Good Neighbors Page 18

  “I want more ice cream and Julia, too,” Larry said.

  It was maybe the worst thing he could have said.

  Arlo bent low, looked just to Larry now. “They blame me for what happened. If your mom’s in the loony bin and I’m in jail, do you have any idea what’s going to happen to you, you little freak?”

  Larry started shaking. He didn’t cry. He just did that thing, and went far away. Julia started crying, though.

  “Goddamn,” Arlo whispered as he backed away from his kids. Then, the worst thing. A thing she’d never seen before. He was wiping his eyes. Her super tough rock star dad was crying. His voice was scrapyard gravel. “Meet you outside,” he said. Then he left the store.

  The people in the Baskin-Robbins were still staring, and Julia couldn’t tell what they were thinking. She just wished they’d stop looking. Larry was wiggling his ice cream–covered toes. “Come on,” she said.

  He didn’t follow, so she took him really gently this time. They found Arlo in the Passat, engine turned. They both climbed into the back, not wanting to sit next to him. He didn’t look back at them. She couldn’t tell if it was because he was mad or because he’d been crying. When they got home, he went down to the basement. Julia was glad. Hoped he’d stay there. Except, he was the only grown-up left.

  She took Larry by the hand and brought him to his room. He was still far away. The room looked even more perfect than usual. Clean and Spartan as a robot’s. His bed was far from the window now. They’d moved all their beds far from windows.

  She made him wash his feet, brush his teeth, put on his pajamas, then pulled back his covers and had him climb into bed. She handed him the Robot Boy replacement doll she’d made for him: two dishrags rubber-banded together in a cruciform shape, with nuts and bolts glued down for face, hands, and feet.

  “He wasn’t gonna get us more ice cream. It was a bad time to ask,” she said.

  Larry just shrugged.

  “Why did you hide in that truck? It makes us look bad. Like we planned to get her alone and hurt her,” she said, and part of her question was curiosity, but mostly she asked because she wanted to jolt him awake. Hurt him into it, like she was hurting, so she wouldn’t be so alone with these feelings in this house.

  “I was scared to leave the park without you. But Shelly didn’t want me there.” He was shaking still, and now that he was under his sheets, he’d wormed his hands down his pants.

  “Gross,” she said. “You’re so weird and gross. The whole block’s talking about us. They’re gonna take Daddy away, and it’s all your fault!”

  Excerpt from Rhea Schroeder’s dissertation, seized from her home office on August 2, 2027

  Consider the panopticon. When Foucault, the father of semiotics, originally imagined it, he’d intended the guard to stand center, watching a periphery of prisoners. The tool was effective for surveillance because none knew when they were being watched, but they knew that it would happen eventually. They couldn’t escape it. And so they behaved their best. But we can all agree that Foucault was drunk on his own ideas, responding not to real-world social surveillance, but to his own personal scars from having been raised by totalitarian parents.

  Modern culture is an inverse panopticon. Not a drunk father, but a vigilant mother. The masses elect a single person to the hot seat for their five minutes of fame. We, the periphery, are the judges and jury. Because we’re separated (like prisoners, we can’t connect to each other through these impossible walls), we’ve no option but to connect via the sacrificial lamb we’ve placed dead center. Even when we privately dispute the censure or praise we heap upon them, publicly, we echo popular sentiment.

  To avoid loneliness, we become a single, unthinking mass.

  And yet, the mother and father both reveal their very limited ability to connect. The proverbial child cannot attach. We participate in this mass identity, but it does not serve us. Our language is reduced to a series of agreed-upon signs reflecting not nuance, but binaries: like/dislike; good/bad; yes/no. We are even more lonely for the failure of it…

  118 Maple Street

  Wednesday, July 28

  Night. Far past time to sleep. A knock came. Rhea Schroeder did not say, Come in.

  “Are you there?” Fritz called through the old, thin wood. All this time in America, and he still had an accent.

  Rhea was in her office, unmarked papers heaped in piles. She turned the volume down on The Black Hole, playing off an old VCR in the corner. The one from college, that she’d brought with her to every place she’d ever lived.

  “Rhea?” Rhee-a, he said, had always said, making that first syllable especially long. But he so rarely spoke her name that it shocked her.

  The room was dark, lit only by the TV light. He wasn’t often home, and when he was here, he never came to this place. She fiddled with Shelly’s Pain Box, which she’d been trying to pick with an unbent paper clip for hours on her lap. So late in the day, her fingers had lost their dexterity.

  She crossed the room. Put her hand on the door, turned the lock inside the handle, so he couldn’t get in. She felt panicked, though she couldn’t explain why. Would he care that she’d gone through two bottles of wine tonight? Was this about the brick? Or Shelly? She didn’t want to talk to him about those things. He had no business offering an opinion, knocking on her secret place.

  She could see the shadow of his feet beneath the sill of the door. He ran his hand, skin on wood, so specific and so similar to the sound of night rain. “Yes. I understand,” he said at last. “I’ll leave you.” And then footsteps; his thick leather loafers, walking away.

  In the dark, she returned to her chair, her lockbox, to her Black Hole. The paper clip caught, then lost the catch. On-screen, it was at the part in the movie where the good guys discover that the captain of the spaceship has lobotomized his own crew and turned them into slaves. They’re not robots after all. She wished her dad were here to watch with her. Imagined him in the chair beside her. Willed it.

  She’d been having fun that day at the Hungarian Pastry Shop, the café all the smart kids frequented. Close enough to graduate-student age that she could have passed for one.

  All nine of them had been talking about the panopticon when this second-year PhD, Aileen Bloom, had started babbling about Bertrand Russell. There’s a troublemaker in every class. They can’t abide authority figures, or they care so much about the subject matter that they self-destruct, or they simply have bad personalities. Aileen Bloom was all three.

  Aileen had this idea that no educated person could believe in God. Politely, Rhea had offered the counterargument: intolerance works both ways. When that hadn’t worked, she’d shut her down, which had been easy, because Rhea knew her Bertrand Russell.

  The rest of them left to get the fresh babka that had just come out of the oven. She’d thought the argument was over. But then, red-eyed with fury, Aileen had scooted her chair close to Rhea, like they hadn’t been teacher-student at all. Like this was the schoolyard, and Rhea was still that awkward, scrawny kid who hid in hallways to avoid recess. Who called home from the office every chance she got. Once in a while, she’d caught her dad when he wasn’t at work but had stayed home sick. He always came when that happened. He’d drive her back home, car swerving. They’d always napped together on the couch the rest of the afternoon, watching old sci-fi.

  “This is about your father,” Aileen had said, fast, so no one else would hear.

  Rhea had stared down at her beer. The noise in the café had been so loud that she’d wondered if she’d misheard. “What do you know about my dad?”

  “Everybody who clings to this fairy tale of an all-supreme being—it’s always daddy issues.”

  Rhea had looked away, trying to hide her full eyes.

  “I don’t care that you’re my teacher. I’m older than you anyway. Just be honest and admit that there is no God. He’s dead.”

  “My father was perfect,” Rhea had answered.

  Aileen h
ad looked at Rhea askance, like there was something wrong with her. She’d unmasked something broken in her teacher that she’d craved to see.

  The students getting their babka returned. Aileen excused herself, and then Rhea did, too. And then, somehow, she’d kicked in a door. Sprained her knee against it. The face on the other side hadn’t looked right.

  Rhea’s knee burst with pain now, just remembering. Or perhaps she’d been hitting it with the Pain Box, that was why. Somehow, more than an hour had passed since Fritz had come knocking. The Black Hole had ended and started anew. It was at the opening credits, the John Barry overture wild and foreboding and even cheerful. After Star Wars and 2001, America had been so excited about things like gravity boots and rotating hallways, a future of space stations and galaxy exploration. They’d expected such great things.

  She put Shelly’s box in her desk. Pain shooting through her bad knee, she got up and she shut the door behind her. Let The Black Hole keep playing in there, by itself. A loop upon a loop upon a loop.

  Dishes had piled up in the kitchen. She’d cooked pasta with butter tonight, left it on the table for them, and retreated into her office, like she’d done most nights since Shelly. The house was quiet, the heat oppressive. Circulars and newspapers, letters of condolence, had all fallen to the tribal Persian rug. She’d bought it for the authentic indigo, so much more subtle than the typical methylene.

  She climbed the stairs, where another tribal Persian rug ran the length. She listened first at Ella’s door, heard soft breathing. Next at FJ’s, heard the same. Last at Shelly’s. She listened for a long time. Imagined the breathing there. Willed it.

  Time passed. More than should have passed. Fritz Sr. had to be asleep. It had to be safe, by now, to go to bed. She limped all the way down the hall, to her room. Opened the door. He was awake, even though it had to be after three. He sat on the edge of the bed, his face in his hands, his shoes perfectly neat and facing out the way he liked. Beside him was a wet washcloth, which he’d used to clean his ears.

  She sat a few feet from him, on the other side of their enormous bed. He smelled like tea rose, her favorite of his scents, and she thought that perhaps now was the time. In the dark, at night, with a man who’d been so invisible to her for so long that it would be like telling no one. She would confess about the Hungarian Pastry Shop, and about all those doubts she’d had, which she’d never voiced when she’d agreed to marry him. How she’d found herself so very alone on Maple Street. How she’d turned inward. How she’d used a brush. Most of all, she would tell him about the murk that had weighed her down ever since The Black Hole. The murk she couldn’t wash clean of, that had assumed a personality all its own. The murk that had committed unspeakable acts.

  She’d tell him these things, and in doing so, unmake them. It would be as if going back in time, back before Shelly, back before the Hungarian Pastry Shop, washed clean to the better life she should have lived. She willed this so very much.

  “I have to tell you something,” she began.

  He looked up at her, and she saw that he was crying. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d seen him do that. If he’d done it before now, he’d done it alone.

  “I miss her so much,” he said.

  “She’s not gone. Not to me.”

  The floodlights in the faraway park shined a human-made moonglow through their windows.

  “How do people live with this?” he asked.

  “With what? Do you think I should feel guilty?”

  “No. I mean, how do they live with losing a child?”

  He’d grown a prickly mustache in the years they’d been together. And his hair was gray. He still dressed in khakis and polo shirts with chemical stains. Still worked long hours. She tried to think of a time he’d taken Shelly on a fishing trip. A time he’d played Uno or catch with her.

  “You didn’t raise her. I don’t understand why you’re the one who gets to cry when you never did anything.”

  “I’m overwhelmed,” he answered. “This isn’t my area of expertise. But I have the capacity. You’ve always known that about me. You and the children are the only people I’ve ever loved.”

  She thought about the way the police had questioned him, and how he hadn’t backed her up. Had only said he wasn’t around enough to know about bricks or sinkholes or sleepovers. Whatever Rhea had told them was probably right. She thought about all the times she’d wanted to come to him over the last twenty-plus years, crying and begging for help. For affection. Approval. Validation. A single kind goddamned word.

  She’d assumed that he’d come knocking on her study door because he’d been concerned. Perhaps even suspicious. But no. He’d just felt lost, like always, and had wanted her to tell him what to do.

  “I hate you so much,” she said. “I wish you were dead.”

  116 Maple Street

  Wednesday, July 28

  It was crazy late, but Julia couldn’t sleep. She tiptoed into Larry’s room. She didn’t know what she planned to say. Sorry didn’t seem to cover it. And anyway, sorry didn’t mean anything to somebody like Larry. He didn’t believe in words. Just actions. She planned to crawl into his bed and cuddle him. But he was sleeping. The new Robot Boy she’d made him was in the garbage by the door, blue dish towel arm curved over the edge, bolt hand resting outside the plastic bin.

  She took it out, put it beside him. His cheeks were splotchy from crying. It was too hot for covers, so he was splayed, his hair wet with sweat.

  “Larry,” she whispered.

  He flopped in his sleep, turned over.

  “You were right. I did want more ice cream.”

  She went back to her room, to her window. Charlie Walsh was looking out his window, too. For most of the time she’d lived on this crescent, she’d kept the blinds closed. So had Charlie. They were a year apart; boy and girl, to boot. It wasn’t cool to live so close. Downright awkward, given Charlie’d told the whole Rat Pack he had a crush on her. But then Shelly fell, and she’d been tempted. Just to explain herself. To show him her dog-bit hand, her half-dissolved stitches, and say, “I got hurt, too. So, do you hate me? Do you blame me? Does everyone?”

  Even then, neither had pulled back their curtains. It had taken the brick.

  Curtains pulled, shade lifted, he’d acted as emissary for the whole Rat Pack the night after she came home from taking her mom to the hospital. Is your mom okay? The baby? he’d asked. It’s so bad, she’d answered. She went so crazy. I didn’t recognize her. Then she’d broken down and cried. He’d just watched until she was done. She’d hoped he would tell her that everything would be okay. He knew such things, because he was logical Charlie. But he’d just stayed with her instead, and that had felt scarier and more honest.

  “How’s your mom?” Charlie now called across the divide.

  “Better.”

  Julia came out, sat perched on the sill, her legs dangling in arcs. It was dangerous, a deadly drop. She braced her hands against the inside walls in case she started to fall. A gesture of wildness, of what was happening inside her heart, made just for him.

  “Is that safe?”

  “I dunno.”

  Charlie came out, too. Mimicked her. It surprised her, that he’d take the risk. Now they were closer. It felt personal. Like on a playdate, when the mom leaves and you’re alone in the house together and you could do anything.

  “I hate this block,” Julia said.

  Charlie knocked the glass from the inside. Looked sad and angry both. “I like your hair.”

  Short. She combed it behind her ears with her fingers. “Shelly was wrong back at the hole… I do like you, Charlie. I’m glad you’re my neighbor.”

  He clicked his Tevas together. “I like you, too.”

  “Good.”

  “Do you like me more than friends? More than Dave?”

  “I dunno. Don’t ask me that.”

  “Sorry,” Charlie said.

  “S’okay. It just feels wrong to think about rig
ht now.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Charlie? Remember when you said you told Dave and Sam and Shelly that you liked me, when I first moved in?”

  Charlie nodded. His bowl cut was just long enough that it curled up at the ends. It was girly by Brooklyn standards, but she decided that girly was okay. It’s fine for boys to be pretty.

  “Why? What’s good about me?” she asked.

  Charlie swung his Tevas. Looked at them, and at her bare, dirty feet, too. She wished she’d washed.

  “You don’t have to say. It’s a weird question.”

  “I like that you’re nice,” he said, all fast, so it was hard to understand.

  “Oh,” Julia answered, because everybody’s nice.

  Then he added, just as fast: “You’re funny and you notice people when they talk. You pretend you’re low-rent but you’re not. I like that you’re a good sister.”

  Julia let go of the edges of the sill. Her body rocked, the fall thirty feet, and she wondered what it had felt like for Shelly, when she’d fallen. Had she snapped out of that trance, and realized what was happening? Alone down there, did she think that Julia had forgotten her?

  “I was mean to him tonight. I told him he was weird and gross.”

  Charlie made a sad face.

  “I’m supposed to take care of him, but I was mean. I do wrong things all the time. Did you know that Shelly told me something? She said a person, not my dad, was hurting her. And I said we should go to the police. And when her mom started chasing us, that’s why we ran. We didn’t want to get caught and stopped. I made it this urgent emergency. It got her worked up. That’s why she wasn’t paying attention. That was my bad advice.”

  Charlie got out of the window and stood. She thought he didn’t believe her. Or maybe he was just disgusted. He was going to close his curtains. But then he said, “Go to your back door. I’ll meet you.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes.” He waited across the way like a mirror image until she climbed back in and started walking, then he did, too.