The Good Neighbor (3 page)

CHAPTER FOUR

My body and brain needed time to recover, the neurologist said. He was a birdlike man with large spectacles and a receding hairline. He repeated what Johnny had told me already: I’d suffered a concussion, a mild form of brain injury. I was under observation for a couple of days. I might experience headaches, dizziness, temporary loss of short-term memory.

That night, I drifted in and out of shallow, restless sleep. Whenever I awoke in a sweat, half-remembered dreams lingered at the edge of my mind. No, not dreams. Nightmares. Flashes of fire, falling timbers, the glow around Mia’s bedroom door. Sometimes I dreamed we were home again, the white bugbane flowers glowing in the moonlight, Monique standing on the porch, her hair blowing across her face.

Johnny grieved in his own quiet way. He slept on the hospital bed beside me, his body pressed against mine, ignoring the guest cot the nurse had unfolded for him. In the morning, he got up early and showered in the tiny bathroom. His suitcase sat on a fold-out table, still holding his conference wear: suits, ties, dress socks.

He ventured out to take care of business, returning with ill-fitting clothes for me, toiletries, and magazines. Thankful for my intact cell phone, I checked my voice mail and returned calls from friends, including a tearful message from Natalie, who had arrived in New Delhi. “I’m coming home,” she said. “Didn’t I say this would happen? Didn’t I?”

“It wasn’t a tree falling on the house,” I told her.

“But something hit you in the head. Could’ve been a tree branch.”

“I suppose, but—”

“This isn’t over yet. I feel something worse coming on. Only this time it’s not going to be a tree or a fire. It’s going to be less obvious, something insidious.”

“You watch too many scary movies,” I said. “You and Dan enjoy India. I’ll see you in a few months.” I hung up before she could protest. Then I called my editor, and when I claimed to be all right, someone else spoke through me, another Sarah, a shadow envoy created to fool the world.

My mother telephoned a few hours later when she reached Nairobi. Her distant voice echoed across the continents. “I’ve been worried about you.”

“I’m fine,” I lied. My head still hurt, my thoughts fuzzy.

“Why don’t you go home? You can stay there as long as you want. Your room is made up. There’s a key under the turtle stone.”

She’d bought the gray stone turtle right before my father had moved out. I’d been nine years old. My mother and I had stayed in the house, a Craftsman-style bungalow in Portland, Oregon, until I’d left home at eighteen. Suddenly, I longed for my childhood bedroom with its serene view of a wooded ravine.

“Sweet of you to offer,” I said. “But it’s too far away. We’ll find something here. It’s going to take a while to get back on our feet.”

“I’ll come back.”

“No need. We’re okay.” My mother would only get in the way. She would try to be helpful, but I would sense her itch to travel, and she was doing more good in her village in Kenya, where she taught sign language to deaf children.

“I love you,” my mother said, a catch in her voice.

“I love you, too.” I hung up, tears in my eyes.

A series of visitors followed, including Pedra and Jessie Ramirez, who brought a vase of multicolored flowers and a greeting card with a picture of Wonder Woman on the front. The message inside read,

Kind and caring,

kick-butt, too,

saving little Mia,

that is you.

Nearly everyone on Sitka Lane had signed the card.

Come back to us soon. You’re a hero. We love you.

I dissolved into tears. I didn’t feel like a hero. What if I’d climbed the ladder sooner? Could I have rescued Chad and Monique as well? What was done was done. Pedra, Jessie, and I cried together in my hospital room, holding one another, grateful for what had been saved, grieving for what had been lost.

The next afternoon, while Johnny was out, the doctor returned to my room one last time before discharging me. He performed a quick neurological exam, testing my reflexes and responses—touch, hearing, smell, taste, sight.

Was I no longer physically myself? Could I not trust my senses? Maybe not. I’d awoken in the night and spotted a silhouette in the doorway, the shape of a man, but Johnny had been in the bed beside me, snoring softly. Terrified, I’d squeezed my eyes shut, and when I’d opened them a minute later, the man had disappeared. Perhaps I’d been dreaming. Or hallucinating.

After the doctor tested my balance and strength, he gave me a pass to leave the hospital. “But you need to rest,” he said. “No strenuous physical or mental activity for a while.”

“I have a new book coming out. I’ve got signings scheduled—”

“Cancel them.”

“But it’s the way I make a living.” I couldn’t turn off my mind. In fact, my neurons and synapses felt more active than usual.

“At least for a few weeks.” And then he was gone, as Johnny returned with shopping bags, which he placed on the counter next to a smattering of gifts from friends.

“I’m free,” I said. “Let’s go to the house.”

Johnny’s eyes darkened. “Remember, there is no house.”

“Still, I need to see.”

“If you say so. Don’t go anywhere. I’ll be right back.” He left his cell phone on the counter, went into the bathroom, and shut the door. A moment later, his phone buzzed.
Unknown Number
flashed on the screen. I answered, “Hello? This is Dr. McDonald’s—”

A dial tone blared in my ear. The words
CALL ENDED
lit the screen in bright red letters. I heard the toilet flush, and Johnny came out. “Who called?” he said, washing his hands at the sink.

“I don’t know. They hung up.”

His lips turned down, his brow furrowed. “That’s odd. I’ve had a few hang-ups lately.” He tore a paper towel from the roll and dried his hands.

“Someone stalking you?” I put the phone on the counter.

“Happens sometimes. They’ll give up, eventually.” He threw the paper towel in the trash, stood behind me, and wrapped his arms around my waist, both of us gazing into the mirror. He looked gaunt, with new worry lines next to his eyes. He’d been working too hard, not sleeping enough.

“I’m well enough to help you now,” I said, reaching up to touch the stubble on his cheek. “You don’t have to take care of everything.”

“I don’t mind. Doc said you need to rest.”

“We can still make decisions together.” But he was right. I barely recognized my reflection in the mirror—sallow skin, sunken eyes, limp hair. In the author photo printed in my books, my shiny hair bounced around my shoulders and I looked radiant, alive.

“We need to decide where we’re going,” Johnny said.

“Home. I want to go home.” I leaned back against his chest, an ache of nostalgia in my bones.

Johnny kissed the top of my head. “We can’t sleep in the ruins.” But I wanted to. By sheer force of will, I would make the ashes rise and reconstitute themselves into the familiar objects of home.

I turned to gaze up into his eyes. “I know it’s going to be hard, but—”

“We can start again in a new place,” Johnny said. “We could move to that town that gets rain year-round. Forks, where they filmed those vampire movies. It’s so wet there, nothing ever catches fire.”

“You’ve got obligations. The clinic.”

“I’ll move the clinic.”

“Your patients can’t move with you. They rely on you.”

“Shhh.” Johnny touched his finger to my lips. “Let’s talk about this later. For now, I’ve got us a rental on the other side of town.”

“So that’s where you’ve been all day.”

“Not
all
day.”

Close up, his face came into focus—his thick lashes, the barely noticeable white birthmark on his forehead, the stubble on his jaw.

“How did you find a place so quickly?”

“I ran into Maude. She was out hosing debris off her lawn. She said Eris Coghlan owns a rental across town. You know, the Realtor? So I gave her a call. Turns out she has a cottage, half-furnished but unoccupied. We can move in anytime. It’s on a quiet dead-end street.”

“You’ve been there already?” My head began to spin again. Johnny worked so efficiently. Usually, I appreciated knowing he’d covered all the bases. I was thankful for a place to stay, so why did uneasiness tug at me? Perhaps because Johnny and I were homeless, forced to rely on the kindness of strangers.

“I checked out the cottage, yeah,” he said. “It’s small, but it has a certain charm. After we stop by Sitka Lane, I’ll drive you out there. You can take a look and decide for yourself.”

“I’m sure it will be perfect,” I said. The sanctuary would be a blessing. Change was born of necessity. I had to be practical now.

CHAPTER FIVE

On the drive back to Sitka Lane, I watched pedestrians strolling along the brick sidewalks of Waterfront Road, peering in shop windows and sipping iced coffees, as if their lives would always be normal. Dry leaves skittered along the gutters, maples turning deep shades of gold and crimson. Autumn was showing off, but sooner or later, autumn would turn into winter, and the trees would lose all their leaves.

Johnny drove west through the old part of town, populated by Victorian homes built during the heyday of the timber industry a century earlier. At nearly seven o’clock, the moon rose behind us, the sunset a smudge of pink across the western horizon. As Johnny turned onto Sitka Lane, my heart fluttered with nervousness. What would remain of the two houses? Johnny parked at the curb and held my hand.

The damage was worse than I’d expected. How could this horrible mess have once been our home? Blasted-out windows, blackened siding streaked with water damage, the roof caved in. The yard resembled a garbage dump surrounded by yellow FIRE LINE tape. The stink of burned wood and fabric remained in the air.

Next door, only a shell of the Kimballs’ house remained. Two suited investigators picked their way through the rubble. The neighborhood was otherwise quiet, shadowed by tall firs, but I sensed people peering out their windows. The night of the fire rushed back to me—the flames, the smoke. Chad and Monique trapped inside their house, slowly suffocating.

“Earth to Sarah. Where are you?” Johnny’s voice echoed down a long tunnel.

“I’m here,” I said, but in my mind, I was back on the ladder with Mia in my arms. “Let’s go.”

“You don’t want to see—?”

“Not now.”

Johnny pulled away from the curb. “I shouldn’t have brought you here.”

“I wanted to come. I should’ve done more that night—”

“You did everything you could.”

I nodded, not trusting myself to speak without dissolving into tears. As Johnny drove back through town, retracing our route, I opened the window and inhaled the fresh air. He headed east into a heavily wooded area and turned onto a narrow, forested road. The street sign read
S
HADOW
B
LUFF
L
ANE
, and a smaller sign read
D
EAD
E
ND
—N
O
O
UTLET
. He slowed past an imposing white Victorian mansion with pale green trim. In the driveway, men in coveralls packed equipment into a blue truck.

“That’s Eris Coghlan’s place,” Johnny said.

I leaned out the window for a better look. “She lives alone?”

“Yeah. Divorced. Not sure about kids.” To the left, across the road, lay an expanse of dense forest.

He kept driving past another grove of tall fir trees and pointed out a moss-colored cottage on the right, set back from the road and surrounded by a buffer of forest. “That’s the rental.”

“You found us a fairy tale,” I said as he parked in the driveway. Through the trees, another neighbor’s house appeared at the end of the cul-de-sac—a modern cedar A-frame with large windows.

Johnny’s shoulders relaxed. “Are you sure? Be honest. We can still go to a hotel.”

“I am being honest.”

“It has only two bedrooms, one bath—”

“Do we need more than that? I lived in a rented room in college. It was good enough then, and it’s more than good enough now.”

“It’s bigger than a room, at least.” He got out of the car and retrieved our meager luggage from the trunk, leaving the gifts in the backseat. Together we climbed the creaky wooden steps to the rickety porch. Birds twittered in the trees, and some larger animal disturbed the nearby underbrush. In the distance, a river rushed down from the foothills of the Olympic Mountains.

Johnny slid the key into the lock. The door swung open, and he heaved the suitcases inside and dropped them in the foyer. Then he leaned back against the open door. “This is it. What do you think?”

I stepped inside. The entryway opened into a well-lit living room painted in pale yellow, oak floors recently swept. Underneath the smells of cleaners and polish, I detected the subtle odors of decay, of old wood. A bay window, with a diagonal hairline crack in the glass, revealed a view of a grassy lawn, a tire swing hanging from a large fir tree, and a forest beyond.

Johnny wrapped his arms around my waist from behind, his firm chest pressed against my back, and I gave in to his warmth. He touched his lips to the sensitive spot at the base of my neck, and I inhaled sharply. He knew me so well. I turned to face him, and he kissed me, his lips firm and insistent. There was something electric about him, a subcurrent of energy. A subtle, unfamiliar scent rose from him—maybe sandalwood. A new aftershave?