Neighborhood Watch (23 page)

My face burned with shame for him. I thought of what my colleagues inside the library would say, how the world of minions waited for such stars to fall from the sky. “What does this
mean
?” I whispered.

“Not that much actually,” he said, shrugging and pulling his backpack into his lap. “I still feel pretty good about the novel. I just finished another chapter this morning.”

He was being sued for plagiary and wrote another chapter this morning?

“But what about these stories?”

“I’ll have to pay the guy something. But it’ll die down after that, I expect.” Was he serious? Could a writer be so cavalier about something so fundamental? “If the book hadn’t been a best seller, the guy wouldn’t have cared. He’s in law school now. He hardly reads fiction. He only picked up mine when he saw the sticker on it.”

I remember the steady and deliberate tone of his voice, as if the fault lay not with him but with the marketing of his book. That silver embossed sticker shouting his award nomination, compelling people to reach out, pick up the book, and find fault with its contents. No, Geoffrey had lost no sleep over this matter, nor, I was beginning to suspect, over the near loss of his friendship with me. Something else was eating at him. Something that had nothing to do with me.

He fingered the toggle on his backpack zipper, opened it a little, then shut it again.
What’s going on?
I thought.
Just tell me, Geoffrey.

I don’t remember exactly what he said—“I’m nervous about something,” or, “I don’t know what I’m doing”—but I do remember the way he reached deep into his backpack and pulled out a long silver box with a tiny gold bow pressed onto the top.

Please let this be a pen,
I thought. It wasn’t.

“Will you look at this,” he asked. “And tell me what you think?”

It was a beautiful necklace, with a delicate gold chain and a sapphire charm shaped like a faceted blue sunburst. He hovered as I looked at it. “She doesn’t wear much jewelry is the thing. Hardly any, really.”

Of course he wasn’t speaking of his wife. Or me, for that matter. We both wore ordinary amounts of jewelry. Earrings, bracelets, our wedding and engagement rings. Linda Sue wore none of those things. “It’s pretty,” I said.

“You really think so?” His desperation was palpable, embarrassing to witness. I thought of him at the party, going mute at her arrival.

After two weeks spent in agony, I realized I wasn’t jealous of Linda Sue or the necklace she was about to receive. I was jealous of him, of feeling this way—consumed by passion, overtaken by love.

W
hen I call an hour later, Roland picks up. His voice sounds changed. “Is this Finn?” he asks.

I’m not used to these new developments—cell phones, caller ID. “No, it’s me, Roland. I’m checking in on Trish.”

I’ve just spent two hours reading the rest of Trish’s first book, and it’s extraordinary, really, how she describes this neighborhood, this block, with cornfields and woods that aren’t menacing but magical, alight with spirits who watch over the humans. It’s heartbreaking to imagine the complicated reality behind the story she’s written.

“Why did you bring her here?” His anger is arresting, even over the phone.

“I thought you wanted to see her.”

“Why would you force the issue? Why would you intrude on such a private family matter?”

In spite of everything I now suspect Roland of, I’m not prepared for this. “Because it’s not private. It involves me.”

“Not really.”

How can he imagine that I’m not involved in the murder I’ve just served twelve years for committing? “Your family knows more about Linda Sue’s death than you’ve ever told anyone. I asked Trish to come back with me so I can find out the truth.”

“Do you know why she was at Linda Sue’s house? Did she tell you?”

“Not exactly. I suspect she was trying to get your attention.”

“Did she tell you she was pregnant?”

I take a deep breath.
Pregnant?
“No, I didn’t know that.”

Roland tells me to come to his basement apartment; he doesn’t want to talk about it over the phone. When I get there, he tells me the whole story. Trish was fifteen and they’d been worried about her for months. She’d started pulling out her hair and skipping school, letting her grades fall, crying out for attention in so many ways, it was hard for them to know what was really going on and what was an act. As he speaks, he fiddles with a grid-lined drawing pad on his desk, open to a page covered in notes. Then she disappeared, leaving behind a hastily written note:
I’ll come back when it’s over.
They called her friends and no one had any idea where she was. One admitted that lately Trish had been talking about killing herself, which scared them enough to notify the police, the school, everyone they could think of.

Though no neighbors,
I want to point out.
You never told any neighbors.

As the days went on their only hope was the regular, untraceable arrival of notes in their mailbox, unsigned but written in Trish’s hand:
Don’t worry. I’m fine. I’ll explain when I see you again.
Another:
I had to do this, okay? I didn’t have a choice.
Though that worried them, of course, they took comfort in the purposeful notes, their clarity, that they suggested that she wasn’t far away—that, in fact, she might be somewhere close by, watching them.
Tell Mom to stop staying up all night,
one note read.
I’ll be back when I’m back
.

Finally Marianne figured it out, walking through the neighborhood at night, peeking in windows. It was her worst fear and also a relief. Trish was sitting in Linda Sue’s kitchen, eating crackers.

Yes, Marianne had sent me over to Linda Sue’s in the hope that I might see Trish and talk to her, get her to come home. “Trish had always been fascinated by you. You represented the world of books. Marianne was always envious of that. She thought you might have better luck than she would.”

Marianne and Roland watched me walk across the street, safety catalog in hand. They watched me go inside and come out again forty-five minutes later, so visibly shaken by whatever I’d seen that I had trouble walking in a straight line. They waited for an hour, hoping to hear from me, and then walked over to Linda Sue’s front door and demanded that Trish come home immediately. To their surprise, she appeared behind Linda Sue looking exhausted and—though it was impossible to say for sure—grateful for their presence. Back home, Trish told them the reason she had left—that she was pregnant and didn’t want to have an abortion. She wanted to have the baby and give it away. By that point, there wasn’t any argument to have. She was past her first trimester, too late for an abortion, which must have been her intention. He and Marianne sat up all night making phone calls to adoption agencies and lawyers, trying to decide what to do. Trish was still so volatile and unpredictable. Yes, she’d come home with them, but who knew how long she’d stay? That was their main fear that night when they locked the door to her bedroom, afraid that if they didn’t, she’d run away again, go farther this time and not let herself be found.

I understand what he’s trying to make clear. She couldn’t have gone back and killed Linda Sue. She was locked in her room. “You don’t know what it’s like to have a child who’s out of control. In crisis like that. It’s terrible. You do whatever you have to and that’s what we did.”

It’s as if he doesn’t realize that it’s not Trish I’m most suspicious of. As if it hasn’t occurred to him that he might be a suspect.

But it’s also clear that his guilt is complicated and based far more on evasions and silence—on what they
didn’t
do and say—than on anything they did. He tells me that neither he nor Marianne left the house that night, and I believe him. They didn’t sleep much either, he says, which made the scene the next morning all the more mysterious at first, and then terrifying: the fire trucks, the police cars, the ambulance that drove away empty. Before they went into Trish’s bedroom to tell her what had happened, they talked about what they’d say—
There’s been an accident. Linda Sue has been hurt
. They wouldn’t lie, but they would do it in pieces, carefully, because they both understood how much Linda Sue had meant to Trish.

I watch his face shift as he gets to the last part of the story, the one that is the hardest for him to tell. They walked in her room that morning with the news of Linda Sue’s death and what they found propelled them back out and onto the telephone, with psychiatric hospitals, this time because they finally understood that what was happening to Trish was more than they could handle alone: She was lying in bed asleep, beside the dead body of the neighborhood stray cat.

“
S
o Dad told you, I guess, right?” Trish says. She is lying on one Sof her twin beds, her head resting on top of a lopsided stuffed pink hippopotamus.

“He told me you had a baby,” I say, though he didn’t get much farther than that. After he got to this part—that she gave birth while still a patient in the psychiatric wing of Hartford Children’s Hospital—Marianne called down and asked him to come upstairs.

After he left, I poked through some of the drawings on his desk, what he’d described as a souped-up electrolytic converter, though even I could tell that it wasn’t. They were meant to be blueprints, and included some instructions (
deuterium—room temperature; palladium cathode, 6cm or less
). I stayed, hoping he would come back down, and then I heard them both get in the car and drive away. I went upstairs to see if Trish had left with them. She hadn’t.

“Are you all right?” I ask her now.

“I guess. I’m tired mostly. My parents are screwed up. Maybe you noticed.”

“They told me you were in a hospital for a while. I’m sorry.”

“I’m surprised they told you. It’s not something they like to advertise too much. Our daughter, the nutcase. My roommate there used to eat her fingernails. Not just chew them, but eat the whole thing. Her fingers were these bloody stumps. Another girl pulled out all her hair. Quite a lively crowd.” She closes her eyes and for a minute doesn’t say anything. “Sometimes I think going to the hospital made me crazy.”

It felt that way to us when my father came home shrunken, a shell of the man who’d left home two months before. He never recovered, really, until after my mother’s death, and then he emerged, inexplicably alive and capable again.

“Of course that’s not true. I had problems before. You don’t get pregnant by some jerk who barely says hi to you at school without having a few—” She rolls over to look at what she’s lying on. When she sees how she’s flattened the hippo, she plumps it up again, straightens its bow tie and what appears to be a homemade black satin vest. “Whatever—self-esteem issues.”

“Who was the dad?”

“This guy Ian. He played trombone in the band. He wasn’t that bad. He cried when I told him and then said I had to get an abortion. That’s why I ran away. I didn’t want an abortion. I wanted to have the baby.”

I almost can’t bring myself to ask. “How come?”

She shrugs. “I saw people around me who wanted babies and didn’t have them.” She doesn’t look at me. “I asked Linda Sue if I could stay with her. When I got there, I told her my plan, that I wanted to have the baby and give it to you.”

My breath catches in my throat. “You did?”

“That was my big idea. I’d heard about your miscarriages, and I thought maybe this baby could take their place. I’d tried to talk to you about it once and you said you were really busy and didn’t have time to think about children too much.”

I remember this. I was standing by the magazine racks at the library and Trish appeared out of nowhere, looking pale. “Can I talk to you for a second?” she’d asked. It was a hot day in the summer and she was wearing short shorts, a tube top, and flip-flops on her feet. Recently we’d had trouble with teenagers coming to the library after the swimming pool closed to lie around our basement, drawing graffiti on our baseboards and making trouble. We decided the only solution was enforcing some dress codes. “You can’t be in here wearing those,” I said, pointing to her flip-flops.

She looked like she was going to cry and I thought,
Oh, for heaven’s sake, Trish, just put on some shoes and come back. I can’t make exceptions just because I like you
. “I wanted to ask you about something,” she said. “Whether you think about having children at all?”

I remember what I thought:
She knows too much. Knows that I sometimes pretend she’s mine.
How could I let anyone see this? “Of course I think about it, Trish, but not at the moment. At the moment, I’m too busy to think about it. Now, why don’t you run home and change and then you can come back.”

Did she come back that day? Did she ever approach me again? I don’t think so.

“I’m sorry, Trish. I didn’t understand what you were saying.”

“Linda Sue was the first person besides Ian who I told. And she was so positive right away. She kept saying I should have it. When I told her I wanted to give it to you, but wasn’t sure, she said it was still a wonderful idea and that you weren’t the only person.”

Of course she said this.

Why didn’t I see any of this before? The books Linda Sue bought, the decorated room. The cigarette she lit. Of course she wasn’t pregnant. No woman who has been pregnant and lost a baby would smoke a cigarette. If she had been pregnant she wouldn’t have decorated like that, announcing it so boldly. Everything I saw during that visit was preparation for a baby she knew she could count on, but also—and here was the important part—a baby she had to
woo
. Why else would she have set up a nursery when she cared so little about decorating? She was doing it for Trish, who needed attention and also needed to see proof:
I want this baby. I will take care of it.