A Crime in the Neighborhood (15 page)

“What,” I said ungraciously.

“When I was six, I got a Cheerio stuck up my nose and I had to go to the hospital. The doctor stuck a big pair of tweezers up my nose. He got it out, but there was blood.

“Yep,” Luann went on, after waiting politely for a response. She rocked back and forth. “I got a Sno-Kone after.”

“Good for you,” I said.

Luann eyed me for a moment from the floor. “My mom says your daddy runned off,” she said. “She says he's committed adult.”

“That's not true,” I hissed, my face hot.

“My mom says it is.”

“Your mom's a fat pig,” I said.

Outside, Mrs. Lauder was saying, “You know his funeral was yesterday.” She paused for a moment. “I heard the parents didn't go to that either.”

My mother nodded, turning to spray the azaleas and then the lily bed.

“I just about can't sleep,” Mrs. Lauder said. “To think of that poor kid.” For a moment or two she closed her eyes and rubbed between them with her finger and thumb. Finally she looked up. “Who could do a thing like that?”

Just then Mr. Green pulled into his driveway. Mrs. Lauder stopped talking while he inched up to his drainpipe, then cut the motor. His car door groaned as he pushed it open. When he caught sight of my mother and Mrs. Lauder, he waved his punctual wave, waited for them to wave back, and then started up his walk. He paused when he reached his front door, then drew out the flyer that had been rolled up and stuck through his door handle.

After he had finished reading it, he folded the paper into a square and tucked it in his shirt pocket. Then he unlocked the door and disappeared inside.

Mrs. Lauder looked into his yard as if waiting for something else to happen. “Now what do you think his story is?” she said after a while.

“Who knows,” my mother sighed, coiling the garden hose, muddy flecks of grass spattering her hands and legs. “But I'm sure he has one, just like everybody else.”

“Luann,” called her mother. “Time to go home, doll.”

On the porch Luann, who had been gazing out the screen, turned suddenly to me. “Want to know a secret?”

When I didn't answer, she came over to my chair, bending so close that her breath dampened my cheek.

“Luann,” called Mrs. Lauder.

“Want to know a secret?” Luann demanded, looking at me the way she looked at barking dogs.

“All right,” I said at last.

Outside our mothers turned toward us, their soft, tired faces like peonies in the fading light.

“Looks like a big thumb,” she whispered, almost kissing my ear. “A boy's thing does.”

It now strikes me as strange that in the days and nights following Boyd Ellison's murder, I never really felt afraid. But I suppose nothing changed very much in my life that hadn't changed already. The worst sort of crime had happened in my own neighborhood, the murder of a child, someone my age, whom I even knew, and still we went to the grocery store and to doctor's appointments; Julie and Steven still pretended to be members of British café society and they still ignored me and they still swiped gum from the drugstore and smoked behind the rhododendrons; my mother still sat in the kitchen selling magazines over the phone; at night we still washed the dishes, dried them, and stacked them in the cupboard.

I find myself trying to imagine Boyd Ellison's mother washing dishes after dinner, filling her sink with soapy water, staring at her reflection in a black windowpane as she scrubbed a bowl, rinsed plate after plate. The repetition would have calmed her. When she had finished the dishes, she might do them all again. I remember her as thin and tall from the single time I saw her at Halloween, thin and tall alone in a doorway, holding a dishrag in her hand, wearing a blue dress. She had dark hair and dark eyes. She looked, as I recall, something like my own mother.

My father once told me, “That whole summer I thought of you children. But for a while you didn't seem to be my children anymore. You seemed to belong to another life that I didn't belong to, and the life I was living seemed to be my only life. We went fishing and took long walks every day. Sometimes we ate at a diner down the street. We drove out into the country. That's mostly what we did.”

Even during the worst times of your life, there are moments when life seems normal, and then you catch yourself wondering which kind of moments—the terrible or the normal—are the real ones. “I tried to write to you,” my father said. “But I didn't have anything to say that I thought would make sense.”

That's how we all seemed to feel about the murder. We didn't have anything to say that would make much sense, so after the early shock of it, while we waited to find out who had done it, and why, we didn't really discuss it much. Although
my mother continued to read aloud news articles, and I continued to paste them in my notebook.

In the first days after Boyd's body was found, a blanketing quiet draped the neighborhood. Black-and-white police cars drove by, or sat parked in front of houses like enormous saddle shoes. Only adults walked alone on the sidewalks, and most people stayed inside. Air conditioners droned and dripped. Once in a while a dog loped down the middle of the road. At night only the pairs of neighborhood men came out, circling the block.

The police had no leads. They would say only that they believed the murderer was someone from the area. Possibly even someone who had known Boyd. Possibly anyone we all might have met.

By Sunday, parents had begun letting their children play outside again. The morning stayed quiet; from our porch I could hear the perky, anodyne drone of cartoon voices, like a bee hum. By that afternoon bicycles began flashing past our house. Steven went down the block to shoot baskets with Mike and Wayne Reade. Julie locked herself in the bathroom to tweeze her eyebrows and came out looking red and furious. Across the street in the Sperlings' yard, two visiting little girls in pink bathing suits ran squealing through the sprinkler while Mrs. Sperling and their mother sat on the front steps, leaning their elbows on their bare knees.

It was right around this time, day number three, when the tower of complimentary Peterman-Wolff magazines stacked on top of the television reached over my head, that my mother told Aunt Fran and Aunt Claire to stop calling.

Ever since their last visit, my aunts had telephoned two or three times a week. They thought my mother should take up golf; they had read that exercise was a “mood enhancer,” a phrase that made Julie choke on her chicken leg when my mother repeated it at dinner. They thought she might want to join a women's encounter group. They recommended the benefits of knitting, yoga, consciousness-raising sessions, long bubble baths.

“Have you heard anything?” they would ask.

After the murder, both of my aunts had called every day.

“You've got to stop this,” my mother told Aunt Claire one night. “You've got to believe that I'm fine.”

From where I was sitting in the living room, I could see her as she paced back and forth in the kitchen, pulling the phone cord taut.

“Listen,” she said. “I appreciate your concern, but you're making me feel like something's wrong with me.”

Finally she paused by the refrigerator, the phone cord trailing behind her. “What does this do for you, Claire?” she said, in a flat tone I'd never heard her use before.

One rainy night that same week, we all came home from a movie to find Mr. McBride leading a well-dressed young Iranian couple into our basement to look at the boiler. My mother
closed the door softly behind us, flushing as she stood in the hallway with her back against the jamb. Julie and Steven instantly evaporated, running up the stairs to their rooms on the balls of their feet.

“Please. Go right on ahead,” my mother told Mr. McBride, who, with his black suit and steepled eyebrows, looked like a mortician surprised by a reanimated client. “Don't mind us. Go anywhere you like. Bathrooms, closets, anywhere. We're just … we're just—”

But she couldn't seem to decide what it was that we were just doing in our own house, so she looked at the neat little Iranian couple, rustling in their pale linen clothes behind Mr. McBride.

“We're selling our house,” she said. “Of course, you know that already.” She paused to laugh helplessly. “My daughter Marsha—this is Marsha.”

The Iranian couple looked at each other, then at Mr. McBride. My mother, intercepting this glance, added hurriedly, “If you have any questions, any … anything, we'll be right here.”

She smiled one of her broadest smiles. The belt from her raincoat trailed on the floor by her feet, her heavy black purse dangled from one shoulder, and mud had splashed on her sneakers. The couple stared curiously for a long moment, as if we were some sort of rare, drab creatures they didn't expect to encounter again; then silently they turned together toward the basement and filed down the basement steps. From the
hallway, I could see the basement's bare lightbulb glint off their sleek, bluish hair as they murmured near the Ping-Pong table.

“Hi, Lois,” said Mr. McBride, shifting in his crow-colored suit. “Didn't hear you drive up.”

My mother smiled harder.

“Heard anything from Larry?” he asked after a moment, looking hesitantly down his long nose. “He's quit the firm, you know. Officially, I mean. Resigned. We had a letter.”

My mother held her smile a moment longer, then she turned away. “I hadn't heard.”

“Well, anything I can—Money. If you need any—?”

“No,” said my mother, turning quickly back around. “We're all right for the moment, thank you, Harold. Shouldn't you get back to your—?” She tilted her head toward the basement.

“Oh,” said Mr. McBride. “Oh, right.”

My mother kept her raincoat on, as if she were the uninvited visitor, pretending to sort through some old mail on the dining-room table. After a few minutes, the Iranian couple filed back up the steps ahead of Mr. McBride, their patent-leather shoes gleaming as they crossed the hall's parquet floor. Looming again by the closet, my mother apologized twice for disturbing them.

“I hope you got to see everything you need to see,” she said. “Don't let us rush you.”

They gazed liquidly at her. Then the man reached for the
door to open it for his wife, and with a little start, my mother stood aside.

“Sorry to surprise you like that, Lois,” mumbled Mr. McBride, hunching his shoulders as he followed them out.

“No, no.
My
fault. Mea culpa,” said my mother gaily. She waved from the doorway as the Iranian couple tucked themselves like a pair of gloves into Mr. McBride's hearselike black Oldsmobile.

But the front door had not quite shut before she hurled her purse across the living room. It hit the stack of magazines on top of the television and the whole column collapsed, washing magazines across the floor. A checkerboard of faces suddenly grinned up at us—young women's faces with red lips and long eyelashes, men's faces with their mouths open in speech, President Nixon's face, Chairman Mao's face, George McGovern's face, George Wallace's face, faces of movie actresses, athletes, businessmen, a whole population of faces, as if the days and weeks of the last few months had literally acquired faces. Faces of people we didn't know. Faces not looking at us. Faces that wouldn't care if we lived or died.

Upstairs, Julie and Steven came onto the landing. I could see them peering down the steps as, still wearing her raincoat, my mother began rushing around the room snatching up magazines and tossing them into corners. Damp hair stuck to her forehead. She grunted and stooped, her face and neck turning red, looking somehow animal in her wrinkled tan coat and spattered sneakers. I suddenly pictured her the way I'd seen
her that night with my aunts, naked with a towel on her head, pink scar snaking into that dark shrub of hair.

When she had hurled most of the magazines across the room, she thundered over to where I was hanging on my crutches in the front hall, rushing up so close that I could see the fine mesh of perspiration clinging to the hair above her lip.

For a moment or two we stared at each other. I don't know what she saw in my face—fear, repulsion, maybe simply surprise, which can be bad enough in certain circumstances. Maybe she saw the color of Ada's hair on top of my head. Whatever it was, it made her do something she had never done before, and never did again. Panting, almost wheezing, she jerked back her arm and slapped me hard across the face.

I fell over, and my crutches fell on top of me before clattering against the floor. Almost immediately I felt a peculiar satisfaction. Then something dark and cold swept through me, a close and desperate feeling, like drowning.

“
Mom
,” Julie screamed from the top of the stairs.

The next moment my mother was on the floor pulling me onto her lap. Julie and Steven had gathered around us, but I could only see their bare legs and ankles from where I was lying. My mother said: “All right, it's all right.”

She rocked me under the front-hall coat rack, her neck smelling moistly of rain and talcum powder. A vein throbbed against my cheek. I held myself very still, counting the beats
until I couldn't tell if I was counting my pulse or hers, or both of ours together.

“What's going on?” Julie said, her hands hovering around her face. “Are you guys all right?” said Steven, at exactly the same moment. They sounded frightened and confused and uncertain about whether they wanted to understand what had happened.

A rumble in my mother's stomach seemed to come from mine. She stroked my hair and patted my back as the buttons on her raincoat dug into my collarbone.

“Are you okay?” Julie kept asking in a high-pitched voice. “Mom?” She had started to cry, shivering a little. “Mom? Mom?” She and Steven leaned toward each other, their faces identically smooth and worried.