Neighborhood Watch (32 page)

Absurd logic, though I recognize it.

“Then I finally realized, maybe you weren’t consciously making this decision anymore. I thought you should have a choice. That if you could get out, you should be able to.”

“But why the cat?”

He looks up, surprised, as if I should know this. “That’s what made me so mad. When I followed Linda Sue upstairs, she came out of the bedroom holding this cat. That’s what she wanted to show me. She said it was about to die and she asked me to take it over to Trish before it did because she didn’t want a dead cat on her hands. My seeing the nursery, hearing about the baby, all that was an afterthought.”

“What did you do?”

“I told her she should take the cat to the vet. She said she didn’t have the money and it wasn’t hers so why should she pay for it. I couldn’t believe it. Here she was, about to get a baby, but she wouldn’t take care of an animal that was
dying . . .
”

No wonder he blew up. I try to imagine all of this. The roar behind the silence on our street that night.

“What happened?”

“I lunged at her. I thought I was getting the cat, but I knocked her over. I didn’t think we were fighting but then she started kicking me.”

I don’t know if it’s better to hear this or not. I see the look on his face, rage buried under a vacant expression.

“I wasn’t thinking about anything but I fought back. I grabbed her neck. Somewhere in there, I pushed her and she fell down the stairs.”

I think about the blood spatter. How she must have still been alive after she fell, coughing up evidence onto the wall. He must remember this part, but he doesn’t speak of it. It’s too much, even now, to remember all of it.

“After it was over, I took the cat over to Trish,” he says. “It was still alive at that point and I went in through the basement, walked up the stairs while Marianne and Roland sat in the living room, arguing about something. I didn’t want to deal with them or talk to anyone, I just wanted to do the right thing by this cat. Linda Sue told me to bring it to Trish, and I did.”

I can hardly believe what this suggests: He left a dying woman to help a dying cat?

“I wanted to see her. Ask about the baby.”

In the confusion of that night did he really think that it was possible to eliminate Linda Sue and have us step in? “What did she say?”

“She was asleep.” He is weeping now, his head bent, his shoulders heaving. He makes no sound beyond a wheezy breathing. I realize, after all these years, I’ve never seen Paul cry before. “I didn’t wake her up. I put the cat in her bed and I left.”

I don’t know exactly what’s making him cry. Whether it’s his confession or his belief that if he’d done things differently, we might still have gotten Trish’s baby.

I understand this much: I need to get out of here as quickly as possible. I know enough now. I know that Paul will have to go on trial and I’ll have to testify about my collusion. I’ll have to explain how I once looked at my mother and thought
I never want to live this way,
then realized, as an adult,
my God, I do
. For fifteen years, my mother lived in the prison of my father’s unhappiness.
This is what we do,
my mother’s life said.
We find ourselves in the sacrifices we make.

I think about
Middlemarch
, the book I loved so much that I made Geoffrey read it, too, a testimonial to the sacrifice a wife can make pointlessly for an undeserving husband. Did I weep when I read it because I saw my life and my future in that story?

No, I think, it’s more complicated than that. Paul was not undeserving just as I am not innocent. We both needed the reassurance of having another person wholly dependant on us. I had played that role for him in my bad spells and then, for a time, we switched.

I don’t remember consciously confessing to a crime I knew Paul had committed but I do remember the feeling, through all those babies lost, of waiting to be needed like this by somebody else. I remember thinking—and this hardly makes sense—
At last, here’s my chance.

How do I say this? Paul is right.

We both wanted a child and he’d become mine. When I get back out to the car Leo takes my hand. “Everything okay?”

“Not exactly,” I say. “But it will be.” I squeeze his hand as he drives slowly out of the condominium complex where all the exteriors are painted the same earth color, tan with the same maroon doors, like open mouths issuing the same silent scream, all with the same rhododendron bush to the side, growing upward as if reaching for the window to cover what they don’t want anyone to see.

“Let’s go,” Leo says softly.

And we do.

If
Neighborhood Watch
is a book about looking below the surfaces we all construct, I am especially grateful to the friends and early readers who helped me do just that with this story: Melinda Reid, Diane WoodBrown, Mike Paterniti, Katie and Bill McGovern, Liz Van Hoose, Jessica Almon, and Laura Tisdel. And for his enthusiastic interest in reading multiple drafts, my dear brother, Monty, deserves a special nod, as does Mike Floquet, who also read many versions and came up with some of the best ideas in here.

Huge thanks to Eric Simonoff for his grace and good cheer through all matters literary and financial and Molly Stern who remains so very smart and funny as she shepherded this book to its strongest incarnation. Thanks to all at Viking for feedback and support: Hal Fessenden, Nancy Sheppard, Clare Ferraro, and Louise Braverman.

And last but not least, all my love to the threesome who keep me going: Ethan, Charlie, and Henry!