The Neighbor (2 page)

When Amalia returned to the kitchen, she said, “I think someone moved in next door during the night. My window was open, and a voice woke me, and then there were lights in all the rooms over there.”

Her bedroom was on the same side of our house as mine. I said, “I didn’t hear anybody. Saw the lights, someone moving around over there, just a shadow. But no Realtor has put up a sign yet.”

“Maybe they decided to rent the place instead of selling.”

“Moving in at three in the morning is kinda weird. Was it just one person or a family, or what?”

“I didn’t see anybody.”

“What about the voice?”

“Oh, that must have been a dream. There wasn’t anyone standing under my window. I
thought someone called out from under my window, a man, but I must have been dreaming and woke up, because when I got out of bed and went to the window, no one was down there.”

I put place mats and flatware on the dinette table. While I made toast, burning the first two slices, Amalia scrambled eggs and fried slices of ham for our breakfast.

“What did he say—the man under your window?” I asked.

“He called my name. Twice. But I’m sure he was in the dream, not really there.”

“What was the dream about?”

“I don’t remember.”

“Not even a scrap of it?”

“Not even.”

Her eggs, ham, and toast were on the same plate. For me, she served those three items on three small plates, as I preferred. I had trimmed the crusts off my toast, so that I could eat them separately. Even in those days, I had little rituals with which I meant to impose a degree of order on what seemed to me to be a most disordered world.

We had hardly begun to eat when the washing machine in the adjacent laundry alcove buzzed, at the end of its spin cycle.

As I rose, intending to transfer the laundry to the dryer, Amalia said, “It can wait, Malcolm.”

Although I remained at the table, I said, “Before you go away to the university, you’ll have to teach me to iron.”

Her green eyes sparkled, I swear they did, when something moved or amused her. “Sweetie, I’d no sooner put an iron in your hands than I would a chain saw.”

“Well,
he’s
never going to iron. And she’d do it only if she could sit down and watch game shows at the same time.”

“She ironed when I was too little to do it. She hasn’t forgotten how.”

“But she won’t. You know she won’t. I’ll be a wrinkled mess.” Although I was only twelve, how my clothes looked was important to me, because I myself looked like such a nerd.

“Malcolm, don’t you dare try to iron when I’m away at school.”

“I don’t know. We’ll see.”

She ate in silence for a while, and then she said, “It’s not right what I’m doing, going to school so far away.”

“Huh? Don’t be nuts. That’s where you got the scholarship.”

“I could get one somewhere close. Stay at home instead of in a dormitory.”

“The university has that special writing program. That’s the whole point of going there. You’re going to be a great writer.”

“I’m not going to be a great anything if I leave you here alone with them and spend the rest of my life regretting it.”

She was the best sister ever, funny and smart and pretty, and she was going to be famous one day. I’d whined at her about teaching me how to iron; I felt selfish, because the truth was that I wanted her to go to the university, which was going to be so good for her, but at the same time I wanted her to stay.

“I’m not all thumbs, you know. If I can play the saxophone as well as I do, I can iron clothes without burning down the house.”

“Anyway,” she said, “nobody learns to be a novelist from a writing program. It’s a very personal struggle.”

“If you don’t take that scholarship, I’ll blow my brains out.”

“Don’t be ridiculous, sweetie.”

“I will. Why wouldn’t I? How am I supposed to live with having ruined
your
life?”

“You could never ruin my life, Malcolm. Why, you’re the most important and wonderful thing in it.”

She never lied. She didn’t manipulate people. If she’d been anyone but who she was, I could have looked her in the eye and insisted that I’d commit hara-kiri, even though I knew that I never would. Instead, I stared at the trimmed-off crusts of my toast and tore them into little pieces as I said, “You’ve got to take the scholarship. You’ve just got to. It’s the best thing ever happened to us.”

I heard her put down her fork. After a silence, she said, “I love you, too, Malcolm,” and then for another reason entirely, I couldn’t meet her eyes. Or speak.

After we cleared the table, after she washed the dishes and I dried them, she said, “Hey, let’s make oatmeal cookies.”

“With chocolate chips and walnuts?”

“For Mom and Dad, we’ll make them with chopped anchovies and lima beans, just to see their expressions when they bite into one. The rest with chocolate chips and walnuts. We’ll take a
plate of them to the new neighbors and introduce ourselves.”

She rattled off a list of things she needed: baking sheets, mixing bowls, a spatula, a pair of tablespoons, a measuring cup.… Because I suspected that this might be the first of many tests to determine if I could eventually be entrusted with a steam iron, I remembered every item, collected them in a timely manner, and didn’t drop even one.

The delicious aroma of baking cookies eventually reached the living room, where our mother left the TV long enough to come to the kitchen and say, “Are you making a mess?”

“No, ma’am,” Amalia said.

“It looks like a mess to me.”

“Only while we’re baking. It’ll all be cleaned up after.”

“There’s housework that should come before this kind of thing,” our mother said.

“I’m ahead of schedule on the housework,” Amalia assured her, “now that school is out.”

Mother stood just inside the door to the hall, an apparition in her quilted pink housecoat and morning hair, looking mildly confused, as though the task upon which we were engaged must be as mystifying to her as any complex voodoo ritual. Then she said, “I like mine with almonds, not walnuts.”

“Sure,” Amalia said, “we’re going to make a batch like that.”

“Your father likes the walnuts but not the chocolate chips.”

“We’re going to make a batch like that, too,” Amalia promised.

To me, my mother said, “Have you dropped and broken anything?”

“No, ma’am. I’ve got it together.”

“I like that glass measuring cup. They don’t make them like that anymore.”

“I’ll be careful,” I said.

“Be careful with it,” she said, as if I’d said nothing, and she went back to the TV in the living room.

Amalia and I baked the cookies. We cleaned up. I didn’t break anything. And then we went next door to meet the new neighbors.

When we climbed the steps and set foot on the porch, we saw that the front door stood ajar. The sun remained slightly to the east, hot light slanting under the eaves and painting a bright rhomboid on the floor. We stood on that illumined patch of gray-painted boards, as if on a trap door, while Amalia held the plate of cookies and I pressed the bell push. No one responded to the chimes, and I rang again.

After I’d rung the bell a third time, when it seemed obvious that no one was home, Amalia said, “So maybe it
was
a burglar last night. In spite of all the lights. I mean, a burglar wouldn’t care about leaving the door open after himself.”

Through the four-inch gap between door and jamb, I could see the shallow, shadowy foyer and the darker living room beyond. “Then why would a burglar bother to turn off the lights? Maybe something’s wrong, someone needs help.”

“We can’t just barge in, Malcolm.”

“Then what’re we gonna do?”

Leaning close to the door, she called out, “Hello? Anyone home?”

The answering silence was worthy of our father when he stood on our back porch eating his breakfast sandwich.

Amalia called out again, and when no one responded, she pushed the door inward, so that we had a better view of the cramped foyer and the living room, where everything appeared to be furnished as it had been when Mr. Clockenwall had been alive. In the month since his passing, no one had come to dispose of his belongings.

After my sister called out again, louder than before, I said, “Maybe we should go home and call the police and report a burglary.”

“But if there hasn’t been a burglary, can you imagine the hell they’ll put us through for making that call?”

By “they,” she didn’t mean the police. Our mother liked nothing more than having a legitimate reason to criticize us. She’d peck and peck and peck at you for the littlest mistake, until you thought she was going to keep at it until you were nothing but bones. And our old man,
who couldn’t stand the sound of our mother’s voice when she was in attack mode, would shout at Amalia and me, as if we were the ones making all the noise: “I’m just tryin’ to watch a little TV here and forget what a shitty day I had at work, okay? Is that okay with you two, is it?”

Repeating her admonition to me, I said, “We can’t barge in.”

“No, we can’t,” she agreed, as she stepped across the threshold with the plate of cookies. “But remember how Mr. Clockenwall wasn’t found for a whole day after he died. Someone might need help.”

I followed her, of course. I would have followed my saintly sister through the gates of Hell; by comparison, the house next door wasn’t particularly forbidding.

Although the sheers hanging over the windows allowed a little daylight to enter, the living room remained cloaked in shadows, a silent solemn chamber in which you might have expected to find a cadaver casketed for viewing.

Amalia flipped a wall switch that turned on a lamp beside an armchair.

A film of dust sheathed the table on which the lamp stood. A pair of reading glasses lay beside a paperback that Mr. Clockenwall might have meant to read before his day turned as bad as any day could be. There were no signs of vandalism.

“We live next door,” Amalia called out. “We came to say hello.” She waited, listening. Then: “Hello? Is everything all right?”

In the kitchen, the refrigerator hummed. Breakfast dishes were on the table, a smear of egg yolk having turned hard and dark on the plate. Toast crumbs littered the Formica surface. The heart attack had felled Mr. Clockenwall here, perhaps as he’d risen from his meal, and no one had cleaned up after the coroner’s van took the body away.

“It’s terrible to live alone,” Amalia said.

The sadness in her voice seemed genuine, though Clockenwall had not been a man who reached out to his neighbors or sought in any way to alleviate his loneliness, if in fact he was lonely. He had been polite; and if he happened to be in his yard when you were in yours, he would spend a few minutes in agreeable conversation over the fence. No one considered him aloof or cold, only shy and on occasion melancholy. Some felt that perhaps in his past lay a tragedy with which he had never been able to make his peace, that the only companion with which he felt comfortable was sorrow.

Amalia was somewhat distressed. “Somebody should have cleaned up these dishes and
emptied the refrigerator before things in it spoiled. Leaving it like this … it’s just wrong.”

I shrugged. “Maybe no one cared about him.”

My sister seemed to care about everyone, even making excuses for our parents at their worst, but now she said nothing.

I sighed. “Tell me you don’t mean we should clean this up.”

As she was about to answer, her attitude abruptly changed. She turned with a start and said, “Who, what?”

Perplexed, I said, “What—who, what?”

She frowned. “You didn’t hear that?”

“No. What didn’t I hear?”

“He said, ‘Melinda. Sweet Melinda.’ ”

“Who said?”

“It sounded like Mr. Clockenwall.”

When I was younger and my sister was not yet perfect, she had enjoyed spooking me by reporting with great conviction things like,
Dad didn’t realize I was there, and he took off his face and under it was this lizard face!
Or on one occasion,
Oh, God, I saw Mom eating live spiders!
She was so convincing that I needed about a year to become immune to her bizarre declarations, and for another year I
pretended
to believe them because it was such fun. Then she became interested in boys and lost interest in scaring me, although I was never so scared by any of her hoaxes as by a couple of the idiot guys she dated; even in those days, however, she was too smart to go out with a psychopathic maniac more than twice.

“Mr. Clockenwall is dead and buried,” I reminded her.

“I know he’s dead and buried.” Holding the plate of cookies with her left hand, she rubbed the back of her neck with the right, as if smoothing away gooseflesh. “Or at least he’s dead.”

“I’m not nine anymore, sis.”

“What’s that mean?”

“I know Mom eats only
dead
spiders.”

“I’m not joking with you, Malcolm.” As before, she startled and turned, as if toward a voice that I couldn’t hear.

“What now?”

“He said it again. ‘Sweet Melinda.’ ”

Suddenly she set out as if in search of the speaker, turning on lights as we entered each new space, and I followed her through the rest of the ground floor, turning off the lights in our wake. When we arrived at the front of the house once more, Amalia peered up the stairs toward the gloomy realm on the higher floor.

After she stood transfixed for a long moment, her face clenched with revulsion, and I asked what was happening now, and she said, “He’s disgusting. Obscene. Sick.”

Suspicious but half believing, I said, “What?”

“I won’t repeat what he said,” she declared, and she hurried out through the open front door.

I stood at the foot of the stairs, gazing up, wondering if she might be yanking my chain or if she might be serious, when I heard heavy footsteps in the upper hallway. And then a creaking arose from the stairs, as though somebody was moving from one tread to the next. The landing at the head of the lower flight creaked, too, and made a cracking noise, as if an old board had splintered a little under a punishing weight. The shadows on the stairs were not so deep that they could have concealed anyone. Whoever descended toward me, if anyone did, was no more apparent to the eye than Claude Rains in that old movie
The Invisible Man
.