Thy Neighbor

by Norah Vincent

  “What, by having me listen to every clinical detail of what my fucking father did to her?”

  “To have you understand slowly, because there was so much.”

  “God. You sound just like her.”

  “Well, then I’m right, aren’t I?”

  “You’re right? Right about what? That I’m the last to know? Yes, I get it, finally. I get it. You’re right about that. But you’re wrong about one thing.”

  “I’m sure I’m wrong about a lot of things,” he said. “If I knew before you, it was only minutes before, when I realized that it was Robin who’d left me the golf card. Until you showed up, until you said she was alive, I’d had no idea who could have planted that or why.”

  “It wasn’t the date or the name that she wanted me to see,” I blustered on angrily. “Or not just that. It was the handwriting.”

  “The handwriting?”

  “Yes. It’s my father’s handwriting.”

  “On the card?”

  “Yes. On the card. But not just there. I’ve been getting things in my mailbox, too.”

  “Ah. Well, there you have it then. We are each only half informed. What things?”

  “Things like your card. Things that didn’t make any sense until just now.”

  “What things, Nick?”

  He sounded alarmed.

  “Notes,” I said. “Love notes. Poems. Whatever. Sick shit that he wrote to her then. All this time I thought it was me. I thought the handwriting was mine, and I’ve been forgetting so much lately, I thought the notes were mine, too. Or I thought somebody was messing with me, playing a prank. I don’t know. It doesn’t matter now. It’s just more of her evidence.”

  “Evidence?”

  “Yes, that’s why I’m here. She told me there was evidence. Evidence that her mother saw. Evidence of what was happening to her. I thought she meant physical evidence. Literally. On the body. I thought she was being hit.”

  “What did she say that made you think that?”

  “Nothing. I guess that was just the worst I could imagine.”

  I laughed.

  “Quaint, isn’t it?”

  “No,” he said sadly. “No.”

  He squinted, as if reading his answers from a prompt that he could barely make out. His voice, his thoughts were slow to catch up.

  “Violence is what you know,” he murmured. “It’s where your mind goes.”

  He hesitated again, removed his spectacles, wiped them, and replaced them on his face.

  “It’s where she knew your mind would go,” he continued, sure of the line now. “It’s the place where you two cross paths in me, ironically.”

  He nodded.

  Yes, he was onto it now.

  “I saw that, too, in my practice,” he said. “Kids who’d obviously been hit, and hit by their parents, the parents who brought them to see me. I knew that look. The look of the guilty party. That’s why I knew that Anita Bloom hadn’t known, hadn’t even conceived of the possibility of what had happened to Robin. That’s also why I knew that look in you, Nick. Just now. That look of not knowing, of not understanding. Do you see? That’s why it was better for me to tell you the truth, for you to hear this from me. I was wrong before. You will have some relief, after all, if you let yourself, and perhaps so will I.”

  He leaned forward in his chair, his fingers long and lean, outstretched, parallel, as if holding something light and fragile for me to take.

  “Listen to me, Nick. Listen. I have it now. All that I needed to tell you, all perhaps that Robin, by her own double-edged means, meant for me to tell you. Your father did this. Yes. He did. There is my confession. What I saw. And there is his, in the card and in the pages you have seen. It happened. I can attest to that now just as you can.”

  He molded his hands around the malleable bulb of air between them.

  “But,” he added, his voice stronger and firm, “and this is the part you must hear. You are not your father. You will never be your father.”

  He enunciated this next part very slowly and deliberately:

  “Nick, you don’t have it in you.”

  I snorted derisively.

  “Oh, and you know that for certain, do you?”

  “I know it as well as I know anything, yes. You are innocent of this—this crime. You are innocent of all your father’s crimes. They are not yours by inheritance, or implication, or anything else. And especially not by temperament. You are your mother through and through, Nick. Her words, her ideas, her love for everything refined that makes people worthy of anything. And you are only as guilty as the rest of us, no more.”

  “All my father’s crimes,” I repeated. “Where is the end of them?”

  “Here!” he shouted. “Right here!”

  I lurched in my own chair, startled.

  “You must stop this now,” he said more softly. “This—” He searched for the word. “Self-torture.”

  He collapsed then, exhausted, his hands limp against the arms of the chair, his head fallen back, eyes closed.

  He was done. There was nothing more to say, even if he’d had the energy to say it, which, by the look of him, I doubted. His lips had gone pale, the lids of his eyes were parchment thin and spider veined. All the verve of revelation had gone out of him, and he could barely muster the breath to mutter good-bye as I stood to go. He looked at me once more with pity and exhausted sympathy, rolling his wan, hollow-templed head to the side and raising weakly the first two fingers of his right hand in farewell.

  I hated Robin then.

  I hated her more than I hated my father.

  More than I hated myself.

  20

  I came home from Dr. Cunningham’s to find Monica sitting on my front steps in the dark. It had been a week or more since I’d seen her. I’d lost track of time, and given all that had happened, seeing her felt like starting over, like we’d have to reintroduce ourselves on all but the most superficial of terms.

  She must have seen the wretchedness written all over me. I couldn’t imagine who wouldn’t. I felt like a hundred and sixty pounds of rotting meat left out in the sun, like a body thrown from a plane crash and lost to rescue, just barely conscious and dying on the bone.

  She didn’t say a word. Not: Where have you been? Not: Jesus, you look like death on a stick. Not even: What happened to you? She just walked with me into the house, poured me a tallboy of Jameson straight, set it beside me on the table by the couch in the study, and sat down.

  We sat there for a long time in silence before we began to take off our clothes. There was nothing sensual in the act. Nothing intentional at all. Monica fetched a blanket from my bedroom and we lay together full length on the couch beneath it enfolded in each other’s arms.

  We fell asleep that way, or I did, and when I woke, as usual, she was gone.

  For all I know, she was never there at all and I dreamt her. She would have been the only comfort I could have taken and then been left by without apology, hurt, or explanation.

  I didn’t know how I was going to tell her what I knew, or if I ever could. I knew only that I had to find Robin right away, to speak or write to her now that I knew all that she had wanted me to know.

  I got up at noon—we had been to bed early—and went immediately to the computer. I logged on to Facebook and sent a message to Iris Gray: “I need to talk to you. Now. I’ll be waiting.”

  * * *

  At four p.m., still nothing.

  But it didn’t matter.

  I wasn’t going anywhere. I had nowhere to go. Everything had led to this, and I was going to be here for it. Right square in the center. Sober. I wanted to be in this pain, this particular, real, differentiated pain, and remember it vividly.

  I could wait.

  I walked into t
he kitchen to make more coffee. Out back, I could see that Miriam was there again, right on time as usual, book bag toppled on the ground disgorging its contents—notepads, pens, dolls, a juice box—all dumped, strewn, displayed under the apple tree.

  Over the past week, and with my help, Miriam’s starling shrine and tea party have spread and morphed into a village. We work in shifts. Every day she is here at or just before four. She stays until five or six, adding, shaping, building. Then she goes home for dinner. I go out around seven and work until dark.

  On Monday afternoon she built a gazebo with a thatched roof made of bark and pine needles, and on Tuesday afternoon she fenced in a cemetery, complete with flat rock headstones inscribed with names and dates in permanent black marker. On Monday evening I dug the outline of a soccer field around a patch of grass, posted netless goals, and trimmed the turf with a pair of scissors. On Tuesday evening I painted in the boxes, lines, and center circle with some Liquid Paper I’d found in my desk. On Wednesday she wound a cobblestone road through the center of town, and that evening I built side streets off of it.

  Today, she was working on something new, or planning it, standing over, scrutinizing the site. I smiled and walked back into the study.

  I closed the laptop and took it to the basement. Downstairs I opened it again—still logged on to Facebook, still no Iris Gray in chat—set it off to the side on the table in front of the monitors, and sat back to wait.

  What was doing these days with the nabes?

  I hadn’t spent as much time with the cameras since my game of shadow building had started with Miriam. Why would I? Watching the live telescreen of my rear window was far more diverting than closed-circuit situation tragedy on rerun any day of the week. Besides, and more to the point, running down Robin and the inflicted past had made everything in my small-screen life feel one-dimensional by comparison.

  There wasn’t much to see.

  At this hour, Dave was never in his bedroom or bathroom, probably not even in the house. Best guess, either he was golfing—yes, you guessed it—at Twin fucking Pines Country Club, or he was having his triweekly rub ’n’ tug at Zora’s, the full-service “gentleman’s spa” downtown that’s staffed by all those platinum, pie-faced heroin whores from Siberia and Ukraine who didn’t quite make it on the tennis circuit.

  Ellie, meanwhile, was watching Ellen or Oprah or some other palliative for hausfraus, catatonic as usual on the couch in the living room. Eric and Jeff were gaming, limp and supine in the rec room, and Iris, the original and best, was, for once, at an apparent loss for words, pulling lazy loop-de-loops on her swing and emitting the occasional bored squawk.

  But a fight was on at Dorris’s, or so it seemed.

  She was in the family room railing at someone in the next room.

  “. . . so much . . . you don’t do any of it. Tell me one way—aside from your three hours twice a week with each of them, which, let’s be honest, you usually combine to three hours once a week with both of them—tell me one way that your life is different because your children are in it.”

  Ah. Of course. Jonathan. Who else?

  “Tell me one way,” Dorris went on. “That you’ve changed, except for the worse. You’re living like a bachelor just out of college, drinking as soon as your coat is off, going out every night, dating women half your age, and you’re going to tell me that you love those kids more than I do? I don’t think so.”

  Jonathan came into view from the kitchen carrying a tall glass of liquid with ice.

  “Well, I do love them more,” he said, sipping and almost laughing. “Just listen to you.”

  He had the swagger of a free man. Good for him.

  “Yes, well—” Dorris sneered. “It’s very easy to love people you see once a week at the amusement park. I promise you, it’s a little harder when they treat you like the hired help and call you a bitch to your face.”

  Now he was laughing outright.

  “Well, you are a bitch. What do you expect?”

  Dorris hurled a throw pillow and missed.

  “They’ve made me one, damn you. You’ve made me one. It’s like I’ve got three kids and no one to help me.”

  She burst into tears.

  “I help you plenty, honey,” snarked Jonathan, still amused. “Just ask my accountant.”

  Dorris grunted through gritted teeth and beat her fists against her thighs.

  “God, it’s incredible. You think your money buys you the right to be a complete bastard all the time to everyone.”

  She stalked to the couch for another throw pillow, seized it, and twisted it violently between her hands.

  “I’d give up your fucking money in a heartbeat,” she shouted. “In a heartbeat—if I could get one crumb of kindness from you, one iota of emotional support . . . if I could get you to do one thing just for me that you weren’t already doing for yourself . . . You can’t starve a person of human contact and walk away feeling benevolent just because you’re paying the bill. It doesn’t work that way.”

  Jonathan took a self-placatory sip of his drink.

  “No, actually, that’s exactly how it works. Exactly. To the dollar amount.”

  He jabbed at the air with his index finger.

  “And don’t tell me you’re doing so much for those kids, because you’re not. You’re about as attentive as a potted plant.”

  “As if you would know—” she began, but he barreled over her.

  “I’m not paying to walk away. I’m footing the bill while my ex-wife has a very public nervous breakdown and leaves my kids to live by their wits or die of shame.”

  “What the hell are you talking about?”

  “How can you possibly pretend otherwise? For God’s sake, Dorris, your name and number might as well be written over the urinal at that trough you’ve been visiting down the road. You didn’t think I knew about that, did you? The Swan, is it? Where you go to grovel at the feet of that fascist you’ve been schtupping . . . I may be out every night, it’s true—to dinner, mind you, not at some sleazy hole-in-the-wall—having the healthy, mature social life that I missed while married to you, but you’re out there tripping and slurring like a leper with bells on, begging the last of the uninfected to fuck you.”

  “That’s a total lie and you know it.”

  “Really?”

  He yanked an envelope from his breast pocket and threw it on the coffee table. Its glossy contents fanned out.

  “Sure looks that way to me.”

  Dorris picked up the photographs and flipped hurriedly through them, her face clenching and clouding with rage.

  “How dare you! How fucking dare you? You’ve been following me?”

  “I’m far too busy for that—” He paused awkwardly. “Let’s just say that some things have come to my attention, and I thought it best to stay informed.”

  “Informed?”

  “Yes. Somebody’s got to watch out for those kids.”

  Dorris threw down the pillow she’d been throttling, shifted her weight haughtily, and crossed her arms over her chest.

  “Wait, I’m sorry. Am I hearing this right? You’ve had a private detective following not just me but the kids?”

  Jonathan hesitated, sipping repeatedly.

  “Miriam, mostly,” he murmured at last.

  Dorris plunged her hands into her hair, bent forward at the waist, and thrashed her head backward in disbelief.

  “Good God!” she shouted. “You’ve had a private detective following your daughter?”

  Jonathan looked away and didn’t answer.

  “That is really beyond . . .” began Dorris, but lapsed into a groan of disgust.

  Jonathan turned on her, hard-eyed.

  “It’s for her protection,” he snapped.

  “Protection?” Dor
ris howled derisively. “From what?”

  “Don’t play dumb, Dorris. You told me yourself that Nick Walsh made some kind of advance to her in this very house.”

  “I’m not so sure anymore. Miriam denies it. And there’s been nothing since.”

  “Nothing since?” he replied. “God, you really have been on the moon. There has been a lot since—a hell of a lot—but, of course, why would you know that when you’re either out cold or demented and servicing all comers twenty-four hours a day?”

  Dorris ignored this last jab, her voice falling to a shocked whine.

  “What do you mean, a hell of a lot? When? Where?”

  “Every goddamned day, Dorris. Every day. Right across the street at his house.”

  “What? But I . . . But how?”

  “On her way home from school every day for two weeks, she’s been creeping into his yard through the back fence and staying for hours. Actually, school has been out for a week already, but why would you know that, either?”

  He threw up his hand sarcastically.

  “What mother would?”

  Dorris was standing there blinking, too stunned to react.

  “And I can tell you,” Jonathan went on, “she’s counting on your ignorance. She must be pretty desperate to be out of this house.”

  Dorris began to cry again, moaning piteously.

  “Oh, relax,” said Jonathan, impatiently. “It isn’t that bad. She’s been safe so far, thank God.”

  “But what,” gurgled Dorris, “has she been doing all day for the past week?”

  “Hanging around the school yard alone, playing on the swings. She spends most of the early afternoon at the public library watching old movies and playing around on the computer. God forbid she actually read.”