The New Neighbor (31 page)

Megan’s face. Megan’s sweet face, transformed by horrified astonishment. That fevered blush she gets, which Jennifer has only ever seen caused by embarrassment, but this time is evidence of something else, some new emotion, whatever it is that Megan now feels.

Jennifer looks at her daughter. Her twin, Tommy used to say. “And why do people think that, Zoe?” she asks coolly. “Because you got rid of the bottles he used to kill himself?”

Zoe doesn’t look at her. “The police took it seriously,” she says to Megan.

“Yes,” Jennifer says. “Thanks for that.”

“We have to go,” Megan says. She has Ben tightly by the hand, and as she leads him past Jennifer, Jennifer can see the tension in Megan’s arm, the way she maneuvers so that Ben won’t accidentally brush against Jennifer, so that Jennifer, the monster, won’t come into contact with her precious son. One minute you are one thing, and the next you are something else. The first thing is lost to you. You can never be the first thing again.

Zoe steps aside to let them leave. Jennifer hears Megan’s car door open, hears Megan urging Ben into his car seat, and knows that next she’ll lean in to check the buckles, adjust the straps, make sure her child is safe. Then she’ll go to the driver’s seat, and then she’ll be gone, gone, gone.

Jennifer darts outside, past Zoe, as if she doesn’t even see her there. She slows a few feet from Megan, who stands grasping the handle of her car door, watching her like a startled deer. “Megan, please,” Jennifer says.

Megan waits. She shakes her head. “Is all this true?”

“She’s my daughter, yes,” Jennifer says. “The rest is complicated.”

“I’m sorry.” Megan opens the door. “I think it’s too complicated for me.”

“Megan, please,” Jennifer says again. She hears the pleading in her voice. “Everybody has secrets. Your marriage isn’t perfect, right? You drink too much.”

Megan rears back. That was the wrong thing to say. Though Jennifer knows with a doomed certainty there was no right thing.

“I’m so sorry,” Megan says, crying now. “I’m so sorry for you.” She gets in her car hastily and shuts the door.

Jennifer doesn’t stand there to watch her back away. She tried, and she ruined it, this life in Sewanee, and now it is over. She turns to go back to the house. Inside Zoe is waiting, pacing up and down in front of the glass doors. She stops when her mother comes in. “I’m sorry,” she says.

This is not what Jennifer expected to hear, and maybe that’s why she proceeds as if she didn’t hear it. “Happy?” she asks. She goes far enough up the stairs to see Milo, engrossed in a violent cartoon. Then she heads for the kitchen to pour herself a bourbon from a bottle Erica brought over. Just last week, that was. When it was still possible for Jennifer to call Megan and Megan’s friends and invite them over for a drink. After a second’s thought she pours a bourbon for Zoe, too. Back in the living room, Zoe’s where she left her. Jennifer hands her the drink, then slides open the glass door. She goes outside and sits in one of the wooden chairs. She braces her feet against the railing. She stares at the woods. She stares at the pond. The deck across the way is empty. The bourbon burns her throat.

Zoe will never understand. There is no point in trying to make her. There’s no point in telling her any of the stories. Even if she did, who knows what Zoe would think they proved? That’s why she never tried. To fight with her would be like fighting with Tommy again, the endless tussle over who was to blame. “You’re never kind to me,” Tommy would say. “You never laugh at my jokes.”

“I don’t feel kind,” Jennifer would say. “I don’t feel like laughing.”

“How can I live like that?” Tommy would ask, and the look on his face would be so desolate that sometimes kind was exactly what she’d feel. Her poor baby. He didn’t want to hurt her. His sorrow and his guilt.

Zoe comes outside, but she doesn’t sit in the other chair. She leans on the railing and looks at Jennifer. Jennifer can feel her gaze. She keeps her own trained on the trees. “How did you find me?” she asks.

“You called me.”

“No, I didn’t.”

“Yes you did, Mom! You called from Margaret’s house, and hung up, like I wouldn’t see a strange area code and immediately assume it was you. Like I haven’t been
wondering
.”

“Margaret’s house? Margaret?”

“Yes, Margaret.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Jesus,” Zoe says. “You can’t even admit you called me. Tell the truth for once in your life.”

Jennifer can feel a tingling in her palm, as though she’s already slapped the girl. She takes a breath. “If I wanted to have conversations like this,” she says, “I would’ve been in touch.”

“You
were
in touch!”

“I wasn’t!” She’d like to take a swig but her hand is shaking. “If someone called you from Margaret’s house, then it was Margaret. Of course. Of course it was Margaret.”

“Why would she do that?”

Jennifer shakes her head.

“It doesn’t matter,” Zoe says. “You called, you didn’t call. Now I’m here.”

“Because of Margaret,” Jennifer says bitterly, as if that were the worst of it.

“She wants to help me. She’s letting me stay with her.”

“You’re staying with her? You’re staying in her house?”

“I came here looking for you, and I ran into her at the Smoke House.”

“She just took you in, a total stranger?”

“She overheard me asking about you. She knew I was your daughter, as soon as she saw me,” Zoe says. “She says I look exactly like you.”

Above the tree line a tiny plane, a prop, climbs into the sky. “There’s something wrong with that woman.”

“She said you’d want to see me,” Zoe says in a small voice.

“Did she?” Jennifer watches the plane. She imagines that wherever it’s going is the next place she and Milo will live.

“But obviously you don’t. I didn’t know you changed your name. You didn’t even tell me where you lived.”

Now Jennifer looks at her daughter again. “You called the cops on me, Zoe. For murdering my husband. You don’t trust a person after that. You can’t trust a person after that. I can’t trust you not to fuck up my life. You’re proving that right now. Do you not understand why I moved away? Why I changed my name? Did it never cross your mind I’m trying to make a good life for your brother? What do you think it would have been like for him—” She shakes her head. “Now thanks to you we’ll have to move again.”

“But what about me?” Zoe says. “Don’t you care about me?”

“Zoe,” Jennifer says. She presses her mouth together against tears. “It never seemed to matter if I cared.”

The woods are at first just silent, and then that silence resolves itself into its component parts: the sound of air, the sound of water.

“All right,” Zoe says finally. She pushes herself off the railing, carefully sets her glass on it. “I don’t actually drink,” she says, conversationally, and then she moves past Jennifer. Into the house, then through it and out the other side. Jennifer can hear her. She moves slowly, as if to give Jennifer time to come after her, to tell her not to go. Jennifer listens until she’s sure the car is gone. Then she waits, watching the house across the pond, but minutes tick by in empty silence. Where are you, Margaret? Don’t you want to see what you’ve done?

Back inside, the house has an air of aftermath, though little is disarranged. The cars the boys were playing with are still out on the floor. The dishes are still on the table. The tiger Zoe brought sits propped against the teapot. Jennifer picks it up. Squeezing its little tummy, she swallows and swallows again. Then she throws it in the bin with the rest of the toys.

Soon she’ll have to pack up. Before the story spreads. Before the clients cancel. Before the looks in the grocery store. She surveys the house with an eye that’s already grown nostalgic. Upstairs Milo is curled up in a tight ball, watching a toy commercial. Jennifer sits beside him, puts her arm around him, and pulls him close.

“Is everybody gone?” he asks, and she says yes. She can sense his agitation. He knows something has happened that hasn’t been fully explained. But he also seems to know better than to want the explanation. He starts telling her about the TV show. Many hours later, when it’s bedtime, she lets him fall asleep in her bed.

But then she is the one who can’t sleep. Around two in the morning she gets out of bed and puts her clothes back on. She scoops up Milo, gently, gently, and carries him stirring and murmuring out to the car. He doesn’t wake as she buckles him in. She drives to Margaret’s house, pulls slowly, slowly up the drive. There’s no way to be totally silent but the lights are all out and everyone seems to be asleep. Everyone—by which she means Margaret and Zoe. She knows Zoe is still here because of the truck in the driveway. Tommy’s truck.

She eases out of the car, closes the door so it doesn’t latch. Then in the dark she walks over to the truck. She puts her hands on it. It feels like metal feels. She looks into the cab. All she can make out in the dark is a new tear in the fabric of the ceiling. It doesn’t have a sense of Tommy about it. It doesn’t speak for him.

Lights come on, and she jumps back from the truck. Too late for a clean getaway—Margaret has those little streetlamps with which people line their walkways, and when Jennifer crosses to her car she’ll be clearly lit by them.

The creak of the screen door, and then the sound of a cane on knobbly pavement. It’s Margaret, then. Trust Margaret to come outside when she hears an intruder, instead of calling the police.

Jennifer steps into the light. “It’s me, Margaret. It’s Jennifer.”

Margaret stops where her face is still in shadow. “So it is,” she says.

“I don’t know why I’m here,” Jennifer says.

“She’s asleep.”

“I thought she would be.”

“You thought right.”

There’s a long silence. “Well,” Jennifer says.

“Did you kill him?” Margaret asks. Matter-of-fact, as if it’s an everyday question.

“Ask Zoe.”

Margaret waves a dismissive hand. “Zoe’s been acting out of hurt, can’t you see that? Hurt and grief and loneliness. Zoe doesn’t know what she thinks. I want to know if you killed him.”

“Why?”

“Why?” Margaret repeats.

“Why do you care? What does it matter?”

“It matters,” Margaret says.

“I loved him,” Jennifer says. She felt fierce before she spoke, but now there are tears in her eyes. She shouldn’t have said that out loud. “I couldn’t help it.” Her voice is shaky. Stop it, stop it! Just stop talking. Just run away.

“I know,” Margaret says.

“What do you mean
you know
? What could you possibly know?”

“Oh, Jennifer.” Margaret sounds so weary. “Please answer my question.”

“So you can tell Zoe?”

“No. I’d never do that.”

“Why then? I don’t understand.”

“You’d understand if you’d listened to me. Don’t you see what’s happening here? I’m letting you tell.”

“You’re
letting
me tell?”

“I think you might want to.”

Jennifer blinks. In the dark she can’t make out Margaret’s expression. She sees the gleam of her white hair, her white cane, her two pale hands. “Yes,” she says. “I killed him. Yes. I killed him. I did.”

Margaret says nothing. How dare she say nothing?

“I killed him,” Jennifer says.

“I know,” Margaret says. “I heard you.”

What was her tone? What is she thinking? Jennifer can’t tell, won’t ask, won’t wait around for more. “Goodbye,” she says, or thinks she says. She gets into her car, where her son is still sleeping, and leaves Margaret and all that Margaret knows behind.

Where should they go now? she asks herself, hands on the wheel. Somewhere beautiful. Somewhere far away. She went to Hawaii, once, with Tommy. They went to the island of Kauai, on a honeymoon funded by his mother. They rented a one-room cottage with a huge bed enclosed by a mosquito net whose purpose seemed romantic rather than protective. They woke with the sun to the sound of roosters crowing. They ate pineapples and lychee fruit. They hiked an eleven-mile trail along a breathtaking coastline and spent the night on a beach, with other hikers and an outpost of hippies who shared the milk from their goats. Jennifer was purely, truly happy on that island, and so was Tommy, and she could go back there now to live with her son and tell him stories about his father, whom she loved. His father, who slept beside her on a starry beach and was a wonderful man.

Z
oe is gone.
When she got back from Jennifer’s, she said, “I don’t think my mother loves me.”

“Oh, Zoe,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

“She hates me.”

“Can a parent hate a child?”

“Clearly,” she said.

I didn’t know what to say to that. Did my father hate me, those times when he looked at me like he did? The time he looked at me, a plump and clumsy child in my heavy shoes, and said, “Every father hopes his daughter will be a butterfly”?

I offered what I could in the way of consolation: food, company, a bed. She wanted to hear more about my family history. I told her about my mother’s older sister, who held court in her big house for years and years, and how my mother always felt in her shadow. Then about my grandmother’s sister, who was addicted to laudanum. I told her every story I could think of. I didn’t mean for them all to be sad, but that is so much of what there is.

After she was settled, I still couldn’t sleep. And so I was awake when I heard Jennifer outside. I didn’t tell Zoe about her mother’s late-night visit. I think it’s best if she forgets she has a mother now.

This morning I fixed her eggs. I poured her orange juice. I walked her outside. “Call when you get home,” I said. “I want to know you got back safe.”

“I will. I promise.” She hugged me. “Thank you for trying to help me,” she said.

I said she was welcome and patted her on the back.

At the door of her car she paused. Her eyes were glistening. “Did my mother really call me?” she asked. “Because she said she didn’t. She said it was you.”

I didn’t have time to think about what was kinder, the lie or the truth. Even with time to think I still don’t know. “It wasn’t me,” I said.