The New Neighbor (21 page)

The only person who doesn’t make an appointment is Megan. Megan sits quietly polishing off her wine during the general hilarity. Jennifer feels a sharp awareness of her silence, even as she schedules the others and laughs at their jokes. Why doesn’t Megan want a massage?

“All right,” Amanda says as they all holster their phones. “That was a job of work.”

“A job of work?” Terry repeats. “A job of work?”

“It’s an expression,” Amanda says. “It means that was hard work.”

“I know what it means. I’ve just never heard it outside of an old Southern novel.”

“Is that a Southern expression?” Juliana asks.

“It sounds like it should be,” Amanda says. “But you know, some of the terms we think of as so Southern, like really antiquated-sounding ones that have hung on in Appalachia, are really holdouts from British English. Like
reckon
, for instance, that was—”

“Jennifer can tell what you’re feeling,” Megan interrupts. “Just from touching you.”

All heads swivel toward Jennifer. “Really?” Juliana says.

“Well, no, not exactly,” Jennifer says. “Not like a psychic.”

“How then?” Samantha asks.

“Explain it to them,” Megan says, waving her hand. Her eyes have an unfocused look that Jennifer doesn’t want to see. That she wants to pretend isn’t there. She repeats what she told Megan: that emotion lives in the body, and so does memory. A betrayal in the right shoulder, guilt in the ball of the foot.

“So when you give us massages,” Amanda says, “you’ll be able to tell us about our emotional state?”

“Probably,” Jennifer says. “If you want me to. Yes.”

“Oh, that’s intriguing,” Amanda says. “You might tell me things I don’t know.”

“Yes,” Jennifer says, “but usually once I say it people recognize it.”

“Oh!” Erica says. “This is going to be like a treasure hunt.” She turns her shoulder toward Jennifer and points. “This knot right here. What does it mean?”

Jennifer’s getting nervous. She doesn’t want to be called upon to perform parlor tricks. She doesn’t want to expose anyone’s pain. “Now, now,” she says, in a mock-scold, “no freebies.” Then, to show her goodwill, she puts her hand on Erica’s shoulder and works the knot a little.

“Ohhhhh,” Erica says, a noise of painful pleasure.

“Don’t worry,” Jennifer says, patting Erica before removing her hand. “We’ll get that out.”

“Can my appointment be right now?” Erica asks, and then someone else jokes about laying Erica out on the table and what the management would say, and how much they’d have to tip, and where the cute waiter is with the promised incredible desserts. To Jennifer’s relief the conversation spirals away from her.

Later, after the passengers of Jennifer’s car have said goodbye to the passengers of Amanda’s, Megan leans against Jennifer and says, “What do you sense about me?”

And because Jennifer is determined not to ruin it, she puts her arm around Megan, squeezes her, and says, “That you’re wonderful,” and not
That you’re very sad
.

S
he tried for
a while to pretend I hadn’t kissed her. Kay, I mean. We both tried to pretend. But there had been a perfect intimacy between us, and now it was gone. She was no longer completely herself with me, nor I with her. Now our friendship was a role to play, the part of Kay, the part of Maggie Jean. Being in her company was like mourning a dead person while sitting down to dinner with her ghost.

There were exceptions. Of course there were. Nothing is ever one thing all the time. Nothing is
consistent
, least of all what a person feels. That morning in Zietz, in Germany, Kay in the blooming garden. That was an exception. She tucked a flower into my hair, touching me like she wasn’t afraid, and I wanted to weep, I wanted to catch her hands and press them to my mouth, but I couldn’t, I couldn’t, and still I was so glad. By the time we’d crossed the border from France I’d been weary to the bone, and sick to death of my weariness, discouraged by my own discouragement. I remember rattling along in the back of a truck, past white flags flying in some smashed-flat town, and thinking with some disgust that I, too, had surrendered. Here was the end of something. Dead cattle and smashed-up towns. Here were the dragon teeth and pillboxes of the Siegfried Line, long tank traps, fields just dotted with foxholes. Here were the white flags flying, and in one little village a town crier calling the people together with a bell.

Once we passed two little girls playing in a front yard, and they were so absorbed in what they were doing they didn’t notice us until we were almost upon them, and when they did they froze. Just froze, and stood there, like people in a painting. A woman—their mother—hurried out of the house. She didn’t look at us, as though if she didn’t look we wouldn’t be there. She grabbed each girl by an arm and tugged them backward toward the house. We were rolling past as this happened. I leaned so far out of the truck to watch them, Kay caught hold of my sleeve. I saw a child’s hand, still extended, and then it disappeared, and the door shut, and they were gone, and so were we. The whole thing seemed to happen without a sound, like a scene from a silent movie. “Be careful,” Kay said. “Don’t want to lose you.”

I don’t know if she really said that. I like to remember that’s what she said.

Despite everything, Germany was beautiful.

The things I remember. The blooming garden. I thought maybe after that things would go back to normal with Kay. But they did and they didn’t. One night at two or three in the morning we were alone on a ward when the klaxon sounded. We’d been told if this happened we were to make for the basement, but we were on a ward where none of the patients could be moved. We ran down the ward putting steel pots and helmets on the patients, whatever we could find, and then we just crouched in a corner, put our helmets on, and pretended our whole bodies fit inside them instead of just our heads. What a store of faith we put in those helmets. We didn’t have anything else.

When you’re accustomed to shells coming in, you can tell by the sound whether they’re going to go over. You can hear them testing—the shells go too far one way, and then they try the other way, and then the third time they get you. “One,” I said out loud as I heard them go too far. “Two,” I said as I heard them go the other direction.

“Don’t,” Kay said.

Three, I said silently in my head. I waited. “Three,” I whispered. But nothing. I held my breath. I let it out. I could have sworn I heard Kay whisper, “Three.” But nothing came.

Kay reached for my hand. She clutched it so hard I felt my bones give way, but I didn’t say a word to stop her. I said, “ ‘But death replied: “I choose him.” So he went, / And there was silence in the summer night; / Silence and safety; and the veils of sleep. / Then, far away, the thudding of the guns.’ ”

“Jesus, Maggie Jean,” she said.

“Siegfried Sassoon,” I said. “I had a patient, before the war, who used to quote poetry to me. Didn’t I ever tell you that? He’d been in the First World War, and I think he was hoping to persuade me not to join. Mr. Lewis. I can’t believe I never told you about him.”

More shells. The first went past us again.

“One,” Kay said.

“He was dying,” I said. “Cancer of the neck. He was probably fifty. He was married, no kids, and his wife almost drove me crazy, because from the moment I saw him I knew he’d come to the hospital to die, and every day she’d come in and ask me didn’t I think he was better. He’d been an English teacher of some kind, high school or college, I can’t remember. The cancer had affected his voice, so that he spoke in this scratchy way that sounded painful. Must have been painful. But he was determined to talk. His whole life had been about talking and it was the last thing he’d let go.”

I stopped talking for a moment and listened. Nothing. I went on. “The head nurse was a stickler when it came to pain meds, didn’t want us to up his morphine. I mean, was she afraid he’d carry an addiction into the next life, begging morphine from the angels? He didn’t complain, not Mr. Lewis, but when a patient’s on your ward long enough you learn to read him, and I could tell by his forehead . . .” In the dark I touched my own, picturing the tension in Mr. Lewis’s brow, the way the skin whitened around his mouth. “Once when I got near his bed I realized some sound I’d been hearing suddenly stopped. After that I started pausing a few feet away to listen to him. ‘Oh, oh, oh,’ he’d whisper, when he thought nobody was near. ‘Oh, oh, oh.’ ”

I stopped again. “Go on,” Kay whispered.

“I asked her—the head nurse—over and over to up his meds. She wouldn’t. So I went to the doctor. He not only upped the meds, he took her to task, let me tell you. She hated me after that.”

Kay snorted. “I shouldn’t wonder.” She sounded a little more like herself. We heard a howling overhead. “Two,” Kay said.

I listened hard. “That’s why I joined. Because Mr. Lewis died. I know that doesn’t quite make sense. But that’s why.”

“You never did tell me that,” Kay said, and I wondered why there was sorrow in her voice. “But I’ve told you,” she said, “how my father didn’t want me to join.” Her shaking seemed to vibrate the floor. “He said I would shame him. He said if I joined I could forget coming home again.” She pulled her hand from mine.

I swallowed. I didn’t want her to mean that I was part of that shame. I didn’t want that to be why she’d taken away her hand. “But where else will you go?”

“I have shamed him, haven’t I?” she said. “He was right to try to stop me. I never should have come.”

“Don’t say that.”

“I’m sorry that I came.”

“Don’t say that.”

“We’re going to die right here, Maggie Jean. We’re going to die.”

“We aren’t,” I said, and I took her hand and held it hard, as hard as she’d held mine earlier, trying to stop her shaking.

We heard howling again, and this time it got louder and louder and failed to diminish. When would it diminish? “Three,” we said at the same moment, and then the shell hit. A life-altering sound. The walls
quaked
. Plaster rained from the ceiling. It felt like it was not just the building about to crumble around us but the entire world.

A long time after the walls stopped trembling, we stayed in that corner. Kay shook and shook and I held her hand and listened to the both of us breathing.

We waited. Nothing, and nothing. Then some distant shouting. “Is it over?” Kay asked.

“Yes,” I said, as if I had any idea.

“Help me up,” she said, and only then did I realize that her back was bad again. I helped her up, though my hands were trembling. And then we went to check on the patients, who were fine, or as fine as they could be, just white with plaster dust. A corpsman had died, but I didn’t know him, and his death isn’t why I tell this story.

I tell it because of this.

For a moment, before we went to check for damage, we stood there looking at each other, my hands on her arms as if to steady her. Her eyes were full of tears that I thought at first were from the pain and the fright. But that wasn’t why she was sad. She looked at me hard, like she was never going to see me again, like she was trying to memorize my face. And then she stepped back so that my hands fell away. That was the moment I really knew I’d lost her. I don’t know what I’d been hoping for, but that was when I knew I’d never have it, or if I’d had it, it was gone.

The next night was when she went out with him. I remember she didn’t seem to want to go. I remember she said before she went, “I don’t know about him. He’s . . . pushy.”

“So don’t go,” I said. “Stay here with me.”

A strange look crossed her face then. Maybe it was the way I’d said the words. Or maybe it was just the way she heard them, that kiss, that goddamn kiss, changing everything. “I think I’ll go,” she said.

And I put my face back in my book, without another word. That’s what I did, Jennifer.

In the morning, when I asked how the date had been, she said it was fine, but she wouldn’t look at me. There was an angry scratch on her neck, a strange flatness in her voice. Do you understand, Jennifer? I didn’t myself, until later. I was there and I failed to see, and maybe that’s one reason why I did what I did, because in my own grief and resentment I’d failed to see. There are so many ways in which the world is terrible, sometimes you fail to spot them all.

T
his morning Jennifer
yelled at Milo. She lost her temper—over a little thing, an everyday thing, his snatching the Cheerios box from her hand after she said no more cereal, spilling Cheerios all over the floor, then stepping on them, crunching them into a spreading dust. All of it, except the snatching, an accident. In return she grabbed his arm, pulled him close, smacked him, twice, on his behind. For a moment he looked mulish but then he burst into tears. “You
spanked
me,” he said, in tones of grief and wonderment.

She knows it’s not rational to blame Margaret for this. But she is tense, she is so tense, and that is undeniably Margaret’s fault.
Just tell me
, she wants to demand.
About Kay, yes, and the terrible world, and why you did what you did, and what you know about me. Unwrap the bandage. Hand me a mirror.
“Do you understand?” Margaret asked, and Jennifer said, “I think—” but Margaret interrupted.

“Don’t,” she said. “Don’t say it.”

“You asked me,” Jennifer said.

“So I did,” Margaret said. And then she abruptly changed the subject. “Are you still spending time with that professor friend?” Why would Jennifer have told her about Megan? But she must have, because then Margaret said Megan’s name. “Her husband’s a photographer, you said?”

“Yes,” Jennifer said.

“Maybe I should have one last portrait made. To go with this”—Margaret waved her hand at Jennifer’s notebook, on her face that look of disdain—“this thing you’re writing. Have you had your portrait made?”

“No,” Jennifer said. “Why would I do that?”

Margaret looked at her appraisingly. “You wouldn’t,” she said with certainty, and then to Jennifer’s surprise she smiled. “I wouldn’t either, to tell you the truth.”