Neighborhood Watch (v5.0)

by Cammie McGovern

  “She doesn’t,” I warn him.

  “Yeah, I figured.”

  “We criminal types probably shouldn’t look to men for our salvation.”

  “Hmm . . .”

  “It’s bound to get us into trouble.”

  “Right.”

  We come out of the woods and into the bright light to see the serpentine line of houses on Juniper Lane. From this distance, they look so out of place. What was meant to happen with this development—the influx of new houses and streets; a community beyond this single winding street—hasn’t. For whatever reason—our soil composition, our water table issues, the chemicals that killed our plants and our babies—Juniper Lane is a mistake no one wants to duplicate.

  “You could always do that thing where you use a man for money and sex.”

  I don’t know if he is making a suggestion or trying to acknowledge what feels like something that will never happen between us.

  “Ah.” I smile, shaking my head. “Okay.”

  “I’m just kidding about that.”

  “Okay.”

  “I think for right now we should get this over with.” He points toward the house. “We should find this girl and then go back to our premature talk about living together and getting married. Then we can have the conversation about how we should obviously get to know each other first.”

  I turn and look at him, my heart pounding so furiously I fear he must hear it. “Okay,” I say, wishing I could kiss him. If I was more practiced at these things I would. I remember standing at the window, watching him work, waiting forever for him to look up. It’s almost too much to have him so close.

  “Are you ready?” I notice something odd. It’s hard to tell from here, but it looks like the crowd that’s been gathered at Marianne and Roland’s house for most of the day is gone. From this vantage point, I can’t see any cars at all.

  “Yes, but can I just say this first?”

  “Go ahead.” I keep watching the house for signs of movement.

  “I haven’t had a drink since I’ve gotten out. I’ve thought about it a lot. I’ve come very close, but I haven’t. That’s all I wanted to say. Yes, I’m ready. What are we thinking, we just break in downstairs and start looking for the access to the secret room?”

  Crossing a cornfield littered with fallen stalks is harder than it looks. I stumble and catch myself once. A minute later, he falls. “Are you okay?” I call.

  “There’s something else I want to say,” he says from the ground below the line of broken stalks. “I’m just waiting for the shooting pains in my knee to subside.”

  I stop walking and wait. Eventually, he gets on all fours, and stands. He looks over at me across the brown-green line of corn plants between us. “When I think about how much I’ve wanted to drink since I got out, it makes me scared that I might be a bad bet for you.”

  “Ah,” I say, raising my eyebrows. “How much do you think about it?”

  “Once an hour maybe.”

  I shrug. Okay, I think.

  “And then all night when I can’t fall asleep.”

  “That’s about how much I think of my children. The ones that I’ve imagined.” I don’t know why I’m telling him this. It’s as if I want to test him.

  “Your children?” he says.

  “The ones I would have had.”

  “Ah.”

  “Sometimes I pretend they’re all here and alive. That we live together in our old house. Not with Paul, though. Just with me.”

  He looks away. “Do they have names?”

  “Yes.”

  “And personalities?”

  He seems to be prodding this, like a tongue in the hole a tooth once occupied. How deep does this go? “Yes,” I say, and think: This is it. He knows the truth now. I’m crazy with loneliness, comforted by the fantasy of being needed. I wish I could tell him: In my mind, my kids are funny and disrespectful. They call me Blah Blah Ma. I deliver speeches they listen to, and afterward they say, Get a life, Ma. They think I’m equal parts funny and embarrassing. They love me, even though I have my shortcomings. I’m a terrible shopper, and every Christmas in our house (in my mind) is fraught with tears and disappointment. Once Shannon asked for Gap straight-leg jeans and I got her Lee bell-bottoms. Another time, Ben, my oldest and sweetest, privately returned what he’d gotten and kept the money. These are the children I’ve given myself— real ones who haven’t aged in the strict sense that other children do. I have kept little Charlotte perpetually six because she loves first grade and has a teacher who studies pioneer life by turning the classroom into a log cabin, like mine once did. I want to defend myself, tell Leo I don’t harm anyone or insist that these fantasies are real. They are private, a small pleasure I keep to myself. One could certainly do worse, but looking at his face, I suspect this doesn’t matter. I’ve made a mistake. Revealed too much. I seem sad to him, I fear. “Recently I’ve been starting to think I should help real children instead of putting so much mental energy into imaginary ones.”

  “Good idea, probably.”

  We start walking again. “In my own defense, I don’t think inventing imaginary children is a terrible way to pass time in prison. Especially when it turns out you didn’t do anything wrong.”

  “Good point.” We’ve started walking again, him with a limp and me slightly ahead. “Imaginary love affairs are good, too,” he says.

  “Is that what ours was?”

  “I don’t know. You tell me. I was all ready to dive in and then we did such a good job at that picnic taking it to another level.”

  “I don’t think that was all my fault.”

  “No, given the choice I would have spent my time talking to Wes as well. He’s an attractive man. Except for the four-teeth thing, I’d call him a catch.”

  “At least he talked to me.”

  “And he stayed solid in school, right through the sixth grade.”

  “Why are we talking about this?”

  He stops walking for a minute, forcing me to as well. “Because I don’t want to be here if there are other people in the picture.”

  He studies me carefully—as if he knows about the one night I spent in the basement, sleeping alone in Roland’s bed. As if he’s been outside watching me. “There’s no one else, Leo,” I say simply. He narrows his eyes as if he’s not sure whether to believe me. I don’t know if we can manage this—get past all our fears and every defense we’ve put up. “Can we just get this over with, please?”

  He holds out a hand. “After you.”

  No one is home. By the look of things through the window, wherever they’ve gone, they left in a hurry. Lights are still on, the radio is playing. Though the basement door is locked, the sliding-glass side door in the back is not. We slip downstairs and find the lab door that is indeed located behind a rolling bookshelf against a far wall. Even as I push the door open, my heart sinks. “Trish?” I say.

  Nothing. She’s not here.

  It’s a dark room piled with equipment and evidence of old work that hasn’t been used in a long time. There are beakers in cardboard boxes along with their stands, and cathodes that look like thermometers with curly phone cords attached to one end. It’s all a disappointment. Not only have we not found Trish, but what happened to Marianne’s story? What about the breakthrough they were just on the cusp of? Leo runs a finger along the dust-covered metal counter.

  He remembers cold fusion, and the hoopla around it. “God, it was so exciting when they first announced it. I remember my high school teacher saying everyone should remember where they were the first time they heard about it because our lives were never going to be the same.”

  By the look of it, this equipment hasn’t been touched in months, possibly years. As if they gave up a long time ago, when Trish left their lives. Leo digs through a box, studies a sheet of paper attached to a mini-fridge still running in the corner. “I’m just surprised they did this with a family upstairs. It seems so dangerous. There was a guy in Santa Clara
who died doing this.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah. The whole apparatus blew up in his face and he died from injuries. Afterward there were articles about this underground cold fusion network that had existed for years, funded by private companies without any oversight. It turned out they were investing because everyone wanted a piece of it if it ever got a patent.”

  I think about the way Marianne told the story. How the explosions were a good thing. A sign of life. She’d lost faith until they happened.

  “Were there other explosions?”

  As he asks this, I think of Barbara’s words, It all started with that accident.

  CHAPTER 33

  It’s a glimmer on the periphery of my vision. Standing on the street again, as night falls, I see a movement in the corner of my eye. A shadow. Someone watching me. I know it’s not dangerous. It’s not going to hurt me. But it could. It’s both things at once, like my father once was.

  I remember this now.

  How my father came into my room at night and lay down on the bed across from me. How he would talk to himself, assuming I was asleep. The first time it happened I held my breath and pretended to sleep. Some nights he came and said nothing at all. He simply wept, a keening sound that went on for hours. Only once, when I feared something terrible might happen, did I speak. “Dad?” I asked.

  He stopped himself.

  When my mother met my father he was head of the grounds crew at Cal State Northridge, where she worked as an administrator in the personnel department. She loved to tell the story—how he was planting a flower bed outside her office during a June heat wave; the students were gone and work was light. She handed him Dixie cups of water through her window and asked him the names of the flowers he was putting in. He told her each one in a voice so soft she had to lean out the window to hear. He was older than she was, from a conservative Catholic family. On their early dates, he brought her fresh flowers laid in shoe boxes lined with damp paper towels. They were lovely—tiny blue bonnets and pink bleeding hearts—too delicate for vases of flower arrangements, so she’d float them loose in a bowl of water and marvel at their unexpected, jeweled beauty.

  He was quiet and a gentleman, she once told me, a man who worked with dirt and spoke with flowers.

  With his daughters, he was shy and easily embarrassed by any talk he thought of as female. We knew him by his silences and the stories our mother told, full of sweetness.

  I never saw him cry until his night wandering brought him into my bedroom, where he’d weep until the first bars of light streaked the sky and brought relief to us both.

  Over time his episodes got worse. He started talking during them. “You girls need another father,” he once said. “I can’t do it anymore.”

  I tried to tune him out. I bought spongy earplugs that just made his words more distorted and frightening. Sometimes he’d blame my mother and say if she would just let him kill himself we’d all be better off. Other times he passed the blame around, to the doctors, his parents, the assholes on TV who thought the world owed them. He made no sense, though I understood in those terrible, endless nights that he spoke a truth. He couldn’t go on like this.

  I have other memories from my childhood: My father, smiling sweetly from our lawn, waving at the neighborhood blind boy. My father watching women’s shows for hours: cooking, home decorating, soap operas. My father throwing a plate of birthday cake at my mother. Though the plate shattered spectacularly against the wall, the cake fell whole onto the counter.

  The only time I ever saw my father cry during the day was on the phone with his brother, talking about the driving trips they once took with their father, a violent man they both worshipped inexplicably. “I just don’t want to do that,” he wept.

  I didn’t understand any of it. How could I hear him at night and turn back to my own life? Eventually I learned that cough syrup helped. When I gave it to him, he stayed quiet and fell back asleep quickly. Doing that I learned the world wasn’t entirely out of my control. If adolescence is a time of constructing one’s character, I built my own on absences and omissions.

  Every night I waited for his arrival, and every night I pretended to sleep through it. By morning he’d be gone and never once did anyone in my family ever mention the unmade bed across from mine, the tear-stained pillow, what I did instead of sleeping for most of my adolescence.

  Now I understand my father better. In the weeks before my trial, as we pieced my past together to build a defense, I realized he’d been sleepwalking that whole time, unaware of anything he was doing to me. It took my breath away to think about what I might have done, what my unconscious might have said to Paul.

  When Paul was asked on the witness stand if he’d ever seen me sleepwalk, I honestly didn’t know what his answer would be. It was something we’d never spoken of directly—Have you seen me at night? Have I done or said things I shouldn’t have? I held my breath because I wanted to hear, in front of all those people, about the ways I had revealed myself.

  And then he surprised me. “No,” he finally said. “I haven’t.”

  At the time, I was enormously relieved. Though it weakened my case, it meant I hadn’t unconsciously terrorized him the way my father had terrorized me. Now I remember more and I think I understand. We were both looking at each other, and lying.

  CHAPTER 34

  That night Leo takes me for my first restaurant meal, burritos, which have gotten more complicated in our absence, and full of choices. It’s possible to have bacon and eggs in a burrito now, or Caesar salad. “Oh, my,” I say, staring at the menu, panicking for a moment. He almost touches my hand and stops. It feels as if we are trying to pass somehow, pretend like we are part of the world that moves much faster and is louder than either of us remembers. Like very old people, we ask too many questions at the counter until finally, food in hand, we move to a table where a girl next to us talks on a cell phone the whole time, loud enough that it’s hard not to listen and try to figure out what the other person is saying.

  Leo fills me in on what he’s been doing in the six weeks since his release. His old job isn’t an option anymore, nor is teaching in a public school with his record. The advice he’s gotten is to establish himself in a new community and work slowly to build trusting relationships with people who might one day be in a position to hire. For now he’s volunteering twice a week for ESL tutoring with newly immigrated adults.

  In the five hours we’ve been together, except for him falling in the cornfield and me helping him back up, we haven’t touched at all. I haven’t blamed him for holding back. After my admission about my imaginary children, why should I hope for anything to happen? We both come with baggage and have futures that look, from where we’re standing now, dim and uncertain. Touching, after what we’ve said to each other and everything we know, would be a lot. I told myself this when he asked if I’d like to go out for dinner. Don’t read anything into this. It’s nice being friends. It is nice having someone I can talk about my last twelve years with. We laugh about the coffee, the powdered toothpaste, the surprise of eating real vegetables again. “I’d forgotten that lettuce comes in other colors besides white,” I say.

  After we finish eating, he asks if I’m planning to live indefinitely with Finn and Bill. “More like a night or two probably,” I say.

  When we get outside, he turns, takes my hand, and says, “Good.”

  Before I can react, he pulls me toward him. Our bodies don’t touch but hover inches apart. “Let’s just get something clear,” he says, touching my face with hands still rough with the calluses from work I spent six months in prison watching him do. “It’s nice to see you again.”

  His breath in my ear, so close to my face, leaves me a little breathless. “It’s good to see you, too.”

  “If you don’t have anywhere to go after that, I have this place. It’s not very comfortable and it’s above a doughnut shop, so it smells like grease.”

  “Yes,” I whisper, and we m
ove from anticipating the kiss to the kissing itself, slow and careful. He doesn’t bury his tongue in my mouth or grind his hips against mine. There’s no sense of rushing into the next part, no urgent reminders of how long it’s been. He seems to feel the same way I always have about kissing: Let’s enjoy this part. He touches my face, my shoulders. He slides his hands down so they’re holding mine.

  We stop kissing and start walking again. “Nice hair, by the way. Interesting choice.”

  “What, you hate it?”

  “On the contrary. It’s got a kind of Annie Lennox appeal.”

  When we get back to the block, a half dozen cars are parked in front of Marianne and Roland’s. The house is lit up, the front door open, and music is playing.

  They’ve found Trish.

  She’s home, safe and sound, and there’s a celebratory chaos, neighbors stopping by. “She’s fine! She’s here!” Roland says when we walk in, and then, a little sheepishly, he has to explain. She’s been in a Buddhist monastery forty miles away. As this news travels around the neighbors gathered in the room, an awkward uncertainty settles over the group. No one is quite sure what to say. Women I recognize from the Taser gun party clutch their purses and give Marianne a hug. Better if they hadn’t called the dogs, people are thinking. Would that the paper had waited a day or two to run it as a front-page missing-person story. But in the end everyone is happy. “Just happy and relieved,” one woman tells Leo, who stands by my side, letting the backs of our hands brush periodically.

  Happy as they might be, I can sense what they’re thinking. Trish isn’t well; she never has been. The family has problems.