Neighborhood Watch (8 page)

Trish’s worst year started with her suspension for a cafeteria incident that she never describes. I flip ahead in the diary to see how much more I can bear:

She must have been fourteen by this point, the same age I was when my father checked himself into the hospital and I spent the next year wondering what our future would be like. It was a lonely, heightened period in my life, the last year when I remember everything that happened with perfect clarity. After that, small holes began opening up, things I either tried not to remember or simply couldn’t.

T
he next morning I walk into the kitchen to find a bowl of batter and a waffle iron on the counter. “Roland,” Marianne says, shaking her head. “He usually eats downstairs but every Sunday he comes up here, makes a mess with his waffles, and goes back downstairs.”

I try to keep the shock out of my voice. “Roland still
lives
here?” He made no appearance at the party yesterday, there’s no car in the driveway, no visible sign of him.

“Oh, sure.” She waves her hand. “Where else would he be?”

“Why didn’t he come up last night?”

She shrugs. “Roland’s never liked my parties. He thinks people ask about his work and then don’t care about the answer. You know Roland,” she says, which makes me blush self-consciously. I wonder if she suspects that I
did
know him once, better than most people realized.

I can see that Marianne doesn’t want to dwell on the subject of her husband.

Last night, Jeremy only stayed at the party for about a half hour, but before he left, he took me aside and said that while I was here I should poke around and see what I could find. “This is the house where those meetings were, right? Where Linda Sue made her scenes?” I nodded and wondered what he thought I might find. “Maybe Marianne has a list of people who attended. It would be nice to find out who might have been there and gotten angry at Linda Sue.”

Marianne pours us coffee and I ask her what became of the Neighborhood Watch group after I left. “I tried to keep it going, but it didn’t work. People wouldn’t even put out their signs.” She shakes her head as if this has been the whole problem: people refusing to acknowledge danger. She thinks she has a list, she says, and an hour later she miraculously produces it. A yellow sheet torn neatly from a legal pad, covered in signatures. I stare at it and wonder if modern science can draw DNA from pen ink or the ancient cells deposited from the hands that brushed over this page.

“Wow,” I say. There are seventeen names on the list, though in my memory more people were there that last night. When I point this out, Marianne says, “Some people didn’t sign in. Linda Sue never would.” She sighs as if, even in death, Linda Sue’s arbitrary stances could be annoying.

I read down the list of names and see ones I don’t recognize and others I’ve so long ago forgotten, I can’t put a face to them. At the bottom Trish Rashke is printed out in bubbly teen-girl handwriting. “Trish was there?” I say. “I don’t remember that.”

Marianne looks over, reading with her bifocals. “I suppose she was. Those were the days when I tried to include her in things so she wouldn’t sit in her room, listening to music that made her want to kill herself.”

This is as close as Marianne has ever come to mentioning Trish’s problems. I don’t know if she doesn’t talk about it, period, or if she keeps her silence on this subject with me in particular, sensing my old feelings, that I was more interested in Trish than I probably should have been. I wonder aloud about contacting some of the people on this list. “I don’t have any phone numbers for them. It’s not like anyone kept in touch.” Marianne seems to have a point she’s trying to make.
This was hard on everyone, not just you.

Except for Paul, there was no one from the old neighborhood at the party last night. But surely they haven’t all moved
that
far away. If strangers have been following my story, I have to assume my neighbors have, too. So why wouldn’t Marianne have called them up? When I press the issue, she finally admits, “I tried a few. They all said they were sorry but it would just be too painful to come back.”

I served twelve years in prison for a murder I didn’t commit, and coming back here would be too painful for
them
? Marianne waves away whatever she’s just implied. “Everyone just feels terrible that they didn’t do more for you back then. They don’t know what to say.”

Maybe they feel guilty because one of them
is
.

Later that morning, after Marianne’s gone out to the grocery store, I poke around the house, though I don’t go near her office. If she’s using this outing as a test, she’ll know if I go through her papers, and I can’t risk that just yet. I notice a tray of mail by the front door and something odd in it—an envelope addressed to Alocin Bell at C.L.E.E.R. Enterprises in Alabama. It’s hand-typed with this address. It must have something to do with John, who lives in Alabama. I don’t move it or touch it (amazing how aware of fingerprints one can be after leaving too many at a crime scene). Instead I go through the kitchen through a doorway that matches one I remember in our old house. There’s a dark wooden set of stairs and no light so I hold fast to a splintering rail on one side and make my way slowly. At the bottom, there’s a cement landing, and somewhere straight ahead a door to the finished apartment. “Hello?” I call, and then louder, “HELLO?”

The door opens a crack and light spills in a line across the floor. “Yes?” I hear a low voice, disembodied and male.

“Roland, it’s Betsy. I wanted to say hello.”

Is this strange that I’ve been here for a day without saying hello, or stranger that he hasn’t come up himself? The door opens wider, and there he is. After all these years, my breath catches for a moment in surprise, but of course time hasn’t stopped for him, either. His thick hair is mostly gray, his narrow face lined. The glasses are the same, as is the slight stoop of his shoulders and the gentle smile. “Betsy. My God. Look at you.”

“It’s nice to see you again, Roland.”

In truth, this isn’t the first time I’ve been down here to visit Roland. The first time I came innocently enough to ask about his work because I was interested in solar panel heating for our house. I’d had three miscarriages at that point and was looking for explanations: The heat when it first came on in the fall smelled funny to me, full of chemicals. I’d gotten pregnant in the late summer twice, and both times lost my babies after the first freeze. Our ducts were full of toxins, I decided. Our furnace was a laboratory of poisonous chemicals. “I don’t want to go another year with this heating system,” I said to Paul, who looked aghast and asked if I realized how much solar heating cost.

In prison, when I told Wanda some of these stories, she always laughed. “Shit, honey, I used to know ladies like you. High maintenance, we call them.” I always defended myself. “It wasn’t
me
I was thinking about, it was the babies, my
children.
” I don’t know if she believed me but it was true. I didn’t want material goods, I wanted a house full of children and their distractions. Wanda had three children, grown by the time she came to prison. “You don’t know what it’s like to never have one,” I told her.

It was January when I first knocked on Roland’s basement door. It was cold and I was surprised to find him in sweatpants and a T-shirt, as if I’d just woken him up. “Oh, wow,” he’d said, running his hands through his hair. “Sure, yeah. Come on in.”

I’d never been in his basement workshop before, but it was just as I’d imagined: crowded with bookshelves and worktables cluttered with rolled-up drawings and designs, notebooks propped open, covered in illegible handwritten notes—data, I assumed, and diagrams that looked a little bit like the electrolytic converter I’d once made for my ninth-grade science fair.

“So what are you thinking about?” He looked around sheepishly at the mess. Shoes and socks on the floor, a comforter balled up at one end of the sofa. For the first time, I wondered if he slept down there.

“Well, solar, of course,” I said. “I was thinking about the panels you have on your roof. Maybe we could start with something like that.”

He was surprised by my interest and a little stumped, too. As it turned out, Paul was right—it
was
a costly investment and, even Roland had to admit, a little unpredictable. “You still need your backups. We go weeks without sun here.” His panels heated water and not much else. “Solar works better in Florida, to be honest. Here, winter is tough.”

“Isn’t this what you do, though, Roland? You work for this company, right?” I held up the catalog he’d given me from Sunburst Enterprises.

“Right. Sort of. I’m a consultant on some research and design projects they have. I’m not a great authority on what’s happening right now. Our system, for instance, doesn’t work that great. We get maybe ten gallons of hot water a week. If that.”

He stood in front of me, barefoot and handsome, with a five o’clock shadow. It was hard to imagine him doing a worse sales pitch. “There’s a lot of kinks to get worked out with solar. The longer I look at it, the more I think these panels are inefficient, the recovery problematic. Sure, it’s renewable, but waste gets created. No one wants to talk about the panel disposal problem.”

“Roland.”

“What?”

“Are you saying I shouldn’t look into it
at all
?”

He leaned closer, weighing his words, as if he were not sure he should say them. “There are other things out there,” he finally said, staring hard. “If you’re interested.”

I didn’t look away. “Like what?”

“I’d have to lay it all out if you want to hear more.”

“Yes,” I whispered, a little breathless. “What is it exactly?”

He smiled and wiggled his eyebrows at me. I’d never seen him flirt like this before. “Cutting-edge stuff. The energy future. Just this last year there’s been some breakthroughs—I shouldn’t say too much.” I tried to imagine what he was implying. “It could be life-changing, though.”

Life-changing?

He wouldn’t say any more than that. He couldn’t, he said.

There’d been a rumor around the neighborhood that Roland was applying for a patent. In the last few months there had been more cars in their driveway and delivery trucks. The week before I’d seen him, barefoot on the lawn, arguing with an older man beside a Lincoln Continental parked in the driveway. We could tell something was happening, but we knew enough not to ask.

“I have some information that I’m not supposed to tell anyone,” he said. I noticed his eyes, brown with green flecks, almost hazel. “But I trust you. You and Paul.”

He said no more. He asked me not to mention it to anyone besides Paul. “It’s still experimental.” He held up his hands, like two stop signs. “If too many people know, it could blow up in our face.”

“Okay,” I whispered.

I didn’t tell Paul. I liked the secretive aspect of it all and for days I tried to imagine what he’d discovered. I even did research at work so I could ask Roland smart questions when I finally got the courage to stop by his basement again. I thought maybe I’d stumbled onto what he was talking about when I read about plans in the works for whole communities structured around net-zero free-energy models, where they produced all the energy they used with geothermal heating and solar photovoltaic cells. There were models already in existence and visionary future ones, incorporating an electric car in the purchase price of every house. The very idea amazed me. People coming together in the service of a larger good, not by real estate happenstance, but joined on a mission. Then I ran into Marianne in the grocery store and told her I’d been talking to Roland a bit about his work. “It sounds exciting,” I said.

She rolled her eyes and reached out for a box of crackers. “Roland always thinks he’s just invented the new lightbulb,” she said, studying the ingredient list on the side of the box through her bifocals.

I knew they’d met when they were both at Texas A&M, that they’d been in the same department. I figured that she must have had at least some idea about his research. “It sounds like something completely new.”

She looked at me over her glasses. “Is that what he told you?”

Was I saying too much? Had he shared information with me that he hadn’t even told his wife yet? “I mean, that’s all he said. He didn’t get very specific.”

“No. Roland never does.” She shook her head and smiled, a little weary, like the mother of a younger child who was precocious and exhausting at the same time. “Get specific, I mean.”

I couldn’t understand what she was saying. What about the FedEx trucks driving up to their house? Or the oversized cars parked in their driveway?

“I’m afraid Roland has gotten in over his head with a few investors who want their money back,” she said, still studying her cracker box.

By the way she spoke I understood this was part of something larger that she couldn’t talk about here. That if we occasionally imagined Roland surprising us with a patent that won him money and fame, it wasn’t likely to happen anytime soon. If he wasn’t crazy exactly, he also wasn’t someone I should take very seriously. He was Marianne’s burden to bear. I felt embarrassed by my own gullibility and the time I’d spent researching at the library.

A week passed, then two. When I saw Roland again, it was from across the street, our lawns and sidewalks stretched out between us. He was bent over his hose spigot. I was guiding a wheelbarrow of fertilizer toward another dead patch that had recently opened up on our lawn. Our eyes caught each other’s and stayed. For a moment, I couldn’t move.
Well?
his face seemed to say. I tried to put on an expression that said,
I’ve talked to Marianne. I understand a little better now.
I didn’t want him to feel bad, but I also didn’t want to get caught up in a conversation that would embarrass us both. I pointed down to the wheelbarrow as if it contained some urgent business I had to get back to. It was weeks before I approached him again, and by that point I’d planned what to say:
I’ve talked to Paul and he wants to stay with what we have for now.