The neighbor had the porchlight switched on; she could see him as clearly as if he were under a spotlight. Even though he had to be at least fifty years old, he still had long hair. There was something about him, the way he could play for hours as if he were playing for his plants so they’d grow better. It seemed like the kind of thing a person from the ’60s would believe in. Her neighbor was old enough to be her father, and yet he was as different from her father—and from Hank—as a man could be. How different would she have turned out if she’d had a father like him? His music infected her, the way it danced around her, drawing her to his fence.
Becky pressed her body against the metal mesh until the flute notes tapered off. She listened to the click as the neighbor went inside, locking the door behind himself. Lights went on and off in his kitchen and bathroom. How safe other people’s houses looked from the outside. His face appeared in the bedroom window before he pulled down the shade. He never saw me, she reminded herself. I was watching him the whole time, but he never knew. That knowledge made her shiver and feel a little creepy, as if she were some kind of ghost.
* * *
Hank kept his gun in the top dresser drawer. Becky often saw him take it out and oil it. He was very proud of his gun. She had never been able to ask him why he bought it or what he intended to use it for. When he was gone, she opened the drawer and just looked at it. Would she ever have the nerve to aim it at someone, pull the trigger? Would such an act make her weak or strong, a heroine or a coward? Aim it at Hank? At her dad? Jesus, she was crazy to even be thinking like that. But sometimes when she wiped the counter at Denny’s on East Lake Street, she imagined herself acting out a scene from
Thelma and Louise,
imagined the exploding bullet and seeing him—Hank, her father, their faces blurring together—crumple backwards, away from her, a puddle at her feet.
Neil picked bruised windfall apples from under the tree in his front yard. This earthy, brainless task calmed him. He tried to breathe deeply, rhythmically—his pulse was still ragged from the emergency room. Alicia, his favorite colleague, had a breakdown that day. They had wheeled in a ten-year-old boy with knife wounds from a fight that had taken place on the grounds of his elementary school. Alicia had an eight-year-old who went to the same school. She had started wailing, and the head doctor sent her home. The anguish on her face still haunted Neil.
He tried to focus on the garden. When he finished picking the fallen apples, he would throw them in the compost heap out back, then go to work picking tomatoes and zucchini, which were growing faster than he could eat, freeze, and can them. As he reached down, he felt a shooting pain near his lumbar vertebrae. Cautiously he pulled himself upright. A slipped disc was all he needed. He tried to reason with his body. It’s just muscular tension. Have a hot bath and it will be fine.
Breathing in slowly, he heard footsteps coming down the sidewalk. Through the metal links of the front gate, he saw the young woman from next door lug a bulging sack of groceries. She staggered with each step. He raised his hand, about to call out something friendly, but her face was shadowed, downcast. He didn’t want to startle her. Her grocery bag was printed with the logo of the local supermarket, which was understocked and exorbitantly priced. Why didn’t she shop at North Country Co-op, he wondered, or one of the East African groceries? As she moved out of his range of vision, he thought of her emptying her wallet to buy mushy hothouse tomatoes, waxy apples, and rubbery broccoli in the zenith of the garden season.
In the distance firecrackers went off, or were they gunshots? Although this neighborhood wasn’t nearly as bad as Phillips or Northside, he’d read in the paper that a Somali teenager had been shot over near the high-rise apartment blocks on Riverside Plaza—where Mary Tyler Moore used to live in the television show. He couldn’t stop thinking of Alicia, how she had just lost it, unable to take in the sight of one more sliced-up kid.
Sound system blasting, the neighbor’s Mustang boomed past, then screeched to a halt. Ten minutes later, as if by appointment, the yelling started again. In summer with the windows open day and night, there was no privacy. Seeking shelter in his kitchen, he tried out to drown out their voices by running zucchini through the food processor, but when he stopped the machine, he heard, “Becky, you stupid cunt…”
He started the machine again so he wouldn’t hear the rest.
* * *
Becky opened the door to find a brown paper bag with deep red tomatoes and green and purple basil spilling over the top. Wasps buzzed around the bag. She glanced next door, but her neighbor didn’t seem to be home—no sounds came from his house or yard. Hank was meeting his buddies after work, so he wouldn’t be home until late. Hugging the bag to her chest, she carried it into the kitchen, set it down on the table, and flicked away the remaining wasps before pulling out the contents one by one, arranging them on the scarred Formica. A perfect head of romaine lettuce wrapped in paper towels. Cucumber and prickly zucchini. An old plastic yogurt container full of raspberries, a second one with gooseberries. Huge sweet bell peppers in green, red, and gold. At the very bottom, a small watermelon. After emptying the bag, she shook it upside down hoping to find a note from him, something like,
Hope you enjoy the veggies
, or,
Compliments of my garden
. But there was no message. She tried not to feel disappointed, but it would have been nice to find out was his name was.
The watermelon looked so good. Before she knew it, she had the big kitchen knife in her hand. She drove the blade through the rind and into the flesh until red juice ran over the kitchen table. After cutting herself a piece, she let the juice drip down her chin. It had been so long since she’d had really good fresh fruit. What was she going to tell Hank when he saw this stuff and asked her where it came from? She could already hear his voice, as cutting and sarcastic as her father’s. “So did you hitchhike to the farmer’s market? Or did the freak next door give them to you?”
On Sunday, Hank had caught her staring through the fence into the neighbor’s garden—the neighbor hadn’t even been home—but Hank had taken her by the shoulders. “Trying to make me jealous?”
She laughed stupidly, like someone on TV.
Har, har, har
. Then he hit with his closed hand, his fist. Not a slap that time. It hadn’t left an awful bruise or anything that makeup couldn’t hide, but the skin around her cheekbone was still tender.
When do you turn into a battered woman? she asked herself, holding the container of raspberries and staring into that deep redness. How bad did it have to get, how much harder would he have to hit her, before it was real?
What would she do with the fruit and vegetables? Eat what she could now and throw the rest away? But they were so beautiful, so perfect. The neighbor had given them to her. He wanted her to have them and she was keeping them. She had to rock herself and laugh at the thought of something that was hers, that she wouldn’t surrender.
Hours later, her voice dragged Neil out of a deep sleep.
“I’m warning you, Hank! If you ever do that again!”
“You’re warning me, huh? Well, bitch, what are you gonna do about it? Just what are you gonna do?”
The hands of Neil’s alarm clock hung suspended, green phosphorescence in the dark, spelling out the time—3:00 a.m.
“Damn it, Hank! I’m warning you…”
Slumped on the bed, Becky saw and tried not to see the ruined room, walls and ugly beige carpet smeared with the remains of the fruit and vegetables. What was worse was the pulp smashed in her hair and down the front of her clothes. Hank had locked himself in the bathroom and made no sign of coming out. Had he passed out in there? It was nearly 4:00 a.m. She had to get ready for work. Scooping the raspberry pulp out of her hair, she tried to hold it, then licked it off her fingers. In spite of everything, it still tasted nice, like the kind of raspberry purée she imagined they would serve in fancy restaurants.
One look at the clock—4:15—told her that she couldn’t waste any more time. She would have to wash her hair in the kitchen sink and let it dry on the bus ride to work. Dragging herself to the dresser to get some fresh underwear, she instead found herself opening the top drawer where the gun was nestled among Hank’s coiled belts. She picked it up, felt the smooth metal, its weight in her hands.
That evening there was no way to shut out the flute music. It was too hot to close the windows. The TV had been wrecked in the fight the night before. Hank stuck his head in his Discman and cracked open a beer. He acted as if the fight were a blank in his memory.
Becky didn’t dare go near the fence but just sat down on the back steps, closed her eyes, and listened. Neil, she thought. When she had come home, she found a letter addressed to him that had landed in her mailbox by mistake— from some woman in Bainbridge Island, Washington State named Gina Martinelli. Before Hank arrived back, she had slipped it into the neighbor’s mailbox.
His music was so beautiful that it pierced her. It sounded Irish, like one of those old laments. Everything was in a minor key, lovely but unbearably sad. She couldn’t hold them in anymore, these stupid tears. She hated tears, hated her mother for the way she had gone off sniveling from her dad’s outbursts, never sticking up for herself. Becky had thought she could be different, that she would never let herself cave in, but that was exactly what she was doing, crouching on the stoop and pulling her knees to her chest. Her body convulsed, arms, shoulders, neck heaving. This was it. She was losing it. Losing.
An explosion shattered Neil’s sleep. Gunshots. Sharp, metallic, irrevocable. He jerked upright. The shots were being fired next door, barely thirty feet away from his bed. Counting six shots, he listened for her voice, for screams, pleas, cries, but there was only silence. Six shots, then that gaping void. Throwing on some clothes, he crept out into the backyard. The moon was just past full, now waning, sinking into darkness. Parting the Virginia creeper, he glimpsed her through the links in the fence. She clutched herself with crossed arms like a lost soul.
He wouldn’t do it—he would not call the police or phone for an ambulance. He knew none of the neighbors would get involved. Rolling his head back, he stared at the scattered stars revolving in a dance too slow to see. Let her get away with it, he thought, shocking himself. Let her get away with murder. Going to the fence again, peering through the links at the moon-bleached woman, he called her name.
She walked numbly around the side of the house to his gate, which he unlocked for her. Shivering, she kept rubbing her skinny bare arms. The only thing he could think to do was put his arm around her and guide her through his door and into his kitchen, where she gazed blankly at the dried herbs hanging from the ceiling.
“Becky, do you want to tell me what happened?”
Turning to him, she took an unsteady step forward, then lost her balance. He caught her before she could fall. “He was too drunk to move,” she said. “I shot him in the back. Like a real coward! I just shot him in the back, and after the first shot, I couldn’t stop.”
He cradled her as she wept, stroked her soft dark hair, cut very short, exposing the fine bones of her face, her large and fearful eyes. He could feel her pulse, much faster than his own, like wings beating frantically—a small bird taking flight.
Becky awakened to insistent electronic beeps, the digital alarm. 4:04. Her hair was damp with perspiration. The sheets were clammy.
“Would you shut that fucking thing off?” Hank rolled over and covered his face with the pillow. He didn’t start work until 9:00.
Her pulse raced as she remembered her dream. She had been a bird—a barn swallow—and she had been flying. That feeling of freedom and weightlessness had been so incredible, but then the dream had shifted, and she had turned into a hawk with talons for ripping flesh. Swooping down on a rabbit, she had torn into the soft fur until blood laced her feathers. But the killing and the blood hadn’t seemed repulsive in her dream, just a thing of nature, a call she had to answer. Walking to the bus stop, she savored the dream, the sinewy power in her wings and talons. It was payday. She knew exactly what she had to do.
Neil was working overtime in the emergency room to cover for Alicia, whose breakdown had been even more serious than he had first thought—she had been hospitalized and would need to take a long leave of absence.
They always seemed to get their worst cases in August when the heat and the glare of the sun gave rise to the most sickening acts of violence. Like a factory line worker, he extracted bullets from flesh and disinfected wounds. Yesterday they brought in a homeless woman who had been raped and then stabbed twenty times. She had lost so much blood that she couldn’t be saved. Alicia was the one who used to work with rape victims—she had done it very well—but the homeless woman was so far gone, not even Alicia could have given her solace. It was getting to be too much, even for him. All week he had been having dreams that made him lurch awake in sweat-soaked sheets: nightmares of the young woman next door gunning down her boyfriend.
Yesterday a letter from Gina, his ex, had arrived. They divorced in 1981. She had been sick of the neighborhood and his lack of ambition. “Everyone else has moved on, but you’re not going anywhere,” she’d told him. “You’re stuck here like one of your plants.” She had gone to Seattle to ride the waves of the software boom and then the dot-com boom. Presently she worked freelance out of her ’20s bungalow on Bainbridge Island, her existence comfortably cushioned by investments and stock options. The one time he had visited her there, the thing that had struck him most was how white and affluent everyone was. He and Gina were still good friends. Since he was the only person on the planet who didn’t have e-mail, they wrote letters every month.
For the past few years, she had been trying to convince him to move. He was welcome to stay with her until he found a job and a place to live. Just down the street from her house was a folk club where he could play his flute. He had to admit that her offer was tempting. Gina would help him find a job in some pristine clinic where his patients would be programmers and engineers, where he would never have to look at another torn-up, bleeding homeless person. If he didn’t get out soon, he would end up like Alicia.