The New Neighbor (17 page)

I remember at some point Kay said, “I’m sorry I was short with you earlier. I know you wouldn’t say anything. I just . . . I’m doing my best to pretend it didn’t happen.”

“I’ll try not to remind you,” I said.

“Will you help me? If I need it?”

“Of course.”

“You’ll protect me?”

“To the death,” I said.

T
he fog is
on the Mountain. For the first time Jennifer understands what that girl meant all those years ago in New York City—a place that, from the vantage point of this window on the foggy woods, now seems like a fanciful notion. Afraid to drive in these conditions, she has kept Milo home from school and canceled her appointment with Margaret. Margaret seemed quite put out at first, but then subsided into understanding, telling her it was of course best to be safe. In truth Jennifer’s glad to have an excuse not to go back today. Yesterday’s interview was strange from the beginning. After the massage, Jennifer set up her tape recorder and settled in for another irritable round of I’ll Tell You, I’ll Tell You Not. But Margaret only said, “Are you ready?” That was all. Jennifer barely got out the
yes
before she began.

And then when she said, “To the death,” and abruptly stopped talking, Jennifer prompted her. “Protect her?”

“Keep her secret. Help her out when she couldn’t manage something. Keep her from getting sent home. Protect her.”

“Were you able to?”

“I tried.” Margaret looked right at her. Why, whenever she does that, does it feel like an accusation? “Do you know why I’m telling you this story?”

“Because you wanted to make a record,” Jennifer recited, though clearly that’s not the real reason, or Margaret wouldn’t have asked. She has a feeling the reason is nothing she wants to know.

“No,” Margaret said. “Do you know why I’m telling this story to
you
?”

“Because I remind you of Kay?”

“No!” Margaret smacked the arm of her chair.

Jennifer tensed. “I really have no idea.”

“All right,” Margaret said. She leaned her head back against her chair and closed her eyes. “I’m tired now.” She said this like she was dismissing Jennifer under a cloud of disappointment, a student who hasn’t lived up to her promise, or won’t. Refuses to.

Should Jennifer call what she feels uneasiness? Or is it actually something approaching dread? She was hoping Margaret didn’t notice. Carrasco. But maybe she did. Let’s imagine the worst: Margaret went to the library, armed with that name, and looked her up. Information poured forth like gold treasure from behind a secret door. Now Margaret knows everything. Every fact except the one that matters most.

Outside her window Jennifer can see trees in the foreground, the color of charcoal except where the green moss is on them, their stolid trunks thinning into branches, thinning into delicate graceful twigs, opening like hands to grasp the sky. Never in her life has she paid so much attention to trees. Beyond these are vague and smudgy trees, as in a watercolor painting, and beyond them nothing. There is just nothing there. Impossible not to see magic in this, the gray mist that disappeared the world. She can’t stop looking at it.

Milo appears beside her at the window, putting his palm on the glass. “Can we touch it?” he asks.

“We can go out there. But I think it’ll just feel damp.”

“What’s
damp
?”

“A little bit wet.”

“I think it will feel like a cloud,” he declares.

“What do you think a cloud feels like?”

He appraises her, catching on. “It doesn’t feel like it looks.”

“I think you’re right.”

“So what does it feel like?”

“What do you think?”

He considers, then abandons consideration. “Cows.” He giggles.

“Cows?” she asks with amusement.

“Cows!” He laughs, enormously pleased with himself. “It feels like cows!”

“All right, silly,” Jennifer says. “Let’s go test that theory.”

Outside the fog moves with them, so that as they approach an object it resolves before them into clear solidity, while beyond it obscurity reigns. They’re enclosed, as in a spell of protection. “It’s mystical,” she says.

“What’s
mystical
?”

“A little like
magical
, but different.
Magical
is bright and sparkly.
Mystical
is . . . strange.”

Milo reaches out his hand cautiously, as if the air might bite him. “I feel it,” he says.

“What do you feel?”

“Cows!” he says, and looks at her hoping for a laugh.

“No, really,” she says. “What does it feel like?”

“Damp,” he says. Then he looks at her in earnest confusion. “Why doesn’t my hand disappear?”

“Well, you can’t disappear to yourself.”

“Why?”

She shrugs. “The fog is never right where you’re standing. Not to you, anyway. It would be to someone looking at you from far away.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know. Magic.”

He doesn’t say,
Mo-om
, a reproving singsong, like he normally does when she offers this explanation. He frowns like he’s taking it seriously. “So I could disappear to you.”

“You could,” she says. “But please don’t.”

He dances away with a mischievous expression, daring her. She stays very still because if she gives chase he’ll definitely run. “Don’t,” she says. She feels a flicker of fear.

He utters a whooping laugh and takes off.

“Milo!” she shouts, running after. She could catch him easily, except that she trips on a tree root and stumbles, and once she’s straightened up he’s gone. Oh God. He’s gone. She listens with terror for the sound of a splash or a scream. But he’ll see the pond if he comes upon it. Just because she can’t see him doesn’t mean he’s actually been swallowed by the fog.

“Milo?” she calls. She moves slowly, listening. He’s doing a remarkably good job of keeping still. Not a crackling twig. Not a giggle. The fog parts for her as she approaches but doesn’t reveal her son. Trees and rocks she can have, but him it keeps. “You did it, Milo,” she calls, trying not to sound terrified. “You disappeared.”

Now she hears a giggle. From Milo, or the changeling sent to replace him as the fairies carry him away? She walks in what she thinks is the direction of the giggle. “Milo? Please come out now. Really, Milo. I don’t like it. It’s not safe out here.”

Silence. She takes a long breath, slows her heart, changes her tactic. She walks backward instead of forward, falls silent herself, stays very still. Waits. Droplets kiss her skin. A small wind shivers the bushes and branches and there is the sound it makes and nothing else in this muffled world—no color, no bright spangling noise. This is what it is to vanish.

Doubtless the time she waits is much shorter than it feels, because how long can a small child bear to be alone in the woods, where his mother cannot find him? A burst of sound, and then he appears, running, running toward her, and she crouches down as he approaches so she can sweep him into her arms. “Mommy!” he says breathlessly. “You disappeared to me!”

“I know,” she says into his ear, squeezing his warm little body. “It was scary, wasn’t it?”

“The fog is
jackass
,” he says.

“You don’t like it anymore?”

“I wish it didn’t
exist
.”

“Maybe not if you stay with me, though. If you stay with me then you’re safe.”

“I want to go inside.”

“All right.” She starts to rise, but he clings to her, so she hoists him up and carries him in, heavy though he’s grown. “Milo,” she says into his ear at the doorway to their house. “What’s your name?”

“It’s Milo,” he says.

“What’s your last name?”

“Young.” He says it like she’s crazy, like there’s never been a doubt.

She doesn’t press. You can create a problem in the effort to discover if one exists. She doesn’t ask,
So why did you say
Carrasco
? What else do you remember? What else? What else?
Carrasco, Carrasco, Carrasco. There’s bad magic in that word. You shouldn’t speak it, not if you know what’s good for you.

So she doesn’t. She carries her son inside and makes them both hot chocolate, and they count out how many marshmallows they’re each allowed.

Has everything she’s done been for nothing?

I
was once
a girl named Maggie Jean being driven on a truck next to a girl named Kay through the war zone of France. Soldiers trudged along the road on either side, and when they noticed us it was with a wonderment that girls of our average prettiness weren’t used to provoking. In the war, we were more beautiful than we had ever been, and everything that should have been beautiful was not. Some places the trees grew together over the road and you couldn’t see any place but exactly where you were, worse than being in a maze because you couldn’t even see the sky. Imagine being trapped in there with somebody shooting at you from the other side. A lovely green arch under a summer sky is a death trap. Topsy-turvy. When you’re in a war, everything is topsy-turvy. Men in blue overalls and berets are smoking at tables outside a café, even though the buildings on either side look like they’ve been punched in from the top by a giant. You put up a hospital in a cow pasture. At first it feels exciting and ridiculous, like you’re players in the world’s biggest game of make-believe. You’ve gone out in the backyard with your tent and your toy medical kits and now you’re busily pretending that sooner or later the patients will arrive.

That first place, the more time passed, the harder it became to believe we ever would get patients. It rained. The latrine trench filled with water. You had to brace yourself very carefully not to slip in the mud. Ants crawled into our bedrolls. All night long we heard shelling in the distance. A whistle. A distant boom. We got up out of bed and brushed off the ants. I tried not to watch Kay for signs of her back injury, because she was alert to the slightest hint that I might be doing so. She snapped, “What?” at me more than a few times when she caught me looking at her. She always said she was fine. But then we’d be walking somewhere, and suddenly her breathing would quicken, and I’d glance over to find her staring straight ahead with a startled, almost panicked look, her mouth slack and her face pale. “I just got a little twinge, that’s all,” she’d say, when she was able to look round and smile and talk normally again. I’d promised to protect her, and I was itchy with the fear that I wouldn’t be able to, with the fear and the boredom and the anticipation.

A few times each day I went and wandered through the tents, as if I were checking on things, though I wasn’t really. There was nothing to check on. Everything was at the ready. In the shock ward and the OR, the sawhorses were lined up just so, awaiting stretchers. Two-foot locker boxes with shelves inside held the supplies. In the empty post-op tent there was one GI blanket folded neatly at the foot of each canvas cot. I wasn’t the only one engaged in this pointless roaming. I saw the other nurses, the doctors—we nodded at each other, pretending that we had some purpose. It wasn’t that we wanted them hurt, the injured and the dying. If we’d had any say in the matter we’d have kept them whole and far from the battlefield. It was just that it was hard living like this, clenched like a fist, listening to the shelling all night long and waiting to see if it, if the war, would have anything to do with us. Already we’d learned to tell from the sound how far away the shells were hitting, how close. It is hard waiting, Jennifer, when you’re waiting for something terrible to arrive. After a while you just want it to go ahead and come.

On the third day, they came, just as I’d begun to think they never would, that this whole thing was some strange, airless vacation on the outskirts of battle. It was lunchtime. Lunch was K rations—ham and cheese mixed up in a can, and cigarettes, of course, maybe some candy. I’d choked down about half the food and moved on to a cigarette. It was very hot. Kay and I were talking to one of the doctors, Captain Richard Steigler, a kind but excitable man. I remember him saying, “I’d just like to get a little blood on my hands,” and then laughing, and we laughed, too, though we weren’t quite sure it was funny, or even if it was a joke.

“You could just kill somebody,” Kay said. “A murder mystery would liven things up around here.”

“True, true,” he said. “But I—” Whatever he was going to say was lost in a sudden commotion. Wounded. We had incoming wounded. “My God,” the doctor said. He looked like somebody had slapped him, and maybe he was thinking about that blood-on-his-hands line, and whether he regretted saying it I don’t know.

I got up to run, realized after a few steps that I still had that cigarette in my hand, and stopped to drop it and rub it out. I remember being very careful about it, making extra sure the spark was gone, because I had a vision of the whole shebang—field, tents, everything—going up in flames, all because of me. In those few seconds Kay got way ahead of me, and I ran even faster to catch up.

It was so unreal, Jennifer. It’s hard to explain how unreal. There I was, running, and certainly that was real, the slap of my feet against ground, the sound of my own breathing in my ears. But what I was running
toward
, that I could no more imagine than I’d been able to when we were waiting in England, punting down the river with the tips of our fingers trailing in the cool water, watching the blur of green along the shore. I was on central supply and operating room, so I went to my station in the OR, just like I was supposed to. There was this excitement—that seems like the wrong word but I don’t know what else to call it—and we all felt it. We looked at each other and knew that we all felt it. Like we were all chanting, silently but somehow in unison:
Here we go. Here we go. Here we go
.

Outside there was quite a commotion, the roar of vehicles pulling into the compound, male voices shouting, and one—I thought I heard one, at least—letting out a quickly stifled cry of pain. Well, I had to go see what was happening, and as I ran outside I realized everyone else was doing the same thing. When had we all begun to share a mind? Outside the tent I climbed up on a crate so I could see. Three jeeps. Eight or ten stretchers. And on them men—boys. The wounded. I was looking at them, watching as the corpsmen carried them into the triage area, and still I could hardly believe they existed. When would reality kick back in? I couldn’t get over the fact that just moments before I’d been smoking a cigarette, feeling disgusted by my paltry lunch, that Kay had just made a joke about murder and I’d been on the verge of a laugh. That was my life, not this.