Right Next Door

by Leah Montgomery

  Nothing made sense. I couldn’t even be sure I wanted it to. I knew first hand that there were times when reality was even worse than the imagination.

  Snatches of time and light and dark wove together in a patchwork quilt. Events, moments, sights, sounds. Different colors, different textures, different patterns, stitched together into something that should’ve made sense, but didn’t. I just couldn’t quite bring it all together.

  I thought there was movement. I thought there were feather-light touches. I thought there were tears.

  Mine?

  Surely not.

  I’d cried all my tears, hadn’t I?

  But if not mine, then whose?

  Smells. Familiar smells. Coconut. Then burning wood. Then clean linen.

  Softness. Like clouds. Clouds that couldn’t, shouldn’t, wouldn’t hold me. I didn’t deserve clouds. I deserved hard, cold concrete.

  And that was the thought that woke me. A memory. The first in a cascade of memories, of terrors I’d just as soon have forgotten.

  That would’ve been merciful.

  But merciful wasn’t to be the case.

  I opened my eyes to the dim glow of light. A lamp. A familiar ceiling as I blinked up at it. Plain white with a medallion around a gorgeous chandelier. I remembered the day Gabe and I picked it out.

  Home.

  I was home.

  It was a thought. A feeling. A fantasy. How could I ever go home? After what I’d done, after what I’d become, how could I ever go home?

  I heard sobbing. Gentle, delicate sobbing. Only when a hand pressed lightly onto my shoulder did I realize it was me. The sobs were mine. They were as broken as I was.

  I rolled onto my side, away from the light. “Bright,” I croaked.

  I needed darkness. I was comfortable in the dark. In the blackness. It held the atrocities. Kept them secret. Shielded them from prying eyes.

  Within seconds, the light vanished. I was lost again. But this time I wanted to be.

  I woke a thousand times. At every noise. At every sensation.

  I woke in the grips of near panic.

  The dark was too dark, the silence too loud.

  It was too familiar.

  Devastatingly, hauntingly familiar.

  But I couldn’t embrace the light either. It was too bright. Too real. I couldn’t face it. Couldn’t face the life inside it. The memories. It was too much.

  Gabe was there each time I cried out. He was there, turning the lamp off and on as I teetered between two worlds, two lives. One a dream, the other a nightmare.

  He held me as I shook. Let me go when I couldn’t bear his tenderness. He crooned to me as he stroked my hair. Lay beside me in silence when even the buzz of the fan grew too loud.

  I fell in and out of a trance-like sleep. Motionless one minute, unable to lie still the next. Warped, watery thoughts drifted in and out. Like I was drugged again. I couldn’t understand how that could be. Unless he’d given me too much for too long.

  I hadn’t had the courage to ask Gabe yet how long it had been. Or really the presence of mind to digest his answer. That was just another gory detail that I dreaded to know. It was one of the many shadows that surrounded me. Lurked. Paced. Threatened.

  I didn’t know how long it had been when I surfaced. Surfaced for real, with real thoughts and a real concept of reality. I only knew that at one point I woke with something on my mind. A single crystal clear thought, as urgent as anything I’d ever experienced.

  Dalton.

  The name circled my brain a half dozen times before it formed on my lips. Made its way out into the claustrophobic air of our bedroom. The moment it did, Gabe was there, answering. Consoling. Comforting.

  “Shhhh. It’s okay, baby. I’m here.”

  “Dalton.”

  “He’ll be home soon. Don’t worry. Rest, sweetheart. Just rest.”

  I whimpered coarsely. Couldn’t find the words that would explain to my husband what I feared. What I’d done. How much we’d nearly lost. How much I’d already lost.

  I relaxed back onto a mountain of pillows. Tried to find relief in Gabe’s reassurance. But all the while, his words felt like lies.

  Something was wrong.

  Very, very wrong.

  Something other than me.

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  The smell of smoke still lingers in the air. It’s the first thing Marcy notices when she steps into the kitchen the next morning. The scent brings it all rushing back. As if it hadn’t been at the forefront of her mind since the moment it happened.

  Marcy goes about her morning rituals, putting the coffee on and emptying the dishwasher as it brewed. Only this morning, each time she passes the window over the sink, her eye is drawn to the charred bones of the neighbor’s jungle gym. It crouches in the back corner of the yard, like a twisted T. Rex skeleton waiting for night to fall so it can come to life and gobble up innocent children.

  Her lips curve into a self-deprecating smile. She only startles a little when she hears John’s sleepy voice.

  “What’s funny?”

  Marcy turns her head enough that he can hit her mouth with his morning kiss. “Not funny really, just some nutty thought that went through my head.”

  “Do tell,” he says, giving her backside a swat before sauntering off toward the coffee pot to pour two mugs.

  “I was looking out at the swing set. It reminds me of a T. Rex carcass for some reason. Then I thought it might be waiting until dark so it could come to life and eat small children.”

  John has paused with his cup hovering a couple of inches from his lips. “I don’t know if that’s brilliantly creative or vaguely demented.”

  Marcy shrugs. “Why can’t it be both?”

  “Sometimes you scare me, woman.”

  “Keep that in mind any time you find your eye wandering.”

  John gives her a gentle smile and wraps his free arm around her waist. “You’re the only one for me and you know it.”

  “Damn straight,” she mutters as he nuzzles her nose with his. “So, be honest, do you think Mark was inside finishing up a booty call with the nanny when the fire broke out?”

  John walks to the back door and looks out as he sips his coffee. “Hard to say.” He tosses a grin over his shoulder. “See what I did there?”

  Marcy rolls her eyes and dries the last of the plates from the dishwasher before putting them away. Her mind is still spinning with theories. “Let’s say Mark did this before. Maybe more than once, but for the sake of simplicity, let’s focus on just one. So say he gets a mistress, promises her the moon, then chickens out and dumps her. Would that be enough to make someone go to these lengths for revenge?”

  “You know what they say, ‘Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned’.”

  “True, but surely a mistress would have to accept, at least to some degree, that the other woman might win out. I mean, he loved Jill enough to marry her in the first place. Surely another woman would realize that’s some serious competition.”

  “Depends on how well he plays that game, I guess. Some men can be very effective bargainers.”

  Marcy stops and looks back at her husband. “Do you think you could convince another woman that she means more to you than the woman you married? Than the mother of your child?”

  John seesaws his head. “Probably. It would depend a lot on the woman, too.”

  “So the more gullible, the more effective?”

  “Yeah. I think that goes without saying.”

  Marcy turns back to the sink, absently drying her hands on the towel. Her eyes stare unseeingly out the window, toward the burnt frame in the neighbor’s yard.

  “In that case, we should assume she’s young. Young and naïve. Right?”

  “Likely.”

  “But then would someone that age be capable of this? I mean, to stalk someone and do these sorts of things takes a lot of planning and a very level head. I would think maturity, too. The letters, no, and the mail box, no, b
ut burning down a swingset without being seen or getting caught? That’s quite a feat. Don’t you think?”

  “It is. She may have put something in place earlier and then somehow set it to go off last night.”

  “The arson investigator would find that, though, right?”

  “I would think.”

  “But even if they figure out the mechanism, even if they figure out how it was done, if she isn’t a suspect and they can’t trace it to her, she’d still get away with it.”

  “Right. And if this happened in another state, where they lived before moving here, it would make her an even less likely suspect.”

  “You really think this could be a jilted lover?”

  “I didn’t say that. I said it’s possible. All of it’s possible. But part of me still believes that the offense would have to be much worse to warrant this kind of behavior.”

  “Explain yourself, Dr. Phil.”

  John tosses Marcy a withering look over the Dr. Phil comment, but doesn’t address it. “Just a young woman who got dumped, to me, isn’t as plausible. But what if she got pregnant? Or what if they’d already taken several steps toward a future? What if they’d bought a house together or she was wealthy and he took money from her? In reality, I think it would have to be something more to set a woman on a revenge path this elaborate. And even then, I’m not sure she would go to these lengths. In my mind, it would have to be bad. Like, really bad.”

  “Bad, like...” Marcy’s eyes round. “What if he raped her? Or what if he abused her somehow? That would make more sense, wouldn’t it?”

  John’s expression turns to one of unease—his brows drawing together, low over his eyes, and his lips thinning into a straight line. “That kind of hatred... It can cause people to do crazy things. Irrational things. Dangerous things.”

  “Oh, God,” Marcy whispers, a sick feeling washing through her gut. “People…they’re monsters.”

  “I think we’re all capable of the worst kinds of crimes if the stimulus is bad enough.”

  Marcy meets John’s eyes and they stare at one another for a few seconds in silence, digesting the meaning of it all.

  The slam of a door, loud enough to be heard inside, brings their attention to the Halpern’s side door. It’s closed and no one can be seen through the open curtains that cover the glass half of the panel.

  “You know, I didn’t get the mail yesterday. I was too distracted with our plan and with preparations. Why don’t you run out and grab it?”

  John nods in agreement, winking at his wife in appreciation of her quick mind. “I’ll do that right now.”

  Marcy follows her husband to the front door, watches him open it. Waits as he walks to the box. She can see his head turn periodically to the right, casually glancing at the house beside theirs. A screech of tires causes Marcy to jump. She opens the storm door and leans out just as Mark Halpern’s silver car finishes its turnaround in the driveway and races toward the top.

  She sees John wave, and Mark pauses long enough to roll down his window and speak to John. Marcy strains to hear what’s being said, but she can’t make it out. She doesn’t want to be too obvious by going outside; clearly Mark is in a hurry. So she waits, not very patiently, for Mark to speed off and John to make it back down to the house.

  She’s holding the door open for him when he steps onto the front porch. “What was that all about?”

  John steps inside and closes the wooden door, snapping the lock shut. “Mark is on his way to the hospital. Jill was in a car accident.”

  Marcy’s hands fly to her mouth on a gasp. “Good God, is she okay?”

  “He thinks so. I asked him if there was anything we could do. He said he’d call if there was.”

  “What happened? Did he say?”

  John’s expression sends a shiver of apprehension jittering through Marcy. “Her brakes went out.”

  Marcy’s skeptical. “Hmmm. Just like that?”

  John nods. “Just like that.”

  “That’s…that’s quite the coincidence.”

  “Isn’t it, though?”

  Marcy pauses, searching her husband’s eyes before she asks tentatively, “You think the lines were cut?”

  “I wouldn’t rule it out, that’s for sure.”

  Marcy exhales, shaking her head. “What the hell have they gotten themselves into?”

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Thirst.

  I was ashamed.

  My husband was lying to reassure me, and my mind was already gnashing its teeth at another need. It rose to take control.

  “Thirsty,” I rasped.

  I’d sipped some water that Gabe had in his truck when he picked me up. I thought I might have even nibbled a cracker. It was cloudy and indistinct, that whole period. Like when he found me, something inside me shut off. Stopped fighting and just went…blank.

  My hard drive just powered down.

  Gabe disengaged himself from me. Untangled limbs I hadn’t been aware of wrapping around him. Made his way into the bathroom. He returned less than a minute later with three small cups of water. “They’re the biggest cups I could find. I’ll go get you a glass while you work on these.”

  He handed me the plastic cups. I took them with trembling fingers. They shook so violently I spilled half of the first one. “Sorry,” I muttered.

  Gabe palmed my cheek. “Don’t apologize. You have nothing to apologize for.”

  I nodded. My eyes drifted closed. Water trickled down my throat as my husband’s footsteps receded down the hall. A minute, or maybe an hour later, he was by my side again. Lifting my head, his big hand cradling my skull. P

  He pressed a cool glass to my lips. I drank and I drank and I drank.

  I’d never noticed that water had a flavor. Or maybe I had and just didn’t retain it. Like the scent of night air. I’d taken it for granted my whole life, but I knew I’d never forget it going forward. Water would be the same. Clean water especially. The wetness of it against my tongue, the flow of it down my throat. The lack of spice or herb or chemical as it coated the membranes on the inside of my mouth. If no flavor could be a flavor, water had it. But this water did have a flavor. It tasted like home. Security. Normalcy. It was familiar. Comfortingly so. And I drank of it. It filled my belly. Bathed my cells. I couldn’t drink enough for it to touch what needed soothing the most, though. Maybe that thirst, maybe that need, wasn’t able to be soothed. Maybe it was beyond helping. Beyond fixing. Like I was.

  When I’d had enough, I pressed my head back into Gabe’s hand and he lowered the glass. There was a glow leaking into the room, seeping in around the curtains. It was light outside. Whether that meant morning or noon or dusk, I had no idea. I only knew that it marked a day, something I hadn’t been aware of in…well, I didn’t know how long.

  But that didn’t matter at that moment. I couldn’t let it. Only one thing did, especially now that my thirst was slaked.

  “Gabe?”

  “I’m here, babe.”

  I turned my face until my eyes met his. I held them steadily. I studied the shape of them—an exotic almond, turned up slightly at the outer edges. I stared at the ring of thick lashes that surrounded them, long curls that any woman would die to have. When we were first married, we would lie in bed on Saturday mornings, not bothering with clothes until well past noon. In our first apartment, sunlight would pour across the bed in wide slats, and I’d prop myself up on an elbow and count each lash that flashed jet black in the light. Now, they were a blur. A fringe with no individual members. They ran together, much like time and thought had, deep inside the brambles of my mind.

  One thing that never looked any different, no matter the amount of light or drink or age, was the truth I could read in Gabe’s eyes. He’d always called me the human lie detector, but I doubted it was me as much as it was that he was a terrible liar. His eyes gave it away when he was trying to mislead or deceive. I’d always loved that about him.

  Until today.

&n
bsp; “Gabe, where is Dalton? Tell me the truth.”

  “I told you he’d—”

  “I heard what you said. Is it tomorrow?”

  “Huh?”

  “You said he’d be home tomorrow. You found me in the dark. Is it tomorrow?”

  I could see his shadowy eyes flitting between mine. I knew he was wishing in that moment that he could lie to me. Probably wishing it as much as I was. But we both knew that wouldn’t happen.

  “No, it’s not tomorrow.”

  “When is it?”

  “It’s the day after tomorrow.”

  “How long have I been asleep?”

  “Almost thirty four hours. On and off.”

  I felt moisture gather in my eyes. Not much, but a little. A good sign for me. Not a good sign for my son. “Then where is he?”

  Gabe dropped his head onto my forearm. Slid off the bed where he’d perched by my side. He withered to his knees like a dying flower.

  I felt his shoulders shake more than I saw them moving. His sobs were silent, but they moved the bed. Like the tremor of a mild earthquake. Not enough to register high on the Richter scale, but enough to do untold damage to my insides. In my heart, I felt the foundation give way. The walls crack. The ceiling crumble.

  “He didn’t bring him back.” Gabe’s voice was a splintered moan.

  My heart thrummed heavily. Pounded so hard I thought my ribs might snap. “What do you mean?”

  “He…he said he would bring Dalton back after he released you.”

  “Where was he supposed to bring him? Here?”

  “No, he was supposed to call again with a location. I was to pick you up at that clearing near the old ranger station at the edge of the national forest, and then the next day he was supposed to call with a location to pick up Dalton.”

  My throat clamped down so hard it took me several tries to push words past the tightness. “And he didn’t call?”

  There was silence. Long, taut, ugly, terrifying silence. It stretched on longer than I thought I could bear.

  “No, he…he called.”

  I dreaded the word, but knew it was coming. Something about Gabe’s demeanor, something about his eyes, something about an emptiness in the room that had always held such love—it all told me something was wrong. So wrong it would never be the same again. And it was something more than just me.