Neighborhood Watch (12 page)

In a trial like mine such questions get asked and never answered. Witnesses aren’t allowed to speculate; important evidence gets dropped. What matters isn’t who wrote that list and why. What matters is the feeling you evoke sitting in a jury’s presence day after day. To those people I must have seemed too distant, too unconnected to everything being said. One juror claimed the only time I cried was hearing Geoffrey testify that, yes, he was in love with Linda Sue and had wanted to start a life with her, which isn’t exactly fair. After hearing this, I turned around to look for Paul, who wasn’t where he usually sat. It took a while to find him, and when I did, he looked so small sitting in the back, so demoralized and ruined, tears sprang to my eyes.

A few weeks after that first Neighborhood Watch meeting, we gathered at Helen’s house for a wine and cheese party to launch the “fauxfinishing” business she’d been talking about starting for years. “It’s a painting technique,” she explained after we arrived. “This is Victorian Gothic. And this is Shabby Chic.” She pointed at a footstool painted with rose vines, then at a side table crackled to look old. By the time ten people arrived, her living room felt like a very crowded flea market.

“I love it, Helen, I do,” I whispered. “But I think I’m going to step outside.”

Helen and Warren’s was one of the few homes that already had an addition—a covered eating porch out back with an expanded master bedroom/bath upstairs. Around the edges of the porch, she had propped mirror frames and medicine chests, sponge-painted to look old and dusted with mold. I squinted at her price tags and had to sit down. “Oh, my,” Paul said joining me. “I don’t think I get it.”

For no reason I could explain, I felt like crying. Suddenly it was more effort than I could bear, praising Helen’s “art,” buying the smallest, cheapest piece we could find. Sometimes this happened. I stood in a room full of people and had to stop myself from screaming the bleak truths I felt.
This stuff doesn’t look good! We aren’t really friends!

“Are you okay?” Paul asked softly. He knew me well enough not to come any closer or touch me.

“Yes,” I said, breathing once, then twice. “I’m fine.”

I looked up and saw Geoffrey through the door bent over a flowerpot painted to look like dirt. The smile on his face had dried to his teeth. My heart skipped ahead. He would see us and slip out here. In a minute this party would make more sense. We’d find a piece of furniture to point out and make a gentle joke about. “I like the flowerpot because you don’t have to wash it,” he’d say, and we’d laugh, and the evening would already be half over.

At his suggestion, he and I had recently started reading
Anna Karenina,
and it seemed as if the dynamic were shifting between us, as if he were ceding some of the authority on literary matters to me. “You understand the modernists better than I do,” he’d said last week. When I said nothing, he added, “It’s true. You do.”

I kept thinking about a conversation we’d had that afternoon. After he clarified a point about Flaubert, I asked him how his own novel was coming. “You’d better hurry up. I need something good to read after we’re done with this.” Right away, I regretted saying it. I knew he got letters from fans begging him to publish, not realizing how much pressure he felt, how complicated it was for him. I also knew he was having trouble. He was a perfectionist, he’d once said, and he couldn’t part with anything that wasn’t as good as he’d imagined it could be. It made me wonder if he held himself to impossibly high standards. “Doesn’t every book have weaknesses?” I pointed out. “Isn’t that the fun for the reader? Finding holes and inconsistencies?”

I thought I’d made a decent point—the book clubs I knew spent most of their time dissecting the flaws of very good books—but he shook his head. “That’s not my problem exactly,” he said. I could tell he was upset. “I thought moving here would help my concentration, get me more focused. I don’t know. I keep letting myself get distracted.”

We were standing in the library and I pushed my shelving cart to the farthest corner of the row. “By what?” I asked.

For the last week and a half I’d been afraid of the changes I’d seen in him—the extra nervous energy, the way he brought up topics and dropped them quickly. It felt as if he were on the brink of making some confession I didn’t want to hear. Perhaps he was drinking again or moving back to Florida.

“It’s not right,” he said, shaking his head.

“What isn’t right?”

I’d never seen himat a loss for words before. “Corinne and Ihaven’t—” He stopped himself there. Whatever he’d wanted to say, he didn’t.

When Geoffrey finally came out onto the porch at Helen’s party, Paul smiled and laughed at the joke he made (“I’m looking for the American flag dining room table. Is that out here?”). A minute later, Paul left, which wasn’t like him. Usually the three of us looked for excuses to sit alone together at these parties. For a second, I wondered,
Is he trying to give us space? Is he angry with me?

Even then I worried about how little I intuited about the people around me, basic dynamics, things that were obvious to everyone else.
What’s going on?
I wanted to ask Geoffrey.
Explain it to me.
My one flicker of prescience: I felt, that night, as if our world were shifting, changing irrevocably, and I just wanted to know where it was headed.

“Linda Sue is coming, right?” Geoffrey said. It was the first time I’d ever heard him mention her name.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I guess. Usually she does.” For all the distance Linda Sue ostensibly kept, she never missed a gathering as far as I could tell.

“Just curious,” he said, looking over his shoulder. “No reason. I mean, she likes stuff like this, I assume. Arts and crafts.”

“Are you okay, Geoffrey?”

“Sure, yeah. Just fired up. Did a little writing today.”

For what felt like forever neither one of us spoke.

“Inspired by you, I guess,” he said, wearing the same dry-mouth smile he’d been wearing earlier, examining the flowerpot.

Say what you mean!
I wanted to scream.
Just tell me what’s happening.
Then I saw it on his face first: how every muscle relaxed into a real, heart-stopping smile; how he exhaled so deeply, I could hear his relief. I turned and saw what he was looking at: Linda Sue had arrived.

Over dinner, I got stuck with Marianne, who was running unopposed to be Neighborhood Watch block captain. “The most important thing is tell the drug addicts we’re
united
,” she said. We were standing with our plates, balancing our wineglasses, the assumption being that we shouldn’t sit down on chairs Helen was trying to sell.

Across the room I saw Roland staring at me, and for a second I imagined going back to his basement and asking him to explain everything he was working on. I imagined what it would be like to be less afraid of the secrets on this street. I watched Geoffrey and Linda Sue move over to a wooden love seat wide enough for two and sit down as if they hadn’t noticed the rest of us not sitting. I had never seen them talk alone before and I tried to imagine what they were saying. Linda Sue spoke so softly, Geoffrey’s head bowed toward hers as if he were afraid of missing a word.

I saw Paul notice, too, and raise his eyebrows at me. We were both in conversations we weren’t paying attention to. He had Helen Baker-Harrison showing him her sponges and explaining her process. Then we watched Linda Sue and Geoffrey stand up from their bench, move over to the coat tree holding their jackets, and leave without saying good-bye to anyone. A few minutes later, Paul and I found each other. “Did you see that?” he said.

I was surprised, actually. Usually, Paul registered even less than I did in these social situations. I’d never understood the exact nature of the friendship between Paul and Geoffrey. On the surface it seemed like one thing—Geoffrey, the star, and Paul, his earnest and approving shadow—but up close I understood there were shades of gray, periods of discord, old resentments that Paul never specified. “Geoffrey can be self-serving sometimes, but who isn’t, I guess,” he’d say. Or, “Geoffrey’s always had a father hang-up.” I’d seen no evidence of this myself. Sometimes I wondered if Paul didn’t dwell on the past as a way of staking his own claim on Geoffrey, as if he alone knew the real problems plaguing his childhood friend. At those moments I wanted to touch his hand gently and say, “Actually, Paul, I see him more than you do.”

But that would have been needlessly unkind. Geoffrey and Paul had their own friendship; they had loved and fought and forgiven each other. Geoffrey never made light of Paul’s inartistic career as an engineer or the boring work stories he sometimes told at parties. I think Paul considered himself the keeper of Geoffrey’s secrets, just as Geoffrey had kept some of his, and the truth is I never asked either one too much about the other. I told myself I wasn’t interested in secondhand stories, though maybe there was a little more to it than that. Maybe I didn’t want to finally hear the secrets I’d managed for so many years to avoid.

When Paul and I left fifteen minutes later, Geoffrey and Linda Sue had made it only as far as three houses up the street. They stood on the sidewalk, heads dropped back to admire the show of stars over our heads. “Oh, my God,” Paul whispered, grabbing my wrist. He pulled me back onto the grass and into the shadows. When they walked past Geoffrey’s house, then our own, Paul pinched my sleeve and pulled me along.

They crossed the lawn and walked inside Linda Sue’s house without any discussion, as if they’d made a plan ahead of time.
I’ll meet you there, we’ll go to your house after.

“Maybe they’re just talking,” Paul said.

I thought of our friendship, the hours Geoffrey and I had spent doing just that. “Maybe,” I said. “We could look in the window.”

I suppose we both thought a glimpse would calm our fears. If they were sitting in her living room, that meant they weren’t racing upstairs, falling into bed. We crept closer to the glowing picture window in her living room. “I think she’s making tea,” I said, grateful that she was in the kitchen and he was in the living room.
It’s nothing,
I almost said, then stopped. Linda Sue had moved to the doorway and Geoffrey was behind her, one arm circling her waist. Her hair fell back over his shoulder. He buried his face in the nape of her neck. They weren’t kissing, but what they
were
doing was more intimate than a kiss. Leaning against each other, finding their fulcrum. Her back to his stomach, his face in her hair. It was silent and endless, a moment that seemed to expand and shrink, to include the world and shut it out, as if we’d never understand the language they weren’t speaking.

I realized something then, though I couldn’t have put it into words. I wasn’t standing there watching because I was in love with Geoffrey. I was looking at them, yes, but I was taking it all in. My first glimpse of the inside of Linda Sue’s house: how empty it was, how up close there was even less than we imagined.
It’s possible,
I thought, my heart beating crazily.
It’s possible for someone to live like this—with nothing but the freedom to make her own choices.

“
O
h, my God, IT’S BETSY!” Helen screams to her husband, Warren, when I tell her who’s calling. “We’ve just been watching you on TV. Warren, it’s BETSY TREADING.” It wasn’t hard to find Helen’s phone number, listed in the Internet white pages in Montclair, New Jersey. Though Marianne warned me that people would feel uncomfortable answering questions, Helen sounds happy enough to hear from me, and when I ask her about the cat, she remembers the one we collectively fed but not what happened to it.

“Did you ever see it after Linda Sue died?”

“I don’t think so. But we were all so distracted then, I can’t be sure. I remember telling Geoffrey that.”

“Geoffrey asked about the cat?”

“Yes. A few days after Linda Sue died, he knocked on our door and asked if we had seen it.”

“Did he say why?”

“He said it was sick and might be dangerous. We thought that it might have gotten rabies.”

“But if Linda Sue had just died, why was he worried about
the cat?”

“We didn’t
know,
Bets. We remembered that party at our house. It was terrible, watching all of that happen. The way Geoffrey was trying to seduce both of you.”

Because I don’t say anything, apparently, she feels free to keep going. “My God, he was shameless. Of course you loved him. He was a writer and you were a librarian. You lived for books and here he was writing them. Though even that wasn’t really true, was it?”

Geoffrey never finished the novel that he toiled away at for two years, living among us, giving us updates that struck us as thrilling peeks into the creative process. I assume this is what she means, though maybe everyone knows the truth now, the part I can still hardly bring myself to admit.

“Who could blame you for falling for his cheap tricks? He dragged you into his midlife crisis so he could feel better about all his bad behavior. He thought if you adored him the rest of us wouldn’t notice what he was doing. Then Marianne got involved and thought sending you over to Linda Sue’s house would open your eyes and solve everything. That’s Marianne for you.” She sighs heavily. “But we never thought you did it, Bets. We never believed that. How
could
you have?”

Where had Helen been with these theories during my trial?

“We just didn’t understand why you confessed. Or why you took that nightgown down to the station to begin with. It could have been
your
blood. It probably
was.
You might have been sleepwalking that night, but that didn’t mean you killed Linda Sue. I don’t know why your stupid lawyer didn’t raise that possibility. Or look at the facts. Ninety-eight percent of sleepwalkers never leave their house.”

She seems to have thought long and hard about my case, which makes me feel both grateful and nervous. “What did other people think?”