The Best American Mystery Stories 2015 (30 page)

People walked or rode bikes. Bayside was so tranquil, the summer regulars said, that you could hear the cedar shakes swell when it rained, yet Simon could always imagine 101 forms of harm. He was a city boy, used to knowing what to watch for, what to listen for. Serenity made him nervous. I can vouch for this. I visited them once (before the event) in their unnecessarily large apartment on the Upper West Side. There I saw Simon almost at ease.

I visited their Manhattan place afterward too, just once, to offer condolence.

There was an edgy quality to that meeting, although it was before the police declared me a “person of interest.”

It is perhaps relevant to explain that I was not the owner of the house next door in the Hamptons. For that momentous year I was subletting. I am a nomad by instinct, I come and go, and for that very reason I adapt quickly to each new address. I am a listener and I am a watcher and I’d wager that within a few weeks I know as much of everyone’s business as the long-term residents know.

“You could get drenched,” Simon said to Melanie on that day in Bayside, the day that would make headlines in the
News
and the
Post.

“So?” she said.

Simon sighed and rolled his eyes at me. We were on opposite sides of the hedge between the summer houses, both spraying for powdery mildew and black sooty mold. “The long walk in wet clothes,” he explained as to a child. “Pneumonia.”

“Nonsense.” Melanie was clipping the rain cover to the double stroller, each fastener snapping shut with a
thock
, a very satisfying and reassuring sound. “If it rains, I’ll roll this down and they won’t get a drop on them. See?” She demonstrated and Simon set down the sprayer and walked over to the shell-grit path. “And as for me,” Melanie said, “I’ve always adored walking in the rain.” She began humming that old Johnny Ray song and they both peered through the plastic windshield at their children. I couldn’t see very well from beyond the hedge, so I’m guessing here. Six-month-old Jessica was fast asleep, her little soft-boned form slumped low in the canvas seat. Joshua, whose second birthday they had so recently celebrated, pawed at the plastic from inside.

“He doesn’t like it,” Simon said. “He feels trapped.”

“Don’t be silly.” Melanie made a funny face at Joshua through the plastic and Josh laughed and perhaps he made a funny face back. “Anyway,” she said, rolling the plastic back up and securing it in two canvas loops, “we probably won’t even need it. You know how incredibly local these thunderstorms are. It can be raining on one side of the street and not on the other.”

That, Simon thought—and I always knew what he was thinking; I zeroed in on him as a confider of secrets within twenty-four hours; I have a talent for picking victims—that was precisely what was so alarming: the sheer arbitrariness of harm, the way it could touch down like the flick of a whip, random, focused, and deadly. “I wish you’d let me drive you,” he said. “If there’s lightning, you’re not to shelter under a tree.”

Melanie laughed. “You want to keep us all in cotton wool.” She stood on tiptoe to kiss him. “Poor Simon. Here we are giving you a whole morning to work on your book and you’re going to waste it on worry.”

“I’m spraying for mold,” he said. “And then I’m mowing. You’ll be back before I get to my book.”

“We’ll go to Joan’s for lunch. We’ll spend the afternoon there. You can have the whole day.”

I watched Simon bend over to kiss the sleeping Jessica on her forehead. When he leaned toward Joshua, his son squirmed and giggled and pulled his T-shirt up over his face.

“You haven’t shaved,” Melanie said. “You’re scratching him.”

Simon tugged at the soft cotton shirt, pulled it back from over his son’s eyes. “I see you,” he said, and his son squealed with hyperexcited glee.

“Say bye to Daddy,” Melanie said.

Simon waved. He watched till they turned the corner before he came back to the hedge.

“I know you think I’m neurotic,” he said, “but they seem intolerably fragile to me.”

I went on spraying. It wasn’t the kind of statement that required a response.

Simon steamrollered on in his melancholy academic way, as he usually did and does. “Harm seems so arbitrary. So . . . malevolent. It terrifies me.”

“I’ve got a dental appointment in town,” I said, as much to shut off the spigot of his pathetic and privileged anxiety as anything else. “Later this morning. I’ll keep an eye on them for you.”

2. Melanie

“I don’t like that man,” she tells the children. “He watches us. We’re going to have to get shades on our windows.” She wipes a thin film of salt from her cheek. The sea breeze, deceptively cool on the beach, turns sticky on the landward side of the dunes. Her sweat is dripping into her eyes. It stings. “Maybe we should have taken your daddy’s offer, Joshua,” she says. “It’s so
hot.
I hope it
does
pour. Wouldn’t that be lovely, punkin? I just adore walking in the rain.”

The walk seems twice as long on sultry days.

“We’ll go to Joan’s house after the shopping,” she says. “We can all cool off in her pool.”

Melanie has an easy elegance about her. She wears white linen pants and a racer-back navy top. Her sandals are Birkenstocks. She swims and jogs and plays tennis. She has worked on getting her waistline back since Jessica’s birth, but the truth is, already she is toying with the idea of getting pregnant again. There is something so gorgeously languid about that fecund state. It must be the earth-mother syndrome.

She brakes the stroller and leans into the front to fan the children. “Poor babies,” she says. “I thought there’d be more of a breeze. As soon as we’ve got the vegetables and the bread, we’ll get ice creams, Josh, okay?” She bends low and covers their silky little cheeks with kisses. “You’re so delicious, I could eat you,” she tells them. “Even your sweat smells good.”

Jessica sleeps on, oblivious. Joshua is drowsy but smiles at the kiss and the thought of ice cream.

“Chocolate,” he murmurs.

“Okay. Chocolate. It’ll be cooler when we get into town.”

There are spreading trees that make a green tunnel of Main Street. Outside Ryan’s Bakery, two strollers are parked in the shade. Melanie maneuvers to the head of the line so that Josh will have a clear view of the dogs. They are tethered by their leashes to the bike rack and they rub noses and sniff behind each other’s tails. She sets the stroller hard up against the plate-glass window, directly under the oversized decal of the
R
, and pushes the brake lever with her foot.

Of course she has never stopped replaying that moment. She has never stopped wishing, she has never stopped asking
What if?

What if she had nestled her little ones behind the Nelson toddler, at the back of the line, beneath the final gold-leafed
Y
of Ryan’s Bakery, would the world have tilted a different way on its axis? Would the climate have changed? Would a different child have been taken?

“Mommy will just be inside a few minutes, Josh. If Jessica wakes, you can sing her the lollipop song, okay?”

“Okay.”

“Then chocolate ice cream,” Melanie promises. “After we get the baguettes.”

3. Joshua

There are three dogs and one of them is lifting its leg. Joshua watches the little river of sunlight spurt out and twist like string, then fall into a black puddle beside the curb. He tries to see exactly where the yellow turns dark. The puddle smells like Jessica when her diaper is wet.

Right now, Jessica has the sleep smell and the baby-powder smell. There is a little bubble of drool on her chin. Joshua leans over to wipe it but his leather harness won’t let him go. He fiddles with the buckle but it ignores him. He tugs. He manages almost to kiss Jessica on her cheek.

There is always plenty of kissing, Daddy kissing him, Mommy kissing him, everyone kissing everyone all over.

And then something arrives, a swooping thing like a black crow coming at him, the jab of its vicious beak. Abrupt change of weather, end of kissing time, but Josh can’t understand. There is a van that pulls up, dogs yapping, a knife, he knows knife, he sees a knife and his harness lets go. It’s like a fast fierce wind that flattens, that blows everything flat (the bakery smell, Jessica, the dogs),
rush, crash, his body seizing up, he can’t breathe
. . . He can’t even figure out who it is, but it’s someone he seems to know and there’s another smell he seems to recognize, not Jessica, not the dogs. Is it the man who watches?

Your mommy said . . .

This isn’t right. It doesn’t feel right. But he seems to know that face, he knows that smell.

You have to come with me, your mommy said . . .

“Mommy!”
he screams in sudden terror, but a hand is clamped over his mouth.

And then the thunderstorm? The black sky? Black clouds over his head?

Joshua is always trying to remember what he remembers. There are opaque things that swirl around and around in fog like clothes in a washing machine. They are there, he knows they are there, but he can never quite see them clear. He catches glimpses of what he once knew, fragments that tantalize. He remembers Jessica. He remembers baby smell and sleep smell. He remembers car-seat smell and that other smell. He remembers Mama and chocolate. He remembers the dogs.

4. Melanie

The smell of a bakery is like the smell of babies, it’s like pregnancy, that yeasty rising. Tonight she is going to talk Simon into letting Joshua sleep in their bed, all four of them curled up together like fresh croissants. Simon thinks Joshua is too old for this, that it isn’t healthy for him, that it will turn him into something squishy and damageable. And yet when Joshua is in his own room, in his own bed with side rails, it is Simon who wakes every hour and gets up to check. Just in case.

“You’re the one who’s babying him,” Melanie accuses. “You’re drip-feeding him a steady diet of anxiety. You’re conditioning him to be a nervous wreck.”

“No I’m not.”

“Yes you are. It’s in your genes, I guess.”

“Maybe it
is
in my genes, it probably is, which is exactly why I want to toughen him up. That doesn’t mean that
I
can stop worrying, but he doesn’t have to know I keep watching. He’s learning independence when he sleeps in his own room.”

“When we’re all cuddled up together in the same bed, he’s learning safety and happiness. What’s wrong with that?”

“It’s tempting fate. It’s creating an illusion. It makes me nervous.”

“You know,” Melanie says, “most of the time things turn out well.”

“You’re wrong. Most of the time things do
not
turn out well, and when they do, it’s dangerous to expect that to last.”

Of course it is precisely Simon’s obsessive and protective anxiety that Melanie finds so attractive, so much more appealing than the thuggish frat boys she dated in college. She loves his gentleness, his passion for music (classical and jazz), his scholarly mind, the sheer and vast volume of his knowledge about everything. She loves his city-boy’s awed attention to their pocket-handkerchief garden on Long Island and to the plants on their balcony in Manhattan. Simon is the grandson of immigrants, blue-collar urban. His grandfather was a cellist in the old country, a deliveryman on the Lower East Side.

Melanie comes from rural midwestern stock and has the small-town top-of-the-heap gift of self-confidence, possibly a little misplaced, but boundless. She won a scholarship to an Ivy League college and that is where she and Simon met. They despised the preppies, of course, but picked up the bohemian variation, which is why they have a summer place on Long Island and why Melanie is buying baguettes.

The bakery is such a small and intimate place that the five customers constitute a crowd.

“Doesn’t this place smell heavenly?” someone asks, and the general response is a murmuring so low and contented and prolonged that it sounds like a Bach chorale.

“Ryan, what do you call these little flaky-pastry things that look like butterfly wings?”

“Those are palmiers,” Ryan says, offering a sample. “Take, take,” he urges. “Irresistible, don’t you agree?”

The women love to ask questions and Ryan loves to expound: on whole grains, on sunflower seeds, on the requisite buttery nothingness of French croissants, on madeleines, on baguettes. Melanie browses the racks of loaves. She and Jenny Nelson exchange chitchat while they wait, and then it is Jenny’s turn. Jenny watches as Ryan wraps her fragrant loaves in a tissue scarf, then places them in brown paper bags. “Got to run,” she says. “Listen! That’s Jason’s mommy-siren. It’ll get louder by the second and we’ll see the stroller rocking like a ship in a storm if I’m not quick.”

Both Melanie and Jenny look out through Ryan’s streak-free plate-glass window. In the spaces between the large gold-leaf letters of his decal, the strollers—or, more accurately, the canvas hoods—are dark blocky shapes that look like garbage bins or thunderstorm clouds. There are now only two toddler conveyances. The wide gap in the middle corresponds to the gap between the
Ryan’s
and the
Bakery
peel-off words.

“I’m parked in front of you,” Melanie says. “Under the
R.
”

“Yours are enviably quiet. How do you manage that?”

“Pure luck of the draw, and liable to change any second.”

“Patience is definitely not a Jason thing,” Jenny says. “Oh jeez, will you listen to that wail?”

“Believe me, mine can outdo him. They’re capable of sounds that would leave police sirens for dead.”

“You’re just saying that to make me feel better. I’ve never once heard Josh throw a tantrum.”

“Oh believe me, he can and he does. In fact, the quiet’s unnatural. But Jessica’s asleep and Joshua’s watching the dogs. He loves puppies.”

“Bye,” Jenny pushes open the door with one shoulder.

“Bye. See you later at Joan’s?”

“Not sure. I’ve got my in-laws visiting this week.”

“All the more reason.”