Bystanders

by Tara Laskowski

  The news anchor comes back for a story on trick-or-treating safety. Parents are urged to make their kids wear reflectors and go in groups to familiar neighborhoods. Ruthie decides she has to go out. She does not want to be at home, waiting like an obedient little mistress, if William calls her. She wants him to wonder.

  It’s late, almost 11:00 p.m., and there is nowhere to go. Ruthie turns on her radio and Pink Floyd is playing “Dark Side of the Moon.” She drives past the Save Mart with its blinking neon sign and thinks of William’s son, Michael, working late at the 7-Eleven. She checks her watch. He will be getting off his shift in an hour, going home to his mother, sleeping in his safe bed down the hall from where his father usually slept.

  Ruthie sings along loudly to Pink Floyd, happy to be on a mission. The gas pedal feels powerful against her thin ballet slippers. She is glad it is still warm, one last hurrah before the winter comes. She can drive with the windows down and feel the air rip through her hair and lift it off her shoulders. She knows the neighborhood where William lives, just a few blocks from the 7-Eleven. She’s memorized his address—7890 Peace Rock Road, such a lovely, permanent-sounding address—and even drove past his house, speeding, one night coming home alone from a bar, one night after they’d kissed but before she’d slept with him, swearing to herself she wouldn’t but knowing already that she would. She is already a sinner. There can be no harm in just seeing his son, no harm at all in just looking.

  She pulls into the parking lot of the 7-Eleven. The windows are covered in advertising posters and look dim and greasy. Two Hispanic teenagers are standing outside smoking. They look her over as she walks past them, eyes up, then down.

  A hard rock station is blaring inside and Michael is there, his back turned to her, sweeping the back counter. It is all so ordinary. She doesn’t know what she was expecting. Michael turns around and glances at her, just for a second, and turns back to what he is doing. He is tall, like his father, and skinny, hair dyed black. The thick chain around his neck looks like a dog collar. Too young to be punk, Ruthie thinks. William must hate it.

  She turns down the first aisle and grabs the first thing she sees, which is peanut butter, and heads to the counter. She is nervous. She pulls her top away from her skin, smoothing it down, wishing she’d worn a bra.

  Michael barely glances at her as she places the peanut butter jar down on the counter. It is plastic; it doesn’t make a satisfying sound. The jaunty letters in green, blue, and red seem to mock her, to make her purchase seem even more silly this late at night, like she is a pregnant lady seeking to fulfill a craving. She feels like she has somehow given herself away, though this kid would never suspect. Then in her paranoid mind flashes a thought, a picture of the future. The two of them finally meeting properly somewhere down the road—Michael stepping forward ruefully to shake her hand and it dawning on him—she was the lady buying the peanut butter that night, that hot fall night at the 7-Eleven. “Long night for you, huh?”

  He grants her a quick shrug.

  “Two forty-five,” he says.

  “Can you add a lottery ticket to that?”

  He rips a ticket off the roll under the counter and hands it to her. Their eyes meet briefly; she sees a flicker of something that makes her more confident. “I’m feeling lucky tonight.”

  He doesn’t say anything, and she laughs, a loud sound that echoes through the store. “Good luck,” he says, handing her change. She uses one of the quarters to scratch off the ticket, blowing the shavings off, and then hands it to him. “Fifty bucks.”

  “No shit!” He grabs the ticket, his fingers brushing hers.

  She pauses a moment. “Just kidding. I lost.”

  “Oh.” He blushes.

  “I’m never lucky. Are you?” She leans forward over the counter, closer to him. “I bet you’re a lucky kind of guy.”

  In the mirror above the counter, she sees herself, aware that her top hangs low, exposing the tops of her breasts. She notices him look, quickly, and glance away. His neck is red. She laughs, remembering how his father steadied his glance at her cleavage that first date until she blushed. The boy had a lot to learn.

  She straightens up and grabs her peanut butter. “Goodnight!” she says cheerfully, winking. At the door, she almost runs into a teenage girl with long dyed black hair. Her lips are a dark purple, almost black. Amateur. Ruthie watches from her car as the girl flips her hair over her shoulder and kisses Michael, her bony hips exposed above low jeans. The Hispanic kids have turned their back on Ruthie, talking into their cell phones.

  ***

  The peanut butter is good, and as she drives through William’s neighborhood Ruthie eats more and more of it with her fingers, digging out gobs of it. She wonders if William has called yet. Oh, what would he do if he knew what she was up to! And how annoyed he’d be about what the sugar was doing to her teeth!

  The blocks in his neighborhood are short and littered with stop signs trying to dissuade her from continuing on. It is a rich area of town, the houses large and hung back from the streets, hidden in part by thick-branched trees. William’s house is one of the smaller homes in the neighborhood, a corner house that sits diagonally across his lawn, segmenting his backyard into a triangle.

  Ruthie pulls over halfway down the street and gets out of her car. The wind picks up, cooler now. Shadows lurk everywhere, dark spots where things remain hidden, undefined, and Ruthie hurries to the sidewalk where the trees shadow her.

  She can see a black and white television casting a dim light on the porch, but William’s wife remains hidden from view. Ruthie will have to cut across the neighbor’s yard and maneuver her way through the line of trees to get a better look.

  The neighbor’s yard is very dark—the people are either asleep or not home—and Ruthie feels safe crossing their lawn. She can’t see the ground at her feet and steps tentatively, trying to be as quiet as possible. She makes her way to the trunks of the first row of trees and looks around them, startled at how close she is now to William’s back porch. From this angle she can see the TV screen—a newscaster standing in front of a storm-wrecked beach. It is still hurricane season. Ruthie feels a deep stir in her stomach, verging on fear and something else, an excitement, a secret. William would enjoy this, she thinks, remembering their jaunt to the Bunnyman Bridge. She is looking down, pressing onward without really thinking about what she is doing. The rough bark of the tree on her palms grounds her and she has the urge to hug it to feel its hardness against her body.

  The light is on in an upstairs window. A woman’s red scarf and hair dryer hang next to a mirror on the wall. She imagines his wife wrapping the red scarf around her delicate neck, surveying herself in the mirror, her mirror, in her house. It pushes Ruthie on. She needs to move farther down the line of trees, smack in the middle of William’s backyard, where the television light will cast on his wife’s face. Jackie. Whenever William says her name in passing, it hangs in the air.

  She creeps along, slipping on the roots of the tree, scraping her leg on the bark. She hates the darkness; you never know who else could be there. The yard smells vaguely of dog shit—William has never said anything about a dog.

  Ruthie walks into a spider web, the feathery feeling of the net across her face makes her spit, rubbing her skin and hair vigorously. She can hear the TV now. It is very low, maybe so it doesn’t disturb the neighbors, and maybe so Jackie can hear her son return home safely.

  “Jackie.” Ruthie whispers the woman’s name, imagining William saying it in the dark. It is all so perfect, the silk scarf, the screened-in porch, the sound of crickets. From behind the tree, she whispers again, this time fierce and loud.

  “Jackie!”

  Nothing happens.

  Ruthie forces herself to move. She is one now with the darkness. It is her friend. She is not a Jackie, she is a Ruthie. She is not sure what that means, but in the spirit of things sh
e believes it, imagining she would rather impale herself on the picket fence, trickle blood down onto the lawn, than be on the other side. At least from here she can still run.

  William’s backyard is narrow, and she is now only a few yards from the porch. She rounds a tree, bracing herself, and hits her shin on something hard and sharp.

  The pain runs up her leg. She bites her lip to keep from crying out. She can make out what it is, the lid to an old barbecue grill balanced on a tree stump. The grill sits next to it like a silent gremlin. Ruthie smiles and pushes the lid over into the grill, startled still at the loud sound it makes as metal clangs on metal. She shrinks back behind the tree, rubbing her shin. The noise echoes through the neighborhood like a shot and stirs William’s wife from her seat.

  “Who’s there?” Jackie’s voice is loud but Ruthie can hear the fear. “Michael?”

  Ruthie tastes blood. She leans hard against the tree and whispers the woman’s name again. “Jackie!”

  It sounds like a growl and it stirs something deep inside her, below her belly. She can sense the woman’s fear pressing into the darkness and it shames Ruthie at the same time that it excites her. Jackie, Jackie, Jackie. Her breath comes loud and fast, and she is sure the other woman can hear her, sure that Jackie is standing behind the screen door, just a few feet away, hesitating. She won’t come out into the darkness, Ruthie knows. No one ever wants to find out for sure.

  The Monitor

  Myra and Corey hadn’t expected anyone to shell out all that dough for the video baby monitor, and they only registered for it hoping to be able to scrape together enough gift cards, coupons, and cash to buy it after the shower. But Myra was pleasantly surprised (and grateful) when her Aunt Verna mailed it to her just a few weeks before the baby was born, with a nice note that mentioned that although she never had the pleasure of becoming a mom herself, Verna thought a video monitor would come in mighty handy for new parents.

  And the monitor did come in handy, very handy in fact, when Eva proved to be a colicky, fussy little thing. Although cute as a button, Eva was a handful. Thrusting and screaming and spitting up more than her body weight, it seemed. So wiggly and terrified and just plain unhappy most of the time that Myra had more than once scared herself with thoughts of throwing her baby clear across the room. And when the child did fall asleep, more often out of pure exhaustion from crying than from any of the show-and-dance rocking and cooing and shushing and swaddling that Myra did—while Corey watched helplessly from the doorway, always a whiskey in hand, his other running through his hair in that nervous way that Myra was sure would make him bald one day—Eva tossed and turned restlessly in her crib, always just one twitch away from waking again and wailing in that way that turned even the sweetest of hearts to stone.

  So they used the monitor often. It came with a small handheld video screen that could be easily lifted from its charging station and carried around the house. Myra propped it on the washing machine while she did laundry in the basement, or tucked it in her sweater pocket while she vacuumed, careful to check it every few minutes to make sure everything was okay. Some days Myra would hold the monitor in her hand and collapse on the couch for a restless nap, her head whirling with all the things she should be doing, that she couldn’t get done. Exhausted. Always. The schedule was relentless, murderous. Myra hated every single one of her friends who had told her how blissful motherhood was.

  When Corey went back to work, Myra started sleeping in the spare bedroom so that he could get his rest. Myra was the first one to get up when the cries came, anyway. She was the first one to go to the baby, to warm up the bottle, to change her diaper. Myra’s body adjusted so that every two hours or so she would wake up, startled, even if the baby wasn’t crying. She would roll over, squint, examine the tiny screen for evidence that the baby was still alive. Wait for a twitch or a sigh or some sign of life before she would try to go back to bed.

  Imagine her surprise when one night, half asleep, exhausted, Myra rolled over to check on the baby and it wasn’t hers. The crib was a darker stain, not white. Where Eva’s name was spelled in pink wood cuts above the crib there were instead three pictures of airplanes. Myra jumped up, shook the monitor. In the process, she knocked over her glass of water, spilling it all over the carpet and herself. She cursed, loudly, and from the baby’s room, a muffled but distinct wail. Eva was awake, and unhappy. And yet, on the monitor, the baby was sleeping soundly.

  In Eva’s room, Myra leaned into the crib to soothe her sobbing child. And on the handheld monitor, nothing. Not Myra’s infrared image, not her nursing nightgown bought when she was still hopeful she could swing the breastfeeding thing. Just a quiet, dark, peaceful room with a perfect sleeping child, hands sprawled above his head.

  She had heard about these things, about monitor frequencies getting crossed, and it bothered her that the neighbors might be able to see her struggling with her fussy, colicky child, judging her and the weight she’d gained, pitying her for her difficult baby. She picked up Eva and moved out of the line of the camera, rocking her in the corner of the room.

  The next morning she told Corey about the incident. “It’s got to be the people across the street,” he said. “Who else do we know around here with an infant Eva’s age?”

  Myra could never remember the names of the couple across the street. They’d introduced themselves several times, but she still could never keep it straight, Ted and Ally, or Ned and Eileen, or something like that. Eileen/Ally was a jogger, jogging right up to the end of her pregnancy, which pissed Myra off. Every time she and Corey would run into them outside, Corey would point at Eileen/Ally’s belly and say, “Must be contagious.” It was sort of funny the first time.

  “Do you think they can see us?” Myra asked, wanting to close all the curtains in the house, lock the doors. She pulled her sweater tighter around her, rubbed her tired eyes. “I find that really creepy.”

  “Maybe not,” he said. “I’ll read the instruction manual tonight to see how to prevent that.”

  ***

  Corey didn’t end up reading the instruction manual, and so when Myra woke up at 3 a.m. that night, she saw that the frequency was messed up again, and that the baby across the street was once more sleeping with his hands pressed together like an infant in a damn Anne Geddes calendar. His bedroom was bigger than Eva’s, and from the angle of the monitor she could see past his crib to the door, which was open and led into a hallway and the staircase. The houses across the street were more spacious than Myra and Corey’s place, and Myra found herself slightly envious of the larger nursery. She studied the room on that grainy monitor, fascinated despite herself. What were their lives like? Were they both sleeping peacefully with such a good baby? Did they have sex—a lot?

  When the flash of movement came in the top corner of the monitor, Myra thought she’d just imagined it. But then she saw it again. A face, peeking into the room. It was a little boy. Like he was playing peek-a-boo, his face would appear in the doorway and then duck back fast. The baby continued to sleep.

  Myra didn’t remember the couple across the street having another child. In fact, she distinctly remembered a story that one of the gossipy neighbors told her one afternoon while she was out on a walk—a horrible anecdote about a late-term miscarriage, Eileen/Ally not only having to deliver the dead baby, but also deal with strangers’ well-meaning comments and congratulations when afterwards she still looked pregnant. Myra remembered feeling awkward, knowing something so private about a neighbor she barely knew—it was part of the reason why she tried to avoid the woman whenever she saw her on the street. It was also (and Myra felt awful about this) part of the reason why she judged her for jogging so late into the pregnancy. Wasn’t she worried about it happening again?

  Myra watched the monitor closely for another few minutes, but the little boy’s face did not appear again, and she convinced herself she’d just imagined it. The monitor’s screen was s
o grainy anyway; it was easy to see something that wasn’t there.

  ***

  Corey wanted Myra to go to the doctor and get on meds for postpartum. Myra didn’t want to get on meds. She didn’t want to walk around like some happy zombie, unable to feel anything. It was normal, after all, to go through some depression after a baby. To feel a little hopeless. She’d read about it, talked to friends who had the same issues. Myra had cried every single day for the first four weeks, and it would’ve been longer than that if she hadn’t felt like she needed to hide it from Corey.

  All the books said this was normal. Babies so young—they don’t do anything. They don’t smile, they don’t play. The first month of Eva’s life was crying, pooping, eating, or some version of that cycle. Myra hadn’t been ready for this kind of thing. She found herself weirdly creeped out by her child—how wrinkly she was, how delicate, how helpless, rooting around Myra’s breasts in the middle of the night like a parasite, staring off into space. Sometimes the child would focus intently on a spot just behind Myra’s shoulder, and it reminded Myra of the stories her mother used to tell her about feeling like the ghost of her father was in the house with them, watching, guarding.

  There was only one time when Myra thought Corey might be right about the postpartum. It was one evening after a particularly hard day with Eva. The baby woke up from her morning nap and wouldn’t stop crying. She cried for nearly three hours straight before passing out from exhaustion, then woke up an hour later and started crying again. Corey was late coming home from work, and in the dim light of the early evening, Myra felt like she was going to die. She had the strongest urge to hit her baby on the head until there was silence. Blissful, peaceful quiet. It scared her so badly she took Eva upstairs and put her in her crib, where she was safe, and walked out. Took a long, hot shower. When Myra got out, the baby had cried herself to sleep again. She never told Corey.