A Crime in the Neighborhood

by Suzanne Berne

  “I’m sorry,” she said, standing up in Mr. Green’s backyard and overturning her cup of wine in the grass. “I didn’t realize—”

  “No—” said Mr. Green, rising also.

  “I have to be getting back.” When he made a move toward her, my mother put a hand on the back of the chair she had just left, stepping behind it so the chair was between them. “You know, I just meant to drop by to say hello—have a glass of wine. I didn’t mean—and now here we are sitting out here—”

  “Please,” he said, standing also.

  “Really, I have to go,” she said too loudly, as if just noticing that the rest of the neighborhood had hushed. “I do really have to get home.”

  Mr. Green stared at her until she looked away.

  She gestured upward. “I hadn’t meant to come over at all,” she said in the same loud voice. “You see, I was making dinner—hamburgers, too, isn’t that funny—but I hadn’t meant—but when I saw you sitting out here all alone—well, I—” She tried to laugh, but the laugh caught somewhere in her throat and thinned to a gasp.

  After a moment she tried to speak again but stopped. I saw her glance over at the pineapple, bristling on the card table. “Do you need help,” she managed finally. “Maybe you need help with carrying these things back inside?”

  He didn’t answer. Instead he walked over to the still-glowing barbecue pit and threw an unopened package of hotdog buns onto the orange coals. A moment later he tossed in the unused plastic forks and spoons and the paper napkins. The stink of scorched plastic curled into the air.

  “Oh don’t.” My mother held out one arm, her hand raised with fingers spread. From where I sat watching, she looked small and toylike with her foolish arm outstretched, as if someone could reach down and pluck her up by that little arm and carry her away.

  “Please don’t,” she said. “I know you’ll wish you’d saved those things for another time.”

  When he didn’t turn around, she dropped her arm, letting it swing free as if she had only been waving. Then she walked very quickly across his neat side lawn and through our own overgrown grass. Mr. Green stayed where he was, standing in front of his barbecue pit with his back to the neighborhood.

  The screen door opened, then banged shut. My mother’s footsteps crossed the porch, and for the first time that summer I heard her close the front door and turn the lock.

  By the time I clumped downstairs that evening, my mother was sitting in the dark on the living-room sofa, one magazine spread open in her lap, several more beside her, the room lit only by the street lamp outside and the light from the kitchen. She had poured herself a glass of wine. After a moment, during which she did not glance at me, my mother patted the cushion beside her.

  For a while we sat quietly, looking across at the bare fireplace and at the piano, which no one had played since Julie had picked out “Heart and Soul” a few days before she and Steven left with the Westendorfs. My notebook lay across my knees and once or twice I flipped the pages. My mother drank her wine. It seemed a very long time since the nights when my aunts had filled this room with their swooping voices and long legs, or since the twins had lain on the floor with their chins in their hands watching television, or since the night my father had sat here staring at Aunt Ada.

  This marks a new era, my mother had said that night, staring at Nixon shaking hands with Chairman Mao on the television screen.

  The windows were open, and as the warm night breeze brushed against our faces we heard guitar music from someone’s radio down the street. The moon was up. Through the windows it looked blurred as an old coin rising over Mr. Green’s rooftop.

  As I watched the moon, I saw a strange thing, if seeing is the right word for it. I looked out the window and saw myself walking down the street toward our house. But then, I wasn’t myself; I was a stranger in the neighborhood walking alone at night, looking in at the yellow lamplight of other people’s living rooms. Most of our neighbors didn’t bother to draw their curtains and it was easy to glance right in and see the green fronds of a plant, the corner of a corduroy armchair, framed photographs of babies and brides smiling on the mantel. On warm nights like this one most people’s windows would be open, and up and down the street I could hear the sounds of running bathwater, the clatter of pots, children’s voices, all mingling and interrupting one another until the whole street sounded as if it belonged to a single enormous family. As I passed each neighbor’s house, each window lit up so that I could see bright flowers in vases and books on bookshelves and rooms full of people moving back and forth. But when I reached my own house I didn’t hear anything; the lights were out and my house was as quiet as if no one lived there.

  Beside me, my mother sighed and pushed back a strand of hair that had fallen across her forehead.

  Sometimes I wonder if it was only to break the silence between us that I reminded her of what I had seen two and a half weeks before, on Thursday, July 20th, at 4:44 in the afternoon. Sometimes I wonder if it was as simple as that. But not very often anymore.

  My mother sighed again. “What do you have to say?” she said at last, reaching up to switch on the small lamp beside her. “Because I have the feeling you want to say something. So if you do, say it now. Otherwise I’m going to bed.”

  Perhaps, perhaps—that careful word again—perhaps I might never have said anything at all if she hadn’t challenged me that evening. But then again, I know this isn’t true. I had never been so prepared to do anything in my life.

  “What?” she said, looking finally at me. “What is it?”

  Though my fingers were trembling, I opened my notebook and showed her the page dated July 20th where, at 4:44 in the afternoon, not a minute sooner or later thanks to my water-resistant wristwatch, parting gift from my father, I had seen Mr. Green’s brown Dodge drive by two hours before he usually got home. It was right there in my notebook. It’s there still.

  “What day did you say?” she whispered harshly.

  I pointed to the book. Then turning each page slowly, almost reverently as I went along, I showed my mother every detail I had recorded about Mr. Green and all the newspaper clippings I had saved.

  There was the black comb found at the murder site, a black comb that could be exactly like the one Mr. Green used so frequently. And the police’s theory that the assailant was left-handed, just like Mr. Green. There was the elderly woman on Ridge Road who had witnessed a boy talking to a balding man in a car just before five o’clock; the bag boy at the mall, who had possibly seen a brown Dodge drive out of the parking lot approximately at the same time as the murder would have occurred; the Band-Aid on Mr. Green’s chin that day. There was the scratching and biting the boy was said to have done.

  And there was this clipping, which I had pasted all by itself on a page and framed with a heavy red crayon border. It began: “Police investigating the abduction and murder of 12-year-old Boyd Arthur Ellison of Spring Hill believe someone living in the vicinity may be responsible for …”

  We sat together in the living room, within that brief circle of lamplight, and I turned the pages of my notebook while my mother drank one and then another glass of wine.

  “Stop it,” she said finally, not looking at me. “This is crazy. It’s crazy and mean. And I don’t want to hear any more.”

  “Wait,” I said.

  But she got up and went into the kitchen.

  For a few moments I sat staring into the empty fireplace. It had never occurred to me that my mother wouldn’t believe my story. It was all there; I had saved everything. Anyone could see what a good job I had done. Outside the Sperlings’ cat began to yowl. It was a low, ugly noise, and after a few moments of listening to it my face grew hot and I felt like throwing something out of the window at the cat, a mug or a paperweight, something that would hurt. I flipped through my notebook again, riffling the pages so they fanned my face. I turned to the page where I had taped Detective Small’s card, rescued from underneath a begonia pot. After that the
re was nothing else on any of the pages, just thin blue lines running across them, and one thin red line running down each left-hand side.

  From the kitchen I heard a glass break. “You know what,” my mother said in a narrow voice, coming quickly back into the living room, her hands fisted by her sides. “I’m tired. I’m tired of you. I’m tired of myself. I’m tired of everything.”

  “No you’re not,” I tried to say.

  “Oh yes, I am. Sick and tired.” And as furious as she suddenly seemed to be, she did look tired, even sick, standing there with the kitchen light behind her, outlined like one of those terrible sidewalk drawings that show where the crime victim lay. Her shoulders slumped and although I couldn’t see her face well with the light in back of her, it seemed to me that it was shut and blank, as if she had already left me and gone to bed.

  “But I haven’t told you it all.” I was beginning to whine.

  “I don’t want to hear anything more.”

  “But I know he did it,” I said, kicking the coffee table with my good foot.

  “You don’t know,” my mother said, folding her arms as she turned away and headed toward the staircase. “You only think you do.”

  “I do know.”

  “You only want to know. That’s all it is, Marsha,” she said bitterly, turning back to me for a moment, her mouth a sharp line. And suddenly it seemed the most important thing in the world to make her stay, to keep her from vanishing up those stairs and leaving me alone.

  “Mommy,” I cried, holding out a hand. “Wait. I have something else to tell you.”

  “My God. Stop it. Just stop it,” she almost shrieked from the bottom of the stairs, her hands flying to her ears. “Why can’t you ever just stop it?”

  I heard her run up to her bedroom, her footsteps falling like stones on the staircase. The Sperlings’ cat started yowling again, this time closer to the window near where I was sitting. It was moaning and snarling at the same time, sometimes dropping to a guttural murmur, then pitching upward to something like a scream, making such a nasty, sad, desperate noise that I banged the window shut, then limped into the kitchen.

  I laid my notebook on the table, next to the telephone and my mother’s Peterman-Wolff vinyl logbook, and sat down. Upstairs my mother walked back and forth in her room, and as I sat there staring at her logbook I wondered what she was doing. Maybe she was packing a suitcase. Once or twice something fell on the floor above me, a book, a shoe. A door opened and closed.

  “Mommy?” I called softly. “Mom?” I said, louder this time. But she didn’t hear.

  Finally I picked up the kitchen telephone and, after another moment or two, dialed his number. He answered at the beginning of the second ring, as if he had been waiting to hear from me, which of course he had not.

  “I have something to tell you,” I said, in a voice loud enough that even all the way upstairs, my mother had to listen.

  Fifteen

  Fifteen minutes passed, or perhaps it wasn’t even that long, and then there were two quick knocks on the screen door.

  For a moment nothing happened. I sat where I was, back on the living-room sofa, not daring to look up from the floor. Then, from the top of the stairs, my mother called, “All right.

  “All right,” she repeated as she came down the stairs and crossed the room to let him in.

  We sat on the sofa, my mother and I, and Detective Small sat down on the piano bench across from us. He was wearing his light blue sports coat. I imagine he said hello, although I don’t remember it. In fact, I don’t remember him entering the room at all, just suddenly being in it.

  But by the time he sat down, everything about him had acquired a penetrating clarity, the way trees and leaves outside come into sharp focus after a rainstorm. I saw the creases in his black leather loafers and the ribs of his black socks. I saw where his brown knit trousers had begun to fray at the cuffs. As he hunched over, elbows on his knees, big hands clasped before him, I saw that he was older than I had first thought, that in fact he was middle-aged, probably my father’s age, and that there was a dab of mustard near his mouth. Not long ago, he had been eating dinner.

  For a full minute no one said anything. My mother stared at her knees. Detective Small stared at me. I thought of the twins sitting cross-legged on a beach in Cape May with Amy Westendorf, listening to her gnomelike giggle under the stars, themselves laughing as the tide washed in darkly across the sand. Something sour rose in my throat.

  Detective Small shifted on the piano bench, unclasping his hands. “So what do you have to tell me, Marsha?” he said, kindly enough, and, perhaps hoping to encourage me by sinking to my level, he got up from the bench to squat down in front of me. “It sounded on the phone like you had a pretty important thing to say.”

  He tried to smile, yet as much as I wanted to get it over with, I still couldn’t speak, and only the sight of my mother’s tense white face so close to mine kept me from simply bursting into tears.

  But as I’ve already mentioned, for better or worse I’m not someone who can stop what I’ve set going, especially not with my mother looking at me with such stark dread and confusion that I couldn’t bear to be alone with her, even as I could scarcely bear to let her out of my sight. And to be honest, I also felt a sickening excitement, a kind of imploding fascination at what I was about to do that was stronger than any impulse to stop it from happening.

  I lifted my head and said: “He tried to talk to me in the backyard. By the lilac bushes.”

  Immediately an image sprang forward of the first time Mr. Green spoke to me, that spring afternoon as I dug in the dirt and sang to myself. A plain, reliable image. I pictured his red face framed by green lilac leaves, his short neck rising up from the lapels of his khaki shirt. His fleshy nose threw a triangular shadow across his cheek in the late afternoon sun. “Hello there,” he said, and cracked his knuckles. We had talked about ameobas.

  “He came up behind me when I wasn’t looking,” I said.

  Now that I’d finally begun, a deep calm settled over me and I felt myself lean back against the sofa cushions. This had happened. This was true.

  “Who is he?” said Detective Small.

  “Mr. Green.”

  He kept his gaze on my face. “When was this?”

  “In the spring,” I said distantly.

  “Did he say something to you?”

  “He asked me if I wanted to know a secret. He said a boy’s thing looked like a thumb.”

  My mother blinked and gave me a piercing look, then she shuddered and took my hand in her hot, dry one. I snatched my hand back and sat up.

  “He said he wanted to bite my boobies. He said that’s what you got for being hoity-toity. He told me if I ever let anybody know what he said he would cut off my head and stick it in his barbecue pit.”

  Detective Small rocked back on his heels. After a pause he said, “Did he try to touch you?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  For a moment no one spoke. Then, very gently, in a careful voice that made me despise him, Detective Small said, “How?”

  I envisioned Mr. Green behind his hedge the morning my mother had asked him if he wouldn’t like a little tornado. Just a little tornado, she said, to blow everything away. And he had stared back at her, slapping the Post against his palm, face reddening, lips twitching, forehead perspiring.

  “He hit me with a newspaper.”

  Detective Small briefly lost his balance. He put a hand down on the floor to steady himself, then straightened up and went back to the piano bench. My mother glanced intently at him and back at me; her eyes were large and dark, but she said nothing.

  “He hurt me,” I heard myself whimper.

  “What happened next?”

  “I ran away. I ran into the house. I never wanted to see him again, but he was always around. She liked him,” I said, looking sideways at my mother. “Everyone else on the street thinks he is weird.”

  It all began to make sense as I heard myself
talk. It was all quite convincing.

  “That’s why I’ve been keeping all those notes,” I said. “Because I was afraid.” Then I closed my eyes and concentrated on breathing in and out. Breathing had begun to require an effort. I remember having the impression that I could forget to breathe at any moment.

  “What notes?” said Detective Small.

  “She has a notebook,” said my mother eventually, when I didn’t answer. “Full of lots of little details about—mostly about Mr. Green. She showed it to me tonight, only I—really Detective, I don’t—”

  “Can I see the notebook?”

  It was lying on the floor near my feet. I felt my mother hesitate; then she leaned over, her warm body resting heavily across my knees, and picked it up.

  For a few minutes the only sound in the room was the sound of turning pages. I kept my eyes closed and pretended I was in a cool, dim room all alone. My mother sat quietly beside me. Once she reached up and brushed my hair away from my forehead, and there was something so terrible about this gesture, the old intimacy of it, that I flinched.

  “Is there anything else you want to tell me?” Detective Small said at last. When I opened my eyes, his own shrewd brown eyes were fixed on my face. It amazed me that he looked skeptical.

  My mother said, “Hasn’t she said enough?”

  I’ll always remember the sound of her voice that night, how anguished it was, and that this made me glad, because in a way I figured everything about to happen was really her fault, not mine. Looking back on it now, I would guess she thought so, too.

  Detective Small stood up, still staring straight at me. “I understand that all this has been very hard for you, Marsha. And you’re a good girl to talk to me. But I want you to go back over everything you’ve just said. I want you to tell me if there’s anything that isn’t true.”

  “Please,” my mother begged. It wasn’t clear whom or what she was begging. Detective Small ignored her and continued to look at me. After a moment, my mother looked at me, too.

  Another child might have seized this moment gratefully, broken down, confessed that she was lying—wailed that she was scared, that she’d had a nightmare, any number of plausible, forgivable things—and even then it would have been all right. The whole episode would have been smoothed over somehow and after a few years maybe even forgotten. Unfortunately, I had ceased to be another child some time ago.