Thy Neighbor

by Norah Vincent

  “Help me to understand.”

  “I’ll try.”

  My turn. Ask again.

  “So your grandmother wasn’t a woman of the world. She didn’t get you. Okay. But why is that a sin?”

  Another pause.

  I couldn’t help it. I could feel the anger resurfacing.

  “And don’t ridicule simplicity of mind the way my mother would have, because that’s just snobbery.”

  That got her.

  “As far as I’m concerned, ridicule has nothing to do with it.”

  “So what, then?”

  “It’s just that simplemindedness can be a form of neglect.”

  “OK,” I replied. “Explain.”

  Iris Gray is typing . . .

  Scroll up.

  “My grandmother saw what she wanted to see, which was the good and the easy and the nice, and the rest just didn’t exist for her.”

  A pause. Then:

  “She lived in denial.”

  Don’t we all, I thought. Big deal. If that’s the greatest sin you know about, Robin, then you’ve had it way too easy in life.

  How could she? How could she say this to me? To me? My father had killed my mother and then himself in this very house, and had left me to live in the scene of the crime. Robin knew this. Every detail of it. Jesus. Denial—you must be kidding.

  But I was the meek one who knew nothing, apparently, the rube confined to questions. I sent a controlled reply.

  “But, Robin, what harm did that really do?”

  More typing on her end.

  “The people who lived in the towns outside the concentration camps lived in denial, Nick. Do you think that denial did any harm?”

  I let loose then, growling at the screen in frustration as I typed.

  “Oh, come on. I can’t believe you just said that. That’s absurd. Absolutely absurd.”

  “That depends on your perspective.”

  “Yeah, I’d say so, and I’m beginning to think that yours is more than a little warped.”

  “Of course it’s warped. It’s mine. But to each of us our pain is everything, especially when we’re children.”

  “You’re saying that your childhood was a holocaust?”

  “Yes. To me it was.”

  Unbelievable. The woman was out of her mind.

  “Pardon the intrusion of reality here, Robin, but I think that, in order to count, a holocaust has to have destroyed the lives of more than one person, and not just in her own mind.”

  “As I said, Nick. You know nothing.”

  Maybe, I thought. And maybe you’re a crazy bitch.

  “I know quite a lot, as I believe you are aware.”

  “Not nearly enough.”

  “Yeah, so you keep saying. We’ll see.”

  “Yes. We will.”

  A long pause.

  I was fuming now. The presumption of the woman.

  Still there was the calmer voice in my head.

  Take it easy, Nick. Take it easy. Get the information you want.

  Typing.

  “All right, all right. So you said you were going through something horrible.”

  “Yes.”

  “And your grandmother ignored it?”

  “No. I said she denied it. She willfully didn’t see it.”

  “So you think she knew and didn’t want to know, is that it?”

  “Let’s just stick with our metaphor—she told herself that the inch of ash on the windowsill was from a fire at the chemical plant down the way, and that the smell of burning flesh was a potato blight.”

  “So there were indications and she didn’t see them. We all do that.”

  “No. You’re not listening. There was evidence and she chose to explain it away.”

  “What evidence?”

  No response.

  Too soon for that, I knew.

  Redirect.

  “So now you think she deserves her suffering?”

  “I think that she can handle her suffering and that it’s not altogether a bad thing that she does.”

  I sat back in my chair flummoxed, my head swirling with ignorance, a hundred questions, a hundred angry retorts, raging curiosity—no, much more than that—a highly discomfiting need to know, and then horror, disapproval, indignation—all of it contained, I saw then, in one question.

  I typed it very slowly, looked at it there on the screen for a long time, and then tapped a hesitant return.

  “Robin, what happened to you?”

  The question hung there for what seemed like several minutes or more, tacked to the scroll in the pop-up box, words on a screen, sent and landed.

  What happened to you?

  And the damned cursor at the end of it, flashing like an exclamation point, or a silent, taunting chime.

  Blink. Blink. Blink.

  What happened to you?

  No response.

  And still the words were there.

  Too much all at once.

  The words to sum up a life, perhaps a family. Her life, her grandmother’s life, her grandfather’s life, maybe even her long-dead mother’s demise. The events that changed everything.

  There was such a long, long pause on the answer. Time enough for me to regret the question many times over and to type numerous apologies and take backs and never minds, and then to erase them just as quickly.

  I was beginning to think she had gone, when finally there came the leading Robinesque reply, the unsettling kind of answer that I was going to have to get used to.

  “What happened to me, Nick?” she repeated.

  A short pause.

  Scroll up.

  “The same thing that happened to you.”

  18

  There was nothing of interest in Jeff’s bag. An Ace bandage for his bum ankle, a can of spray for jock itch, a couple of bottles of Vitamin Water, two extra racquets, several packages of Tourna-Grip, three dirty white terry cloth wristbands, two pairs of athletic socks, a towel, and some loose change. Pretty straight up. Nothing of value except a set of his house keys, which I kept. The rest I tossed in a Dumpster behind the Dunkin’ Donuts across the parking lot from the racquet club.

  Poor guy. I felt bad for him now. Now that I knew he wasn’t Iris Gray. He was going to be reliving our special moment over and over for the next few months, maybe the next few decades, either rapturously or torturously, depending on his turn of mind and his tendencies.

  If he was gay, he’d never kissed a guy before, that was for sure. Even I knew that, and I’d never kissed a guy before, either. From the feel of it, I’d say he’d never kissed anything more animate than his own forearm while dreaming hot and wet of an at-long-last consummated amour.

  Per the monitors, nothing had changed at the Grubers’ in recent days. J.R. was still spouting at the breakfast table, quoting snatches of Mein Kampf and The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and raving about the great socialist conspiracy of the rainbow coalition as embodied, naturally, by President Obama, whom he referred to as B.O. or the Manchurian candidate and denounced as a puppet of North Korea.

  Eric was still in his cage, though only one dry night away from freedom. He’d taken to consuming no liquids after noon, and no liquids whatsoever with caffeine or alcohol, or so he’d told Jeff over an especially gory game of Grand Theft Auto while reclining on the couch in the basement.

  Jeff himself, also reclining and slaughtering virtual hookers willy-nilly with his right thumb, had upgraded from Vitamin Water and was drinking large quantities of the latest rip-roaring fitness drink, which I believe was called Ursa-Fuel Ultra. I’d seen it in the local GNC, had thought about trying it, but had read the label and passed. There was no mistaking it, though. It came
in a Day-Glo yellow can with black lightning bolts on it. It was definitely not FDA approved (or even dreamt of), and was probably filled with all kinds of test-tube aminos that no one had even named yet. Its dubious claim to fame and most potent ingredient was alleged to be a derivative of polar bear bile—hence the name—which, when consumed in sufficient quantities, could “fortify” your metabolism (whatever that meant), presumably making you capable of digesting and extracting performance-enhancing nutrients from anything—including rusty nails, plywood, and concrete. Or something like that.

  I guess that’s what you do when you’re a teenage guy in the suburban Midwest, your dad’s a storm trooper, and you’re afraid you might be gay. Not the reaction I’d expect, but not exactly a curveball, either. Sit back, drink yourself green with overdoses of creatine and B vitamins, and take out your aggressions on a video game.

  I was as desperate for distraction as they were. It was four o’clock in the afternoon, I’d been up for only an hour, and I was already well into a fifth of Jameson.

  I was obsessed by one thought.

  Robin said there was evidence.

  Evidence that her grandmother “chose to explain away.”

  I’m looking at the transcript of our chat, and that’s what it says. That’s the part she wouldn’t answer.

  What evidence?

  There was only one place I could think of to go looking for it. Only one other person I could ask.

  But how could I dare to do it? How could I intrude again on that poor woman’s grief, and this time not to commiserate but, essentially, to accuse. Because that’s what it would mean. Even just to ask about what might have happened to Robin, to ask about some alleged evidence of harm done to a child—that in itself was to judge, or at the very least dredge up the worst of the past. And yet, if Robin was telling the truth, we were now talking about my past, too.

  The same thing that happened to you.

  That’s what she’d said.

  Carefully chosen words.

  Make me do the work. Make it matter to me. Take a man whose own past is a mystery to him, and make him believe you hold the key to it, make him believe that your story, true or not, is his story, too, and he will go running all over creation to find the answer, even though all he is really doing is playing out the family drama of a disturbed runaway looking to take revenge on an old woman. What better way to hurt her grandmother, justifiably or not, than by sending me over there to give the old woman the only piece of news that would hurt her more than the news she thinks she’s already had?

  Oh, yeah, don’t mind me, Mrs. B., I’m just here on your doorstep once more, the bearer of bad news—again—here to tell you that—well, um—this may come as a bit of a shock—it being the last straw, camel’s back trauma of your life and all—but, uh, well, you know that thing, that really awful thing that you thought you knew all these years? Yes, yes, that’s the one, that dreadful conclusion you’d been forced to reach after going so long without hearing a word, and with which you’ve finally managed to make something approaching a separate peace—yes, precisely, the death of your granddaughter, thank you—well, as it turns out, you were wrong. We were all wrong. Your beloved granddaughter is, I’m pleased say—fate being what it is and all—your granddaughter is actually alive and, in a manner of speaking, well.

  Physically well, I mean, or we think so anyway. We haven’t seen her. Just chat room stuff, you know, typing back and forth, but she seems . . . uh . . . coherent, I guess you’d say, if a bit pissed off, and maybe a shade unreasonable, but that’s to be expected after so long on the run, and really it’s quite a miracle in a case like this to find— What’s that? Oh, yes, yes, we’re sure it’s her. Yes. Absolutely sure. No question about it. We gave her the usual Dalai Lama tests and such, and she picked out all the right items, knew all the right quotations. No, there’s no question it’s her. Yep. Alive and kicking, as it were.

  Anyway, we just thought you’d like to know, so that you can go about contemplating why she hasn’t seen fit to contact you in all these years or to alleviate your suffering in any way—oh, and of course, first things first, so that you can stop putting that silly light in the window, eh? No point now, really, is there? Salt in the wound and all that.

  Okay then, well, that’s that. Message received. Damage done. My work is finished here, I think. Do take care, Mrs. Bloom. Yes, nice seeing you again, too, and on such a happy occasion. Ta-da.

  Fuck me if I was going to go over there and abuse that woman, holocaust (small h) denier or not.

  There had to be another way.

  There just had to be.

  And then I remembered.

  Dave’s conversation with Dorris about Miriam.

  I was looking for evidence of abuse, right? Standard stuff—cuts, bruises, welts, maybe broken bones. Stuff, if it was bad enough, that a teacher might notice or, yes, a doctor might have to treat. A pediatrician. Dorris had said that Jonathan’s profession was a small world. They all knew each other. It had been only thirteen years. Robin’s doctor might still be around, maybe even still practicing. It was worth a shot.

  * * *

  Jonathan has his practice over on Mission Lake Road, and a tricked-out website to go with it, of course, so it wasn’t difficult to get in touch.

  “He’s in surgery over at the hospital every morning until noon,” said the receptionist. So I left a message with her saying it was an urgent private matter and if he could get back to me soon I’d be grateful.

  He called back late that afternoon, probably out of curiosity more than anything else. What the hell is my ex-wife’s neighbor doing calling me? he must have been thinking. Whatever he was expecting, it certainly wouldn’t be about the long-lost Robin Bloom—he’d have known about her only tangentially, the same way Dorris knew about her, through the gossip mill, or maybe through some neighborly tea and sympathy session with Mrs. B. when they’d first moved into the neighborhood. Go and pay a visit to the sad old lady next door and bring a basket of fruit. Just the kind of thing she’d have hated.

  He wasn’t exactly chatty on the phone, but then, who knew what Dorris had told him about me.

  “Nick, Jonathan Katz here. You left a message with my service.”

  “Yeah, yeah. I did. Thanks for calling me back so quickly. I appreciate it.”

  He was all business.

  “Not a problem. What can I do for you?”

  “Look, I know this will seem a little strange and out of the blue, but it’s about my neighbor, and your old neighbor, Mrs. Bloom.”

  “Anita Bloom?”

  “Yes.”

  “The widow?”

  “Yeah. The one whose granddaughter disappeared thirteen years ago. Remember hearing about that?”

  “Oh, jeez. Yeah, I do remember that. I was sick to death when I heard about it. What a thing. Terrible. They never solved it, right?”

  “No. They’ve never found her. But that’s the thing. See, Mrs. Bloom and I have gotten pretty close over the years, you know, with what happened to my parents and all, and she’s asked me to look into things for her, keep an eye out, that sort of thing.”

  “Didn’t the cops do all that years ago?”

  “Yeah, but you know how that goes. By now it’s essentially a closed case. Missing presumed dead. No leads. It’s nothing formal between us, but she just asked me to look around, maybe follow a few different angles. She’s getting old, and I think she wants to make one last push for closure.”

  “Why not hire a private detective?”

  “Probably a money issue, but I think it’s a privacy thing, too. She doesn’t want to deal with a stranger. Besides, they did hire one years ago, right after it happened, while Mr. Bloom was still alive. Nothing substantive came up.”

  “So, I don’t get it. Why are you calling me?”

 
“Well, here’s the strange bit. I’ve come across some information that suggests there may have been some sort of abuse going on—maybe in the home—or maybe outside. Unclear.”

  “What do you mean by abuse?”

  “Well, I’m not sure yet. It might be nothing—my source is a bit unorthodox . . .”

  “You mean unreliable.”

  “Maybe. I don’t know. You come across a lot of false leads and strange people in this kind of thing, people claiming to know things they don’t.”

  “Yeah, I’m sure you do.”

  “But I gotta check it out. Thing is, I don’t want to go to Mrs. Bloom with every piece of lint I pick up, especially when it’s something really sensitive and possibly hurtful like this. Not until I know more, and not unless I have to.”

  “Sorry, Nick, but I’m still not getting you. What is it you don’t want to go to her with?”

  “I need to know the name of Robin Bloom’s pediatrician. The one she would have seen thirteen or more years ago if she’d had a broken bone or some other injuries that might have been a bit off the run, might have indicated she was being abused.”

  “Whoa, whoa. Wait a minute there, guy. Slow down. That’s privileged information. I couldn’t tell you even if I knew—which I don’t, as it happens.”

  “But you work in the field. It’s a small world, no?”

  “It doesn’t matter, Nick. Don’t you get it? It would be highly unethical for me to give you that information. Highly unethical.”

  “I’m just looking for a name. That’s all.”

  “No, that’s not all you’re looking for, and even if I could get you the person’s name, he’d tell you the same thing I’m telling you. But in his or her case, it would be illegal, not just unethical, to disclose the details of Robin Bloom’s medical history without her or her legal guardian’s prior consent.”

  “Look, I know all that, and if it comes to that, if there’s something in it, I can probably get Mrs. Bloom’s permission, or get someone who can get it—”

  “Nick, I don’t want to hear any more of this. Do you have any idea how creepy you sound? I understand you’re trying to do some good here, or you think you are, but it’s just wrong to go about it this way. I can’t help you. I’m sorry.”