The New Neighbor (3 page)

H
ere I am
at the end of adventure. The quiet house. The woods. I sit on my deck like a bird-watcher, like a hunter in a blind, wondering if my neighbor will poke her head out. I finish one mystery and start another, this one about a young woman trying to solve her family’s murder. I look up from blood and bodies to gaze at the still blue pond. Blue when the sunlight’s on it, gray otherwise. This is a metaphor for something. When I grow weary of that I go inside and sit where I sit now, at my desk, in the room I call my study, though what am I studying here? This desk was once my father’s, and it’s imposing, as was he. Dark shiny wood, bigger than a desk has a right to be. It must weigh a great deal. I have nicked it here and there, banging it with my cane, and left a stray ink mark or two on its surface. I’ve cluttered it with papers and books, though at least I have no computer to offend its old-fashioned sensibility. Still, it is dignified and reproachful, which are also words that belonged to my father.

I am personifying the desk. Am I so lonely I’d like it to come to life, and sing and dance with the silverware, like in a fairy-tale cartoon? No, that’s not right. Loneliness is not my problem. My problem is restlessness, forever and ever, amen. I’m restless. I want something to happen, though it’s been quite some time since anything happened to me.

Jennifer Young. Jennifer Young. What are you doing here?

People used to tell me I must be looking forward to retirement, after all those years of working so hard. I worked until I was in my seventies! But some of us don’t work so that we can rest. Some of us rest so that we can work. I belong to the second group, but for a while, at least, I mistook myself for a member of the first. When I bought this house, I thought my restlessness had burned itself out, and that it was at long last time to retreat into peaceful solitude, free of all the world’s demands. Isn’t that the end of the story, for soldiers and adventurers? At least for the ones who fail to die.

Let’s talk about this house, this mountain, my paradise on earth. After I moved here I was seized by a sudden interest in local history, and there is little I don’t know about this place, though I don’t find the facts of it quite as interesting as I once did. I live on the Cumberland Plateau, one thousand feet up, with its caves and its waterfalls and its highways blasted through rock. So many delights for the nature-minded! Trails to swimming holes and wildflowers and other species of the picturesque. When I first moved here I was nimble enough to walk the less challenging trails. No more. When I want a view from the bluff now I have to drive to an overlook in Sewanee. I like the one with the Cross. The Cross—it’s a war memorial, white, sixty feet tall. Around its foot there’s a circle of spotlights, so that at night it glows and draws bats and moths of all sizes. Moths as big as bats.

There’s always been religion on the Mountain, though that’s not why I moved here, as the war long ago cured me of any belief in God. Sewanee is an Episcopal school, a bishop’s notion. Then there’s the Assembly—founded in 1882, as a summer-long Sunday school. When I first came to the Mountain, as a girl in the 1930s, we were visiting a friend of my mother’s who had a family cottage there. I could have bought a house in the Assembly when I moved here, but I wasn’t looking for community. What I have in this house is community’s opposite. My house is on a winding road off the main highway with its two lanes and its too-fast drivers. The road to my house goes past the little airport, which has little planes that putt-putter down little runways. They remind me of the war, but in a way I like. They remind me of a movie about the war. My house was built by an old couple who got divorced, or maybe a young couple who died. I can’t remember which. I know it wasn’t old/died, young/divorced, because I remember that when the Realtor told me the story I felt surprised. Behind it is a pond. Around it woods. The woods are also around the pond. The only other sign of human habitation is the deck of Jennifer Young’s house, and her house’s brown exterior wall. When I sit on my own deck I can see sunlight glinting off the windows. But for a long time no one lived there. As for my house? My house has too many rooms.

I was born the year women got the vote. That’s an interesting fact about me. I changed everything. “Things are different now,” my mother used to whisper, smoothing back my hair after she’d tucked me in at night. “Things will be different for you.”

My mother had married at nineteen, had three children and lost one, suffered in her marriage to my father, though of course I didn’t understand that then. If there was a shadow of grief on my mother I felt it only on those nights when she whispered like that in my ear. I remember her as bubbly, irrepressible, theatrical. She dressed for dinner and called me “
chérie
” and referred to the living room as the “parlor.” As a child I marveled at her endless cheer—I admired it enormously, and it mystified me. So I couldn’t quite see her as human. And then I got older and she grew artificial, or my idea of her did. After that we couldn’t understand each other at all. But when I was a child, and she was all marvelous gleaming surfaces, moments of truth—her whisper in my ear—just frightened and unnerved me.

For years she imagined for me the brilliant life I’d have at college, but my father was a doctor, and I wanted to go to nursing school. What I really wanted was to be a doctor, too, but nothing led me to believe that was possible. When in the end she couldn’t wear down my determination, she swallowed her own disappointment and behaved as though nursing school had been exactly what she’d wanted for me all along. When I joined the army, that was something else. I said, “I enlisted,” and she turned ashen at the words. She looked at me like I was already a ghost. All those times she’d said
different
, this was not what she’d had in mind.

It’s funny where your mind goes, when you get to be my age. When my mother died I was in the emergency room with her. We’d been in there five hours or more. She’d had a stroke. I was holding her hand, and she kept talking about a song called “The Old Oaken Bucket” that was stuck in her head. Was the line “
by
the well” or “
in
the well”? Which was it? I didn’t know. I had no idea, and that was maddening to her. What was wrong with me? Finally I picked one. After that she kept saying
don’t leave me
.

Don’t leave me. Anyone I might say that to is already gone.

I’m restless. Once upon a time I would have cleaned my house from top to bottom, or perfected my garden, or gone to work. Now what am I to do with this energy? Fly to Paris and take a lover? Jog?

In the days when I still had conversations, and people found out I went to war, they’d ask if I’d wanted an adventure, and I’d want to tell them no, that all I wanted was to serve my country. But I suppose if that were truly all I’d wanted I could’ve stayed at home and knitted socks. I was not pressed into service, rising to the occasion against my will. I always wanted something more. Something bigger. Something different. Something else.

T
hey need money.
Even more so, now that she’s put Milo in school. Their need for money wakes her every night into midnight silence, so that she traverses the darkened hall to Milo’s room, whispers to his sleeping form that everything will be all right, then goes out on the deck and looks at the starry night and wills herself to feel peace. All around her the maddening mindless thrum of insects, punctuated occasionally by an eerie, insistent owl, a sound that reminds her of the woman across the pond. They need money, so she’s trying to get it, sticking in each thumbtack, asking each proprietor if she can leave a stack of her cards. At the coffee shop in Sewanee, at the café in Monteagle, at Monteagle’s real-deal small-town places and Sewanee’s knowingly rustic ones, they tell her to go ahead, smiling at Milo as he zooms his toy car up the side of a counter, and she puts up her flyers, with their hopeful tabs printed with her number and her name. A woman behind a café counter in Sewanee tells her she has no competition: there used to be a massage therapist in the little strip of three storefronts at the edge of Monteagle—“You know the place? Everything that opens there closes”—but a few years ago she moved away. Jennifer isn’t licensed in Tennessee but up here there seems little chance that anyone will check.

She’d meant to do this task alone, but impulsively she picked up Milo early from preschool, right before nap, which she knew would win his gratitude. He hates nap. He hasn’t napped since he was two and a half. “Naps are
stupid
,” he likes to say. “Naps are
jackass
.” Though she knows she shouldn’t let him say
jackass
, she’s so amused by the way he uses it as an adjective that she finds it hard to make him stop. She loves the vehemence of his pronouncements. She loves the smile that breaks across his face when he sees her. She loves the appreciative sound he makes—
mmmm
—when she gives him a bite of something good. Where they let her hang her signs, she buys a treat for herself and Milo to show her gratitude. So far they’ve had real lemonade, fries, a blueberry muffin, and they’re topping it all off with an ice cream cone, sitting at a little table in a café that looks like a log cabin. The ice cream is an enormous scoop of dripping chocolate that she’s ceded entirely to Milo, who’s struggling mightily to conquer it. “You need to lick around the bottom,” she says. He pushes his whole tongue against the top, shifting the scoop into a dangerous tilt. “No, the bottom,” she says. “The
bottom
. Do you want me to show you?”

“I can
do
it,” he says, loudly, and she looks away, resisting the urge to snatch the thing from him before it ends up on the floor, or in her lap. Looking away, she catches the eye of a woman at the cash register. The woman is waiting for her change, holding a brown bag of something to go, and for some reason she is turned around, looking at Jennifer. Jennifer freezes, but the woman immediately breaks her gaze, returning her attention to the girl behind the counter. Jennifer turns her own head, too, but she is in the grip of adrenaline now, adrenaline that tells her to be watchful, to be ready at any moment to flee, and she keeps the woman in her peripheral vision. The woman probably just glanced over because Milo was loud. She knows this. She should shake the habit of bracing for confrontation.

But then the woman looks again, and once her change is in her hand she approaches, fumbling with her purse. Time stretches, as in the slow slide into a car wreck. There is endless time, and yet somehow not enough time to stop what’s about to happen. Milo is still fighting his ice cream cone, chasing the drips around the side with his tongue. They’re faster than he is. Some part of Jennifer registers that his frustration is building, but there’s no time, either, to head off the tantrum or the tears. The woman gets very close, her head cocked like she’s trying to place Jennifer’s face. Her expression is pleasant as she does this, but it could morph, at any moment, into wary confusion, or even horror. “I recognize you, don’t I?” she says. Jennifer absorbs these words with the vacant calm of someone who expected disaster. In the last year she’s developed the ability to climb down into the deepest part of herself as if into a storm cellar, pulling a trapdoor shut behind her. After three weeks on the Mountain she hasn’t lost the skill. At the woman’s question, she is gone. It is her body, and not herself, that answers, “I don’t know.”

Now the woman looks at Milo, who is growling at his cone. Nothing conforms to our wishes, not other people, not ice cream, which must insist on melting, dripping sticky down our hands. “Yes,” the woman says. “I’ve seen you two at the playground.”

“Oh,” Jennifer says. She nearly sways in her seat, and puts her hand on the table. “That’s right,” she adds, hardly knowing what she’s saying. “I recognize you now.”

“My son and—I’m sorry, what’s his name?”

“Milo,” Jennifer says, and Milo looks up, snaps, “What?”

“That’s right, Milo. My son and Milo have played together. I think they’re about the same age.”

“
What
, Mommy?” Milo asks.

“Nothing,” Jennifer says. “I was just telling her your name.”

Milo shoots the woman a look, wearing a deep, disgruntled frown. “Why?”

“You played with her little boy at the playground, remember?”

Milo cocks his head, his expression suddenly pleasant. “What’s his name?”

“It’s Ben,” the woman says. “And I’m Megan.”

“Jennifer,” Jennifer says. “Nice to meet you.” She’d offer her hand to shake, but she’s afraid it would be trembling.

“Megan and Jennifer.” The woman—Megan—laughs. Jennifer is bewildered. She’s back in her body, but sluggish, as if she’s been sedated. “We just need a Heather,” Megan says. “Seventies names.” Jennifer tries a polite chuckle.

“Where’s Ben?” Milo says. He’s given up on his ice cream, dropping it onto his napkin on the table, where it pools and spreads. He wipes his fingers on his pants, which doesn’t get his fingers clean but does distribute the mess.

“He’s at school,” Megan says. “He goes to the preschool at the church in Sewanee.”

“That’s where I go!” Milo says. Understanding dawns in his face. “I know Ben,” he says. “He has Spider-Man shoes.”

“Oh,” Megan says, glancing at Jennifer, who interprets that glance as question or judgment.

“Sometimes I get him before nap,” she says. “He doesn’t nap anymore, and it’s hard on him to lie there quietly for two hours.”

But Megan doesn’t care about naps, or why Milo isn’t in school. “We should get them together,” she says. “Set up a playdate.”

“Yes,” Milo says, “yes, yes, yes.” He’s bouncing in his seat, chanting the word. Megan laughs again. Jennifer gives herself an inner slap. Be normal, she exhorts herself. Be friendly. She can almost remember how it’s done. “Hmmm,” she says, playacting. “I get the feeling Milo would like that.”

They exchange numbers and chat for a few minutes, Milo interjecting his desire to have the playdate that day, right now, immediately. Megan is a professor of sociology. She lives in Sewanee. She’s younger than Jennifer, Jennifer thinks, though maybe not by a lot. She looks younger, anyway, with her open, freckled face and her wide, far-apart eyes. She looks younger than Jennifer feels.