The New Neighbor (32 page)

Zoe nodded. She swallowed. “I really don’t know why I came here,” she said. “I don’t know what I want from her.” She looked at me like I might have answers, but I don’t. I have none.

He came in
like all of them, on a stretcher. I saw right away that he had a chance to live—he wasn’t gut shot, he had all of his head. His hand was bandaged—it looked like a finger or two was missing—but the real trouble was his legs. He was a tall man, and I would have bet that after the surgeons got done he would be much shorter. He could wait, though. He could wait. He was moaning. He opened his eyes and saw me and in his gaze was the desperate pleading pain I’d grown used to. He said, “Please, nurse,” and automatically I soothed him. “Don’t worry, don’t worry,” I said. “We’ll take good care of you.”

But then I took in his face. You see, he was the man. He was the one. I hadn’t realized it, so focused on his injuries, on whether he would live or die. He was the one who did that to my friend. To Kay. I’d known all along what he looked like, though I’d never known his name. Because I followed her, the night she went out with him. I followed her out of the tent a few minutes after she left, and though my intent had been to call her name, to stop her, to attempt reconciliation, just as I spotted her—no, no, I was about to lie. Why? Why always lie, until we are dead? I was about to say her date appeared and stopped me speaking. But the truth is once Kay was in earshot I had minutes to catch her—three, four, maybe five—and instead I followed without speaking, without her knowing I was there. I obeyed an impulse to go unnoticed. Maybe I wanted to get a look at her date. Maybe I wanted to see the life she lived without me. Because I was jealous, or because I was curious, or afraid, or, or, or. I don’t know
why
. I just know that’s what I did.

I saw him waiting for her. He had a pitiful bouquet clearly snatched from a roadside garden, and while I couldn’t hear him, I could see by his face that he’d made a joke about it but was also proud to have it on offer. I could see his face but not hers, so I’ve never known what she was thinking. That he was sweet? That his bouquet was charming? That she was happy to go on this date, after all? Or that he was too eager, too insistent, too
something
, something she already sensed. That she didn’t want to go with him, wanted to plead a headache and go back to the tent. But back in the tent there was me.

He held her down. I don’t know exactly what happened. She didn’t tell me. I didn’t ask. That was all she said:
He held me down
.

I killed him.

If he had been gut shot he might have bled out and died screaming, and that is what should have happened, that is what should have been. But it was only the legs! In all the chaos I had no trouble injecting the extra morphine unnoticed. It wasn’t even hard. I could have considered it sufficient punishment for him to live without his legs. But that would still have been living.

Learning to say, to
mean
, “only the legs”—how could you imagine that wouldn’t do something to a person?

I keep thinking
of Jennifer’s face in the light from my little streetlamp. How, at last, the rock rolled away from the cave. I looked at her and I
saw
her. Nothing was hidden, nothing stashed away. It was astonishing to see, miraculous as starlight—a human face without a trace of the mask. At the sight of it my heart thrilled and broke. And I kept my own face in the dark, so that she would not know it.

It wasn’t when she said
I killed him
that this happened. It was when she said
I loved him
.

I’ve started rereading another Agatha Christie, in hopes that its tidy structures will help me contain my own life. Detectives are after certainty. That’s why people like them—they paper over the unsolvable with deductions and photographs.

I sit here with my book, waiting for Zoe to call.

H
e was propped
up in bed with his foot in that boot. Surgery had fixed the break, but three weeks later it still hurt. He’d been augmenting his prescription meds with other painkillers. One of his drinking buddies had a hookup, Jennifer assumed. She hadn’t asked. Tommy had taught her to be uncurious. She’d found his stash, three fat bottles in a little brown paper bag like you use for school lunches, or drinking liquor in the street. She was standing near the bed with the bag in her hand, and they were fighting. “So now the drinking’s not enough?” she said. “Why not start gambling? Why don’t you go fuck a prostitute? Or maybe you have already.” She was suddenly struck. She asked, in a small, quiet voice, “Have you?”

He had the nerve to look affronted. “No,” he said. “How could you ask that?”

She shook her head. “I don’t know what you won’t do,” she said.

“How could you say that? How could you think that? I’m in pain, Jennifer. My ankle fucking kills me all the time. The pills are for the pain. I don’t know where the rest of this is coming from.”

“You do know where,” she said flatly. And looking at his face, she could see that he did. He knew he’d failed in all the ways she said he had, and he knew he’d fail her again in the future, just as she said he would. He looked at her—raw and naked and
sorry
, so sorry—and then his expression hardened.

“Just give me the pills,” he said.

“Fine,” she said. She took all three bottles out of the bag and opened them and shook them over the bed, a rain of pills, saying, “Fine, fine, fine,” while Tommy said, “Jesus, stop it, stop it.” A furious duet. When the bottles were empty, she was panting, and she threw them at him, so that he had to duck. “Here are the pills,” she said. “Why don’t you take them. Take them all.”

She grabbed his glass from the bedside table and took it into the bathroom, where she filled it so full it spilled when she set it back down next to him. “Thought you might need this,” she said.

He was looking at her with what she thought was a dull hatred, but would seem to her later to have been blank despair. “You wish I was dead,” he said, and his voice was flat and cold with conviction.

“Wow, Tommy,” she said. “You catch on fast.”

Did she think he’d do it, when she left him there with the water and the sea of pills? Did she believe
you catch on fast
would be the last thing he’d ever hear her say? These are the questions she asks and cannot answer. With time she’s arrived at what she thinks was in his mind when he swallowed every pill she gave him. She believes he loved her, and that for him that love had always transcended everything, his transgressions and hers, and finally he’d understood that for her it no longer did, hadn’t for a long, long time. He’d thought they had a great love. She convinced him at last that it was an ordinary one. Believing that, he despaired. If his story wasn’t an epic romance, then it was a squalid little tragedy.

But it
was
a great love, Tommy. It was. And she is so, so sorry.

J
ennifer is gone.
Jennifer and her little boy. I don’t know where they went. I hope they’re happy there. I sit out on my back deck and see nothing at the house across the pond. No lights. No people. A few weeks ago I drove over there and looked in the windows. The house is empty, neat as a pin. No stray toys on the floor, no lost crayons. No clues. No evidence.

I did not mean to do them harm. I’ve never meant that. I’ve had many friends. I’ve saved many lives. I should have kept a record of all the lives I’ve saved.

Lately I go beyond standing beside the pond and imagining Virginia Woolf. Lately I fill my pockets with stones. Then I walk slowly back toward the house, tossing them out as I go. I won’t do it. There is Lucy, who may yet come visit, and now there is Zoe, who says she wants to visit, too. She has a friend she might bring down, someone who likes to hike. I think perhaps, if Zoe needs one, I might offer her a job for the summer. Her duties would be minimal. She could stay in the guest room, be there just in case. It would make Sue the librarian happy. We all get older by the day. Each breath, and we are older.

I stand at the edge of the water but I don’t ever wade in.

I will live until the last possible minute. I will have every second.

I am not sorry.

F
or more than
fifteen years I tried and failed to write a novel based on the experience of my late grandmother, born Nina Jean Riley, in the Army Nurse Corps during World War II. Though Margaret’s story bears only minimal resemblance to my grandmother’s, much of my information about what it was like to be a field-hospital nurse in the ETO came from conversations we had, as well as her scrapbook and her letters home to her parents. Kate Moore was also indispensable, in describing to me her time as a nurse with the Army Reserve in Iraq and helping me imagine what it’s like when casualties arrive. I read widely in WWII histories and found the following books particularly useful:
Women Were Not Expected
by Marjorie Peto;
G.I. Nightingale
by Theresa Archard;
Bedpan Commando
by June Wandrey;
And If I Perish: Frontline U.S. Army Nurses in World War II
by Evelyn Monahan and Rosemary Neidel-Greenlee; and
No Time for Fear: Voices of American Military Nurses in World War II
by Diane B. Fessler.

My thanks to Susan Autran for lessons on dancing and Suzanne Smith for lessons on massage; to Detective Jennifer Mitsch for invaluable advice; to Leigh Anne Couch for prompting my memory of Sewanee landmarks (I took some liberties); to Carmen Toussaint Thompson and the Rivendell Writers’ Colony for allowing me to stay there while I revised this book; and to Cheri Peters, Wyatt Prunty, and John and Elizabeth Grammer for bringing me there in the first place. I’m grateful for the support of UC’s Taft Research Center and my colleagues Jay Twomey, Michael Griffith, and Chris Bachelder.

My editor, Sally Kim, is all a writer could hope for: she always guides me toward a better version of the novel I’m trying to write. I’m so lucky to be working with her on a fourth book, and I’m grateful to her and to the other people at Touchstone, particularly Etinosa Agbonlahor. I’m equally lucky to have the fabulous Gail Hochman as my agent; she is a marvel of energy and insight. For early reads, my thanks to Holly Goddard Jones and Amanda Eyre Ward. My husband, Matt O’Keefe, line edited the manuscript, giving thoughtful consideration to every sentence, and the book is much better for his time and attention.

To my children, Eliza and Simon, thank you for letting me steal your funniest lines.

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© JASON SHELDON

Leah Stewart is the critically acclaimed author of
The History of Us
,
Husband and Wife
,
The Myth of You and Me
, and
Body of a Girl
. She received her BA from Vanderbilt University and her MFA from the University of Michigan. The recipient of a Sachs Fund Prize and an NEA Literature Fellowship, she teaches in the creative writing program at the University of Cincinnati and lives in Cincinnati with her husband and two children.