The New Neighbor (22 page)

Jennifer is reviewing this scene, thinking about Margaret, even though she’s out walking in an effort to shake her off. She’s on the Perimeter Trail, which encircles Sewanee—or the Domain, that humorously fantastic and yet appropriate name. She’s discovered, since Megan introduced her to this trail and the access point at the Cross, that she likes a solitary walk in the woods, likes clambering up a rock where the trees open out on a view of valleys and mountains and trees and trees and trees. She likes surveying an uninhabited world. When someone approaches on the trail—you can always hear them coming, their voices and their footsteps in the crackling leaves so wrongfully loud—she has to fight an urge to dart behind rock or tree and hide until they’ve passed. She forces herself to stay on the path, make eye contact, smile, say hi.

“You and I,” Margaret said yesterday, “we’d both like to be invisible.”

“What makes you say that?”

“But then,” Margaret said, “sometimes we wish we weren’t.”

Jennifer would’ve liked to deny this, but instead she looked down at the notebook, closed the cover on its words. Jennifer wishes Margaret didn’t know Megan’s name.

Her phone rings in her pocket and she checks the screen and sees the number for Milo’s school. She pauses, panting a little from exertion, and holds on to a small tree. Right here the trail’s at the very edge of the bluff, and it’s a long way down. She makes herself wait one more ring before she answers, makes herself say a calm hello, as though to behave as if something bad had happened would guarantee it had.

But something bad
has
happened. Milo is fine, Milo is fine, but he’s harmed another boy. “I don’t understand,” Jennifer says, after the first description, and so Miss Amber explains again. Her Southern accent has an edge during the second telling, sweetness that isn’t sweet. “But I don’t understand why he would do that,” Jennifer says.

There’s a shrug in Miss Amber’s voice. “He says the other child took his toy, but of course that’s no excuse.”

“Of course not,” Jennifer says blankly.

“We’d like you to come pick him up,” Miss Amber says. “He’ll have to go home for the rest of the day. We don’t tolerate this kind of violence. That’s our policy.”

Jennifer has an impulse to ask what kind of violence they do tolerate, but she doesn’t. She assures Miss Amber that she’ll be there soon, and then she stands there clutching the tree in a daze. What Milo did today was stab another child in the face with a pencil. “Thankfully,” Miss Amber said, “not in his eye.”

Yes, thankfully not in his eye. But why at all? Why would her tiny child, her baby, her sweet, sweet boy, put a hole in another child’s face? Because she spanked him today? This is what she knows—she with her repository of secrets, her comforting, healing touch: that none of us is good, as much as we might want to be. And yet somehow she believed that Milo would be the exception. Now, like everyone else, he’s an inflictor of damage. He’s left a scar.

When she gets
out of her car in the preschool parking lot, Sebastian is a row ahead of her, getting out of his. She stops, surprised and unnerved, and hoping his presence doesn’t mean that Ben was the victim of Milo’s attack. Ben and Milo proclaim themselves best friends at every opportunity. Again and again Jennifer and Megan have shared affectionate smiles at the sight of the two boys whispering together, one with his arm around the other’s waist. If Milo had to stab somebody, she would rather it be Ethan, a pushy and obnoxious child who runs up to her at pickup for the sole purpose of giving her an animal’s predatory grin, baring his sharp and tiny teeth before darting away. She’d like to stand here a moment, let Sebastian walk into the school ahead of her, but that would be cowardly, and even if she waited chances are slim that she could avoid him completely in the narrow hallways, crowded with cubbies and bins of picture books. So she walks, at a normal pace, and before he reaches the gate into the playground he hears her footsteps and turns. Then she has to keep walking toward him, with him watching her, which she doesn’t like.

“Well, this is a surprise,” he says, when she’s very close. “Was it Milo?”

“Was it Ben?” she answers.

“With the pencil in his face? Yes.”

“I’m sorry,” she says.

He shrugs. “You didn’t do it,” he says. “I assume you’re not at home doing weapons training with school supplies.”

She smiles, against her will. “No,” she says. “But I’m still sorry. I can’t imagine why he’d go after Ben. He loves Ben.”

“We hurt the ones we love,” he says. “Let’s go survey the aftermath.”

Jennifer realizes, following him inside, that she’s relieved it’s Sebastian and not Megan who’s come to deal with this. She’s afraid Megan will be terribly upset, will take this as a sign that both burgeoning friendships should be quashed. Sebastian, though, seems calm. We hurt the ones we love. Maybe he takes that for granted.

Sebastian walks right into Miss Amber’s classroom, but Jennifer puts her head in the door, trying not to feel like she herself is the guilty one. Milo isn’t in the room. Ben is playing trucks in the corner with another child, a Band-Aid cross high on his left cheek. Sebastian crouches next to him and picks up a truck. As far as Jennifer can tell he’s not asking about the incident. He crashes his truck into Ben’s, and then Ben crashes his into Sebastian’s. On the other side of the room Miss Amber is enmeshed in a hug from an adoring little girl. She looks up and sees Jennifer and her expression changes. As she comes over to Jennifer, her face is grave. “Milo’s in Miss Helen’s office,” she says. Miss Helen is the preschool director, a woman in her sixties who is either sweet or stupid or very cleverly disguised. “What happened?” Jennifer says, because it’s her obligation to know.

Miss Amber holds up both hands as if to forestall attack. “I didn’t see it,” she says. “First thing I knew, Ben was crying and his face was bleeding. Milo says he did it but he won’t apologize. I’ve seen nothing wrong between them. They play a little rough every now and then, but that’s just boys. I’m surprised Milo would be so aggressive. Has something been going on at home?”

Jennifer hates this question: the teacher’s polite way of asking how you’ve fucked up your child. She got it frequently with Zoe, who behaved and tested well but often half-assed her homework. Sometimes Jennifer suspected Zoe of doing it on purpose—her messy unfinished algebra or partially plagiarized essay on Huck Finn—so that Jennifer would have to have these conversations. So that again and again she’d have to lie. “No,” she’d say. “Nothing’s going on at home.” She says it now, and for once she’s not lying. “I don’t know why he’d do that.”

Miss Amber makes a moue of sympathy, which may or may not be genuine. “Well, it’s probably just a one-time thing,” she says.

“Either that or he’s a sociopath,” Jennifer says. Miss Amber looks like she doesn’t quite know how to respond to this, so Jennifer smiles, to signal that she’s joking, and Miss Amber makes a sound that gestures toward laughter, and Jennifer says she’ll talk to Milo and withdraws into the hall. Once, after Milo had been in the classroom about a month, Jennifer arrived unseen and heard Miss Amber saying to the children, “You’re killing me.”

Inside Miss Helen’s office, Milo is slouched in a child-size plastic chair with his arms folded across his chest. Her baby, her boy-child. Her reward. He radiates defiance, and Jennifer can tell from the edge in the director’s voice that she’s been trying and failing to inspire remorse. “We’ve been talking about what happened,” Miss Helen says.

“What happened, Milo?” Jennifer asks.

“Didn’t Miss Amber tell you?” Miss Helen asks.

“She told me what happened,” Jennifer says. “I was asking him why.”

“Well, he hasn’t told us that. We’ve asked, but he refuses to say.”

Milo slides from the chair to the floor and picks two cars out of a plastic bin. In an echo of Ben, he crashes the cars together. “Ow, ow, ow,” one car cries, and the other says, “Ha ha ha,” and smashes down again. She could tell him not to smash the cars like that, not to act out the infliction of pain. She could make it a permanent rule. But then he’d just do it when she wasn’t there to see. Is that all morality is? Concealment?

Miss Helen stands up behind her desk as if to signal that she wants the both of them to get the hell out. “Milo has refused to apologize. I’ve explained we need to control our bodies. We need to be sorry when we’ve hurt someone.”

“I’ll talk to him,” Jennifer says. Milo suddenly launches himself up from the floor and into Jennifer. He smashes his face into her leg and clings with both hands to her jeans. He growls. Jennifer steadies herself and puts a hand on his head. “I’ll talk to him,” she says again, and then she crouches and picks Milo up—awkwardly, he’s getting so big—and hustles him out of there as fast as she can. He’s still clinging, still intermittently growling. “Milo, Milo, Milo,” she says into his ear. “Why did you do it?”

“I
didn’t
,” he says, ferociously, as if he believes it. Maybe he can persuade her to believe it, too.

How could he stab his friend in the face, her sunny, innocent creation? How could he do that? Because he’s hers? What she should do is drive away from this Mountain, flee the scene. Now there’s not just her reputation to escape but Milo’s as well, and in the next place there will be no preschools, no lunches, no playdates, so that no one can know them. No one can ever know them.

Back outside, she’s surprised to find Sebastian and Ben lounging on the playground, as if waiting for them. She assumes Sebastian wants to see Milo apologize, so she complies with this unstated request—crouching down, looking Milo seriously in the eye, pointing at Ben. At first he refuses, but she walks him over and makes him repeat the words until they approximate sincerity. Throughout this Ben twists from side to side, as if he finds the whole scene excruciating. When it’s over, he looks up at his dad. “Can we go to the playground?” he asks. “With them?”

“We’re on a playground.”

“No, the other playground. The one me and Milo like.”

Sebastian looks at Jennifer and shrugs. A master of ambiguity. It bothers her that Ben is so quick to forgive Milo, so recently his abuser. And yet she’s also glad. “Okay,” she says.

They walk. Though often in Sewanee you drive a distance that short, Sebastian sets off walking without discussion. The boys run ahead of him and Jennifer lags behind, because her only previous encounter with Sebastian has convinced her that she doesn’t enjoy his company.

To her surprise, when they get to the playground Sebastian starts playing with the boys—chasing them and swinging them around until they’re manic with delight. She’d had him pegged as the type to hang back, checking his phone. She sits on a bench and watches him do the testosterone thing. Sometimes she plays with Milo like this, but she’s too old to sustain the necessary energy long. Tommy wanted to be this kind of dad, and intermittently was, before he died. But a drunk can’t be counted on to distinguish between fun and frightening. A drunk can’t be counted on to gauge another person’s response.

Sebastian flops down next to her on the bench, giving off heat. He makes an animal sound of weariness. He doesn’t look at her, keeping his eyes on the boys. They’re giggling behind the slide, planning something they clearly think is devilish and clever, but most likely isn’t. “I guess that was just a blip on the radar,” he says.

“What was?”

He mimes stabbing.

“Oh,” she says. “I’m really sorry.”

He shrugs irritably, and from this she concludes he wants no further apology. But she can’t think of anything else to talk about, so if they’re to converse the burden will be on him. He props his elbows on the back of the bench, not looking at her. “I need to apologize,” he said. “I’m sorry about how I was at Megan’s party.”

“It’s all right.”

“Not really. It was a little early in our acquaintance to show you my worst side.”

“Better than the reverse,” Jennifer says. “At least then you know what you’re getting.”

Sebastian looks at her like he can’t decide whether to be affronted or amused.

Jennifer watches herself choose to press forward. Something about him provokes her to speech when normally she’d choose silence. “Why do you live here, if you don’t like it?”

“We came for Megan’s job.”

“Oh.”

“If you’re an academic, you have to go where the jobs are.” He sighs. “But also Megan likes it here. She didn’t really like New York.”

“But you did?”

“I did. I was a real photographer in New York, and now I take pictures of toddlers in their Easter clothes.”

“Oh,” Jennifer says again. Then, to her own surprise, she says, “I lived in New York a little while. I wanted to be a dancer.”

“Really? What happened?”

“I got married.”

“Ah.” Sebastian laughs. “Me too.” There’s a silence, and then he says, “At my wedding my aunt told me she had a piece of advice. I thought it would be something like never go to bed angry, but instead she looked at me and said, ‘Endure. Endure. Endure.’ ” He tells this like it’s funny, but Jennifer feels no urge to laugh. Maybe because she doesn’t, he gives her that wary look again. “Anyway, I’m sorry. I’m sure you think I’m an asshole.”

“Maybe not.”

“Maybe not?”

“It was just one incident,” Jennifer says. “Do you think my son’s a sociopath?”

He grins. “No. Maybe not.” The grin fades, and he continues, “But I have to warn you that Megan might. She gets very worked up about Ben, very nervous any time she thinks another kid might be a bully.”

“Oh,” Jennifer says.

“We have friends, another couple, with a kid a year older than Ben, and once we had them over for dinner and their kid bit his ear. Now I can’t get Megan to hang out with them. Don’t be surprised if she’s weird with you for a while.”

“But
I
didn’t stab Ben.”

He shrugs. “Your kid did. Same thing.”

“But not for you.”

“I’m not quite as caught up in the psychodrama of child rearing. Is your kid alive at the end of the day? Did you feed him? Did you tell him you liked his drawing? Good. Great. You’ve done your job. It’s crazy to think you can mold them into perfect human beings, if you just make all the perfect choices. It’s crazy to think you can protect them from pain.”