Good Neighbors Page 18

  Means nothing, Diane. Just a dream. Forget about it. She’d like to but it makes her feel crummy. She has a sense of dread sitting heavy in her guts.

  She looks at the clock – nine minutes past six.

  The suitcase she packed is on the floor next to the bed. She must have kicked it off the bed in her sleep.

  Dreams of running.

  When she was a little girl living in a small town called Elgin, in Texas, she had a pet dog named Dinosaur. For some reason she thought it was hilarious at the time to name pets after other animals. She also had a pet cat named Horse. But it’s the dog, Dinosaur, she’s thinking of right now. He used to run in his sleep. He would lie on his side on the carpet in the middle of the floor when he slept and everyone would have to step over him to get from one place to another in the house and every once in a while while he slept his little feet would really start kicking and he’d bark once or twice or three times and run and run and then it would be over.

  ‘Chasing rabbits,’ dad would say.

  Dreams of running.

  She picks the suitcase up off the floor and sets it on the bed. Then she picks up the clothes that fell out and puts them back in and closes the suitcase.

  She clicks the metal latches, locking it, puts her hand around the handle, hefts it, and walks to the bedroom door. She unlocks the bedroom door and pulls it open, hardly believing she is actually doing this.

  Is she crazy?

  There are worse things a person can do than what Larry did.

  But, she thinks now, this isn’t really about what Larry did. Maybe if that was all she could find a way to forgive him eventually. Maybe. But there’s more: there’s the way watching him eat used to amuse her and charm her but now it makes her stomach sick; the way he never wants to talk about anything; the way he goes through her purse and takes her tip money so that he can go out drinking – if he asked, she’d give him some, but he doesn’t even ask. Dozens of little things. That’s what it’s about.

  She walks out of the bedroom and into the living room.

  Larry is asleep on the couch, lying on his side.

  He is wearing his pants and socks but that is all. His white belly, lumpy with fat, is spread out on the couch like unrolled bread dough. Gray hairs sprout in a trail from his waistline, up past his belly button, and then thin out and disappear.

  The sound of sirens grows louder, but it’s still faint.

  She sets down the suitcase, walks over to Larry, and quietly kisses him on the cheek.

  ‘Goodbye,’ she says.

  As she walks back to the suitcase and wraps her fingers around its handle she hears a sound from the kitchen. A cock crowing.

  When she lived in Elgin, Texas as a little girl she used to hear the real thing every morning. They had chickens for eggs and to eat. Once when she was about seven or eight her dad took his axe into the chicken coop, a plywood structure he’d spent a couple afternoons building, and there was the familiar sound of chickens squawking, feathers flying, and then a thunk! as the axe thudded into the tree stump in there. Dad’d had to pull many trees out of the ground after they bought their acreage so that there’d be room to set down their little house and after building the chicken coop one of the tree stumps went in there to act as a chopping block. It was soon covered in hatchet scars and a slick layer of curdled blood.

  Usually after the thunk! there was silence, as if the other chickens understood what they had witnessed and were mourning, but this day there was none of that. The feather flapping and the squawking continued. Then Diane heard curse words – shitfuckgoddamnitall – escape her father’s mouth. A moment later a headless chicken came running out of the chicken coop proper and into the fenced-off area surrounding it. Diane had spent the next nine days stuffing grain down its headless gullet. On the tenth day, though, she found it dead. The rest of it had finally caught up with the head, which had been put in the pig’s slop the day it was axed.

  According to Diane’s watch, it’s ten minutes past six.

  The clock is off, slowing down; the battery must be dying.

  She thinks about writing batteries on the shopping list stuck to the refrigerator, just under eggs, which she remembers writing yesterday after cooking the last of them, making Larry an omelet before she left for work, but there’s no point in that.

  Instead she simply lifts the suitcase, walks to the door, grabs the doorknob, and pulls it open.

  Thomas finishes the last of his now-tepid coffee in a single swallow and sets the chipped mug down on the coffee table. In his left hand he holds a brown paper lunch bag. He is afraid to walk out into that bloody courtyard but knows he’s got to do it.

  In the distance, but growing nearer, the sound of sirens – at a level where you almost don’t realize you’re hearing them, like real-world sounds incorporated into a dream that you only understand you heard once you’ve awakened.

  ‘I have to get to work,’ he says.

  Christopher is dressed now himself, wearing his own pants, a shirt that Thomas loaned him, and his bowling shoes. He is holding a cup of coffee and sitting in Thomas’s easy chair.

  ‘Okay,’ he says. He sets his coffee cup down and gets to his feet.

  ‘Maybe,’ Thomas says, scratches his cheek, continues, ‘maybe we shouldn’t walk out together.’

  Christopher doesn’t say anything for a moment. He just looks at him.

  After a while he nods. ‘Okay, if you think that’s best.’

  Thomas doesn’t really know what he thinks. He’s never been in a situation remotely like this before. The relationships he’s had with women all felt forced and false for one thing and almost always ended as a result of apathy on his part. He just didn’t care enough to – well, to do anything. And then it was over and the credits rolled.

  This doesn’t feel like that. This feels natural. Yet it also makes him feel guilty. But that might simply be for the reason Christopher says it is: he has been told his entire life that one should feel guilty for having such feelings and especially for acting on them. It makes his stomach feel sick. It makes his stomach feel sick but it also makes him feel happy somehow, happier than he can remember being. It makes him feel that someone else, another human being, understands the turmoil he’s felt all his life; it makes him feel for the first time that another human being could possibly be a salve for his loneliness. He’s been so lonely perhaps because he has spent a lifetime rejecting the only source of companionship that could have meant anything to him, the only kind of companionship that felt right.

  ‘What if . . .’ he says, and stops.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘What if we walk out together? What if we didn’t pretend at all anymore?’

  ‘It will change our lives forever.’

  Thomas nods.

  ‘We’ll never be able to go back,’ Christopher says.

  Thomas nods again. He knows that what Christopher is saying is true, but somehow it doesn’t seem to matter.

  ‘I’m tired of lying,’ he says.

  Christopher is silent for a long time, thinking it over, and then finally he says, ‘Okay.’

  ‘Let’s go,’ Thomas says.

  Peter and Anne stand next to one another in the living room. They are standing a couple feet apart but they’re also standing together. Peter feels melancholy despite the fact that Anne has agreed to try to work things out. He knows they will probably never get back to the place they were before last night, but maybe in time – a year, two years – they’ll be able to get close.

  He hopes so.

  Ron and Bettie are standing by the front door. Ron’s nose rests crooked on his face, bloody wads of tissue stuck in his nostrils, and Peter thinks the guy will probably have to visit the hospital. Then he remembers his broken knuckle and thinks he might have to as well.

  ‘I’ll see you at work,’ Ron says, grabbing the doorknob, twisting it, pulling the door open, revealing the empty hallway which leads to the tiny self-service elevator twenty feet awa
y, which is barely big enough for two and always smells like corn chips and socks for a reason Peter has not been able to figure out in his three years here. Three and a half years.

  ‘I think I’ll be calling in sick,’ Peter says.

  Ron nods.

  ‘Then tomorrow.’

  ‘Tomorrow,’ he says.

  And then Ron and Bettie step out the front door, closing it behind them. Peter can hear the muffled sound of them talking as they walk away. Usually – because the walls are thin – he’d be able to hear what they’re saying, but not this morning, not right now.

  Right now the overwhelming sound is the sound of sirens.

  Erin Riva wakes to the sound of wailing. She sees that though it is a gray light shining in through the window morning has arrived; the sun is beginning to make its ascent. She is on the couch and her mouth tastes bad.

  She wipes the sleep-boogers out of the corners of her eyes, blinks several times.

  Did Frank come home last night?

  The last thing she remembers is talking to him on the phone, the relief that overwhelmed her when he told her that she hadn’t killed anybody, that the worst she had done was damage a child’s toy, walking over to the couch, deciding to lie down while she waited. Then nothing. Beautiful sleep. She had dreams of the accident but they were only dreams – not nightmares – and waking now she doesn’t have that crummy nightmare-headache she sometimes gets.

  ‘Frank?’ she says, but he does not respond.

  She walks through the apartment looking for him, her feet shuffling through the place, making lonely feet sounds, and as each room is found empty, she gets more nervous.

  Why wouldn’t he be home yet?

  He called – she looks at a clock – almost an hour and a half ago. He should be home. Even if the car broke down and he had to walk he should be home by now.

  So why isn’t he?

  And where is he?

  48

  Frank looks up from Kat and sees a white Ford F-100 ambulance hooking around the corner, tilting with the momentum of the turn, straightening out, and rushing toward him and the scene, all lights and noise.

  A moment later it’s arrived and it screeches to a stop.

  The passenger’s door opens and a pale, dark-haired man in his mid- or late-thirties steps out through it. He looks like a man who’s already seen too much but knows he’s gonna see a lot more in his life before it’s finished.

  Frank gets up and steps out of the way so that the man and his partner, who is stepping from the driver’s side door of the ambulance, can do their jobs.

  Before the ambulance has even come to a complete stop David pushes open the ambulance’s passenger door and steps out of the vehicle.

  He doesn’t have to ask anyone where the injured party is. He can see her before his feet hit the ground, a brownish-red blanket of blood covering her body, the same brownish-red that has been splashed all over the surrounding area – everywhere he looks he sees blood.

  A colored man is kneeling over the woman, stroking her hair absently, watching him get out of the ambulance. He rushes toward him and the fallen girl and is about to ask the man to please step away when he does it on his own.

  ‘What happened?’ David says as he arrives, assessing the situation.

  ‘She’s been stabbed,’ the guy says in sad understatement. The kitchen knife in her chest up to the hilt would make it obvious even if the other wounds did not. Her dress has been pushed up around her waist, and there are bloody gashes in her right calf and her left thigh. There are four bloody slits in the abdominal area. Another in the shoulder. Another at the back of her neck. Another in the small of her back. Her arms are raw, completely lacking in skin – looking like a segmented picture from an anatomy text – and David can’t even begin to guess how that happened. Her panties are bloody and shoved to the side.

  The colored guy must have seen him looking because he says, ‘I wanted to pull the dress down but I didn’t know if I’d be destroying evidence.’

  David nods, moves around to her front, feels her pulse, which is weak but present.

  John arrives carrying a scoop stretcher and freezes.

  ‘Jesus,’ he says. ‘Is she dead?’

  ‘Alive,’ David says, and he hears the admiration in his own voice.

  He does admire her; she has fight. He knows that not because she’s still alive – though someone with less fight in her would have been long dead – but because of the carnage. She is a person who has refused to die, who tried to fight her way out of this situation that she was thrown into. Life in a city like this is simply one accidental run-in after another, strangers passing each other by the thousands, sometimes interacting, usually not in any significant way – howdy, hi, a stolen wallet, dropped change, excuse me, sir, you forgot your hat, eye contact on the subway, here, take my seat, I didn’t realize you were pregnant or I’d have offered sooner – but sometimes when passing one another, strangers collide. Hard. It’s just the way it is in a city. And sometimes it ends in death.

  ‘Let’s get her on the stretcher,’ David says.

  John hunches behind her, putting the scoop stretcher against her right shoulder, which is lying against the cold concrete of her front porch, and holding it in place with his legs. Then, together, David and John roll her onto her back on the stretcher – David pushing, John pulling – moving her as gently as possible.

  A pained groan escapes her mouth. David is glad for it. At this point – with her in the state she’s in – he’s glad for any sign of life.

  Kat can’t move. She doesn’t understand why she can’t move but she can’t. She should be able to but she can’t. She can only stare straight ahead. She sees her neighbor Frank’s bent knees. He is crouched in front of her and he is wearing jeans smeared with car grease. She feels his hand stroking her hair and that’s good, that’s nice, and she can hear him saying, ‘An ambulance is on the way.’ And she can hear the ambulance. It’s here. She only had to lie here and wait. Then a brief conversation, and then someone is moving her, and it hurts, God, all of the wounds that had gone cold and silent start screaming again, but when she tries to scream herself it’s only a barely-audible groan, and then she is on her back, and she’s looking at the gray sky, the gray sky behind which, she thinks, this universe’s malevolent God is hiding.

  ‘One two three,’ someone says, and she feels her body being lifted.

  Things are moving. She is moving. She is being carried somewhere but she can’t move her head so all she can see is the gray sky and things out of the corners of her eyes – buildings passing by and trees passing by and brief faces with shining eyes looking at her – and then she is in a small room with a white roof; no, not a room, she’s not in a room: she’s in a vehicle.

  An ambulance – she’s in an ambulance.

  She’s saved.

  Diane stands in the courtyard with her suitcase in her hand. Is this what she saw when she looked out her window last night – all this brown blood? It can’t be what she saw; she would have called the police.

  Someone must have called them, though – police are here. But that first scream, that was hours ago.

  As she stands there looking at all the blood, the lights of the ambulance flashing against her face and the complex’s stone walls and the concrete and the oak trees and espaliers, she sees others walking out to the courtyard. Thomas, who pretends to be married but isn’t, walks from his building’s elevator. He is holding hands with another man. Christopher. She knows him. He’s come over to watch baseball and drink beers with Larry. That explains it, she thinks, when she sees them holding hands; that explains why Thomas pretends to be married. Thomas looks up at her and quickly pulls his hand away from Christopher’s, pulls it away almost harshly. Then she sees the kid with the sick mother. She doesn’t remember his name; he’s just the kid with the sick mother who sometimes watches her from across the courtyard. He walks out into the gray morning light looking dazed and his eyes are red. And th
e nurse. She walks out into the courtyard in her nurse’s uniform and her white nurse’s shoes. And a couple she doesn’t know. The man looks like his nose is broken as it’s planted crooked and on his face like malformed clay and a wad of bloody tissue sticks from each of his nostrils.

  Diane finds herself standing out in this bloodsplattered courtyard with all of them. She finds everyone looking at everyone else and at all of the blood – there is so much blood – but when any two people look at each other at the same time, when eye contact is threatened or made, something like shame passes across the faces and the eyes are dropped.

  Diane does this herself. When the boy with the sick mother looks at her at the same time as she looks at him their eyes meet briefly and she feels ashamed and suddenly finds her own shoes very interesting.

  Patrick looks away from the woman he saw crying in her living room last night and toward the street. An ambulance sits at the curb, lights flashing. Then two men carry someone by on a stretcher. The girl he saw out here, the girl who was attacked. They carry her by on a stretcher and they put her in the ambulance and they get inside.

  Doors slam.

  Frank watches the ambulance drive away with a strange heavy sadness pressing against his chest and making it difficult for him to breathe. After a moment he turns away from the street and toward the courtyard, and there sees several of his neighbors. And Erin – his wife. Frank walks toward them, stepping over a puddle of blood as he does, and he feels the sadness and the sickness inside him turning into something else, mixing together and turning into something else completely – a strange but undeniable chemical reaction.

  ‘Nobody saw what was happening out here?’ he says, looking from one person to the next. ‘Nobody called the police?’

  He thinks about seeing her driving home from her job at that bar she works at, passing her, waving, seeing her smile at him; it seems like it’s been ages, but it was only a little over two hours ago. He thinks of that and he thinks that she must have been out here the whole time. Her keys are still in her front door. He thinks of all this blood. It trails across the courtyard, which is lit with lamps at night. Dim lamps but lamps. Dim but bright enough to see by. Bright enough that you can see the courtyard at night even if your apartment lights are on.