Good Neighbors Page 22
Puzzle pieces. She thought about her dad, weaving in the road. The candy apple–sweet smell of his breath and the way he always went down to his workroom at night. Went away. Just like Fritz. She thought she’d liked being alone, but maybe that was only because she didn’t know how to accept company.
She thought about Aileen, that piece of shit.
She thought about kicking down a bathroom door. The too-young face on the other side.
She thought about Shelly, goading her. Too sensitive and too needy.
She thought about cruel Gertie, who’d only pretended to care.
She thought about all the world, filled with stupid people.
She honked her horn at the next asshole who passed. Long and hard. All the blind spots came together. They smeared into a too-dense point, and became nothing. Oblivion. Erasure. The murk overtook her.
Rhea went blank. This was not new. This happened all the time.
There was nothing wrong with her. It was them. They’d forced her hand with their stupidity. Their ignorance and their incompetence. No thinking person quotes Bertrand Russell or grades on a point system. They don’t allow sinkholes to form in their neighborhoods, school lunches to be composed of grade B meat. The moronic masses were steering this country into ruin. She was the only person who could see through the lies, the social convention, the politeness. She was the only person who could will it all away, into a new and better direction.
She pulled back onto the road.
118 Maple Street
Saturday, July 31
Rhea sped into the driveway. Gertie watched her stride from her car to the back door in a frenzy.
“We’re gonna die!” Ella hissed in blind panic.
Gertie didn’t have time to replace the lockbox. Still holding it, barefoot, she rushed out of Rhea’s office just as Rhea yanked open the back door. It rammed the opposite wall, shivering.
“What are you doing in my office?” she shouted.
Heavy-bellied, Gertie stood as still as she knew how in the archway between the dining room and hall. Clearly visible, if Rhea looked.
“You know you’re not allowed in there!”
“I’m sorry. I’m sorry,” Ella’s soft voice answered. “I thought I heard Hammy.”
“Who?”
“Hammy. He got out?”
“I don’t want a hamster in my office!”
Gertie was on tiptoe. In the hall. So slow. She made it to the front door in plain sight.
“I’m sorry,” Ella said.
“Sorry doesn’t cover it. Now come here!”
“ ’Kay.”
Gertie opened the front door. Stayed in the threshold. Down the long hall, Rhea was in the kitchen, her back to Gertie. Ella was on the other side, facing them both.
Rhea raised her hand high.
She slapped herself: wholp!
Gertie gasped.
Rhea didn’t hear, because Ella yelped at the same time.
Gertie took a step back inside the hall. Her adrenaline rushed so fast that even Guppy had noticed and was swimming.
Rhea took Ella’s hands in hers. “Calm down,” she said. “You’re not the one who’s hurt.”
Ella nodded.
“I’m not going to hurt you,” Rhea said. “I’m just sad about what the Wildes did to Shelly. I bet you’re sad, too. I bet you could just kill them.”
“Yes.”
Rhea pulled the girl in and squeezed until she stopped fighting. Until she went along with the hug. Until, finally, she returned it, and stroked Rhea’s back with her tense little fingers. “Don’t be sad, Momma.”
They rested like that. A wisteria and oak, intertwined. The one strangling the other, in order to survive. Ella watched Gertie all the while. But she wasn’t like Shelly. She didn’t plead for help.
Gertie backed out of the house. Shut the door softly. Maybe the cop stationed there saw her. Maybe he didn’t. Holding the lockbox, she jogged with bouncing belly down the walk, past the naked topiary, to her house. Her run-down house, which didn’t smell like cheap perfume.
118 Maple Street
Saturday, July 31
Back in the Schroeder house, Rhea poured herself a nooner of wine. Glugged, hoping to find some relief for this excruciating pain in her knee. Red and rage-eyed, she searched with her daughter for Hammy, who really was missing. They checked all the usual places, and when that didn’t work they checked the basement, where bitumen had gathered and someone had left footprints all over the tile. They found Hammy there, trapped in oil that had seeped up.
Ella cried.
Rhea intuited that Ella could not tolerate one more indignity. She needed this animal. So she waded through the muck. She lifted Hammy and rinsed him gently with detergent. Got into the car and drove with Ella and Hammy to the East Williston Veterinary Clinic, where he was declared healthy. Or she? Who knew. Who cared. It was a rodent.
“You see?” she asked. “We found him and he’s fine.”
Ella began to cry uncontrollably at that, but she was in the back seat, and Rhea up front. There was too much traffic to pull over.
When they got home from the veterinarian’s office, Rhea limped back down to the basement. Something had bothered her that she couldn’t place. A scratch carved into her memory; something not quite right.
She returned to the footprints. They were bigger than hers, but narrow. Feminine. For the briefest of moments, she turned flush, thinking it was Shelly, come home at last.
But then, beside the stairs, tucked neatly in a shadow, were Gertie Wilde’s cute and practical Payless walkers.
116 Maple Street
Saturday, July 31
Shelly’s phone. It had no signal. Wasn’t on network. Gertie charged it. Went through all the applications. Only one of them had files—the photo app. She flicked through the dozens of images she found there. Some showed shoulders. Others a side, or a stomach, or a bottom. But most showed a back. All were fresh, taken soon after whatever blow had been issued. Viewing the pictures felt pornographic, as if the simple act of seeing made her guilty, too.
Gertie remembered Rhea’s words from that night months ago: Shelly can’t keep her hair neat. It goads me. I’d like to talk about it with you, because I know you like Shelly. I know you like me. I know you won’t judge.
It came to her that the oval-clustered bruises in these photos were from a brush.
In the quiet of that den, where she’d pinned so many hopes for a better life, Gertie curled up on herself and cried.
She might have gone to the police. But to get this evidence, Gertie had broken the law. The bruises, all inside Shelly’s bathing suit line, did not have an obvious author. None were more than a year old. In other words, none preexisted the Wildes.
What if she handed this to Bianchi, and it only made Arlo look guiltier?
She returned the phone to the Pain Box. Locked it, so the kids didn’t stumble across those awful photos. Put it beside her makeshift bed in the den.
Lunch and then dinner came. She tried to pretend to the children that everything was normal. Explained that they had no reason to worry. They knew something was wrong, or else they were absorbed in their own emotions. They didn’t ask questions.
That night, Bianchi stopped by to tell Gertie that CPS was keeping Arlo for another night. She lingered in the doorway, thinking she should hand over the evidence. But for all she knew, Rhea had planted the brush that had made those bruises in the glove compartment of the Passat. Or Arlo’s nightstand. Anyplace at all.
“Is something wrong?” he asked.
She looked at him for a while.
“Point taken. Have a good night.”
She couldn’t climb the stairs, so the children put themselves to bed. They called good night from far away, their voices uncertain.
On the couch, in the dark, without the protection of her husband, Gertie’s mind roamed: Shelly can’t keep her hair neat. It goads me. I’d like to talk about it with you, because I know you
like Shelly. I know you like me. I know you won’t judge.
But Rhea hadn’t just vented about Shelly that night. Boozy, she’d talked about how trapped she’d felt, and her unhappiness. These were all the things that Gertie also felt, but had always been too scared to say out loud. Sometimes having a family and people who depend on you is too much. But you can’t leave them. They need you. So you resent them just a little.
She’d been grateful to Rhea, for her honesty. Relieved by it, that someone as special and smart as Rhea’d had these same feelings. It’s lonely, being a grown-up. It feels like walking through life in a mask.
Looking back, she hadn’t shown that gratitude. Making close friends is scary. Gertie was better at fake smiles and keeping people at a distance. She didn’t like them to know that at home, her family had a foul mouth. That she was messy, had never learned anything domestic until Arlo. She didn’t read novels like the rest of the people on this block; just self-help. She was easy to sneak up on. The kids knew this and made lots of noise when they walked into a room to keep from startling her. She could have confessed all this to Rhea, but she’d confessed so much already. When you let people know things about you, sometimes they use it against you, to hurt you. That’s what Cheerie had always done. Rhea hadn’t been the only one to avoid their friendship after that; Gertie had avoided it, too. Not because she didn’t like her. Because it had all felt too momentous.
In hindsight, Rhea had been asking for help.
If Gertie had asked questions, been as open as Rhea had been, things might have turned out different. It didn’t change her opinion: Rhea was horrible. A hunter. Just this evening, she’d slapped herself in front of her own child.
But it did give clarity to something that before had been opaque.
* * *
Late that night, Larry couldn’t sleep. He cried out. Julia scampered to his room to soothe him. Gertie heard, too. She’d had enough of sitting around, of calling up. Gertie went to him. She climbed into the bed with both of them and held them. They snuggled. It was good and necessary. But after a time, they were all too hot, the bed too small.
Gertie was snoring and no one wanted to disturb her. So Julia and Larry left that room, playing musical beds. Everyone slept in someplace new.
* * *
The night turned to early morning. Rhea didn’t send her son to do this job. She used the spare key. The one Gertie had given her months ago. She wore bitumen over her clothing. Painted her face with it so that she appeared even to herself as something obliterated. Her gait was crooked, her knee undone.
She crept through Gertie’s dark living room. Beheld the slumbering figure huddled beneath pillows and blankets on the couch. So small, all curled up. Almost childlike. She knelt on her good knee, leaving the other straight and sideways. Matched her breath to blanket-covered Gertie’s; deep and slow.
Almost a quarter of a century ago, she’d chased Aileen Bloom into a bathroom. She’d kicked open a door with her knee. Whock! It had hit a girl in the head. The girl had slumped, her forehead streaming blood while Rhea had lain beside her, wanting to cry out in pain but afraid to attract attention. The face had been wrong. It hadn’t belonged to Aileen Bloom.
“It was an accident,” Rhea had explained once people filled the women’s restroom at the Hungarian Pastry Shop. “I slipped.” Except for Aileen Bloom, they’d all believed. Because what kind of maniac would knock a thirteen-year-old child unconscious?
The slumberer in the Wilde house woke. Struggled to sit up; pinned by all those blankets and pillows. The grunting reminded Rhea of an old slapstick movie. Funny and unreal.
The blanket came down. Everything was smeared, her vision just spots. Rhea saw a reflection in this opposite person’s eyes, but it didn’t belong to her. Shining oil and snarling lips, it belonged to the angry murk.
She’d learned from the movie The Black Hole that it’s not magical thinking. It’s not a cancer born of shame. It really is possible to travel through time, and correct your past. Jettison the murk, and come out cleanly on the other side.
I didn’t do it, she thought. Someone else.
Like making a wish, she took the lockbox that bitch had stolen. Slammed it against the side of Larry Wilde’s head.
THE MONSTERS ARRIVE ON MAPLE STREET
August 1–2
Map of Maple Street as of August 1, 2027
*116 Wilde Family
*118 Schroeder Family
INDEX OF MAPLE STREET’S PERMANENT RESIDENTS AS OF AUGUST 1, 2027
100 VACANT
102 VACANT
104 The Singhs-Kaurs—Sai (47), Nikita (36), Pranav (16), Michelle (14), Sam (13), Sarah (9), John (7)
106 VACANT
108 VACANT
110 The Hestias—Rich (51), Cat (48), Helen (17), Lainee (14)
112 VACANT
114 The Walshes—Sally (49), Margie (46), Charlie (13)
116 The Wildes—Arlo (39), Gertie (31), Julia (12), Larry (8)
118 The Schroeders—Fritz (62), Rhea (53), FJ (19), Ella (9)
120 VACANT
122 VACANT
124 The Harrisons—Timothy (46), Jane (45), Adam (16), Dave (14)
126 The Pontis—Steven (52), Jill (48), Marco (20), Richard (16)
128 The Ottomanellis—Dominick (44), Linda (44), Mark (12), Michael (12)
130 VACANT
132 VACANT
134 VACANT
TOTAL: 34 PEOPLE
From Interviews from the Edge: A Maple Street Story,by Maggie Fitzsimmons,
Soma Institute Press, © 2036
“Charlie was never the same. None of those kids was ever the same. They stopped trusting us. They stopped being kids. Margie and I got divorced. I was mad at her for making the whole Arlo thing about her own childhood. I felt too bad to challenge her so I went along even though I knew it was wrong.
“It was awful, the way they beat him senseless in the middle of the street. I’ve heard them all say in the years since that he had it coming. He didn’t. Everything he said about us was right. It haunts me. Sometimes I feel like that’s what being an adult is all about. Being haunted.” —Sally Walsh, former resident of Maple Street
From “The Lost Children of Maple Street,” by Mark Realmuto, The New Yorker, October 19, 2037
Discovered among Ms. Schroeder’s belongings was a scrapbook she’d apparently kept on Jessica Sherman, the thirteen-year-old girl she’d knocked unconscious at a café in Seattle. Little Jessica woke from the incident within minutes, but family members later connected that kick to the brain aneurysm from which she suffered six months later.
According to her family, Jessica’s aneurysm rendered her permanently disabled. In Facebook posts, her mother, Skylar, announced that she would be the family’s forever child, needing extra care and staying close to home. She was both a blessing and a cross to bear. Her mother reported that while she’d formerly been a calm child, she now suffered wild mood swings and rages.
Rhea Schroeder’s scrapbook ended after two years, when Jessica turned fifteen years old. There’s no evidence that she continued to monitor the child’s progress. Jessica, now forty years old, lives in a group home in Seattle.
The Sherman family sued the University of Washington, Rhea, and the Hungarian Pastry Shop, but because Jessica never went to a doctor after her initial injury, experts couldn’t prove a causal link between the violent incident in the café and her subsequent disability.
As seen in these photos, the likeness between Jessica and Shelly Schroeder is uncanny. They could have been twins. It’s hard not to wonder if Rhea was thinking of little Jessica…
116 Maple Street
Sunday, August 1
“It’s been a while. I haven’t seen you take the train. How are you?” the guy at 7-Eleven asked. His name tag read OSCAR.
“It’s a steaming garbage kind of day,” Arlo answered.
Oscar took an especially long time to make change, counting and recounting the dollars and then the cen
ts, and Arlo understood that he had seen the news. Knew about the accusation. “Happens.”
The ride service that had picked him up from CPS hadn’t been able to stop right on the crescent. The road was still closed. So he’d had it drop him here, where he’d picked up a six-pack of ginger ale for Gertie, an avocado for Larry, a fresh pack of Parliaments for himself, and more milk and cereal—Frosted Flakes—for Julia.
“Huh?” Arlo asked.
“Sometimes you have bad days.”
“Yeah. You have a good one for both of us.”
“I can try.”
Carrying his bag, he walked across the park. It was afternoon on a Sunday. The park was empty. No crickets or cicadas. No chirping birds. Just orange cones, a slab covering the hole, and a lot of bitumen. It mucked his shoes and he walked fast, never pressing down too hard, to keep the suction from stealing them.
The accusations at CPS hadn’t made sense. Three out of the four kids wouldn’t talk to the cops; only their parents had done that. The one who would go on record claimed only that Arlo had repeatedly put his hand on the kid’s knee, which the CPS people had decided was “grooming.” None of these kids’ names was given to Arlo and there was not enough evidence for an arrest or any kind of action at all.
While stuck there, Arlo had called Fred again at his office—water from a dry well. Fred called back from the Mount Sinai Hospital in Manhattan. Turned out Bethany’s fancy new immunotherapy cancer drug wasn’t going to work. They were out of options. “What’s the trouble?” Fred had asked.
“Nothing. Just wanted to let you know we’re thinking about you,” he’d said. “We want to visit as soon as possible.”
Fred’s voice had caught. He’d taken a while and Arlo had waited, hand pressed on MUTE so the guy didn’t hear the CPS workers calling to each other, loud and oblivious. “When she got sick. It’s been years. You have no idea how many people have scattered. At this point, I’m the only one.”