Neighborhood Watch (30 page)

He remembers cold fusion, and the hoopla around it. “God, it was so exciting when they first announced it. I remember my high school teacher saying everyone should remember where they were the first time they heard about it because our lives were never going to be the same.”

By the look of it, this equipment hasn’t been touched in months, possibly years. As if they gave up a long time ago, when Trish left their lives. Leo digs through a box, studies a sheet of paper attached to a mini-fridge still running in the corner. “I’m just surprised they did this with a family upstairs. It seems so dangerous. There was a guy in Santa Clara who died doing this.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. The whole apparatus blew up in his face and he died from injuries. Afterward there were articles about this underground cold fusion network that had existed for years, funded by private companies without any oversight. It turned out they were investing because everyone wanted a piece of it if it ever got a patent.”

I think about the way Marianne told the story. How the explosions were a good thing. A sign of life. She’d lost faith until they happened.

“Were there other explosions?”

As he asks this, I think of Barbara’s words,
It all started with that accident.

I
t’s a glimmer on the periphery of my vision. Standing on the street again, as night falls, I see a movement in the corner of my eye. A shadow. Someone watching me. I know it’s not dangerous. It’s not going to hurt me. But it could. It’s both things at once, like my father once was.

I remember this now.

How my father came into my room at night and lay down on the bed across from me. How he would talk to himself, assuming I was asleep. The first time it happened I held my breath and pretended to sleep. Some nights he came and said nothing at all. He simply wept, a keening sound that went on for hours. Only once, when I feared something terrible might happen, did I speak. “Dad?” I asked.

He stopped himself.

When my mother met my father he was head of the grounds crew at Cal State Northridge, where she worked as an administrator in the personnel department. She loved to tell the story—how he was planting a flower bed outside her office during a June heat wave; the students were gone and work was light. She handed him Dixie cups of water through her window and asked him the names of the flowers he was putting in. He told her each one in a voice so soft she had to lean out the window to hear. He was older than she was, from a conservative Catholic family. On their early dates, he brought her fresh flowers laid in shoe boxes lined with damp paper towels. They were lovely—tiny blue bonnets and pink bleeding hearts—too delicate for vases of flower arrangements, so she’d float them loose in a bowl of water and marvel at their unexpected, jeweled beauty.

He was quiet and a gentleman, she once told me, a man who worked with dirt and spoke with flowers.

With his daughters, he was shy and easily embarrassed by any talk he thought of as female. We knew him by his silences and the stories our mother told, full of sweetness.

I never saw him cry until his night wandering brought him into my bedroom, where he’d weep until the first bars of light streaked the sky and brought relief to us both.

Over time his episodes got worse. He started talking during them. “You girls need another father,” he once said. “I can’t do it anymore.”

I tried to tune him out. I bought spongy earplugs that just made his words more distorted and frightening. Sometimes he’d blame my mother and say if she would just let him kill himself we’d all be better off. Other times he passed the blame around, to the doctors, his parents, the assholes on TV who thought the world owed them. He made no sense, though I understood in those terrible, endless nights that he spoke a truth. He couldn’t go on like this.

I have other memories from my childhood: My father, smiling sweetly from our lawn, waving at the neighborhood blind boy. My father watching women’s shows for hours: cooking, home decorating, soap operas. My father throwing a plate of birthday cake at my mother. Though the plate shattered spectacularly against the wall, the cake fell whole onto the counter.

The only time I ever saw my father cry during the day was on the phone with his brother, talking about the driving trips they once took with their father, a violent man they both worshipped inexplicably. “I just don’t want to do that,” he wept.

I didn’t understand any of it. How could I hear him at night and turn back to my own life? Eventually I learned that cough syrup helped. When I gave it to him, he stayed quiet and fell back asleep quickly. Doing that I learned the world wasn’t entirely out of my control. If adolescence is a time of constructing one’s character, I built my own on absences and omissions.

Every night I waited for his arrival, and every night I pretended to sleep through it. By morning he’d be gone and never once did anyone in my family ever mention the unmade bed across from mine, the tear-stained pillow, what I did instead of sleeping for most of my adolescence.

Now I understand my father better. In the weeks before my trial, as we pieced my past together to build a defense, I realized he’d been sleepwalking that whole time, unaware of anything he was doing to me. It took my breath away to think about what
I
might have done, what
my
unconscious might have said to Paul.

When Paul was asked on the witness stand if he’d ever seen me sleepwalk, I honestly didn’t know what his answer would be. It was something we’d never spoken of directly—
Have you seen me at night? Have I done or said things I shouldn’t have?
I held my breath because I wanted to hear, in front of all those people, about the ways I had revealed myself.

And then he surprised me. “No,” he finally said. “I haven’t.”

At the time, I was enormously relieved. Though it weakened my case, it meant I hadn’t unconsciously terrorized him the way my father had terrorized me. Now I remember more and I think I understand. We were both looking at each other, and lying.

T
hat night Leo takes me for my first restaurant meal, burritos, which have gotten more complicated in our absence, and full of choices. It’s possible to have bacon and eggs in a burrito now, or Caesar salad. “Oh, my,” I say, staring at the menu, panicking for a moment. He almost touches my hand and stops. It feels as if we are trying to pass somehow, pretend like we are part of the world that moves much faster and is louder than either of us remembers. Like very old people, we ask too many questions at the counter until finally, food in hand, we move to a table where a girl next to us talks on a cell phone the whole time, loud enough that it’s hard not to listen and try to figure out what the other person is saying.

Leo fills me in on what he’s been doing in the six weeks since his release. His old job isn’t an option anymore, nor is teaching in a public school with his record. The advice he’s gotten is to establish himself in a new community and work slowly to build trusting relationships with people who might one day be in a position to hire. For now he’s volunteering twice a week for ESL tutoring with newly immigrated adults.

In the five hours we’ve been together, except for him falling in the cornfield and me helping him back up, we haven’t touched at all. I haven’t blamed him for holding back. After my admission about my imaginary children, why should I hope for anything to happen? We both come with baggage and have futures that look, from where we’re standing now, dim and uncertain. Touching, after what we’ve said to each other and everything we know, would be a lot. I told myself this when he asked if I’d like to go out for dinner.
Don’t read anything into this. It’s nice being friends
. It is nice having someone I can talk about my last twelve years with. We laugh about the coffee, the powdered toothpaste, the surprise of eating real vegetables again. “I’d forgotten that lettuce comes in other colors besides white,” I say.

After we finish eating, he asks if I’m planning to live indefinitely with Finn and Bill. “More like a night or two probably,” I say.

When we get outside, he turns, takes my hand, and says, “Good.”

Before I can react, he pulls me toward him. Our bodies don’t touch but hover inches apart. “Let’s just get something clear,” he says, touching my face with hands still rough with the calluses from work I spent six months in prison watching him do. “It’s nice to see you again.”

His breath in my ear, so close to my face, leaves me a little breathless. “It’s good to see you, too.”

“If you don’t have anywhere to go after that, I have this place. It’s not very comfortable and it’s above a doughnut shop, so it smells like grease.”

“Yes,”
I whisper, and we move from anticipating the kiss to the kissing itself, slow and careful. He doesn’t bury his tongue in my mouth or grind his hips against mine. There’s no sense of rushing into the next part, no urgent reminders of how long it’s been. He seems to feel the same way I always have about kissing:
Let’s enjoy this part.
He touches my face, my shoulders. He slides his hands down so they’re holding mine.

We stop kissing and start walking again. “Nice hair, by the way. Interesting choice.”

“What, you hate it?”

“On the contrary. It’s got a kind of Annie Lennox appeal.”

When we get back to the block, a half dozen cars are parked in front of Marianne and Roland’s. The house is lit up, the front door open, and music is playing.

They’ve found Trish.

She’s home, safe and sound, and there’s a celebratory chaos, neighbors stopping by. “She’s fine! She’s here!” Roland says when we walk in, and then, a little sheepishly, he has to explain. She’s been in a Buddhist monastery forty miles away. As this news travels around the neighbors gathered in the room, an awkward uncertainty settles over the group. No one is quite sure what to say. Women I recognize from the Taser gun party clutch their purses and give Marianne a hug.
Better if they hadn’t called the dogs,
people are thinking.
Would that the paper had waited a day or two to run it as a front-page missing-person story.
But in the end everyone is happy. “Just happy and relieved,” one woman tells Leo, who stands by my side, letting the backs of our hands brush periodically.

Happy as they might be, I can sense what they’re thinking.
Trish isn’t well; she never has been. The family has problems
.

For her part, Trish seems quiet but fine, unaware of the commotion she caused. At one point, she tells everyone that she left so early in the morning because she was trying to get there by seven, before morning meditation started. “That’s my favorite part and I didn’t want to miss it. After that is chanting, which I don’t like as much.”

The police fiddle with their belts, Roland scratches his knee, and then, as if a rash were spreading, his ankle. Trish explains the blood in the bathroom with a shrug, saying she cut her leg a few days earlier and the scab opened up again when she was standing in the dark. She didn’t think she was leaving that much of a mess, but she also hadn’t turned on the light to look. Everyone nods uncomfortably and looks at the door. Before we leave, Trish asks if she can talk to me alone for a second.

“Of course,” I say, following her up to her room.

When the door is closed, she turns around. “The blood wasn’t just from a scab.”

“I guessed that.”

“I tried to kill myself that night. It was terrible. Like the walls were pressing in on me. All the secrets my parents kept.”

I try to think of the most reassuring thing I can tell her. “They aren’t doing it anymore. Keeping secrets, at least.”

She looks up, surprised. “Do you know what my parents do?”

I nod.

“Did you know they’re still at it? They’ve moved the lab but they’re still doing it.”

“They
are
?”

“That night I spent here, after you’d woken everyone up, my mom left the house. She went into the woods beyond the cornfield, and I followed her to this place that looks like a metal storage facility. It’s hidden away. You can’t see it from here. But that’s where they’ve moved their lab.” She tells me she knew about their cold fusion work for years before Marianne told her. It wasn’t that hard to figure out. She knew it had to be something important because of the people who drove out to the house and talked to her parents in the basement. She listened in on a few conversations, went to the library and looked up some words. “You helped me once, I remember.”

“I was looking for the difference between
fusion
and
fission
. You found it.”

I shake my head in wonder. I remember the impossibly difficult reading she did as an eight-year-old. How we all assumed she was an odd child, a little troubled maybe, but no one considered this: Maybe she understood everything. Maybe she saw it all better than we did.

“My mother didn’t talk to me about it until I was fifteen, and by then she’d decided it was never going to work. That the reaction they were getting was chemical, not nuclear, because they’d never found any measurable radiation. Low levels of radiation are almost impossible to measure, and are usually inaccurate when you do. She said if they’d really been achieving fusion all along, their own bodies would be a barometer. They would have had side effects and they didn’t.”

“What would the side effects have been?”

She looks away from me. “Cancer, infertility.”

What is she trying to say?

“But it wouldn’t necessarily affect everybody. It just increases your chances. What my mom never knew is that John and I found the lab when we were kids and we used to steal beakers and pour them on people’s lawns. We thought it was funny, coloring the world brown in the middle of the night. Killing all the gardens, one plant at a time. I laughed about it until I was thirteen, and then I realized it wasn’t funny. Our parents had no idea how powerful this stuff was.”