The Woman Next Door (5 page)

Maybe all they wanted was to borrow something: a saw, a hammer, a little coffee, perhaps, some kitchen utensils—one of those things people always find themselves short of when they've just moved into a place.

She looked frantically around the room. She thought,
It's too dark. They'll wonder why there are no lights on, what I'm doing in here with no lights on . . . and with the drapes open on such a cold day.

She crossed the room, flicked the overhead lights on, hurried back to the window, drew the drapes closed. The sudden shutting of the drapes caused a quick flow of perspiration under her arms and on her forehead.

She studied the room again. And smiled. They would be impressed by it. She parted the drapes a little and watched as they disappeared around the corner of the house. They were going to the side door.

T
im
Bennet
hoped no one was home. Forty-five minutes or an hour of idle chitchat and instant coffee served in demitasse cups with these very private people was not the stuff that ideal mornings were made of. Very private people, he knew, because in all the months he'd worked on the house, they hadn't once come over to lend a hand or to say hello. He'd seen the husband only a couple times, either coming or going in his big dark-green Mercury Marquis. And occasionally he'd caught glimpses of what appeared to be a woman's form at some of the side windows. Only the little boy—dark-haired and gray-eyed; he seemed incapable of smiling—had never bothered to say anything to him, and that just a hurried "Hi" or "You gonna live here?" or "My mommy says I gotta get right home," without waiting for a reply.

He looked around the edges of the side door. No doorbell. He knocked gently.

"Louder," Christine said.

"We don't want to disturb them, honey."

"We aren't disturbing them." She leaned forward in the wheelchair and rapped hard on the massive oak door.

And the house itself—Tim's thoughts continued—said, announced, that they were private people. Gray brick and black trim and spiked wrought-iron fence around the sides and front, only the long driveway open.
Good fences make good neighbors
, Tim thought when he first saw it. And everything about the house always so neat and tidy. These were not only private people; they were fastidious. Private and fastidious. Not the kind of people who enjoyed surprise visits by new neighbors.

"Let's go, honey," he said. "They're obviously not home."

"They're home." Quick, certain.

And Tim heard the doorknob being turned. He put on his
How are you?
smile, though he despised it, and looked down at Christine. He saw that she was smiling in the same way. It pleased him.

The door opened.

She was not what Tim had imagined. He had imagined someone thin and pale and with something unmistakably authoritarian, or aristocratic, about her. This woman might have been dowdy were it not for a kind of cold sharpness around her eyes and mouth. Her dark-brown hair had just begun turning gray above her forehead and around her temples, and her skin suggested too much time indoors. "Hello," she said. (Tim detected a whisper of tightness in the voice; he thought he knew what it would sound like in thirty years—a high-pitched crone's screech, grating and insistent.) "You're my new neighbors, aren't you?" she continued. (Her tone of condescension was obvious.) "I'm afraid my husband's not home. He's at work. He's always at work." (And her breasts were huge, hard-looking. They hugged her black cotton housedress in a way that would have been appealing on any other woman; on her, they were merely big and hard-looking.)

"Hello," Tim said. "I'm Tim
Bennet
."

She offered him her hand. "Marilyn Courtney."

He took her hand, noticed that her flesh was soft and cool; it seemed an anachronism. He nodded to his right. "And this is my wife, Christine."

The woman withdrew her hand and offered it to Christine. Christine took it; her smile brightened. "I'm very happy to meet you, Mrs. Courtney."

"Please call me Marilyn."

"And call me Christine."

Tim—as if in prayer or thanksgiving—lowered his head momentarily and closed his eyes. Somehow, he could read it in the way Christine spoke, in the way she smiled, in the few words that had passed between her and this woman, she had come back to him, had rid herself of the thing—the vampire—that had been slowly draining her these past six months.

S
onny Norton was a tall, stocky man in his middle thirties who walked as if he were constantly hurrying somewhere—legs stiff, shoulders thrust up, arms straight and swinging in precise arcs. He had a long, angular face, reminiscent of the Easter Island stones; his eyes and the set of his jaw had that same studied blankness.

The "pictures" he saw had never scared him too much—they had never actually hurt him—but they had made him wonder and worry about himself, because (his sister, Irene, had told him) they meant that he was not only slow but also crazy. Sonny had been able to memorize Irene's exact words, since she used them so often: "You tell people about these things you think you see, Sonny, and they're not going to like you. They're going to say, 'Look at him, he's not only stupid, he's
crazy
.'" Sonny hated that word—
stupid
. It was a mean word, meaner than the word
slow
, which Dr.
Fenaway
liked to use. Other people liked to use
retard
. "He's the local retard," Sonny had once overheard George Fox say, as if being slow meant he couldn't hear, either. "But he's okay. He'd cut his right arm off for
ya
if
ya
needed it. It just makes me a tad uncomfortable having him around, if you know what I mean." And Sonny thought maybe he did know what George Fox meant, but he wasn't sure.

Sonny had heard about the new people in Cornhill. He remembered that someone had told him the names of the new people—their last name, anyway, but be couldn't remember what it was. Names meant very little to him. They were
always
hard to remember, and he found it difficult to understand why other people put so much importance on them. A person's face was important, and his smile, his tone of voice. You learned a lot from those things. But you learned nothing from a person's name. Sonny had once been told that those thoughts were "surprisingly profound," and, of course, be had no idea what that meant. He knew only that they were true thoughts.

He smiled to himself. It was good to be able to think.

He saw that he was approaching the big, dark house where Mrs. Courtney lived, and be remembered the time—a year ago?—he had been passing the house, and Mrs. Courtney's son had been on the sidewalk, and he, Sonny, had said "Hi" to the little boy, just trying to be friendly, and Mrs. Courtney had come running out of the house, and pulled her son to her and almost spat, "Get out of here, get out of here! Stay away from my soul."

The pictures he had seen around the woman had frightened Sonny more than any of the others. Never before had he seen such pictures around anyone. And the feelings that had radiated from her had made him nauseous, as if someone's strong hands were clutching hard at his stomach, trying to squeeze out what was inside.

Ever since that day, even passing the Courtney house made Sonny nauseous, and so he gave it a wide berth, his eyes riveted on the house all the while.

"Hello," he heard, aware that the word was not really a greeting but designed to make him take notice of the person saying it. He turned his head and stopped immediately. The pretty blonde woman was in a wheelchair, her legs covered by a heavy checkered blanket. She was one of the "new people" in Cornhill; Sonny knew it immediately.

"Hi," he said.

"Hi." The woman smiled.

"My name's Sonny." He gestured toward Avenue A, behind him. "I live down there."

"Hello, Sonny. My name's Christine."

Sonny thought that he liked her voice; it was soft, nearly musical. Which is why he was puzzled, confused, that the picture, the memory, should come to him at that moment. It stemmed from the beginning of Cornhill's rebirth, two decades before, when Sonny was still a teenager. Some of Cornhill's old, decrepit houses had been gutted to make them ready for renovation, and people with hammers and saws and truckloads of brick and roofing tile were everywhere.

Sonny had never been allowed to own a pet (they demanded a lot of attention and care, he was told); but that did not stop him from making "free pets" of the numerous stray cats and dogs that then roamed the streets of Cornhill. ("They're my friends," he explained. "I feed them, sometimes, and I pet them. They know me, and I know them.") One day, he came upon a new stray—a huge, short-haired gray tabby sleeping quietly just inside the front entrance of an abandoned house. He watched the cat a while, pleased by the feeling of serenity and comfort it gave him, by its perfect beauty. And then—because he had no fear of stray animals, had always known instinctively which were approachable and which weren't, and because of the good feelings this animal gave him—he leaned over and put his hand on the cat's back and began to stroke it.

Instantly the cat awakened, lashed out at him, and ran into the house. Sonny followed, his intention to apologize to the animal for disturbing it. He found the cat in a second-floor bedroom, cornered it—"I'm sorry, kitty cat, I'm sorry"—tried to understand the new feelings radiating from it, feelings of fear and panic, tried to equate those feelings with what the cat had been only moments before, felt awed by the two so totally different creatures this cat could be.

He leaned over again, certain he could calm the cat and make it into the beautiful, peaceful thing it was.

It took many stitches to sew up his arm and hand. The scars would remain with him for the rest of his life.

Sonny could not understand why that memory should return—and so vividly—when he talked to the pretty lady in the wheelchair. The feelings that came from her were so good, so loving. What could his memory of a cornered and panicked animal have to do with that?

C
hristine shook her head slowly, in self-criticism. This wouldn't do. What she had captured here, on the canvas, was not the boy's spirit, not the fire inside him, but only the face he had presented to the world—the innocence and the wonder the world expected of him. The boy she remembered had gone deeper than that—subtly, yes, but deeper. That boy would have been a world burner someday. The boy she had painted would not shape the world; he would be shaped by it.

Her error, of course, was in the eyes. Perhaps she had
wanted
only innocence, only wonder from this boy. Perhaps the thing she had seen in that other boy's eyes had frightened her a little, had made her want to restructure him on the canvas so she could save a semblance of him from the pain that would obviously have been his—a kind of
Picture of Dorian Gray
, only the other way around.

"Does it hurt very much?" the boy had asked, pointing stiffly at the chair and at her legs.

"I don't remember that it ever really hurt," she told him.

There were other children his age playing in the small park, but he had apparently only been watching them from a distance. Not glumly, as though he wanted to but could not be a part of their fun; merely watching.

"Do you come here a lot?" Christine asked.

"No," said the boy. "I come here sometimes."

"To play"—she nodded—"with the other kids?"

The boy glanced around. When he looked back, a soft, almost long-suffering smile was on his lips. "I play with them sometimes, but not a lot."

"Don't you like to play with them?"

The boy's smile sharpened, as if Christine had told him a bad joke. Christine thought the effect, on any other child's face, would have been ludicrous. He said, "I don't think they like to play with me," and he emphasized the word
me
.

"No," Christine said without thinking, "I'm sure you're mistaken."

"No, I'm not," the boy said, and the same,
That was a bad joke
, smile was on his face. He turned abruptly to his right and, in a minute, was gone.

Christine thought of yelling after him, "I'm sorry," but realized the apology wasn't necessary. She hadn't upset the boy, hadn't opened old wounds; he was merely finished talking with her and had better things to do.

She had gone back to the park a number of times in search of the boy, but he had not reappeared. It saddened her a little. She imagined that he was a very lonely child—though, in time, he would learn to cope with it—and that she was one of the few people who would ever know how to deal with him, how to talk with him, how to be his friend.

And then one day, just after her marriage to Tim, she was sitting in the park and a little girl, apparently intrigued by the wheelchair, approached her tentatively, cautiously.

"Hi," the girl said.

"Hello," Christine said. "What's your name?"

"Cecile."

"That's a nice name. My name's Christine."

"You're very pretty," the girl said.