“You can tell me anything, you know. I would never tell anyone.”
“I know.” He sat back on his heels. “When we were little it was different, but now—I don’t know. I think of how I want to tell you everything and sometimes when things aren’t so great at home I think about something funny you said. And the way you are with your sisters and your parents. I used to think what my life would be like if I were your brother instead of your neighbor but then a while back I realized I don’t want to be your brother because then we couldn’t get married one day.”
“Married!” Kate nearly shouted before she burst out laughing.
“I mean it.”
The porch light went on in the house next door and they jumped apart. “We better go,” Peter whispered. Kate scrambled back to the ladder while Peter took the slide. They sprinted to the sidewalk—Kate slapped the For Sale sign as she passed by—ran down Madison, and turned onto the far end of Jefferson, where Peter stopped, scooped her up in his arms, swung her around, and then set her back down. Stumbling, giddy, they resumed their run until their houses appeared. When they got close they crouched for a moment in the shadow of the Nagles’ boxwoods.
“I’m sorry about what happened yesterday,” Peter said. Kate studied his face in the uneven moonlight and glimpsed what he would look like when he was grown. She reached up and put her hand on his neck. He closed his eyes.
“It’s okay.” None of that mattered. They were tied now by what he’d said, by the kiss, by knowing each other their entire lives. Silently, they shot out from the boxwoods like a pair of foxes—Peter to his house, Kate to hers.
* * *
They would have gotten away with it, too, if Lena Gleeson hadn’t remembered that she’d left the garden hose to a trickle after dinner. She’d just planted that hydrangea, and now she might have drowned it. She’d been asleep but something in her dreams had reminded her, jolting her awake. She arrived in the kitchen to find the back door slightly ajar. She stared at it, looked quickly to the living room to see if Francis had come home, and then wondered if she’d really forgotten to lock up. She went outside into the chilly night and turned off the water. The ground under her slippers was sopping. She returned to the kitchen and fingered the little twist lock on the doorknob. When she went back upstairs to check Kate’s room, it felt almost good to be right.
“Where were you?” she asked when Kate finally came creeping around the holly bush to the back door. Lena was sitting on the back step. Kate gasped, put a hand over her heart.
“Mom!”
“I asked you a question. Where were you?”
Her voice sounded so calm that Kate thought, at first, she might not be in too much trouble. Behind her, Peter’s shadow cut across the lawn to his own back door.
“Hold on a second,” Lena called out, striding across the soggy lawn in her bright white bedroom slippers. “Just hold on.” She passed right by Peter and pounded on the Stanhopes’ back door.
“What are you doing? Mom! Wait. Please,” Kate said, pulling on her mother’s sleeve like a toddler. “You don’t understand. Why do you have to tell them?” A lamp on the first floor of Peter’s house was switched on. Then the kitchen light. Kate looked to Peter to chime in, to help, but Peter just sighed.
“You know,” Lena said when Brian opened the door and the light boxed them in together. She drew her robe more tightly around her body. “You can tell your wife that her son is no angel either. This was his idea, them sneaking out.” From the depths of her robe pocket she removed the paper airplane. A car pulled into the Gleesons’ driveway. A door slammed. Everyone listened to Francis walk up the path, fumble at the door for his keys. He flicked on the living room light and walked straight through the house to the back door, which was standing wide open.
“What’s going on?” he asked as he approached, though Kate could tell he’d already figured it out.
“She’ll tell you,” Lena said as she gripped Kate by the most tender part of her elbow and pulled her back toward their house. Brian held the door open for Peter, who stepped past his father with his head bowed.
“Ow,” Kate said as she tried to maneuver out of her mother’s grip.
“Am I hurting you?” Lena asked as she gripped harder.
* * *
In all the years they’d lived next door to one another, the Gleesons had never heard the Stanhopes yelling. Hearing them argue now—a woman’s voice, yes, they could all hear it, and a man’s, and Peter’s—made all of them stop to listen. Kate felt the attention deflected from her just a little. Sara appeared at the bottom of the stairs. “There’s something going on next door.”
Then she saw Kate and said, “Oh boy.” She plopped down on the couch and looked around with naked interest in whatever might happen next.
“He’s leaving them,” Kate offered, desperate to keep their focus on the Stanhopes. “Mr. Stanhope. He’s moving in with his brother. Peter just wanted to tell me.”
“It has nothing to do with you, Kate,” Francis yelled, pounding his fist on the table so hard even Lena jumped. “Make a new friend, for God’s sake. Stay away from those people.” It was his fault, he knew. Even as he was yelling he knew it was on him. Anne Stanhope rang an alarm in him the first moment he met her, and yet he’d done nothing. Because he liked Brian. Because he thought, they’re little kids, what harm? But what does a little kid care except to have another kid to play with? There was a window there somewhere when they could have replaced Peter with any other child and Kate wouldn’t have even noticed. Nat and Sara were a pair, but he and Lena could have let Kate invite friends home from school. That’s what some of Kate’s classmates did, according to Lena. It seemed so American, inviting a kid from across town when there were so many walking distance from home, but they should have done it. They should have encouraged her to go over to the Maldonados’ more often. Susannah was maybe a little dumb and that older brother always seemed up to something, but at least their parents were normal. But Lena always said it was sweet, how Kate and Peter sought each other out. She’d stand at the kitchen window and look at them out there in the yard, always talking, talking, talking. She said it was important to have a good friend, and anyway, they’d grow out of it. One would get tired of the other and move on.
“How do you know?” Francis asked after the incident at Food King, when there was no sign of them growing apart. Brian was markedly less friendly to Francis after the New Year’s drama, and a few times he seemed outright hostile. People get funny when they know they’re in the wrong.
“It’s called adolescence,” Lena had said. “It’s called life.”
Kate looked so scrawny in her thin pajamas, her narrow little body the same as it was when she was in kindergarten, only stretched out. She was his girl, Francis thought, though he was always careful to not play favorites. His heart would swell sometimes to see her tearing around from the back of the house in any type of weather while her sisters painted their nails inside. She was the only one who might tag along with him to the hardware store on a Saturday morning, even though she knew as well as he did that they’d spend half their time there standing around with the other cops who’d been tasked by their wives to fix something, install something. Together in their black dress socks pulled up to mid-calf and their plaid shorts—all of them with their off-duty weapons holstered under their short-sleeved button-down shirts—they scrutinized every manner of bit, nail, and screw without having the first idea what to do with any of it because they’d all moved up from the city where they’d just badgered their supers until things got fixed. Having grown up in Ireland didn’t make it any different for Francis; where he came from they didn’t have ambitions of cedar decks out back. “What did you have?” Kate asked him once. “A patio?” He’d laughed. Once, when she was barely out of diapers, she gathered her stuffed animals on the stairs and told him she’d called them for muster.
But now she was thirteen and he watched her wipe her nose roughly with her open palm. Le
na was always after her to stop doing that.
“Listen to me, Kate. There’s enough trouble in the world without going out and looking for more.”
Lena itemized all the things she could not do. Wasn’t there a big graduation party coming up? Well, she could count that out. Also: no phone, no television. Kate smirked and folded her arms. She didn’t use the phone anyway. She barely watched TV.
“No going outside after school,” Francis added, and Kate’s heart dropped. She felt her smirk falter. “And no more bus. Mom or I will drive you.”
Natalie appeared, rubbing her eyes. “What the heck?” she said, and then looked past her mother, past her father, and squinted at the front door. “Is that Peter? What’s he doing?” Kate jumped up and spun around. There was Peter, standing under the extinguished porch light as if deciding whether or not to knock. When he saw all of them looking at him, he raised his hands like a half-hearted surrender.
It was Francis who opened the door. “What now?” he asked, looking past Peter into the dark.
Lena said, “I think we’ve had enough for one night.”
Peter nodded, taking the comments in. His Adam’s apple tumbled up and down the chute of his skinny neck as he swallowed, grew more nervous, swallowed again. He glanced over at his house, and then, taking a breath as if he were about to dive into a body of water, he stepped inside. “Will you guys call the police please?” he asked, looking only at Kate. But instead of waiting for an answer, he simply walked past the entire Gleeson family, through the family room, through the dining room, to the kitchen, where their phone was on the wall in the very same spot as it was in his own house. They all stayed exactly where they were for a moment, listening to the hollow plastic sound of the handset being removed from the cradle.
Lena began to speak, but Francis held up his hand. “What’s happening?” he demanded, following the boy into the kitchen.
Peter looked directly at him as he spoke into the phone. “Yes. Hello. Can you send someone to seventeen eleven Jefferson Street? Yes. Please hurry. My mother has my father’s gun.”
Lena clapped her hand over her mouth as Sara and Natalie flew to the window. Kate looked only at Peter. Francis shook his head. It wasn’t possible. The boy had misunderstood. This was why bystanders made terrible witnesses. Peter’s mother had taken his father’s gun in the past, so the boy only thought she’d done it again. They thought—he and Brian—that they could keep that one detail from the kids just as they’d kept it from the rest of Gillam, but these kids knew everything. They watched and listened and knew too much.
“I’m going over there,” Francis said.
“Wait,” Peter said. “Just wait a second.” As Peter held the curved blue handset like a supplicant offering alms, Kate could see that he was thinking of a way to minimize the drama, a way to keep them out of it despite having to use their phone. It struck Kate how much he looked like his father as he struggled to articulate what he wanted to say. They had the same way of holding themselves, that same way of appearing to wear their trouble lightly.
But just like that Peter’s second was up. Francis moved past Lena and in what seemed like a single instant, he was standing on the Stanhopes’ faded welcome mat, pounding on their door with his legs set apart in a stance Kate had never seen him strike before. “Brian!” he shouted. “Anne!” He tried the handle. Pounded again. He’d given the gun lock to Brian himself, back in January. It was New Year’s Day, the hardware store was closed, but Francis had an extra combination lock still in the packaging sitting in his shed. He’d walked back there with Brian, and when he opened the door they were hit with the smell of old grass and gasoline. He found it right away, a miracle, and he’d watched as Brian ripped it open. As Francis was pulling the shed door closed behind them, he told Brian not to write the code down anyplace. Brian had looked at him as if to ask if Francis really thought he was that much of an idiot, and Francis had shrugged, angry all of a sudden, very tempted to point out that Brian was the asshole who’d lost track of a loaded gun.
So the boy had to be wrong. Maybe she’d made a threat. It had been almost five months since the incident at Food King, since he gave Brian that lock. Almost five months of making a habit stick. As Francis considered what to do, he leaned over and ran his hand over his calf as if the gun Peter had seen might have somehow been his own. He unsnapped the holster, but then snapped it closed again. It was completely impossible. He remembered a story from home, from just before he left for America. A family up the lane had lost two children, drowned in their well, three years apart. First the one died, and then three years later another, in nearly the exact same way, at nearly the exact same age. “God love them,” his mother had whispered to his father in their kitchen, overcome with grief. “Couldn’t it have happened to any one of us?” Now, nearly thirty years on, Francis wanted to return to the scene, wanted to raise his mother and father from the dead just to say, no, now that he’d time to think about it, he just did not agree. It could not have happened to any one of them.
“Francis!” Lena yelled across the yard. A light inside the Maldonados’ house went on. The Nagles, too, had woken up. The 911 operator had instructed Peter to remain on the line so he had, and now he looked to Kate to relay to him what was going on outside. He should hang up, he thought. It was probably fine. He’d gotten nervous and had overreacted and now everything would be worse. His father had planned on leaving that weekend. He’d said it might be for just a little while and Peter decided right then not to call him on anything, to let him say whatever ridiculous thing he wanted to say, and Peter would just do what he liked. That’s when he’d sent the paper plane out the window. That’s when he decided he didn’t really care if he got caught. The operator on the other line was asking him what happened, what kind of gun, whether it was loaded, but Peter ignored her. “Just tell them to come quickly,” he said. “As quickly as they can.”
From inside the Stanhope home came footsteps. “Coming!” called Anne Stanhope, as brightly as if it were three o’clock in the afternoon. Francis looked across to Lena and waved in a way that would let her know it was all fine.
Anne threw open the door and staggered back several steps. She was empty-handed, Francis noticed first. She was wearing a paisley nightshirt, little colorful teardrops hanging loosely over slim legs. She looked like she was in pain, and Francis wondered for a moment if the boy had only gotten half mixed up. If in fact it was Brian who’d had enough and reached for the closest thing.
“Are you hurt?” he asked, taking one tentative step inside. Anne dropped slowly to her knees, sat back on her heels. Francis looked quickly around the room, to the stairs, to the shadowed place behind the open door. In the distance, sirens.
“Where’s Brian?” He took another few steps farther into the house.
“I’m very sorry about all this,” Anne said, and when Francis glanced at her, she seemed sorry. Her face was ashen and she looked exhausted, brokenhearted. Then she reached under the couch cushion next to her and, moving faster than Francis thought possible, removed a gun, pointed, and fired.
six
IN GEORGE’S APARTMENT, THEY ate on paper plates. Peter tagged along when his uncle headed to the wholesalers in Long Island City every few months to buy a six-pack of the white undershirts George wore every day and a package of two thousand premium, heavy-duty paper plates, which he kept stacked on the counter in two equally sized towers. He didn’t have a kitchen table so they ate in front of the TV, their dinner on their knees. For utensils, they used the silverware that Brenda left behind when she moved back in with her parents, and the sink always had a scatter of forks, knives, and spoons across the bottom. In the bathroom, Brenda left a jar of face cream that George shoved to the corner of the counter, where it slowly became crowded out with cans of shaving cream, Old Spice, Clearasil, mouthwash, toothbrushes left in scummy puddles here and there. Once in a while, after a shower, Peter would open that tub of cream and inhale. Cucumbers. Dryer sheets. The bri
ght silver cap of the jar never seemed to gather dust, and Peter wondered if his father and George did the same.
Brian got moved to modified duty after everything happened, and then to Traffic once the case settled. The house sold quickly, to a young family from Rockaway, and the realtor arranged for an estate salesperson to go in and tag all their furniture. Their dishes, even. Linens. Tupperware. The umbrella stand and the three umbrellas that sat inside. Peter’s bike went, his old Lincoln Logs. Every dollar had to go to legal fees, medical fees, all in and straight out again as if through a swinging door. Brian made the mistake of telling Peter, and Peter, who had been stoic through everything, who had remained unflappable through his mother’s detention—the county jail, an indictment, most of a trial, a settlement, a state hospital—was rattled, finally, by this: the thought that there were strangers moving through their house in Gillam, looking at his sticker collection and trying out his creaky desk chair, while he and his father sat on George’s couch in Queens, watching Jeopardy! Brian watched him take it in. They were nearly the same height now. Their hands the same breadth. Peter flushed a deep red and Brian looked away. It was easy to forget how young he was.
“What about my stuff?” Peter asked. “The stuff that’s not worth money. My notebooks. Other things.”
“We’ll get it, Pete. Don’t worry. The lady will set that stuff aside and we’ll pick it all up.”
“My tapes?”
“Yeah, I told her to leave them aside, too.”
Ask Again, Yes Page 9