t fit in. There is an electricity between us that’s impossible to ignore and impossible to act on. I have too many specters crowding my thoughts, too much I still need to figure out.

  Over the last three days I’ve hardly slept at all. After my conversation with Marianne, I fear I may never sleep again. It’s a danger zone for me, the place my unconscious runs freely. In prison I had a locked cell and neighbors accustomed to activity all night. There, I weaned myself off sleeping pills and started dreaming again. Night became my private time, a chance to visit with the children I gave myself. Whatever I did in the night—laughed, talked, used names none of my block mates had heard of—it was brushed over the next day. Now such freedom is impossible. Even sleeping over at Finn and Bill’s won’t help in this regard. I can’t run the risk of sleeping so deeply I might get up in the middle of the night, so I sleep in guarded, light snatches, waking every hour or so to make sure that I’m in bed, where I’m meant to be.

  Finally Roland says, “You’re welcome to spend the night here if you wa
nt.”

  It’s such a surprise that I say nothing.

  “We don’t have to do anything. But if it helps you sleep better.”

  How does he know that my body aches with fatigue? My legs can’t stop moving, as if they want to run a marathon and win the right to rest. “I haven’t been able to sleep at all,” I whisper.

  He nods. “I’ve been worried about that. With all Marianne’s hovering. I’ve kept thinking, how can she relax?”

  I feel an old humming start in my brain, a noise that drowns out all other sounds and thoughts. I remind myself: Breathe in and breathe out. It’s a feeling. Not an attack. I’m here with this man who is flawed in his own ways and forgiving of mine.

  But it scares me. It reminds me of lying on my prison mattress, writing letters six and seven pages long to a man I’d spoken with only once about when we’d meet again at the next picnic. I know a place we can go, Leo wrote. Though I won’t pressure you in any way. I’d be happy just holding you. For years, I’d made fun of my fellow inmates who had sex in broom closets and on top of washing machines, but by that point I understood exactly how they felt. I’m happy to go to a Porta Potti if we have to, I wrote back. I just want to be alone with you.

  “You can use my bed,” Roland says now, and gestures toward a door in the corner. “Marianne doesn’t have to know. I’ll stay out here and make sure nothing happens.”

  We both know what he’s saying. That he’ll make sure I don’t get up and do anything untoward. Of all the generosity I’ve been the recipient of, this seems to me the simplest, kindest act of all. I can’t say no. My body won’t let me. I need to sleep and I can’t do it unwatched, alone in Trish’s room. “Thank you,” I say.

  And then, because it’s late and I’m scared of ruining this moment with more talk, I lean over, kiss him on the lips, and stand up. “I’m going to go to bed now.”

  He looks flustered for the first time. The kiss is nice, but not lingering and not a reprise of the one twelve years ago that I’ve never forgotten. It’s more of a nod, a thank-you that defies my ability to say: I’d like to sleep with you, but I can’t.

  That night I lie in Roland’s bed and think about things I can’t forget. Leo was the one who pulled away first. At least that’s how it felt, though in prison, with unreliable conduits running letters back and forth, it’s impossible to be sure what really happened. He’d introduced a note of caution into his declarations of love: I’m not sure why I feel this way or how long it will realistically last. I understand that we don’t really know each other and we are bound to be a disappointment sooner or later. That’s how it goes.

  Was this his way of saying he’d heard about my crime? That if his bore the weight of shortsightedness, it was also inarguably unintentional. Mine was the fatal bludgeoning of a woman’s head. Quite a difference on any level.

  I want to work these things out, but I also want to be able to talk honestly with you about our differences.

  I read that line as an accusation: You’re a real murderer, I’m not.

  Fine, I wrote back. Maybe we should take a break from these letters for a while.

  He protested (halfheartedly, I thought), and then, when I made a test out of refusing to write to him for a week, he responded in kind and wrote nothing at all. I grew so desperate, I solicited Wanda’s help. “What are you, twelve?” she asked when I told her what was going on. “Just write him again.”

  “I’m afraid to. I’ve written him so much.” I hesitated. “I’m afraid he’s seen the real me and that’s what he’s backing away from.”

  “All men back away, honey. That’s what they do.”

  “And then what?”

  “You keep all your options open and play a few games. You say, maybe I’ll see you at the next picnic, and then you talk to everyone but him for the first hour.”

  “I’m forty-five years old.”

  “Right.”

  “I don’t have any options. I’ll be sixty-two when I get out of here.”

  “Look, honey, no one’s a pretty picture in here. You work with what you got. You show him who you are, then you say, you want me, you gotta do some work. I want some pipe cleaner necklaces and some nice long letters. I want to feel the love again.”

  I took Wanda’s advice. I decided I wouldn’t regret my earlier honesty, but I also wouldn’t sell myself short. I wrote him a note saying I’d be at the picnic if he wanted to talk but I wouldn’t expect anything. In the span of three weeks we managed to devolve from marriage talk to junior high. Maybe I’ll see you there, or maybe not, I wrote.

  For the first two hours of the picnic I sat huddled with the same women I’d ridden over with. When I finally broke free, I lost my courage walking over to him. I started talking to two older men who asked why I was called the Librarian Murderess. Did I beat people up with books or what?

  “I used to be a librarian,” I said, smiling, so that if Leo was watching, he might think I was having a good time.

  “Seriously,” the moon-faced man asked. “I thought that was, like, a joke.”

  “Oh, no. No joke.”

  “So what? You stamped dates?”

  “Right. Among other things.” Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Leo and it sent me backward, performing a dance of nonchalance. I could feel his eyes on me—it was possible to feel them—but I couldn’t imagine what he was thinking. This was our only chance to talk after four months of letter writing and neither one of us was taking the first step to do so. Even if we technically weren’t supposed to touch, we could do what everyone else did—hide behind a tree and touch until someone told us to stop. Or we could sit, as we had last time, tell our stories, and laugh.

  But he wouldn’t walk over. And the longer he refused, the greater the gulf grew.

  In the end, we never spoke.

  Wanda said it was the saddest thing she’d ever seen. “You two shoulda hung signs around your neck, I’M NOT GONNA TALK FIRST. My kids used to do stuff like that. Course they were in second grade at the time.”

  “Please, Wanda,” I said, lying down on my bunk. “I don’t want to talk about it.”

  CHAPTER 17

  “We missed you at the end of our Wild West shoot-out,” Finn says the next morning, pouring me a cup of coffee when I come back to keep researching. “You missed the tinfoil target man going up in flames. That was exciting. Everyone had to throw their terrible wine on him.”

  “I’m sorry I left.”

  “No, no, you got out of there just in time. We actually wondered afterward if maybe Marianne is losing it a little.”

  “Really?”

  “I don’t know. We’ve always liked her, but last night raised the bar to a whole new level of strange.”

  Poor Marianne. I think about the days when Roland had expensive cars parked in front of their house and work that wealthy men wanted to invest in. Maybe there was a simple explanation for that odd gathering. Maybe Roland’s work had never amounted to much and they needed the money. “Were other people feeling the same way?”

  “Who knows? She sold a few guns to the people who seemed the least likely to ever use them. I don’t know. I’m too judgmental, I’m sure.” He pours milk into a creamer and pushes it toward me. “So the real question Bill has forbidden me to ask, but I will anyway, is where did you go and where did you sleep?”

  “I went down to Roland’s.”

  Finn raises his mug along with his eyebrows.

  “Nothing happened. Roland’s an old friend and I’ve been having so much trouble sleeping. It’s made me—” I stop myself before I say a little crazy or afraid I’ll start sleepwalking. “We got to talking and I was so tired, I fell asleep on his couch.”

  “That’s it?”

  “That’s it. I woke up this morning still wearing all my clothes.”

  “Oh, Bill will be disappointed. We’ve always thought that Roland was so cute. I used to watch him through the window sometimes, working on his little experiments.” He points through thei
r front window, where you can see into Roland’s basement. I have to wonder: If this had been my view, how much time would I have wasted watching that window? “Wait, what experiments?” I say.

  “I don’t know what they were. Something with beakers of water and measuring temperatures.”

  Was he back at work on solar heating? I never saw any beakers in his work space.

  “I don’t think that’s going on anymore, though he’s still working on something. I see him up at night. Speaking of which, I did a little of my own work last night.”

  I follow him into his office, where he pulls up old police blotter columns that list car accidents significant enough to have been noted in the police report. “There were two highway accident reports the night of Linda Sue’s death, both about twenty miles away. I checked through the column for the whole week before Linda Sue’s death. Nothing on Juniper Lane, until I found this about two weeks before the murder: ‘Hazardous Waste Spill Reported at 32 Juniper Lane.’ According to the item, which is only three lines long, the spill occurred between two properties—32 and 34 Juniper Lane—and was contained. An inspection team came in ‘to assess the area, and made recommendations, which were followed up on by the homeowners.’”

  “Do you know what constitutes a hazardous waste spill in a residential area?”

  Bill comes in from the kitchen, holding a bowl of cereal he eats standing up. “Antifreeze, maybe, or refrigerator coolant. At my school, some kid once stabbed a barrel of Freezone outside the hockey rink and the stuff was so toxic a team from the EPA came out to remove two feet of dirt from an area the size of a soccer field. It freaked us all out because we were standing right there when the guy did it. Everyone said we were contaminated now and we’d never have babies. Of course that might have also been because we were all gay.”