Good Neighbors Read online

  Arlo let go of MUTE. “I’m here. Gert’s here.”

  “That means more than I can say,” Fred said.

  For the second night in a row, the CPS people asked if he could stay overnight in the GCPD jail as a courtesy. He should have said, No, thanks. But they’d made it clear that if he tried to leave, they’d have taken Gertie in for questioning.

  So he’d agreed.

  This morning, Bianchi showed up for the second time, his suit rumpled like he’d been up all night. He’d reassured Arlo that he’d sent a cop car over twice and had visited Gertie in person as well. “Have you considered moving away from that block?” he’d asked Arlo.

  “We have to get our ducks in a row. It’s… not easy. Nothing’s easy.”

  Bianchi reached through the bars and patted him on the shoulder, and for the first time, Arlo realized the guy was on his side. “These people are the kind you leave behind. Take the high road.”

  A few hours later, CPS asked him all the same questions. After answering them, Arlo finally stood. “We’re not done, sir.”

  “Are you charging me?”

  Nobody answered. Arlo didn’t ask permission; just walked out.

  He took the Uber to 7-Eleven. Carrying his groceries, he now saw Linda Ottomanelli on her stoop. Saw Margie and her wife, Sally, hosing their front walk of tar sand. The Ponti men were on their stoop, too. As he got closer, he noticed that they were looking at him. All eyes.

  He had a bad feeling. Worse than usual. First the Pontis went inside, which he wouldn’t have expected. Those mooks should have been itching for a fight. Then the Walshes. Last, Linda and Rhea. They moved quickly, practically running.

  He noticed that the door to 116 Maple Street, his house, was open.

  Garden City Police Department

  Sunday, August 1

  “I didn’t do it,” Rhea Schroeder said. “Someone else.” She was sitting in Detective Bianchi’s office. Fritz Sr. was beside her. He’d insisted on coming along, which had surprised her.

  “Who?” Bianchi asked.

  Rhea shook her head in slow shock. She was so overtired that she was having a hard time seeing straight. Everything was bright spots of emptiness. And the weight of it. She felt heavy as an astronaut on Jupiter. “Honestly. It wouldn’t be beyond me to hurt Gertie. I can’t stand her. But Larry? I’d never do something like that. It’s not in me.”

  Bianchi nodded. “I’m told there was a lockbox that’s now missing. It was originally taken from your home, by Mrs. Wilde. Someone broke into the Wilde house and took it back last night. Do you know anything about that?”

  Rhea blew a deep breath out. “A lockbox?” she asked. “What do you mean, taken from my house? Was Gertie in my house?”

  Bianchi waited.

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about,” she said. “Can you explain it to me?”

  “Did you hear anything last night? See anything?”

  She shook her head. Then whispered. She meant this as she said it. She really did. Because she had a dim memory of visiting the Wilde house that night, but only to get back what had been stolen. To teach Gertie a lesson. She would never have hurt a child. Someone else, possibly, but not her. “Could Gertie have done it?”

  “Why would she do something like that?”

  “Why would anyone? She’s not right in the head. I was getting aspirin in her bathroom once. She takes Klonopin. That’s not a light medication. She’s had a history. A really bad one.” Rhea’s eyes began to water, because this was just so awful. All of it. So unthinkable. “She’s been talking in baby talk. I heard her. This Arlo pedophilia thing put her over the edge.”

  Bianchi looked at her for a long while. “When did you hear her talking in baby talk? Was it the night of the brick? I thought you were sleeping that night. You didn’t hear anything.”

  Rhea turned red. “Another time. She did it a lot.”

  There was more silence. Bianchi kept looking at her.

  But something new. Fritz was looking at her, too.

  “I’d like to go home now,” she said, though there wasn’t a rush. Even if he searched her house, he’d find nothing. She’d hidden the hair-gristled Pain Box in a safe place. The Benchleys’ mailbox. Not even her property. “Can I go home?”

  “Yeah.”

  116 Maple Street

  Sunday, August 1

  Julia was the one to find him. Everybody slept in late, or as late as you can sleep in summertime heat. She went downstairs. The figure on the couch hadn’t looked right. The house still quiet, she’d wondered if she was having a nightmare. Or if the world had cracked open and changed, its rules all different. The blanket had been caked to Larry’s cheek by dark blood.

  She’d stood, afraid to go closer. Afraid to tell her mom, too. Afraid the person who’d done it was still in the house. She should have gone to him. Touched him. But she’d been so scared. She’d left. Walked in bare feet and grimy old sleep clothes down the crescent. She could have knocked on doors. But whose? Which one of them wasn’t an enemy? She’d gone through Sterling Park, past the hole.

  The tiny diver hadn’t been able to get through. Her hips had been too wide. The hole was covered now, about to be filled. Shelly lost inside.

  She called 911 using the 7-Eleven clerk’s landline. They tried to get her to stay on the line but she hung up. She needed to wake her mom before they arrived. Keep her calm so she didn’t wind up in a psychiatric ward again.

  Back home. Through the park and back to her house, this time passing Rhea Schroeder, who was standing on her porch. She seemed completely normal. Calm and well dressed. “Hello, Julia,” she said.

  Julia felt something like terror, only deeper. Something in her bones that screamed. “Hi, Mrs. Schroeder.”

  She got inside. Her mom was up now. Bent over Larry. Julia backed up, afraid. “Is he?” she whispered. And then she was sliding down the side of the wall, the atmosphere on this strange planet too heavy.

  “He’s breathing,” her mom answered. She was shaking with manic energy as she lifted him, put a pillow beneath his head. Larry wasn’t Larry right then. He was a doll that she moved, pale and inanimate. “Everything’s going to be okay. I’m the adult and I have this under control,” she said, but there wasn’t meaning attached to it. Julia understood then, that her mom was quoting some mantra she’d read in one of her child rearing books. She was winging it. She had no idea what she was doing.

  “I called for an ambulance,” Julia said.

  Gertie’s eyes were especially bright in the dark. They pierced. “Oh, thank God. You always do what needs to be done,” she answered.

  The ambulance came. The neighbors watched from inside and from out. Only one person was allowed to ride along. So Julia told her mom to go ahead; she’d figure it out. She’d planned to ask Charlie’s moms for a ride, but lost courage when she got to their door. Didn’t ring the bell. Because maybe they’d call Child Protective Services. Accuse her mom of abandonment.

  She went back inside her house. Threw away the bloody blanket. Showered. Changed. Packed a bag for Larry and her mom. Left a note for her dad in case he came home. It occurred to her that now might be a good time to stop and cry. But she didn’t want to do that. It was easier to keep moving. She started the three-mile walk to the hospital on her own.

  116 Maple Street

  Sunday, August 1

  Arlo got Julia’s note. He tried to reach the hospital and Gertie by phone, but reception wasn’t clear. So he jogged back out onto the crescent. All the house doors in both directions were shut, the people inside. He could feel them watching him. They must have known what had happened. They couldn’t all have been ignorant of his son’s attack. The ambulance had probably been very loud.

  He stuck up his middle finger. Waved it. Then got into the Passat.

  Halfway there, he saw a kid by the side of the road. Awkward-looking, her short hair a wild mess, she lugged a canvas bag, straps looped around both shoulders in a makeshift b
ackpack like a runaway. His first thought was of his own childhood. The world’s full of loveless urchins. But then he saw that the kid was Julia.

  He pulled over. Leaned across and opened the door. Julia climbed in. He didn’t start driving right away. Just sat. He was reluctant to reach out to her. Maybe she’d heard all the bad things people were saying about him. And she looked so grown, all of a sudden. So adult. So they breathed, looking ahead.

  “I feel very heavy. Lately, it hurts to walk. I’m afraid to go to the hospital. I’m afraid this moment is the last one where we’re still a family,” he said, though he knew he shouldn’t have. But sometimes you can’t hold things in. Because you’ve done that your whole life, and it builds up so much you think you might die.

  “I don’t know if I told you this,” he said. “But when I met your mom I had nothing. For the life of me, I’ll never understand what she saw. She was so nice. The nicest person I ever met. I know it doesn’t always seem like it. I make mistakes. But you and Larry and your mom are the most important people, the most important everything to me.”

  She eased to his side of the car and cried in his arms. He ran his hands down her short, wet hair, her pimple-picked neck and back. She was substantial in his arms. Grown. He’d been chipping by the time he’d been her age. Fighting a nascent addiction. When he’d looked at other kids back then, they’d seemed like a different species. He’d never imagined they had anything in common with him. He saw now that wasn’t true. All kids are fighting their own kind of war.

  “You’ll hear some things about me. Maybe you have already,” he said.

  “You didn’t rape my best friend. I know that,” she said.

  “No. I didn’t.”

  As he held her, cars passing, his head over hers, he cried, too. She couldn’t see his tears, but she was Julia, so surely she felt them.

  NYU Winthrop Hospital

  Sunday, August 1

  Larry had suffered a concussion. This accounted for his lethargy. The Wildes were told they would have to wait for the swelling to go down to know whether the damage was permanent.

  Gertie spoke with the police as soon as she’d arrived at the hospital. They returned a second time. In the waiting room, among strangers, she repeated the events of the previous day and left nothing out. They asked Arlo questions. He had a good alibi. After that, they asked if they could speak with the psychiatrist at Creedmoor who’d attended Gertie after the brick. She agreed to this.

  When all that was done, they were told that they could see Larry, but no more than two people at a time. The Wilde family heard this. They were in so much trouble already that they didn’t care. The hospital was busy. No one noticed. They sneaked Julia in between them.

  They gathered in his room. He’d been struck with something sharp and hard. It had cut a flap of his skin open along his forehead and upper brow. He had an intravenous tube to keep fluid moving through his system so his brain stem didn’t swell.

  Gertie was glad to see that his eyes could focus. When he’d first woken, they’d goggled.

  They didn’t say much. Just showed him all the green clothing that Julia had packed, and talked about how lucky he was to get an unlimited supply of lime Jell-O. Then they sat on the bed, careful not to disturb him. They breathed in and out in time. As if matching him, trying to be him, and carry his pain. This didn’t last. They were too different.

  For a long time, Gertie had blamed herself for Larry. Worried that she’d eaten the wrong things while pregnant with him, or been too stressed out. She’d yelled too often and tweaked his nervous system in the wrong direction when he’d been little, or she’d not been affectionate enough and because of that he couldn’t connect with others. After the accusation, she’d even worried that Arlo had done something to him.

  But now, Julia’s homemade Robot Boy in his arms, vigilant and cheerful despite his heavy eyelids, she saw that he was the perfect incarnation of all of them. A misfit, who never stops trying.

  * * *

  They talked quietly in the car on the ride home. Julia was in back, but these things couldn’t wait until she was someplace else.

  Gertie told Arlo her story about the photos of brush bruises, about the bricks and the state of Rhea’s house. She told about leaving her shoes behind. That the evidence she’d worked so hard to get was now gone, though she hadn’t been sure it would have proven his innocence anyway.

  It might have been Rhea who’d sneaked in during the night. But was Rhea strong enough to cause such damage? It might also have been Fritz or FJ, or anyone else from Maple Street. Why they’d picked Larry to retaliate against was anyone’s guess. Perhaps, on the ground floor, he’d just been closest and most convenient.

  They kept driving. The closer they got to Maple Street, the less they talked. From her slinked-down position in the car, Julia could only just see blue sky and green trees and an airplane flying too close to the ground, its engine rumbling.

  * * *

  At 116 Maple Street, they packed their belongings. Enough for a couple of days. They’d decided to go to that Motor Inn in Hempstead. They closed their windows. They passed under the crystal chandelier that Gertie loved so much because it reminded her of the convention center in Atlantic City, all rainbows and light. They took their favorite things from the small bedrooms and the bathrooms with real tile, and they passed the squeaking stairs they’d loved so much because they’d never had stairs before. Never had a house before.

  They looted the fridge, grabbing the stuff they could microwave at the extended-stay, plus apples and frozen cherries. They took the gun. They locked the door behind them. Julia took the back seat again. She slunk down again, too, so that all she could see was sky.

  Arlo and Gertie packed the trunk. It hurt her back to move but she did it anyway. As they packed these things up, the patrolman left the block. After that, the neighbors began to appear. They didn’t come out of their houses. They were too cowardly for that now. They brushed aside curtains and peered through windows, no breeze on that unbearably hot Sunday afternoon.

  Arlo glared from one house to the next, trying to catch a single eye. The Walshes, the Harrisons, Pontis, Schroeders, Singhs-Kaurs, Hestias, and the Ottomanellis. Unabashed, they met his gaze. The people of Maple Street. They’d won. He and his family would never come back to this place they’d dreamed about. This place that was supposed to be their golden ticket. Maple Street had deemed them not good enough. And now they were gloating about it.

  You reach a certain point, and there’s no going back. It’s a place so hot that logic breaks down.

  “I could kill them,” Gertie said, and that was all he needed.

  * * *

  The safety was on. That was the important thing to keep in mind. He hadn’t wanted to hurt anybody; he’d just wanted to scare them. Because he’d finally understood what they wanted. This wasn’t about Shelly. It wasn’t about rape. It was about his tattoos. It was about Gertie’s accent. It was about Julia, stealing those Parliaments, and Larry’s Robot Boy. It was about their crappy lawn, and their Slip ’N Slide, and the ludicrous music of a has-been.

  He and Gertie had dared try to become one of the All-Americans. They’d had the audacity to move to Garden City, and for that all of Maple Street had wanted to punish them. To tear up their family. To erase them. They’d won that. Arlo was ready to surrender. If that was all they wanted, he might have left quietly. Sold 116 at a loss, taken the family, and never come back.

  But now that they had their hooks in, they wanted more than erasure. In order to prove themselves right, to soothe their own guilty consciences, they wanted the Wilde family’s total evisceration. They wanted Julia in foster care and Larry dead. Gertie in a mental institution, the baby wrenched from her belly and delivered to strangers. Arlo back in jail and on the needle, because nothing else was left.

  That’s what they wanted, and they couldn’t have it. He couldn’t let them win.

  * * *

  At first, the people of
Maple Street probably didn’t see what he was holding. He didn’t carry it like a cop, but like a first-time fisherman loosely gripping slimy bait.

  He veered from the Passat and in their direction, walking through oil so thick now that grass and pavement were no longer visible. Faces looked out. He hadn’t planned to do anything. Had just wanted them to know that he was carrying. That if they tried to burn down his house tonight, or come after Larry at the hospital, or call the cops on Gertie, bearing false witness that she’d attacked Larry in the night, he’d be ready.

  He started with the Walshes. Stood at the edge of their walk. No trespassing with a firearm involved. Sally peered out from her den. He smiled in a friendly way while holding the thing daintily, safety on. “Hey!” he cried. “Thanks for breaking my kid’s skull last night. You’ve been great neighbors.”

  Kept walking.

  Next the Hestias. The parents both took marijuana for their anxiety, which they baked into cookies and offered for dessert at dinner parties, like they thought they were the first people on earth to turn addiction into social convention. They treated their daughters like their best friends, confiding frustrations and work problems, and the frequency with which they had sex. They considered themselves hip. Cutting edge. They listened to Eminem. They didn’t tell people what they did for a living, and sometimes lied about it, claiming to be doctors. That was because they worked for the insurance company that managed the greatest number of World Trade Center victims in New York. The company was famous now, for denying dust as causation. Trade Center dust, they’d argued in court, with science backed by people like the Hestias, might be no worse than regular dust. They’d tied the money up for years while the sick had died and continued to die of heart failure, emphysema, and cancer. The world was falling apart. They were making it worse. There was a hole in the middle of the park that kept puking black bile. But the Hestias had this idea that Arlo and his family were the real threats. Fucking Brooklyn accents were the problem.