Neighborhood Watch (v5.0)

by Cammie McGovern

  I flash on a memory of my own indiscretions and the terrible price I paid. I remember my own lonely youth spent thinking, I don’t blame them for not saying hello. I wouldn’t say hello either if my friends were all around me. If I had any friends. I want to reassure Trish, tell her she wasn’t alone in doing stupid things, just to feel a connection. “It wasn’t easy growing up on this block, I’m sure. I thought it would be so great for kids and maybe it was the opposite. Too much pressure to look and act a certain way. Maybe it was a mistake.”

  “It was a mistake.”

  “Maybe so.”

  “Those people weren’t your friends. Trust me.”

  I look up, slowly. “What do you mean?”

  “They just talked about you sometimes. About the problems you had.”

  I feel my face go red. “That’s not true.”

  She shrugs. “Well, I mean—sorry—but yeah, it is. I used to hear people talk about what you could handle and what you couldn’t. They weren’t supposed to let you drink too much, that was one thing. Linda Sue wasn’t sure what to say when you came over to her house that day. That’s why she came in to talk to me while you were there.”

  That must have been where she went while I stood in her bedroom. “What did she say?”

  “That you were freaking out.”

  I remember that part, the end of the visit after I found the pregnancy test in the bathroom and felt a panic attack start to close over me. Vertigo, shallow breathing. I was sweaty and hoarse. “I have to go,” I’d said.

  I suspect Trish is right about this much: There was a collusion behind my back that started before Linda Sue’s murder and extended long after I turned myself in. If it’s true, it means Paul must have been worried right away, and looking for ways to deflect suspicion from me. It means the canvassing the police did and the initial questions they asked were more pointed in my direction than I ever realized. Did my neighbors assume I’d done it? Did they start Neighborhood Watch to help their mentally unbalanced neighbor and then close ranks so tightly that I got shut out completely?

  Whatever they did must have reaffirmed every suspicion the police had about me and cemented the weak case they built against me. Yes, my neighbors must have whispered in confidence and off the record. We’ve been worried about her for a long time. She seems to periodically break down and disassociate. The implication was there all through my trial. Even my coworkers talked about my “bad patches.” In theory, we asked for this. Building a corollary of the insanity defense meant that we had to establish that I was not in control of my actions at the time of the murder. But Jeremy was right; there was far too much evidence of calculated cover-up for that defense to have ever worked. So why did we use it? Why did Paul suggest a lawyer who would agree to argue a losing insanity defense when there were other, better options out there?

  I have to assume the answer is that Trish is right, that “keeping an eye on me” meant protecting me, ostensibly, but it also meant protecting themselves from me. In my neighbors’ eyes I must have been more unsettling than Linda Sue even, with her home-glued clothing and her Bohemian ways. I was trying to fit in, to pass, and she was not. I was outside every weekend, weeding and gardening, trying valiantly to seem normal. My presence was a reminder that we were all vulnerable to forces we couldn’t control. Talk of miscarriages makes every woman take a step back in fear that a mysterious problem could be contagious. My neighbors might have pretended otherwise, but they blamed me and helped convict me in part because they wanted me out.

  “What happened with the cat?” I ask Trish. I have to hear the end of the story, how she ended up that night in bed with it.

  She doesn’t say anything.

  “The cat they found you with. The morning after Linda Sue died.” Roland told me they were never able to figure out how the cat died. By the time they found it in Trish’s bed, it had been dead for a while. According to him, Trish wouldn’t talk about it, wouldn’t talk at all in the terrible confusion of that morning as they shuffled her, nearly catatonic, out to the car and to the hospital. “If there was any chance she’d seen something or knew what happened to Linda Sue, we would have stepped forward,” he told me. “But she was locked in her room from seven o’clock that night and Linda Sue died just before eleven o’clock. We were on the telephone talking to people. Even the doctors agreed. If she didn’t see anything, she shouldn’t be forced to talk to the police.”

  “That cat was really sick,” Trish says softly now. “I was trying to take care of him, but he kept drinking water and peeing all over the floor. Then his back legs stopped working and he started walking sideways into walls. Right before you came over, he’d fallen down the stairs and Linda Sue brought him up to me and said it was time to take him to the vet and put him down. I put him in the bathroom cupboard because I didn’t want her to find him. I’d made him a nest. He liked being in there. That was one of the things we were fighting about. She thought I was too obsessed with it, that I needed to focus on taking care of myself and my baby, not some stupid cat. She kept saying the cat wasn’t our responsibility. But it was. It was my responsibility.”

  “Why did you think that?”

  “Because it was.”

  It’s all so strange and hard to piece together. If the cat was sick at Linda Sue’s house, what was it doing in Trish’s bed the next morning? “Why did you think it was your fault?” I ask.

  “Because I killed him. Just like I killed everything else.”

  CHAPTER 24

  This is what happens: Bodies believe the lies they’re told at night.

  Or mine did, anyway.

  After our wedding, Paul and I took two days to drive down to Florida for our honeymoon, stopping along the way to have sex and sleep in cheap motels. Neither one of us liked the beach particularly, so we chose St. Augustine because of its history, Ponce de León and the Fountain of Youth. We went on tour buses for the air-conditioning and visited an alligator farm, where we watched a mother alligator carry her newly hatched baby across the water in her mouth. I loved the way we disappeared there, like other tourists. There was another newly-wed couple at our hotel and I once caught the other bride’s eye sitting at the bar. We both rolled our eyes at our sunburned husbands, who were wearing matching flip-flops and had cameras hanging around their necks. What was I thinking? she mouthed, and we laughed. That was how I imagined our neighborhood would be—that seeing ourselves as mirror images would solidify what sometimes felt liquid and uncertain.

  I had so many questions on that trip. Did other women sit down to dinner with their husbands unsure of what to talk about? Did a meal feel like a long time to other couples, too? Our marriage had sweet times, yes, but more often than not it felt like an effort. A happy one at first, and later less so. I know this much: It went gray and empty long before I found the bloody nightgown balled up in my hamper. Even before that doctor’s fateful declaration, we were both starting to wonder if our relationship would survive its inability to procreate itself. I seemed to love him best when he came to me with an injury, or a need—when he became the child we would never have. We never talked about what the doctor had told us because by then we were well practiced in avoiding difficult conversations. Why talk about something hard when you could just as easily not talk about it, too? It was a way to go on. A holding pattern, yes, but it contained a thread of optimism. We’re holding on until we can’t anymore! We’re not there yet! But even if it wasn’t over, we’d each begun to give up in our own ways. I stopped cooking elaborate dinners with recipes I’d clipped from magazines, stopped setting the table with place mats and flatware we’d gotten for our wedding. Instead I used the microwave and we ate some nights with two books open on the table. Why not? I thought. No one’s watching.

  He stopped feigning interest in my life or what I wore. I stopped caring. If my body had failed me, why should I attend to it at all? I didn’t know if we’d bother with sex after we got the news from the doctor that no babies would come of it
. What had once felt like a private delight had become hard work that reminded us too much of our most basic failure.

  Maybe he’s right not to talk about it, I told myself, knowing there was a corollary advantage. If we never discussed our children who’d died, I could keep them alive inside my head. I could name them and visit them when I needed to. Shop for them at Christmas, and worry when I read certain articles in the newspaper. It’s true that I began living in my head long before Linda Sue’s death. I heard voices crying out. I stood up at work sometimes believing I was needed when nothing had happened or been said aloud.

  I said I had been to Roland’s basement apartment twice, which is true. Once carried over by my restless unconscious, once not. The second time I went, I was fully awake, in a heightened state, keyed up and agitated. I’d been awake for days, unable to settle the jumble of thoughts crowding my head for the last week and a half. I have to go back and talk to him, a voice would say one minute, and the next another would chime in, Leave it alone. Sometimes those voices were cruel. You’ll only embarrass yourself, knocking on his door like a teenager when you’re thirty-three now.

  Lying awake night after night, I’d feel the fierce urgency of my father’s old panic: I can’t take another night. I’ll die doing this.

  I kept imagining our one kiss, that delirious cliff-falling. I convinced myself that another visit would get it out of my system. I’ll disgrace myself once and be done with it. I’ll sleep again after he tells me there’s no chance of this ever happening again.

  The night of the murder I lay in bed for hours thinking about the fool I’d made of myself at Linda Sue’s earlier that day. How I stood in her bathroom, folded over myself to catch my breath. She thought I was sick and asked if she should call a doctor. “No,” I said, pushing her hand away.

  “Don’t call anyone. Don’t do anything.” It’s a terrible feeling, not knowing if your legs will work long enough to carry you out of a place you must leave. They did, eventually. I got out of there and went to bed, where my mind traveled for hours on its own roller coaster.

  Finally, I decided: I will do it tonight.

  I waited until ten-thirty to leave, a half hour after Paul had fallen asleep, as he always did, reading a magazine. There was one light on in Roland’s basement but no sign of movement, none of the rolling shadows that I sometimes watched for.

  I remember the yellow glow of Roland’s window. I remember crossing the street and feeling the world drop away, the silence developing a sound of its own, a mute roar that filled my head. After that, I remember nothing. And then, in flashes, way too much.

  Do I still hear voices in my head? Yes, sometimes.

  Are they real or imagined? That’s the problem, isn’t it? In solitary confinement in prison, where silence is pervasive, is it sane or insane to hear voices in your head? To hold whole conversations with people who, you understand, aren’t really there? If therapy were provided in the parting package of nothing that I got from the state, I’d ask these questions and listen carefully to the answers. What constitutes insanity and what is a sane response to insane conditions? If I have memory gaps—hours and even days that are foggy and clouded with ominous feeling—does that mean I know more than I’m able to say? If I remember pieces, the smell and feel of blood on my hands, am I responsible for committing terrible acts? I remember this much: When the police cars pulled up to Linda Sue’s house, I knew what they would find inside. The body at the bottom of the stairs. The oval-shaped pool of blood splashed up on the wall and already dried by the time I got there.

  CHAPTER 25

  I don’t tell Finn what Trish said about the cat. I fear it would get him thinking about his dog, who got sick and died after being in Trish’s care. It has me wondering if Marianne’s paranoia began not because she was afraid of losing her daughter but because she was afraid of what she’d glimpsed her daughter becoming: dangerous, aggressive, a pet murderer, even. And if Trish had done this, was it possible she’d done something worse? The evidence presented at my trial was clear. Linda Sue’s injuries could have been inflicted by someone smaller and weaker, by which they meant a woman. But could it also have meant a child, a fifteen-year-old girl, pregnant and terrified? Had playing the pawn in the complicated adult dramas around her simply pushed her too far?

  Instead of telling Finn this, I ask him if he would do a search on some of the terms I found in Roland’s drawings. I keep thinking about one detail from Trish’s account of when her parents came over to Linda Sue’s. They weren’t worried about me, they were worried that I was telling their secrets. “It must have been about his work,” I tell Finn. “That’s the thing they were always secretive about.”

  “Why would Linda Sue have cared?”

  “Exactly. I don’t know.”

  Before I left her house, Trish revealed one more tidbit about her family that I’d never heard before: that Roland wasn’t her real father. Her real father, who died when she was five, was more like John, her mom always said—meaning too cerebral, too intense, apparently. He was the real scientist of the family and it was his work that Roland was trying to complete. “Her dad’s name was David Bell,” I tell Finn. “Maybe we should start there.”

  It’s hopeless, of course. Far too common a name, and he died too long ago, to have any relevant information come up. We try David Bell, chemist; David Bell, physicist. Nothing. We get many listings and no hits until, in a very random stab on Bill’s computer, I try David Bell Free Energy, and then I don’t just get a listing. A Web site pops up: The Free Energy Society of America, David Bell, Founder.

  “Look at this,” I say.

  Finn is across the room on his own computer, doing his own search. He rolls his chair over beside me.

  “Oh, my.” He reads through the goals listed on the Web site, which seem broad and insanely optimistic. All cars hydrogen-powered by 2012; decentralized power grids by 2015; combinations of wind, solar, biomass, and nuclear-fueled communities by 2030. His mission statement ends with this: We envision a world with no utility companies, imagine a globe with no wars to be fought over fossil fuels. Imagine indeed.

  “Can anyone make a Web site these days?”

  “Pretty much.”

  “So a lot of crazy people do, I imagine.”

  “Sure.” He scrolls through a little farther and reads some more.

  “The thing is—this is kind of interesting. He’s got all this Nikola Tesla stuff in here, and he wasn’t so crazy. He was an electrophysicist working around the same time as Edison, and everyone says he was this great unrecognized genius. He invented a whole bunch of things—wireless radio, alternating electrical currents, radiant energy—and then did a terrible job holding on to his patents.”

  Bill is in the other room making us tea, though he must be listening in on the conversation because he calls out from the kitchen, “Wasn’t that the pigeon guy?”

  Finn turns to me. “All right, he was crazy at the end. After he died, they found his notebooks and hoped they’d be filled with more amazing inventions, and instead he’d spent his last years writing about this one pigeon. I guess it flew into his hotel room pretty regularly and at some point he married it.”

  “Married the pigeon?”

  “Right.”

  “And David Bell’s Web site is dedicated to his ideas?”

  “That’s the thing. Yes, he went crazy by the end, but his ideas about energy weren’t crazy. Now everyone looks back on him as a real visionary. He saw the problems with coal pollution and carbon emissions a hundred years ago. He anticipated all the issues with utility companies having exclusive monopolies on electricity. He said there would be global conflicts over fossil fuels if we didn’t diversify energy sources early on. No one else had that kind of foresight.”

  “Or a wife quite like his,” Bill jokes, handing me a mug.

  Something occurs to me. “A few days ago, there was mail across the street for someone named Alocin Bell. I thought it had something to do with John b
ecause it was from a company based out of Alabama, where he lives. I wonder if there’s a connection.”

  “Someone must be maintaining this Web site. In fact, if the guy died years ago, someone must have set up this Web site in his name. He wouldn’t have had anything to do with this. This looks like it’s three or four years old at the most.”

  “Maybe he’s not dead?”

  “Maybe not. Especially if he’s still getting mail across the street. How do you spell the name?”

  I write it down so I can see how it looks: ALOCIN BELL. Then I study it some more. Alocin seems like an odd derivative for either John or David. It might be Italian, or Spanish, possibly. But it also might be a code of some kind. When I turn the paper upside down so Finn can read it, I realize it is. It’s another anagram.

  “Look—” I say. “It’s Nicola backward.”

  We search for Alocin Bell and get no hits on Google, and nothing on any of the other search engines, either. We get loads of other Bells, and assume that we must be misspelling the first name. “Does this mean this person doesn’t exist?”

  “No. It means he or she hasn’t been named in any public documents available on the Internet. It’s more common with young people who haven’t bought houses or been around long enough to get their name listed. I’m not sure what it tells us except that this is probably a pseudonym and whoever’s using it hasn’t made their work public.”

  CHAPTER 26

  Sometimes my children come to me at night, speaking so authoritatively on teenage matters that I don’t see how it’s possible I made them up. “No one wears those jeans anymore, Mom. Look around,” Shannon will say. In prison Ben used to talk about my life as if he was there, alongside me, watching it all. “Let it go, Mom. Taneesha’s jealous. She’s not really your friend.”