Good Neighbors Page 14

  “Hello? Something’s happening on my block!”

  Outside, neighbors with anonymous faces assembled in front of the Wilde house. The moonlight played against their makeshift disguises; a luminescence that was both absorptive and reflective, emitting hues in blue and red. It wasn’t the craziest thing he’d ever seen. In Iraq, a kid with an IED had taken out his commanding officer while civilians watched through broken windows. Some of them had cheered. So yeah, he’d seen some crazy shit, which was how he knew what crazy shit looked like.

  “Can you hear me? Send a car to Maple Street.” A bad connection. Too much static. Peter hung up and tried again.

  Outside, the moonlight stretched the neighbors’ silhouettes. A slender man with broad shoulders took the lead. A small woman walking slowly, as if in pain, came up beside him. The man wound his arm. Released something heavy in a high arc—

  Clink!

  Glass broke.

  Someone inside the house cried out.

  “Help!” Peter panted into the phone.

  Crackle.

  Crossed signals. All he could hear was Arlo’s static-riddled song: You nod. It doesn’t mean “come in.” He hung up. Tried again.

  The woman—it had to be Rhea Schroeder—handed the tall man another piece of ammunition. He wound his arm.

  “They’re trying to kill someone!” Peter shouted into his phone, but there wasn’t any connection. He hoisted himself and leaned out. Even as he shouted, he wondered if this was real, or if he’d finally lost the plot. Fifteen years living in his parents’ house, stapled to an Oxy habit that rendered the waking and the sleeping into the same dreamlike chimera.

  “I see you, FJ! I see you and I called the cops!” he screamed.

  The kid had already released the second brick. Another crash, another cry from inside the house. A pain cry.

  In eerie near-unison, the neighbors turned. Their faces reflected the earth and the sky and the houses ahead of them, and he knew that if he got close he would see his distorted self, too. “I see you! I see every one of you!” he bellowed.

  Like the night the sinkhole appeared, the people of Maple Street disbursed. Some jogged for their houses, some hid behind hedges. Some, like Rhea Schroeder (who limped just slightly), walked slowly and steadily back toward home. A leisurely pace. Infuriatingly fearless.

  Lights went on in the Wilde house.

  Then came another panicked yelp, this time from a child in there.

  Peter rushed past his therapy mirrors and rolled out to the hall. Considered waking his parents, who slept deep, but they got confused at night. Taking the time to explain would only slow him down. He hoisted himself and went down, down, down the chairlift.

  His all-terrain chair waited at the bottom of the stairs. The one he’d saved up his disability for. He hurried. Got in, reached to unlock the front door. Then out and down the ramp to the sidewalk.

  As he rolled, he felt eyes. They watched from houses. The gape out there, surrounded by reflective orange cones, seemed also to watch. It felt like being in-country. Like Iraq.

  He got to the Wildes’ house, only they had no ramp. He hoisted himself down, his stumps on footrests, then rolled to the ground. Dragged himself by the arms, his belly against black, sticky mud. Pulled himself up the first set of steps, panting from unaccustomed exertion, wondering if he’d imagined all this. If he was about to arrive at the Wildes’ door in the middle of the night, and they’d think he was psychotic.

  He wrapped his stumps under him. They hurt—fire where his knees ought to have been. Not enough mirror therapy today. He banged on the wood just below the doorknob.

  Knock! Knock!

  The air was still and hot. It reminded him of the bad place. An oil field, on fire. A kid offering a nail bomb to his CO like an apple, changing all their lives forever.

  Knock! Knock!

  The boy who answered wore a dingy tank top and no shoes, and for a moment, he was sure this was a trick. He was back in-country. The past had folded over. Followed him six thousand miles and fifteen years.

  The boy stood with his hands in his pants. He shook with shock. Larry. That’s right, this was the neighbor child. Larry Wilde.

  “S’okay,” Peter panted. “You’re okay. Your mom and dad home?”

  The girl with the bandage on her hand appeared beside him. Julia. “My mom’s hurt,” she said. “We can’t get an ambulance and we’re scared to move her ’cause of the baby.”

  It took Peter another beat. So this was real after all. How strange, that it should be a relief to him.

  From Interviews from the Edge: A Maple Street Story, by Maggie Fitzsimmons,

  Soma Institute Press, © 2036

  “I love the New Yorker magazine, but that article and the book that came after aren’t true to life. I don’t think like a computer, in binaries. I didn’t pick a side. Hate one family, love the other. It’s not how rational people engage with their surroundings.

  “We were bystanders that summer, watching something bad unfold. Those searchers out there were a constant reminder. Some of the newspeople came to us for comments. We didn’t have any. What could we say that they didn’t already know?… People who’d never lived in our town, who’d never met anybody involved, they kept writing about it online. They had all these theories about how Shelly had escaped and run away, or was faking it. The global warming occultists were worse. Who gets possessed by a hole? Everywhere we went, people at work and the grocery store and our extended families asked us about it. Especially, they asked about Arlo. We knew that we had to do something, take it back from them, because if anyone had earned an opinion, it was us…

  “Look at it the other way. What if we’d done nothing? Acted like it was Rhea’s problem. The press and all those blogs would have come down on us just as hard. You can’t get away with being a bystander anymore. There’s too much information. You have to take a stand or people think you’re guilty, too… We didn’t mean anything by the brick. If they were innocent, no harm done. And if they were guilty, well, we’d put them on notice.” —Margie Walsh

  “People talk a lot about health effects, but I’m fine and it’s been years. No cancer or what have you. None of my buddies have it, either… What I noticed about those people—the ones you call the people of Maple Street—is that they didn’t have respect. They shoved their way all over like they thought looking busy meant they were helping. They kept asking all these questions. They made us nervous. They made that woman, Rhea Schroeder, nervous, too.” —Alex Figuera, Garden City Fire Department search supervisor on Shelly’s case

  “We moved to a short-term rental as soon as Sterling Park caved in. My eldest had asthma. I didn’t want to take any chances.

  “I wasn’t as friendly with the people who stayed. They had their own clique. Their children all played together. Rhea was their Top Dog. I never got a bad feeling about her. She was always polite. Some people say that now, that she’d seemed dangerous. But I never saw that side [of her] and that’s not why I left…

  “Would it have happened if the rest of us had stayed? I’ll bet they’d have felt more self-conscious. The brick thing wouldn’t have happened… And I suppose all the worse things after that wouldn’t have happened, either.

  “They acted like good neighbors, but they weren’t. They’ve all written blogs and gone on chat shows and cashed in and I don’t judge that. Everyone’s doing their best in this economy. But there’s not a single account by any of them that they went over to Rhea’s house and asked how she was doing. Not a single mention that they offered to take care of Ella or drive FJ to lacrosse practice. Nobody ever invited Fritz for a beer. Even Linda Ottomanelli, who claimed to be Rhea’s best friend, never set foot inside that house. Not for the entire four weeks. Honestly, were any of them really friends?” —Anna Gluskin

  Maple Street

  Monday, July 26

  In the hangover-like aftermath of the brick, the people of Maple Street turned inward. They went to work and c
leaned their floors and paid their bills and neatly arranged the things that, over the long search for Shelly, had gone untended.

  Those who’d watched Peter Benchley roll to 7-Eleven, presumably to call the police, and then return with an ambulance and three cop cars, had been surprised. Who would have guessed that Peter was so capable? And why would the Wildes need an ambulance?

  They’d been appalled when thrashing and pregnant Gertie Wilde got wheeled out on a stretcher. What were the odds, throwing blind, that FJ would have struck anyone at all?

  They’d watched the Wilde house after it emptied, too. Its lights stayed on and its front door open, though the family was gone. Peter Benchley got out from his motorized chair and crawled up the Wildes’ front steps, stumps shimmying, until he was at the top. He looked back at the crescent. House to house. Could he see them, watching him? They stepped back, out of the light. He reached high, got his hand on the knob, and closed the Wildes’ front door.

  This small act of decency proved unnerving. An accusation, boomeranged back at its accusers.

  More detectives—people named Hudson and Gennet—appeared early that next Monday morning before many left for work. They went door to door. We saw nothing, they said. We heard nothing.

  We know nothing.

  * * *

  The children of Maple Street were not so sanguine as their parents. Their testimony had hurt the Wildes and they knew it. They thought about the things they’d said. The conversations they’d repeated. They’d used the word rape, hadn’t they? But was that a word Shelly had ever used?

  Or had they invented it, to cure their boredom, engineering a summertime fantasy that they’d never imagined responsible adults would believe?

  Through eavesdropped whispers, they heard about their parents’ greased faces, and Gertie Wilde’s hysterical shrieks inside an ambulance, and poor Julia and Larry, riding after in tank tops, shorts, and sleep-caked eyes.

  The brick was a double insult, too soon on the heels of the first—Shelly’s fall. They had not yet caught their breaths. They wanted to mourn their missing friend. To digest that unless she’d perpetrated a great hoax, she really wasn’t coming back.

  “Could we pretend I never told you?” Sam Singh asked his mom on the morning after the brick.

  “It’s not your concern,” Nikita answered while her four other children buzzed, each tossing glasses and spoons and bowls into the sink. Even though the house had a “no shoes” rule, the floors were caked with bitumen.

  “But it wasn’t true. Shelly lied. I only told you because you asked.”

  Nikita was a busy woman, and this American culture was still new to her. It always would be. She hadn’t the tools to measure nuance here. That was someone else’s job. “Just be lucky he’s never been alone in a room with you, Sam Singh!… He hasn’t ever been alone with you, has he?”

  “I don’t think so?” Sam asked.

  Nikita visibly began to shake.

  * * *

  Charlie Walsh had an even harder time.

  “Mom, you’ve got it wrong. Shelly was the one who went after Julia. Her family’s nice. She’s the nicest girl on the block. I like her. I’ve been over their house a hundred times,” he told Margie. She was sitting at the polished kitchen table, scrolling through a grant proposal for Habitat for Humanity.

  “Can I tell you something?” Margie asked. “This is for grown-ups. It’s a grown-up matter. I know you think they’re good people. Maybe they are good people. But good people do bad things. That’s why it’s so awful.” Her tears had welled, as if from personal experience. “Look at what they come from. That song about heroin and cartoons. That’s a true story Julia’s dad sang, about his own life. That kind of history leaves scars, Charlie. It damages a person. Victims turn into predators… I know this from experience… Tell me the truth,” she asked, earnestly and for the ninth time, “has he touched your penis?”

  “No, Mom.” Charlie backed away, one foot after the other, until he was out of the well-lit study, and in the dark hall.

  He approached Sally Mom after that. “We have to stand up for them. They’re innocent,” he said.

  Sally looked up from her papers, the model of practicality. She was shut up in her home office, her printer singing as it pooped out another land-use proposal. She did property law and he saw her for maybe a half hour a day. But he liked her. If they were strangers, he’d seek her out, and he had a feeling she felt the same. This wasn’t love, necessarily. It was that lucky thing you have when two people understand each other utterly.

  “This isn’t our problem. If they didn’t do it, no one’ll file charges. We’ll all forget about it in six months. Not even Rhea Schroeder can hold a grudge that long when she’s in the wrong.”

  “But someone threw a brick at them!”

  “And the police have been hunting them down all morning. Let Margie Mom have her way on this. Trust me. This kind of accusation isn’t something people like us can fight.”

  * * *

  Dave Harrison sucked it up and approached both his mom and his dad. This wasn’t a pleasant endeavor. They really had divided the house with a black Sharpie marker.

  He started with his dad, Tim, who hadn’t worked in years. Some days he was dizzy, other days he ached. There were fevers and chills. He’d been sick for so long that everything scared him. He was scared of public places and too hot days and anyone with a cough or head cold. He was especially scared of the hole—afraid it was radiating cancer. The doctors and Dave’s mom called it hypochondria. Long ago, they’d stopped believing his complaints, so he’d turned to hypnotists and aura readers and scammers who’d promised cures and never delivered. Dave didn’t think it was hypochondria. The old man really was sick. But after more than a decade of sharing his body with an enemy he couldn’t evict, he’d lost faith.

  “It’s gone too far,” Dave said. They were in the den with the old, Scotchgard-covered couches made of chemicals that were now banned in forty states. His dad’s shoes had tracked bitumen everywhere. The floor was sticky goo. This whole crescent was seeped with it.

  Tim blew a lazy raspberry, eyes closed, as he lay on the couch. The only channel that got reception was local news. The static-riddled story was about a potential pedophile on Maple Street, implicated in Shelly’s death, whom sources claimed was the ex-rocker Arlo Wilde. The camera showed footage of the Wilde house, and of the hole, too. Nobody except Rhea Schroeder was available for comment. I can’t tell you anything for certain, she exclaimed, her eyes bright and fanatic. But there’s no way Shelly went out into that park, unless she was running from something.

  “FJ Schroeder threw that brick, didn’t he?” Dave asked. “Were you there?”

  Tim’s face was puffy from the Chinese herbs his holistic healer had given him. He smelled like plum flower.

  “God, Dad. I told you it was all a lie. What’s wrong with you?”

  Tim finally opened his eyes: creepy green lights, focused on nothing, clots of luminescent sand oil in their crevices. “You don’t understand the kind of evil a person can do,” he answered. “I’m protecting you.”

  “Dad, were you out there last night? Did you help them throw that brick?”

  “You don’t want to tattle. Imagine what would happen if they took me away.”

  Dave imagined. His life would be a lot easier with one of them gone. He’d have a whole house again.

  Tim read his mind. “You’d have the house, but you and Adam would be all alone with her. No buffer.”

  Dave approached his mom after that. Jane was his practical parent, who paid bills and got groceries and set boundaries. When Tim first got sick, she’d been really upset. Cried herself to sleep and all that. But she cried herself dry. All her sympathy ran out. And not just her sympathy for Tim.

  Jane wore her hair in a loose bun and dressed in pretty floral outfits and spoke softly because she was the headmaster of the Hillcock Preschool. She read lots of child rearing books and had a PhD in early chil
dhood education, too. You never got the real Jane when you talked to her; just this textbook automaton semblance of sweet compassion.

  He found Jane in his parents’ bedroom. The fucked-up part? They’d even split the bed. Some nights, neither giving an inch, they both slept in it. Her side was made and she was sitting, papers neatly stacked all around. She kept her things clean, in order. No bitumen. No crumbs.

  “We should go to the police before anyone else gets hurt.”

  Ringlets of hair streamed down from her loose bun. She was going through a roster for next year’s class. “You think we should go to the police?”

  “Yeah. Because it’s not true. That story about Mr. Wilde. It’s not true. But everybody’s acting like it is true. We don’t even know for sure that Shelly’s dead. You went to a service for her and we don’t even know for sure.”

  “You think Mr. Wilde is innocent?”

  “I told you that. I’ve always been telling you that.”

  Same calm voice. Except she wasn’t a calm person, not really. Because she’d been the one to divide the house with a Sharpie. It went all the way into the kitchen, bisecting it so they each used different cupboards. He got the microwave; she got the stove. They’d been to court only once. The lawyers said it would last for years unless she signed a paper allowing him half of everything, including her huge inheritance, because he was too sick to work. But she wouldn’t do that. She just kept redrawing the lines every time the Sharpie smudged. She used an online ruler app to make them perfect.

  “You’re scared that unless you help him, he might hurt you?”

  “No, Mom. You’re not listening.”

  “You’ve said that twice, honey, that I’m not listening. But I am. What makes you think I’m not listening?”

  Tears of frustration ran down Dave’s face. She had the power to do this to him. No one else. Which was why he only ever talked to her when it was house-on-fire-absolutely-necessary. “Mom. Please. Dad’s sick and Adam can’t say shit unless FJ Schroeder tells him to. It’s just us and you know that. Please, Mom. Listen to me. The Rat Pack are lemmings and so are their parents and because of them Mrs. Wilde is in the hospital. What do we do?”