The Neighbor (21 page)

At least that’s how it felt to me.

One night, toward the end of summer, when Ree was due to start preschool in September and I would start my first gig as a student teacher, Jason and I stayed up late. He had a George Winston CD playing. Something soft and melodic. Ree and I were constantly torturing him with rock-n-roll, but he always gravitated toward classical music. He would close his eyes, and enter some Zen state where I was certain he was sound asleep, only to realize he was humming softly under his breath.

Tonight, we sat on the little love seat. His left arm was thrown across the back, his fingers touching the nape of my neck and rubbing gently. He did this more and more. Light, little touches, caressing me almost absently. In the beginning, I had startled at the contact. I had learned since to sit still, not say a word. The longer I relaxed, the longer he touched me, and I enjoyed my husband’s touch. Heaven help me, I liked the feel of his calloused fingertips grazing the back of my shoulders, sifting through my hair. Sometimes, he rubbed my scalp and I arched and shifted under his hand like a kitten.

Once I had tried to reciprocate, to scratch his back. The second my fingers went to lift his shirt, however, he got up and left the room. I never tried again.

A husband stroking his wife’s neck while they cuddled on the love seat, on the other hand … Welcome to our little slice of normalcy.

“Do you believe in heaven?” I asked him casually. We’d watched some Harrison Ford movie that night, where the vengeful ghost of the husband’s first wife had wreaked havoc on the household.

“Maybe.”

“I don’t.”

His fingers tugged gently on my earlobe, firm, erotic pressure. I nestled closer to him, trying not to startle him, but having a harder and harder time sitting still. Who knew ears could be such an erogenous zone? But mine were, mine were.

“Why not?” he asked me, fingers moving from my earlobe, down the side of my neck, then back up again. A husband touching his wife. A wife snuggling with her husband. Normal. All perfectly normal.

So normal that some nights when I woke up alone in my marriage bed, my heart shattered into a thousand pieces. Yet I got up the next morning and did it all over again. Sometimes, I even heard my mother’s voice in my mind
, “I know something you don’t know. I know something you don’t know….”

She was right, in the end. At the ripe old age of twenty-one, I was finally seeing all of life’s great truths: You can be in love and still feel incredibly lonely. You can have everything you ever wanted, only to realize that you wanted all the wrong things. You can have a husband as smart and sexy and compassionate as mine, and yet not really have him at all. And you can look at your own beautiful, precious daughter some days, and be genuinely jealous of how much he loves her, instead of you.

“Just don’t,” I said now. “Nobody wants to die, that’s all. So they make up pretty stories of an eternal afterlife, to take away the fear. If you think about it, however, it doesn’t make any sense. Without sadness, there can be no happiness, which means a state of eternal bliss really wouldn’t be that blissful. In fact, at a certain point, it would be mostly annoying. Nothing to strive for, nothing to look forward to, nothing to do.” I slid him a look. “You wouldn’t last a minute.”

He smiled, a lazy look on his dark features. He hadn’t shaved today. I liked the days he skipped the razor, his unkempt beard a nice compliment
to his deep brown eyes and perpetually rumpled hair. I’d always appreciated the bad boy look.

I wished I could feel his beard, trace the line of his jaw until I could find his pulse point at the base of his throat. I wished I could know if his heart was beating as hard as mine.

“I saw a ghost once,” he said.

“You did? Where?” I didn’t believe him and he could tell.

He smiled again, unconcerned. “An old house near where I used to live. Everyone said it was haunted.”

“So you just stopped by to check it out? Test out your male prowess?”

“I was visiting the owner. Unfortunately, she had died the night before. I found her body on the sofa, with her brother sitting beside her, which was interesting since he had died fifty years earlier.”

I was still dubious. “What did you do?”

“I said thank you.”

“Why?”

“Because once upon a time, her brother saved my life.”

I scowled, agitated by the coyness of his reply, and worse, the ten thousand nerve endings he had now stroked to life.

“Is it always going to be like this between us?” I asked abruptly.

“Like what?” But his hand was retreating, his face shuttering up.

“Half answers. Semi-truths. I ask a simple question, you dole out one tidbit of information while hoarding the rest.”

“I don’t know,” he said quietly. “Will it always be like this between us?”

“We’re married!” I said impatiently. “It’s been three years, for God’s sake. We should be able to trust each other. Tell each other our deepest darkest secrets, or at least the basics of where we come from. Isn’t marriage supposed to be a conversation that lasts a lifetime? Aren’t we supposed to take care of each other, trust one another to keep each other safe?”

“Says who?”

I startled, shook my head. “What do you mean, says who?”

“I mean, says who? Who makes up these rules, sets these expectations? A husband and wife should keep each other safe. A parent should take care of a child. A neighbor should look after a neighbor. Who sets these rules and what have they done for you lately?”

His voice was gentle, but I knew what he meant and the starkness of his words made me flinch.

He said softly, “Tell me about your mother, Sandy.”

“Stop it.”

“You claim to want to know all my secrets, but you keep your own.”

“My mother died when I was fifteen. End of story.”

“Heart attack,” he stated, repeating my previous assertions.

“It happens.” I turned away.

After a moment, Jason’s fingertips brushed my cheek, whispering across my lowered eyelashes.

“It will always be like this between us,” he said quietly. “But it won’t be this way for Ree.”

“There are things you lose you can’t get back,” I whispered.

“I know.”

“Even if you want them. Even if you search and pray and start completely over. It doesn’t matter. There are things you lose you can’t get back again. Things that once you know, you can never unknow.”

“I understand.”

I got off the sofa. Agitated now. I swear I could smell roses and I
hated
that smell. Why wouldn’t it leave me alone? I had fled my parents’ house, I had fled my parents’ town. The damn roses ought to leave me alone.

“She was mentally ill,” I blurted out. “A raging alcoholic. She did … crazy, crazy things and we covered for her. That’s what my father and I did. We let her torture us every single day and we never said a word. Life in a small town, right? Gotta keep up appearances.”

“She beat you.”

I laughed but it wasn’t a pleasant sound. “She fed me rat poison so she could watch the doctors pump my stomach. I was a tool for her. A beautiful little doll she could break every time she wanted attention.”

“Münchhausen.”

“Probably. I’ve never sought an expert opinion.”

“Why not?”

“She’s dead. What’s the point?”

He gave me a look, but I refused to take the bait.

“Your father?” he asked at last.

“Successful lawyer with a reputation to uphold. Can’t really be admitting that his wife bashes gin bottles over his head every other night. Wouldn’t be good for business.”

“He put up with it?”

“Isn’t that how these things work?”

“Sadly, yes. Tell me again, Sandy, how did she die?”

I thinned my lips, refused him.

“Carbon monoxide poisoning,” he said at last, a statement, not a question. “Found in her car in the garage. Suicide, I would guess. Or maybe she drank too much and passed out behind the wheel? What I don’t understand is why the authorities let it go. Especially given that it was a small town, and someone, somewhere, had to know how she treated you.”

I stared at him. I couldn’t help myself. I stared and I stared and I stared. “You knew?”

“Of course. I wouldn’t have married you otherwise.”

“You
investigated
me?”

“It’s a prudent thing to do, before asking a girl to become your wife.” He touched my hand. This time, I jerked away. “You think I married you for Ree. You have always believed I married you for Ree. But I didn’t. Or at least, not for her alone. I married you because of your mother, Sandy. Because you and I are alike that way. We know monsters are real, and they don’t all live under the bed.”

“It wasn’t my fault,” I heard myself say.

He was silent.

“She was mentally unstable. Suicide was probably only a matter of time. Last way to screw with us and all that.” I was babbling. Couldn’t shut up. Couldn’t stop myself. “I was getting a little too big to keep dragging to the emergency room, so she upped and killed herself instead. After planning the biggest funeral the town had ever seen, of course. Oh, the roses she demanded for the event. The mounds and mounds of fucking roses …”

My hands fisted at my sides. I stared at my husband. Dared him to call me a freak, an ungrateful daughter, a white trash piece of shit.
Look at me,
I wanted to cry.
My mother lived and I hated her. She died and I hated her more. I am
not
normal.

“I understand,” he said.

“Afterward, I thought I would be happy. I thought, finally, my father and I could live in peace.”

Jason was studying me intently now. “When you first met me, you said you wanted to get away, never look back. You weren’t kidding, were you? All these years later, you’ve never called your father, never told him where we live, never let him know about Ree.”

“No.”

“You hate him that much?”

“All that and more.”

“You think he loved your mother more than you,” Jason stated. “He didn’t protect you. Instead, he covered for her. And you’ve never forgiven him for it.”

I didn’t answer right away. Because at that moment, I was picturing my father again, his charming smile, the crinkle lines that appeared at the corners of his bright blue eyes, the way he could make you feel as if you were the center of the universe just by touching your shoulder. And I was so filled with rage, I could barely speak.

I know something you don’t know. I know something you don’t know….

She had been right. She had been so fucking right.

“You said we’re different,” I whispered hoarsely. “You said we know better, that the monsters aren’t all under the bed.”

Jason nodded.

“Promise me, then: If you ever see my father, if he should ever show up at our front door, you’ll kill him first, and ask questions later. He’ll never touch Ree. Promise me that, Jason.”

My husband looked me in the eye. He said, “Consider it done.”

Ree fell asleep in her booster seat before Jason even pulled out of the parking lot. Mr. Smith was curled up in the passenger’s seat now, licking his paw, rubbing his cheek, licking his paw, rubbing his cheek. Jason drove aimlessly toward the interstate, not sure what to do.

He was tired. Exhausted. What he wanted most in the world was to curl up in the sanctuary of his own home, and let the world disappear.
He would sleep like the dead, and when he woke up again, Sandra would be standing beside the bed, smiling down at him.

“Wake up, sleepyhead,” she would say, and he’d take her in his arms, and hold her as he should’ve been holding her the past five years. He would hug his wife, and he and Ree could be happy again. They would be a family.

He couldn’t go home. News vans would be there, staked out across the street. Lights would flash, reporters shouting out questions Ree was too young to understand. They would scare her, and after the morning she’d had, he couldn’t bear for her to be traumatized again.

The police believed he was guilty. He had seen it in their eyes, the minute the interview had concluded. His own daughter had implicated him, but he didn’t blame her. Ree had done what they’d asked of her; she had told the truth the best she understood it to be. He’d spent four years preaching to his daughter not to lie. He couldn’t be angry at her now for following the values he and Sandra had so carefully instilled in her.

He was proud of Ree, and that saddened him, because the more he turned the matter around in his mind, the more he arrived at the same inescapable conclusion: He would be arrested. Any day now, he supposed. The police were putting it all together now, building their case, buttoning it up tight. They’d taken his trash. They’d interrogated his child. Next would come a fresh sweep of his house, followed by a search warrant for his computer.

They would dig deeper into his background, trying to contact associates and friends; that would stall them for a bit. He never socialized with his associates and he never bothered to make friends. Plus, he checked his “firewalls” from time to time; they were holding tight. But nothing was impenetrable, especially once the right expert was brought to bear, and the Boston police had those kinds of resources. It wasn’t like he was dealing with backwoods yokels here.