Neighborhood Watch (16 page)

“You can,” I said, grateful for the prospect of something to balance our evening’s embarrassments.
Yes,
I thought,
kiss me.
And he did. A minute later, we were stretched along the length of the sofa, our bodies pressed together. It was lovely and frantic and a little overwhelming. When we came up for air, his glasses were skewed.

“I’m sorry,” he said, sitting up and speaking quickly, as if finishing a conversation. “I want to move out. Make this situation clearer.” He pointed above him, meaning
his home, his marriage.
He took off his glasses and held them in one hand, pinching the bridge of his nose with the other. “I feel—ah! I don’t know.” I thought for a moment he might be crying. “Tethered.” He turned and looked at me for a long time—just my face, taking it all in, as if he already knew that what had just happened couldn’t be repeated. “I wish I felt free to make my own choices, but I don’t.”

That was it. That was all he said.

“I should go, then,” I said, pulling my nightgown back into place. Maybe we were both relieved at the prospect of escaping our swan dive into madness.

Back home, I lay in bed and thought over the simple truths we’d each revealed. I was barren; he was unhappy. If I had exposed myself, he had, too. Though we never repeated that night, I never forgot it. Sometimes in prison when I got tired of imagining a life with the children I never had, I’d go back to that night and remember as much of it as I possibly could. His drawings spread out on the table in front of us, his soft hands, the blue faded T-shirt he wore, the way he tried at the last minute to rectify things by grabbing my hand and saying, “You can come back, you know. Anytime you want.”

Now Marianne studies me with an expression that suggests she knows more about all this than she’s ever let on. That maybe she’s kept up a friendship with me for reasons that have more to do with keeping enemies close than with compassion. I don’t know. Maybe inviting me to live here was a test of some kind, of Roland’s loyalty, or of mine.

 

 

Later that night, I call Paul, who says I shouldn’t read too much into anything Marianne says or does. “She’s always been a little strange. Maybe you’re forgetting.”

Just hearing his voice makes me a little emotional. I want to ask if what Marianne implied was true—if being married to me felt like a burden. “She said the whole block used to worry about you, the way you had to take care of me sometimes.”

“She said that?”

“She said everyone knew.”

He seems to think this over. “We took care of each other, Bets. That’s what married people do.”

“I wonder why Marianne invited me here at all. I keep thinking maybe she knows something and feels guilty that she didn’t come forward during my trial.”

“Knows what?”

“I have no idea. Something about that night. About who else might have done it. She keeps saying I shouldn’t talk to any of the old people from the block. If you think about it, wasn’t it strange that none of them were at my welcome-home party?”

“They all moved away.”

“But we were friends, weren’t we? I talked to Helen, who lives an hour away. She says she would have come but she never heard about it. Why wouldn’t Marianne have wanted Helen to come?”

“I don’t know. Marianne and Roland always had their own things going on. To be honest, I never liked the idea of you staying there. Going from prison to their house. I just never thought it was a good idea.”

He may not have liked it, but he never offered his own place. He still doesn’t. “I don’t know how long I’ll last here,” I say.

Then he surprises me with an idea I hadn’t thought of. “Maybe you should get out. Meet some of the new neighbors.”

I know what he means, but isn’t saying. He wishes he could help me more, in the ways I need most, but he can’t because doing so would send us both back in time to the fragile house of cards that was our marriage, filled with so much sweetness and so much disappointment. “Maybe I’ll do that,” I say.

“
H
ello!” Finn says, when I knock on his door. It’s strange to stand here, on Geoffrey’s old porch. Finn is wearing jeans, holding a cup of coffee. “Did you want to hear more stories about Bill’s bad old days at prep school?”

“No.” I smile. “I have a favor to ask. I’m wondering if I might borrow your computer for a little while to do a little research. Marianne has a personal safety seminar she’s getting ready for. I’m just trying to get out of her way.”

“Oh, of course,” Finn says. “Come in, come in. I almost forgot—she invited us to that, where everyone gets to try out Taser guns.”

“Something like that.”

He says I’m welcome to stay as long as I’d like, that I can even spend the night if I’d like. They have a guest room finished for Bill’s mother, who was going to move in and never did. “She has a hard time staying here and pretending Bill isn’t gay, I guess.”

I ask Finn if he knows how I might find some of the old neighbors online if I have no idea where they live now. “Do they have search engines where you can look by names and ages? Something like that to narrow it down?”

“Oh, please,” Finn says. “Wait’ll you see what we have now.” He tells me to write down a list of names, which I do. A few minutes later, he has found the first name: Baylor, B. and K., in New Haven, Connecticut.

Barbara Baylor was the closest thing we had to an eyewitness at the trial. She took her dog for a walk from 10:00 to 10:20 the night Linda Sue was murdered and reported seeing no one on the street. She walked past Linda Sue’s house and heard no voices, nothing resembling a fight, which the prosecution took to mean that it couldn’t have been a domestic dispute if Linda Sue was killed at 10:50.

“Oh, Bets. I just never expected to hear from you is all,” Barbara says when I tell her who it is. She sounds a little breathless, as if I’ve caught her in the middle of something. “Kevin is out of work these days. I didn’t recognize your number on the caller ID. I was hoping it was one of those headhunters he’s waiting to hear from.”

When we knew them, Kevin worked on Wall Street and they were the first family to put a two-story addition on their house, which at the time we thought was a little ostentatious. “It’s been terrible,” she says. “He hasn’t worked in three years and we had to move down here to a smaller house. I know I shouldn’t complain compared to your life. Never mind all that. How are
you
doing?”

“I’m all right.”

“It must be strange, I guess. Being back on the block.”

I tell her it is, and ask if she’d mind answering some questions about what she saw the night Linda Sue died. It’s awkward. She repeats exactly what she said at my trial—that she saw and heard nothing—but she speaks slowly, as if she were weighing her words. When I ask if there was anything that she didn’t tell the police, she doesn’t answer right away. Then she says, “It wasn’t related to the murder. It wouldn’t have helped your case or anything.”

“What do you mean?”

“There were some things we weren’t supposed to tell anyone. About the accident earlier and what was going on with Trish. Sometimes I think it all started with that accident—”

“What accident?”

“No one knew if it was related or not. They just kept saying they needed to keep it confidential—wait, Kevin’s just got home. I need to go. I’m sorry. I’ll call you later.”

After she hangs up I call Paul back to see if he remembers anything about an accident.

“Like a car accident? No.”

What puzzles me most is the fact that no one was supposed to talk about it. I ask him if he remembers what Trish was doing around the time that Linda Sue was killed.

He is quiet for a minute. “She had some hard times, I remember that. I don’t know too much more.”

“What kind of hard times?”

“Didn’t she leave home for a little while and they didn’t know where she’d gone?”

How did Paul know this when I never did? It’s unsettling, to say the least—as if people were intentionally keeping things from me.

“She came back later, for a little while anyway. Then she left again.”

“Did you know that she was hospitalized?”

He hesitates. “Yes. I heard something like that.”

“Why hasn’t anyone looked into this more—or figured out if there’s a connection between her disappearance and Linda Sue’s death?”

“I did, actually. I told Franklin all this and he couldn’t find any evidence that Trish and Linda Sue knew each other. The more I looked into it, the more it seemed like he was right. She was a pretty troubled girl, but all of her problems were focused on kids at school. I couldn’t find anything that connected her to Linda Sue.”

Except that she lived next door,
I think. And this: Geoffrey’s inscription in her copy of
Middlemarch.
Evidence that at some point he befriended her the same way he befriended me, with books and talk.

Paul keeps going. “Turns out she ran away from home two weeks before Linda Sue died. That’s where Marianne and Roland were the day Linda Sue’s body was found—picking her up and sorting things out. She wasn’t even around for the murder.”

So if Trish had been gone for two weeks, the last night I saw Trish, or any of us did, must have been at the last Neighborhood Watch meeting. I ask Paul if he remembers seeing her there, if she looked different or distraught.

“You forget,” he says. “I never went to those meetings. That was when I decided that Marianne reminded me too much of my mother.”

I laugh because I do remember even though I never understood the comparison. By the time I met her, Paul’s mother had become a free spirit who lived in an artist community in Arizona. When Paul was a child, the youngest of five children, she was entirely different, weary and distracted from coping all the time. “Five was too many kids,” she once told me. “Four more than I should have had.” Honesty was something she’d discovered in middle age, along with Eastern religions and poetry writing. She was blunt about everything, even, on the eve of our wedding, her feeling that we shouldn’t get married. “It’s just a sense I have,” she whispered privately to me. “It’s probably nothing.”

The first time she visited, she stood on the front lawn and said it was hard to imagine why Paul had wanted to live here, on a block so much like the one he grew up on. “Maybe he’s forgotten how unhappy he used to be.”

We learned to brace ourselves for her tactless observations.

“Is no one here interested in doing their own thing?” she’d ask, looking around the neighborhood. “Could someone paint their house chartreuse if they wanted to or is that against the rules?”

“It’s not against any written rules, Mother,” Paul would say. “It’s just
understood.
”

Her visits drained us and I could see in Paul’s face how hurt he was by her. “It’s not your fault she wasn’t happy back then,” I once said to him. “Think about it, Paul—your mother disapproves of you living the same life she
brought you up in.
”

“It’s not that. Sometimes living here makes me feel like a child again. I can’t explain it.”

It was an odd thing to say, when buying this house meant we looked and acted older than anyone else our age, but I knew what he meant. Sometimes I’d look at Paul and see the child he must have been, the youngest and the shiest, the one his mother waited on to leave, which she let herself do when he was fifteen. He never talked about that time in his life. I heard about it only from her when she insisted, “He was
fine
. I knew he would be. That’s why I left.”

Paul never chimed in on those conversations, never said, in so many words,
Yes, I was,
because he wasn’t. That was my discovery after I married him. Paul still needed everything his mother took with her when she left him in a big rambling house, alone with his father—reassurance, protection, a feeling of self-worth. My fondest memories of our marriage were the moments when I most felt her absence—making him a sandwich and cutting it along the diagonal, or standing in the bathroom fitting a Band-Aid around the finger he’d just cut. All those times where I thought:
Here is the mothering he never got.

“You
could
have gone to those meetings, Paul,” I say now. “You
chose
not to.”

“That’s right. No, you’re right.”

“You didn’t because you said the whole idea of Neighborhood Watch was creepy and strange.” What’s strange, actually, is how easy it feels to go over all this with him.

“
Wasn’t
it, though?”

“Yes,” I say, letting myself laugh. “It
was
a little strange.”

W
e had three Neighborhood Watch meetings altogether. At the second, Marianne introduced a retired police officer named Norman with the wizened, folded face of an apple-core doll and a special fondness for doing home security on the cheap. Every idea he showed us had a price tag under ten dollars. Who needed an alarm system when you could glue a telephone pad to your wall and paint a red dot on it for seven dollars? Why buy a dog when a bowl of dog food and a BEWARE OF DOG sign will achieve the same effect? We were charmed by his parsimony; beside him, Marianne beamed.

If Linda Sue was there that night, she didn’t speak up or ask any questions the way she had at the first meeting. She saved that for the last meeting, after everyone was seated and Marianne announced brightly, “Tonight we have a very special guest.”

We all looked around the small living room. We knew everyone there. “Give me a sec,” Marianne said, and returned a moment later, followed by a middle-aged man wearing a denim jacket, brown corduroys, and a baseball cap pulled low. “This is Gary,” she said, walking him up to the front of the room. “And he’s a former burglar.”

We looked around. Beside me, Linda Sue whispered, “What is she
thinking
?”