A Crime in the Neighborhood Page 8

  Mr. Green’s face, which all this time had been lifting into an alert expression, plunged back into its customary blankness. Clearly he didn’t, couldn’t follow why my mother would want a tornado. Especially after we’d just had such an early hurricane.

  He wasn’t the first person to be confused by my mother’s domestication of disaster. I recall being terrified as a child the first time I heard her announce that she was about to drop dead after vacuuming the stairs. I was terrified the first time she declared that someone was “trying to kill us” by cutting in front of our car on the Beltway. Only eventually did her near-death experiences, her brushes with mayhem, her descents into lunacy while she looked for parking spaces, lost library books, or the lid for the mustard jar leave me unconcerned. The only way to tolerate life’s dangers, she had long ago decided, was to make them routine. She never seemed to understand that other people found this attitude unnerving.

  “Wouldn’t it be lovely to get rid of all this hot air?” she asked wistfully. “Just a short tornado, to blow it all out to sea?”

  Mr. Green’s smile returned, twitching the muscles in his face. Then surprisingly he laughed. He laughed the way cartoon characters laugh, enunciating the words “ha, ha.”

  “Ha, ha,” echoed my mother, fanning herself with a hand.

  I’m sure she would have been astonished if someone had told her right then that she was flirting. But what else could she have been doing? And who, besides me, could have blamed her? Even Julie and Steven probably understood, if they had bothered to notice. Of course, I still wonder if I would have done what I did if my mother had been less friendly that afternoon, or if she had kept herself and her tornado in the house altogether, and Mr. Green had remained in his folding chair, his bald spot winking at nothing but the sky.

  Ada and my father had been gone three weeks by then. They hadn’t called, or sent a letter, or even a postcard. They could return at any moment, or never. Aunt Fran’s husband, Uncle Billy, who was a lawyer, had drawn up divorce papers by then, and my mother was waiting to send them to my father as soon as he came back. In a few months, she planned to be the only single mother she knew. Already she figured the other mothers on the street were looking at her narrowly, calculating whether or not she was likely to turn into a husband-stealer. A few years ago, Julie told me that Mrs. Guibert and Mrs. Bridgeman had invited my mother over for coffee one morning that summer, and in Mrs. Guibert’s neat kitchen, with its brick-patterned linoleum and avocado-colored refrigerator, they informed her gently that this was “a family street.” “Oh really?” my mother said. “Whose family?”

  And so while my mother waited for what would happen to her next, she spent her days stumbling through her Peterman-Wolff pitches. At night she sat up late drinking Chablis and reading nineteenth-century English novels in which everyone ended up married in a manor house surrounded by Lombardy poplars. Or she murmured to Aunt Fran or Aunt Claire on the phone and tried to convince them not to come visit again.

  But out there, out on the lawn, the air shimmered.

  “It’s so hot,” my mother said in a trembling voice. “I think my brain is melting.”

  “Ha, ha,” said Mr. Green, whacking his newspaper into his palm.

  She bent her head modestly, already thinking up a new witticism. “No really,” she said. “It’s so hot out that—”

  A jet cannonaded overhead on its way up from National Airport. My mother’s witticism was lost.

  Before she could repeat herself, Mr. Green interrupted her. Today, it seemed, he had a statement of his own to make. This statement wasn’t going to be easy for him to deliver, however. From the porch I watched his reddening face break into a struggle between hesitance and determination, lips twitching, eyes blinking as he staggered a little behind the hedge, his forehead perspiring, even his ears turning red, until finally he managed to open his mouth just wide enough to say: “I want.”

  He sank back, swallowing and plucking at the front of his khaki shirt. Just as it seemed he might give up and pretend he hadn’t said anything at all, he added almost vaguely: “Was wondering.” Again he paused for a breath, gripping his newspaper like a man clutching the end of a rope. But he was into it now; he was going to finish or be damned. “Wondering—I wondered if you might want to come to a cookout at my house?”

  My mother stared and Mr. Green flushed a heavier red, tucking his chin into his neck.

  “A cookout,” he repeated.

  “A cookout?” she repeated right after him. Already I could tell that she was stalling.

  “Yes.” The front of his khaki shirt had soaked through in two long panels, but he set his jaw.

  “Oh.” She smiled the best of her impregnable smiles.

  “Finished my barbecue pit.” He gestured with his newspaper.

  “Oh yes I see, it’s gorgeous. Look at all those bricks. Really—I could never make anything like that. I even have a hard time making toast. What day did you say?”

  “Sunday? Maybe some Sunday? Two, three weeks from now?” He seemed unwilling to name a date, as if now that he had succeeded in announcing his intention to have a cookout, he was amazed that anything else should be required of him.

  “Two or three Sundays from now?” My mother smiled. She cocked her head, pretending to consult a calendar hanging just behind Mr. Green’s head. Prior obligations whizzed almost visibly through the air: Visits to cousins. Pool parties. A promised trip to the zoo. We could always leave home for the day and drive around Great Falls or Silver Spring. It was convenient to have children; people always believed you when you said you had to do something for your children.

  Mr. Green, who had been watching her face, nodded and looked away. “I thought,” he said sullenly, “I could invite some neighbors.”

  “We-ell,” said my mother.

  She played with her metal watchband, dragging it away from her wrist and letting it snap back. Even from the porch, plastic binoculars pressed against the lens of my glasses, I could see her flesh pinch between those tiny nickel-plated sections. Spend an evening with meat-colored Mr. Green, watching him bumble over his barbecue pit? Impossible. I imagined him offering her a quaking paper plate, a sticky Dixie cup of wine, while under his sleeve his mermaid tattoo jiggled.

  My mother’s eyes narrowed. Her smile stretched thin, became transparent. Mr. Green swallowed and pulled a leaf off the hedge.

  But then, in a gently ironic voice, a voice reserved for disappointing suitors and defenestrating unfaithful husbands, my mother said: “Why yes. Alden. Yes, I’d love to come.”

  Six

  A grown man ran down our street at seven on the evening of July 20th, just as most families were sitting down to dinner. He ran first to the Guiberts’ Tudor on the corner and shouted, banging on their door. Mr. Guibert appeared, and even from my house half a block away we could hear their excited voices. Then the man ran across the street to the Reades’ house and banged on their door. Husbands, wives, children began crowding toward the windows as the man zigzagged from house to house, each time talking loudly, hardly pausing before running to the next house. We were still holding our napkins as we turned to look out our windows.

  By the time he reached the Bridgemans’ house, the Morrises and the Sperlings were opening their screen doors and stepping onto their front steps. You could hear the twang of door springs all up and down the street, like frogs in a pond. People were calling to one another over their fences and hedges, asking what all this was about, had something happened, what was that man saying?

  A boy is missing, he was saying. Tell your neighbors. A child is missing.

  He had run over from Buena Vista, where the Ellisons lived, and started knocking on doors to ask any grown men he found to meet up in the Ellisons’ front yard. Number 26. His wife, who was sitting with Sylvia Ellison, had told him that he should get as many men together as possible. The Ellisons had called the police, but the police couldn’t do anything for twenty-four hours. He’s probably off with a
friend, they’d said. That was the police for you.

  A child is missing. A child is missing.

  And so it went through the neighborhood.

  Every man under seventy and every high school boy on our street volunteered to help search—Mr. Sperling; Mr. Lauder; Mr. Bridgeman and fat, goggle-eyed David Bridge-man; the Reade brothers, Mike and Wayne, both of whom I loved for their straight blond hair and slanty eyes, and for their surly grace when they played basketball in their driveway; bald Mr. Hollowell; Mr. Guibert, a French Canadian with gaping nostrils who sometimes shouted “Merde” at the Morrises for letting their terriers squat on his lawn. Every man, that is, but Mr. Green. As far as I can recall, no one remembered to ask him.

  In less than half an hour from the time that man bypassed our house and Mr. Green’s house, stopping instead at the Lauders’ door, the men on our street had gathered on the grass in front of the Ellison house, and their wives had locked all the doors and windows in spite of the heat and had herded their children onto the living-room sofas, where they all waited to watch the ten o’clock news on television.

  Everyone felt tensely excited, as people do when something terrible may have happened to someone else. Of course we all hoped the boy would be found, but we also hoped that he wouldn’t be found, at least not immediately and that it would be a dramatic rescue when he was, with rope ladders and dogs and EMTs.

  For a few hours the neighborhood drew tight as everyone except my mother closed and locked their doors and locked their windows and checked the basement. A few small children probably cried when their father grabbed up a flashlight and hurried out the door, but most children would have been impressed by their father’s sudden importance, and longed to go with him into the pinkish, loamy twilight. They sat quietly, leaning against their mother, watching figures slide across the television screen. Periodically their mothers rose to look out the windows. Fans whirred. The children sucked Popsicles. Finally they fell asleep. And then from their kitchens, mothers began calling everyone they knew.

  No one had knocked on our door, probably because they realized my father no longer lived there. Everyone seemed to realize that almost before he had left. But we’d heard the shouting and along with everybody else had gone to the screen door to see what was happening.

  “Rubberneckers,” muttered my mother, when Mr. and Mrs. Lauder and Luann and then the Morrises appeared outside on their front steps. Then the Sperlings stepped out, too, with Mrs. Sperling joggling the baby in her arms while dark-haired Mr. Sperling waved to old Mr. Morris. It looked like a parade was about to go by. The Jack Russell terriers started barking.

  “I’m going out there,” said Steven.

  “Me too,” said Julie.

  “You are not. Eat your dinner.” My mother put her hands on her hips. Then she wheeled around so abruptly she bumped into my crutches.

  “Ma,” said Steven.

  “Never, ever call me ‘Ma,’” she said unsteadily. In the last week she’d begun drinking a glass of wine in the kitchen while she made dinner, in addition to the glass she drank with dinner, and the glass she drank afterward while she read on the sofa.

  On her way back to the table she turned up the radio. “Civilized people,” she added, as we sat back down, “do not gawk at the misfortunes of others.”

  “Yeah, right,” said Julie.

  It had been a hot, still day, full of wide green leaves that barely stirred and damp sidewalks. The kind of day that reminds you that Washington, D.C., is a Southern city. All afternoon locusts buzzed in the trees, while the neighborhood cats lay in the same position for hours on whatever doorstep or porch they could find that seemed a little cooler than anywhere else.

  While other mothers in our neighborhood began shutting their windows and doors, and Julie and Steven stalked into the living room to watch television, my mother made me help her with the dishes, the two of us standing together at the open kitchen window, steam clouding around our elbows from the sink.

  We were still standing by the sink when the phone rang. It was Mrs. Lauder from next door. I watched my mother cradle the receiver between her ear and shoulder as she dried a salad plate. Her eyebrows lifted and fell. “Oh no,” she said.

  She moved toward the dining room, dragging the phone cord. “Who is it? Do they know who it is?” She paused. “Yes, I’ll do that. All right, Marie. Thanks for calling.”

  Hardly had she hung up and placed the salad plate back in the cabinet before the phone rang again. She just had time to tell me, “A child’s gotten lost,” before she had to say hello into the receiver. This time it was Mrs. Sperling, who was crying because she was scared to be alone with just Baby Cameron.

  “Don’t worry,” said my mother, now drying a bowl. “You’re perfectly safe. I’m sure they’ll find him. I’m sure it will all turn out just fine.” Her brisk tone informed me that this was for my benefit as much as Mrs. Sperling’s. “Really, I think you’re getting much too worked up, Dolly. There’s no reason to be afraid. They’ve probably found him already.”

  After another minute or two, she hung up, and by the dissatisfied way she stared at her dish towel, I could tell she realized that she should have invited Mrs. Sperling to come over and sit with us. A moment later she dialed the Sperlings’ number, which was taped to the refrigerator on a piece of paper with the numbers of the fire department, the poison control center, and several of the other neighbors. Aunt Ada’s phone number, once written at the top above Aunt Fran’s and Aunt Claire’s, had been neatly scissored off. The Sperlings’ line was busy. A few minutes later Mrs. Morris called.

  While my mother talked to Mrs. Morris, I clumped out to the porch on one crutch and sat down, my notebook ready in my lap along with my binoculars and a new Bic pen I’d stolen from Julie’s room. Lately I had taken to writing in black ink, which I thought looked more serious. The Sperlings’ tortoiseshell cat skulked across their lawn. A moment later, Mr. Morris’s stooped silhouette passed his drawn living-room blind, like something from a Hitchcock movie. I propped my cast on the wicker table littered with Peterman-Wolff magazines and by habit looked over at Mr. Green’s house. The sprinkler on his lawn arced back and forth. Otherwise the only movement I saw came from the beech leaves shifting above his roof.

  While we all slept that night, the hunt widened, spreading past the mall, I learned later, all the way down to the abandoned amusement park by the river, where search teams played their flashlights into the cracked, empty wading pools and under the old roller coaster, which creaked and moaned and looked, from down below, like the collapsing skeleton of a dinosaur. So many places to hide a child, or his body: deep within the crusted gears of the old merry-go-round, behind the splintered arcade with its fourteen plaster clown faces, in one of the termite-eaten turrets of Jack’s Happy Castle. Even the air tasted secretive, mixed with the taint of river water and an ancient undercurrent of popcorn. They shouted his name, again and again. Somebody got hold of a klieg light and managed to wire it, and suddenly the park lit up, ghastly, smaller. It would be appropriate, even reassuring, to find a nightmare in that place of nightmares, Playland gone to seed. But he wasn’t there.

  All evening my mother sat inside on the living-room sofa, riffling the pages of a magazine. For the last several weeks, the Peterman-Wolff Company had been sending us every issue of every magazine my mother was supposed to be selling, on the off chance that she might be required to say something specific in her sales pitch. That night, while the twins defiantly watched a Japanese horror movie, she sat in a corner of the living room skimming through the magazines she had just received, looking annoyed and exhausted. “Blah blah blah,” she would say periodically, tossing the magazine onto the floor. “That’s all it is. Blah blah blah.” After a few minutes of gazing into the cup of her hands, she would retrieve the magazine and go back to reading.

  I refused to come in from the porch even after she had announced twice that it was past my bedtime. The phone rang for Julie. It rang for Steven, th
en for Julie again. I kept rehearsing one sentence: A child has gotten lost.

  A child has gotten lost. The grammatical construction of this statement baffled me. Who had lost the child? Had he lost himself? Could you lose a child the same way you could lose the car keys? Even then I was something of a determinist, as most children are; I believed that things were lost for a reason. Perhaps God collected lost things for his own benefit, keeping them until you died, when whatever you had lost would be returned to you. I imagined heaven lined with shelves, a celestial pawnshop. All it took was a moment’s carelessness, I told myself, and you could lose anything. I didn’t understand the implications of this observation, but I remember the thrill that ran up my spine, composed mostly of gratification at being, for the moment, predictably where my mother would look for me.

  Years later, during one of our infrequent visits, I told my father about that night and how the twins and I had watched from the porch as all the other fathers gathered on the street, talking with their arms folded. “We were frightened. We needed you,” I said, although I was no longer sure that this was true. “And you weren’t there.”

  “Yes, I know.” He took off his glasses to clean them with a cocktail napkin. He looked sad and thoughtful. But when he put his glasses back on, he said, “But you got through it all right, now didn’t you?”

  Light shone from nearly every window of every house, from attic to basement. When a dog barked from behind our house, the whole neighborhood seemed to jump. My mother, however, refused to lock the front door. “I don’t believe in the bogeyman,” she said. And I have always wondered whether she was being simply stubborn and foolhardy that night, or whether something darker was passing through her mind.

  The light in Mr. Green’s kitchen snapped off at nine-thirty, followed by the light in his bedroom at his usual ten o’clock. His house was the first on the street to go dark.