Authors: Alice McDermott
At the hospital, someone dialed the phone number Sheryl gave them and found it had been changed. They called the local police station instead. An officer there who had been to that address twice in the past year suggested that a police car would alarm the mother unnecessarily: the girl, after all, and by a sheer stroke of luck, would live. A plainclothes detective, just back from lunch, was asked to do the job instead.
The suburb where we lived, like most, I suppose, was only one in a continuous series of towns and developments that had grown out from the city in the years after the Second World War. They were bedroom communities, incubators, where the neat patterns of the streets, the fenced and leveled yards, the stop signs and traffic lights and soothing repetition of similar homes all helped to convey a sense of order and security and snug predictability. And yet it seems to me now that those of us who lived there then lived nevertheless with a vague and persistent notion, a premonition or memory of possible if not impending doom.
We had among us even then, for instance, families (the Meyers were one of them, I think, and the family that lived behind the Rossis) who had fled here from other, older, suburbs to our east and who spoke to us now like bitter, breathless exiles of what had occurred. Families who assured us that despite their best efforts, their love of the land they had owned there, of the solid brick house that had sat upon it, despite their determination to live out their lives in the very place where their eldest child had first smiled and tumbled, the neighborhood—and here they shook their heads, defeated, resigned—had changed.
We had parents who spoke to us and to each other of the city streets where they had spent their childhoods as lost forever, wiped from the face of the earth by change; who said of their old neighborhoods, “You can’t go there anymore,” as if change had made a place as inaccessible as a time. Parents who had come from “what used to be the country,” from farmhouses on dirt roads that we could still see (they told us) were it not for change. Who would point to a supermarket or a school or a highway overpass and say, “There, there, that’s where it used to be,” until it seemed to us that another world had once existed right beneath our feet, that another world had vanished from the very air we breathed.
We had grandparents, some of us, who remained in embattled city apartments or dilapidated houses buzzed by highways like flood victims clinging to chimneys and roofs, caught by the quick and devastating course of change. We could hear our parents shouting to them through telephones as if through time, “Mama, when are you going to get out of there?” “Dad, they want to tear it down!”
Enough, too much, has been said about the cowardly incompetence of memory, how it can be pushed around by time, bullied by desire, worked over by our intractable ability to see what we want to see. Even children know you cannot separate the tale from the teller. And yet it seems to me that even in those snug and orderly days the word carried a threat that seemed to boil and echo and slowly, inevitably, approach the street where we lived as surely as the sound of their engines had moved toward us that night.
And it seems to me that, just as we had done with the boys in their cars, we ignored it. No less than those stubborn and curious people who build and rebuild their homes on fault lines or slippery mountain slopes or at the edges of ever-eroding rivers and lakes, we seemed to live from day to day either resigned or indifferent to what we knew was coming. We lived from day to day as if the years were circular and the return of a summer or fall just like the last clear evidence that whatever was would last.
Sheryl’s father died on the way to work one morning and we shook our heads as if for that family alone things would never again be quite the same.
Just a few years ago, after sodium lights had been placed on the boulevard, giving the present that bright, unreal tinge that more properly belongs to nightmare or memory, and neighbors had begun to gather to form crime patrols (black and white now, although the change that had been spoken of had once meant integration as much as anything else), my parents retired and put their house on the market. I was at the end of my own marriage then, living unhappily in a similar town ten miles away, and when winter came and the house had not yet sold, I agreed to move in so my parents could go south. In the last few years, we had learned a Bible’s worth of wisdom regarding muggers and rapists and thieves and one of the tenets of this code was never to let any house, ever, give the appearance of being unoccupied. It was necessary, then, I explained to my fading husband, that I be there whenever a real estate agent brought someone through and that I keep my car in the driveway at night.
I was aware at the time that it was a retreat for me, not so much to the security of my past as away from the awkwardness of my future, but what was cowardly about it was well disguised by what seemed dutiful. My husband nodded as if he believed I would be back. We had by then reached that point in our marriage where we seemed to have lost our capacity for nostalgia, where what we’d shared, that part of our past together that had sustained us until now, had finally worn thin, and only an imagined history, or future, held any promise. We had begun to say we should have moved farther from our parents when we were younger, tried life in another city or state, switched jobs years ago. We should have married later. We said, “Of course, if we’d had children,” pretending to be grateful for the freedom our decision, our caution as we had called it, had earned us. If there were children, we could not so easily and amicably part.
I stood at the front door waiting for the real estate woman to arrive.
It was February or March, one of those limp, colorless days of late winter. The lawns seemed threadbare, the hedges and trees tangled and pale white. The houses themselves, persistent in their bright colors and definite stripes of aluminum siding, were foolish-looking without an accompaniment of snow or flowers or leaves; they seemed somehow abandoned, washed up on a desolate shore of dry yellow earth and branches the color of driftwood. Across the street, in the driveway of what had been the Rossi’s house, the new people had a small boat propped up on cinderblocks and covered with pale green canvas. They had put black bars across their windows—foolishly, we said; things hadn’t gotten that bad. Next door, the Carpenters had brown burlap wrapped carefully around each of their small bushes and trees. In Sheryl’s old house, the windows were all covered with thick, clear plastic that occasionally caught the dull white sky and then lost it with the next breeze, leaving only black glass.
As the woman pulled into our driveway in her shiny real estate salesman car, I saw that she had the usual couple squeezed into the front seat beside her and some children in the back as well. I took this as a good sign; the ad we’d run in the Sunday paper had been headed, “Bring the Kids!”
The man was the first to emerge and he got out of the car slowly, looking, as they always did, first up at the house and then to his left and right. It was a cold day, but he wore only a short leather jacket with wide lapels and designer blue jeans. There was a hand knit muffler cast in various shades of brown and gold at his throat, and he had his fingers in his shallow pockets. He only nodded when I let him in, the real estate woman with her card and her clipboard leading the way, the children still behind them in the car. I put him in his mid-forties at first, but if I count the years more carefully, I would have to believe he was younger than that. He had dark hair and a moustache and pale, somewhat sallow skin. That abrupt, bent, furtive manner of an adult trying not to be shy.
Behind him, his small wife grinned as if she were entering a party where she knew neither the hosts nor the guests nor why she had been invited. She shook my hand when we were introduced and said, “This is nice.”
There are, of course, as many different ways for a prospective buyer to look at a house as there are prospective buyers and houses, but I don’t think I’d be compromising my belief in the infinite variety of human potential by saying there are, in general, three or four kinds of lookers. There are the studious ones, who begin in the basement, pace the dimensions of each room, try all the faucets and doors and poke their heads into the attic; the dreamy ones, who walk through each room like well-behaved tourists, noticing what they are told to notice and keeping their hands to themselves; the impatient or embarrassed ones, who seem to need only to confirm that there is, indeed, a house on the inside that more or less conforms to the house on the outside and will gladly take your word for it that there is a basement below and three bedrooms up; and my favorites, those creative, seemingly homeless types who make the imaginative leap to ownership as soon as they walk through the door and spend their entire inspection placing their furniture, setting their table and so thoroughly immersing themselves in their domestic life in this home that they will discuss whether the television in their bedroom will keep the children awake on school nights before they ask how the house is heated or even its price.
Rick, however, when he came through our house that day, was not quite any of these. He followed the real estate agent dutifully, like a dreamer, but then would suddenly break away from her to return to the living room or to reinspect the master bedroom. He asked few questions but answered most of the saleswoman’s statistics with “Yeah,” or “I know.” He neither tapped the walls nor tried the lights nor shoved a screwdriver into the floor joists, but in every room he went first to the windows and carefully, studiously, took in the view. The saleswoman, picking up on this, said a great deal about exposure and sunlight and north winds, but it was clear this did not interest him. Later, in what had been my brother’s bedroom, he stood for a good while at the front window, looking out over the driveway and the street, his arms straight at his side.
He was not good-looking. His dark hair was long in the back and poorly cut, his shoulders were narrow and bent. The jacket he wore was cheap, the smell of the leather overcame even the real estate woman’s perfume, and he was just heavy enough around the hips to make the pockets of his jeans bulge out a little, showing their white lining. His legs were short, and he wore black socks and scuffed black shoes with silver buckles. He also wore a thin silver wedding ring and there were dark hairs on the back of his thick fingers and hands. Watching him from the hallway just outside the room, where I lingered to answer questions and keep an eye on everything in the house that a prospective buyer might pocket, I thought he seemed like an earnest, ignorant family man who was, would always be, beset and besieged by money problems. Not unlike my own father, I supposed, like all the men who had lived here when I was young.
He turned to me as he again looked around the room. The afternoon light through the windows only emphasized the shadows under his dark eyes. There was a small, pale scar beside his nose, and under his thin moustache one of his front teeth was yellow. “How long have you lived here?” he asked me.
I said, “Until I was twenty-three.”
The saleswoman added, “The house was built in ‘49.”
He looked at her and nodded before meeting her eye.
Across the room, his wife, who was the thorough sort, closed the closet door as if she had made up her mind about something and then announced that she was going out to check on the kids in the car. She had a narrow face and a head of thick frosted hair. Earlier, in the living room, her husband had asked her, “Do you think it’s big enough?” and she had slowly raised her eyes to the ceiling, as if the room’s dimensions were written on the rafters. “Big enough for what?” she’d said finally, and I recognized the sudden tension between them, the bitterness on her part and on his, the long, weary effort to please.
“For living,” he’d answered.
Now he put his hands in his pockets and turned to me again as she left the room. “You ever know Sheryl?” he asked. He motioned toward the window. “She used to live over there.”
I nodded. “Sure, I remember her.” And then I added, because I hadn’t quite made the connection, “Did you know her?”
He pursed his lips just slightly, as if to retard a smile. “Yeah,” he said. “I dated her in high school.” He said it with a bit of a swagger, and yet coming from a man his age, the expression seemed innocent and quaint. I dated her.
He looked at me carefully, his eyes dark and myopic. “I dated her for over a year,” he said.
I smiled, failing to recall for just one moment the details of that night because, for that moment, I was embarrassed for him. He was bragging.
“You do know this neighborhood, then,” the real estate woman said. She brushed past me into the hallway. “Great.”
He followed her somewhat reluctantly, but then turned. I suppose he was trying to determine how old I was, or would have been then. “Were you a friend?” he asked.
I shook my head. “She was much older,” I said. “Or at least then she was older. It wouldn’t seem that way now.”
The woman had paused in the hallway, the clipboard to her breast. She smiled at me patiently.
“People who seemed much older when you were young have a way of letting you catch up with them,” I went on.
She held out her arm to indicate that we should head back downstairs.
“Don’t they?”
Rick glanced at us both as if we had somehow agreed to thwart him, and then turned to once more lean into the bathroom and reinspect the master, where my parents had slept. Already I had begun to recall the way he had bent, driven his fists into his thighs. Already I had begun to wonder if it could be possible, if he had come back, not merely inadvertently found himself in a place that shocked and surprised him with its significance, but somehow planned, even manipulated this return. Downstairs, I saw him glance at the street again, at what I imagined was her house. I imagined I understood his persistence.