The Invaders (13 page)

“You're taking this too far,” Jeffrey called out.

“This is about safety,” Mary Ann shouted, not bothering to look back.

Jeffrey shook his head and stared at our disappearing neighbors. We sat down on the curb, silent for a long time.

“What's happening here?” he asked. “How'd it get to this?”

We sat there until the street lights came on and moths crowded the light.

“Cheryl, I'm unhappy,” Jeffrey said.

I had the sense that he had spent weeks drumming up the courage to say this to me right at this moment.

“I know you are, too. I don't know why you have to keep pretending like everything is fine,” he continued.

“I don't think everything's fine. Do you want me to cry so you can see
how not fine I think everything is?” I asked.

“I don't know what happened, but nothing's working anymore,” he said.

“I know this isn't working, but it can,” I said.

“I just feel worse and worse about us. I can't give you what you need.”

“How do you even know what I need?” I asked.

“It can't be this,” he said, looking at me as if he was embarrassed that I had put up with the way things were for as long as I had.

I felt like I needed to stop this from happening somehow. I heard myself saying, “I can try harder.” Even though I didn't think I would.

I even went as far as saying, “I can be better. We can get it back to how it used to be, you just have to want it.” Jeffrey looked straight ahead and nodded, like for a second he wanted to believe it, too.

Then he said, “I don't think so.”

We got up and squared off. I didn't know the right thing to say to make
him
wake up and be better. Where would I even go? Back to my mother? I had given him everything. Why was he the only one who got to choose the outcome? The lines on the asphalt were crumbling and cars were slowly driving by, weaving by us the minute their headlights picked up our lonely outlines.

“Is it someone else? Is that the problem?” I asked.

“It's just you,” he said. “It just went away.”

“Get it back. Bring it back. You can't just run away every time.”

“Do you think this is easy for me? Do you think I want to feel this way?” he yelled.

I didn't know why he wanted me to feel sorry for him, for his position in this, but I did for a moment.

“You're not thinking clearly. You need some sleep,” he said. “You can't possibly want to stay in something so toxic.”

“Don't tell me what I should think or want. I gave you everything.”

“That's not a reason for anyone to stay,” he said, as if it were a fact.

The yelp of seagulls filled the air and I watched as a car came tearing onto the road, its headlights heading straight for us. I walked toward them.

“Goddamn it, get out of the road!” Jeffrey yelped. Then he jumped out of the way without reaching to pull me to safety. And the car swerved to miss me and drove through the metal fence of the tennis courts and straight over the clay, finally stopping at the net and rolling over. Jeffrey was standing against the curb as we looked at each other and then at the car, recognizing it as Teddy's.

“What's wrong with you?” Jeffrey asked me.

We ran toward the car together. The headlights were still on and illuminated the deep grooves in the clay, the hard silt spread everywhere, the lines pulled up by the pegs. We saw that the driver-side window was open and Jeffrey dropped to his knees. The mesh of the metal fence was imprinted deep in the clay and hurt my knees as I dropped down, too.

“Teddy,” Jeffrey bleated.

He reached his arms into the car and tried to make sense of the darkness. Smoke and clay dust was sifting through the air around us as the car stayed on.

He said “Teddy” again and again.

Finally, we heard a sound and I exhaled for the first time.

The association security guard rolled down Club Parkway toward us. The track lights on the top of his Dodge Neon glowed orange and he pulled into a parking space and then stepped out of his car with no sense of urgency.

“Everything okay?” he asked.

“Call an ambulance!” I shouted.

He pulled his phone from his belt clip as he trotted back to his car. Jeffrey kept reaching his hands into the car, trying to tug. I reached for Jeffrey's arms.

“Jeffrey, you might hurt him,” I said.

“Don't touch me,” Jeffrey said, and I pulled back.

We both leaned down and tried to peer into the car at Teddy. He looked like a trapped animal. We told him not to move. He had a cut over his eye and blood poured out over everything, turning the scene gruesome. I held onto his hand while Jeffrey got up and ran to the security guard, whose name, I think, was Pete.

“Teddy, can you hear me?” I asked.

He was young again in that car seat, the first time his face betrayed his feelings in a long time. He wasn't pretending to be bad or good or adult. He was in there, mewling, scared.

“They're coming to help. They'll be here soon.”

“Did I hit anyone?” Teddy whimpered.

“No,” I said, hunched down low.

“I'm sorry,” he said.

“It was an accident,” I said.

“It wasn't your fault,” Jeffrey said, coming back behind me to comfort Teddy.

I clutched Teddy's hand, my knees bruising on the ripped-up fence. I looked to see where Jeffrey was, but he had disappeared. I heard sirens and I knew Teddy heard them, too. I told him it would be okay soon, that they would get him out. I asked him what hurt as I rubbed his hand and he said, “I can't feel you touching me.”

•  •  •

The club said the summer tennis tournaments might have to be scrapped because the courts were a disaster after the accident. Jeffrey had stayed silent about what we had talked about before the crash and I could only assume it was because he couldn't possibly handle taking care of Teddy alone.

The impact had detached two nerves in Teddy's right arm and rendered it numb and immobile below the elbow for the foreseeable future.
He sat in bed or on the sofa staring out into the ocean each day, just silent. Simple things like putting on a shirt or pants were suddenly difficult. He would snap at any suggestions of help because he was making an attempt at going it alone. I told him things like
you need us
,
we
'
re here for you
, and other words of encouragement, but he only really said anything when we were going to and from physical therapy or the other specialists we had to see. And then it was just various words of disappointment and questions of
when
and
how long
.

I was still staying away from the nature preserve. No one asked me why. I knew Teddy wasn't happy, no matter what we did. I thought if I was kinder to him he would never suspect that I had walked in front of the car. He had never asked how we had gotten to him so quickly. Time always seemed distorted during moments of tragedy.

The only thing was, sometimes the phone would ring and I would pick it up and there would just be the faintest breath inhaling and exhaling on the other end of the line. Sometimes I would ask, “Who is it?” But the breath just kept rasping. Sometimes I would stay on the line for five minutes and just count the breaths. The person never hung up; I always had to.

The last time it happened, I whispered “Steven?” and waited for an answer. There was none. I started to think about the way he had looked at me when I'd seen him with Lori. His lingering glance had morphed into a sustained look and I could remember the color of his eyes. I picked up the phone again and dialed. My mother's number had been disconnected.

I had sent my mother another check and it was returned, too. This time I got it before Jeffrey did. I knew I had to go to her, find her. I was afraid of what would be there, but I had avoided it long enough. I didn't want to sit in the house with Teddy as he scratched his arm, hoping to get it to move, to have feeling again. He was leaving sores in the hard-to-see places, but when I helped him out of his shirt I could see his
frantic attempts to prove that this was all temporary. I had to get out, even if just for a while.

Maybe my mother had moved to New Mexico to live with my sisters in some vast desert town. I looked up their addresses on Google Maps and stared at the space and destitution of their squat square homes. I tried to look up their numbers, but they were unlisted. I knew my attempts were feeble. I couldn't practice what I would say to any of them if I saw them again.
I chose him, I was wrong.
No amends seemed enough. I stared at the old trucks in their driveways and daydreamed about what their lives must be like. I saw cacti bent over in the sun in their front yards. I tried to move the camera on their streets and into their dirt driveways, closer to the windows so I could look inside, but I could only shift left and right along the main road. A hedge hid Vanessa's house from me. I wish I could see a person. I typed in my mother's address and clicked the street view on the map. A blue ranch with chipping paint. It seemed like autumn in the picture because the leaves on the trees were orange and yellow. I wondered how often they updated these photos. Had it been taken last fall? The fall before? Was her house really in this much disrepair? I tried to zoom in again and noticed a shiny material in the windows. I leaned closer to the computer screen.

My mother had tinfoil masking her windows.

I clicked the window closed in embarrassment.

I asked Jeffrey to take Teddy to his doctor's appointment and got into the car.

I-95 had fewer cars on it than usual and I thought about how Jeffrey hadn't even asked where I was going. He didn't care.

When we were kids, my sisters and I thought our mother's house was the world. The pond, the woods, and the farmland, where we would creep around to watch the cows sleep. We would hunt frogs and kick over stink cabbage, screaming as it erupted in the sulfuric
smells of decay. Our hair would hang down loose around our faces as we used sticks as knives and pretended to spear each other, hunted for one another in the deep woods. We were always playing attack. Sometimes we'd crowd around the small stone headstone we had found in those woods. Laurel, it said. There was no last name. It was one of those hand-carved markers and we had different ideas about where it had come from. We imagined our mother asking one of her men to haul it out back for her, doing things her own way, not letting anyone know her business, not even us. We would run through the woods carrying our sticks high, chanting Laurel, Laurel, Laurel, resting only to cast spells of protection for our lost sister.

I parked across the street from my mother's house and looked up and down the road: modest homes dotted yards that were encircled by trees. The area was surrounded by farms or old remnants of farms. I hesitated before crossing the street, not wanting to move past what I had been able to see in the Google street view. The trees were lush and thick and bore down on the small blue house. The windows did indeed have tinfoil on them, crinkled in some places, and I shuddered. My mother would never . . . Our family home would never look like this.

I didn't know the woman who shut the world out with scraps of tinfoil and tape.

I finally made my way onto the lawn. There was no car in the driveway and I couldn't imagine she had ever cleaned out the garage. I couldn't look into the windows because of the tinfoil, so I went around the back, checking behind me to make sure no one was looking. All the windows had tinfoil on them, even the pane on the back door. What was my mother doing in there? I couldn't even begin to imagine. There was nothing in the backyard and it looked overgrown. The front yard did, too, as I walked back around to the front door.

I knocked and pressed my ear against it. I didn't hear a sound. She had taken away our keys when we left, saying she didn't like drop-in visits.
It hadn't even crossed my mind. I walked into the woods and tried to remember the way we used to go to find our sister Laurel.

It was as if the terrain had changed completely. Missing trees and layers of dry leaves, years of them, covered up any sign of our little stone. I stood in the woods and thought about how fearless we had been and how fearful I was now, even before Steven. As kids, we had spent hours getting lost and never felt concerned about finding our way again. We were explorers, through and through. Sometimes we'd daydream about staying in the woods forever, being close to Laurel and building a family of wild girls. And now she was a nowhere girl, forgotten under all these leaves. I stared at our house through the trees and at the small window that used to be ours, the small gravel patch underneath it, and walked toward it.

On hot nights my sisters and I would strip down to our underwear and run around the room we shared, arms flapping like we were crazy. We'd lounge around reading fashion magazines and trying on our mother's makeup. We were in a rush to be women, to be looked at and admired. In the winter, with the wood stove burning hot in our room, we'd be nearly naked, window wide open, hoping the smoke would pour out, mouths up against the window screen breathing in the sharp, cold air. Sometimes we'd hear footsteps on the gravel and stare at the window, wondering who was watching us in the dark. We'd dare one another to take off our bra tops and we'd strut around in front of the window, trying to get the phantoms to want us, practicing at being grown up. We'd always aim ourselves toward the window when we'd hear that gravel crackle and put on a show. When we'd walk outside the window in the daytime we'd find crushed-up cigarette butts and our stomachs would tingle, knowing it wasn't a raccoon out there, or a possum, making all that noise. It was a man. Someone who wanted to look at us for a change, someone who couldn't get enough. In the winter we'd find them, too, covered in snow, wet through. We felt invincible
then because we had all the power in the world. We were wanted, lusted after.