Good Neighbors

After their teenage neighbor was arrested for attempting a mass shooting at the high school; after the FBI and SWAT teams blocked off their street for three hours as her children barricaded themselves in the kitchen with couch cushions, afraid the armed officers were coming to arrest them; after their other neighbor—the elderly man—told Claire he’d heard the teen’s father had been arrested too, for resisting arrest on behalf of his son, that he’d been shot with a bean bag gun and taken on a stretcher to the hospital; after Claire learned that they’d found a stockpile of weapons in the basement and neo-Nazi propaganda, which the father had been spreading online, Claire could not sleep.

She lay in bed, her head beneath the window overlooking their teenage neighbor’s house, thinking about what it would feel like to wake to glass shattering and the rapid gunfire of a semi-automatic weapon. She pictured her children, asleep, pierced by stray bullets. She didn’t want to imagine it, and yet she could not stop. Night after night her mind flooded with scenarios. She was shot in the arm, Jack shot in the head, their tiny son bleeding out at the top of the stairs. The haze of her days bled into the sleeplessness of her nights, and in any given moment, she could not be completely sure whether or not she was dreaming.

If she could muster the energy to cook her children eggs for breakfast, she inevitably screwed them up. Fried eggs were overcooked, scrambled eggs too watery. When at last she thought she’d gotten it right, her son whined, “Too salty,” sounding at age three like a cranky old man. What percentage of jerks were born that way, she wondered. How much was nature, how much nurture—or, what society really meant: How much was the mother’s fault? Before Claire had kids, she’d been the first to blame the parents when children misbehaved. But now, she sometimes wondered what her own children were capable of.

Would they, one day, attempt to bring a gun to school?

It pained her to admit that she could not be sure. Her children were autonomous creatures, they made choices for themselves—which, she still believed, was part of what made her a good mother. She was raising kids who could think for themselves. Wasn’t that the goal?

Since the gun incident, she drank more and more coffee, but it never made her feel awake. She was exhausted and wired. She used to be patient—a friend once said that Claire was the most patient person she’d ever met. That was before she had kids. But even after they were born, when they cried as newborns or threw toddler fits, she would stay calm while Jack would grow frustrated and angry. He’d yell at the kids to stop screaming, which of course only made it worse. For years, Claire didn’t understand why he couldn’t comprehend that a crying child needed to be held and comforted, and why he was incapable of providing that. But without sleep, Claire grew more like him, irritable and jumpy. When her children screamed, she could almost feel their sound waves piercing her skin and slicing her nerves. She screamed back at anyone in proximity—the kids, Jack, the cat.

“What’s up with you?” he asked one night after they’d put the kids to bed and Claire slammed her dresser drawer shut while changing into her pajamas.

Being called out on her anger infuriated her more. “What do you think?” she wanted to ask, partially because she was curious what he thought. But she looked at him before she spoke and saw, for the first time in a long time, that he was worried about her. For months, he seemed to have hardly noticed her. Now here he was, looking at her with his blue eyes, so softly, and it made Claire feel ashamed. That was how he used to look at her, back when she thought she had to give him a reason to look at her that way, with cute outfits and mermaid hair. A waste of time, she realized now, because he would have looked at her that way regardless—in the beginning, when he was madly in love.

“I’m just so tired.” She felt the heat rising behind her eyes.

“Come on,” he said, pulling her toward him and wrapping his arms around her. “You need to sleep.”

She melted in his arms and rested her head against his chest. “I know, but I can’t. How can you sleep knowing what might have happened—and might still?”

“They confiscated the guns. Terry and his son were arrested. There’s nothing to worry about,” Jack said, his voice calm. “We’re safe.”

Claire couldn’t remember the last time she’d been soothed by his voice, and she closed her eyes, locking the sound to memory. But in a moment her anxiety was back. “They’re hardly printing anything about this in the paper. It’s like they’re protecting them.”

“Well, the boy is a juvenile.” Jack combed his fingers through her hair. “They probably are protecting him.”

“But that’s not fair. He almost committed mass murder. No matter how young he is, people have a right to know.” She moved to the edge of the bed with her back facing Jack.

“You have to stop,” he said.

“Stop what?”

“Stop thinking about all of this. Especially right before bed. It’s been three weeks and the kid’s in jail. He’s not doing anything.” He put his hand on the small of Claire’s back. She bristled. “Look, I wasn’t going to say anything,” Jack went on, “but I think you should see someone.”

“What do you mean, ‘see someone’?”

“You know, like a therapist.”

“You’re telling me I need a therapist?” Clare scoffed. “If one of us needs a therapist, it’s you.”

“You need to figure out how to sleep.”

“I know how to sleep. I’ve been doing it my whole life.”

“Then why can’t you do it now?”

She shook her head. “Maybe we should move.”

“There’s no way we can afford to move right now.”

“So what are you saying? We’re stuck here living next to a would-be murderer and his neo-Nazi father?”

“I guess. Yeah.”

“No amount of therapy is going to make me feel safe in this house.”

“Maybe we should get a dog.”

“And where do you think we’re going to find the time to take care of a dog?” Claire asked.

“It’s going to be okay,” Jack tried to reassure her. “I won’t let anything happen to us.”

Claire almost laughed, but she held it back. She knew that whatever bad the universe had planned for them would come to fruition, despite his best attempts at protection. She remembered a story she once read in a newspaper about a husband who had lain on top of his wife on their bed during a tornado. The roof had caved in on top of them, crushing him, but the woman had lived. Despite how Jack saw himself, Claire didn’t believe he was the sacrificing type. Not for her or the kids.

Claire feared the worst, but she knew deep down that Jack was right. They weren’t safe, exactly, but their lives would continue on in this way. Their marriage a shadow of what it once was, their children growing up every day while her and Jack’s parenting skills lagged behind. They would continue to find each other, night after night, in this room. Everything in it a reminder of the people they once were. Their wedding photo with those smiles, so youthful now, transported her back to a time when the air they breathed seemed filled with limitless possibility. They were so full of good feelings for each other and the world. That was youth, Clare thought. That was love.

***

Claire caved on the dog. It was impossible not to. The night after Jack brought it up, he began texting her links to puppies he found online. Of course, they were adorable. She fought him off for about ten rounds. But then he sent her a mini Goldendoodle. It had the saddest eyes Claire had ever seen. She wanted to take that puppy and give it a better life.

In reality, the puppy only further incited her rage.

Since they’d gotten the dog, their house never smelled the way it once did, and this fact alone made Claire certain she’d made a mistake.

She had known she would end up being the one to do most of the work, but Claire had not understood that she would be waking up at 5:00 a.m. to let the puppy out, feed her, then let her out to go potty again and again in the middle of everything else she had to do.

One morning as the kids sat at the kitchen island, counting the days until Halloween while they  awaited their scrambled eggs, the dog peed on the foam mat Jack had put by the sink to cushion their feet while they washed dishes. Claire didn’t notice until she stepped in it, the warm liquid oozing out of the mat onto her bare feet.

“Luna!” Claire yelled, pointing at the mat. “No, no, no, no!”

She kneeled, sopping the wetness with a paper towel. Luna got excited and started leaping around her and nipping at Claire’s face.

“Get out of here!” Claire screamed. “I didn’t even want you!”

Margot immediately grew offended. “You didn’t want my birthday present?” she asked.

“She wasn’t your birthday present. She’s the family dog,” Claire reminded her, a fact Margot didn’t seem to comprehend, because the dog had arrived days before her birthday, at her urging.

Jack, still in bed upstairs, heard Claire screaming and yelled her name down the stairs. Claire quieted.

“Why don’t you want Luna?” Margot asked.

Claire took a deep breath. “She’s a sweet dog,” she said, trying to be generous. “She’s just a lot of work for Mama.”

“I’m on the stairs,” Jack’s voice rose from the next room as if warning them not to say another word about him. “I’m coming now.” When he reached the kitchen, he said, “Morning,” and Claire was embarrassed that he’d heard her raging at the dog. He prepared his coffee with hardly a word, then went onto the back deck to drink it with the puppy.

Claire followed him with her own coffee after giving herself a moment to cool.

“I think we should give the dog to your parents,” she said with forced calm. “They just lost Zadie. Now is the perfect time, while they still miss having a dog, before they get a new one.”

“You’re insane.” He bent down to pet the dog’s neck. “She’s our dog. We adopted her. We’re not going to just give her away.”

Claire thought of her grandmother, who had tried to give her own daughter away during the Great Depression. Her grandmother had arrived on her neighbor’s doorstep, hoping to relieve herself of her tiny burden. But the neighbors refused. Claire was like her grandmother, she realized, trying to unburden herself of another body to feed and clean up after, and she felt like a monster. She dropped the subject, but she couldn’t stop thinking about the commitment she’d made. The dog would probably live fifteen years. This was the life Claire had chosen for herself until she was in her fifties. She looked down the street toward their neighbors’ house, wondering why she’d ever thought a dog could make her feel safe.

***

It was Halloween, and they took the kids trick-or-treating. Otto wore a hedgehog costume he loathed. He fought Claire, screaming, as she pulled the hedgehog-faced hoodie over his head.

“If you don’t wear the costume, you won’t get candy,” Margot said. So he relented, and as soon as the first fun-size M&Ms plopped into his bag, he forgot about his discomfort.

Margot was a bunny. They had the ears from Easter, so all Claire had to do was dress her in white, paint some whiskers on her face, and stitch a pom-pom onto the back of her shirt. It had cost her less than two dollars and that’s exactly what she needed now—low-cost solutions. Sometimes she wondered if they’d ever recover financially after their move from California to Maine. It had been two years, but with her not working and Jack not making much as a carpenter, she didn’t imagine things would change anytime soon. Claire ushered the kids down the street in the opposite direction of the home of their recently-arrested neighbors.

The kids ran from house to house knocking on doors, Margot in the lead and Otto trailing behind. He didn’t understand trick-or-treating and tried to enter the front door of every home they knocked on. It was funny, the way some people stepped aside to let him pass. Claire would stand in the doorway calling his name. “It’s not your house, honey,” she said, soon realizing the only way to lure him out was with the promise of candy next door.

Her children behaved so well for candy, perfect little angels, and Claire was proud of the way they said thank you each time as she’d instructed. But she knew their good behavior was only temporary, until the sugar kicked in from the pieces she unwrapped for them as they walked.

They circled the neighborhood in a two-block radius and headed back toward the house. It was a quick night for Halloween, but Claire was tired, and so was Jack. She could tell by the way he had grown quiet. Only three more blocks and they’d be home and could tuck the kids in and have a moment to themselves.

The kids were running up ahead, but Claire didn’t mind. She had her eye on them, and Jack was a few paces behind them. She was enjoying her moment of emotional freedom, of letting him do the work for one second while she savored the bite-sized Reese’s peanut butter cup she’d stolen from Otto’s bag. No kids, not even the dog to command her attention. She was in complete control of her thoughts. And yet, she could think only of her family, what they’d need to do at home to get ready for bed. The bath, the brushing of teeth—or the fighting over the brushing of teeth. What level of resistance could she expect tonight? She looked up and saw Jack running after the kids. The dog pulled at the leash so hard Jack stumbled. The kids were running through the gate of a chain-link fence, down the sidewalk, toward the steps that led to the front porch.

It was the house.

She lunged forward as if to stop them, but she was half a block behind. Margot and Otto climbed the steps. Inside her head she was screaming, but no sound escaped her lips. The door was open and the woman, mother of the arrested teen, wife of the neo-Nazi, reached down, smiling, to put candy into Otto’s bag. Claire could hear her children’s tiny, happy voices calling, “Thank you!” Then Otto was crossing the threshold, stepping into the house. The house whose presence on their street kept Claire up at night. The house that had, only weeks before, been home to so many firearms and a skinny boy with plans to commit mass murder.

Claire ran, pushing aside moms and dads and princesses and dinosaurs, bolting past her husband and their dog, who nipped at her ankles, past her daughter crossing the yard, hand outstretched to display her full candy bag. “Mama, look!” she said, but Claire didn’t look. She fled up the steps and across the porch and into the scene of her nightmares, scanning the living room for Otto.

It was a small house with outdated furniture, beige carpeting, family photos in fake gold frames. It reminded her of her own childhood home, and she hated it. An embroidered pillow on the couch said, “Home is where the cat is.” If she looked underneath it, Claire wondered, would she find a gun?

She raced through the living room, almost knocking over a vase of wilting flowers.

Her neighbor had let her son into this dangerous house, and Claire could hear the woman speaking to him in baby talk. The sound of her voice, the high-pitched playfulness, and Otto’s little laugh, set off alarms in Claire’s head.

“Otto!” she called, “Otto!” Her own voice was shrill and cracking. Hearing it terrified her even more.

“We’re in here!” So chipper, the woman practically sang from the master bedroom. “The little guy followed the cat.”

Otto sat on the bed, patting the fur of the cat’s back with his open palm.

“He likes you,” the woman. “Hear him purr?”

Claire thought about the neo-Nazi propaganda the police had confiscated when they took the guns and wondered, standing in the neo-Nazi’s wife’s bedroom, what this woman thought of her jet-black hair, her wide Filipino nose, inherited from her mother. Was it possible to be married to a neo-Nazi and not be one yourself?

Claire knew nothing about the woman except that she gave singing lessons, because another neighbor, Melanie, had said to Claire—days after the husband and son had been taken away, when all of the neighbors were gossiping like mad because they wanted information, any information, and the news wasn’t giving it to them—“I’ve been in that house! My daughter took voice lessons there!” She’d said it with a look of horror, and the fear in her voice, her disbelief, had given Claire the chills. Claire wanted to say all this, but her neighbor spoke first.

“I never knew it was possible to grieve this way for the living.”

Claire was shocked at the woman’s openness, her willingness to be vulnerable with Claire, whom she hardly knew. And she looked at Claire so tenderly, so full of hopelessness and longing, that Claire had to resist the urge to move toward her automatically. She felt her cue to put her hand on the woman’s shoulder, to put her arms around her and tell her something of comfort, but a feeling rose up from deep inside her, and she resisted.

She snatched Otto off the bed, walked straight out of the room and out the front door.

“Don’t do that,” she scolded Otto. “You can’t just walk into someone’s house. Do you understand me?” Her voice was shaking.

“I want the cat!” he cried, reaching back toward the house and the woman standing on the front porch beneath the sagging American flag.

“That’s a bad house,” Claire said loudly. “Don’t ever go in there, do you understand? Bad house. Bad people.” She knew she shouldn’t be evoking fear in her son, especially fear of the neighbors. She was doing it all wrong, parenting. But she was trembling, and she ran with Otto in her arms, past Jack and Margot and the dog, racing them home, where she would shut the door behind her and collapse onto the couch.

Why had her son done that? Why had he made her enter that cursed house, where a deranged teen had probably spent months devising a plan that would have wrecked their community for decades? Why did Claire have to look at the woman who’d most likely given birth to that boy, who loved him, and who was—one could argue—at least somewhat responsible for the way he’d turned out?

Claire’s body shook. For the rage at her neighbors she’d bottled in. For the fear that had nowhere to go but her body, the anxiety slicing her blood. Questions she’d been burning to ask streamed out of her mouth, addressed to no one:

“Why didn’t you stop him? Couldn’t you see what he was up to? Can you be that stupid? Look what you’ve done!”

The eyes of skeletons, unicorns, and black cats settled on her. She turned to see Jack and Margot jogging to catch up. Behind them, through the window of her neighbor’s house, the woman moved slowly, almost aimlessly, across the living room. Claire stood in the street as a family dressed as Wizard of Oz characters brushed past, and she realized what she must look like. Muttering to herself, hyperventilating, clutching her confused toddler who was well and able to walk himself. It was Halloween and she hadn’t bothered to dress up. She stood in the street in the sweatpants she’d put on that morning, the same ones she’d worn the day before. “Is this how it starts?” she wondered. She held Otto so close he cried to be let down, but she only clung more tightly. Who would her son become?

In the house, the woman walked to the window and looked out, her sad eyes locking on Claire. Then the lights of her house went dark.

Claire pressed her cheek against Otto’s to hide her face, wondering why she should be the one ashamed. The glow of the moon fell upon her like a spotlight.