The New Neighbor: A Novel Read online

  Milo turns to Megan suddenly, his sweet little face as severe as a frown can make it, and says in the deep voice he uses when he’s being serious or confessional, “My dad went fishing.”

  Jennifer goes hot, then cold. She wants to retort, No, he didn’t, but she bites her tongue. For a moment she’s uncertain—did Tommy like to fish? She has no memory of that. Is it possible Milo remembers something she doesn’t? Is it possible Milo remembers?

  Megan gives her a searching look, hovering on the edge of apologetic. “He was just telling us some things about his dad.”

  Jennifer tries to smile, but she can feel that the smile is a stricken, frozen one. “Like what?”

  “Oh . . .” Megan is visibly nervous. “Just, you know. He drove a pickup truck.”

  “He did!” Milo insists hotly, as if someone’s disputing it.

  Jennifer puts her hand on his head. “Yes, he did,” she says, trying to sound soothing. “You’re right, honey.” But how does he remember that? How does he know? Zoe took the truck, and Milo hasn’t seen it or Zoe in more than a year. He does not remember Zoe. He doesn’t even remember his own last name.

  “He built things,” Milo adds, like this is proof.

  “That’s right.” Jennifer looks at Megan and says, “He did woodwork. Built-in bookshelves. Cabinets.”

  “I know,” Milo says.

  “Yes,” Jennifer says. “I guess you remember.” But he doesn’t, he doesn’t, he doesn’t. He doesn’t remember. That is the foundation on which this life is built.

  Ben pulls back from the fish and takes off, and Milo’s face lights up with excitement, Tommy abruptly discarded. He swings one arm back, like a pitcher winding up, and launches himself into pursuit. “Boys!” Megan calls. Then she sneaks a look at Jennifer, hesitates. “Is your husband . . .”

  “Dead?” Jennifer says. “Yes, he’s dead.”

  “I’m sorry,” Megan says. “I didn’t know. I’d assumed you were divorced.”

  “It’s okay,” Jennifer says. “It’s been a couple years. Whatever Milo says, he doesn’t really remember him. He was only two when Tommy died.”

  She can see Megan considering whether to ask another question. She thinks for a wild moment about telling Megan the story about Tommy. All of it. How they’d started out so much in love, and how things had slowly gone wrong, and how she’d tried, she’d tried, she’d tried. How whenever she resolved to leave Tommy she’d succumb to sorrow and nostalgia, yes, but mostly she could just never resist her stupid, primal attraction to him, and one of those times they’d conceived Milo. How things had gotten better for a while, because Tommy took such good care of her while she was pregnant, and then was so good with the baby. What went wrong after that. If she told Megan all of it, all of it, would she understand? Would she still be her friend? Who in the world will still want you, once they know everything you have to tell?

  Jennifer says, “We’d better go after them,” and Megan obligingly drops the subject. She calls, “Boys!” again, and breaks into a light jog. Jennifer stands there. She just needs a second. Just a second, and then she’ll be fine. She puts her hand against the glass, and the fish flee from it. She parts and scatters them with her terrifying hand. Because she is the bad guy. She is the bad guy, of course. Even if Megan imagines differently, she is not the tragic figure. Tommy is. Tommy always was. Nobody saw the tragedy in being the practical one. He was the one who fell painfully short of his potential, the one who, even as he let his business flounder and drank too much and showed up late, continued to be thought of as a really great guy. And he was a really great guy. He’d never changed. He still felt things deeply and struggled not to show it, and he still lost that struggle, and rewarded your comforting charms with an irresistible outpouring of emotional truth. He still drank so much you worried about him, but held his liquor well enough to escape pity or scorn. He could still charm. He could still treat all his mistakes like the inevitable result of his own sad-fuckup nature, his bad choices beyond help and therefore beyond judgment. He was still sweet. He still looked at her like she was the only thing in the world.

  And other people saw that, the way he looked at her and all those other things. And so she was the villain. She was the one who didn’t laugh at his joke, or who looked pained when he gave in to the call to stay for another. She was the one who wanted to leave the party; he was the one who kept it going. The one who wants to leave the party is never the favored one. People thought she didn’t know how good she had it. People thought she was mean. No one ever said that directly, of course. Instead, if she complained, their responses started with “at least” or “come on.” Come on, he’s so sweet. At least he’s still into you. Come on, you’re so lucky. At least he’s hot. Once a close friend had said, “Well, you know, you’re always mad at him—you’re probably not the easiest person to live with.” Even her friends liked him better. They might not have, if she’d told them about the affairs, but she couldn’t bring herself to tell, because that would expose her weakness as well as his.

  The third—or fourth?—time she found out that Tommy had slept with another woman, he’d left his email open on their shared desktop—something he never did—and curiosity had made her read it. It was curiosity of the kind that comes with a shiver of nausea, because you know you don’t want to know what you’re about to find out. She printed the email out, as calm as a secretary. When he got home that night—late, he’d had drinks after work, of course he had—she was sitting at the dining room table waiting with the email in front of her. He said, “Hey, babe,” and bent to offer her a kiss that was sharp with whiskey, and she pushed the email over so he could read it. “What the fuck, Tommy,” she said. “What the fuck.” It was all she could think of to say, so she kept saying it, a hundred times, slamming down the word that described both her outrage and the thing he’d done. She went around the house saying it, picking up his things and throwing them, while he followed, alternately pleading and shouting at her to stop. Finally he grabbed her hands, and she threw him off with such force that he stumbled backward, and she took a step in his direction and hit him as hard as she could in the face.

  “Stop it!” Zoe screamed. She was eleven, or twelve. She was supposed to be in bed, but she’d come downstairs, and they hadn’t seen her. Before her guilt rushed in, Jennifer felt a flash of anger toward Zoe, her daddy’s girl of a daughter, who couldn’t even allow her the fleeting triumph of hitting him, the satisfying pain of their failures colliding.

  “It’s okay,” Tommy said to Zoe, who had her arms around him, who was trembling, who glared at her mother like she wanted to do her harm. “It’s okay, honey. I deserved it.”

  “Oh God,” Jennifer said. She was moving toward the garage door before she knew her own intent. “Can’t you let me have anything?”

  Tommy followed her into the garage. She wrenched the car door open. “What do you mean?” he said as she slammed it shut. He rapped on the window, the garage door slowly opening at her back. She could hear him through the glass. “What do you want me to let you have? Whatever it is you can have it.”

  She rolled the window down. “I’m tired of forgiving you,” she said. “Just once I want to be the one in the wrong.” She threw the car in reverse and he stepped away, then followed the car as she backed down the driveway. Zoe stood behind him, framed in the doorway to the house, crying, calling, “Daddy, Daddy, Daddy, come back,” as her mother drove away.

  They were right, the people who talked about her. He did love her. She was always mad at him. She was mean. Time after time a sharp word from her left him quiet and wounded, looking at her with his sorrowful eyes. In those moments she was almost on the side of the people who disliked her for wounding him, and her dislike of herself was one of the many things she’d held against him.

  Zoe’s preference for him—that was another one. She’d loved her father—who so openly admired her brains and beauty, who told her about problems at work and listened seriously to her advice,
who engaged her in long, confessional discussions of his troubled childhood and her romantic travails—much more than her matter-of-fact mother, who bought her shoes and got her to school on time. It wasn’t just Jennifer’s opinion that Zoe had loved Tommy more. Zoe herself frequently said that. Even before Tommy died Zoe had treated her like an evil stepmother whose only purpose in the story was to cause misery.

  If Zoe had known about the affairs, she might not have cared. Maybe no one would have cared, would have cut Jennifer slack for her sharp tongue in the face of Tommy’s charm. It occurs to her now that she’s been telling herself a comforting lie, assuming people didn’t know. Everybody in town knew him. If they weren’t his friend, they wanted to be. Once she’d tracked him down in a bar and asked a bartender to stop serving him, and the woman had said, “I’m not cutting off Tommy Carrasco.”

  She had developed a stoic nonreaction to all such commentary, but that night she learned its limits. At the bartender’s defiant defense of the man Jennifer had to live with—the man whose boozy three a.m. entrance would interrupt her sleep, the man whose bleary hangover would keep him from doing the school run in the morning, the man whose devotion to her never stopped him from letting her down—she cracked wide open. All the ugliness rushed out. “I hope you have a head-on!” she screamed at him.

  That story got told a lot, later.

  But what about the time he’d taken her dancing on her thirty-fifth birthday, and they’d stayed out on the floor all night, swaying, her head on his shoulder, her palm pressed to his chest so she could feel his heartbeat and know by its steady rhythm that it was as much hers as ever, and then at some point he stopped moving and lifted her head and held her face in both hands like he’d done from the beginning of time and said, “I’m so lucky,” and then he kissed her until some drunk buddy poked them, laughing, and said, “You guys are horny as teenagers”? What about that? That was a story no one wanted to tell.

  In her commitment to Sebastian’s decompression, Megan has planned a whole day in Chattanooga, and so after the aquarium they walk the pedestrian bridge over the river, the boys exclaiming at the many webs shimmering between the slats of the railing, half-faking terror at the fat spiders. Jennifer’s interest is in the shiny, snaking river, the way it glistens in the bridge’s gaps. Just right there. Just below. Sometimes when she leans over the edge of things it’s hard not to feel how it would be to fall. The rush and whoosh. But no collision, no splash. As if she’d disappear before she landed. Megan has kept up a nonstop chatter, building a wall of talk between now and the mention of Tommy. Megan tries to fix things. She tries to make you feel better. She tries to erase what has been. On the other side of the bridge, in an ice cream place called Clumpies, Jennifer sits studying the T-shirts for sale—would you want to wear a T-shirt over your breasts that said Clumpies?—and waits for Milo and Ben to finish their cups of animal cracker ice cream and for Megan to stop talking. Just. Stop. Talking.

  “Do you think we’ve been gone long enough?” Jennifer asks abruptly. Rudely. She is sorry when she sees the insult register on Megan’s face. None of this is Megan’s fault—that Jennifer broke her own rule about Tommy, that Milo was the one who caused her to break it. That Megan believes things can be fixed, while Jennifer believes all you can do is flee the rubble, the survivor’s aftermath. “I just mean, do we still have time to go to the park?”

  “Park, park, park!” Ben chants, and Milo joins him. “Park, park, park!”

  Megan smiles fondly at them, while over her shoulder Jennifer spots a young couple frowning in that can’t-those-women-control-their-children way. “I think we have time,” Megan says happily, willingly accepting the fiction that Jennifer wasn’t being a bitch. Wasn’t saying she wanted this outing over. Wasn’t saying, Do you think we’ve done enough? Do you think your asshole husband is satisfied now?

  Megan gets up, herding the boys to the bathroom to wash their hands, and when Jennifer starts to rise and Megan shakes her head and says, “I’ve got it,” offering her a please-like-me smile, all Jennifer can think about is Megan’s sweetness, Megan’s desire to please, Megan’s fervent wish to get along, and what a shame it is to waste all that on her. But Jennifer needs to be the kind of person who makes friends, doesn’t she? For Milo’s sake. Because otherwise she’s not far removed from the prickly isolation of Margaret. Look at how she just snapped at Megan. Without Milo, she’d be a younger version, rude and suspicious, alone.

  Margaret obviously wanted to show her that scrapbook—but then the agitated urgency with which she slammed it shut! Like the rest of that book was a locked room in a fairy tale, a box that should never be opened. Whatever you do, don’t go in there. Jennifer has been so focused on her own secrets for so long that she’d nearly forgotten other people have them, too. It’s been quite some time since she allowed herself curiosity. If curiosity is back, what else might return?

  Megan emerges from the bathroom, guiding the boys toward the table, and when she sees Jennifer watching she flashes her a terrifyingly genuine smile. Jennifer smiles back. The expression can precede the emotion and still get you to the same result. Smiling can conjure happiness. Studies have shown.

  Lucky You

  Jennifer came prepared for our interview today with a tape recorder and a notebook to boot. When I emerged after the massage, I found her waiting in a chair she’d pulled close to my armchair, the tape recorder on the side table. She’d moved another small table close, too, and laid the scrapbook on it. She sprang up when she saw me and put her notebook and pen down in her chair. “Could you get me some water?” I asked, and she went to obey. I stood with my hand on the back of her chair, looking down at her notebook. There were already words in it. I couldn’t make out what they said, but I assumed they were questions. I felt a little wobbly. I thought perhaps I should have had the massage after the interview, so as not to be softened up. Because I have no intention of unburdening. I’m not going to tell her the story. Of course I’m not.

  She came back from the kitchen and moved past her chair to set the water glass on my table. Then she rounded her chair again, coming toward me with hand extended. “What are you doing?” I said.

  “I thought you might need help sitting down.”

  “Oh. Yes. Thank you.” She took my arm and we shuffled around to my chair and then she helped ease me into it. “Sometimes it’s odd having you here,” I said. “I’m not used to this. Other people. Human contact.”

  “I think we both like being alone.” She was turned away from me, picking up her notebook. I couldn’t quite see her face. I couldn’t quite make out her tone.

  “Is that a good trait? Or a bad one?”

  “I don’t know.” She sat. “What do you think?”

  “I’ve spent most of my life alone,” I said.

  “But you like that.”

  “Yes.”

  “So lucky you,” she said. “Maybe you should be glad.”

  She’d surprised me again. Sue at the library would have said, But you’re not alone, Miss Margaret. You have me, with a face that exuded pity, and a desire to pat my hand. How many people would say I should be glad? Jennifer is a cave with a rock that blocks the entrance. What are the words that mean “open sesame”? I’ve never had a gift for them, the right words. This is perhaps obvious by now. What comes out of my mouth is too direct, too undisguised, and then the other person is startled, and I’m annoyed, or shamed, and after that the best thing is silence. For a long time I chose silence. I chose my solitude, even if now I grow restless in its echo chamber. I chose it. I would not call it luck.

  She reached over and pressed the button on the tape recorder. She flipped to a fresh page and readied her pen.

  I asked, “Are you divorced?”

  “What?” She looked up quickly.

  “You said I was lucky to be alone,” I said. “I thought perhaps you were thinking of an ex-husband.”

  “Oh,” she said. “I was.”

  “You’ve never
mentioned a husband.”

  “No.” And then she said, “Neither have you.”

  “Me?” I laughed in a startled way. “I never had a husband to mention.”

  “No?”

  “I had romances.” For some reason it seemed important that she know this. “I wanted to get married. I wanted children. It just never happened.”

  “In the war?”

  “What?”

  “You had romances in the war?” She wrote something down. What could she possibly have written down?

  “In the war, before the war, after the war.” I wanted to laugh again, like a belle of the ball, but I couldn’t quite manage it. “There was a boy named Lloyd, for instance. Lloyd Kerr.”

  “Lloyd Kerr,” she repeated, writing it down.

  “Let the record show,” I said, “that there was a boy named Lloyd Kerr.”

  She looked at me, pen poised. She has patience, that one. She could sit beside you in a foxhole and bide her time.

  “I met him in basic training.”

  “Where you met Kay.”

  “That’s right, Fort Bragg.” I frowned.

  She waited. “You could tell me about meeting Kay.”

  “He took me to dances,” I said. “Lloyd Kerr. He squired me around. We were all very popular, you know. Not much on offer in the way of girls.”

  “So you dated other boys, too?”

  “Oh, yes. But Lloyd Kerr is the one I remember, because he found me again overseas. He popped up out of nowhere. That happened sometimes. Once I passed another soldier I knew in a jeep; he was going one way, I was going the other. We waved. I hadn’t seen him in months and months.”

  “But that wasn’t Lloyd.”

  “No, Lloyd just appeared one day. Somehow he knew where I was. This was in France. He took me to see a movie in an old château we’d taken back from the Germans. Casanova Brown—a silly romance with Gary Cooper and Teresa Wright. They put up a screen in the entry hall. And sitting on the marble floor watching that silly movie were hundreds of dirty unshaven GIs with guns in their hands. Topsy-turvy.”