Good Neighbors (17 page)

‘Okay,’ he says. ‘Try not to break it.’

He licks his lips, looks at the spot on his arm where he plans to hit himself, swallows.

Blood drips from his earlobe and splashes warm on his shoulder.

‘Okay,’ he says again.

Then he swings.

30

Kat is barely standing. She is leaning against the cold stone wall in front of her apartment – hidden in the shadows of her front porch – or she wouldn’t be standing at all; without the wall to lean on, she couldn’t stand. But she is standing. She’s here, only inches from her front door, standing in the shadows. She has no idea how she managed to get here, but here she is.

The man who attacked her stands only fifteen or so feet away. The kitchen knife is in his hand. He stands half in the shadows and half in the light of the courtyard. He turns in a circle, looking for her.

‘I know you’re out here somewhere,’ he says, ‘and I’m gonna find you.’

Kat watches him. He hasn’t looked on the porch yet. She doesn’t know why – it doesn’t make sense – but he hasn’t. Not yet. She has no doubt that he will. Even if he doesn’t, he’s bound to see her movement in the corner of his eye while he looks elsewhere, and it will probably happen sooner rather than later. She can’t just stand here leaning against the outside wall of her apartment; she has to get the apartment door opened without him seeing her. Once she does that, she can just let herself fall inside, kick the door shut, and, hopefully, if she’s got any strength left, she’ll be able to find enough in her to reach up and twist the dead-bolt home. And then she’ll be safe.

But first, the door needs to be opened.

Easy-peasy, she thinks. It’s already unlocked. All she has to do is turn the doorknob – without jingling the keys – and push the door open. That’s all.

She reaches out with a raw shaking and bloody left hand. With her right hand, she grips onto the wall behind her, hoping she doesn’t fall.

The man who attacked her is now out of sight in the courtyard; she can hear him cursing and stomping around.

She can do this. She just has to do it before he comes back out toward the street, that’s all.

‘Where are you, you bitch?’

She can do this.

Her fingers touch the cold metal of the key-scratched doorknob, and she reflexively pulls away, startled by the feeling.

Her nerves are shot.

Just do it, she tells herself. Before he comes back. Please, Kat, just do it.

She reaches out again, wraps her bloody hand around the doorknob.

She can hear the sound of his footsteps coming back.

She looks toward the courtyard. He is walking along the bloody trail she left behind on her way here. She dumbly thinks of Hansel and Gretel. There’s something wrong with her brain. He is going to look up and see her soon. Any second now.

She can’t worry about being quiet anymore.

She turns the doorknob, jingling the keys which stick from it as she does, and she shoves.

The door swings open and Kat falls with the momentum of her shove, face down on her front porch. She tries to scramble inside but she’s so weak she can barely crawl, but she tries, and she manages to get the upper half of her body over the threshold and inside – I’m inside, she thinks, madly, I’m safe – before a hand grabs her by the leg and drags her back out into the early-morning darkness.

‘No,’ she screams, and the word tears at her throat like a jagged stone as it makes its way out of her. ‘No.’

The man pulls her out and into a flower bed in front of the building with one hand, and with the other he brings the knife down. She twists as she tries to escape, and the blade stabs into her calf. And then another stab, this one into her left hip. She can feel the moist soil of the flower bed beneath her.

The sun hasn’t come up, but there are no more stars in the sky.

Gray clouds swarm above her, blocking her view of anything beyond the atmosphere.

Something slides into her stomach.

31

David hasn’t said a word; he’s simply been sitting in the back of the ambulance, thinking.

He thinks of a boy with dark hair and light eyes – a small, pale boy – a boy who likes to sit in his bathtub, even when he’s not taking a bath, and play with his toy cars, pretending the edge of the tub is a roadway, making the noise of a car shifting gear, but the car’s going too fast, oh no, it’s in trouble, it’s gonna lose control, and then it does lose control and it flies off the road which is on a hundredfoot cliff, and it crashes to the bathroom rug below and explodes and the driver screams, ‘Oh, no! My hair’s on fire!’ He thinks of a boy who tries to tell his father what happened to him at school, whose father calls him a liar, tells him not to make things up, tells him he’s grounded for a week for making things up, tells him he’s sick for even thinking up such things. He thinks of a boy who lies in bed afraid to go to school. A boy who stands in the bathroom, at the bathroom counter, grinding soap into his left eye, trying to give himself pinkeye, trying to give himself the appearance of pinkeye anyway, because pinkeye is contagious and they don’t make you go to school when you have pinkeye, and when he’s done his eye is red, so red it looks like it will never be white again, and for three days he gets to stay home with mom and listen to the radio and eat fried bologna sandwiches with the crust cut off. He thinks of a boy who’s grounded for a month when he’s caught grinding soap into his eye, giving himself pinkeye for the fourth time. A boy who packs a suitcase and runs away from home but who really only runs as far as the garage, who crawls up in the attic above the garage and sleeps there for four nights, only going into the house when his parents are gone, going into the house to collect cans of food and go to the bathroom. A boy who in that four days gathers quite a collection of piss-filled Mason jars in the garage attic. A boy who does nothing but sit and read
A Princess of Mars
by the dim light of the attic’s sole window while his mom cries about her missing son. A boy who gets caught sneaking food from their General Electric Monitor Top refrigerator after his father pretends to leave but really hides just outside the kitchen, looking in through the window. A boy with welts from a razor strop who gets even more welts when his father finds the jars of piss in the attic and tells him he’s disturbed, he’s sick, making up lies about his teachers and saving his urine in jars. That’s what he thinks of as they head toward the hospital, the monster he’s wished dead for twenty-six years on a stretcher not a foot away, strapped down, unable to move, a jagged piece of glass sticking from his forehead like a shelf.

The ambulance pulls to a stop in front of the hospital.

The sirens go silent; the lights stop flashing.

He looks at Mr. Vacanti and the man looks back at him with somehow gentle eyes. It surprises David to see the man has gentle eyes. It surprises him, even at thirty-seven, to discover that monsters can have gentle eyes. Something is terribly wrong with a world where monsters are allowed to have gentle eyes.

‘You’re doing the right thing, Davey,’ Mr. Vacanti says. ‘What I did was . . . unforgivable. I know that. But you’re doing the right thing.’

David clenches his jaw and looks away. He swallows back words. He turns toward the closed back doors of the ambulance, unlatches them, and forces them open.

He’s surprised to see it’s still dark out. It felt like he was in the ambulance for hours – days, weeks – with that monster and his gentle eyes.

With John’s help, he pulls Mr. Vacanti out of the ambulance, and a moment later he and John take him into the hospital.

32

Diane sits on the bed beside a suitcase whose leather jaw is hinged open and whose mouth is full of her clothes, jewelry, memories.

She is holding a photograph in both hands, a framed wedding photograph, nineteen years old. In the photograph she and Larry are young and thin. Larry has all of his hair. None of her skin has begun to sag or wrinkle. Both of them have shining eyes: eyes that are shining with the youthful belief that love really can conquer all, and, worse to Diane as she looks at the picture now, that it actually has. Their eyes are shining with the belief that now they are safe. They are together and married and the world will never get to them. It might get to some people, but they’re not some people. They’re Larry and Diane.

They’re safe.

There is a knock at the closed bedroom door.

Diane looks up from the photograph.

‘I told you,’ she says, ‘I don’t wanna talk to you and I can’t stand to look at you.’

‘Please, Diane,’ Larry says in a muffled voice from the other side of the door, ‘just let me come in.’

There is a rattle of doorknob, a futile shove. The door stands firm.

She looks down at the picture and wonders how either of them could ever have been so naive.

‘I’m not letting you talk me into staying,’ she says to the closed door.

‘I don’t want to talk you into anything. I just want to talk.’

‘You don’t want me to stay?’

‘Of course I want you to stay. But this isn’t about talking you into anything.’ Silence, and then a very quiet, ‘Fuck,’ which is, of course, not intended for her; and then, ‘Please. Open the door.’

Diane sets down the photograph, looks at it for a minute longer, and then tilts it down, pressing their smiling faces against the wood of the nightstand. She doesn’t want to have to look at their goddamn innocent faces anymore.

‘Diane?’

‘What?’

‘Please.’

God damn him.

She gets to her feet and walks to the door. She stares at it for a moment and then turns the lock and pulls it open.

Larry is standing there looking at her, a defeated man. His eyes are red. What’s left of his hair is a bird’s nest. He’s wearing no shirt, his flabby white belly simply hanging out, pale and vulnerable. There is desperation in his eyes, in his posture.

In their old life, Diane wouldn’t have been able to stay mad at this broken Larry. The sight of him like this would have melted her heart. Her big strong Larry looking like a boy who’s lost his dog. It would have gotten to her.

But this isn’t their old life.

‘I’m sorry,’ he says.

‘That’s not good enough.’

Larry nods.

‘I know. I know it’s not. I know nothing is. But I love you and I don’t want to lose you. I don’t want that.’

‘You’re not losing me,’ she says. ‘You threw me away.’

‘I didn’t.’

‘What do you call it? What do you call what you did? You made a promise, the most important promise a man can make to a woman, and then you broke that promise. You threw it away. What does that say about your feelings for me?’

‘Nothing,’ he says. ‘It doesn’t say a goddamn thing about my feelings for you.’

‘I don’t believe that.’

‘It says I’m an idiot. It says that I don’t appreciate what I’ve got until I’m threatened with losing it. It says I’m a bad person, a fuck up, a low life. Scum. But it doesn’t say anything about my feelings for you, Diane. I love you. I will never stop loving you. If you can’t forgive me and you have to leave, I understand that. It breaks my heart, but I understand that. But don’t leave because you think my mistake means I don’t love you. I want to continue to wake up next to you for the rest of my life, for the rest of our lives. I want you to know that. I’ve just been sitting out in the living room, trying to think of ways to tell you that, but there it is. I don’t know how else to say it. I love you and I want us to stay together more than I’ve ever wanted anything. So if you’re going to leave me, don’t leave me because you think I don’t love you, or I’ve thrown what we have away. If you can’t forgive me, you can’t. But I hope you can. I want you to. I’m asking you to. Please, Diane, forgive me. Please – forgive me and let me make it right again.’

Diane does not say anything for a long time. She stands there and she looks at Larry looking back at her with his pained red eyes. She thinks of the happy times when they met, and the several happy years that followed – but she also thinks of the sad years, their inability to have children, the miscarriages, the way it broke her heart, the way Larry blamed her as if she’d done it on purpose; she thinks of the way they can sit in the same room and seem miles apart, the silence between them.

‘Diane?’

Diane shakes her head.

‘I’m sorry,’ she says. ‘I just don’t think I can.’

33

Harriette is tired – more tired than she has ever been before.

‘Patrick.’

She does not say it loudly but Patrick is a good boy and attentive and a moment later the door is pushed open and he’s standing there looking down on her with concern in his eyes.

‘What is it, momma?’

‘Why is it,’ Harriette wonders aloud, ‘that you can still call me momma, but I can’t call you Pat anymore?’

Patrick smiles.

‘That’s different,’ he says. ‘Are you okay?’

It was hard – it was a hard life – raising him up alone for the last eight years and change, but looking at him now she thinks she’s done all right.

‘Of course I’m not okay, honey,’ she says. ‘I’m dying.’

Patrick does not say anything.

‘I’m dying,’ Harriette says again.

‘Is there anything I can do?’

She holds up an orange bottle of pills in her hand.

‘I couldn’t get these opened.’

‘It’s not time for you to take your pills.’

Harriette nods her head and says, ‘I believe it is, Patrick.’

She watches her son go pale as he comes to understand what she’s saying; she watches him shake his head.

‘Your arm,’ he says, motioning to the machine in the corner, ‘it didn’t. . . you weren’t in pain, were you?’

‘I’m finished.’

‘No.’

‘Why not? I’m tired, Patrick. I’m tired and I’m bedridden and the only way I see the sun anymore is through a dirty pane of glass.’

She shakes her head.

She thinks of sleep, blissful darkness, the kind of blissful darkness she had before she was born. She felt no pain then. She felt nothing. She once heard life described as a brief window of light between two vast expanses of nothingness. She doesn’t know if that’s accurate – but she does know her light is flickering, and she hopes it’s accurate: she wants it finished; she doesn’t want to wake up ever again, not anywhere.