Seventh Heaven

by Alice Hoffman

  This feeling, this premonition or expectation, or whatever the hell it was, always took Hennessy by surprise, and once in a while he’d have a false alarm. He’d reach for the back of his neck, just waiting for something to go wrong, a light bulb to explode, a fight to break out, and nothing would happen. The kids would be in bed, Ellen would be listening to the radio, and that’s when the tingling would start and he’d find himself scared to death right there in his own house, on his own street. Tonight it had begun after midnight. He and Ellen had twin beds, and Hennessy was much too big for his bed, his feet always hung off the edge. Yet when he’d awakened he felt completely lost beneath the sheets. He’d wanted the promotion; he’d fought for it. Why was it, then, that getting what he wanted made him feel so hollow? Why was he standing out in his driveway at the hour when the milkman’s truck turned the corner onto Hemlock? Now that he was a detective he was privy to things he never knew about before. Hardly state secrets—he could have found out much of it when he was in uniform, if he listened to gossip, if he read the news, but he realized he had never wanted to hear about certain cases. It wasn’t ten-dollar speeding tickets and school assemblies now, it was dirtier business, and that was why he needed to be out here while the rest of his neighbors were in bed; he needed to believe that people could still sleep comfortably with their doors and windows unlocked.

  This week he had been called in to a domestic. His first. The patrol officers had been waiting for him on the front stoop of a house he had never noticed before, at the edge of the neighborhood. Two neighbors had made anonymous complaints right after supper, but when the patrolmen arrived everyone clammed up. Hennessy stood outside the house with the officers, Sorenson and Brewer, and they all smoked cigarettes to give the couple inside a chance to cool off. Sorenson and Brewer had been delighted to leave; Hennessy had always felt the same when he was in their shoes, but now he was in plainclothes, he was the one stuck here, knocking on the door.

  The guy who finally opened up when Hennessy showed his badge through a crack in the door was a hard case. Hennessy had seen dozens like him. But he’d never before had to insist on being taken into one of their living rooms. The house looked fine from the outside, the shutters hung straight, the grass was cut. But inside, the place was a disaster. Hennessy had been spoiled by Ellen’s housekeeping; he never thought about dust or dirty laundry. Here, everything was neglected. The living room was unnaturally dark, as though it had never been painted. The couch cushions were ripped and yellow stuffing showed, and there were greasy-looking blocks piled up on the floor. There was the stench of urine, and a mean whiskey smell over that.

  “You don’t have any rights to be in my house,” the guy had told Hennessy, and he had his chest puffed out as if he were actually proud of the stinking mess around them.

  Hennessy had to calm him down, then advise him that there’d been two complaints about the fighting that had gone on. The walls of the house, one complainant had sworn, had been shaking.

  “Oh, sure,” the guy had said, satisfied in some way. “I’ve got great neighbors here. I’ll bet not one of them had the guts to leave their name.”

  That was true, but a complaint was a complaint and Hennessy had to ask to look around. He asked as nicely as he could, but God, his heart had been pounding. The house made him feel trapped; the squalor grated against his bones. He found the wife in the kitchen, slapping some hamburgers into a frying pan, even though it was much too late for supper. Hennessy had to explain himself all over again, to her back, because she refused to face him. She had blond hair, and she wore a cotton dress with buttons up the back. Hennessy guessed she wasn’t more than twenty-five. He went on about the neighbors’ complaints while the guy stood in the doorway behind him, a little too close for Hennessy’s taste. When Hennessy finished, the wife said, “I’ve got nothing to say,” in such a flat tone Hennessy almost believed her. He was tempted to get the hell out of there right then; his throat was dry and he’d have given anything for a beer. But he began to feel something along the base of his neck. He looked down and saw that the wife’s legs were purple with bruises.

  Oh, shit, he thought. Goddamn it.

  She had put another hamburger down into the pan and the meat sizzled and gave off a rancid odor.

  “Do you mind turning around while we talk?” Hennessy said.

  Hennessy had been right; she wasn’t more than twenty-five, maybe younger. Her lip was split and there was a circle that would soon turn purple around her eye. But what got to Hennessy, what made him take a step backward, was the way she looked at him, with such hatred you would have thought he’d been the one who’d struck her.

  “What happened to you?” Hennessy asked. He could feel her husband behind him. He half expected the woman to laugh in his face.

  “Nothing,” she said.

  “What I’d like to know,” the guy said from behind him, “is what gives you the right to waltz in here whenever you want?”

  Hennessy faced the husband and pulled back his sport coat to reveal his holster. “This,” he said.

  The husband quickly moved back. Hennessy had known a gun would matter to a guy like this. He knew he was lucky to be six two, because in this house, force was what mattered.

  “So, what happened?” Hennessy asked the wife again.

  “I fell,” she said. “Against the stove.”

  “Yeah,” Hennessy said. “The stove is right at eye level.”

  The wife stared right through him.

  “I have to look through the rest of the house,” Hennessy told the husband.

  “Jesus fucking Christ,” the guy said. “My own goddamned house!”

  Hennessy went back through the dining room and living room to the rear hallway. He knew the floor plan by heart, the house was the exact same model as his own, so no one had to tell him where the children’s rooms were. He opened the door to the first bedroom and took the flashlight from his belt. A toddler was asleep, holding on to a stuffed animal. The floor was littered with toys and trash and there was a pile of dirty diapers in one corner. Hennessy quickly closed the door. He hated the idea of getting involved in a domestic; this was personal, this was between a husband and a wife.

  In the living room, the guy had switched on the TV. It was a Saturday night, and in his own house Hennessy’s boy, Stevie, was probably watching the same channel. Bonanza. Hennessy stopped in the bathroom doorway. He saw some blood on a towel draped over the shower curtain; the wife had probably washed her face when Sorenson and Brewer first arrived, and cleaned off her split lip. Hennessy told himself all he had to see was the blood, it was none of his business if the tub and toilet were filthy, he didn’t need to ask himself what kind of woman would keep her house like this. But it was his job to look in their bedroom, to see the rumpled sheets on their bed and the piles of dirty laundry on the floor, in the same corner where he and Ellen had their pine bureau. Hennessy went on to the last bedroom, the one where his three-year-old, Suzanne, slept at home. It took a while before what was so different about this room registered. This room was neat, that was it. The toys were stacked in boxes, and pictures of animals, horses and golden retrievers, had been carefully cut out of magazines and thumb-tacked to the walls. Hennessy moved the beam of his flashlight around the room and found a small girl of seven or eight beneath a frayed blanket.

  “Jesus H. Christ,” he could hear the guy in the living room say to his wife, “this jerk’s going to take all night.”

  The little girl who kept her room so neat was doing a good job of faking sleep, certainly better than Hennessy’s own kids when he checked on them. But just when he might have been fooled into believing she was asleep, Hennessy heard her quick breathing. If he hadn’t had children himself he might not have recognized a child awake, but he did, and he went over to the bed and crouched down beside it.

  “Did you see what happened?” he whispered.

  “Nothing happened,” the little girl whispered back, and that was when Hennessy k
new she had seen.

  “Someone was being mean,” Hennessy said.

  The little girl shook her head no and moved deeper into her blanket.

  “You have a real pretty room,” Hennessy said. “I like the pictures on the wall. My little girl is crazy about horses, too.”

  Hennessy could feel himself winning her over; it was so easy he could have wept. The little girl propped herself up on her elbows to get a better look at him.

  “My daughter likes those yellow horses, the ones with white manes,” Hennessy said.

  “Palominos,” the little girl said.

  “Is he ever mean to you?” Hennessy whispered.

  “Just her,” the girl said.

  Hennessy realized he had been keeping his hand inside his jacket, close to his gun.

  “Does your little girl have her own horse?” the girl asked.

  “Our backyard is just like yours,” Hennessy said. “It’s much too small. A horse would never fit.”

  “Oh,” said the girl, disappointed. “But you could take her riding, you know. She’d love that.”

  The door was quickly flung open, but the little girl was quicker. She lay down flat and closed her eyes and her breathing grew heavy, like a sleeper’s. The girl’s mother stood in the doorway; with the light in the hall behind her you couldn’t see her bruises. She looked like some pretty young woman who hadn’t had time to comb her hair.

  “Don’t you dare wake my girl,” she snarled at Hennessy.

  Hennessy stood up and his knees cracked. He went over to the woman; he forced himself to sound reasonable, as if he walked into somebody’s life this way every night. “You can press charges right now,” he said.

  The woman snorted. “Not on your life,” she said.

  “I could escort him from the house,” Hennessy told her.

  “Oh, yeah?” the woman whispered. “And then are you going to spend the rest of your life sitting on my front stoop so you can keep him from coming back? Are you going to watch out for us after tonight?”

  Hennessy felt like a fool. He knew the little girl was listening. What exactly was he offering them?

  “You can get a court order,” he said.

  “Look,” the woman said. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “All right,” Hennessy said. God, he said it too damned quickly. He pulled out one of his cards, which was still so new you could smell the ink on it, and handed it to the woman. “You can call me anytime if you change your mind.”

  The woman snorted again, as if he were crazy, and she shoved the card back at him. Hennessy followed her out of the bedroom, but before he did he slid his card under the little girl’s mattress. The guy was waiting for him in the living room. He acted as if he were watching Bonanza, he acted as if he didn’t have a care in the world, but Hennessy knew he was waiting. The guy stood up from the couch slowly. He looked at Hennessy, saw he’d found nothing, and broke into a grin.

  “Tell those neighbors of mine to go fuck themselves,” the guy said.

  All Hennessy wanted was the front door.

  “This is my house, got it?” the guy goaded him.

  “I got it,” Hennessy said. “But if you don’t keep it down, I’ll be back. You get that.”

  Hennessy took off and he didn’t look back. He drove straight to the White Castle on Harvey’s Turnpike, but he couldn’t eat anything he ordered, he couldn’t even swallow his coffee. He kept thinking about the house from the outside, how it looked like any other house in the neighborhood. He could have been blindfolded and still have found the oil burner in the basement. You couldn’t tell a goddamned thing from the outside, and it made him wonder exactly what he’d been seeing for the past six years when he looked at the houses on his block. He felt sick. He might as well have been the one who punched that woman in the face, because he knew it had happened and, with no complaint from her, he had to walk away. And the worst of it was, he’d been relieved, and that was why, nearly a week later, he was standing in his driveway at dawn, waiting for the milkman.

  He tried to think of his own children, asleep in their beds. He thought about the grocery money his wife always kept in a cream pitcher on a shelf above the stove, about the clean, wet smell of shirts as she ironed in the morning. By now he should have forgotten the pictures tacked up in the little girl’s bedroom; he shouldn’t even remember the shape and color of the bruise forming above her mother’s eye. He could hear the hum of the milkman’s truck as it shifted gears. Across the street, at Olivera’s old place, the weeds had grown since Hennessy had cut the lawn; they were as tall as a man’s thigh. The truck parked, and Hennessy could hear the milk bottles clink against each other as the milkman reached into the back of his truck. All Hennessy wanted was for everything to stay the same. That’s all he was asking for.

  The milkman came up and surprised him. “How you doing?” he said, as if Hennessy stood out here to meet the truck every day at dawn.

  “Cold,” Hennessy said, and he realized that he was. The weather had changed and he was wearing only a short-sleeved shirt and chinos.

  “Two quarts and a cottage cheese,” the milkman said.

  Hennessy nodded, although he hadn’t the faintest idea of what Ellen had ordered. The milkman gave Hennessy the bottles of milk and the container of cottage cheese.

  “See you,” the milkman said, and he took his metal carryall and headed for his truck, then pulled away slowly, since he was going only as far as the Shapiros’.

  If there isn’t a sign, Hennessy told himself, everything will stay the same. I’ll put this milk in the refrigerator and go back to bed and be grateful that my children are safe whenever they go out in the street to play. I’ll eat scrambled eggs every morning and I’ll never ask for anything again. Just let me be, he thought, but it was a little too late for that. He’d wanted detective and he’d gotten it, and now he was stuck with the job and everything it forced him to know. And then he made a big mistake. He should have turned around and walked up the path to his house, but instead he looked up at the last few stars, and they filled him with yearning the way diamonds did other men. He turned his gaze east, to see if the sun was rising, and that was when he saw the woman up on Olivera’s roof, cleaning out her rain gutters, oblivious to anything else on the street, and Hennessy realized that it was too late to make any deals. He had already asked for things, and what happened was what always happened whenever a desire was granted. He wanted more.

  BY SEVEN THIRTY YOU COULD SMELL COFFEE AND toast, you could hear the metal milk boxes open and shut, and the sound of cars idling as the fathers on the block got ready to commute to work. Soon the houses would be empty, except for the mothers and the youngest children, toddlers learning to walk and babies set down for their naps, because by eight fifteen bands of children headed down Hemlock Street, the boys up front, hitting each other and stopping to wrestle on the lawns in their new chinos and plaid shirts, the girls following, their hair combed into neat braids, their knee socks pulled up high.

  Billy Silk watched them from the cement stoop in front of his house. He was still wearing his pajamas and his feet were bare. Inside, his mother was fast asleep. The baby had awakened at six, and Billy had given him a juice bottle, which James sucked on dreamily in his crib. Mr. Popper had followed Billy outside, and now the cat sat beside him, licking his paws and ignoring Billy. When Billy ran his hand over Mr. Popper’s fur, the cat arched his back, but he didn’t stop grooming himself. He didn’t even blink. Billy found himself missing Happy. Early in the mornings, when everyone was asleep, Billy used to get a carrot out of the refrigerator and hold it through the wire of Happy’s cage. The rabbit always seemed grateful; he would let Billy pet him through the meshing, he would drum his foot up and down with pleasure.

  This morning the air felt cool. Billy Silk wished he had slippers. He was eating stale cookies for breakfast. He had already had a Yoo-Hoo, which he drained while standing in front of the open refrigerator. If he was still hungry
after the cookies, he planned to eat one of the green tomatoes his mother had left to ripen on the windowsill. Lately Billy found he was eating a huge amount of food. He figured they must be running out of money, because his mother had been pretending she was on a diet, when anyone could see she didn’t need it. Every day Billy swore he would eat less, but he could never keep his promise, even though all his mother ever had was black coffee, grapefruit halves sprinkled with sugar, and glasses of skim milk.

  Nora would never have admitted it, but Billy knew she kept finding more and more wrong with the house. A family of squirrels was living in the garage, and the refrigerator was on the blink so that sometimes the milk went sour and other times the eggs froze in their shells. When it rained the bathroom sink filled with water, and they had found a garter snake making its way across the linoleum in the basement. Nora insisted that everything was great; or, if it wasn’t exactly great, it would be soon. She had begun selling magazine subscriptions by phone, and she talked herself into a job as a manicurist at Armand’s, the beauty shop next to the A&P. For the past few days, Nora had been practicing on herself, so that the house smelled like nail-polish remover, and Billy found emery boards on the kitchen counters and in between the pillows of the couch. But if it was so great, why was she drinking coffee and eating grapefruit, why had no one on the block talked to them yet?