Neighborhood Watch (15 page)

That was how the trial went, the reason I didn’t step forward to offer my own evidence of a hole in Geoffrey’s alibi. I felt sure I was going to be found guilty anyway.

What would have been the point?

Now I wait for Jeremy to applaud my good work.
We’ll get a DNA sample, check it against the hair
.
How long will it take? Two days?

“It’s not Geoffrey,” Jeremy says, stopping me before I can say any more. “We’ve already had his blood drawn. I just got the results back today. The skin doesn’t match. Neither does the hair.”

I don’t say anything.

“I’m sorry, Bets. But it was someone else.”

“
I
told you about this,” Marianne says, pulling out boxes marked

I “Samples” from the closet. “It’s not a party exactly. I like to think of it as a public seminar on personal security.”

Ah, yes. Marianne’s new side career, what has evidently become of her failed Neighborhood Watch efforts. Now, instead of inviting police officers into her home, she hosts parties where women can order rape whistles, pepper sprays, and what she describes as her most exciting new product, pastel-colored Taser guns that come with their own animal-print carrying pouches.

“Oh, my,” I say, as she unfolds a life-sized, human-shaped target with a bull’s-eye on its chest, which she tapes to her living room wall.

“I know you probably think I’m crime obsessed, but I’m not really. It’s about moving past that, about being
prepared
so you don’t have to
worry
.”

She seems so agitated that I want to say something supportive, let her know that I don’t judge her. “This seems nice, Marianne. Like a new Neighborhood Watch.”

“Oh, no. It’s not like that. It was never really about crime prevention.” She looks up at me as if she’d inadvertently revealed more than she meant to.

“It wasn’t?”

“No. I mean, sure, that was
part
of it.”

I wonder why I’ve never asked her this before: Why
did
she start Neighborhood Watch? We all wondered about it at the time when we’d never had a crime in our neighborhood.

“But obviously it didn’t work very well. After our third meeting, Linda Sue was killed.” I can see her hesitation, trying to decide what she should say. “It was Helen’s idea originally.” She gestures as if to say,
You remember Helen, her crazy ideas
. “We were worried about you. All the miscarriages you’d had. And then you’d get pregnant again so quickly. It broke our hearts, Bets. That’s all.”

I stare at her. “You started Neighborhood Watch because of my miscarriages?”

“No, no. Or not exactly. You just—you had these episodes, where you didn’t seem like yourself. You’d stand in the garden sometimes and you wouldn’t answer when someone spoke to you. I’m sure it was the hormones. My God, what your body must have been going through.”

I feel my breath go shallow.

“So much of the time you seemed
fine.
And then, on a bad day, you were so
immobilized.
” She goes on, speaking quickly. She tells me they were worried about Paul, how “stretched” he seemed at times, taking care of me and working. “We wanted to help. Helen thought of Neighborhood Watch as a way to let Paul know we were here to help.”

“You talked about it with him?”

“Sort of, yes. We told him we were here if you needed anything.” She looks at me carefully. “I don’t think he knew all of it, Bets. I don’t know if he ever saw you sleepwalking.”

“But you did?”

She nods and closes her eyes. “Twice. Once at about midnight. You stood on your lawn, in your bare feet. Earlier that day you’d been having one of your spells so I watched for a while. You looked so vulnerable I wanted to help, but then you went back inside. The next day I almost said something, but you seemed fine. Back to yourself.”

I don’t understand this. Why didn’t she speak up sooner and tell Franklin? He spent weeks trying to find someone to testify to recent sleepwalking episodes. “And the second time?”

“The other time. Yes.” She looks down and fidgets with a ring. “I think you remember what happened the second time.” Her eyes narrow in my direction.

“Yes,” I say, nodding, after a painful silence. “I suppose I do.”

I’d been praying for a miracle of absolution, that there might have been another episode of harmless night wandering that she’d borne witness to. But no. Before she even begins, I know the night she’s referring to. The time I woke to discover myself in Roland’s basement sitting on a tattered sofa in the corner, him leaning toward me, offering me a warm mug of peach tea.

“Nothing happened,” I say simply. “He woke me very gently, made me some tea, and I went home. I’m not sure why I knocked on his door. I probably saw the light on and went toward it without thinking. He was kind about it. I don’t think it bothered him.”

“Still.”

“Yes.”

“You can understand why I worried. A woman in a nightgown knocking on doors in the middle of the night.”

“Yes.”

“We thought you needed help, Betsy, but none of us knew what to do. When you were fine, you were so efficient and in control. And Paul didn’t want to say too much. He told us you’d had more miscarriages than anyone realized. He also said you had premenstrual dysphoria—that it was related to hormones and was a severe form of PMS. He said it usually passed within a few days.”

During the worst times it felt like being pulled into a vortex, spinning without bearings, washing ashore on a beach I didn’t recognize. Though it happened often enough that I took medication, it still usually took me by surprise. One day I’d be fine and the next I’d stop moving altogether. I lost time, I know. Sometimes whole days. I’d disappear and reemerge having to ask Paul what day it was, and what had happened in my absence. It’s hard for me to think about those days of torpor, when lassitude filled my limbs with sand and my mouth with cotton wool. It wasn’t that I
couldn’t
speak during those times; I was paralyzed by a fear of what I might say if I
did.
I lived in fear of my old selves emerging—as if I might suddenly become the high school malcontent again, or the college freshman party girl. Were those old episodes due to hormonal surges or the exhaustion of watching everything I said? I never knew really.

I learned to anticipate a few of the warning signs—a headache that started in the back of my neck, blurriness on the periphery of my vision. Sometimes Paul would pick me up at work and we’d tell people I had the flu. Having grown up with my father, I should have known such secrets aren’t kept for long. People know even as they collude in a show of not knowing. I understood this as a teenager, every time the guidance counselor asked, as if she didn’t already know, whether I had any “issues I was worried about at home.” She knew my childhood secrets, just as my neighbors knew far more than they ever let on.

Back then I believed only Viola and Paul knew about my spells. Even Jeremy, to whom I’ve told as much truth as I know how, doesn’t know that I used to have blackouts during the day and unexplained episodes of lost time. The first time I saw Paul after my arrest, we talked about how much we should tell a lawyer. It wasn’t a long conversation. We didn’t have much to debate—the sleepwalking was enough of an explanation, we agreed.

Now I understand that my memories aren’t wholly reliable. If the world saw me as fragile and troubled, then every story I recall of myself functioning normally is a lie. During the weeks and months I thought I was fine, I was a far cry from it apparently, being held aloft by an elaborate charade being played out by everyone I knew.

Marianne is also right about this—the worst of the episodes began after my first miscarriage. After the later ones, it varied. Sometimes it happened right away. Sometimes I’d be fine for three or four months and then I’d start having dreams about babies left in a car or locked in a closet. I’d be at work and think,
Where is he? I have to find him!
I hope I never said this out loud, but how much was I able to control? My heart would race with crazy fears—
My baby might be dead!
—and then I’d remember.
That’s right. He is
.

Can I be blamed for this surfeit of unexpressed feeling? When there is no funeral, no ceremony, no condolence cards to mourn the loss of an unborn child? When we have no language beyond salvos of superstition and the terrible suggestion to try again? I stopped telling anyone when it happened. The first time Marianne talked to me about forming a Neighborhood Watch group for the block, I’d had a D & C only a few days before. The pad in my underpants was soaked with blood and the sound of the procedure, the vacuuming slurp, still echoed in my head and made my stomach clench. “Think about the things you don’t want to lose,” Marianne had said, meaning of course our stereo, our TV. I thought of the only thing I cared about: the stain on our mattress. The closest thing I had to a picture of a baby.

I want to tell Marianne that she doesn’t need to worry about these episodes happening anymore. In prison I learned not to shut down the way I once did. There, such incidents meant you were strip-searched and put on suicide watch in an isolation cell with a mattress on the floor and a toilet without a seat. In my first year, two women committed suicide while on suicide watch using bedsheets tied around air vents. If you felt like killing yourself, I discovered, that cell where you might go four days without speaking to a doctor was the last place you should be. When I felt the grip of a dark episode coming on, I rode it out as unobtrusively as possible. I found routines and stuck to them. My library job was an unsupervised blessing. I could sit in the dark if I needed to for hours at a time. If anyone asked, I talked about my troubles as if they were in the past—
I was feeling a little blue, but I’m fine now.
After a while I didn’t lose myself in dark patches.

I discovered that in a place where the appearance of normalcy mattered so little, I stopped feeling oppressed by it, and after a few years the darkest parts of those moods faded away. I still got depressed, of course, but I managed to get by. My psychiatrist said I was integrating my personality, taking ownership of all aspects of it, which felt like an apt enough description. In the last five years I haven’t experienced the immobilizing waves that used to take hold and close me off from the world. Now I understand the factors that caused it—the stress of keeping up appearances, of trying so hard to seem fine to the world. Maybe I even knew what I was doing, making it clear in some subconscious way:
I’m not fine
.

I also remember that the episodes usually passed as mysteriously as they arrived. One morning I’d wake up able to feel my skin again, taste the coffee Paul had made, read more than a headline of the newspaper. Invariably, I’d look around, giddy with relief, and wonder how much I’d missed. The morning after I found myself on Roland’s basement sofa in the middle of the night I awoke even more exuberant than usual. I didn’t remember right away where I’d been or what had happened, only that I felt free, as if a silence had been broken. I kissed Paul right on the lips, which must have taken him by surprise because for two days I hadn’t dressed or left the house. I remember clearly how breathless and full of optimism I was.

“Hello!” Paul gasped, when I finished kissing him. “Feeling better?” We used euphemisms as much as possible. “Yes!” I said. “Much better. Sorry about all that.” Force of habit by then—I always apologized after an episode. Not a real apology (it was too large, and too inexplicable, to tell him how truly sorry I was). This was more of an acknowledgment; as if I’d been late or had burned the dinner I was serving. I hadn’t yet remembered the night before, only that I’d been in the throes of a bad episode and now it was over, the heavy weight in my heart replaced with elation.

Later that morning, almost like a movie playing in my head, I saw it all: where I’d gone, how Roland invited me inside his apartment and made me tea. He became the first neighbor ever to ask me, directly, what was happening with my pregnancies. Some neighbors knew parts of it—they knew we were trying; that I’d miscarried once or twice—but with Roland alone, I told the whole story: “I’ve had five pregnancies in four years and lost every one. The doctors say my womb isn’t hospitable, but no one says why. They don’t
know.
”

I told him that one baby held on for almost five months.

That time, I started bleeding at night and the baby came out a few hours later in a bath of blood. He was the only one I got to see and touch, his little webbed fingers and toes, the nub of genitals, the great dome of head. I could have made a footprint—I’d heard of a mother doing that with her twenty-week miscarriage—but I didn’t. I held his tiny hand and it wasn’t nearly as sad as you might think. He was real, and there, the size of my palm. We kept him in a Tupperware bowl and carried him the next day to the doctor.

I also told Roland something I’d never told Paul, that I’d been pregnant once in college and had an abortion. “I’ve always felt like that time was different. Like that baby would have lived.” In the end, I explained what had precipitated all this. I’d been to the doctor. He told me my body couldn’t take any more, that I’d have to give up.

For a long time, Roland didn’t say anything, and then his hand moved over to rest on top of mine. His palm was warm and dry. “I’m just so sorry,” he said. “About all of it.”

I leaned back, meaning to close my eyes and catch my breath. It was dizzying to be there, to realize everything I’d just spoken aloud. Instead of calming my nerves, I fell into the crook of Roland’s shoulder, felt my cheek against his chest. I allowed the storm of feelings kept at bay for so long to rise up and began sobbing into his shirt. “Shhh,” he kept saying, touching my face and my neck. “Shhh.”

After some immeasurable length of time, I stopped crying and looked at him. I understood that I’d humiliated myself beyond any normal measure. I didn’t know how I’d ever face him again. Then I let myself look into his face and saw his genuine sadness and something else in the way his eyes moved around my face, as if he were trying not to get away but to remember this moment. “I want to kiss you,” he said. “But I don’t know if I should.”