The Invaders (9 page)

I put the phone down. Unsteady again.

Jeffrey should have been at work still. And Steven could have been discovered by someone on the trail by now. I didn't hear any sirens, though.

So I just sat down and waited, careful not to touch the couch with my hands in case there was still bleach on them. I looked down and realized I had no shirt on. I threw my tank top in the garbage and covered it in leftovers from the fridge: mixing spaghetti and sauce with whatever blood might be on it. I couldn't even begin to imagine where Teddy was. I ran to lock all of the doors.

“PAULINE, GET OFF
my dick.”

She always laughed when I said it. It was too easy. She rolled away from me and back onto her lounger and we sat in the sun, drying off. Kids had taken over the pool, and old ladies swam laps in lanes. There was nowhere for us to go. When I came back from sailing, I saw Pauline putting her towel down on a pool lounger and thought,
Why not?

“I wish I was on your dick,” she whispered.

“Jesus.” I groaned and put on my sunglasses, waiting for her to stop talking. She turned over, looking pissed. Whatever, there were finally hot women at the pool, even if they had kids with them. These moms weren't wearing those bathing suits with skirts anymore. One woman even had a bikini. It was Jill from last night. She didn't have a butch haircut like everyone else, but she had a rock like the rest of them that I couldn't really compete with. She looked at me; I saw it. Pauline's eyes were shut tight, so I took off my sunglasses and checked out Jill in her bikini.

She caught me staring and took a long time pulling herself down the pool stairs and because she was right in front of me, I knew she was doing it for me. She inched down and made the necessary “it's so cold” face. I was close enough to see the goose bumps on her arms. Her arm hair was blond, not like Pauline's coarse black hairs. I had taken a risk being seen with Pauline in public. My moment of weakness was giving people the wrong impression. They would think I didn't care about aesthetics. You are, after all, only as good as the people you align yourself with. Her presence could be viewed as toxic to my success, especially with lonely women. I should have been studying sales training manuals instead of being by the pool, so I had to make this count.

Luckily, Jill finally dipped back in, careful not to get her hair wet, and she swam after her kids, who were trying to splash her. I could tell she was letting me watch her. She made a big show of it and I looked at the other mothers, the ones with the short-short haircuts and one-pieces and tight white shorts cutting off their circulation, and I knew they were watching her, too. She was new here and she wouldn't last long if she kept acting out some kind of pool fantasy, my pool fantasy, splashing around and squealing like that.

“God, shut up,” Pauline said.

I guess she wasn't impressed, either. She covered her face with a magazine.
Cosmopolitan
. “How to Orgasm 6 Ways.” Bullshit.

I returned my attention to Jill and she gave me a little wave.
Fuck, I can't do this
, I thought. She had kids. She didn't have any good secrets.

I looked up and saw old Elaine put her arms above her head and shake out. She had skin like jerky that cascaded down in flaps around her bikini as she tanned by the pool day after day. Cheryl usually tanned with her, but I didn't see her today. Where was she? Busy making my dad a meal? Cleaning her visor? She had been all right when she first started coming around. I could see what he had seen in her. She had been young and
pretty hot and hadn't had the drunken bloat my mother had. I don't think anyone in the world had. Cheryl had been so happy and grateful for the opportunity to be his wife, to be let into our community.

Jill got out quickly and made an even bigger scene of drying herself off. I liked watching her, I wasn't going to lie. She had a nice hard body and she knew it.

“Stop looking at her already,” Pauline said.

I got up and started putting on my clothes.

“I was kidding. Where are you going?” she asked.

“Home.”

“Let's go to mine,” she said.

I told her I didn't feel like it and she started to pout. Jill brushed past me, and even though we didn't touch I could feel her.

I think Pauline knew it, too. She screwed up her face and asked me what I was going to do at home.

“I gotta talk to my pops about some opportunities,” I said.

“Fuck him and fuck opportunities,” Pauline said.

She had her fine points, but respect for her elders wasn't one of them.

“Come on, Pauline. This is serious,” I told her. She looked back at me, annoyed. It was hard sometimes when you were the only one who was trying to give a shit.

Old Elaine was staring at us both, waiting for something to happen. She always took her top off when she lay down on her stomach. Who was ever going to see her tan lines, anyway? Pauline tugged at my arm and I looked down at her.

“Are we going to go or what?” she asked. I told her I was going home and slid my feet into my flip-flops and walked away. I could hear her getting pissy and packing up her stuff, but I couldn't deal with it, so I kept walking.

As I rounded the corner up toward our street I saw cop cars at the Cronins' house and I wondered if Steven had gotten busted again.
That guy was always pushing the wrong people. Bigmouthed people. Fucking idiot. I remember the morning they found tire tracks all over the third hole at the golf course when we were in high school. At first everyone thought it was an accident, and then they realized that someone had damaged the course on purpose. After that, there were always headlights beaming out from the golf course, waiting for it to happen again—someone was always on guard, wanting the assholes to come back. They behaved like they were always under some kind of threat.

It didn't end there. Each time they put up big white signs welcoming people to
LITTLE NECK COVE, A CONNECTICUT BEACH ENCLAVE,
they were set on fire or spray-painted. The new homes that were being built on Spruce were vandalized. Everyone thought it was townies, people angry that everyone in Little Neck Cove wanted to separate and have their taxes flow back into their own community for flower street dividers and not into the public schools in town. But it wasn't them. It was us: me, Joe, Steven, Chucky, and Rob. That's what was so funny. It was us all along—their own children doing it to them.

Steven was a fucking sicko, though. When we were kids, he would take french fries from the snack bar and slide toothpicks into them, then wait for the seagulls to swallow the fries up. They'd fly away, up into the air, and the toothpicks would pierce their throats and he'd watch them fall out of the sky, one by one. Or he'd catch the gulls and tie their legs together, clipping their wings and leaving them in the road to be run over. He was always weirded out by the fact that we weren't into torture as much as he was. We all had to draw the line somewhere.

There was a crowd forming near the cop cars, mostly old ladies on their way home from women's doubles. A couple of golf carts stopped in front of the house, clubs still attached. I wanted to know what was going on, but I also didn't want to be implicated in anything. I sold him
the rest of my leftover bad shit the other night and I didn't want to get my face in anyone's memory. I was done with selling, anyway.

•  •  •

At the house, Cheryl was sitting on the sofa looking so out of it. She eyed me suspiciously and I thought she might have heard the sirens or something.

“Are there police outside?” she asked. I told her they were swarming and she ran to the window to look.

“They're not coming for you, Cheryl. You can open the curtains. Jesus.”

She was not fucking amused.

“I'm not hiding,” she said.

“What's wrong with you?” I asked.

“Where are they?”

“There're like five cars in front of the Cronins' house.”

She looked at me like she really wanted to tell me something. All she said, though, was: “Steven, oh.”

I wanted to say,
Spit it out, Cheryl. Why are you so fucking weird?

“Are you going out?” she asked.

I told her I had just been out. I was tired and going upstairs. She literally stuck her hand out and I raised my eyebrows like “What?” until she had to let me go.

“Stick around,” she said. “At least until your father gets home.”

“I said I was tired,” I snapped at her.

I DIDN'T WANT TEDDY
to leave me alone, but I didn't know how to ask him to stay. I called my mother three more times while I waited for him to come downstairs, but she never answered. I wanted to tell someone what I had done. If she'd had a machine I would have confessed to it. I would have said, “I hurt someone terribly.” But no machine picked up, so I kept my mouth shut. I stared out at the ocean and saw that the sun was moving lower in the sky. Where was Jeffrey? I tried his phone again. This time it went straight to voice mail. He was somewhere that he shouldn't be while I was “leaving myself open.”

There was a commotion outside and I ran to see what was happening. I peered out through my front window and saw police cruisers. I felt like vomiting. They knew, Steven had told them. I was going to tell the police about him, about what he was going to do, and they'd realize I was the victim here. People were coming out of their houses to see. Where was Jeffrey? Everyone would see, everyone would know. Things would be said about me and I wasn't even sure that Jeffrey would defend
me. If Steven had thought I wanted it, would other people think that, too?

I opened the door, tired of waiting. I would go to them and simply explain that I had been too scared to call the police.

“I didn't do anything!” a man yelled.

I was startled when I saw two police officers push a man down on the ground and straddle him, fishing poles flying.

I backed away, like the rest of them. No one knew why the police were apprehending him, but I had an idea. He was not in this much trouble for illegal fishing. I knew then that I was a terrible person because I wouldn't come forward. This man was saving me from everything and I was letting him.

“What's going on?”

Teddy was standing behind me, wrapped in a towel, wet hair dripping on the rug.

“You should get dressed,” I said.

“What are they doing to that guy?” he asked.

“I don't know,” I lied.

“Maybe it's because of whatever was going on at Steven's,” Teddy said.

I shook my head, thinking about what a bad job Steven's mother had done of bringing him up. That boy used to do terrible things. Now, nearly an adult, his evil had accelerated. His mother was always protecting him—
Not my son, he would never.
I did the world a favor.

“Is he dead?” I asked, nearly hopeful thinking about it.

“What?” Teddy asked.

He eyed the man on the ground. “No, he's still moving,” he said.

“Not him,” I heard myself saying.

Teddy looked at me like he knew something about what I was talking about.

“What's all this now?” Jeffrey said, striding up to the house. He
looked perturbed, inconvenienced.

Teddy and I stood side by side and glared at him.

“I had to park in the club parking lot. I couldn't even get into my own driveway,” he said.

“Where were you?” I asked.

He set his briefcase down and went to see what was going on, ignoring me. The policemen were still straddling the fisherman on the ground. When were they going to let him up? I noticed a teenage girl standing and looking at the man on the ground. They could have been related. Jeffrey noticed her, too. He was eyeing her in a strange way. She was saying something in Spanish that I couldn't understand and she wouldn't stop crying. He started to go over to her and then thought better of it and turned his attention back to the man on the ground, but not before locking eyes with her.

Everyone was watching the display and Jeffrey walked up to the policemen like they weren't even busy.

“What do you think he'll do?” I asked.

“Probably tell them they're creating an eyesore,” Teddy answered.

We stared as the man tried to wriggle free and then at the cop who was trying to calm down Jeffrey, who was pointing and acting animated. We were too far away to hear what he was saying and I considered stepping closer, but I didn't want the policemen to get a good look at me. My guilt was overwhelming, but I could not move. I would not help that poor man. Jeffrey came back in a huff.

“What did they say?” I asked.

“There's been an attack,” Jeffrey said.

I covered my mouth and realized my hands still stunk of bleach. I quickly shoved them in my pockets and decided to re-check them for blood when I was alone.

“Who was attacked?” Jeffrey looked back at the police and I quickly glanced at Teddy, who was looking at me.

“We don't even know the whole story,” Jeffrey said.

“Let's not jump to conclusions then,” I said.

“Do you want to identify him?”

“What?” I asked.

“The man from yesterday. Is it him?” Jeffrey pointed to the man on the ground. His arms were being zip-tied.

“No, of course not,” I said.

“You didn't even look,” Teddy said.

“Will you both leave me alone? I hardly saw him,” I said.

“Damn, Cheryl. Chill—”

I could hardly hear the last part because I was rushing into the bathroom.

“Are you okay?” Jeffrey asked.

“Fine. Fine.” I got my bearings straight and walked out of the bathroom. My nostrils were still burning from the bleach, but there was no more blood anywhere on me.