Thy Neighbor (29 page)

She glared at me.

“And if you want your ridiculous detail, there it is. I don't love you—whatever the hell that means to you—because you're a baby. You're a self-satisfied, lucky baby who thinks he's a tragic hero because he's joined the vast majority of the rest of the human race in finding out that life is hell.”

She laughed nastily.

“You wish you had the power to hurt me? My God, do you have even the smallest inkling of how . . .
luxurious
and oblivious to actual suffering that is? Like the richest man in the world looking down on the bloody writhing pile of human misery and wondering why—O great sadness—he can't have his fresh figs today . . . It's unbelievable.”

She stopped as abruptly as she had begun, turning her head to the side away from me and staring blankly at the floor.

I was looking around the room absently, watching, out of habit, the glow of the hall light reflected in the windows across from us. The black of the nighttime windows was just barely beginning to fade. The sun would be up soon.

“I guess your story must be pretty damn bad,” I said, wearily.

She shrugged.

“No worse than anyone else's.”

“When you think about the ragpickers in India,” I agreed.

“Oh, fuck off.”

“Jeez, Mon. That's got to be four ‘fucks' for you tonight alone. And there I was thinking I had the foulest mouth.”

She turned up the edges of her lips derisively.

“Foulest mouth. Biggest pain. Deepest soul.”

“Okay, okay. Let up a little, will you? Jesus.”

“You wanted to know.”

“I know, I know . . . So I got it. Honest, I got it. You don't have to elaborate any more.”

“I won't.”

“Of course.”

“Right,” she murmured.

“For what it's worth,” I offered, “everything you said was true. I can't deny that.”

She sighed impatiently, but I went on.

“And I'm really sorry for it. Sorry because it's so shameful and exposing and petty—you're right about that—but sorriest because it's cut me off from you. Maybe it's cut me off from everyone . . . No—of course it has. You can't go around hurting and offending everyone as a matter of course and expect anything but solitary confinement. Or a good, hard slap in the face.”

“I'm sorry,” she said gently. “I lost my temper. I shouldn't have said anything.”

“No, no. It's good. I'm glad you did. You told me what I wanted to know. It's what I've always wanted to know, and I feel like I've been asking you to tell me this in a hundred ways since we met. That's what was always behind your moods, and I knew it.” I put up an appeasing hand. “Sorry, more self-pity.”

“Oh, forget it,” she said, batting my hand away. “Just forget it. Who am I to say anything to anyone?”

“Someone who's been through a lot, I think.”

She smiled sadly.

“Maybe I just read all that in a book.”

“Well, it doesn't matter. It's true and you were right.”

“All right. If you think so.” She put a heavy hand on my back. “Now maybe we should just leave it at that.”

“Yeah, okay,” I said, forcing a squelched laugh. “Just give me a sec.”

She smiled again, and moved her hand along my spine.

“Sure.”

It wasn't very long before I had the impulse to move, or maybe I was just lost in the echo of all that she'd said. Replaying. I was sitting on top of the pit, she'd said, watching it all obscenely.

So I was, I thought, so I was. So come and see.

“Come on,” I said, standing awkwardly. “I want to show you something.”

I led her to the basement steps.

“You want to see something really criminal?”

I turned and barreled down the stairs without waiting for a reply. Monica followed slowly. By the time she had gotten down the stairs, I had the locks and the door to the control room open and I was powering up the system. The screens blinked into life, revealing mostly empty or darkened rooms. A light had been left on in Dorris's bathroom, but nobody was there.

I pointed to that monitor.

“This is Dorris Katz's master bath.”

I pointed again.

“And this is her bedroom.”

Monica squinted and leaned closer.

“And these two,” I said, indicating, “are Dave Alders's bedroom and bath. Too dark to see much.”

I moved to Gruber's basement, where the light was on as usual, even though Eric wasn't in the crate.

“This is Gruber's basement,” I said. “His youngest son's a bed wetter, and every time he has an accident, he has to sleep in that crate for a month straight without incident before he can go back upstairs.”

Monica's brow furrowed.

“Man,” she said, shaking her head.

I pointed to the next monitor.

“This is Gruber's living room—also dark at the moment, unfortunately—where his wife spends her life watching TV. And this is . . .”

The light was on in the study.

Jeff was sitting in Gruber's chair.

“What is he . . . ?” I blinked and touched the screen. “Uh . . . and this is Gruber's middle son, Jeff.”

I tapped the screen gently with the nail of my index finger.

Monica pulled my hand away to get a better look.

“What is he doing?” she said, squinting again.

“Your guess is as good as mine,” I replied.

“You were just there, weren't you?”

“Yeah, but he wasn't.”

“He wasn't home?”

“He wasn't awa—” I stopped and corrected myself. “I didn't see him.”

She turned back to the screen.

“He wasn't awake?” she said.

“Well, he sure as shit wasn't in that chair.”

“Do you think he could have seen you?”

“I don't know. Maybe. If he was hiding.”

She grasped my shoulder and shook it, turning me toward her.

“Nick, what did you do over there?” Her eyes were wide and piercing. “Tell me.”

“Nothing,” I said testily, wrenching free of her grasp and turning sharply back toward the screen.

“You went into the house and did nothing?” she said flatly. “
Riiight
.”

I didn't reply.

I was looking at Jeff. He had something lying on the desk in front of him, but the angle of the camera made it impossible for me to tell what it was. It was a blurry mass in the foreground, the focus of his gaze. His face was blank, without expression, as serene as I had ever seen it.

Gruber's voice came booming from behind the camera. He must have been in the doorway.

I jumped.

“What in God's holy name are you doing in my study, boy?” Gruber shouted.

Jeff looked up calmly, but said nothing. His eyes fell again to whatever was on the desk.

Gruber must have looked, too.

“What—?” Gruber said, panicked.

His hands came into view from the top of the picture, reaching across the desk, taking up the thing that was lying there, and raising it closer to his face to get a better look.

“I told you never, ever to go near—”

Jeff's eyes were locked on Gruber's face.

“What?” he cut in, curiously.

“I said,” Gruber began, but Jeff interrupted triumphantly.

“I heard what you said.” Then, acidly, he added: “It's too late. You're too late.”

Gruber said nothing. Jeff was still watching him intently.

“What did you really think was going to happen?” Jeff said. “Something had to. Eventually.”

This was already beyond what Gruber could do. This wasn't going to be a conversation. But then, it was clear that Jeff had never intended it to be.

This was bolder than Jeff had ever been, something planned and reckless at the same time, and I wondered if I had pushed him to it. Maybe after all the beatings and humiliations and hard treatment, a kiss had finally ruptured the torpor that had held him in check for so long. He'd chosen his mother's way, fitting oblivion around him like a drug and taking the bruises less brutally as a result. But now he was wide open, and everything inside was coming out.

Monica was standing beside me as shocked as I was and feeling the same mute tension of something terrible impending. But she seemed more thrilled than concerned, hunched and greedy for the reveal, as if this really were just happening on television as entertainment and she was the riveted audience, willing the plot to resolve.

I started to ask if she was all right, but she waved me away impatiently.

“Shhhh.”

Gruber was still looking at the thing in his hands.

Jeff saw this with satisfaction, then dropped his eyes thoughtfully and began to speak.

“All this time . . .” he said calmly. “All this time I thought so much about how to be your son.”

His voice broke slightly, and he paused to gather himself, swallowing and breathing through his nose.

“I tried so hard for so long to figure out how to please you . . . And, you know, all I ever did was fail. Always—fail. And you hated me. You hated us all. Still. The same as ever.”

His face took on the puzzled expression of a person saying something aloud for the first time and experiencing his own words as a revelation.

“So then I thought, okay, this is never going to change. This is the sentence. Do the time. Just survive . . . And, you know, I thought that would be enough. I'd make it through, leave, and never come back—start again somewhere else and spend the rest of my life free. There has to be a better life out there, I thought. I'll find it. And this place—you, all of it—will just go away.

“But then somewhere along the way I realized that that wasn't true. The world isn't really a better place at all, and just surviving isn't enough.”

He sighed heavily.

“Because you take it all with you. No matter where you go, or who you're with, the world you walk into always has you in it, and you're not just some easy guy who did his time and shook it off and kept on going. You're the kid who grew up in your dad's house.”

He looked up accusingly at Gruber, his brow contorting fiercely.

“And you know who that guy is? That guy's a really pissed-off, broken-up son of a bitch who takes after the old man.”

He stopped, checking Gruber's face again for recognition, or the progress of an emotion he had sought to provoke.

“And that's why, if you want to know,” he said, nodding at what Gruber still had in his hands. “Because I can't have a better life. I can't get out. I'm stuck here with you no matter what I do . . . and while I am . . .”

He was struggling through a sob.

“I'm going to get you back, you rotten scumbag piece of shit, and I'm going to keep on getting until you die of it or you kill me . . . Yeah, that's right—until you kill me, if you even have the balls. I'm not afraid of that anymore. Go ahead.”

He gestured at the guns on the wall.

“Take your pick.”

Gruber didn't move or say anything.

Jeff swiveled in the chair, raised his right leg, and kicked his foot through the glass display case. He kicked three more times around the edge of the first point of impact, and the whole of the left pane came down in pieces to the floor. He reached in, picked out one of the pistols, and sat back in the chair, holding the gun loosely in his lap. He lifted it limply.

“I thought about using one of these to do it,” he said, glaring into Gruber's face. “But I wanted—I wanted to feel it, you know? I wanted to feel the life going out of her . . . I wanted to feel her heart stop beating and her whole body go slack. I wanted to squeeze and see if she would fight or if she would know what was coming. I wanted to look into her eyes and see if she was afraid, or if something there would go blank when her neck snapped.”

Gruber roared, “Noooooo.”

“Oh, Jesus,” I said, moving to flip the switch. “I'm turning this off.”

Monica grabbed my wrist. “Don't touch it,” she snapped.

Her eyes were hard on the monitor.

Jeff was smiling thinly, his eyes shadowed with satisfaction.

“Does it hurt?” he said. He seemed to be asking Gruber, but then he answered as if to himself.

“I don't think so. Maybe I should have done something that hurt. Slowly. Maybe the vice in the woodshop? Would that have worked?”

Gruber made a lunge forward with one arm, but Jeff pointed the gun toward him.

“Ah, ah. Take it easy, old man. Back off.”

Gruber pulled back slowly. Still cradling Iris in his left hand, he brought her body to his cheek, held it there, and closed his eyes.

“Oh . . .” He moaned. “She was inno—”

Jeff reared up out of the chair.

“Innocent?” he screamed. “Is that what you meant to say? Fucking innocent? Well, guess what. So was I. So was Mom. So were all of us,
father
 . . . But somehow you couldn't feel for us what you felt for her, could you? You couldn't protect us and pet us and baby talk to us, could you? You couldn't bathe us and feed us by hand? You could hardly bear to be in the same room. Why was that?”

He paused, rhetorically, reading Gruber's face and the truer signal of his hands, which had begun shaking violently.

“You know, I thought about that, too, when I was killing her.”

Gruber moaned again, and pressed Iris closer.

“Well, right before, actually. I thought, what is it about her that he loves so much? That he
can
love? So damned much. And I couldn't get an answer. I couldn't figure it out.”

“You have no idea what you've done,” Gruber said, his voice now shaking, too. “You have no idea.”

“I've done what I meant to do,” Jeff hissed ecstatically. “And maybe a lot more, which as far as I'm concerned is a bonus.”

“You—” Gruber began, but Jeff cut him off, screaming again, his voice breaking hoarsely with the effort.