The Invisibles (12 page)

“You can't distract me.” Henry made his shot and exhaled a stream of smoke, but Candy missed it because she'd noticed, as I had, the change in Perzik's face. His eyes had a hollow look, his lips were pressed white.

He put down the radio and looked at me. “Nolan, what's your parents' address?”

“Twelve-twenty-six Woodacre,” I said. “Why?”

“Do you know a woman who lives at twelve-thirty-two?”

“Is that Ellie's place?” Henry held his cue in two hands, bending it a little. He'd passed many days in my neighborhood and had a right to worry about my parents' neighbor. She had been a kind of trial crush for us both.

“Yeah, it's Ellie Pardo's house,” I said. My dread must have shown in my face, because Candy came over and stood by my side. “What happened to her?”

Perzik looked at me, the twitch in his mouth reminding me of the crass, deadpan answers he used to give in class. His throat worked and he said, “Somebody tied her up and killed her.”

Ellie Pardo bought the gable and ell house next door to our cottage when I was still new enough that strangers dropped in to meet me. She bought the last house on the street, blocked on two sides by the woods. What some people might have thought creepy she considered peaceful. She'd left a drunk who never got over high school graduation. The gossip said he had knocked her around a lot, but the woman I knew was indomitable.

A feisty Italian who always had a tray of lasagna in the oven or a red sauce bubbling on the stove, she jogged back and forth on our street each day, exposing her beautiful legs even to the wicked cold of our winters on the lake. She said that red thighs were a sign of good circulation. Most of our neighbors were elderly, but she stopped to talk to them all, running in place the whole time. Since she didn't discriminate by age we became friends shortly after I began to talk.

I often cut through her yard to go to the woods. Her kitchen window looked back on her shady plot, and when I passed by I'd look up to her working at the counter or standing over the stove. If she looked up we would wave at one another. I wasn't allowed to shoot any birds or rabbits in her yard, but she didn't mind if I used her snow to make snow prisoners and then executed them with a pellet to the head. Once she came out and helped me pack snow into plastic crates, and together we built a sturdy fort, despite the neighborhood's lack of boys needed for a good war. Ellie enjoyed her indulgence of the child next door, and our afternoon passed in harmony. Then Henry began to come over.

Henry was a small and sickly boy. He was winded easily and didn't like to fight, and in the presence of mean children he kept his head low and his mouth shut. Yet around nice children and
interesting adults, no one was more animated and jovial. When I taught him how to load, pump, and aim my pellet gun, he was afraid to pull the trigger. He said he didn't want the kick to bruise him. When I convinced him to try a shot with a pillow between the stock and his shoulder, he pierced the empty soda can I'd put on a fence post. He ran to retrieve the container, and when he picked it up, admiring the puckered hole the pellet had made and how it had scraped away the can's green paint, he fashioned a new appreciation of technology.

The first time Ellie saw Henry and me in her yard, she was moved by the sight of the small boy whose head had been wrapped in a homemade red scarf. His exact little nose reminded her of the men in her family. She ran outside in sweats and a race T-shirt and called out to me. She asked me to introduce my friend, then brought us inside and made us look at a photo album. Sure enough, Henry could have been a long-lost, much younger brother. Ellie believed in the sacredness of family and culture, and she persuaded us to agree with her by feeding us slices of homemade pizza and bowls of steaming wedding soup.

Once, we'd eaten too much to hunt successfully, and Henry and I conferred about our visit with Ellie and agreed that we each saw an opportunity to improve our days. It involved keeping our after-school kill a little more discreet. Instead of cutting through yards with our grocery bags of bloody animals, we'd pick a path through the woods and bury the bodies behind my shed. Then we would stage a snowball fight that crossed from my yard into Ellie's, knowing she'd invite us in for a hot meal. Some days we deliberately starved ourselves at school, sitting beside one another at lunch, two ascetics among the devouring hundreds, to intensify the flavor of Ellie's creamy, tomatoey dishes and the ecstasy we felt as we stuffed the gooey morsels into our mouths. Ellie would sit at
the table, presiding as we cleared our plates. She encouraged us to take seconds, and we couldn't say no, not to this beautiful woman so dedicated to pleasing us. Henry was more slap-happy than I was. Once his belly had distended, he'd sit back and sigh in his high-pitched voice, his bulging eyes in love with the act of smiling.

A feeling of strangeness settled over me as we made our way from the pool hall to the parking lot. There was discussion about the logistics of our inebriated travel, but I just sat in the passenger seat of Henry's car. It was good that I hadn't driven to Frogville because the news about Ellie had reduced me to staring.

Soon we were moving along the roads to Woodacre, Henry steering his giant car between Officer Perzik's cruiser and Officer Candy's jeep. He was drunk, and as we passed between the twilit fields, his wheels crossed the center line and the shoulder many times. He cursed as we drove, intent on getting there, but I couldn't comprehend what he was saying. My mind had backed up to a point outside my body, flying over the three automobiles moving in a tight formation over the frozen highway. I could see a shadowed barn standing at the edge of a field against a staple line of trees. Hundreds of starlings alighted in the frozen furrows, only to flutter up again and trade places. The changing sky took on a pearly quality, full of a hard sunlight slowly grinding us into dust. Henry glanced at me as he rambled, his mouth unhappy and jagged. Gradually it came to me he was upset because Perzik, in the cruiser in front of us, would not exceed the speed limit.

Henry slammed a fist on the dashboard and, shaking his hand, shouted, “Why doesn't he turn on his fucking lights?”

The suburb hadn't seen a murder in over a decade, and the far end of the street was crowded with police cars, an ambulance, and
almost everyone who lived in a house on Woodacre. As we parked at the end of the cruiser jam-up, I quickly looked for my parents and, not seeing them, put the task of finding them aside for the moment. Henry ran ahead of Perzik and Candy, and I followed him. Together we pushed through a line of vehicles and people that seemed to indicate Ellie's house. The front yard was outlined with yellow tape stretching around the trees at the edge of Ellie's yard. The dark windows of the house reflected the winter scene and the dour faces of onlookers. A woman in a parka talked loudly and quickly about how frightened she was. No one spoke to her. Police paced anxiously in the yard, trying to look busy.

Henry refused to recognize the police boundary. He was outraged by the official measure dividing officials from citizens. When he lifted the yellow tape a young cop pushed him back, saying, “Please, sir, you don't want to do that.”

“Fuck you, I'm welcome in this house,” said Henry. “I'm going in there.”

“I'm afraid you're not,” said the cop.

When Henry stepped back and made a fist, it was obvious that he was going to throw a punch. There was an interval in which the cop seemed to think outside himself, happily enumerating charges he would bring against Henry. Then he sidestepped the swerving blow and chased Henry into a zinnia, where they struggled and gritted their teeth at one another and then fell into the snow. Four more cops came running, and I knew Henry was in trouble if no one would come to his aid, preferably someone with more local influence than I had.

The neighbors silently watched the police restrain the man who'd played in their yards years before. They must have known him from his ads in the paper, but no one protested when one cop slapped him. The young cop straddled Henry's chest and prepared to pummel him, but Perzik had gotten there, and he stepped in
and pushed him off. Big enough to make the other cops hesitate, Perzik seized Henry from the ground and thrust him in my direction. Henry stumbled forward, confused, while Perzik held up a hand and told the younger cop to let it go. Then they began to argue, other cops started to shout at Perzik, and soon the crowd's interest concentrated on the squabbling throng of men in navy blue uniforms. Henry hurried over to Candy and me. His nose was bleeding and he was crying.

“Nolan, can you get him out of here?” Candy asked me. “They'll arrest him if he sticks around.”

Once I'd taken Henry's car keys and gotten him to put on his seatbelt, I searched the crowd for my parents. They were at their house now, up on the front stoop, looking over the heads of the crowd at the policemen locked in debate on Ellie's lawn. They wore no coats despite the cold, only sweaters, and they were holding one another, their gray hair and their glasses poor masks for the grief in their faces. My father saw me in the street, waved, and said something that alerted my mother to where I stood in the Cadillac's open door, and then she waved, too. I pointed at the roof of the car, and sniffling Henry beneath it, in an attempt to explain that I had to leave.

My father gave me a thumbs-up and a nod, and it was clear that I didn't need to explain myself to him or my mother. They'd seen the scuffle between Henry and the cop. For the time being they'd ceased to be my parents, and I'd ceased to be their son. We were just three sad people in a sad crowd.

I didn't notice Ellie Pardo's unhappiness until I was in my teens and was suddenly tall. My new perspective proved my neighbor to be a tiny woman, though her age, wisdom, and arresting good
looks gave her more authority over me than ever. I was a shy teenager, and I blushed when she teased me about my growth spurt.

She would come over and sit with Henry and me in the garage, where we had removed our shirts and hefted the dumbbells from my father's old weight set. We'd set up mirrors and took our self-improvement seriously, choking down protein drinks between sets, and maybe Ellie sat with us for a little comic relief from her monotonous routine of work and exercise. We didn't mind the intrusion, and we held in our stomachs and kept our arms flexed just in case she wanted to check us out. We were average-looking boys without girlfriends. We didn't even have girl buddies to happen into romance with. Yet here was this beautiful woman whose deep green eyes seemed to see into us, talking about love.

“I'm through looking for men,” she'd say with total certainty. “They can come to me from now on. You boys remember that. It's important for you to approach the woman. Men have forgotten that. Don't be shy. The girls will be glad to have you. And once you get one, don't stop telling her how much you like her.”

She gave us tips to improve our lifting techniques. She told us when she noticed a new muscle line in an arm or an abdomen. I suspect she invented these lines on occasion, since her opinion of our physiques would drastically improve after a girl rejected one of us. I'd noticed how sometimes, when we'd cranked up the radio and were doing reps with our puny arms, that Ellie's attention would drift away from our workout studio. She'd explore a dark corner of the garage and look over one of the generic pastoral paintings my mother bought at garage sales. Henry and I would share a frown and keep flexing. Whatever she was missing, we couldn't identify it, and in those days the world of girls, music, and interesting subjects was expanding at such a rapid rate that, away from my garage and its weight bench, we easily forgot the melancholy silences of my next-door neighbor.

I wouldn't have an answer for years, until I came home from college, twenty-one years old, full of bravado and little else. I hadn't thought of Ellie in many months and was sitting with my father in the living room when we saw her Rollerblade past the window.

“I see Ellie's still keeping herself fit. Good for her,” I said. At that age I spoke to adults as if I knew all about their pain. “But she never remarried. That's a real shame.”

My patient father peered through his bifocals after her and said, “That woman has had her heart broken more times than anyone can count.”

“She used to tell Henry and me that she'd given up on men.”

My father chuckled. “They haven't given up on her. You think a woman like that can live in the suburbs, single, and not be asked on a date whenever she leaves the house?”

When I asked my mother why Ellie hadn't been over to say hello, she shrugged and looked over the boiling pots on the stove. She was canning frozen berries, and empty mason jars lined the countertop of her small kitchen. “She's going through one of her down periods. She'll be around when she's feeling better.”

When I said that I remembered none of these “down periods,” she gave me a long and skeptical look. “You really think you had any idea about what was going on in this neighborhood when you were a boy? Your father and I, we kept you good and ignorant. We wanted you to get out of this city.”

When Ellie did stop over to say hello, she seemed anxious and distracted. She'd just finished running, but she smelled good when she came over and planted a kiss on my cheek. When I hugged her I was aware of her lithe back and the curve of her waist and that her perspiration had plastered single black hairs to her temples.

Her body grew rigid in my arms, and when we'd released each other I glimpsed a look of discomfort passing between my parents. When Ellie looked up at me again the friendly, open expression
I had relied on as a child had been replaced by a look of courteous distance. I'd noticed this look in other women. She turned to my father and began to talk about the houses for sale on the street.