Good Neighbors Page 16

  Bianchi’s eyes moved at last. They scanned the hall, which she’d neglected, she now realized. Her own bitumen shoeprints marked the edge of the carpet. He looked toward the dining room, too. Shelly’s bloody cushion in plain sight. He looked right at it and a crazy urge filled her, to bludgeon him. With a chair or the metal base of a lamp. Right there, right then. Wait till dark and dump his body down the hole. And if anybody else saw, she’d kill them, too.

  “She should be well preserved in that cold water. There are people whose job is to examine every detail. We’ll know exactly who’s to blame,” he said.

  He looked back at her. Locked eyes. In her mind, she saw a girl, slumped against the bathroom floor, unconscious.

  Quite against her will, Rhea Schroeder gagged.

  He saw that, too. Then he was walking slowly down the steps, so unassuming as to seem invisible.

  Obstetrics, NYU Winthrop Hospital, Mineola, New York

  Monday, July 26 Early Morning

  Gertie remembered everything. The sounds. The smells. Her children’s terrified expressions. The flashing ambulance she’d had to ride alone in, that had tinted everything a worrisome red. She remembered the many bedrooms she’d grown up in as a girl. Doors knocked down. Fists in walls. One time, there’d been a man making soft noises she hadn’t been able to locate until hours later, in the dark, when she’d finally opened her own closet door. She’d remembered these things, and then everything had gone red.

  In the emergency room, sonogram pictures had shown a little girl. Head and eyes and spindly limbs. A baby sea creature.

  Gertie’d cried and screamed. She’d carried on, knowing it was scaring the kids and Arlo, but unable to stop herself.

  The doctor had been shaking her. Then a nurse. More screaming. So red. How could she have a baby inside her? Had a bad man put it there? She was still a baby! And then a shot in her arm, and the slow, cold rush of weightlessness.

  “Calm down,” the doctor had said. “The baby’s fine. Look.” And there, on the sonogram, little Guppy averted her face from the camera. “It’s a surface wound nowhere near your womb. Some resulting pressure on the spine.”

  Gertie heard that her family was healthy. She understood it. But she didn’t feel safe. She felt like the whole earth was made of sharp things. She couldn’t stop shaking, wailing, shouting foul words in baby talk. This had happened before, during her years with Cheerie, and then again, very briefly, when she’d been hospitalized with post-Julia baby blues.

  “Fuck that cunt Schroeder bitch,” she heard some crazy woman say, in a freakish baby voice. And it was her. She was that woman.

  The kids hid behind the next hospital bed’s curtain, peeking out with wide eyes. Arlo stood a few feet back, hunched and making himself small. She knew that they would not remember the brick from this night. They’d remember the heart of their family going mad.

  “Bee bee boo,” she said. “Shitty neighbors down the hole.”

  The doctor got in her face. Whispered hard and urgent, in the way that women do to each other, when important things happen and children are involved. “Stop it! Right now!”

  Wide-eyed and terrified, pleading for help as best she knew how, Gertie opened her mouth. “The hunters are coming. They take the children first!”

  Another prick, and everything faded.

  Creedmoor Psychiatric Center

  Tuesday, July 27 Day

  She woke up in a different hospital, in a room with a locked door. The guy who interviewed her was the chief psychiatric resident at Creedmoor, Queens’s version of a public madhouse.

  She lucked out. The resident was better than the social workers from when she’d been growing up, or even the shrink who’d helped her process her baby blues. He asked her about her childhood and whether she ever hit her kids. If she’d lately considered hurting the baby in her belly. If she’d stayed on the medication her records showed she was supposed to be taking, which she had. Whether she and Arlo loved each other, or if she needed a referral to a family shelter for battered women. He asked her why she’d reacted that way, gotten so hysterical. She’d told him maybe his neighbors should get together and hit his pregnant belly with a brick in the middle of the night, and then he could call her hysterical.

  Because she had a history of mental illness, and also because she was responsible for young children, he placed her on a thirty-six-hour hold. He’d check in again. If she was still rational, he’d release her.

  Arlo came that night. She wanted to be strong; show him that she wasn’t crazy or damaged or any of those things. But as soon as he sat down in the chair beside her, she was weeping from the shame of it, the brick entirely forgotten.

  He didn’t comfort her like she’d expected. Didn’t seem to have his usual sixth sense, to know that this time, she wanted to be held. “I’m so ashamed,” she said.

  “I’m tired of shame. We didn’t do anything wrong,” he answered. Then he stretched out his arms. You had to look closely. They’d healed after all these years. But she’d seen him naked. He had track marks in other places, too.

  “I feel like I did something wrong. I always feel that way.”

  “I know that feeling.”

  “Can the kids come? Are they here?” she asked. “I need to hold them.”

  “Cafeteria.”

  “They don’t want to see me?”

  “Don’t take it personal.”

  She cried more. Took a while to get hold of herself. He didn’t comfort her and she saw that he was exhausted. Body aching, not sleeping, marrow-deep exhausted. “Sit down next to me,” she said.

  He shook his head. He was trying not to cry. “I’m afraid I won’t be able to stand back up.”

  “Did I upset the children very much?”

  “They’ll get over it,” he said. They both knew from experience that this wasn’t true.

  Tuesday, July 27

  It took a while, but she returned to herself. Her thoughts stopped spinning so very hard, and she stopped feeling so horribly frightened. When that happened, alone in that hospital with distance from the neighbors, she had time to think about the brick.

  Arlo hadn’t just spotted a single psycho out on Maple Street. If that were the case, what happened might have made some sense. No, he’d spotted at least ten neighbors out there, all smeared with sticky oil to appear anonymous.

  What kind of people commit such acts?

  Did Maple Street truly believe that Arlo had raped Shelly? They could not. Physical evidence placed him elsewhere.

  So what was going on?

  She knew these people. Not just Rhea, but the rest of them. She’d seen them stay up all night to finish their kids’ science projects. She’d seen them get weepy over news reports about teen drug addicts and pediatric cancer and lead-contaminated water. They had date nights and took salsa lessons. They read popular fiction about the women’s movement, even the men. They’d gone to real colleges—the kind with ivy and real dorm rooms—and they aspired to send their kids to even better colleges. So how could people like that turn on her and Arlo, and by proxy, Julia and Larry?

  She regretted moving to Maple Street. She’d been the one to push for it. Arlo’d wanted to buy an apartment in their old building. Stick with the kind of people they already knew. Nice people, but people so strapped they didn’t have the time or interest to self-improve unless you counted dieting and trying to quit smoking. She’d been the one to insist on Long Island. She’d had this idea that they’d be like undercover agents, learning the life secrets of the suburban middle class. They’d develop habits like them, and wind up with better jobs like them. She’d reasoned that even if she and Arlo weren’t comfortable with Maple Street, their kids would learn to be. Upward mobility was what counted.

  But when they got here, it hadn’t been like that. Nobody except Rhea had shown any interest. She’d felt distance when she talked to the neighbors, like everything she’d said had been stupid, but they’d never explained to her why. Never
explained the right things to say. They’d never referred clients, even though Gertie had kept handing out her business cards. They’d never suggested Arlo stop by their offices and talk to their office managers about new copiers, even though he’d told them he was available, anytime. Aside from Rhea, they’d changed the subject whenever Larry’s name came up, like she ought to be embarrassed. Like, if your life isn’t perfect, you keep your mouth shut and don’t talk about it until it is perfect, and then you brag.

  Rhea’d proven she was a terrible person. Rhea was a hunter worse than Cheerie, whom, God help her, Gertie wished dead. But she’d had more time than she wanted in this hospital, most of it alone with her thoughts. At first she’d reviewed everything that had transpired between herself and Rhea, searching for indications of treachery. But she searched so thoroughly that she’d inevitably reviewed her own behavior, too.

  If she was honest, there had been trouble in paradise long before the Fourth of July. Unanswered texts, half-smiles and waves instead of stopping to chat, the withdrawal of Shelly from sleepovers—these all should have been obvious to anyone paying attention. Even at the Memorial Day barbeque a month before, Rhea’d barely stopped to say more than a How are you? before moving on.

  If the friendship really had been important to Gertie, why hadn’t she done anything about it? Why hadn’t she rung Rhea’s bell, a red wine bottle bribe in hand if necessary, and asked to sit down with her and have a frank talk? Is this about the night on my porch? a poised, normal person like the kind you see on TV would have asked. Whatever’s going on, you know I’m here for you, because you’re important to me. And you were right. I won’t judge, this normal woman would have said. And the truth was, Rhea really had been important to her. She wouldn’t have judged.

  After Shelly’s fall, a regular person would have baked a ziti for Rhea’s family, then stood next to her while she’d kept vigil at the sinkhole. She’d have said: I love(d) your daughter. Her absence is a physical pain. So I can’t imagine what you’re going through. What can I do to ease your burden?

  Why hadn’t she done these things? Why hadn’t they even occurred to her until now? Why, for that matter, had she left Julia alone with crazed Shelly Schroeder that morning, when any sane mother would have stopped her car?

  What was wrong with her? How could she have been so blind?

  Gertie once read that when people start to lose their sight, they don’t know it. Their minds fill in the missing parts. So, when they’re driving, maybe they’re passing a field of cows, but what they see is just green. Their minds make an assumption based on past experience. It occurred to her that people’s personalities were like that. Full of holes. We think we’re complete but we’re not, and usually that’s just fine. It’s typical. But sometimes the holes line up. You get hit with a brick and you lose your shit like a psycho. Your kid falls down a sinkhole and you turn into the Wicked Witch of the West.

  And maybe, between her and Rhea, something electric had happened. Their blind spots had lined up.

  Tuesday, July 27

  Arlo, Julia, and Larry arrived as soon as visiting hours started. The TV shouted infotainment in the corner of the ceiling and Gertie tried to turn it off, but her drugged-up roommate had the remote.

  Gertie smiled wide. As calming as she knew how. But her voice broke. “Oh, my babies. It’s so good to see you.”

  The kids made their slow way to Gertie’s bed. She patted the side of it, but neither of them climbed up. “That’s okay,” she told them as they elected to share the floor while Arlo took the chair.

  Everybody looked tired and on edge. They waited for her to explain what had happened, what that baby talk was all about.

  “I’m better now,” she said. “I got hit on the head. It made me loopy.”

  “Really?” Larry asked. “You’re better? Can you come home? I need you home.”

  “This is a psychiatric hospital,” Julia said. “We had to prove we’re family just to get allowed in.”

  On a good day, Arlo would have cracked jokes to lighten the mood: What’s red and green and blue all over? Who’s buried in Grant’s Tomb? What do you get when you cross a skeleton and a chicken? Now he crumpled in the armchair like a trench coat without an owner.

  “Julia, she’s all better!” Larry said.

  “I am. I’m all better,” Gertie promised.

  Normally, Julia would have confronted. She’d have persisted until Gertie admitted that no, she hadn’t been hit in the head. Yes, this was a loony bin. Mom’s a little bonkers. But something had shifted in her. A loss of innocence. Instead, she stood. Slowly, so as not to cause surprise, she put her hand over Gertie’s hand. Held it. “Okay,” she said.

  After that, they tried to talk like things were normal. The kids told her about the heat on the crescent, and the fact that the sand oil had surfaced as far as the town pool. Arlo said that they’d been cleaning the house in her absence, getting it ready for her homecoming.

  “Are they giving you a hard time about not coming to work?” Gertie asked.

  “No,” Arlo said. “Josh Fishkin told me to take as long as I need.”

  “Are they still gonna pay you?”

  Arlo looked at his fingernails, which were clean and filed. She noticed that the kids’ hair was brushed, too; their faces clean. Even under this stress, he’d kept things up. But that was his nature. He was a caretaker. “My name got leaked to the press, so…”

  “Leaked how?”

  “Just that I’m the guy who wrote that song, and the cops questioned me about what happened to a missing girl. No specifics yet. I was worried paparazzi’d show up at our door, but they’re just using the stuff they find online, plus a picture of our house from the sales records.”

  “You’re fired?” she whispered.

  “Temporary leave. Half pay.”

  “Oh, Arlo.”

  “Yeah. It’s not as personal as it feels. On the down low, they told me the division’s closing. It’s a bad time for office products. Nobody really works in offices anymore.”

  News played at low volume. On-screen, a picture of the sinkhole flashed, and then Shelly’s seventh-grade class picture. That long, black hair, gossamer as angel wings. Rhea’s voice followed: I just don’t understand it…

  “She makes me want to upchuck,” Gertie said.

  “The worst. I feel like any second all of Maple Street is gonna drag me out. Dip me in tar ’n’ feathers.”

  The kids were listening. This wasn’t for them. Julia stood. Took Larry by the hand. “Can we have some money for Cokes?” she asked. Arlo handed her five dollars, told her to take her time.

  Once they were gone, Arlo said, “I don’t think we should go back to Maple Street.”

  “Where else is there?”

  “Cheerie’s still got that two-bedroom, doesn’t she?”

  “Not while I’m alive. Not while I’m dead, either.”

  “ ’Kay. I called my mom but she took a turn.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Yeah. The Medicare has her covered but she’s in no position… I hate the idea of bringing you back to Maple Street. They got it out for us. The signs are in neon. And the way it affected you…”

  She blushed, remembering it from a dense and murky place. “I don’t do well with things in the night. In my bedroom. It’s just a thing with me. I’m not crazy.”

  “I know.” Arlo didn’t reach out to her. And that was probably right. Maybe he knew her better than she knew herself. Because she wanted to be touched and consoled by him, her husband, but she wasn’t ready for it yet. The shock of what had happened with the brick was still too fresh. Her nervous system was still in panic mode. “It’s understandable, what with the stuff you’ve been through…”

  “Yeah,” Gertie said. “If it hadn’t happened in our bedroom. At night…”

  “I know… I talked to Bianchi. He assigned a beat cop to the crescent. But it’s only an eight-hour shift. We’re alone the other sixteen. I’m worr
ied something’ll happen again.”

  Gertie took deep breaths to keep from losing control again. “Why are they doing this to us?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Gertie pressed her hands to her wet eyes. “If they’re so scared of us, why don’t they go? They’re the ones with the money.”

  “I think they feel like they’re taking a stand.”

  Arlo reached out for her. She flinched. They stayed like that: a hand on a bed, a body inches away. The distance between them felt hot.

  “I hate them. I wish they were dead. Every one of them,” she said.

  “Yeah.”

  The kids came back.

  The TV returned from commercial with a new clip. This one was live and in front of the hole, where rescue workers were making a last-effort search. They’d widened the tunnel as much as they’d been able and were now flying in a special diver, just five feet tall, to wriggle through. I trust the truth to come out, Rhea said. My daughter was running from a predator when she fell. I happen to know the police questioned him.

  All four of them watched. Thin and shadow-riddled, Rhea looked so haunted by grief that it could have been cancer. Her story was so compelling that even the Wildes almost believed that there was a stranger on Maple Street. A threat.

  “It can’t be coincidence. This was her plan since Shelly fell. She’s been laying the track. To blame you,” Gertie whispered.

  On-screen, the picture now showed Arlo, standing in front of 116 Maple Street beside Gertie and the kids. Rhea had taken that one, when they’d first moved in. A circle got drawn in red around his neck.

  Arlo and the kids looked for the remote in Gertie’s drooling roommate’s bed, but they couldn’t find it. They couldn’t make it stop.

  118 Maple Street

  Tuesday, July 27