by John Grogan
Parenthood, we found, suited us well. We settled into its rhythms, celebrated its simple joys, and grinned our way through its frustrations, knowing even the bad days soon enough would be cherished memories. We had everything we could ask for. We had our precious baby. We had our numbskull dog. We had our little house by the water. Of course, we also had each other. That November, my newspaper promoted me to columnist, a coveted position that gave me my own space on the section front three times a week to spout off about whatever I wanted. Life was good. When Patrick was nine months old, Jenny wondered aloud when we might want to start thinking about having another baby.
“Oh, gee, I don’t know,” I said. We always knew we wanted more than one, but I hadn’t really thought about a time frame. Repeating everything we had just gone through seemed like something best not rushed into. “I guess we could just go back off birth control again and see what happens,” I suggested.
“Ah,” Jenny said knowingly. “The old Que será, será school of family planning.”
“Hey, don’t knock it,” I said. “It worked before.”
So that is what we did. We figured if we conceived anytime in the next year, the timing would be about right. As Jenny did the math, she said, “Let’s say six months to get pregnant and then nine more months to deliver. That would put two full years between them.”
It sounded good to me. Two years was a long way off. Two years was next to an eternity. Two years was almost not real. Now that I had proved myself capable of the manly duty of insemination, the pressure was off. No worries, no stress. Whatever would be would be.
A week later, Jenny was knocked up.
CHAPTER 13
A Scream in the Night
W ith another baby growing inside her, Jenny’s odd, late-night food cravings returned. One night it was root beer, the next grapefruit. “Do we have any Snickers bars?” she asked once a little before midnight. It looked like I was in for another jaunt down to the all-night convenience store. I whistled for Marley, hooked him to his leash, and set off for the corner. In the parking lot, a young woman with teased blond hair, bright lavender lips, and some of the highest heels I had ever seen engaged us. “Oh, he’s so cute!” she gushed. “Hi, puppy. What’s your name, cutie?” Marley, of course, was more than happy to strike up a friendship, and I pulled him tight against me so he wouldn’t slobber on her purple miniskirt and white tank top. “You just want to kiss me, poochie, don’t you?” she said, and made smooching noises with her lips.
As we chatted, I wondered what this attractive woman was doing out in a parking lot along Dixie Highway alone at this hour. She did not appear to have a car. She did not appear to be on her way into or out of the store. She was just there, a parking-lot ambassador cheerfully greeting strangers and their dogs as they approached as though she were our neighborhood’s answer to the Wal-Mart greeters. Why was she so immensely friendly? Beautiful women were never friendly, at least not to strange men in parking lots at midnight. A car pulled up, and an older man rolled down his window. “Are you Heather?” he asked. She shot me a bemused smile as if to say, You do what you have to do to pay the rent. “Gotta run,” she said, hopping into the car. “Bye, puppy.”
“Don’t fall too in love, Marley,” I said as they drove off. “You can’t afford her.”
A few weeks later, at ten o’clock on a Sunday morning, I walked Marley to the same store to buy a Miami Herald, and again we were approached, this time by two young women, teenagers really, who both looked strung out and nervous. Unlike the first woman we had met, they were not terribly attractive and had taken no efforts to make themselves more so. They both looked desperate for their next hit off a crack pipe. “Harold?” one of them asked me. “Nope,” I said, but what I was thinking was, Do you really think some guy would show up for anonymous sex and bring his Labrador retriever along? How twisted did these two think I was? As I pulled a newspaper out of the box in front of the store, a car arrived—Harold, I presumed—and the girls drove off with him.
I wasn’t the only one witnessing the burgeoning prostitution trade along Dixie Highway. On a visit, my older sister, dressed as modestly as a nun, went for a midday walk and was propositioned twice by would-be johns trolling by in cars. Another guest arrived at our house to report that a woman had just exposed her breasts to him as he drove past, not that he particularly minded.
In response to complaints from residents, the mayor promised to publicly embarrass men arrested for soliciting, and the police began running stings, positioning undercover women officers on the corner and waiting for would-be customers to take the bait. The decoy cops were the homeliest hookers I had ever seen—think J. Edgar Hoover in drag—but that didn’t stop men from seeking their services. One bust went down on the curb directly in front of our house—with a television news crew in tow.
If it had been just the hookers and their customers, we could have made our separate peace, but the criminal activity didn’t stop there. Our neighborhood seemed to grow dicier each day. On one of our walks along the water, Jenny, suffering a particularly debilitating bout of pregnancy-related nausea, decided to head home alone while I continued on with Patrick and Marley. As she walked along a side street, she heard a car idling behind her. Her first thought was that it was a neighbor pulling up to say hello or someone needing directions. When she turned to look into the car, the driver sat fully exposed and masturbating. After he got the expected response, he sped in reverse down the street so as to hide his license tag.
When Patrick was not quite a year old, murder again came to our block. Like Mrs. Nedermier, the victim was an elderly woman who lived alone. Hers was the first house as you turned onto Churchill Road off Dixie Highway, directly behind the all-night, open-air Laundromat, and I only knew her to wave to as I passed. Unlike Mrs. Nedermier’s murder, this crime did not afford us the tidy self-denial of an inside job. The victim was chosen at random, and the attacker was a stranger who snuck into her house while she was in the backyard hanging her laundry on a Saturday afternoon. When she returned, he bound her wrists with telephone cord and shoved her beneath a mattress as he ransacked the house for money. He fled with his plunder as my frail neighbor slowly suffocated beneath the weight of the mattress. Police quickly arrested a drifter who had been seen hanging around the coin laundry; when they emptied his pockets they found his total haul had been sixteen dollars and change. The price of a human life.
The crime swirling around us made us grateful for Marley’s bigger-than-life presence in our house. So what if he was an avowed pacifist whose most aggressive attack strategy was known as the Slobber Offensive? Who cared if his immediate response to the arrival of any stranger was to grab a tennis ball in the hope of having someone new to play catch with? The intruders didn’t need to know that. When strangers came to our door, we no longer locked Marley away before answering. We stopped assuring them how harmless he was. Instead we now let drop vaguely ominous warnings, such as “He’s getting so unpredictable lately,” and “I don’t know how many more of his lunges this screen door can take.”
We had a baby now and another on the way. We were no longer so cheerfully cavalier about personal safety. Jenny and I often speculated about just what, if anything, Marley would do if someone ever tried to hurt the baby or us. I tended to think he would merely grow frantic, yapping and panting. Jenny placed more faith in him. She was convinced his special loyalty to us, especially to his new Cheerios pusher, Patrick, would translate in a crisis to a fierce primal protectiveness that would rise up from deep within him. “No way,” I said. “He’d ram his nose into the bad guy’s crotch and call it a day.” Either way, we agreed, he scared the hell out of people. That was just fine with us. His presence made the difference between us feeling vulnerable or secure in our own home. Even as we continued to debate his effectiveness as a protector, we slept easily in bed knowing he was beside us. Then one night he settled the dispute once and for all.
It was October and the weather still had
not turned. The night was sweltering, and we had the air-conditioning on and windows shut. After the eleven o’clock news I let Marley out to pee, checked Patrick in his crib, turned off the lights, and crawled into bed beside Jenny, already fast asleep. Marley, as he always did, collapsed in a heap on the floor beside me, releasing an exaggerated sigh. I was just drifting off when I heard it—a shrill, sustained, piercing noise. I was instantly wide awake, and Marley was, too. He stood frozen beside the bed in the dark, ears cocked. It came again, penetrating the sealed windows, rising above the hum of the air conditioner. A scream. A woman’s scream, loud and unmistakable. My first thought was teenagers clowning around in the street, not an unusual occurrence. But this was not a happy, stop-tickling-me scream. There was desperation in it, real terror, and it was dawning on me that someone was in terrible trouble.
“Come on, boy,” I whispered, slipping out of bed.
“Don’t go out there.” Jenny’s voice came from beside me in the dark. I hadn’t realized she was awake and listening.
“Call the police,” I told her. “I’ll be careful.”
Holding Marley by the end of his choker chain, I stepped out onto the front porch in my boxer shorts just in time to glimpse a figure sprinting down the street toward the water. The scream came again, from the opposite direction. Outside, without the walls and glass to buffet it, the woman’s voice filled the night air with an amazing, piercing velocity, the likes of which I had heard only in horror movies. Other porch lights were flicking on. The two young men who shared a rental house across the street from me burst outside, wearing nothing but cutoffs, and ran toward the screams. I followed cautiously at a distance, Marley tight by my side. I saw them run up on a lawn a few houses away and then, seconds later, come dashing back toward me.
“Go to the girl!” one of them shouted, pointing. “She’s been stabbed.”
“We’re going after him!” the other yelled, and they sprinted off barefoot down the street in the direction the figure had fled. My neighbor Barry, a fearless single woman who had bought and rehabilitated a rundown bungalow next to the Nedermier house, jumped into her car and joined the chase.
I let go of Marley’s collar and ran toward the scream. Three doors down I found my seventeen-year-old neighbor standing alone in her driveway, bent over, sobbing in jagged raspy gasps. She clasped her ribs, and beneath her hands I could see a circle of blood spreading across her blouse. She was a thin, pretty girl with sand-colored hair that fell over her shoulders. She lived in the house with her divorced mother, a pleasant woman who worked as a night nurse. I had chatted a few times with the mother, but I only knew her daughter to wave to. I didn’t even know her name.
“He said not to scream or he’d stab me,” she said, sobbing; her words gushed out in heaving, hyperventilated gulps. “But I screamed. I screamed, and he stabbed me.” As if I might not believe her, she lifted her shirt to show me the puckered wound that had punctured her rib cage. “I was sitting in my car with the radio on. He just came out of nowhere.” I put my hand on her arm to calm her, and as I did I saw her knees buckling. She collapsed into my arms, her legs folding fawn-like beneath her. I eased her down to the pavement and sat cradling her. Her words came softer, calmer now, and she fought to keep her eyes open. “He told me not to scream,” she kept saying. “He put his hand on my mouth and told me not to scream.”
“You did the right thing,” I said. “You scared him away.”
It occurred to me that she was going into shock, and I had not the first idea what to do about it. Come on, ambulance. Where are you? I comforted her in the only way I knew how, as I would comfort my own child, stroking her hair, holding my palm against her cheek, wiping her tears away. As she grew weaker, I kept telling her to hang on, help was on the way. “You’re going to be okay,” I said, but I wasn’t sure I believed it. Her skin was ashen. We sat alone on the pavement like that for what seemed hours but was in actuality, the police report later showed, about three minutes. Only gradually did I think to check on what had become of Marley. When I looked up, there he stood, ten feet from us, facing the street, in a determined, bull-like crouch I had never seen before. It was a fighter’s stance. His muscles bulged at the neck; his jaw was clenched; the fur between his shoulder blades bristled. He was intensely focused on the street and appeared poised to lunge. I realized in that instant that Jenny had been right. If the armed assailant returned, he would have to get past my dog first. At that moment I knew—I absolutely knew without doubt—that Marley would fight him to the death before he would let him at us. I was emotional anyway as I held this young girl, wondering if she was dying in my arms. The sight of Marley so uncharacteristically guarding us like that, so majestically fierce, brought tears to my eyes. Man’s best friend? Damn straight he was.
“I’ve got you,” I told the girl, but what I meant to say, what I should have said, was that we had her. Marley and me. “The police are coming,” I said. “Hold on. Please, just hold on.”
Before she closed her eyes, she whispered, “My name is Lisa.”
“I’m John,” I said. It seemed ridiculous, introducing ourselves in these circumstances as though we were at a neighborhood potluck. I almost laughed at the absurdity of it. Instead, I tucked a strand of her hair behind her ear and said, “You’re safe now, Lisa.”
Like an archangel sent from heaven, a police officer came charging up the sidewalk. I whistled to Marley and called, “It’s okay, boy. He’s okay.” And it was as if, with that whistle, I had broken some kind of trance. My goofy, good-natured pal was back, trotting in circles, panting, trying to sniff us. Whatever ancient instinct had welled up from the recesses of his ancestral psyche was back in its bottle again. Then more officers swarmed around us, and soon an ambulance crew arrived with a stretcher and wads of sterile gauze. I stepped out of the way, told the police what I could, and walked home, Marley loping ahead of me.
Jenny met me at the door and together we stood in the front window watching the drama unfold on the street. Our neighborhood looked like the set from a police television drama. Red strobe lights splashed through the windows. A police helicopter hovered overhead, shining its spotlight down on backyards and alleys. Cops set up roadblocks and combed the neighborhood on foot. Their efforts would be in vain; a suspect was never apprehended and a motive never determined. My neighbors who gave chase later told me they had not even caught a glimpse of him. Jenny and I eventually returned to bed, where we both lay awake for a long time.
“You would have been proud of Marley,” I told her. “It was so strange. Somehow he knew how serious this was. He just knew. He felt the danger, and he was like a completely different dog.”
“I told you so,” she said. And she had.
As the helicopter thumped the air above us, Jenny rolled onto her side and, before drifting off, said, “Just another ho-hum night in the neighborhood.” I reached down and felt in the dark for Marley, lying beside me.
“You did all right tonight, big guy,” I whispered, scratching his ears. “You earned your dog chow.” My hand on his back, I drifted off to sleep.
It said something about South Florida’s numbness to crime that the stabbing of a teenage girl as she sat in her car in front of her home would merit just six sentences in the morning newspaper. The Sun-Sentinel’s account of the crime ran in the briefs column on page 3B beneath the headline “Man Attacks Girl.”
The story made no mention of me or Marley or the guys across the street who set out half naked after the assailant. It didn’t mention Barry, who gave chase in her car. Or all the neighbors up and down the block who turned on porch lights and dialed 911. In South Florida’s seamy world of violent crime, our neighborhood’s drama was just a minor hiccup. No deaths, no hostages, no big deal.
The knife had punctured Lisa’s lung, and she spent five days in the hospital and several weeks recuperating at home. Her mother kept the neighbors apprised of her recovery, but the girl remained inside and out of sight. I worried about the
emotional wounds the attack might leave. Would she ever again be comfortable leaving the safety of her home? Our lives had come together for just three minutes, but I felt invested in her as a brother might be in a kid sister. I wanted to respect her privacy, but I also wanted to see her, to prove to myself she was going to be all right.
Then as I washed the cars in the driveway on a Saturday, Marley chained up beside me, I looked up and there she stood. Prettier than I had remembered. Tanned, strong, athletic—looking whole again. She smiled and asked, “Remember me?”
“Let’s see,” I said, feigning puzzlement. “You look vaguely familiar. Weren’t you the one in front of me at the Tom Petty concert who wouldn’t sit down?”
She laughed, and I asked, “So how are you doing, Lisa?”
“I’m good,” she said. “Just about back to normal.”
“You look great,” I told her. “A little better than the last time I saw you.”
“Yeah, well,” she said, and looked down at her feet. “What a night.”
“What a night,” I repeated.
That was all we said about it. She told me about the hospital, the doctors, the detective who interviewed her, the endless fruit baskets, the boredom of sitting at home as she healed. But she steered clear of the attack, and so did I. Some things were best left behind.
Lisa stayed a long time that afternoon, following me around the yard as I did chores, playing with Marley, making small talk. I sensed there was something she wanted to say but could not bring herself to. She was seventeen; I didn’t expect her to find the words. Our lives had collided without plan or warning, two strangers thrown together by a burst of inexplicable violence. There had been no time for the usual proprieties that exist between neighbors; no time to establish boundaries. In a heartbeat, there we were, intimately locked together in crisis, a dad in boxer shorts and a teenage girl in a blood-soaked blouse, clinging to each other and to hope. There was a closeness there now. How could there not be? There was also awkwardness, a slight embarrassment, for in that moment we had caught each other with our guards down. Words were not necessary. I knew she was grateful that I had come to her; I knew she appreciated my efforts to comfort her, however lame. She knew I cared deeply and was in her corner. We had shared something that night on the pavement—one of those brief, fleeting moments of clarity that define all the others in a life—that neither of us would soon forget.