The New Neighbor (7 page)

Jennifer feels a sudden sharp longing for her own mother, for both her parents, her sweet bookish uncritical parents. Before she and Milo came here, they stayed with her parents for months. After the police finally gave up, in a kind of aggressive backing away that made it clear they still didn’t believe her, her parents grew cheerful. Her father resumed his habit of singing hits of the seventies—John Denver, Gordon Lightfoot, Cat Stevens—as he tidied up the house. She stopped him one afternoon as he was straightening magazines on the coffee table, in the middle of the chorus of “Sundown.” She put a hand on his arm. He turned to look at her, surprised at the touch. They were not a physical family. The love between them was strong, but its expressions were tentative. She said, “Dad.”

He looked worried. “Yes?”

“Aren’t you ever going to ask me if I did it?”

“Did what?” he asked, though of course he knew, so she didn’t answer. She waited. He looked at the magazines in his hand, gave them a final tap, then laid the neatened pile carefully down. He shook his head. She waited for him to say he didn’t need to be told she was innocent to know it was true. He said, “No, I’m never going to ask.” She could tell by the determined way he said it that he’d come to that decision quite some time ago. He’d decided not to seek the answer, which meant part of him thought it might be yes.

She cried. Her father put his arms around her and she wept against his chest. She might’ve been a child. All he wanted was to give her comfort. She wondered later if he took her weeping as confession. What it was, really, was heartbreak. Because at that moment she understood—completely, thoroughly understood—that no one in that town, not even her parents, would ever be able to separate her from that question. It didn’t matter who she’d been before. Now she was what the answer made her, and since
yes
could never be uttered and
no
could never really be believed, she would forever be the woman who might have. She was the woman whose own daughter thought she could. She imagined the moment—at ten, at twenty—when Milo would want to know whether she killed his father. And she knew she couldn’t let him become that. A person who had to ask.

T
oday is Tuesday,
not that it matters. Today she made her third visit to my house. I don’t care about the days of the week anymore, except as they help me know when to go to the doctor and when not to expect the mail. I had an appointment yesterday, which is why she couldn’t come then. “You’re doing very well, Ms. Riley, considering,” Dr. Bell said.

“Considering what?” I snapped, though I knew damn well.

“Your age,” Dr. Bell said mildly. She doesn’t react, that doctor. She and Jennifer Young must have gone to the same acting school. What a pleasure it would be to really piss somebody off, just to see my existence fully register on someone else’s face.

Massage is like a drug, and a heavy dose of it. I can’t keep myself present on the table, or fight the rolling fog of calm and goodwill her poking and prodding induces. I didn’t really try today, honestly. How often do I get to forget my body? My body is too much with me. “Late and soon,” as Wordsworth has it, though of course he’s complaining about the world. “Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers,” etc. Thanks to Mrs. Smith, my tenth-grade English teacher, I still have that poem memorized. But Wordsworth and I do not agree on our difficulties. The world I can more or less get away from, as I think I’ve proven, and there’s so much of nature around me I’d be hard-pressed to long for more. Sometimes I wish the birds would shut the hell up. It’s not the world I can’t escape but my body. Not its demands so much at this stage, but its complaints and limitations. Its resistance and its pain.

After today’s massage, I came back to myself more quickly than I did after the first two, which I regretted. Perhaps massage, like a drug, is something you get used to. I think she knows, already, that I like her to sit for a few moments afterward, or perhaps this is something she does with all her elderly clients, knowing that part of what they pay for is a little bit of company. It’s her routine to give you a glass of water and ask how you’re feeling and remind you to take it easy, as though it were even possible for a person my age to take it hard. Today I was determined not to let her leave at the conclusion of all that. In anticipation of my own dazed state, I’d prepared a question that would keep her, and I asked it, feeling pleased that I hadn’t let the question slip away when I floated off the table into memory and dream. “What do you think of life here?” That was the question. Not a yes-or-no, you see.

“It’s peaceful,” she said. “I love living on the water, even if it’s just a pond.”

“You don’t find it boring?” I asked. “Or lonely?”

“Lonely?” She shook her head. “l don’t like people,” she said. She smiled immediately afterward, as if this were a joke, but it struck me as the truest thing she’d said to me so far.

“What about your little boy?”

“Well, I do like him,” she said.

“No, does he like it here? Does he like the woods?”

“The woods? We haven’t done a lot of exploring there. We’ve been to all the playgrounds. I guess I’m warming up to the idea of the woods.”

“Are you frightened of them?”

“Frightened?” She has a habit of repeating part of your question. Perhaps this is a way of giving herself time to consider her answer. She exhaled, wearing a small frown. “Milo’s not very careful with his body yet.”

“He’s too young to value it,” I said.

“Yes.” She sighed. “I worry about the pond. I lock the doors at night so he can’t slip out. But if I could I’d fence it off.” She looks out toward my deck, the water beyond it. “Sometimes I think I shouldn’t have rented that place.”

I was delighted by this confession—not because of its substance, but because it was personal information offered without my asking. I debated whether to ask why, in that case, she’d chosen the house. She is so careful, so guarded. There are locked doors in conversation with her, and no way to tell when you’re approaching one. Before I could decide she changed the subject. “But it’s a beautiful place,” she said. “An easy place to be.”

To be what?
I wanted to ask. “And you like the house?”

“It’s quirky, but we like it.”

“I’ve been curious about it,” I said, “living across the pond from it all these years. I knew the woman who lived there before you.”

“Oh?”

“Yes, her name was Barbara. We got along. I don’t know why we never came to be better friends.”

“Mmmm,” she said.

I pressed on, perhaps too forcefully. “I’ve never seen the inside,” I said. “Have you changed it much?”

“Not really,” she said. “Not yet. We’ve only been here a month.”

I waited a beat, but nothing else was forthcoming—by which I mean, no invitation to tea. “I wish Barbara and I had thought to visit. We just stuck to waving at each other across the water. It does seem a shame.”

“But maybe it isn’t,” she said. “Maybe you liked each other better with the pond between you.”

I didn’t want to agree with that. There was a silence, and she shifted forward in her chair, a prelude to departure. I still wasn’t ready for her to go. “I’ve lived here twenty years,” I said. “Before I retired I was the vice president of a hospital in Nashville.”

“Oh?” she asked, politely, holding still.

“I bet you wouldn’t have guessed that. People don’t assume a woman my age had a career, but I did. I kept on working after the war. I went back to school for my doctorate. I was head of all the nurses at the hospital.”

“That’s impressive.”

“I haven’t spent my life teaching Sunday school,” I said. “I got a PhD. I published articles. I’ve slept in a foxhole. I’ve sat on a hill in the dark and watched the tracer bullets go by. I landed on the beach at Normandy.”

“Really?” Now, at last, she looked at me with real interest.

“D-Day plus thirty-eight. Bastille Day—July 14.”

“What was it like?”

“What was it like?” I used her trick of repeating the question—not on purpose, but because suddenly I wasn’t sure how to answer. Now that I had introduced this topic, what did I want her to know? “It was a mess,” I said.

“You must have a lot of stories.”

“Of course,” I said. “Doesn’t everyone?”

“I meant about the war. Everyone doesn’t have those.”

“No,” I said. “Everyone is lucky.”

She let a silence lapse before she spoke. “I’m sorry,” she said.

“For what?”

“Bringing up a painful topic.”

“You didn’t. I did.” I didn’t like her mentioning my pain. “I don’t mind telling my war stories. Nobody asks.”

“What about your family?”

“I told them some things. I wrote letters home. But all the people who got them are dead.”

“There’s no one left?”

“One nephew, two grandnieces,” I said. “One of them I like.”

“No kids?”

I shook my head. “I haven’t left much of a record of myself.”

What a serious face Jennifer has. She looked at me like this was terrible news. “You should write your stories down.”

I didn’t know what to say. Why would I do that? Who would I do it for?

After she left,
I couldn’t concentrate on my book, an old Martha Grimes I’d somehow missed. Though it took considerable, exhausting effort, though even now my right elbow hurts from that effort, I dragged my army trunk out of the guest room closet. It’s where I keep all my memorabilia from the war. My souvenirs. I used to have real souvenirs—empty perfume bottles, framed postcards of girls from different regions of France—but I divested myself of all that bric-a-brac long ago. Here’s what remains: the letters I sent home to my parents; the frayed, folded map on which I tracked my movements; a photo album I never open because I pressed a flower inside; my scrapbook. I pulled out the scrapbook, which is a heavy, fragile thing these days. It’s probably sixteen inches tall, more than a foot wide, with a cover made of fake boards, complete with wood grain. On the front it has a drawing of two mallards in flight, one large in the foreground, one small in the back. Above that are the words
Scrap Book
in an old-fashioned cursive.
Scrap book
used to be two words. Now it’s one. So many changes happen without our noticing, without our say-so. The pages are crisp and brown, decorated with menus and postcards and pictures held in place by photo corners, or slipping out of them. All the things I thought worth saving. So brittle now. I turned the creaking pages carefully until I found the first picture of Kay.

These photos are tiny. They’re snapshots, “snaps” we called them, from the forties, three-inch-by-two-inch black-and-white rectangles with thick crimped white borders. And my eyes are not what they used to be. So I can’t swear by the resemblance. Kay’s hair was dark, a rich brown, almost black, not blond like Jennifer’s, and she wore it rolled back, pinned, and curled, as was the fashion of the age. Her eyes were dark, too, and mischievous, and she had a sardonic grin, a way of flashing it at you like she knew exactly what you were thinking. These things I remember without the aid of photographs. I’d forgotten how slender she was, how small she looked encased in men’s coveralls and a gas mask, how short. When we stand together in a photo I look a good five inches taller, and I was only five six myself, before I started to shrink.

Still, I think it is Kay she reminds me of.

W
hen she’s alone
at night, that’s when Tommy visits her. Or, more precisely, that’s when she lets him come. The rule is that she’s not allowed to think of him during the day, though this is a rule she sometimes breaks. He’s there all the time, leaning against the curtain, insisting she notice him. She can see the outline of his form, and all day she looks away, looks away, looks away, and then at night when the world is stripped bare and the woods are humming she relinquishes effort. She lets the curtain rise. Sometimes he stands there as he was at the end—the eyes never quite focused, the redness in the nose, the hand that shook at ten in the morning. Sometimes he is as he was at the beginning, in their mutual enrapture, in the days of wonderment. Which is worse?

She’d been right, back when she watched him from the corner of her eye, to imagine Tommy was more complicated than he seemed. His easy physicality, his cowboy boots—she’d expected a father in the military, a broad-shouldered sergeant, or a contractor, maybe someone who worked with livestock. But his parents owned the local supermarket and two others in neighboring towns. They both had business degrees. Tommy’s house was one of the nicest she’d ever seen, bigger and plusher than her own perfectly nice one, but he almost never had his friends over, preferring to shoot hoops in their cracked driveways, hang out in their cramped untidy basements. Most of his friends had the kind of dad she’d imagined for Tommy, before she met his father, and saw his polite and distracted smile, his glasses and his suit. Tommy’s parents didn’t want him to work in the summers—they said there was plenty of time for having a job—but he did it anyway. He told her this with indignant pride. He’d been working for a guy who remodeled kitchens since the summer after his freshman year. The guy wanted Tommy to go into partnership with him after he graduated. This, not college, was Tommy’s plan.

Tommy could tell you anything you wanted to know about his boss—how in high school he’d been a rodeo bull rider, where he’d met his wife—and he had an equivalent level of knowledge about the janitors at school, the cashiers in his parents’ stores. They’d run into the guy in charge of produce and she’d stand there smiling while Tommy talked music, sports, how the produce guy had a kid who was learning to drive, can you believe it? Tommy talked and laughed and she smiled politely. He’d have his arm around her waist. His fingers would brush her skin just below her shirt. His thigh would brush her thigh. She didn’t mind standing there while he worked his charm. He was so good at it. She can’t pinpoint the moment when her admiration became resentment, though she knows they were married by then. She thought it was sweet that he liked everybody, until it struck her that maybe he just needed everybody to like him. He always had to be the bartender’s best friend.