The Good Neighbor

by Cathryn Grant

  It must mean he’d sent that photograph. Threatening me. Making my eyes look as if I were dead. It was disgusting. And knowing it was him made it more disgusting.

  Was Moira right? Did he know something? Was he involved somehow? I couldn’t believe it was possible. Yet when I thought about how Nicole had pushed me away, how she overreacted to my suggestion that Luke should have helped with the search effort, it sent a chill through my body.

  I picked up my phone. I should tell Officer Carter. But what if…? I put the phone down. I couldn’t. I couldn’t believe it was him and I couldn’t do it.

  25

  Luke

  I remember that day like it happened last week.

  When I was younger, what I mostly remembered from that day was my dad in the center of the entryway with a suitcase standing up beside each foot, the handles extended, ready to roll. To me, those suitcases looked like little kids he was taking with him. Maybe because I was crying and everything was a blur. I was fourteen and I felt like a fucking loser for crying, but I couldn’t stop. He looked at me like I was a loser. He looked like he felt sick to his stomach, and I wasn’t sure if he was embarrassed that I was such a loser or he just wanted to be out of there and not have to deal with my runny nose and eyes, not to mention the drama of my mom standing a few feet behind me, yelling and crying at the same time.

  Those suitcases looked like the kids he wanted instead of me. It was stupid. Stirring up drama. I don’t even know why I thought that. There weren’t any other kids in our family. He didn’t have a kid with his girlfriend, so kids had nothing to do with it. I sure wasn’t a little kid, so it makes no sense, even now, why I had that impression.

  Those were the things I remembered the first few years. The last year or so, what I remembered about that day was Ashling.

  I’m not sure if that’s because remembering her makes me feel good and remembering my dad makes me feel like shit, even after all this time. It could be I’ve picked the memory I prefer. Or maybe because one memory of that day makes me feel like the same runny-nosed loser and the other makes me feel like I found my soul mate, and it was a no-brainer, not the search of a decade.

  That day hadn’t improved when I arrived at school.

  I was pissed that my mom made me go to school after what happened at our house that morning. I barely had time to blow my nose and scrub my face with a cold washcloth. All that accomplished was turning my skin redder.

  Tears were pressing against the inside of my skull all the way to school. I couldn’t say goodbye to my mom when I got out of the car or the tears and more snot would ooze out. I could barely get my backpack on my shoulders, thinking everything might start running down my face. The only way I survived the morning was reminding myself how pissed I was at my mom for making me go to school. Being pissed moved the tears deeper so they didn’t shove against the backs of my eyes.

  At lunch, I was sitting at a table in the back corner of the cafeteria. I faced the wall, the rest of the room behind me so they couldn’t see my misery while I tried to choke down whatever they were serving that day. Fish sticks, I think, and fries. I definitely remembered the fries.

  Some kid I hardly even knew came up and sat across from me with two other guys. I was more pissed that they were sitting there when there were plenty of other places. And then, without warning, tears started filling my eyes. A few dribbled out no matter how fast I shoved food into my mouth. The kid laughed and poured his milk onto my plate. Suddenly, Ashling was standing there. A minute later, the assholes were gone and she was sitting in their place.

  I’d known her before that. We’d been in school together since she moved to California in third grade. We were in some elementary school classes together.

  She gave me a casual smile like it was no big deal I was crying.

  She had light brown bangs that were too long. They covered her eyebrows and brushed against her eyelashes. She kept pursing her lips and blowing air up so they flew away from her eyes. It was distracting and impossible to look away from. I wanted to lift them over to the side of her forehead. It didn’t seem to bother her; it was just a routine she followed to make it easier to see.

  “Bad day, huh?”

  I nodded.

  “Brad’s a jerk.”

  “Who knew?”

  She laughed. Immediately I felt better and the tears disappeared.

  She handed me a couple of fries from her plate since mine were soaked with milk. Then she pushed her tray to the middle of the table so we could share her fries. There were a ton of them, like she’d gotten a double serving. She dipped them in ketchup and ate them with tiny bites. “Are you okay?”

  I shrugged.

  “What happened?”

  “My dad took off.”

  “Oh.” She stabbed a fry into the tiny plastic cup, scooped up a glob of ketchup, and stuffed the whole fry in her mouth. Ketchup smeared across her lip, and some got stuck in the corner between her upper and lower lip. When she smiled, her teeth were red in the spaces, and there was some chewed-up potato between two of them. It looked like blood. Everyone always thinks ketchup looks like blood, a horror movie staple. There’s a reason they think that. It’s because it does. I turned my attention back to her bangs, which were now fluttering when she blinked because they touched her eyelashes, and she couldn’t blow air at them while she was chewing.

  “I know how that is,” she said.

  I was concentrating so hard on the bloody look of her lips and her bangs, wondering why she didn’t cut them, I couldn’t immediately figure out what she was talking about.

  “My dad flew the coop when I was eight,” she said.

  I laughed. I stopped quickly. “I’m not laughing at him taking off, just—flew the coop.”

  “That’s what my mom calls it.”

  We talked for the rest of the lunch period. She seemed to get that I didn’t want to talk about my dad, but that I did want to hear everything I could about other dads leaving. She told me all the details. She didn’t cry or even look that upset. I guess it was old news. You get used to it. She told me about all the bad parts as well as the benefits. Well, one benefit, really. That both parents want you to be happy, so they’ll let you do more stuff and give you more of what you want.

  “Guilt,” she said. “And bribery.” She laughed.

  I laughed with her and thought about that sick-to-his-stomach look on my dad’s face. I could see she was probably right. It didn’t make me feel a lot better, but she did make me feel like it might be possible for me to feel better later. In a few months. Or a year. Or someday.

  We ate lunch together every day that year. We talked about what it was like having divorced parents. It wasn’t as if we were the only kids in school with divorced parents. Far from it. But she was there the day it happened, and I think she felt good knowing she helped me stop crying. And I think she liked that I was the kind of guy who had enough feelings that he would cry if things were bad enough.

  She didn’t tell me that right away, but a few months later. Or maybe a year later.

  We started doing our homework together. At some point, after missing my dad turned to being used to having him gone, I started thinking of her as someone I wanted as a girlfriend, not just a friend. But by then, it seemed too hard to make that jump. The more we were together, the more I wanted it and the scarier it felt. She’d been almost my best friend for more than a year, and I never wanted to wreck that. I couldn’t live without her.

  Over the summer of freshman year, we saw each other a lot because of summer school, which we both took because our moms wanted us to get ahead of the curve in math.

  The next year we ate lunch together a lot, though not every day. And then, I’m not sure why, we weren’t doing homework together anymore. The summer after sophomore year, we drifted away from each other because she wasn’t in summer school.

  After that I saw her at parties. We walked to classes together sometimes. We still talked about the hassle of going to
the other parent’s house on the weekends, parents playing games, and lots of other stuff, but it wasn’t like that first year. Still, I couldn’t get the nerve to kiss her when I saw her at a party, or even ask her to dance. Maybe I was still the same loser my dad saw crying in the entryway.

  When we graduated from high school, Ashling’s dad bought her a condo so she could move out of her mom’s house. We laughed about that. She knew it was more of the same, him wanting to win. Once she turned eighteen, he figured he could get on a more even footing if she didn’t live with her mom.

  A lot of kids hung out at her condo, obviously. No one else had their own place. She didn’t have huge parties, only small groups over to drink beer, smoke a little weed, listen to music. I went to her condo once when she moved in, but after that I felt like I didn’t really fit in with her other friends.

  We texted each other from time to time. A couple of times she and some of her friends came by my mom’s house to smoke with me.

  I wanted to make a move. I couldn’t go on feeling the way I did and never doing anything about it. Then, after the night Brittany showed up in the gazebo, I knew I was ready to do something. It just clicked that night for whatever reason. Maybe because I saw that despite Ashling’s aura of cool, she was still the really nice person I’d known since I was a kid. Carpe diem.

  While I thought about Ashling and fiddled with my phone, bringing up a text window, I watched the houses around me. The courtyard door of the house to our left opened, and Freya Bryant came out. Usually people came out in their cars, backing out while the garage doors opened and closed automatically. She was headed somewhere, and a moment later I saw she was coming my way. I thought about dropping my cigarette into the can of Red Bull, then decided the smoke might keep her from hanging around too long. She didn’t look happy.

  Before she even reached the opening to the gazebo, she was talking. “I should have called the police on you a long time ago. You’re underage.”

  I held up the Red Bull and the cigarette. “All legal.”

  “This time.”

  “What do you want, Ms. Bryant?”

  “I want to know what you know about that poor missing girl.”

  “Not much.”

  “That’s a rather cavalier attitude.”

  “It’s the truth.”

  “I hope you didn’t get into some trouble with her. Some accident you’re trying to hide.”

  “Fuck off.”

  “Nice. That’s exactly the kind of person you are.”

  “You’re on my property.”

  “It’s not your property, Luke.”

  “Whatever.” I took a deep drag on my cigarette and blew out the smoke.

  She didn’t back away from it.

  “So what do you want?”

  She pointed at me, leaning forward. “I want you to know that we’re all watching you.”

  “Thanks for the update.”

  I took another drag. She walked away. I pulled out my phone and looked at it, wishing it was the way things used to be with Ashling and I could text her without having a big mental debate about it.

  26

  Taylor

  Duncan was almost giddy that I’d shut down the Find Brittany page. To escape the house, and possibly the neighborhood, we went out to eat at our favorite Chinese restaurant, where we gorged on pot stickers and tangy, sweet, crunchy chicken salad. That chicken salad was the reason it was our favorite. We drank ice-cold Chinese beer and talked about nothing important. We laughed. We smiled at each other for no reason.

  At home, Duncan lit the two fat white candles on our dresser, spread a large fluffy towel on the bed, and gave me a massage, complete with almond-scented oil.

  While he worked the knots out of the muscles in my shoulders, my mind remained twisted and gnarled. My eyes were closed, my breathing easy and soft, but behind my eyelids, the image of that vacant spot where the Facebook app used to live on my phone haunted me.

  I imagined reports flooding in from people who had actually seen Brittany. They would disappear into the ether. I imagined an increased outpouring of affection and support for the Cushings falling into empty spaces. I fabricated stories of lost children reunited with their families, posted alongside photographs of parents hugging their daughters and sons. People following the page loved to share their own stories. It was as if losing a child built a community of its own and they had an instinctive drive to tell what they’d lived through, longing to give other parents reassurance and hope.

  Duncan’s mind was somewhere else, completely unaware of where my thoughts had gone. I felt as if a magnet drew me back to Brittany every time I tried to turn away. Despite the threat to my life, to Brittany’s life, I wanted the Facebook page back. I felt like I’d let down Moira and Alan, and like I’d yielded to threats from someone who was socially inept and emotionally damaged, hovering in front of a computer screen, an internet cable their only connection to the world. In their own way, the trolls and monsters were seeking a community of their own design.

  When I pictured this damaged individual, I knew it couldn’t possibly be Luke. No matter how often that curious phrase replayed itself in my head, it had to be a bizarre coincidence that both Luke and the abductor had used it. Luke was a kind, thoughtful kid. He was not a pervert, and he was not the kind of person to make anonymous threats.

  As Duncan and I made love, my mind was with Brittany and the people doing all they could to remain hopeful on behalf of the Cushings. I felt like I’d betrayed all of them. At the same time, I was betraying Duncan, not allowing my mind to come along with him, pretending my attention was on him.

  He fell asleep quickly and I got out of bed. I wrapped my thin cotton robe around me and went into the living room, where my phone sat on the charging pad. I reloaded the Facebook app and retrieved the page. It was easy. I suppose permanently eliminating an entire social group was not so simple; they’d all remained in a limbo state, waiting for me.

  The page immediately flooded with comments. Right behind the comments came a rush of personal messages from Crystal Green.

  The moment they began to appear, I knew that was part of what had drawn me back. There was something compelling about the story of her abducted child, about her persistence.

  Mrs. Green: Where the hell are you?

  The message had been sent seven hours earlier, so I didn’t answer right away. I waited, wondering if she was constantly logged in, immediately aware that the page was live again and my face showed I was active. I went into the kitchen and poured a small glass of red wine. I curled up on the couch, tucking my feet under my hips.

  It was fifteen minutes before she sent another message.

  Mrs. Green: Why did you shut down the page? I guess you’re afraid of me.

  Her comment was jarring. Was it possible she was the one sending threats? There was no reason for her to do that. Unless her entire story was a complex lie and she’d abducted Brittany. Maybe she was a nutcase after all, and more than that…a seriously disturbed individual. Maybe she got off on playing some kind of weird game. I pressed my thumb and finger to the bridge of my nose, trying to make myself think logically instead of wandering all over every single possibility that presented itself.

  It couldn’t have been her. Whoever sent the threats had photographed me.

  But how did I know she didn’t live nearby, that she’d been watching us all this time? Everything could be a fabrication. For all I knew, the person communicating with me was a man. Or a teenage boy. A girl. It could be anyone. I sighed and took a sip of wine. I put down my glass and typed my message.

  Taylor Stanwick: I’m not afraid.

  Mrs. Green: What’s the progress on finding my daughter?

  Taylor Stanwick: Maybe progress isn’t really the right way to think of it. She’s either missing or found. There is no in-between, no concept of progress.

  Mrs. Green: Stop babbling philosophy. Are you saying the police have no clues, leads, whatever?

&
nbsp; Taylor Stanwick: Unfortunately, no.

  Mrs. Green: Did you tell that bitch and her husband what you know?

  Taylor Stanwick: She’s not a bitch. She loves Brittany very much. They both do.

  Mrs. Green: Well they have no right. She’s my child.

  Taylor Stanwick: That’s really hard to believe.

  Mrs. Green: Did you see my message about her birthmark? She has a birthmark. You need to look at their photographs. Find a picture of her in a swimsuit. She has a birthmark that looks like a little bunny rabbit on her left shoulder.

  I smiled at that. I didn’t want to, but the image of a birthmark shaped like a bunny, and the fact that Crystal seemed to find charming what most would consider a flaw, something to hide, made me warm to her.

  Taylor Stanwick: I don’t know what to say.

  Mrs. Green: There’s nothing to say. Find a picture. Then we’ll chat.

  I spent another hour reading what had been posted since I’d shut down the page. There were no more threats, and the claims of people having seen Brittany were clearly bogus, filled with awkward sentences and laced with convoluted conspiracy-like embellishments.

  As I read, my mind churned over what Crystal had said. When I was finished, I knew I had to find a photograph of Brittany wearing a swimsuit. It was the only way to settle my mind.

  27

  Moira

  My phone buzzed with a message from Taylor. I’d stayed away from her for a few days. My constant weariness wasn’t helped by her enthusiasm and her almost frantic need to help me. I ran hot and cold on this. Sometimes I craved her desire to talk about Brittany, to listen to my memories, to complain about the police, to speculate on who might have taken her. At other times I just wanted to let myself go numb. I didn’t want to smile or respond to another person. I didn’t have it in me to try to follow the threads of even the simplest conversation. I couldn’t bear the energy and opinions and needs and sheer physical presence of another human being.