Authors: Sara Rosett
He nodded. “Mine, too. We knew each other in high school.” He took his bowl over to the sink, rinsed it, and put it beside the lone bowl in the dishwasher. He refilled his glass and looked embarrassed. “Can I get you something to drink? Sorry, I’m kind of out of it.”
“No, thanks. I’m fine.”
“That was great minestrone. Thanks for bringing it over.”
“Look, if it makes you feel any better, she might have been trying to get her EpiPen out when she slipped down the slope. Her purse was open on the passenger side.”
He nodded. “There was an EpiPen in the glove compartment, too. I always made sure she had one there and one with her.” He shook his head. “It doesn’t matter, though. She’s still gone.”
I gathered up the toys Livvy had flung out of the stroller and pushed the stroller to the door, mentally kicking myself for bringing the conversation back to Cass’s death.
On the porch, I paused. “Do you need anyone to water your plants or take in your mail while you’re gone? Mitch and I could do that for you.”
Joe studied the hanging baskets of petunias like
someone had placed them there this morning. “Ah, yeah. I hadn’t thought about that. The plants were Cass’s department.” He swallowed, fighting down emotion. “Let me get you a key.” He disappeared back into the kitchen and then returned with a smiley face key chain with two keys on it. “Front and back doors. Just put the mail on the kitchen counter. Thanks.”
I walked back across the street as Ed and Mabel, our next-door neighbors, drove their town car into their neatly shelved and spotlessly clean garage, not even an oil spot on the concrete. Mabel carried her purse and a small Styrofoam “to-go” container into the house while Ed, finger-combing his fringe of white hair, ambled over to talk to Mitch. Mitch saw him and cut the power on the mower.
“You’ve been busy.” Ed Parsons stood on his side of the hedge that divided our front yard from his. Ed nodded to me as I joined them at the hedge. “Good to see you working so hard on the place. That last couple that lived there didn’t do a thing, never mowed or picked up pinecones. Just blasted their music until we could hear it in our bedroom, that’s on the other side of the house. You about unpacked?” I looked over their flawless carpetlike lawn and pristine flower beds. No way we would be able to measure up to that standard. And I thought we were leaving the “Lawn of the Month” competition to on-base housing.
“Almost. It’s just too hot to work inside today, so we decided to get started out here.” My frenzy of activity coupled with Abby’s help had been productive. Our essentials were unpacked. Our home was emerging from the chaos. Mitch had hung our new miniblinds and curtains. I was thinking about where to hang pictures.
“Figured as much,” Ed said with a satisfied smile. He removed his toothpick from his mouth and gestured to the street. “I saw that moving van yesterday picking up empty boxes, so I knew you were making progress.”
Mabel crossed the driveway and ran a critical eye over the hedge, but didn’t say anything when she joined us. “They’re almost unpacked,” Ed told her with triumph in his voice. “Knew it, seeing that truck.”
Mabel nodded. “You had the blue carpet removed.” Her voice was flat and I couldn’t tell if she approved or disapproved.
“Yes, we did.” I was glad Mitch had hung those miniblinds. Were these people watching us instead of television for entertainment? “We didn’t like the color,” I said. It was an awful shade of turquoise and full of dirt.
“Hideous.” Mabel said. She wore a white shirt, khaki pants, and a blue-and-yellow plaid vest. Did she always wear plaid? I saw her gardening a few days ago wearing orange and yellow plaid shorts.
Mabel nodded her head in the direction of the Vincents’ house. “How’s he taking his wife’s death?”
“You knew the Vincents?”
“Of course. They’re part of the neighborhood. We make it a point to meet everyone and keep an eye on things.”
I’m sure you do. Mitch and I exchanged a glance and I knew he was thinking the same thing I was. He hid a smile and I said, “He’s still in shock, I think.”
“Not surprising,” Mabel agreed. She squinted down the street at the plain white house next to the Vincents'. “I wonder if she ever met her neighbor—the one in the white house.”
“I don’t know.”
Mabel leaned toward me and said confidentially, “Cassandra spent hours gardening in her yard, but I think she worked outside so she could watch that house.”
“Now, Mabel, you don’t know that,” Ed cautioned.
“Well, she watched it and she asked me if I knew anything about the people who lived there.”
Ed harrumphed and drew Mitch over to examine a patch of lawn that wasn’t as verdantly green as the rest of his grass.
Mabel said, “I think Cassandra suspected it was a drug house.”
“What?”
“Strange comings and goings at night. Lots of activity after dark. I’m watching it.”
“Oh. Well. That’s good.” I think. At least it might keep her gaze off our house.
Mabel changed the subject. “How do you like your new house?”
I smiled. “We love it. Now if it will just cool off we can really start enjoying it. It’s like an oven in there right now.”
“You don’t have a window cooler?” Mabel asked, glancing at Livvy in the stroller.
“No. We didn’t know we needed one.” How could they miss knowing that? They seemed to know everything else.
“Ed, find that window unit we got at the garage sale last year and help them put it in.” Mabel started back to the house. She tossed over her shoulder, “Got a good deal on it. Use it until it cools off.”
I stood for a few seconds with my mouth open before I shut it. Abrupt, generous, and nosy. What a combination for our next-door neighbors. I glanced back at
Joe’s house. I hoped he was doing something else besides staring at the TV with the sound turned down. But bluish light flickered in his front windows.
Simplicity, clarity, singleness: these are the
attributes that give our lives power and vividness
and joy.
—Richard Halloway
W
ith Livvy’s cries ricocheting off the windows, I adjusted the angle of the mirrors and shoved a jumble of paper cups, tissues, and a Snickers wrapper aside with my foot to make room for my feet on the floorboard. Then I nosed Cass’s van out of the Security Police’s holding area. Joe had called early this morning to ask me if I could pick up the van.
“The funeral’s tomorrow,” Joe had said. There wasn’t any inflection in his voice. I tucked the phone between my ear and shoulder so I could hold Livvy in one arm and pick up her plastic book from the floor with the
other hand. We had been up three times with Livvy during the night. She didn’t seem to know what she wanted.
“I’m going to stay out here for a few more days. The Security Police at Greenly are releasing the van. Could you please pick it up for me?”
I did a quick mental scan of the day’s events. Mitch had training in the flight simulator, or the sim, as the guys called it. I’d planned on going to the Comm, the grocery store on-base called the commissary. “Sure. I’ll have Mitch drop me off on the way to his sim. I’ll drive your van back and leave it in your driveway.”
Hopefully, Livvy would sleep during the drive to the base.
That morning, I’d gone through the whole routine—feeding, burping, diaper changing. I’d hoped a car ride would soothe her. It didn’t. She cried during the twenty-five-minute drive. As I stopped for a light, I reconsidered my grocery shopping plan. I didn’t think I could handle it with Livvy’s fussiness. I drove past the chapel, the gym, and the Comm, each painted pastel yellow with mud brown trim. The government must have gotten a huge discount on that paint. It’s the standard exterior paint at every base I’ve ever seen. The color is probably called Pale Blah.
A military base is almost like a college campus, a self-contained world with everything a person could need: a gas station, credit union, banks, grocery stores, a base exchange, which is similar to a Wal-Mart only smaller, a recycling center, and a movie theater. Theoretically, a person never had to leave. Of course, if a person never left the base, theoretically, that person would go insane.
I rolled to a stop at the next intersection, tapping the steering wheel with my thumb, unsure what to do. I could tough it out and do our grocery shopping, but
Livvy’s cries, although not as insistent as they were at the beginning of our drive, were still shrill and loud. Just the thought of navigating the Comm’s aisles with Livvy crying made my head hurt.
I flipped on my blinker and turned right for the car wash. Sometimes loud noises soothed Livvy. She loved the roar of the vacuum cleaner and the gush of water into the tub. The van was dusty on the outside and gum wrappers, dead pine needles, and paper napkins and cups littered the floor mats. I doubted Joe would want to even see the van, much less clean it up, so I could do that for him. Livvy went silent in midcry.
I could feel my eyebrows wrinkle together as I tried to figure out why she stopped crying suddenly. Then she grunted. I knew exactly what that noise meant: urgent diaper change. I sighed and pulled over to the side of the car wash parking lot.
I hated changing diapers in the car, but this was the worst I’d ever seen. Without a second thought, I tossed her overalls and shirt embroidered with a gardening theme of flowers, pails, and shovels in the trash. There was no salvaging that outfit. I fished a worn onesie from the depths of the diaper bag. It fit like a surgical glove. She was growing every day. I put her back in the car seat. As soon as the buckle clicked, she squished her eyes shut and cried.
I found several quarters in the bottom of my brown leather backpack purse and slipped them into the machine. I sat back in the dim light as the water pounded the car. Livvy gave a few more gulping sobs, then a shaky sigh tapered off into silence. Thank goodness. My nerves were stretched to the limit. Mitch could ignore her crying or tell himself that she was fussy and would be all right in a little while, but my natural mother response
system couldn’t take much more of Livvy’s unending crying. Shouldn’t she quiet down when I comforted her? Shouldn’t I be able to figure out what was wrong?
I sighed again and glanced around the interior of the van in the dim light. Cass sat in this same seat right before she died. I got that creepy feeling I always get in a car wash, the gloomy half-light and the sense of enclosure. A fine layer of soap bubbles coated the van and intensified my uneasiness as it cut off my view of the cinderblock walls. I flipped the wipers on to open a small clearing. Get a grip. I sat up straighter. Cass didn’t even die inside the van. There was no reason to feel so uncomfortable. I glanced around the interior. Someone had cleaned up the personal items that were scattered over the passenger seat and floorboard the day she died. Probably returned them to Joe.
I opened the glove compartment and shifted the maps, flashlight, tapes, and napkins around. Where was the EpiPen? Joe said he kept one in the van. Had the police returned it to Joe with Cass’s purse? I flipped the compartment door shut and eased the van slowly through the dryer. Then I hit the accelerator hard, knowing that without the loud water noises the motion and tire noise of the van might keep Livvy asleep.
It worked. It was a blissfully quiet drive home. I was even able to think about Livvy’s crying with a little perspective. She had always cried loud and often. Livvy was not one of those babies who slept for twenty hours every day. My books said she fell into the “high maintenance baby” category. But, this was extreme, even for her. Was she getting sick? I dreaded her first cold. I knew she wouldn’t be able to tell me what was wrong,
where it hurt. I decided to call a doctor when we got back home or, I amended, find a doctor.
“I’m sorry, but Dr. Henry isn’t taking new patients,” the cool voice said without a hint of regret.
I hung up and looked for Dr. Williams in the phone book. I finally found it under Northwest Family Health in the Yellow Pages. She was taking new patients and could see Livvy in six weeks. “You can try our Urgent Care Department. I’ll transfer you,” the receptionist said. I took their first opening, Friday at 10:30.
I sat on our kitchen steps with the thick phone book splayed open on my lap, hoping our neighbors wouldn’t call Child Protective Services. Faintly, I could hear Livvy crying in her crib. I had done everything I could think of: feeding, burping, diaper changing, playing, cuddling, singing, and rocking. She seemed to want to eat, but after a few moments, she’d jerk her head away and cry.
I felt like crying myself. So I put her down in her crib and shut the door. I was amazed that Livvy, so small and powerless, could almost push me to my limit. When I was pregnant a friend told me, “You have to have a place where you can put your baby down and walk away when you get so frustrated you can hardly stand it.” At the time I thought she was crazy. How could a sweet, helpless baby push someone over the edge? Now I understood.
I rubbed my forehead and tried to think of something to do outside. I looked over at the van still parked in our driveway, where I had left it as I hurried to get inside, feed Livvy, and put her down for her nap before I ran it across the street to Joe’s driveway.
“If it’s worth doing, it’s worth doing right.” My dad’s steady voice sounded in my head. It was a hot spring day when he showed me how to wash a car. He unlooped the vacuum cleaner cord and said, “Doing it right includes vacuuming the inside and cleaning the tires, too.”
I found the handheld vacuum and the extension cord. Sliding back the door on the passenger side, I tossed paper cups and a discarded newspaper into the trash, then I vacuumed up pine needles, lint, dried grass, pebbles, and tiny paper scraps. Neatness hadn’t been high on Cass’s priority list. When I turned the handheld vacuum off to close the sliding door and move up to the floor mats in the front, I knew something was wrong, but I couldn’t place what it was. I stood still and listened.