David went into the family room to read the morning paper while Jenny watched cartoons, and after putting away the dishes, Marilyn walked outside to feed and water her plants. David was supposed to mow the lawn this weekend, but procrastinator that he was, she had no idea when he’d actually get around to doing so, and she couldn’t postpone her watering just because he didn’t like to use the mower on wet grass. Her flowers needed food.
She was disconnecting the sprinkler when the front door slammed, and she looked up, expecting to see David, but instead Jenny was skipping across the lawn.
The girl stopped, looked up at her. “I’m going to play over at Mr. Gault’s. Daddy said I could.”
Her tone of voice wasn’t nah-nah-nanah-naah, and she didn’t stick her tongue out in defiance, but the result was the same, and Marilyn watched, furious, as her daughter ran next door and raced up the Gaults’ porch steps. She was torn between going after Jenny and confronting David, and it took her only a minute to decide that it would be more effective to get David and have him hear what was going on in that house. Mrs. Gault was home—Marilyn had heard the old woman’s voice—and she was fairly certain the old man wouldn’t do anything really bad with his wife nearby.
She strode back indoors. “David!”
He was out of his chair before she’d even entered the family room, obviously alerted by the anger and edge in her voice, and the expression on his face was one of quizzical surprise.
She did not even allow him to get out a word. “You told Jenny she could play at Mr. Gault’s?”
David frowned. “What are you talking about?”
“You told her she could go next door and play?”
“I didn’t tell her anything! I don’t know what you’re talking about!”
Fear slipped into her heart through a crack in the anger. “Jenny just went next door and told me you said she could go over there.”
“She never even asked me. She said her cartoon was over and I could watch what I wanted, so I put on the ball game. I thought she was in her room.”
Marilyn turned and hurried out of the house, across the front yard. David followed hastily.
From the Gaults’ open window came the sound of that damn Smurfs music.
And voices.
“Dick,” Mr. Gault said.
Jenny laughed. “Big dick!”
Marilyn stopped, turned toward David. “What do you make of that?”
“It’s probably the name of someone on the show they’re watching.”
“How much you want to bet that when we go in there, there’s not one character named ‘Dick’?”
“Jenny!” David called out.
She rushed to the front window, looked down at them. “Hi!”
“You get out here. Right now.”
She frowned. “But Daddy, we’re—”
“Now,” he told her.
She moved reluctantly back from the window, and they heard her saying goodbye.
“We’ve known Gault for nine years,” David said. “That’s two years longer than we’ve had Jenny.”
“But what do we really know about him? We say ‘hi’ and ‘bye,’ comment on the weather, and that’s about it. He could be burying bodies in the back yard for all we know.”
“Marilyn!”
“Well. Interviews with the neighbors of child molesters and mass murderers always say they were nice pleasant people, and everyone’s always shocked and surprised when they find out the truth.”
“I still think Gault is probably okay.”
She looked at him evenly. “Are you willing to take that chance?”
David shook his head slowly. “No,” he admitted.
“Let’s just make sure Jenny stays away from him.”
They looked toward the Gaults’ porch as their daughter came bounding out. She smiled, running toward them, not a trace of guilt in her face, no indication that she had done anything wrong.
“Jenny,” David said sternly. “You lied to your mother.”
“You’re in big trouble,” Marilyn said.
Jenny looked up at her, frowning. “Bitch.” She turned sweetly to her father. “That’s what they call a female dog. It’s not nasty.”
Marilyn and David shared a glance.
Without waiting for another word, Jenny ran into the house.
Marilyn wanted to resist, but she couldn’t help it. “I told you so.”
David nodded wearily.
Inside, the volume of the television suddenly increased, and there was the roar of a crowd, the hyperactive patter of a sportscaster.
“Tits!” Jenny announced, her voice carrying through the open window. “Big giant titties!”
****
They stayed away from the Gaults after that. It was difficult, living next door to each other and not having any contact, especially since they’d once been so friendly, but the anger did not abate, and every time Marilyn looked over at that house, she felt like burning it down. They’d discussed going to the police or putting up neighborhood flyers, but David convinced her that Mr. Gault had not actually done anything illegal, and they suffered in silence. She took to keeping the drapes closed on that side of the house, so they wouldn’t have to look at the Gaults’, and they both made sure that Jenny was closely watched and supervised every time she played outside. For her part, the forced estrangement from Mr. Gault seemed to do Jenny a world of good.
The bad words disappeared from her vocabulary, and the defiant yet secretive attitude Marilyn had sensed in her seemed to fade as well.
But a month or so later, Jenny was playing with her friend Jasmine in the front yard while Marilyn watched them through the window. She saw Mr. Gault roll his wheelchair out to the sidewalk and Jenny run over to him. It looked like he had an envelope in his hand, a letter of some sort, and that he wanted to give it to her. Marilyn dashed out of the house, called out “Jenny!” in her sternest voice and strode over to the sidewalk, grabbing her daughter’s arm. “Get inside!”
“But—”
“Get in the house!”
Jenny ran inside, practically in tears, a confused Jasmine following her, and Marilyn turned to face the old man on the sidewalk. “You are not to speak to my daughter again, do you understand? If you so much as look in her direction, I’ll have you in jail so fast your head will be spinning.”
He swiveled his chair and wheeled away from her. She thought she heard a muttered “Cunt,” but he was already moving quickly up the walk the way he’d come, and she turned, heading back across her own yard and inside.
She sent Jasmine home, and she and David had a talk with Jenny about how she knew she was not to see Mr. Gault anymore and how important it was that she follow that rule. Jenny seemed to understand, but Marilyn could not help thinking about how enthusiastically the girl had run over to Mr. Gault, how she had seemed ready to take the envelope from the old man.
That afternoon, David took Jenny to the park. On an impulse, Marilyn went into the girl’s room and started searching through her desk and toybox and bookcase and belongings. She doubted that this was the first time the old pervert had tried to contact their daughter, and while she didn’t know exactly what she was looking for, she had no doubt that she would find some type of evidence that Mr. Gault had secretly communicated with Jenny.
There was nothing in the toybox, nothing in the bookcase. She sorted through the top drawer of the dresser, the second drawer, the third.
She found it in the bottom drawer.
Proof.
It had not been her imagination, she had not been overreacting. He was after her.
Marilyn took out of her daughter’s drawer a small garter belt and baby black lace bra. The pounding of her heart overrode all other sounds, the heat of hatred flushed her skin. It felt as though her insides had been scooped out. She felt empty, hollow, and in terrible pain, and without thinking, without even realizing what she was doing or what she was planning to do, she grasped the child-sized lingerie and stormed
out of the house, walking up the Gaults’ porch and into their house.
As always, the door was unlocked. She had no idea where Mrs. Gault was, didn’t even care, but Mr. Gault was right where she’d known he’d be, in front of the television, watching cartoons, and she pushed him with all of her strength, knocking him out of his wheelchair and onto the floor. She was still gripping the garter belt and bra in her right hand, and with her left she instinctively grabbed a throw pillow off the couch and dropped to her knees, straddling the old man’s chest.
She placed the pillow over the bastard’s face and pressed down on both sides of his thin head. He seemed stunned, didn’t appear to know for a second what was happening, didn’t move, but then he was wildly thrashing, kicking out with his bony old legs, punching with his ancient arms, jerking his entire body in a futile effort to escape death. She could feel his screams more than hear them, desperately unbridled cries that came from deep within his diaphragm but were effectively muffled by the pillow.
He died. It took longer than she thought, and almost all of her strength was drained by the time he finally kicked his last, but eventually she extinguished the life of the sicko who had corrupted her daughter.
She was still not thinking right, still not thinking straight. She knew that, was aware of it on some sublevel, but the knowledge seemed filtered, disassociated, and it did not really connect with her. She had just killed her next-door neighbor, and if she was behaving rationally she would have thought of a way to make it look like an accident or self-defense or try in some way to deflect blame from herself, but she did not even bother to check if his wife was in another room. She simply stood, left the pillow, garter belt and bra in place and, in a kind of daze, wandered out of the house.
Back home, back in Jenny’s room, behaving as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened, as though she had merely taken a short bathroom break, Marilyn continued searching through the bottom drawer of her daughter’s dresser. There was nothing out of the ordinary here, but when she started rummaging through the contents of the girl’s desk, she found, underneath a stack of Hello Kitty stationary, a full-color Frederick’s of Hollywood catalog.
Marilyn picked up the glossy bulletin. What fell out was a lingerie order form.
Filled out in Jenny’s sloppy childish hand.
She started tearing up the room, going through everything, searching for other hidden evidence that Mr. Gault had been corrupting her daughter, exploiting the little girl’s innocence for his own perverted ends.
She was not prepared for what she found.
Underneath Jenny’s mattress, next to a foil-wrapped condom, was a crumpled list, on which she’d written the names of several men on the block. Mr. Gault’s and Mr. Kreski’s names had red stars next to them, and Marilyn recalled with a sudden twist in her guts that before she’d had a falling out with the Kreski twins, Jenny used to sleep over at their house quite often, and that she’d spoken enthusiastically about how nice their father was.
Maybe it hadn’t been Mr. Gault after all.
She hated herself for having such a thought, but once there it would not go away, and a cold chill gripped Marilyn’s heart.
The front door opened. “We’re back!” David announced.
Stunned, Marilyn shuffled out of her daughter’s bedroom. David did not even seem to see her as he moved past her in the hallway and flipped the light on in the bathroom, shutting the door behind him.
Marilyn went into the living room, moving past the sofa, past the coffee table. Glancing out the open window, she saw her daughter talking to Mr. Miller, the retired computer programmer from up the street.
Mr. Miller, Marilyn recalled, was another name on the list.
She stepped back from the window, not wanting to be seen, suddenly conscious of the fact that she was afraid of letting Jenny see her. She grabbed the curtain, peeked around the edge.
Outside, Jenny looked around to make sure that no one was about. Satisfied that she was unobserved, she smiled slyly up at the old man.
“I’ll show you my pussy,” she said, “if you show me your cock.”
APT PUNISHMENT
(2016)
“I’d rather saw off Mommy’s legs than eat another ranch biscuit,” I proclaimed.
So that’s exactly what Father made me do.
BLACK FRIDAY
(2016)
“What’s the total?”
“One dead, six injured.”
“That’s it?”
“Apparently.”
“There were no—”
“No.”
The police chief exhaled in relief. “Thank God,” he said.
“A good year.”
“Yes.”
****
Donald and Cat arrived without warning.
The plan had been to have a quiet Thanksgiving by themselves, and they’d almost pulled it off. Zac’s parents were going to spend the holiday with his brother’s family in Michigan this year, and Aviva’s mom and dad had for some reason decided to take a Caribbean cruise for the week. So, traditions were out the window, and their plan was to order take-out Chinese food and stay in all day watching the Twilight Zone marathon. “I can’t think of a more American way to spend Thanksgiving,” Zac said.
Then Donald and Cat stopped by.
It was the day before the holiday, so technically they could have gotten away with sticking to the plan, but Aviva made the mistake of inviting the other couple to stay (“You’ve driven so far!”), and their friends were only too happy to take them up on the offer.
In their younger days, in the 1980s, when all four of them had lived in Milwaukee, they’d been inseparable, but after Zac and Aviva had moved to California, they’d gradually grown apart. While they still communicated through Facebook, actual visits were down to once a year, phone calls not much more than that.
This stopover was not only completely unexpected but completely out of character. Donald was probably the least spontaneous person Zac had ever met, and he didn’t do anything without planning for it extensively. His claim to have woken up the other day deciding to drive aimlessly west did not ring true—or if it was true, it indicated that there were far deeper problems in their lives than they were willing to admit.
Indeed, Donald and Cat’s marriage did not seem to be going well. In the year since he’d seen them, their banter had become sour. What had been playful little digs were now pointed criticisms, meant to hurt, and he found it uncomfortable to be around them.
“It’s only a few days,” Aviva told him when he followed her into the kitchen, leaving Donald and Cat alone. “They’re leaving on Sunday.”
That was true, but three days was a long time to spend with people he didn’t really know anymore and wasn’t sure he liked. Aviva was better at the social stuff than he was, thank God, because he ran out of things to talk about almost immediately. Even with her skills, however, the mood was awkward and often tense, particularly between Donald and Cat, who seemed to take turns sulking and being silent. Initially, Zac hoped that they would offer to leave on their own, but he soon got the impression that he and Aviva were being used as buffers, that their friends didn’t want to be alone with each other.
Which meant it was going to be a long, long weekend.
Thanksgiving was taken care of. They were all Twilight Zone fans, so the plan was still to order Chinese and watch the marathon. But after that…?
At dinner Wednesday night, Cat drank too much wine and, in the middle of recounting their trip to the Grand Canyon, said that she’d wanted to take the Bright Angel Trail but that Donald hadn’t been “enough of a man” to go on the hike. “Not enough of a man,” she repeated, taking another sip of wine.
Aviva tried to defuse the situation. “We actually have dessert—”
“In more ways than one,” Cat said insinuatingly.
“Your hole’s as big as the Grand Canyon,” Donald retorted.
“Well, it sure didn’t get stretched out from you
,” she shot back.
Zac stood, hastily following his wife into the kitchen. “I’ll help you with the dessert,” he said, grateful to get away.
“Oh God,” Aviva whispered. “Oh God. Why’d they even come? And why didn’t they call us first? I mean, it’s common courtesy…”
You’re the one who invited them to stay, Zac was tempted to tell her, but of course he didn’t.
“What are we going to do with them after tomorrow? We can’t just sit around while they attack each other. We need to find some way to keep them busy.”
“Something touristy?”
“Something.”
In bed that night, Zac brought up the two days that stretched before them. “Any ideas yet?” he asked Aviva.
“Maybe. I was thinking about Downtown Disney? Cat did mention that she wanted to buy some presents for her family back home.”
He turned to her. “There are a lot of good bargains the day after Thanksgiving.”
She paled. “You’re not thinking…”
“I’m just saying—”
“You’re talking about Black Friday.”
He nodded.
“They’re supposed to be our friends,” Aviva said.
“But are they? Really?”
They were both silent.
“I didn’t mean that,” he conceded. “Of course they’re our friends. And we wouldn’t let them get too close to the front.”
“No,” she said. “It’s too dangerous.”
“They’ll stay back. They’ll be safe.” He paused. “But they’ll be there.”
She looked at him, and he saw the fear in her eyes.
“And maybe they’ll see her.”
Aviva shook her head vehemently. “No.”
“Wouldn’t you like to find out?”
Walking Alone Page 13