Neighborhood Watch (24 page)

I think about the other things she did, showing me the room, turning on the light and then snapping it off as if she recognized the risk and changed her mind. Trish must have been up there, hiding in the third bedroom, and Linda Sue was making a point of some kind, letting Trish know,
Look, it’s official now, you can’t back out.

Linda Sue knew I was the competition and, in many ways, the more natural choice. I was married, for one thing. If we didn’t have plenty of money, at least we had two jobs between us. Maybe Linda Sue was putting on a show because she wanted me to break down again. She wanted Trish to know,
This woman seems fine and then she has episodes and acts crazy. Watch, I’ll show you.

“When did you tell Linda Sue?” I ask now.

“A few days after I found out. I was looking for Geoffrey over at her house and he wasn’t there. I started crying and she asked what was wrong.”

Which meant Linda Sue had known for weeks, maybe even months, when she started those fights at our meetings. We thought she sounded like a teenager, but now I understand what it really was: the effort to
please
a teenager. Trish was there, at those meetings, forced to come by her mother
.
How could Marianne have guessed what was really happening, that Linda Sue was working to win Trish’s trust, prove she was different than everyone else? Maybe seducing Geoffrey was even part of it. I had a husband in my favor, and she knew no single woman would have an easy path to the adoption. She’d need a man. Why not pick the one Trish liked the most?

“Then it got strange. I wasn’t sure what was happening. She and I started fighting. . . . I think she wanted me to leave, but didn’t want to come right out and tell me to. She and Geoffrey got in a fight that morning before you came over.” She stops herself, though I can tell there’s more to the story.

“What was the fight about?”

“I don’t know. Me, partly.”

“What happened later, when your parents came to get you?”

“I was upstairs, but I heard them talking on the porch before they came in. My mom said, ‘She’s probably already told her everything,’ and my dad said, ‘She doesn’t know anything to tell.’ That’s when I knew they hadn’t really come for
me
. They didn’t even realize I was having a baby. They were just worried that I was telling their secrets.”

“They didn’t know, Trish. You never looked pregnant.”

“She was my
mom.
I wanted to hide it from everyone else, but not from her. I thought, my God, sooner or later, she’s got to see. She’ll look at me and
see.
”

“What were the secrets they didn’t want you to tell?”

“It doesn’t
matter.
That was the point. That’s what I told your husband when he came to see me in the hospital.”

“
Paul
came to see you in the
hospital
?”

“He asked if I’d still consider giving the baby to you and him. He didn’t think your case would make it to trial. He said they didn’t have enough evidence, that you’d get released within a few weeks, and he asked me to at least consider you two as parents.”

I try to imagine Paul doing this. What makes me want to cry is that I can—I picture his earnest good intentions, his hopeful heart thinking I’d be out soon and we could have a chance at a new life. “What did you say?”

“That considering everything that happened, I didn’t want to put my baby with anyone I knew. And I didn’t want it to grow up on our block. Then he said if I ever saw you again I shouldn’t tell you about the conversation. He said you had some psychological issues and couldn’t handle certain kinds of stress and this would be an example of something you couldn’t handle.”

It’s still light enough outside to see the view from Trish’s window across a strip of lawn, two rows of hedges, and into Linda Sue’s house. This must have been what Trish looked up and saw every night: Linda Sue moving through her empty house, Geoffrey joining her.

“Were you friends with Linda Sue before you ran away to her house?”

“I wasn’t supposed to be. My mom made all these rules about who I could talk to on the block. She didn’t think I should have adult friends, but what else was I going to do? The only other friends I had were boys who wanted to sleep with me.”

I flash on a memory of my own indiscretions and the terrible price I paid. I remember my own lonely youth spent thinking,
I don’t blame them for not saying hello. I wouldn’t say hello either if my friends were all around me. If I had any friends.
I want to reassure Trish, tell her she wasn’t alone in doing stupid things, just to feel a connection. “It wasn’t easy growing up on this block, I’m sure. I thought it would be so great for kids and maybe it was the opposite. Too much pressure to look and act a certain way. Maybe it was a mistake.”

“It
was
a mistake.”

“Maybe so.”

“Those people weren’t your friends. Trust me.”

I look up, slowly. “What do you mean?”

“They just talked about you sometimes. About the problems you had.”

I feel my face go red. “That’s not true.”

She shrugs. “Well, I mean—sorry—but yeah, it is. I used to hear people talk about what you could handle and what you couldn’t. They weren’t supposed to let you drink too much, that was one thing. Linda Sue wasn’t sure what to say when you came over to her house that day. That’s why she came in to talk to me while you were there.”

That must have been where she went while I stood in her bedroom. “What did she say?”

“That you were freaking out.”

I remember that part, the end of the visit after I found the pregnancy test in the bathroom and felt a panic attack start to close over me. Vertigo, shallow breathing. I was sweaty and hoarse. “I have to go,” I’d said.

I suspect Trish is right about this much: There was a collusion behind my back that started before Linda Sue’s murder and extended long after I turned myself in. If it’s true, it means Paul must have been worried right away, and looking for ways to deflect suspicion from me. It means the canvassing the police did and the initial questions they asked were more pointed in my direction than I ever realized. Did my neighbors assume I’d done it? Did they start Neighborhood Watch to help their mentally unbalanced neighbor and then close ranks so tightly that I got shut out completely?

Whatever they did must have reaffirmed every suspicion the police had about me and cemented the weak case they built against me. Yes, my neighbors must have whispered in confidence and off the record.
We’ve been worried about her for a long time. She seems to periodically break down and disassociate.
The implication was there all through my trial. Even my coworkers talked about my “bad patches.” In theory, we asked for this. Building a corollary of the insanity defense meant that we had to establish that I was not in control of my actions at the time of the murder. But Jeremy was right; there was far too much evidence of calculated cover-up for that defense to have ever worked. So why did we use it? Why did Paul suggest a lawyer who would agree to argue a losing insanity defense when there were other, better options out there?

I have to assume the answer is that Trish is right, that “keeping an eye on me” meant protecting me, ostensibly, but it also meant protecting themselves
from
me. In my neighbors’ eyes I must have been more unsettling than Linda Sue even, with her home-glued clothing and her Bohemian ways. I was trying to fit in, to pass, and she was not. I was outside every weekend, weeding and gardening, trying valiantly to seem normal. My presence was a reminder that we were all vulnerable to forces we couldn’t control. Talk of miscarriages makes every woman take a step back in fear that a mysterious problem could be contagious. My neighbors might have pretended otherwise, but they blamed me and helped convict me in part because they wanted me out.

“What happened with the cat?” I ask Trish. I have to hear the end of the story, how she ended up that night in bed with it.

She doesn’t say anything.

“The cat they found you with. The morning after Linda Sue died.” Roland told me they were never able to figure out how the cat died. By the time they found it in Trish’s bed, it had been dead for a while. According to him, Trish wouldn’t talk about it, wouldn’t talk at all in the terrible confusion of that morning as they shuffled her, nearly catatonic, out to the car and to the hospital. “If there was any chance she’d seen something or knew what happened to Linda Sue, we would have stepped forward,” he told me. “But she was locked in her room from seven o’clock that night and Linda Sue died just before eleven o’clock. We were on the telephone talking to people. Even the doctors agreed. If she didn’t see anything, she shouldn’t be forced to talk to the police.”

“That cat was really sick,” Trish says softly now. “I was trying to take care of him, but he kept drinking water and peeing all over the floor. Then his back legs stopped working and he started walking sideways into walls. Right before you came over, he’d fallen down the stairs and Linda Sue brought him up to me and said it was time to take him to the vet and put him down. I put him in the bathroom cupboard because I didn’t want her to find him. I’d made him a nest. He liked being in there. That was one of the things we were fighting about. She thought I was too obsessed with it, that I needed to focus on taking care of myself and my baby, not some stupid cat. She kept saying the cat wasn’t our responsibility. But it was. It was my responsibility.”

“Why did you think that?”

“Because it
was
.”

It’s all so strange and hard to piece together. If the cat was sick at Linda Sue’s house, what was it doing in Trish’s bed the next morning? “Why did you think it was your fault?” I ask.

“Because I killed him. Just like I killed everything else.”

T
his is what happens: Bodies believe the lies they’re told at night.

Or mine did, anyway.

After our wedding, Paul and I took two days to drive down to Florida for our honeymoon, stopping along the way to have sex and sleep in cheap motels. Neither one of us liked the beach particularly, so we chose St. Augustine because of its history, Ponce de León and the Fountain of Youth. We went on tour buses for the air-conditioning and visited an alligator farm, where we watched a mother alligator carry her newly hatched baby across the water in her mouth. I loved the way we disappeared there, like other tourists. There was another newly-wed couple at our hotel and I once caught the other bride’s eye sitting at the bar. We both rolled our eyes at our sunburned husbands, who were wearing matching flip-flops and had cameras hanging around their necks.
What was I thinking?
she mouthed, and we laughed. That was how I imagined our neighborhood would be—that seeing ourselves as mirror images would solidify what sometimes felt liquid and uncertain.

I had so many questions on that trip. Did other women sit down to dinner with their husbands unsure of what to talk about? Did a meal feel like a long time to other couples, too? Our marriage had sweet times, yes, but more often than not it felt like an effort. A happy one at first, and later less so. I know this much: It went gray and empty long before I found the bloody nightgown balled up in my hamper. Even before that doctor’s fateful declaration, we were both starting to wonder if our relationship would survive its inability to procreate itself. I seemed to love him best when he came to me with an injury, or a need—when he became the child we would never have. We never talked about what the doctor had told us because by then we were well practiced in avoiding difficult conversations. Why talk about something hard when you could just as easily not talk about it, too? It was a way to go on. A holding pattern, yes, but it contained a thread of optimism.
We’re holding on until we can’t anymore! We’re not there yet!
But even if it wasn’t over, we’d each begun to give up in our own ways. I stopped cooking elaborate dinners with recipes I’d clipped from magazines, stopped setting the table with place mats and flatware we’d gotten for our wedding. Instead I used the microwave and we ate some nights with two books open on the table.
Why not?
I thought.
No one’s watching.

He stopped feigning interest in my life or what I wore. I stopped caring. If my body had failed me, why should I attend to it at all? I didn’t know if we’d bother with sex after we got the news from the doctor that no babies would come of it. What had once felt like a private delight had become hard work that reminded us too much of our most basic failure.

Maybe he’s right not to talk about it,
I told myself, knowing there was a corollary advantage. If we never discussed our children who’d died, I could keep them alive inside my head. I could name them and visit them when I needed to. Shop for them at Christmas, and worry when I read certain articles in the newspaper. It’s true that I began living in my head long before Linda Sue’s death. I heard voices crying out. I stood up at work sometimes believing I was needed when nothing had happened or been said aloud.

 

 

I said I had been to Roland’s basement apartment twice, which is true. Once carried over by my restless unconscious, once not. The second time I went, I was fully awake, in a heightened state, keyed up and agitated. I’d been awake for days, unable to settle the jumble of thoughts crowding my head for the last week and a half.
I have to go back and talk to him,
a voice would say one minute, and the next another would chime in,
Leave it alone.
Sometimes those voices were cruel.
You’ll only embarrass yourself, knocking on his door like a teenager when you’re thirty-three now.

Lying awake night after night, I’d feel the fierce urgency of my father’s old panic:
I can’t take another night. I’ll die doing this.

I kept imagining our one kiss, that delirious cliff-falling. I convinced myself that another visit would get it out of my system.
I’ll disgrace myself once and be done with it. I’ll sleep again after he tells me there’s no chance of this ever happening again
.