A Crime in the Neighborhood Page 21

  I could hear myself speaking and I knew what I was saying, but by the end I think I realized that I wasn’t saying anything anyone else really wanted to understand. In fact by the end I’m not sure I was actually saying words at all.

  “Hush,” said my father, looking around the restaurant. “Marsha, honey, please. Stop it.”

  The twins stared at me. Finally Steven said, “Nuts,” and drew a spiral around his ear with his finger.

  “No,” said my father, reaching over to pull his hand down.

  We all sat for a while longer at the table, looking out the window at the cars coming and going. Julie got up to go to the bathroom. Our waitress, who had a perfect blond ponytail and spotty skin, came to take the bill and the money my father had laid out. She said, “Can I get you anything else?” in a tone that meant she hoped we would say no. A few more people came into the pizza parlor, a man in a Redskins T-shirt, a woman with a baby, two teenage girls carrying shopping bags. They passed our table and glanced at us, then looked away.

  Eighteen

  The Night Watch kept up their patrols for another month or so, then gradually people became less afraid—or more used to being afraid—and the pairs of fathers stopped circling the block and went back to watching Monday Night Football. Perhaps it was the excitement around Mr. Green’s arrest; it satisfied everyone to have someone arrested, even if he turned out to be the wrong person.

  Now when neighbors got together to drink coffee or sip iced tea they were more likely to talk about George McGovern or the Watergate break-in or foreign affairs. Although it seems to me that our neighbors never again visited one another as frequently as they had before the murder. After those first few weeks of frantic interest, people stopped asking each other if they had heard anything new. All of Mrs. Lauder’s bake-sale signs eventually disappeared, to be replaced here and there by campaign placards. Boyd Ellison himself was growing more and more indistinct, until after a while he simply faded into his name. Even I got tired of counting over the meager facts I knew. He was a short blond boy with a square head. He once asked to wear my glasses. He sat in our basement tying knots. He tortured an insect with a pocketknife.

  I was there, I whispered to myself. I knew him.

  His parents moved to Virginia, and gradually I stopped circling past their house, with its red Japanese maple in the front yard and pulled window blinds.

  Mrs. Sperling made Mr. Sperling put locks on the downstairs windows and took to answering the door by first looking through the newly installed peephole. The Lauders put up a stockade fence around their backyard. The Reades bought a German shepherd. And the Morrises died, one after the other.

  By then we had moved away.

  Not long ago I asked a lawyer at the Justice Department, a friend of a friend, if he could find out if the police ever caught the man who murdered Boyd Ellison. He said he would call someone he knew at the F.B.I. A few days later he phoned me to say the case was still open. Apparently every time a child is murdered in a wooded area, the Montgomery County police see if they can link it to Boyd Ellison’s murder. They’re still looking for a pattern, he told me. Even after twenty-five years.

  “Couldn’t it have been an isolated incident?” I said.

  My friend’s friend thought not. “No one has the impulse to do something like that just once,” he said. “It’s like a guy who cheats on his wife. Once he’s done it and gotten away with it, he’s going to do it again.”

  I said it didn’t seem like the same thing to me at all, but I thanked him and hung up.

  These days whenever I drive through my old neighborhood, which isn’t often, I always note that it hasn’t changed much. Spring Hill is almost exactly as I remember it, a quiet green place in the summertime, full of neat lawns and hedges and shaggy maples that shade the sidewalks. The houses look a little older and smaller, and more established; trees I remember as saplings are now two stories tall, and in some cases ivy has completely covered a wall or a fence. But children still ride their bicycles back and forth or teeter by on Rollerblades. Men and women who look like the children’s parents weed their flower beds or wash their cars. It looks like a safe enough place, even a hopeful place. A few weeks ago when I drove by on my way to visit a client I saw election bumper stickers and a couple of lawn signs. It’s that time again.

  Our old house no longer belongs to the people we sold it to, or even to the people who bought it from them. When I last passed it, a couple about my age was standing on the lawn with two little boys; the woman had red hair and a disagreeable mouth, but her chubby blond husband had a nice face and he was smiling as one of the little boys tugged at the grass with a toy rake. For some reason, they had decided to paint the house chocolate brown—perhaps a heat-saving measure?—which has given it a squat brooding look. Next door, the Lauders’ house still looks the same, although someone has torn out most of the front yard and put down asphalt. Four cars were parked there when I last went by. The Morrises’, the Sperlings’, and the Reades’ houses have all undergone a renovation or two—a set of sliding glass doors, a breezeway, a new garage—without altering their original appearance much. Even the Ellisons’ house isn’t really different from what I remember; it could be just another three-bedroom split-level on a quarter acre.

  Oddly enough, of all the houses in the neighborhood only Mr. Green’s house, what was so briefly his house, has really changed. A second floor has been added, and a mansard roof. The marigolds are gone, replaced by an ambitious attempt at a Japanese garden, complete with mossy rocks, a tiny cement goldfish pond, and a little black iron pagoda near where he used to set his sprinkler. And that enormous old copper beech in his backyard is no longer there, dead from some blight or fungus or chopped down by the new owners, who seem intent on small-scale landscaping.

  I was surprised at how much I missed that copper beech. You never quite expect a tree to disappear, especially such a big one. It was probably over a hundred and fifty years old, maybe the last tree left from when Spring Hill was simply a hill, and malls and subdivisions hadn’t been dreamed up yet. I remember how wide its canopy used to seem, and the bright color the leaves turned in the fall. The whole street seemed slightly unbalanced by its absence, like a row of books when one in the middle has been pulled out. Every time I drive by, I expect to see it. And every time I have to realize again that it’s gone.

  Once I actually stopped and parked for a few minutes across the street from Mr. Green’s house. For years, I could keep myself awake at night simply by picturing the way he had looked that summer morning when he came back from the police station, gripping his briefcase, the outline of his undershirt showing through his wrinkled white shirt. Every time I thought of him I would feel a kind of hot suffocating panic that made me sit up and throw off my blankets, and only after turning on the lights and reading magazines for a while could I push him back south to wherever it was he went.

  My life seemed bound to his in a way I couldn’t explain and didn’t want to. The closest I could come was the feeling that somehow what I’d done to him had made me his child, and that one of these days he would figure it out and come back for me.

  Yet eventually all that guilty fear was replaced by something quieter, until as I sat in the car by myself that afternoon, staring at a house that could never have been his, I could honestly say I wished him well. I hope he found a nice place to live somewhere in the country. I can almost see him tending a vegetable patch in back of a little wooden house, weeding around his melons and tomatoes, wearing a straw hat, although he must be an old man by now. Sometimes I imagine myself driving down south, to Tennessee or Georgia, and just by accident finding his house. He would be in the yard leaning on his hoe, wiping his pink face with a faded blue bandanna. For a minute or so we would stare at each other, as you do with people you recognize but can’t name, then he would give me a short nod.

  But whenever I carry this fantasy much further it begins to get tangled up with explanations from my therapist and my o
wn excuses, and Mr. Green and his hoe disappear along with everything I meant to tell him.

  Two days after he met us at the pizza parlor, my father drove to Cleveland, his hometown, where the brother of a cousin’s husband gave him work in an insurance company. In a funny way, I never expected him to stay in town. Which didn’t mean I was glad to see him leave again, only that I wasn’t surprised by it. He called us once a week that first fall, usually on Sundays; he was lonely, I think. Then slowly he called less frequently, until we heard from him only around our birthdays and on Christmas and Thanksgiving, or when something in particular made him think of us. Usually we went to visit him for a week or two in the summer. It wasn’t the best way to conduct a relationship, but it wasn’t as bad as some I’ve heard about. He put all three of us through college.

  Ada came back that September as well, but like my father she didn’t stay long. All we heard from her was a single note to my mother, scratched in pencil on the back of an old receipt, slipped through the letter slot one afternoon when no one was home. It said: “I’ll call you.”

  But instead she went to Milwaukee to stay in Aunt Fran’s big brick Tudor near the lake. According to Aunt Fran and Aunt Claire, Ada spent most of her time sleeping on the living-room sofa. As I passed through our kitchen one afternoon that fall, just before we moved to the house we would be renting in College Park, I heard the familiar sound of my mother defending Ada on the phone.

  “You know Ada, she’s always had a different metabolism than the rest of us,” she was saying, slapping the phone cord rhythmically against the floor. “Well, maybe she’s sleeping so much because she has the flu.”

  But that very afternoon, Ada woke up from a long nap, threw some clothes into a paper grocery sack, and walked out Aunt Fran’s front door. She walked straight to the bus station, bought a ticket to San Francisco, and for the next two years or so, vanished.

  No one heard a word from her. Aunt Fran and Aunt Claire hired a private detective. They took out small advertisements in five California newspapers: ADA. WHERE ARE YOU? MUCH LOVE. Although they were furious that Ada had left so theatrically, without even a note—like a child, they said, or a crazy woman. “You know Ada,” they repeated to each other, but now in a questioning tone, because clearly neither of them did.

  When they heard from Ada again, it was by Christmas card in 1974, a woodcut of a nude Madonna with lopsided breasts sitting on a tree stump; she sent one to each sister. By then she was living in Mendocino, up on the northern California coast. She had married a carpenter, who built a little frame house for them not far from the ocean, and she had her own tailgate business making macramé handbags and plant holders, which she said wasn’t “Art,” but she could sell them to tourists.

  “I often think of you,” Ada wrote in lavender ink to my mother.

  And perhaps she still does, although that was years ago and I don’t believe my mother ever wrote back to her. Or maybe she did write back and decided to keep whatever answers she got to herself. That would be like my mother. But as far as I’m concerned, Ada has disappeared. People can do that. I think that’s the worst thing I have had to face as I head into middle age, the years when disappearance begins to be commonplace, when it’s no longer such a dramatic thing to lose someone. “I haven’t heard from him in years,” we say. “She died a while ago. We had fallen out of touch.”

  But to lose a child—I don’t know how anyone would ever get used to that. I don’t think you are supposed to get used to it. Years go by and I forget about Boyd Ellison, but then something will remind me and there it is, that hillside in July, afternoon sunlight hanging in the humid air like yellow gauze. It was so hot that day. It was such an ordinary day. Until that little cry reached a tired florist about to get into her car.

  Once I’ve let myself venture that far I can’t help but start wondering all over again. What if she had moved two steps to the left? What if she had worn her glasses that afternoon? What if she had listened harder, not been so preoccupied. I wonder if the florist herself still retraces those few minutes, if after all these years she still dreams of climbing the hillside, wading through broken bottles, locust husks, and creeper vines. Could she have done things differently? Could she?

  But it wasn’t until I found this notebook the other day, helping my mother move some old boxes out of the basement of her apartment building, that I started to wonder what had become of Boyd’s parents. All I really know is that they moved to Virginia. Like Mr. Green, they got out fast, but not before they’d had to live through his arrest. Not before they’d had to live through thinking their son’s murderer had been caught, that they might actually see the man who had taken everything from them, see that he was real, human, maybe even get to ask him the question that as the years went on must have haunted them—“Why?” they would ask, why? why?—only to find out that it was the wrong man, that their killer was still out there. I should have known all that. And yet until tonight, as I sat here turning the pages of this old notebook, I’d never realized how I must have hurt them, too.

  It’s funny, after all these years I’m still fascinated by how people hurt each other, why it happens, and by what makes people need to be cruel. But I’m afraid my interest nowadays has become practical. When I was a child, I was curious about the mechanics of pain. Now I want to understand for reasons of security. “Watch yourself”—it’s still the best advice anyone ever gave me. Pain is always about to happen somewhere to someone I know and at times it seems that the best I can hope for is not to be the cause of it. In this way I guess I am a product of my generation, most of us anxious pragmatists and skeptics, who are less interested in the mysteries of human pain and cruelty than in how to avoid them.

  Which is why, in a curious way, I’ve come to feel grateful to Mr. Green. Because when you have watched yourself do the worst thing you can imagine doing to another person, at least you know what you’re capable of. At least you have the rest of your life to be more careful.

  A child’s body on a hillside in July. A woman reading magazines in the dark. A man standing alone in an empty street. Like images from a flickering projector, they appear, disappear, but they are always there. I don’t want to be melodramatic, but they are what I have.

  One of the last times I spoke to my father on the phone, not long before he died last May, I said: “I just want you to know. I don’t hold anything against you.”

  He sounded genuinely surprised when he answered, “Why should you hold anything against me?” Then, as if suddenly recollecting, he said, “It’s been a long time, Marsha. I don’t know how long you’re supposed to hold onto something like that.”

  “For as long as you don’t understand it,” I shot back.

  “I always loved you,” he said softly, breathing onto the phone receiver.

  “Then why did you leave me?” I asked. And there it was. I had finally asked. I hadn’t even known how much I wanted to ask him that question until I had done it, until that question whistled out of me like a cry. Why did you leave me?

  For quite a while he didn’t say anything. I listened to him breathe hoarsely onto the phone and imagined him sitting alone in his little Cleveland apartment in his recliner, the window closed and locked beside him, one hand drifting through his thin gray hair. Outside, evening would be coming on, sharp light slanting along the sidewalk. At last he said regretfully, “I don’t know. I’m sorry. I can’t remember that well anymore.”

  “That’s all right,” I said, ashamed to find myself relieved. “Maybe we’ll talk about it some other time.” But of course there wasn’t another time. He died a couple months later, of a heart attack that nobody predicted. He was only sixty-seven.

  I wasn’t prepared for how it would be when he died. I had been living without my father for nearly a quarter of a century and yet when Julie called to tell me that he was dead, suddenly there I was, ten years old all over again, and he had just left me, and the world was a wide place in the dark, and right then I understood
as if for the very first time that nothing in my life would ever feel safe.

  Acknowledgments

  I would like to thank the National Endowment for the Arts and the Massachusetts Cultural Council for their generous support. I am very grateful as well to Marcie Hershman, Eileen Pollack, Marjorie Sandor, Alex Johnson, Jodi Daynard, Jessica Treadway, Phil Press, and especially Maxine Rodburg—all of whom read drafts of this novel and offered encouragement and advice. Many thanks, also, to my agent, Colleen Mohyde, and to my editor, Shannon Ravenel.

  Published by

  ALGONQUIN BOOKS OF CHAPEL HILL

  Post Office Box 2225

  Chapel Hill, North Carolina 27515-2225

  a division of

  WORKMAN PUBLISHING

  225 Varick Street

  New York, New York 10014

  © 1997 by Suzanne Berne.

  All rights reserved.

  This is a work of fiction. All names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. No reference to any real person is intended or should be inferred.

  Grateful acknowledgment is made to Agni, where an excerpt from this novel first appeared in slightly different form.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available for a previous edition of this work.

  E-book ISBN 978-1-56512-689-3

  ALSO BY SUZANNE BERNE

  A Perfect Arrangement

  The Ghost at the Table