Good Neighbors Read online

  She grew up and forgot, the way all adults forget about magic. And then her dad died. She should have been there with him on that couch when it happened. She should never have moved away. She knew it was magical thinking, the illusions of a child; and yet magical thinking imprints. It leaves a mark, a binary of real and unreal that never goes away. On one hand, her dad was a drunk who raised her in a vacuum of neglect. On the other, he was the hero she’d abandoned and could have saved.

  She remembered Aileen at the Hungarian Pastry Shop that day, smug. Aileen with her perfect future and her perfect family from Connecticut and her fancy Tory Burch cashmere sweaters. Aileen, catching Rhea out as broken in ways Rhea herself had never guessed. The way she’d look at her, so smug, Rhea wondered if the murk around her was visible. If people who looked closely, who hated her enough, could see it.

  She’d wanted to travel again. Expunge herself. But it had been so long that she didn’t remember how. With a woman as special as Rhea, the murk built up, a force all its own.

  She remembered going blank after entering that bathroom. When she woke, she’d been sitting on the floor with a sprained knee, across from a bleeding young girl.

  She remembered sitting with Gertie, confessing so much. Her words, every one, a gasp for breath from a drowning woman. And then Gertie’d seen her for what she was. She’d seen the dirty murk monster inside her. She’d pushed Rhea back down into it. Tried to drown her. Rhea’d had no other option but to fight back.

  She remembered the way Shelly had always watched her, as if seeing what she could not. What she would never see. The holes. The missing things that made her incomplete, and the murky things that made her disgusting. The wrong things in a house of wrong. She remembered a brush, a thrumping into the quiet, to contain those revelations. To hold them still.

  She remembered smashing her daughter’s Pain Box against the wrong person’s head.

  These memories came at her like gunshots and she saw clearly, what she was and what she had done. She saw herself as something knotted and too large. A raging thing. She and the murk were the same. It was time to unburden. If she could not do it the one way, through time, she would do it the other way. She must confess.

  She considered doing this. Today. She imagined Bianchi in his midpriced suit, hiding his grin. She imagined Gertie, at last given permission to retaliate, screaming at Rhea, the veins in her graceful neck taut as a barking dog’s. She pictured all of Maple Street, pointing and whispering. Her house would be like a prison. She’d sit center, the object of all that opprobrium.

  Your fault, they would say.

  But it wasn’t true. It wasn’t her fault. Someone else had done this.

  A wave of terror bathed her. This was too much. She preferred the nothing. The murk unfurled then, heavy and glistening. It swallowed her.

  She blinked, wet-eyed, over the papers and photos before her. Did not recognize them, or remember having brought them out. Put them away and stood. Left her office and turned out the light.

  116 Maple Street

  Monday, August 2

  Gertie woke to a strange, empty room. She oriented quickly. Found the note on the nightstand. It read:

  Gone to get Shelly.

  She put on her shoes, brushed her hair, put it in a ponytail, and washed her face. Invented these ablutions as a means of keeping calm. Of taking a breath and staving off panic. She didn’t want to collapse again.

  She got her keys and her wallet. Her phone. She called Detective Bianchi even though the sun had only started to rise. “Julia sneaked out. She’s at the hole looking for Shelly, I think. I’m going there now.”

  Then she got on the road, back to Maple Street.

  Sterling Park

  Monday, August 2

  Those with lights shined Julia’s path. It reminded her of those movies they showed in woodshop class—archaeological digs in faraway places, exposed to modern air for the first time in thousands of years. The smell thickened with acid sweetness. The walls were vast, stretching far wider than the hole’s mouth, and honey-combed by the wear of composite metals. To prevent collapse, hydraulic steel barriers shored the hole’s wide sides. These appeared sturdy, mechanical, and clean, even though bitumen seeped over the steel and red-painted pistons that ran the length between them and held them in place. The ladder ran down along the middle.

  She was wearing her dad’s Hawaiian shirt again. It felt like a kind of synchronicity. Like going back in time. Her Toms sneakers went squish-squish. She got to the bottom where the ladder ended on a ledge, made room. The rest came down. They shined their phones. The water was ice cold and ankle deep.

  Just a single path led downslope and they followed it, leaving the dawn behind. They went deeper, beyond the safety of the hydraulic barriers that prevented cave-in. Like bats, they could feel the hollow up ahead before they saw it: an absence. Their lights shined the path—a black, scaffolded shoring tunnel, made just for people to walk single file. They knew intuitively that it wasn’t big enough to prevent cave-in, but if the walls gave way, it might protect them long enough until someone found and rescued them. The tunnel was about two feet deep with springwater because the dredge they’d used to keep it clear was gone, the hole slated for fill later today. Straight ahead through the tunnel was the only direction to go.

  “Here,” Charlie said, pointing. “It’s a current.”

  “So, let’s follow,” Dave said, serious and awed.

  Julia walked atop the tunnel’s steel girding that led to cool water. Girding was above, too—narrow steel beams like an animal cage. She grazed a top bar with her shoulder and it was ice cold.

  Squish-splash. She went down for maybe five hundred feet. She could hear only the single-file splashing behind her, and the rushing of water. At last, the girding beams ended. Nothing was shored. All that was left was an unsupported tunnel of dirt and sand that weaved beneath Sterling Park. They shined their lights into the last section, where the water was higher and the tunnel much smaller. The current pulled them toward it.

  If there was a cave-in here, nothing would save them.

  She braced herself, holding to the last of the steel girding. Her thighs and toes were numb. Her heart pounded hard. She kept hoping her body would get tired, forced into calmness by exhaustion. For how long can a person stay so wired?

  “This could cave in,” she said. “People should only keep going if they want to.” She looked back at them, let the light blind her, so they could see her face. So they could know that she forgave them whatever they’d said or done. They didn’t have to prove anything.

  She forged ahead. They followed.

  Deep water. The current dragged her and she ran-swam. So cold. Rushing sounds, and also a distant hum she couldn’t place—like the rhythmic shaking of trees in a heavy wind.

  She felt the others splashing nearby. They arrived at a crevasse, through which all the water rushed. On a ledge, something reflected the flashlight. She picked up a depth gauge—that last, specially small diver must have left it. This must have been where the diver had stopped and given up. The crevasse was narrow and long and submerged under freezing water. Virgin territory, it was made for people with small hips and shoulders. People not yet fully grown. A part of the earth no human but Shelly had ever known.

  The depth gauge read something impossible: 1,000 feet.

  She’d read and heard that the deepest parts of the lowest Lloyd Aquifer went down 1,800 feet. Could Shelly be that far down? If the trained, professional adults hadn’t found her, how could they possibly do it?

  Even as she reached her hands through the tight gap and held her breath, she understood that this was insane. Foolish and in some ways, selfish. But she couldn’t go back. She’d either surface with a body, or not at all.

  She took the deepest of breaths, silently whispered the briefest of prayers (Please). Then underwater. Her arms went through first, catching purchase of soft rock. She tried to squeeze her head and shoulders through but had the
angle wrong. She pulled back out. Breathed again. Submerged. Pushed through again. This time her head went first, tender and vulnerable to whatever waited on the other side.

  Breath held, she wriggled. Everything felt tight, the surrounding walls of sand and tar and dirt unstable like they might crash down. Still holding her breath, still underwater, she pushed her shoulders. Easier. Then the rest. Small, child hips. She shimmied, bound tight as a worm, her shoulders doing the work. Sound took a long time to echo through water. She could feel life behind her—her friends. They felt so far away.

  She burst through. Out! Her lungs still full of air, she went buoyant, carried by water to the top. She burst up, gasping into a wide-open space.

  A current ferried her. She worked not to panic. Not to struggle and drown. Just to stay on her back, breathing, and let herself be carried, as surely Shelly must have been carried. She could see only with her hands and her breath, and the hairs on her arms.

  The current brought her to an enclosed shallows where she was able to stand. The water rushed past her, knee deep. This was a kind of chamber. She could feel but not see the walls, the center where the water rushed and seemed to drain. There was a flapping; that tree sound in wind only much louder. The room oscillated, and in the dark, it was hard to tell what was happening.

  One by one, the rest appeared. Phones recovered and wiped clean, they shined their lights, illuminating the enclosed crescent where everything above seemed to have dragged down. The shallow current rushed past the ledge and down, gathering depth as it pooled in the middle of the high-ceilinged room, a pile that moved. The water drained down.

  She placed the rhythmic tree-shaking sound, at last. It was the sound from which the crescent had been bereft all summer. The sound that defined East Coast summer: cicadas. They’d swarmed down here, instead of above.

  The movement, yes, the movement. This room was alive.

  Ella shined her phone on a bird beside Julia’s sneaker, flapping its wings, trapped in tar. And then more phone lights. They lit up this closed, dead-end chamber and Julia could see hundreds of flapping things beneath the shallow stream, all trapped in dense tar: birds and squirrels and possums. Cicadas, too. Seventeen-year and thirteen-year broods and annuals. Every size and breed. They were stuck to the center pile and to the walls and even the ceiling by tar, their bodies glimmering.

  Their death made a vibrating hum.

  “Is she here?” Dave whispered. Julia turned and Dave Harrison, toughest kid in the Rat Pack, was wiping away tears. “Julia, we have to find her. I hate this place. She can’t stay here.”

  Julia started wading, following the water to its deep unknown. She held her Hawaiian shirt and tried not to trample. Pretended these birds and squirrels and household pets were something else. Butterflies in cocoons, about to take flight on a great adventure. It was a field of them, beautiful and terrible.

  The sound got louder. A living friction. The current drew her to its inevitable end where it drained, leaving just the living pile, as massive as a killer whale. Shivering and shaking and sick, she scanned the monstrosity. The rest shined their lights. They circled the pile, and yes, even climbed it, despite its wailing pain-song of flapping, mewing struggle.

  Shelly.

  It was Ella who discovered her on the opposite side of the pile, halfway up. She recognized her Free People skort. The Wildes’ funeral box lay open at her side, a harmonica and a necklace and a Robot Boy and blond hair spilled over her knees.

  They had known, of course. There was no way she could have survived. But until now, they had not believed. Shelly Schroeder was dead.

  Julia was the first to touch her and she was as cold as the water. The rest followed. They touched her, too, as if to warm her. They wiped away the oil and dirt. They cleaned her arms and legs and face—a thing they could never have done alone, and yet a natural thing to do together. She was cold and still and perfectly preserved. As haunted as she’d been on the morning of the fall.

  Shelly Schroeder

  Shelly Schroeder.

  Shelly Schroeder.

  I know what happened to you.

  A challenging girl. Smart and kind and fragile and sensitive and wonderful in the ways of wonder. A hero and a villain and a bitch and a savior. Shelly Schroeder, their friend.

  They tried to lift her, but the murky pile held her tight. Like cement, it had hardened. But it was Julia and Ella and Charlie and Dave and Mark and Michael and Lainee and Sam, all pulling. Some were scared to touch her, weeping and mewing along with the trapped animals as they did it, but nonetheless doing it.

  The muck held tight.

  Julia thought about the listening thing that she’d felt all summer. The thing she’d noticed from the very first time she’d come out to the sinkhole. Not a dog. The thing that lived in absence. The lonely thing. It was here now. This was its terrible home, where it trapped the weak and the broken. Because this was Shelly, she lost her fear of it. All that remained was her fury against it.

  “You can’t have her!” she shouted.

  They pulled again but Shelly did not come free. And then they all shouted it, so loud it echoed through the entire chamber. It pushed out the tunnel and up the hole. It reverberated through Sterling Park. It entered basements and blasted through windows. It went everywhere, each young Rat Pack voice recognizable and distinct and clarion as nothing had been before or ever would be after.

  “YOU CAN’T HAVE HER!”

  The sound loosened the pile. It shook the chamber and rattled the crevasse. It sent the metal ladder and shoring apparatus singing. It moved even the hole.

  Shelly came free.

  They plucked her from the murk as if from a watery womb. They carried her out, all hands lifting, even as the secret chamber began to cave. It shriveled upon itself, collapsing in animal screams. As they sped, the crevasse opened for them, liked wilted tulip petals off a bloom, and they were not afraid.

  Later, authorities would insist that the children’s collective weight had broken the tunnel’s soft ground, or that their shouting had resculpted the sensitive architecture of the chamber. The children would agree to this, without promoting their own interpretation, that the sinkhole submitted to them, because they had won.

  They ferried her back to the opening, as gently as they’d have carried their own bare hearts.

  118 Maple Street

  Monday, August 2

  “You can’t have her!”

  Rhea Schroeder woke to those words, and knew. It wasn’t a psychic connection. It wasn’t a mother’s love, though these things did exist. It was simply that she’d known all along that Shelly would be found. Just like that girl, on the floor of the bathroom, her scalp running red.

  She’d meant only to hurt herself in the women’s room of the Hungarian Pastry Shop. To kick hard enough to split herself in two. To frighten Aileen, who’d have stayed safe inside her locked stall. She’d have left after that. Returned to her seat and pretended to have been there all along.

  In another world, that happened. In another world, she got over her dad’s death. His betrayal, too. She moved on and dated one of those passionate grad students from her class. Her life was clean and perfect in that other world.

  But Rhea slammed too hard against the cheap stall door with its sharp metal corners. The lock broke. The small person sitting inside must have been leaning down, head parallel to her hips.

  Rhea had yelped in pain as she’d fallen, and then she’d been on the floor, her knee too tender to bend. So she’d scooted against the wall. She’d closed her eyes against the thing inside the half-open stall. The girl’s ebony hair, immobile as a wig. Not Aileen Bloom. An accident. The wrong girl. Bright red ran out, adhering to grout around the baby-blue tiles.

  People crammed the women’s room. The mother came first. And then more, including Aileen and the rest of the class. They’d seen Rhea, some running straight for her, to tend to her. Her kneecap had floated just off center. And then they’d seen the blood.


  Jessica Sherman.

  Who did that to you?

  * * *

  Gertie Wilde was just parking her car in front of her house when she heard Julia’s voice: “You can’t have her!” More young voices followed, all saying the same thing: You can’t have her!

  The sound resonated. It roused Dominick and Linda Ottomanelli, who hadn’t been sleeping anyway. They’d decided that Arlo wasn’t really hurt. Just like Gertie and the brick, he was being hysterical. They’d decided they’d done the right thing in defense of their twins. And yet, they couldn’t sleep.

  It woke Sai Singh, Nikita Kaur, and their children who were seriously considering moving to Jackson Heights, where it wasn’t nearly so upwardly mobile but at least you weren’t the only South Indians on the block. And these Americans were fucking drama queens.

  It woke Cat, Rich, and Helen Hestia, who’d stayed inside during the beating, and now felt they’d shirked their moral responsibilities. So Rich and Cat had drafted a letter to the New York Times about the mistreatment their daughters had likely received at Arlo Wilde’s hands.

  It woke Sally and Margie Walsh, who’d begun to wonder if they’d gotten carried away by all this child abuse talk.

  It woke Tim and Jane Harrison, who forgot about the Sharpie line when they exited their divided house, smearing it as they walked.

  It woke Adam Harrison, whose best friend, FJ, had cowed him into breaking into a veteran’s painkillers. What FJ did after that, smashing the mirrors and smearing them with his own waste, hadn’t been part of the plan. Adam had been disgusted by it, and by his drunken friend, too. Ever since, he’d popped Oxy at night, just to sleep.