Good Neighbors Read online

  She shakes her head.

  ‘What?’ he says again.

  ‘We shared sex,’ she says. ‘That’s it.’

  He licks his lips. Oh, God.

  ‘But – but you don’t understand,’ he says.

  ‘It was sex,’ she says. ‘That’s it. That was the point.’

  ‘You’re lying,’ he says. ‘You’re lying to spare Ron’s feelings.’

  ‘No.’ She shakes her head.

  ‘Oh, goddamn it,’ Anne says.

  ‘But—’ Peter turns back to Ron. ‘This was your fucking idea.’

  ‘But it was your mistake,’ Ron says.

  ‘I can’t believe I was stupid enough to let you talk me into this.’

  Anne gets to her feet and disappears into the dark hallway.

  A moment later, there is the slam of a door.

  Peter walks to the couch and falls into it.

  He puts his head into his hands.

  ‘Fuck,’ he says. ‘Fuck.’

  18

  ‘Um. Let’s see,’ David White says, looking through the glass front of a case which holds dozens of donuts. He ate before he started his shift but he’s hungry again.

  ‘Take your time,’ the cop standing behind him says. ‘It’s not like anyone’s waiting.’

  Then there’s a yelp of sirens and a brief flash of light from the ambulance on the other side of the window. He probably shouldn’t be stuffing himself with donuts anyway.

  ‘Guess that’s it,’ he says. ‘How much?’

  ‘On the house,’ the man behind the counter says. ‘Go save some lives.’

  ‘Thanks,’ David says. ‘’Preciate it.’

  Then he turns away and heads for the front door, kicking it open since his hands are full, and then slipping through before it has a chance to swing shut. As he nears the ambulance, John reaches over the width of the cab and shoves open the passenger’s door for him.

  ‘Thanks,’ he says, getting into the ambulance, handing John his coffee, pulling shut his door. ‘What do we got?’

  ‘Car accident,’ John says.

  David nods, tries to take a sip of his coffee, but just as the cup touches his lip, John puts the ambulance in gear, it lurches forward, and coffee spills down the front of David’s uniform.

  ‘Shit.’

  John glances over. ‘Sorry.’

  David nods but waits until the ambulance is up to speed before attempting a second sip.

  He looks out the window at the blur of night as they head toward whatever carnage awaits them. He is tired. He is always tired. He just can’t seem to sleep. Part of it, he thinks, is this job. The graveyard shift is a brutal shift no matter how long you’ve been working it. He gets off work and drives home in a half-dream, exhausted, at a time when the day is just beginning to gain speed. The sun is up, evaporating the last of the midnight dew. People are showering and shaving and eating eggs and driving to work and he is headed in the opposite direction toward home. But not toward bed. Never toward bed – not immediately. The noise – of traffic and talking and life – keeps him awake. He pushes through the front door and walks straight to his couch and sits down. His dog Sarah greets him, licks his hand, curls up against his leg, and he pets her absently. For the next hour or two, he stares. That’s all. He simply stares at his reflection in the gray television screen, stares at the wall, stares at his waking dreams in the corners of the room. Sometimes he talks to Sarah. Sometimes he tells her about his night. ‘Tonight was rough,’ he’ll say. ‘Got called to a shooting. Man was shot in the head, directly between the eyes, but he didn’t die. So the gunman shot him again and ran, but he still didn’t die. When we pulled up, he was sitting on the curb. Just sitting there. Arms resting on his knees. He looked at us and smiled. Raised an arm in greeting. “Hello,” he said. If it wasn’t for the two dots on his forehead, he could have been anybody. Two red dots. One right in the middle of the forehead, the other above his left eyebrow. They were both oozing a little bit of blood, but they weren’t bleeding bad. Just big enough to poke a finger into. For a minute, I thought, this is one tough motherfucker. He took two bullets to the brain and doesn’t seem phased. Then I saw the back of his head. The exit wounds were big enough to shove baseballs into. Tangerines, anyway. Then I saw ten feet to his left where most of the contents of his head had splattered. He was just a zombie. “How you doing, sir?” I said. “Hello,” he said again. Just a zombie, Sarah. That’s all. And he wouldn’t die. We got him to the hospital. He could have walked, but we didn’t let him. We rolled him into the emergency room, and every time he saw someone he would say it. “Hello. Hello. Hello. Hello.” It was unnerving. Doctors say he’ll probably be dead by the end of the week if he’s actually gonna go – but he may live. If he’s not dead by then, he’ll probably live. They’re cleaning up the wounds as if he’s gonna live. If he does, he’ll just be able to walk around and say “Hello.” He’ll just be a zombie with half a head. “Hello. Hello. Hello. Hello.” I asked a friend of mine who’s a cop if there’s any leads. He seems to think they’ll never catch the guy who did it. No one’s talking. Even the woman who called the police, she says she only heard the shots. The first one, she just thought it was car backfire or something. By the time she got to the window after the second shot, the shooter was gone, leaving behind the zombie, leaving behind this guy with a wife and a daughter, this guy who can walk and say “Hello” but can’t do nothing else.’ Sometimes he’ll talk to Sarah and sometimes he’ll just sit and stare. But he never sleeps when he gets home. Around ten o’clock in the morning, once everyone who’s going to work has gone, it’s a bit quieter and he’s had time to flush work from his body – it’s drained down and leaked from the soles of his feet – so he walks to the bedroom and lays himself on the bed and stares at his closet door. After a while, he gets up and opens it. David does not like closed doors. He doesn’t know why, but he doesn’t. He hates not being able to see exactly what’s on the other side. When he moves into an apartment, the first thing he does is get out a screwdriver and a hammer and start removing hinge-pins and the doors that separate rooms. He leaves on the closet door and the bathroom door. Closets sometimes get cluttered, and though he almost never has company, the bathroom door is necessary when he does. But he can’t sleep with the closet door closed. So he opens it – even though it means Sarah may run off with a shoe – then he walks back to bed and lays down again. Around eleven he’ll finally get to sleep. But by two or three, the heat will wake him up, the heat and the afternoon sunlight, and he’ll be up for good. The rest of the day he’ll just spend wandering around, a zombie himself, grocery shopping, doing laundry, vacuuming the carpet, washing the dishes he’s let pile up in the sink. Sometimes he goes to a massage parlor. He always feels guilty about it afterwards – those girls who don’t speak English and have few other options – but he does it anyway. Sometimes he just needs to get it out of his system, to have physical contact with another human being, physical contact of any kind.

  And then, eventually, it’s time for work again.

  There are already two police cars parked on the side of the road with their lights flashing when David and John arrive in their ambulance. Flares blaze, and one uniformed cop who David doesn’t recognize is standing in the street to make sure looky loos keep their distance. David can’t imagine there’ve been too many at this time of night – but who knows?

  John parks the ambulance on the wrong side of the street, in front of one of the police cars, killing the sirens while the lights continue to bleed the night.

  ‘Looks pretty ugly,’ he says.

  David nods in agreement, and then pushes open his door and steps outside. He walks toward the upended Fiat and looks inside through the bloody side window. The car is empty.

  ‘He’s over there,’ the policeman he doesn’t recognize says.

  David looks up and sees the guy pointing to his right. He follows the finger to a storefront with a shattered window. Behind the shattered glass, David c
an see several fallen bicycles and flashlight beams shifting around, crossing one another. Other cops, he assumes.

  ‘Inside,’ the cop says. ‘He’s unconscious.’

  David nods and walks back to the ambulance.

  He grabs a scoop stretcher from the back and heads toward the building. John follows.

  ‘Son of a bitch,’ David says. ‘You son of a bitch.’

  He stares down at Mr. Vacanti lying unconscious behind the counter of this night-dark bicycle shop. He’s flat on his back, one arm folded underneath his body, the other angled up, bent at the elbow, touching the top of his head with the thumb, shaping the number four. There is a six-inch shard of glass jutting from his forehead, a shelf of glass, and he’s lying in a pool of his own blood.

  For a brief moment – just for a second – David considers simply reaching down and twisting that shard of glass, shoving it in further, as far as he can, until it hits bone on the other side, at the back of the head, and then giving it one last push, till it scars the vinyl floor beneath. He thinks there’d be a sense of satisfaction as he felt the spongy brain being sliced through, as he heard the pop of bone giving way.

  ‘What is it?’ John says behind him.

  ‘What?’ David says.

  ‘You said, “son of a bitch,”’ John says. And then, after a moment, when he doesn’t reply, ‘David?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Oh,’ David says. ‘I know him.’

  ‘Who is he?’

  ‘Just someone I know,’ David says. ‘Someone I used to know. Let’s get him into the ambulance.’

  19

  Kat doesn’t know how long she’s been out here, she doesn’t know how long ago the man with the knife left, but she knows she has to do something. She can’t just sit here forever. She can’t just sit here and bleed.

  For a while, though, she doesn’t know what else to do. There’s something wrong with her head. She can’t think. Why can’t she think?

  There’s a bench there, not ten feet away. She can get to the bench. She’s almost sure of it. Anybody could get to the bench. It’s right there, not ten feet away.

  She can get there; she knows she can.

  She gets on hands and knees and starts crawling in that direction.

  Her fingers are very cold. Her nose is very cold. Her lips are very cold, and when she licks them, because they’re dry, dry and cracked, she can barely feel them. It’s almost like they’re not her own. Somehow, it reminds her of when she was a little girl. She used to love to ride her bike. She would ride as fast as she could, and then stop pedaling, and just coast as long as she could, smiling away, the cold and wild wind rushing against her, freezing her knuckles and her nose and her lips, but she didn’t care because she was flying.

  Flying.

  A brief smile touches her cold, cracked lips as that memory passes through her head, but it’s quickly gone.

  Every thought that enters her head is quickly gone. She can’t think. The pain overwhelms. Every time she moves at all, the pain seems to be the only part of the world that’s completely real. Her right side, inside her body, under her armpit – that’s where it’s the worst. It itches. It feels like it’s frozen and on fire simultaneously. And it itches.

  All she wanted was a gee-dee bath.

  She doesn’t understand what happened. Why did that man stab her? She had never seen him before and she didn’t do anything to him so why did he stab her? She’s sure she never saw him before tonight.

  She reaches the bench and puts her arms against the seat of it and pushes herself up. The paint has been worn away by weather and the seats of jeans and she can feel the coarse grain of the gray wood beneath her arms. She hears herself groan as she lifts herself, as she straightens herself out, and she feels more warm, coppery-smelling blood pouring down her back, and jabbing pain in her armpit, and the groan turns to a scream, but she doesn’t stop pushing herself up. She doesn’t stop until she’s pushed herself to her feet. It feels precarious, but here she is, standing. She feels herself swaying left, then right. Black out-of-focus dots dance in front of her eyes, moving this way and that, like insects, like dust motes in a beam of light. She feels dizzy, but she’s standing – she’s standing.

  She can feel something warm running down the front of her now, too, and she remembers the second attack, and she looks down at herself, and she sees four more holes in the front of her dress, her light blue dress, her new dress that she got from Woolworth’s only a week ago, a treat from her to herself for working so hard last month. She’d gotten some compliments on it earlier tonight and she was glad she bought it.

  She looks around. Most of the faces that were looking down on her before are gone. Most of the living-room lights have turned off. But a few living rooms are still lit up, and in others, even with the lights off, she can see people standing behind the glass, looking at her. Maybe they turned off their lights to get a completely unobstructed view, maybe not; either way, a few faces with white eyes still look down on her.

  ‘Help . . . me,’ she says. ‘Please.’

  She meant for it to be a shout, but it’s barely a whisper. A weak breeze. A rustling of leaves. She has strength for very little more than that – but she tries.

  ‘Someone,’ she says, her voice breaking, ‘help! Please!’

  She hears desperation in her own voice.

  The people standing in their living rooms watching her do not move.

  Maybe this is just a nightmare. It feels like it must be nothing more than that. It feels like that’s what it has to be. When she was a teenager, Kat used to lie in bed, wondering if her whole life was nothing but a dream. She would lie in bed and she would be afraid to go to sleep because she thought when she woke up she would be waking into her real life and in her real life she was an old woman already – or something like that. So she would lie in bed, thinking this life was a dream, but it was a good dream, a dream she didn’t want to wake from, in part simply because she didn’t know what she’d be waking to – what was reality? – but now she wishes this were a dream. She hopes it’s a dream. No matter what she wakes to, it has to be better than this. She closes her eyes and wills herself to wake up, but when she opens them again, she’s still here, surrounded by concrete and glass, the courtyard empty but for her.

  Why isn’t anyone helping her? If this isn’t a dream, why isn’t anyone helping her?

  Because it’s a nightmare, a voice says.

  Tears stream down her pale face.

  She can’t feel them, but she knows they’re there.

  And for a moment she allows herself to just let go. To cry. Her body shakes with the crying, convulses with it, and the convulsions send sharp pain shooting into her, send more blood seeping out of her, but she allows herself to cry anyway because she knows it’s coming whether she wants it to or not.

  Then she makes it stop. She simply shuts it off. She can’t allow herself to bleed to death out here. She can’t allow that. She has to do something. She has to get inside, that’s what she has to do, and crying won’t get her there.

  She looks in the direction of her apartment, the direction from which she crawled. Her eyes follow the trail of blood leading around the corner. So much blood. It looks brown under the courtyard’s light, brown instead of red.

  Where is her purse?

  On the front porch. She dropped it on the front porch.

  Where are her keys? She closes her eyes, trying to think.

  They’re in the door, but she doesn’t need them. The door is open. She remembers opening the door, so the door has to be open.

  Sometimes, when it’s hot outside and she wants to let a breeze blow through the apartment, she keeps the door open so the wind can blow in through it and out through the window. She insisted on getting one of the complex’s eight garden apartments for just that reason. She has to prop it open, though, because sometimes the wind blows the door shut again. But that didn’t happen this time. She wo
uld have heard the door slamming if it had. That means the door is open.

  All she has to do is get there.

  An attainable goal.

  Easy-peasy.

  She can see herself doing it. She just walks to the door one step at a time. She’s dizzy and it’s not easy to stay on her feet, but she holds her arms out, away from her body, to keep her balance – the way she did when she was a little girl and trying to walk along something narrow like that short wall that surrounded the shrubbery in front of her grade school; she would pretend she was a high-wire act in a circus and she was world-famous and she would close her eyes and hold her arms out, away from her body for balance – and she walks, one step at a time, and then she can see it, her front door, open not closed because she would have heard it slam if it was closed, and she just has to put her arms forward and push it the rest of the way open, and so she does that, and then she’s inside, and there’s her couch and her favorite chair and the throw pillows she bought a couple months ago that match the curtains and the pictures of her family, and the phone, there’s her phone, and she walks straight to it on the end table in her living room and she picks it up and she puts it to her ear and she says, Hello, operator . . .

  ‘Hello, operator,’ she says, still standing in the courtyard, her body swaying in the night air. ‘Hello, I’ve been . . . stabbed. I need an ambulance.’

  Yes, she thinks. That’s what she’ll do.

  It’s an attainable goal.

  Like pouring a drink. Like changing a tire.

  Easy-peasy.

  She concentrates only on what she’s doing, and she takes her first step toward her apartment. Her left knee wants to buckle as she moves her right leg forward, but she manages to keep it locked in place – shakily, true, but it holds – and then she puts her right foot down. That’s one step. She’s one step closer to being saved, one step closer to saving herself. She locks her right knee and drags her left leg up even with her right leg. She stands, breathing hard. Okay, she thinks. Again. She puts her left leg forward, carefully, carefully . . . but then, suddenly, without warning, her right leg gives up, just quits, I’m done, and that’s it, there’s nothing under her but ground, and she simply breaks into pieces and crumbles to the concrete surface beneath her.