The Girl Next Door (32 page)
He turned to Susan. “Can you walk, honey?”
She sniffed. “If somebody helps me up the stairs.”
“Just as soon carry her,” said Thompson. “She won’t weigh much.”
“Okay. You first, then.”
Thompson picked her up and headed out through the door and up the stairs. Willie and Donny followed him, staring down at their feet as though unsure of the way. My dad went up behind them, like he was part of the police now, watching them, and I followed him. Ruth came up right behind me, hard on my heels as if in a hurry to get this over with now all of a sudden. I glanced over my shoulder and saw Woofer coming up practically at her side, and Officer Jennings behind him.
Then I saw the ring.
It sparkled in the sunlight pouring in through the backdoor window.
I kept on going up the stairs but for a moment I was barely aware of where I was. I felt heat rushing through my body. I kept seeing Meg and hearing her voice making me promise to get her mother’s ring back for her, to
ask
Ruth for it as though it didn’t belong to Meg in the first place but was only on loan to her, as though Ruth had any right to it, as though she wasn’t just a fucking thief, and I thought of all Meg must have been through even before we met her, losing the people she loved, with only Susan left—and then to get this substitute. This parody of a mother. This evil joke of a mother who had stolen not just the ring from her but everything, her life, her future, her body—and all in the name of raising her, while what she was doing was not raising but pushing down, pushing her further and further and loving it, exulting in it,
coming
for God’s sake—down finally into the very earth itself which was where she’d lie now,
un-
raised, erased, vanished.
ask
Ruth for it as though it didn’t belong to Meg in the first place but was only on loan to her, as though Ruth had any right to it, as though she wasn’t just a fucking thief, and I thought of all Meg must have been through even before we met her, losing the people she loved, with only Susan left—and then to get this substitute. This parody of a mother. This evil joke of a mother who had stolen not just the ring from her but everything, her life, her future, her body—and all in the name of raising her, while what she was doing was not raising but pushing down, pushing her further and further and loving it, exulting in it,
coming
for God’s sake—down finally into the very earth itself which was where she’d lie now,
un-
raised, erased, vanished.
But the ring remained. And in my sudden fury I realized I could push too.
I stopped and turned and raised my hand to Ruth’s face, fingers spread wide, and watched the dark eyes look at me amazed for a moment and afraid before they disappeared beneath my hand.
I saw her
know
.
know
.
And want to live.
I saw her grope for the banister.
I felt her mouth fall open.
For a moment I felt the loose cold flesh of her cheeks beneath my fingers.
I was aware of my father continuing up the stairs ahead of me. He was almost to the top now.
I pushed.
I have never felt so good or so strong, then or since.
Ruth screamed and Woofer reached for her and so did Officer Jennings but the first step she hit was Jennings’s and she twisted as she hit and he barely touched her. Paint cans tumbled to the concrete below. So did Ruth, a little more slowly.
Her mouth cracked open against the stairs. The momentum flung her up and around like an acrobat so that when she hit bottom she hit face-first again, mouth, nose and cheek bursting under the full weight of her body tumbling down after her like a sack of stones.
I could hear her neck snap.
And then she lay there.
A sudden stink filled the room. I almost smiled. She’d shit herself like a baby and I thought that was most appropriate, that was fine.
Then everybody was downstairs instantly, Donny and Willie, my dad and Officer Thompson minus the burden of Susan pushing past me, and everybody yelling and surrounding Ruth like she was some sort of find in an archaeological dig.
What happened? What happened to my mother!
Willie was screaming and Woofer was crying, Willie really losing it, crouched over her, hands clutching her breasts and belly, trying to massage her back to life.
What the fuck happened!
yelled Donny. All of them looking up the stairs at me like they wanted to tear me limb from limb, my father at the base of the stairs just in case they tried to.
What happened? What happened to my mother!
Willie was screaming and Woofer was crying, Willie really losing it, crouched over her, hands clutching her breasts and belly, trying to massage her back to life.
What the fuck happened!
yelled Donny. All of them looking up the stairs at me like they wanted to tear me limb from limb, my father at the base of the stairs just in case they tried to.
“So what
did
happen?” asked Officer Thompson.
did
happen?” asked Officer Thompson.
Jennings just looked at me. He knew. He knew damn well what happened.
But I didn’t care just then. I felt like I’d swatted a wasp. One that had stung me. Nothing more and nothing worse than that.
I walked down the stairs and faced him.
He looked at me some more. Then he shrugged.
“The boy stumbled,” he said. “No food, lack of sleep, his friend dying. An accident. It’s a damn shame. It happens sometimes.”
Woofer and Willie and Donny weren’t buying that but nobody seemed to care about them much today and what they were buying and what they weren’t.
The smell of Ruth’s shit was terrible.
“I’ll get us a blanket,” said Thompson. He moved past me.
“That ring,” I said. I pointed. “The ring on her finger was Meg’s. It belonged to Meg’s mother. It should go to Susan now. Can I give it to her?”
Jennings gave me a pained look that said enough was enough and not to push it.
But I didn’t worry about that either.
“The ring belongs to Susan,” I said.
Jennings sighed. “Is that true, boys?” he asked. “Things’ll go better from here on in if you don’t lie.”
“I guess,” said Donny.
Willie looked at his brother. “You fuck,” he muttered.
Jennings lifted Ruth’s hand and looked at the ring.
“Okay,” he said and then all at once his voice was gentle. “You go give it to her.” He worked it off her finger.
“Tell her not to lose it,” he said.
“I will.”
I went upstairs.
All at once I felt very tired.
Susan lay on the couch.
I walked over to her and before she could ask what was going on I held it up for her. I saw her look at the ring and see what it was and then suddenly the look in her eyes brought me down to my knees beside her and she reached for me with her thin pale arms and I hugged her and we cried and cried.
EPILOGUE
Chapter Forty-Seven
We were juveniles—not criminals but delinquents.
So that under the law we were innocent by
definition
, not to be held accountable for our acts exactly, as though everybody under eighteen were legally insane and unable to tell right from wrong. Our names were never released to the press. We had no criminal record and no publicity.
definition
, not to be held accountable for our acts exactly, as though everybody under eighteen were legally insane and unable to tell right from wrong. Our names were never released to the press. We had no criminal record and no publicity.
It struck me as pretty strange but then as we were excluded from the rights of adults I suppose it was the natural thing to exclude us from the responsibilities of adults as well.
Natural unless you were Meg or Susan.
Donny, Willie, Woofer, Eddie, Denise and I went to juvenile court and Susan and I testified. There was no prosecutor and no defense attorney, just the Honorable Judge Andrew Silver and a handful of psychologists and social workers earnestly discussing what to do with everybody. Even from the beginning what to do was obvious. Donny, Willie, Woofer, Eddie and Denise were placed in juvenile detention centers—reform school to us. Eddie and Denise for just two years since they hadn’t any hand in the actual killing. Donny, Willie and Woofer until they turned eighteen, the stiffest sentence you could get in those days. At eighteen they were to be released and their records destroyed.
The child’s acts could not be held against the man.
They found a foster home for Susan in another town, up in the lakes district, far away.
Because of what she’d said about me at the hearing and the fact that under juvenile law there was, strictly speaking, no such thing as an accomplice, I was remanded to the custody of my parents and assigned a psychiatric social worker, a bland school-teacherly woman named Sally Beth Cantor who saw me once a week and then once a month for exactly a year and who always seemed concerned with my “progress” in “dealing with” what I’d seen and done—and not done—yet always seemed half asleep as well, as though she’d been through this a billion times before and wished against all reason and evidence that my parents would be far more unforgiving with me or that I’d go at them with an ax or something, just to give her some issue or occurrence to sink her teeth into. Then the year was up and she just stopped coming. It was a full three months before I missed her.
I never saw any of them again. At least not in person.
I corresponded with Susan for a while. Her bones healed. She liked her foster parents. She had managed to make a few friends. Then she stopped writing. I didn’t ask why. I didn’t blame her.
My parents divorced. My father moved out of town. I saw him infrequently. I think he was embarrassed by me in the end. I didn’t blame him, either.
I graduated school in the low middle third of my class, which was no surprise to anybody.
I went to college for six years, interrupted by two years in Canada to avoid the draft, and came out with a masters in business. This time I graduated third in my class. Which was a big surprise to everybody.
I got a job on Wall Street, married a woman I’d met in Victoria, divorced, married again, and divorced again a year later.
My father died of cancer in 1982. My mother had a heart attack in ’85 and died on the kitchen floor by her sink, clutching at a head of broccoli. Even at the end, alone and with no one to cook for, she’d kept the habit of eating well. You never knew when the Depression would be back again.
I came home with Elizabeth, my fiancée, to sell my mother’s house and settle her estate and together we poured through the cluttered relics of her forty years of living there. I found uncashed checks in an Agatha Christie novel. I found letters I’d written from college and crayon drawings I’d made in the first grade. I found newspaper items brown with age about my father opening the Eagle’s Nest and getting this or that award from the Kiwanis or the VFW or the Rotary.
And I found clippings on the deaths of Megan Loughlin and Ruth Chandler.
Obituaries from the local paper.
Meg’s was short, almost painfully short, as though the life she’d lived hardly qualified as a life at all.
LOUGHLIN—Megan, 14, Daughter of the late Daniel Loughlin and the late Joanne Haley Loughlin. Sister of Susan Loughlin. Services will be held at Fisher Funeral Home, 110 Oakdale Avenue, Farmdale, NJ, Saturday, 1:30 p.m.
Ruth’s was longer:
CHANDLER—Ruth, 37, Wife of William James Chandler, Daughter of the late Andrew Perkins and the late Barbara Bryan Perkins. She is survived by her husband and her sons William Jr., Donald, and Ralph. Services will be held at Hopkins Funeral Home, 15 Valley Road, Farmdak, NJ, Saturday 2:00 p.m.
It was longer but just as empty.
I looked at the clippings and realized that their services had been just half an hour apart that day, held in funeral homes about six or seven blocks from each other. I had gone to neither. I couldn’t imagine who had.
I stared out the living room window at the house across the driveway. My mother had said a young couple lived there now. Nice people, she said. Childless but hoping. They were putting in a patio as soon as they had the money.
The next clipping down was a photo. A picture of a young, good-looking man with short brown hair and wide-eyed goofy smile.
It looked familiar.
I unfolded it.
It was an item from the Newark
Star-Ledger,
dated January 5, 1978. The headline read “Manasquan Man Indicted for Murder” and the story told how the man in the picture had been arrested December 25th along with an unidentified juvenile in connection with the stabbing and burning deaths of two teenage girls, Patricia Highsmith, 17, of Manasquan, and Debra Cohen, also 17, of Asbury Park.
Star-Ledger,
dated January 5, 1978. The headline read “Manasquan Man Indicted for Murder” and the story told how the man in the picture had been arrested December 25th along with an unidentified juvenile in connection with the stabbing and burning deaths of two teenage girls, Patricia Highsmith, 17, of Manasquan, and Debra Cohen, also 17, of Asbury Park.
Both victims exhibited signs of sexual assault and though both had been stabbed repeatedly, the cause of death was burning. They’d been doused with gas and torched in an abandoned field.
The man in the photo was Woofer.
My mother had never told me. I looked at the photo and thought I could see at least one good reason why—I might have looked in the paper and seen the picture.
In his twenties Woofer had come to look so much like Ruth it was frightening.
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