The New Neighbor: A Novel

by Leah Stewart

  But then the woman looks again, and once her change is in her hand she approaches, fumbling with her purse. Time stretches, as in the slow slide into a car wreck. There is endless time, and yet somehow not enough time to stop what’s about to happen. Milo is still fighting his ice cream cone, chasing the drips around the side with his tongue. They’re faster than he is. Some part of Jennifer registers that his frustration is building, but there’s no time, either, to head off the tantrum or the tears. The woman gets very close, her head cocked like she’s trying to place Jennifer’s face. Her expression is pleasant as she does this, but it could morph, at any moment, into wary confusion, or even horror. “I recognize you, don’t I?” she says. Jennifer absorbs these words with the vacant calm of someone who expected disaster. In the last year she’s developed the ability to climb down into the deepest part of herself as if into a storm cellar, pulling a trapdoor shut behind her. After three weeks on the Mountain she hasn’t lost the skill. At the woman’s question, she is gone. It is her body, and not herself, that answers, “I don’t know.”

  Now the woman looks at Milo, who is growling at his cone. Nothing conforms to our wishes, not other people, not ice cream, which must insist on melting, dripping sticky down our hands. “Yes,” the woman says. “I’ve seen you two at the playground.”

  “Oh,” Jennifer says. She nearly sways in her seat, and puts her hand on the table. “That’s right,” she adds, hardly knowing what she’s saying. “I recognize you now.”

  “My son and—I’m sorry, what’s his name?”

  “Milo,” Jennifer says, and Milo looks up, snaps, “What?”

  “That’s right, Milo. My son and Milo have played together. I think they’re about the same age.”

  “What, Mommy?” Milo asks.

  “Nothing,” Jennifer says. “I was just telling her your name.”

  Milo shoots the woman a look, wearing a deep, disgruntled frown. “Why?”

  “You played with her little boy at the playground, remember?”

  Milo cocks his head, his expression suddenly pleasant. “What’s his name?”

  “It’s Ben,” the woman says. “And I’m Megan.”

  “Jennifer,” Jennifer says. “Nice to meet you.” She’d offer her hand to shake, but she’s afraid it would be trembling.

  “Megan and Jennifer.” The woman—Megan—laughs. Jennifer is bewildered. She’s back in her body, but sluggish, as if she’s been sedated. “We just need a Heather,” Megan says. “Seventies names.” Jennifer tries a polite chuckle.

  “Where’s Ben?” Milo says. He’s given up on his ice cream, dropping it onto his napkin on the table, where it pools and spreads. He wipes his fingers on his pants, which doesn’t get his fingers clean but does distribute the mess.

  “He’s at school,” Megan says. “He goes to the preschool at the church in Sewanee.”

  “That’s where I go!” Milo says. Understanding dawns in his face. “I know Ben,” he says. “He has Spider-Man shoes.”

  “Oh,” Megan says, glancing at Jennifer, who interprets that glance as question or judgment.

  “Sometimes I get him before nap,” she says. “He doesn’t nap anymore, and it’s hard on him to lie there quietly for two hours.”

  But Megan doesn’t care about naps, or why Milo isn’t in school. “We should get them together,” she says. “Set up a playdate.”

  “Yes,” Milo says, “yes, yes, yes.” He’s bouncing in his seat, chanting the word. Megan laughs again. Jennifer gives herself an inner slap. Be normal, she exhorts herself. Be friendly. She can almost remember how it’s done. “Hmmm,” she says, playacting. “I get the feeling Milo would like that.”

  They exchange numbers and chat for a few minutes, Milo interjecting his desire to have the playdate that day, right now, immediately. Megan is a professor of sociology. She lives in Sewanee. She’s younger than Jennifer, Jennifer thinks, though maybe not by a lot. She looks younger, anyway, with her open, freckled face and her wide, far-apart eyes. She looks younger than Jennifer feels.

  Megan is talking about the necessity of regular escapes from the Mountain, her family’s weekend jaunts to Nashville, the benefits of a membership to the aquarium in Chattanooga, when Milo leans perilously close to Megan’s nice skirt with his disastrous fingers, and Jennifer catches him gently by the wrist. “I’d better clean him up before he slimes you,” she says.

  “Oh, I’m used to it,” Megan says.

  “Still,” Jennifer says, holding up Milo’s hand for the other woman’s inspection. “Chocolate.”

  “True,” Megan says. She smiles at Milo. “Chocolate is very messy, isn’t it?”

  “Mommy can stain it out,” Milo says.

  “Stain it out?” Megan repeats. She flashes Jennifer a conspiratorial grin. Kids and their cutely mangled sayings. Something to post on Facebook.

  “He sometimes says, ‘I smell like’ to mean he smells something,” Jennifer offers. She imitates the way Milo lifts his head, alert as a hound dog, when he catches a scent. “ ‘I smell like garbage.’ ”

  “I smell like chocolate!” Milo shouts gleefully, wanting in on the joke.

  “Yes, you do, bubby,” Jennifer says. She stands, pulling him out of his chair, and at last the other woman releases her, promising a call. “Great!” Jennifer says. She wants to turn to someone afterward, blow out air, share her relief. But there’s only Milo to turn to, and her relief is nothing she can express to him, so instead she proceeds to the bathroom to scrub him clean.

  The someone she wanted to turn to, she realizes as she rubs Milo’s reluctant little hands together under the water, was Tommy. She still misses him, which surprises her. She comes upon the feeling from time to time, like when you step funny and feel that particular twinge in your knee. Back again. No matter what you did to get rid of it.

  Horrible Deeds

  Once a week I go to the library in Monteagle, a brown little institutional box of a building. Sue the librarian expects me. She knows my habits and makes me a stack of books she thinks I’ll like: always five books, always detective novels, waiting for me behind the circulation desk. You might imagine that being an old lady I like the cozy mysteries, but you’d be wrong. Spare me the cats and knitting. It was Sue’s idea to start picking out books for me—perhaps she gets bored—and the first stack she presented me, two or three years ago, was full of such nonsense. I don’t need my murders made adorable. Death in a book is still only death in a book, but give me an author who doesn’t flinch. If a mystery doesn’t walk you up to the abyss before it rescues you, it’s a shallow form of comfort.

  At any rate Sue knows better now. When I arrived today she had ready a good solid stack of horrible deeds. “Miss Margaret!” she greeted me, beaming like she always does. “How are you today!” I did not make a mistake with the exclamation point; that is how she talks.

  “As well as could be expected,” I said, which is one of my standard answers. What should I say? I’m ninety. Fine would be a ridiculous lie.

  “I’ve got some good ones for you,” she said. She got up from her stool to get them, which gave me time to get to the desk and heave my returns onto it. In the past she’s come out from behind the desk and tried to take them from me, but when politeness didn’t work I snarled at her and now she doesn’t do it anymore.

  She plopped her books next to mine. This is one of the best moments of my week, seeing those two stacks side by side: something accomplished, something to anticipate. Perhaps it is the best moment. She lifted the top book, by Tana French, and displayed it as proudly as if she’d had a hand in its creation. “This just came in,” she said. “Hasn’t even made it to the shelf yet. I know you like her.”

  “I do,” I said. “Thank you.”

  She went about the business of returning and checking out, and as she did my mind drifted. She talks while she works, but she’s really talking to herself—saying my name as she types it in, and so forth—and so I don’t really listen. She used to tell me
all the local gossip, but I never responded with more than a flat, “I see,” and eventually she stopped. She knows everything about everyone, Sue, and has little ability to discern what’s interesting. I wondered if she’d heard about my new neighbor. My eye fell on the computers they keep for public use—near the front, to my dismay, as when I go to a library what I want to see are books—and it struck me that I could look up Jennifer Young on the Internet. It’s a common name, though, I imagine. How would I know which Jennifer Young she was? What could I find that would really interest me? My detective novels would be terribly boring if all questions could be answered by an Internet search. It must be hard, these days, to imagine a mystery.

  I don’t have the Internet here in my home. If I did I’d probably look her up. Jennifer Young. We are curious creatures and can’t be expected not to satisfy that curiosity when the answers are so readily available. A child doesn’t really want to spoil the surprise of her Christmas presents, but if she knows where they’re hidden in the closet she’ll have no choice but to look. The world has forgotten that there is more pleasure in wondering than knowing. A quick answer—the year someone was born, the reason for hail—is such a dull satisfaction. Why do you even want to know? That’s the true mystery.

  At any rate I was thinking about Jennifer Young, and so when Sue spoke it seemed like telepathy. “Have you found anyone?” she asked.

  I was startled. “What?”

  “Weren’t you looking for someone?” She pushed the new stack in my direction. “To check on you now and then? To keep you company?”

  “No,” I said, with no small amount of indignation.

  “Are you sure? I could swear you said you were. Last week. You told me that.”

  “Sue, are you getting old?”

  She laughed. “Miss Margaret,” she said. “Every day.”

  “Perhaps you’ve been talking to my doctor.”

  “Oh, Dr. Bell doesn’t gossip. You know that.”

  “Do I?”

  “Miss Margaret, you are wicked. She didn’t say a thing. Well, if you didn’t tell me that then I must’ve dreamed it.”

  “I don’t know why you’d dream about me,” I said.

  “Well, I think about you, all by yourself out there.”

  “I live five minutes from here.”

  “I know, but you’re all alone, out in the woods. My mother fell, and—”

  “I’m not going to fall,” I said.

  “I know, but—”

  “I’m not going to fall.”

  She sighed. “All right, Miss Margaret. And I’m sorry if you get an unwanted call, because I did tell someone I thought you were looking for help.”

  “Who?”

  She lifted her chin to indicate the bulletin board by the front door. I never look at it, being both uninterested in and immune to the usual exhortations to go to church, buy a house, do something charitable, or join a club. I followed her gaze, confused. “She put a sign up there,” she said. “I can’t think of her name—I guess I am getting old—but she said she’d rented Barbara’s old house, which puts her near you, so maybe that’s why you came to mind.”

  “Jennifer Young?”

  “Yes!” she said. “You know her?”

  “No,” I said.

  She looked at me a moment, awaiting an explanation I had no plans to offer. “Well,” she said, “she does massage, and she’s new here and just getting started. I thought she might be willing to come and see you, from time to time, if you needed that.”

  “I don’t,” I said.

  I do not like to be treated with the restrained patience one must show a petulant child, and so I was quite annoyed by the way she was looking at me, by the careful way she said, “I know you don’t.” She flashed a quick smile to signal her withdrawal from the field. “She seems like a nice lady. A tiny bit shy, I think. She has a cute little boy. I hope she likes it here.”

  “Where did she come from?”

  “I don’t know.” Sue cocked her head, considering. “I don’t think I asked. That’s not like me! She’s a little . . . I said shy. So you know me. I just chattered.”

  “About me.”

  “Well, not just about you! Miss Margaret, my goodness. Don’t be mad at me. You know I mean well.”

  I relented. “I know,” I said. “It’s all right.” I slid the books to my chest and said, in my sweet-old-lady voice, “Thank you for these.”

  We said our goodbyes, but I lingered near the front door, pretending to look at the carrel of new releases. I was waiting for Sue to be busy, and once someone finally appeared at the desk to occupy her attention, I stepped to the bulletin board. LICENSED MASSAGE THERAPIST, the sign said. IN-HOME MASSAGES. Then those tear-off strips, printed with a phone number and the name Jennifer Young.

  Now I sit here at my desk knowing I could call this person, my new neighbor, if I wanted to. I have her number right here, on the little slip of paper, and, just in case I lose that, copied into the Rolodex I keep beside my phone. If I want to, all I have to do is pick up the phone and call.

  In the Beginning

  She was fourteen when she first knew him, and not an old fourteen. She’d never kissed a boy, unless you counted a sloppy encounter during a game of Truth or Dare, which she didn’t. He was a junior. He had long legs and thick, unruly hair. At seventeen he already carried himself with an air of amused experience. He was good at eye contact. He had an all-inclusive smile. Everybody wanted to be near him, even—or especially—the ones who were too nervous to approach. Truth and beauty, he was truth and beauty, the beauty part probably more important than the truth, or at least what made the truth so interesting. Was he even, objectively, as handsome as he seemed? It was hard to tell, impossible to be objective in the face of his charisma. To Jennifer her longing for him seemed natural, inevitable. She made no effort to explain. Above his right eyebrow was a beauty mark—probably he would have called it a freckle or a mole, but she studied it surreptitiously every day and she called it a beauty mark.

  It was geometry class that offered her this opportunity. As a freshman she should have been in algebra, and as a junior he should have been in trig. She was good at math; he was bad. She used to imagine the story would unfold the way it did in teen movies and TV shows—she’d be asked to tutor him, they’d meet after school, he’d grow to depend on her until suddenly he’d realize she was all he needed. She believed that she sensed something beneath the careless smile and the cool, a powerful undertow of longing and hurt. She imagined scenes in which he confessed his deepest emotions, told her she was the only one he could talk to, really talk to. The words would be all the more affecting because they were so hard for him to say. It didn’t happen like that. For months they sat in desks next to each other without exchanging more than a sentence or two. For months she perfected the art of watching him without appearing to watch him. She was good, he was bad, but they both liked the back of the class.

  There was nothing particularly interesting about her, at least not at school. In the dance studio, she was a star. But that was her secret life, and she kept it secret. Dancing was for her a deep privacy. This despite the yearly public recitals. In rehearsal Miss Suzanne was always having to remind her to look up and out, to watch herself in the mirrors. She succeeded in school without attracting attention, or at least not attention that outlasted a teacher’s occasional unsuccessful effort to get her to speak up in class. She always nodded a lot and said she’d try, and then she never did try. She couldn’t really understand the urge that made her more eager classmates wave their hands. If she spoke, everyone would look at her. If she didn’t speak, what had been lost?

  Her mild, forgiving parents didn’t mind that she was shy, though they sometimes remarked—mildly—that it seemed odd for a shy person to want to be a dancer. She didn’t like to explain herself—no matter what she said, it always sounded wrong—so she only nodded, or sometimes shrugged, or once, irritably, said, “You always say that,” her eyes fixed
resolutely out the front passenger window of her father’s car.

  “It’s not a criticism,” he said that time. “Just an observation.” He hesitated. Her parents were never anything but supportive, spending their money and driving her to lessons without a word of doubt. They’d both had difficult parents, and they’d told her directly and indirectly that they wouldn’t make her life any harder than it had to be. She could hear in his voice that it cost her father something to press on. “It’s not an easy road, is it? I just want to be sure you’re sure.”

  “I’m sure,” she said. She was sure. She was sure beyond sure, and maybe that was why she couldn’t be sure of anything else. A person came equipped with only so much certainty, so much confidence. She’d spent all of hers in one place.

  This was how it happened: She had a friend whose older brother was often pressed into chauffeuring them both, very, very much against his will. He was driving them to the movies. It was a Saturday night in January. He took the scenic route, cruising the usual gathering places—the parking lots of churches and fast-food establishments—in search of people he knew. In the front seat his sister scolded and protested, threatening to kill him if they missed the previews. In the backseat Jennifer leaned her forehead against the window and stared at things until they blurred and faded. Trees, streetlights, people, cars. She couldn’t bring herself to care whether they missed the previews. It was her friend who wanted to see this movie. What she herself wanted seemed very far from here.

  The car stopped, her friend’s voice rising as she socked her brother in the shoulder. “Hey!” the brother said, in protest, and then, “Hey, man,” out his window, and a deep male voice drawled back, “Hey.”