by Susan Breen
“I had a rock and if I’d seen him, I was going to throw it at him.”
For a moment the phone was quiet. Then Winifred began to laugh. “I’ve played softball with you, Maggie. You’d never have hit him.”
“That’s not the point,” Maggie said. “I had murder in my heart.”
“Seriously, you were going to throw a rock through a window. What were you thinking was going to happen? Wait, didn’t someone do that in one of your mysteries? But no, the murderer dropped a boulder from the roof.”
“I couldn’t get up on my roof. And I didn’t want to kill him. I wanted to hurt him.”
Winifred laughed so hard that Maggie heard the nurse come back in and ask if she was all right. She felt like laughing herself, and might have except that there was still a body on her lawn and a man was dead and his wife was a widow and his children fatherless.
“I feel so foolish. What sort of person plans to throw a rock at her neighbor? I feel like an ant, or a worm. This is not at all the sort of person I want to be.”
“You’re a good person, Maggie. But you’re not a saint. No one is. No one should want to be. Better to be human. Tell you the truth, this hatred of yours for Bender has been the most interesting thing about you in years.”
“That’s a terrible thing to say!”
“I mean it. You’ve become a droop, Maggie.”
“A droop! My daughter died. My husband died. My whole world disappeared. I think I’m entitled to be depressed.”
“That was twenty years ago,” Winifred said.
“It could be a hundred years ago. You don’t recover from something like that.”
“You’re not the only person in this world who’s suffered,” Winifred said. “Look at me. Here I am, in a nursing home, can’t even move. I’ve suffered too.”
“I appreciate that, Winifred.”
“Come right down to it. I’ve suffered more than you. You’ve got your own house and car. You can go out at night. Frankly, I might just as well have lost my daughter because she’s not talking to me. It’s just like she’s dead.”
“No, I’m sorry, but it’s not the same thing. You and your daughter had an argument and if you would simply call Amy and apologize for being a horse’s ass, she’d forgive you. She’s alive. My daughter’s dead,” Maggie cried out. “There’s not a thing in the world I can do to bring her back.”
“Well, you have happy memories,” Winifred continued, unabashed.
“God damn it,” Maggie swore, and slammed down the phone. Why did Winifred always have to make the conversation about herself?
Her anger seemed to spatter across her genteel living room, pulsating the way the ambulance light had moments ago. Maggie was so angry she couldn’t move; she felt as though something large had settled itself against her chest. She staggered to her feet, swaying under emotion, thinking she would go upstairs, go to sleep, but then she heard someone saying her name.
The windows were open. She’d just yelled in front of half her community. She, who had struggled so hard to maintain a brave face all these years, had just let down her guard and yelled about her grief, and worst of all, the widow was on her lawn. Maggie could hear Noelle saying her name.
She remembered then something her mother used to say: Listeners never hear good of themselves.
But it was too late.
Chapter 5
“Maggie Dove?” the voice said. A woman’s voice. Soft, cultured in the way movie stars from the ’50s sounded. Fake. “That short old lady? The mean one who was always yelling at Bender?
“She’s the one who found my husband?” the disembodied voice went on. “I bet she didn’t shed any tears over my Bender. No matter what Bender did, she was on him.” Maggie felt herself shrink. No matter what her grievances with Bender were, they felt so insubstantial interpreted through this woman’s eyes. Maggie might have writer’s block, but she was still enough of a writer to be able to go into someone else’s head; to see herself as Noelle must.
“That old lady hated my husband. She must have spent half her time looking out the window to see what my Bender was doing.”
I’m not that old, Maggie muttered. Not yet.
She wanted to go outside and defend herself, but the conversation had gone on too long to interrupt. Then it would look like she’d been sitting in her house eavesdropping, which she had been. Maggie groaned and sank into her couch, prayed they would all just leave. Now. But they didn’t. The night wasn’t going to end.
“Didn’t your husband try to kill her tree?” Peter asked. Loyal Peter.
“Thank you for him,” Maggie whispered.
“It was just an oak tree,” the widow responded. “Not even a healthy one. There was a brown patch in the middle. And my husband offered to move it.”
My God, they were an annoying family, Maggie thought. The whole lot of them. The husband was a psychopath, the widow deluded. The younger daughter poorly behaved and the older one swiped Snickers bars on Halloween. Maggie hadn’t complained, but she saw that girl come running up her front stoop and pour a whole bowl full of candies into her bag. They took her snow shovel too. During the last big storm she’d left it out on her front stoop and when Maggie went outside to shovel some more, it was gone. They’d taken it. “Can I have it back?” she’d asked the young one, who was standing on her driveway, holding it.
“Sure,” she said. Sure.
“My husband offered to pay her, to get her a new one, to move that one. She was beyond reason.”
“She’s very attached to that tree,” Peter said. “She has a long-standing relationship with it. Your husband should have respected that.”
Maggie sank deeper into her couch. She wondered how much worse this could all get, though she knew the answer to that. Things could always get worse. That was the surprising thing about life. There were no limits. That was what you learned when you grew up. You might be lucky, you might coast through, but you might be cursed too and if you were, if things started to go wrong, there was no limit. She heard the sound of the phone inside her head, Doc Steinberg on the other end, telling her there’d been an accident. A terrible accident. “You’re going to have to be strong, Maggie.”
She began to feel that metallic taste in her mouth, the taste of panic and grief, the terror of grief. No one told you how frightening grief was, because it was bottomless, it was quicksand, it could swallow you and you could sink and sink.
“Will there be an autopsy?” the widow asked.
“Yes, there’s always an autopsy with a sudden death.”
“So when will I be able to schedule a funeral?”
Noelle sounded short of breath.
“I’m sure they’ll release the body to you quickly,” Peter said soothingly. “You’ll be able to have the funeral whenever you want.”
“He was always worried about having a heart attack,” Noelle said. “His father died of a heart attack and his mother died young too. He was sure he wouldn’t live to see forty. He always had huge celebrations on his birthdays. That’s how we met.
“He was shy,” she went on. “But men often are when they meet me for the first time. It’s the nature of the business.”
What business? Maggie wondered. What did that mean? What did Noelle do for a living?
“Would you happen to know why he was on Mrs. Dove’s lawn?” Peter asked.
“What are you suggesting?” Noelle said. “My husband lies dead before us and you’re going to start talking about that tree. Are you suggesting a tree is more important than my husband’s life? He would have paid her good money to move it and it’s only an oak. Nothing special. Those trees are like weeds. She could have bought herself something special, a Japanese maple. Something pretty. She didn’t really care about that tree. She just wanted everyone to think of her as a victim. She would have moved it soon enough if one of her friends had asked her to.”
Her words seared Maggie, she wondered if they were true. Had she said no just to be unpleasant?
But the widow changed direction yet again, the enormity of the situation hitting her. “This is bullshit,” Noelle shouted, her voice an animal trying to break free of its bounds. “He can’t be dead. He just had a checkup. With that bitch, Dr. Steinberg. She said he was in great shape for a man his age, but he could stand to lose five pounds. He was so upset about that. He’s such a hypochondriac. I told him we should go out to lunch and celebrate, but he didn’t want to. He wanted to exercise.
“How could this happen?” she cried. “How could he be alive one minute and dead the next?”
Maggie had cried out something similar when she lost her daughter. That had been the most shocking part of the whole tragedy, the thin line that separated before from after, a line so narrow it seemed like you should be able to stick your hand through it and grab your old life back. But you couldn’t.
Her heart ached for Noelle then. Whatever had divided them, they knew what it was like to share grief. Maggie stood up. She had to go outside. She couldn’t stay inside anymore, listening. She walked toward her door, but before she could open it Peter asked, “Do you have family we can call? Someone to help you with the children?”
“They’re not my children now,” she said.
“Why’s that?”
“They’re his first wife’s. He got custody of them, but she’ll never want to leave them with someone like me.”
She’d got herself under control.
“They’ll say I’m not good enough to take them. I’ll probably never see them again. What am I talking about, they don’t even like me. Never wanted to live with me in the first place. They’ll be glad to say goodbye to me.”
“I’m very sorry,” Peter said, and he sounded like he meant it. “Is there no one I can call?”
“No,” she whispered. “No one.”
Maggie couldn’t take it anymore. No one deserved this. No one deserved to be alone with her dead husband and about to lose her kids and be surrounded by hatred and contempt. She had to go outside, Maggie thought, pushing open the front door and walking onto the veranda. Kindness had to trump humiliation. She stepped out onto the front porch just as the widow said, “Did that awful Mrs. Dove watch him die?”
Maggie came stuttering to a stop, struck motionless on the front lawn, now almost empty, in front of a young woman who stared at her aggressively, angrily. She wore a tight black dress; she must have changed into mourning the moment she heard her husband was dead. A suspicious person might think she’d had it at the ready.
“No,” Maggie said. “He’d been long dead by the time I got there.”
“I don’t know if I believe you.”
She was beautiful and proud. Her eyes flashed, her brown hair was combed softly around her and she’d put on makeup, unless she normally went to bed with carefully lined eyes and plumped-up glossy lips. She didn’t have shoes on though. She stood unprotected on Maggie’s lawn.
“Let’s take him,” Peter said, indicating Bender, who was covered up.
“Get her away from me,” Noelle said.
Maggie didn’t argue, went back inside. Only a small part of her, the churlish part, thought Bender had got what he wanted. Her lawn. He’d finally kicked her off her lawn.
Chapter 6
That night Maggie woke up to the sound of the 2:00 freight train. She’d been listening to that train most of her life, counting up the cars though she usually fell back asleep before she got to fifty. She loved the trains, the town hall clock that sounded every hour, the barking of Cavanaugh’s dog every morning, the street sweepers on Tuesday and Friday, the garbagemen yelling at the commuters who were going crazy trying to get around them, the peepers that erupted every March, the Halloween parade that took place every October, the Arbor Day ceremony every April, the rhythms of her town.
She loved order. She supposed that was why she was so religious, because she sought meaning in everything. She couldn’t picture life without a plan. She imagined the universe as her little village writ large. She suspected that was why Bender upset her so much, because he was a convulsion in the natural order of things. Because he represented chaos and she was clutching so tightly to the rules of her world. Her daughter. Her Juliet. How she missed her. How losing her had broken her heart.
Maggie couldn’t sleep.
The train passed, but she was restless. She paced around her bedroom. A deep fog had descended, blocking out the lights of the Tappan Zee Bridge, which normally she could see twinkling. All was hidden. She stared down at her lawn, muffled in fog. She felt her heart beating wildly and wondered if she too would collapse, as Bender had done. She wanted to call Winifred and apologize to her, but she’d already disrupted the nursing schedule once. She’d call first thing in the morning.
She turned on the lights and picked up one of her favorite mysteries. Agatha Christie, of course. A Murder Is Announced. She became a mystery writer because she loved Agatha Christie so much. People thought she wrote mysteries because she liked murder and mayhem, but in fact she loved the rules of mysteries.
Crime and punishment. Cause and effect. Unlike life, mysteries made sense. Someone died and it was for a reason. Someone else figured out the reason and then he sent the bad guy to jail. It all made sense. The few times she’d read mysteries without a solution she’d thrown them away. That was why she’d stopped writing them. Because when her life lost its order, she could no longer write about it.
A girl. Loved. A beautiful girl who sailed through her life, surrounded by a family and village who loved her. A girl on the brink of incredible success, a talented linguist offered a scholarship to a prestigious school, who went to a party to celebrate. A rainy night. But she was a careful driver. Didn’t drink. Left the party early to make her curfew. Put on her seatbelt, except that, while she was waiting at a traffic light, a van skidded on the slick road and crashed into her. Her passenger, Peter Nelson, who was not wearing a seatbelt, was thrown from the car and survived with a few bruises. But Juliet was killed by her injuries.
How could one write mysteries after that? How could one presume to know how people lived or thought or how things could turn out? Sometimes Maggie wondered how she managed to hold on to her faith after all that, except she loved Him so much, she couldn’t let go of Him. But she never trusted God in quite the same way again. She lost so much on that terrible night.
How dare Winifred suggest she’d hung on to her grief for too long? How dare she judge? She’d entered uncharted territory on the day her daughter died. No one had the right to judge her anymore. Only perhaps, Peter, who had suffered too, who had loved Juliet almost as much as she did. Whose life was also destroyed by her death. Who had clung to her memory just as Maggie did. How could Winifred even suggest that an argument with her daughter was the same thing? Poor Amy Levy, who had never been able to do anything right as far as her mother was concerned, because she was fat and had bad skin and wasn’t the daughter Winifred wanted. Again, that terrible pounding of Maggie’s heart. Anger was swallowing her alive, and as she looked out the window, she could almost imagine Bender there still.
Why couldn’t he have died on his own lawn? What possible reason did he have for running onto hers?
That question ate at her. Bender would not have run on her lawn without a reason. She knew him well enough to know that. She grabbed a flashlight and went outside. All was quiet. Still. She smelled the widow’s heavy perfume, and looked toward Bender’s house, lit up, as usual. All was as it should be. The widow in bed, the body in the morgue. Peter gone home. Nothing to worry about and yet the peace did worry her. She prowled around her lawn, seeking, peering into the forsythia, crouching down by the floribunda, looking under the hydrangeas, one of the most poisonous of plants. She’d used the leaves in one of her mysteries. She searched around some more, looking into the little space by the stairs where balls often rolled.
Something caught her eye. She walked toward it and saw that it was a bottle of drain cleaner, hidden by her house. A white bottl
e with red flames on it. She’d never seen that brand before. Maggie picked it up. The bottle was empty but some drops of liquid still clung to the rim. Someone had used it recently.
So it was true, she thought. He really did plan to kill her tree. “You son of a gun,” she muttered, and with that every light in his house shut off.
Chapter 7
Friday morning broke rainy and wretched and Maggie, waking early, saw a figure on her lawn. For a moment she thought it was Bender, come back to haunt her, but then the figure moved and she saw it was the piano teacher, Mr. Cavanaugh, and his dog. Frisky little dog that seemed to think of her lawn as his own personal latrine, but Maggie put that thought in a bag and deposited it elsewhere. She could hate one neighbor, but not two. When you hate one person, it’s his fault; if you hate two, it’s yours.
“Avante, Fidelio,” Cavanaugh called out, tugging his dog in the direction of Main Street. He was a little white pouf of a thing. He always looked puzzled; the dog, not Ellis Cavanaugh.
But no, he wasn’t done. Cavanaugh, not the dog. He stood in front of her oak tree for a moment. She couldn’t make out the expression on his face. He wore a poncho, and glasses covered his eyes, but she assumed, from the stillness of his position, that he was remembering Bender, perhaps wondering, as she was, how it was possible that the events of last night had left so little trace. The lawn looked as it always did. Life went on, the great tragedy of life, and she had just begun to think about that when Mr. Cavanaugh rocked back on his feet and spit at her oak tree. Then he grabbed up his little dog in his arms and strode in the direction of Main Street.
Maggie was stunned. She’d never seen that man lose his temper and Mr. Cavanaugh had been sorely tried. She’d seen him on the verge of tears. At the high school concert, when Jeremy Burns played Chopin at twice its required speed she’d seen him brush his face with a handkerchief. But never angry.
What had Bender done to him? Maggie wondered.