Neighborhood Watch (29 page)

“I got released,” he says, though he doesn’t sound happy or relieved. He’s too mad, I can tell. “Six weeks ago. I tried to tell you, but you sent back all my letters.”

“No, I didn’t. I never sent any back.”

We sit for a minute with this—his anger, my confusion. Why didn’t we remember where we were living, how anyone around us could have sabotaged our letter exchange, out of jealousy or spite? “I’m sorry, Leo. You stopped writing and I didn’t understand. I assumed you’d moved on.”

“No,” he says, shaking his head. “No. I didn’t move on.”

I want to reach out, take his hand, do something, and I can’t. I think about the dreamy promises we once made to each other.
If I get out first, I’ll come every Saturday and bring you cookies. When we’re both out, I’ll take you for the spiciest enchiladas you’ve ever eaten.

Once, after we’d been writing for a few months and letting our letters get racier, he asked if I liked having sex with the lights on or off.
Off, of course,
I wrote back.
Maybe you’ve forgotten, but I’m a librarian
.

He responded:
Ah, then, you’re in for a treat. I’m a lights-on, loud-music type. Jefferson Airplane, Jethro Tull, anything really. Your choice. But the lights, my dear. On.

Now here we are, sitting so close to each other and crippled by our shyness. Maybe we’re both thinking of those letters, how easy they were to write compared to this.

He says the hardest part of being released was leaving without knowing what happened to me. “I thought maybe your husband came back into the picture. I knew there was talk about your DNA testing and I assumed that’s what happened.” After he got out he kept seeing things we talked about doing, which made him depressed at first, then angry. “You don’t know this yet, but I don’t give myself away like that. I meant all of it with you.”

I meant it, too.

He’s been following the drama since my release. When he read about Trish’s disappearance and saw my name in the paper, he decided to try to get in touch. He drove here last night, slept in his car, and this morning left a note in Marianne’s mailbox.

It’s too much to look at his face and try to take this all in. He leans across the table between us, close enough that I can smell his breath: coffee and cough drops. “Can we go for a walk?” he says.

His gait is a little funny, legs bowed like a cowboy who has just dismounted. It’s strange. Up close he looks smaller than I remember from watching him through the window. I want to break this nervous impasse by touching him, but clearly, even outside and alone, this isn’t in the cards. He points us away from the garden toward a line of trees and undergrowth left to grow untended. A suburban wildness, too swampy for development. As we walk, I tell him about Trish disappearing in the middle of the night. I tell him it’s possible she ran away and it’s also possible her parents have done something with her, sent her away, silenced her somehow in the interest of preserving their work. I keep thinking of Marianne’s words:
The timing was just terrible.

I don’t know what Marianne was about to tell me when the telephone rang and stopped her story. If she did more than suspect Linda Sue of stealing their work secrets—if she killed her to save them. If she had stepped inside Linda Sue’s house she would have seen that there was nothing there. No computer, no files, no nefarious motives. It wasn’t Marianne and Roland’s work she wanted. It was Trish’s baby.

Was any of this enough to spark a murderous rage in Marianne? Had she been on the brink of making a confession when she got interrupted?

“And this is
Cat Ashker
we’re talking about—the author?” Leo says.

“I’ve read some of her books. The first one came out while I was still teaching. I had one student who was a big fan.”

“Did you like them?”

“Oh, sure. Suburban menace and magic. They’re great. Amazing that someone so young wrote them.”

“She started young. She always talked about becoming a writer. I was her librarian.” I blush a little, afraid I sound silly. I wish I could tell him what she said at her reading—that I mattered to her, that I made a difference. “That’s who I came here expecting to find.”

“Huh.” He nods and jams his hands in his pockets. “Were you disappointed?”

“No.” I try to sound perfectly clear. “No. I’m not.”

“So no one has any idea where she is?”

I tell him she has a history of disappearing, especially from pressured situations. “The police are still looking but I get the sense they’re not thinking of it as a crime anymore.” I don’t tell him,
If they were, I wouldn’t be here right now. I’d be down at the station, undergoing my forty-eighth hour of questioning. I’d be so hungry and tired, prison would look like a hotel room
. “I do have one idea about where she might be.”

He looks at me, curious, waiting to hear my hunch. I tell him about Marianne and Roland’s secret laboratory. “Right before Linda Sue was killed, Marianne started taking Trish into her confidence, telling her about the work they were doing.” I think about her getting closer to the secret that lurked all her life in the basement, and I remember the story she told us. The plan for her final book and the ultimate threat to suburbia: slow-acting, toxic poisoning of the environment.

“What if the reason no one’s seen Trish outside the house is because she never
left
?”

“You think she might be hiding there, still inside the house?”

I think about it—the drawings and notes on Roland’s desk, Marianne’s meeting to arm her neighbors with Taser guns, their terrible resistance to seeing Trish again. Marianne and Roland’s fears are alive. Is it possible they see danger everywhere because they’re still working on cold fusion? Finn saw the beakers of water, and Roland up late, working at night. I remember Marianne’s talk about bad timing. Does that mean they’re on the brink of another breakthrough? Does Trish recognize the danger of her parents’ work? Is she hiding down there trying to draw people’s attention to it?

I am grateful to Leo for saying he’ll come with me. “I don’t know how we’ll get in or if they’ll let us look, but I need to try.” We walk back through the woods and the cornfield so we can approach the house from the backyard and not be seen by whoever is there now. Along the way, he tells me his reading program hasn’t been going as quickly as he’d hoped. He’s been on
Sister Carrie
for a while. “Good book,” he says. “Depressing but good.” I remember loving
Sister Carrie,
the decent woman’s slide into destitution and crime because so many stabs at love haven’t worked out. “I keep thinking, My God, if she just found the right man, she’d be okay.”

“She doesn’t,” I warn him.

“Yeah, I figured.”

“We criminal types probably shouldn’t look to men for our salvation.”

“Hmm . . .”

“It’s bound to get us into trouble.”

“Right.”

We come out of the woods and into the bright light to see the serpentine line of houses on Juniper Lane. From this distance, they look so out of place. What was meant to happen with this development—the influx of new houses and streets; a community beyond this single winding street—hasn’t. For whatever reason—our soil composition, our water table issues, the chemicals that killed our plants and our babies—Juniper Lane is a mistake no one wants to duplicate.

“You could always do that thing where you use a man for money and sex.”

I don’t know if he is making a suggestion or trying to acknowledge what feels like something that will never happen between us.

“Ah.” I smile, shaking my head. “Okay.”

“I’m just kidding about that.”

“Okay.”

“I think for right now we should get this over with.” He points toward the house. “We should find this girl and then go back to our premature talk about living together and getting married. Then we can have the conversation about how we should obviously get to know each other first.”

I turn and look at him, my heart pounding so furiously I fear he must hear it. “Okay,” I say, wishing I could kiss him. If I was more practiced at these things I would. I remember standing at the window, watching him work, waiting forever for him to look up. It’s almost too much to have him so close.

“Are you ready?” I notice something odd. It’s hard to tell from here, but it looks like the crowd that’s been gathered at Marianne and Roland’s house for most of the day is gone. From this vantage point, I can’t see any cars at all.

“Yes, but can I just say this first?”

“Go ahead.” I keep watching the house for signs of movement.

“I haven’t had a drink since I’ve gotten out. I’ve thought about it a lot. I’ve come very close, but I haven’t. That’s all I wanted to say. Yes, I’m ready. What are we thinking, we just break in downstairs and start looking for the access to the secret room?”

Crossing a cornfield littered with fallen stalks is harder than it looks. I stumble and catch myself once. A minute later, he falls. “Are you okay?” I call.

“There’s something else I want to say,” he says from the ground below the line of broken stalks. “I’m just waiting for the shooting pains in my knee to subside.”

I stop walking and wait. Eventually, he gets on all fours, and stands. He looks over at me across the brown-green line of corn plants between us. “When I think about how much I’ve wanted to drink since I got out, it makes me scared that I might be a bad bet for you.”

“Ah,” I say, raising my eyebrows. “How much do you think about it?”

“Once an hour maybe.”

I shrug.
Okay,
I think.

“And then all night when I can’t fall asleep.”

“That’s about how much I think of my children. The ones that I’ve imagined.” I don’t know why I’m telling him this. It’s as if I want to test him.

“Your children?” he says.

“The ones I would have had.”

“Ah.”

“Sometimes I pretend they’re all here and alive. That we live together in our old house. Not with Paul, though. Just with me.”

He looks away. “Do they have names?”

“Yes.”

“And personalities?”

He seems to be prodding this, like a tongue in the hole a tooth once occupied.
How deep does this go?
“Yes,” I say, and think:
This is it. He knows the truth now. I’m crazy with loneliness, comforted by the fantasy of being needed.
I wish I could tell him: In my mind, my kids are funny and disrespectful. They call me Blah Blah Ma. I deliver speeches they listen to, and afterward they say,
Get a life, Ma.
They think I’m equal parts funny and embarrassing. They love me, even though I have my shortcomings. I’m a terrible shopper, and every Christmas in our house (in my mind) is fraught with tears and disappointment. Once Shannon asked for Gap straight-leg jeans and I got her Lee bell-bottoms. Another time, Ben, my oldest and sweetest, privately returned what he’d gotten and kept the money. These are the children I’ve given myself— real ones who haven’t aged in the strict sense that other children do. I have kept little Charlotte perpetually six because she loves first grade and has a teacher who studies pioneer life by turning the classroom into a log cabin, like mine once did. I want to defend myself, tell Leo I don’t harm anyone or insist that these fantasies are real. They are private, a small pleasure I keep to myself. One could certainly do worse, but looking at his face, I suspect this doesn’t matter. I’ve made a mistake. Revealed too much. I seem sad to him, I fear. “Recently I’ve been starting to think I should help real children instead of putting so much mental energy into imaginary ones.”

“Good idea, probably.”

We start walking again. “In my own defense, I don’t think inventing imaginary children is a terrible way to pass time in prison. Especially when it turns out you didn’t do anything wrong.”

“Good point.” We’ve started walking again, him with a limp and me slightly ahead. “Imaginary love affairs are good, too,” he says.

“Is that what ours was?”

“I don’t know. You tell me. I was all ready to dive in and then we did such a good job at that picnic taking it to another level.”

“I don’t think that was all my fault.”

“No, given the choice I would have spent my time talking to Wes as well. He’s an attractive man. Except for the four-teeth thing, I’d call him a catch.”

“At least he talked to me.”

“And he stayed solid in school, right through the sixth grade.”

“Why are we talking about this?”

He stops walking for a minute, forcing me to as well. “Because I don’t want to be here if there are other people in the picture.”

He studies me carefully—as if he knows about the one night I spent in the basement, sleeping alone in Roland’s bed. As if he’s been outside watching me. “There’s no one else, Leo,” I say simply. He narrows his eyes as if he’s not sure whether to believe me. I don’t know if we can manage this—get past all our fears and every defense we’ve put up. “Can we just get this over with, please?”

He holds out a hand. “After you.”

No one is home. By the look of things through the window, wherever they’ve gone, they left in a hurry. Lights are still on, the radio is playing. Though the basement door is locked, the sliding-glass side door in the back is not. We slip downstairs and find the lab door that is indeed located behind a rolling bookshelf against a far wall. Even as I push the door open, my heart sinks. “Trish?” I say.

Nothing. She’s not here.

It’s a dark room piled with equipment and evidence of old work that hasn’t been used in a long time. There are beakers in cardboard boxes along with their stands, and cathodes that look like thermometers with curly phone cords attached to one end. It’s all a disappointment. Not only have we not found Trish, but what happened to Marianne’s story? What about the breakthrough they were just on the cusp of? Leo runs a finger along the dust-covered metal counter.