The New Neighbor: A Novel Read online

  My face—what can you say about that? It no longer looks exactly like my face. And my ears have grown enormous. If I live much longer I’ll be able to use them to fly.

  And what of Jennifer Young? I wager her ears are still normal sized. Beyond that I can’t hazard a guess as to what she looks like, except to say she’s a white woman with blondish hair. I wonder how old she is. I wonder what she’s done with her life. I wonder what she’s doing with it here. There are only so many reasons to live in this place, in the woods, in the tiny towns. The Mountain birthed its longtime people, who seem to have no choice but to stay. The university brings the students and the professors, and the quaint old cottages in the Assembly and the big built-to-order houses in Clifftops bring the vacationers and retirees, those of us who flee up the Mountain into silence and cooler air and frequent sightings of woodpeckers and fawns. I myself moved here twenty years ago, one of the elderly evacuees of the working world. Those are my people—the no-longers, the once-weres. Jennifer Young is too young to be one of us. Perhaps she’s a professor of something or other, and her being here is easily explained.

  But nothing is ever easily explained, is it? Nothing is ever easily explained.

  Noise

  Is the woman still there? Yes, she is. Today, like each of the last several, she’s there every time Jennifer glances out the glass doors to the deck. A white-haired figure on the other side of the pond, sitting and sitting and sitting. It’s early spring and the light is beautiful—perhaps the woman just enjoys the outdoors. But Jennifer had never noticed her until the morning she waved, and now there she always is. As if she’s watching. As if she’s waiting for her.

  She forces herself to slide the door open. To step with confident purpose onto the deck will vanquish her paranoia. She strides to the railing and waves, because if the woman is watching her, maybe this will embarrass her inside, but the woman doesn’t wave back and now Jennifer can see, squinting, that she has her head bowed. She appears to be reading. She’s an old lady who likes to sit outside and read, that’s all, and yet Jennifer wishes fervently that she would go away. Behind her inside the house Milo bangs cars together on the floor of the dining room, that little-boy cacophony, but out here on the deck it’s utterly quiet. It’s a humming silent sound.

  She chose this place, this mountain, this rental house, because of a conversation she had more than twenty years ago, at a party on a rooftop, during her brief sojourn in New York, when she was still trying to be a dancer. A girl from her dance class, a girl whose name and face she can no longer recall, told her about Sewanee, where she’d gone to college. “It’s like Brigadoon,” the girl said, and when Jennifer looked puzzled, she explained, “From an old movie, about this village that appears every hundred years. Whenever I go back, it’s like no time has passed. Everything’s exactly the same. And in the winter, when there’s fog on the Mountain, it feels like you pass through clouds to get there, and on the other side the rest of the world is just gone.”

  “Did you like it?” Jennifer asked.

  The girl shrugged. “There’s two kinds of people who graduate from Sewanee,” she said. “The ones who can’t wait to leave and the ones who spend the rest of their lives trying to get back.” It had the ring of a practiced remark. The girl wanted to claim the first category, and yet her wistful tone persuaded Jennifer she belonged to the second. This was why the conversation had stayed with her: the girl’s divisive longing, called forth by something she both loved and wanted to leave. Jennifer recognized it.

  At any rate, the girl was right. Up here there is no rest of the world.

  She thinks about shouting, “Hey!” across the pond. Nothing else, just “Hey!” Probably the word would echo, from the water, from the trees: hey, hey, hey. Does she want the woman to look at her or go away? She leaves her to her book, slides her glass door emphatically shut. Back inside she clambers onto her knees beside Milo and leans over him to pick up a car. “What do we do?” she asks, revving the car in the air. “Vroom, vroom?”

  “No, Mom,” he says importantly. He takes the car from her hand. “You have to go up this ramp”—built of magnetic tiles—“and then you crash the building and you get points.” He goes on explaining the point system, but her interest in it isn’t strong. She puts her mouth on his jawline, where she knows he’s ticklish, and kisses him. “Mom,” he says, giggling. “Come on, Mom.” His voice has that tone of pleased annoyance perfected by little boys with doting mothers. “I need to do this, okay?”

  “Okay,” she says, rocking back on her heels. “You do it.” She hoists herself up by a chair and then sits in it, watching him play. He is too precious to her. He is the only thing that breaks the silence. Already she can feel how someday that will be a burden to him.

  “Milo,” she says, but he doesn’t hear her over his own noise, or he ignores her. She doesn’t want to ask this question. Or maybe she does want to ask it, because she’s hoping he’ll say no, and then she can stop feeling guilty for making him so alone. Do you really want to go to school? Please say no. “Milo,” she says again.

  There’s a preschool in the Episcopal church in Sewanee. She knows because they have a sign outside and a large, rambling playground that always draws Milo’s eye. She parks the car on the street, and she and Milo walk up to the school, she holding tightly to his hand. He cried the whole drive over because he’d dropped one of his cars off the front porch and into a bush, and Jennifer had been unable to find it. But he’s happy and skipping now. Children can be so very, very sad, and then that sadness can be so quickly forgotten. She wishes she knew that trick. Afraid of the tears returning, she tells him as they walk that he might not be able to go right away, there might not be room. She wonders if that’s what she’s hoping for. He’s so happy right now, but she isn’t. She doesn’t want him to go to school. The thought of it tightens her throat.

  They do have room, though, and seem delighted at the arrival of a new pupil. If she’ll fill out the paperwork, he can start that day! At this news Milo drops his shyness—he buried his face in her hip while she talked to Miss Amber—and bounds over to the water table, where two little girls in enormous blue smocks are pushing around plastic boats. “This one is the fastest!” he says, pointing, with his cheerful assumption that people will like him. One of the girls says, “No, this one is,” and Milo calls over to Jennifer: “Mom, the water’s pink!”

  “Cool!” she says, insisting on her own enthusiasm.

  She lingers for quite some time even after she’s filled in every blank and signed her name to the check. Milo seems to have friends already, potential invitees to his birthday party. He is talking to two other boys, looking down at his Spider-Man shirt, which he holds out toward them, pinched on each side. Trying not to hover, she isn’t quite close enough to hear their conversation, and she wonders what he’s telling them. Tommy was the one who introduced him to Spider-Man.

  Miss Amber comes over to her wearing a sympathetic smile. “See?” she says. “He’s doing great.”

  “What?”

  “I wouldn’t worry at all,” she says. “He seems like a very adaptable little boy.”

  “He is,” Jennifer says. Miss Amber thinks, or is pretending to think, that she’s lingering out of concern for Milo. She doesn’t want to disabuse her, so she says, “Well, just call me if he needs me,” as matter-of-factly as she can manage. When she hugs Milo goodbye, he clings to her, the fabric of her shirt bunched tightly in his little fists, and she feels a surge of relief—he doesn’t want to stay, he’ll come away with her, they can go. But across the room another child calls his name, and just like that Milo is gone.

  Out on the street, she blinks into the sunlight. She has no idea what to do with her freedom. How did this happen? The day began as every other day in Sewanee has, and yet suddenly she is alone. She has no job. She has no friends, and can’t make any, because friends want to hear your story. Where you came from and what you’re doing here. Why Milo has no father. Why sh
e is so very alone.

  Don’t Leave Me

  Here I am at the end of adventure. The quiet house. The woods. I sit on my deck like a bird-watcher, like a hunter in a blind, wondering if my neighbor will poke her head out. I finish one mystery and start another, this one about a young woman trying to solve her family’s murder. I look up from blood and bodies to gaze at the still blue pond. Blue when the sunlight’s on it, gray otherwise. This is a metaphor for something. When I grow weary of that I go inside and sit where I sit now, at my desk, in the room I call my study, though what am I studying here? This desk was once my father’s, and it’s imposing, as was he. Dark shiny wood, bigger than a desk has a right to be. It must weigh a great deal. I have nicked it here and there, banging it with my cane, and left a stray ink mark or two on its surface. I’ve cluttered it with papers and books, though at least I have no computer to offend its old-fashioned sensibility. Still, it is dignified and reproachful, which are also words that belonged to my father.

  I am personifying the desk. Am I so lonely I’d like it to come to life, and sing and dance with the silverware, like in a fairy-tale cartoon? No, that’s not right. Loneliness is not my problem. My problem is restlessness, forever and ever, amen. I’m restless. I want something to happen, though it’s been quite some time since anything happened to me.

  Jennifer Young. Jennifer Young. What are you doing here?

  People used to tell me I must be looking forward to retirement, after all those years of working so hard. I worked until I was in my seventies! But some of us don’t work so that we can rest. Some of us rest so that we can work. I belong to the second group, but for a while, at least, I mistook myself for a member of the first. When I bought this house, I thought my restlessness had burned itself out, and that it was at long last time to retreat into peaceful solitude, free of all the world’s demands. Isn’t that the end of the story, for soldiers and adventurers? At least for the ones who fail to die.

  Let’s talk about this house, this mountain, my paradise on earth. After I moved here I was seized by a sudden interest in local history, and there is little I don’t know about this place, though I don’t find the facts of it quite as interesting as I once did. I live on the Cumberland Plateau, one thousand feet up, with its caves and its waterfalls and its highways blasted through rock. So many delights for the nature-minded! Trails to swimming holes and wildflowers and other species of the picturesque. When I first moved here I was nimble enough to walk the less challenging trails. No more. When I want a view from the bluff now I have to drive to an overlook in Sewanee. I like the one with the Cross. The Cross—it’s a war memorial, white, sixty feet tall. Around its foot there’s a circle of spotlights, so that at night it glows and draws bats and moths of all sizes. Moths as big as bats.

  There’s always been religion on the Mountain, though that’s not why I moved here, as the war long ago cured me of any belief in God. Sewanee is an Episcopal school, a bishop’s notion. Then there’s the Assembly—founded in 1882, as a summer-long Sunday school. When I first came to the Mountain, as a girl in the 1930s, we were visiting a friend of my mother’s who had a family cottage there. I could have bought a house in the Assembly when I moved here, but I wasn’t looking for community. What I have in this house is community’s opposite. My house is on a winding road off the main highway with its two lanes and its too-fast drivers. The road to my house goes past the little airport, which has little planes that putt-putter down little runways. They remind me of the war, but in a way I like. They remind me of a movie about the war. My house was built by an old couple who got divorced, or maybe a young couple who died. I can’t remember which. I know it wasn’t old/died, young/divorced, because I remember that when the Realtor told me the story I felt surprised. Behind it is a pond. Around it woods. The woods are also around the pond. The only other sign of human habitation is the deck of Jennifer Young’s house, and her house’s brown exterior wall. When I sit on my own deck I can see sunlight glinting off the windows. But for a long time no one lived there. As for my house? My house has too many rooms.

  I was born the year women got the vote. That’s an interesting fact about me. I changed everything. “Things are different now,” my mother used to whisper, smoothing back my hair after she’d tucked me in at night. “Things will be different for you.”

  My mother had married at nineteen, had three children and lost one, suffered in her marriage to my father, though of course I didn’t understand that then. If there was a shadow of grief on my mother I felt it only on those nights when she whispered like that in my ear. I remember her as bubbly, irrepressible, theatrical. She dressed for dinner and called me “chérie” and referred to the living room as the “parlor.” As a child I marveled at her endless cheer—I admired it enormously, and it mystified me. So I couldn’t quite see her as human. And then I got older and she grew artificial, or my idea of her did. After that we couldn’t understand each other at all. But when I was a child, and she was all marvelous gleaming surfaces, moments of truth—her whisper in my ear—just frightened and unnerved me.

  For years she imagined for me the brilliant life I’d have at college, but my father was a doctor, and I wanted to go to nursing school. What I really wanted was to be a doctor, too, but nothing led me to believe that was possible. When in the end she couldn’t wear down my determination, she swallowed her own disappointment and behaved as though nursing school had been exactly what she’d wanted for me all along. When I joined the army, that was something else. I said, “I enlisted,” and she turned ashen at the words. She looked at me like I was already a ghost. All those times she’d said different, this was not what she’d had in mind.

  It’s funny where your mind goes, when you get to be my age. When my mother died I was in the emergency room with her. We’d been in there five hours or more. She’d had a stroke. I was holding her hand, and she kept talking about a song called “The Old Oaken Bucket” that was stuck in her head. Was the line “by the well” or “in the well”? Which was it? I didn’t know. I had no idea, and that was maddening to her. What was wrong with me? Finally I picked one. After that she kept saying don’t leave me.

  Don’t leave me. Anyone I might say that to is already gone.

  I’m restless. Once upon a time I would have cleaned my house from top to bottom, or perfected my garden, or gone to work. Now what am I to do with this energy? Fly to Paris and take a lover? Jog?

  In the days when I still had conversations, and people found out I went to war, they’d ask if I’d wanted an adventure, and I’d want to tell them no, that all I wanted was to serve my country. But I suppose if that were truly all I’d wanted I could’ve stayed at home and knitted socks. I was not pressed into service, rising to the occasion against my will. I always wanted something more. Something bigger. Something different. Something else.

  Trapdoor

  They need money. Even more so, now that she’s put Milo in school. Their need for money wakes her every night into midnight silence, so that she traverses the darkened hall to Milo’s room, whispers to his sleeping form that everything will be all right, then goes out on the deck and looks at the starry night and wills herself to feel peace. All around her the maddening mindless thrum of insects, punctuated occasionally by an eerie, insistent owl, a sound that reminds her of the woman across the pond. They need money, so she’s trying to get it, sticking in each thumbtack, asking each proprietor if she can leave a stack of her cards. At the coffee shop in Sewanee, at the café in Monteagle, at Monteagle’s real-deal small-town places and Sewanee’s knowingly rustic ones, they tell her to go ahead, smiling at Milo as he zooms his toy car up the side of a counter, and she puts up her flyers, with their hopeful tabs printed with her number and her name. A woman behind a café counter in Sewanee tells her she has no competition: there used to be a massage therapist in the little strip of three storefronts at the edge of Monteagle—“You know the place? Everything that opens there closes”—but a few years ago she moved away. J
ennifer isn’t licensed in Tennessee but up here there seems little chance that anyone will check.

  She’d meant to do this task alone, but impulsively she picked up Milo early from preschool, right before nap, which she knew would win his gratitude. He hates nap. He hasn’t napped since he was two and a half. “Naps are stupid,” he likes to say. “Naps are jackass.” Though she knows she shouldn’t let him say jackass, she’s so amused by the way he uses it as an adjective that she finds it hard to make him stop. She loves the vehemence of his pronouncements. She loves the smile that breaks across his face when he sees her. She loves the appreciative sound he makes—mmmm—when she gives him a bite of something good. Where they let her hang her signs, she buys a treat for herself and Milo to show her gratitude. So far they’ve had real lemonade, fries, a blueberry muffin, and they’re topping it all off with an ice cream cone, sitting at a little table in a café that looks like a log cabin. The ice cream is an enormous scoop of dripping chocolate that she’s ceded entirely to Milo, who’s struggling mightily to conquer it. “You need to lick around the bottom,” she says. He pushes his whole tongue against the top, shifting the scoop into a dangerous tilt. “No, the bottom,” she says. “The bottom. Do you want me to show you?”

  “I can do it,” he says, loudly, and she looks away, resisting the urge to snatch the thing from him before it ends up on the floor, or in her lap. Looking away, she catches the eye of a woman at the cash register. The woman is waiting for her change, holding a brown bag of something to go, and for some reason she is turned around, looking at Jennifer. Jennifer freezes, but the woman immediately breaks her gaze, returning her attention to the girl behind the counter. Jennifer turns her own head, too, but she is in the grip of adrenaline now, adrenaline that tells her to be watchful, to be ready at any moment to flee, and she keeps the woman in her peripheral vision. The woman probably just glanced over because Milo was loud. She knows this. She should shake the habit of bracing for confrontation.