The New Neighbor (26 page)

My father’s medals from the First World War

A dried flower, pressed inside a photo album

My doctoral degree, in a black frame

My first nurse’s cap

Also, this: a silver spoon like people used to collect, engraved with the word
Wisconsin
. Do people still collect these spoons, arrange them in little wooden curio shelves carved to secure their handles, made exactly for this spoon-collecting purpose? I don’t think so. Oh, the things that disappear from the world. This spoon belonged to Kay. Kay wasn’t from Wisconsin. After she was gone, I found it. I’ve never had any idea what it meant, but I’ve kept it all these years and whatever it meant for Kay, I believe I’ve kept that, too. The spoon is in the bottom drawer of my father’s desk. I’ve never been to Wisconsin, but when I think of it I imagine snow.

From Jennifer’s house I took a small stone. It was on a high shelf of the bookcase in her room, which is how I know it’s hers and not Milo’s. It’s a brown rock—smooth, shiny, close to round but slightly irregular. It contains many shades of brown, even approaching gold. I imagine she found it on a beach. She is the kind of melancholy person one can picture gazing out to sea. Sometimes I picture myself standing on the prow of the ship that brought me home from the war, the salt wind in my hair, on my face an expression of sorrow and resolve. When in fact I spent much of the journey home crying in my bunk, trying not to be heard by the other girls.

The rock is here on my desk now. It’s pleasing to the touch. I’ll have to hide it before the next time Jennifer comes over. One more object that no one else will ever understand.

I have Zoe’s number on my desk, too, and I can’t help but think of how not so long ago I had her mother’s number here, yet to be called, and now my life has changed. I wonder what Zoe would say if I called her. Were I a real detective, I wouldn’t hesitate. I’d think I had every right to call her and ask her what she knows.

So much depends on every choice we make. This is obvious and yet endlessly to be marveled at. So many tales of what ripples outward, so many dreams of parallel universes. Because we tell stories about the things we find impossible to bear. Then we can pretend they are only stories.

I went down the Mountain today after all. I stood for a long time at my father’s grave, and told him none of this.

N
ow that she
has friends, or at least potential friends—now that she knows people—Jennifer is cleaning up in case any of them drop by. In case she takes a notion to invite them over. Her grandmother used to say that having someone see your dirty house was like having someone see you naked. And her mother. And her father. They were and are constant cleaners, habitual cleaners, and for most of her life she’s been one, too. But she’s let this house fall into an embarrassing condition, in a way she’d stopped noticing until Margaret came over for the egg and she saw it under her critical eye. Ever since, she’s felt a nagging sense of duty neglected, but she’s done nothing about it until today. She’s in Milo’s room, sorting toys into bins. She saved his room for last, because it was the most daunting. Her own room is spotless, and the bathroom, and the study—everything. She’s just about ready, should anyone unexpectedly arrive.

She slides her arms under Milo’s bed to feel for small items. Wherever she looks, she finds Legos. She sweeps some out and picks through them, sorting by color—an almost entirely pointless task, but she’s feeling thorough. Red, yellow, blue, black, black, yellow, blue. Her cleaning has failed to turn up the stone that belongs on the bookshelf in her study. Yellow, yellow, yellow, green. She thought maybe Milo took it and she’d find it in his room.

When she’s finished she tours her clean house in admiration of her handiwork. The only thing that continues to nag is the missing stone. At the bookshelf in her study, she once again runs her hand over the space where the stone used to be. It’s hard not to believe, when something is lost, that you’ll find it back in the place where it was, if you just look one more time.

One summer, when Zoe was four, the same age that Milo is now, Jennifer took her to the beach for a few days, just the two of them. The trip had been Tommy’s idea as much as hers, and the theory was that without him there to prefer, to anticipate, Zoe might like her mother more. At first the experiment seemed like a failure, Zoe kicking Jennifer’s seat so hard on the drive there that she had to move Zoe behind the passenger seat, Zoe shouting, “You told Daddy not to come,” Zoe wailing that she’d left behind her favorite toy and wanted to go home. What toy it was, Zoe wouldn’t say. She was skilled at manipulation but not yet good at lies.

On the third day Zoe started bringing her things she’d found around the rental cottage. A shell. A puzzle piece. A feather. A tiny gold bead. Jennifer would come upon these treasures, placed in a way that marked them clearly as meant for her: beside her coffee cup, on her bedside table, resting atop her book. It was like being courted by a cat. Jennifer was afraid that if she acknowledged the gifts out loud they’d stop coming, so instead she responded in kind. She left a dime, a lip balm, a pair of cheap shiny earrings. Once or twice she watched from around a corner as Zoe discovered her offerings. The child’s delight was unmistakable, but she too never said a word. It was hard to say who was following whose lead. One day Jennifer left Zoe that stone, a souvenir of the beach, shiny and smooth, and for the remainder of the vacation Zoe carried it around in her pocket, taking it out from time to time to study it under the light.

The vacation over, they were an hour away from the beach house when Zoe started to cry. The stone was lost. She couldn’t find it. Jennifer turned the car around. She had to go back to the rental office and ask for the keys. It took them another hour to find the stone, behind the headboard of the bed where Zoe had been sleeping. Zoe clutched it all the way home, and when they got there, before Tommy came out to lift his precious sleepy daughter from the car, Zoe handed it to Jennifer, her expression focused and intense, and said, “You keep this for me, Mom. So I can always find it.” As soon as she laid eyes on her daddy, she was Tommy’s girl again, but still, for a long time after that, Zoe had checked in with Jennifer on the stone’s safety, and Jennifer had thought that meant something, and then Zoe had grown older and forgotten, and Jennifer had kept it anyway, had kept it all this time. Now it was gone.

I always see the skull beneath the skin.

—P. D. J
AMES

I
n Zoe’s oldest
memory her father is singing. She doesn’t remember what, only that it was something sweetly melancholy, and that she was in his lap and he was rocking her and she was very, very upset. She no longer knows why. She was holding a doll with a tear-shaped stain under one eye, and she remembers believing that both the doll’s tear and her father’s song expressed the depths of her own sorrow.

Her father! He was a wonderful man. If she were to list her top five memories, it would be tough to include one that didn’t feature him. If she were to then arrange those memories chronologically, as a version of her life story, it would look like all that had mattered in her life so far was the time they spent together. Lying on her bed in her dorm room, staring up at her roommate’s stupid posters, she can picture this timeline. Like the ones she used to make in elementary school, with photos and dates and titles for the appropriate milestones—My First Birthday, My First Dance Class.

They wouldn’t be milestones, though. Not on this timeline. Never mind the clichés. No birthdays, no tutus, no sitting on Santa’s lap. What should matter isn’t what’s
supposed
to matter but what
does
. At nineteen Zoe already knows how much of experience loses substance in your mind, grows foggy, fades and vanishes. From solid to smoke. What matters are not the times when you took lots of pictures. What matters are the times when you felt something so strongly it overrode the automatic delete. The memories that stay in your mind like a program you can run. Like a dream you can reenter. Like a hologram. Time in a bubble. There’s a reason you see so much of that stuff in sci-fi. Everybody wants it to be real.

“See there?” the film studies professor who tried so hard last semester might say. “You
do
have a topic you can write about.”

Would she rather her brain was a projector, and she could play scenes on the wall, watch them like a movie? Or would she prefer a virtual reality machine, letting her live her memories again? Maybe she’d like to have both capabilities, so she could switch between them at will. Sometimes she’d watch. Sometimes she’d live.

Zoe’s childhood, which she thinks of as a fairly standard American middle-class one, took place in Clovis, New Mexico. In fact most of her life to date took place there, excepting a few vacations, until she came to college here. To people here, in Michigan, New Mexico is exotic, but this is beyond ridiculous. She spent no time at all roaming the mountains, learning Native American wisdom. We’re talking small-town Americana, people. A town with strip malls and housing developments, sitting in matter-of-fact exposure on the flat-ass plains. There’s nothing exotic about a pickup truck.

Zoe exists in a condition of irritable sorrow. Her grief is a secret to the people around her. Her irritability is not. At least she thinks her grief is a secret. Some of the adults—that film studies professor—treat her with a compassion that suggests they can spot it. Her peers mostly leave her alone, and thus she lies on her bed in her dorm room on a Friday night, while the rest of the world makes merry. She would not like anyone to know it, but she has cried about this. And yet the people who try to reach her—she pulls back from them with all but an animal snarl.

She was not always like this. Once she had many friends, she had an openness to joy. What her father taught her in childhood was how to welcome the world, to seek out delight. Her mother, her wary, closed-off mother—but she will not think about her mother now. Her father once showed her a video of her mother dancing. Zoe was little, five or six. Her father whispered, “Don’t tell her I showed you this,” even though her mother wasn’t there to hear. It was hard for Zoe to understand that the dancer on the stage was her mother, even though of course she looked like her. But she was so
abandoned
. At that age Zoe wouldn’t have used that word. But she recognized what she wasn’t yet able to describe: her mother not just abandoned to beauty, but making the world more beautiful, all by herself. Her mother summoning joy. Zoe’s eyes filled with tears, watching.

“Oh, look at you,” her father said, pulling her onto his lap, wiping her eyes with his fingers. “Look at you, sweet pea. Are you happy or sad?”

“Why?”

“Why what, sweet pea?”

“Why can’t I tell her?”

Her father watched the video. She could see he was thinking about what to say. “Sometimes we don’t like to remember when we were happy.”

“Why?”

“Because remembering makes us miss it, and then we feel sad.” He kissed her head. “But I wanted you to see how your mother could dance.”

“Could I dance like that?”

“You’re her little girl,” he said. “I bet you can.”

Zoe closes one eye and then the other, watching how her roommate’s poster shifts from side to side. It’s a
Doctor Who
poster—her roommate is a major fangirl. Zoe, never having heard of the show, did ask some polite questions in the beginning, but she found her roommate’s eager complicated explanations hard to follow, and then when the other girl offered to show her some episodes Zoe said no. Now her roommate has found a crowd of like-minded people, and they wear catchphrase T-shirts they find on the Internet and buy advance tickets to midnight openings of fantasy movies. Zoe probably could have belonged to this group—maybe quite happily, as she has no objection to nerds or their enthusiasms—if she’d just that one time said yes. She could be with them right now, doing whatever they’re doing—her roommate doesn’t bother to tell her anymore.
Sure, let’s watch one.
Would that have been so hard?

Yes, that’s the trouble. Yes, it would’ve been.

So that’s one memory. Is that really a top five though? What criteria is she applying? Does
top
mean favorite, or just unshakable? She remembers sitting on the stairs until her leg fell asleep, and how scary and weird that was, because it had never happened to her before, and it hurt but it didn’t, and she couldn’t walk on it, numb and then prickly prickly prickly, and she cried. Who came running when she cried, that time? She doesn’t remember. Maybe no one. Does that count as a top-five memory? Does she have to be crying in all of them?

And so we move through childhood into junior high and high school, and there are birthdays, and tutus. She insisted on taking dance classes, though her mother was reluctant at first. She took them all through elementary school. Then, after the end-of-year recital in seventh grade, her mother was in tears, and Zoe stormed away, certain they were tears of disappointment, and her mother caught up to her and squeezed both of her arms and said, “For God’s sake, Zoe, I’m crying because you were wonderful!” The next year, when her mother said, “So I’m signing you up again, right?” Zoe said, “No, I don’t want to do it anymore.” Her mother opened her mouth to argue. But then she just closed it and walked away.

That was her mother. They never talked about it again.

She walked away from most fights with Zoe, her face set, her mouth thin, everything about her a refusal. She was willing enough to scream at Zoe’s father, though. If the fight was with Zoe’s father, she was perfectly willing to freak out.

High school was high school: classes, friends, dating. Learning to drive. A baby in the house—that was a striking development. And seeing your mother in a movie theater with some guy, performing a confident hand job. There’s one that stays in the brain. She’d like to have seen the teacher’s face if she turned in a timeline with that on it. But that happened before high school—she’s jumbling everything up. That happened around the time she decided to quit dancing.