Neighborhood Watch

  When Paul and I left fifteen minutes later, Geoffrey and Linda Sue had made it only as far as three houses up the street. They stood on the sidewalk, heads dropped back to admire the show of stars over our heads. “Oh, my God,” Paul whispered, grabbing my wrist. He pulled me back onto the grass and into the shadows. When they walked past Geoffrey’s house, then our own, Paul pinched my sleeve and pulled me along.

  They crossed the lawn and walked inside Linda Sue’s house without any discussion, as if they’d made a plan ahead of time. I’ll meet you there, we’ll go to your house after.

  “Maybe they’re just talking,” Paul said.

  I thought of our friendship, the hours Geoffrey and I had spent doing just that. “Maybe,” I said. “We could look in the window.”

  I suppose we both thought a glimpse would calm our fears. If they were sitting in her living room, that meant they weren’t racing upstairs, falling into bed. We crept closer to the glowing picture window in her living room. “I think she’s making tea,” I said, grateful that she was in the kitchen and he was in the living room. It’s nothing, I almost said, then stopped. Linda Sue had moved to the doorway and Geoffrey was behind her, one arm circling her waist. Her hair fell back over his shoulder. He buried his face in the nape of her neck. They weren’t kissing, but what they were doing was more intimate than a kiss. Leaning against each other, finding their fulcrum. Her back to his stomach, his face in her hair. It was silent and endless, a moment that seemed to expand and shrink, to include the world and shut it out, as if we’d never understand the language they weren’t speaking.

  I realized something then, though I couldn’t have put it into words. I wasn’t standing there watching because I was in love with Geoffrey. I was looking at them, yes, but I was taking it all in. My first glimpse of the inside of Linda Sue’s house: how empty it was, how up close there was even less than we imagined. It’s possible, I thought, my heart beating crazily. It’s possible for someone to live like this—with nothing but the freedom to make her own choices.

  CHAPTER 11

  “Oh, my God, IT’S BETSY!” Helen screams to her husband, Warren, when I tell her who’s calling. “We’ve just been watching you on TV. Warren, it’s BETSY TREADING.” It wasn’t hard to find Helen’s phone number, listed in the Internet white pages in Montclair, New Jersey. Though Marianne warned me that people would feel uncomfortable answering questions, Helen sounds happy enough to hear from me, and when I ask her about the cat, she remembers the one we collectively fed but not what happened to it.

  “Did you ever see it after Linda Sue died?”

  “I don’t think so. But we were all so distracted then, I can’t be sure. I remember telling Geoffrey that.”

  “Geoffrey asked about the cat?”

  “Yes. A few days after Linda Sue died, he knocked on our door and asked if we had seen it.”

  “Did he say why?”

  “He said it was sick and might be dangerous. We thought that it might have gotten rabies.”

  “But if Linda Sue had just died, why was he worried about the cat?”

  “We didn’t know, Bets. We remembered that party at our house. It was terrible, watching all of that happen. The way Geoffrey was trying to seduce both of you.”

  Seduce?

  Because I don’t say anything, apparently, she feels free to keep going. “My God, he was shameless. Of course you loved him. He was a writer and you were a librarian. You lived for books and here he was writing them. Though even that wasn’t really true, was it?”

  Geoffrey never finished the novel that he toiled away at for two years, living among us, giving us updates that struck us as thrilling peeks into the creative process. I assume this is what she means, though maybe everyone knows the truth now, the part I can still hardly bring myself to admit.

  “Who could blame you for falling for his cheap tricks? He dragged you into his midlife crisis so he could feel better about all his bad behavior. He thought if you adored him the rest of us wouldn’t notice what he was doing. Then Marianne got involved and thought sending you over to Linda Sue’s house would open your eyes and solve everything. That’s Marianne for you.” She sighs heavily. “But we never thought you did it, Bets. We never believed that. How could you have?”

  Where had Helen been with these theories during my trial?

  “We just didn’t understand why you confessed. Or why you took that nightgown down to the station to begin with. It could have been your blood. It probably was. You might have been sleepwalking that night, but that didn’t mean you killed Linda Sue. I don’t know why your stupid lawyer didn’t raise that possibility. Or look at the facts. Ninety-eight percent of sleepwalkers never leave their house.”

  She seems to have thought long and hard about my case, which makes me feel both grateful and nervous. “What did other people think?”

  “Everyone assumed Geoffrey had done it and you found a nightgown with a period stain and dreamed up this story because you wanted to help him and you wouldn’t really get blamed because they had so little evidence. And then we got confused. You were arrested and there was all that talk about sleepwalking and no one knew what to think. That was about the time Geoffrey started going around talking to people, telling his side of the story.”

  “What did he say?”

  “That he felt responsible. That he had no idea you had so many issues. All the stuff with your family and your past. He told Warren and me that he felt like it was partly his fault because he’d seen glimmers of your instability.”

  I feel a queasy burning in my stomach. Why would Geoffrey have done this? Helen speaks into the phone in a breathy whisper. “He said we should all do whatever we could to help you get off on an insanity defense, that you needed to get help, not go to prison, and we had to make that happen.”

  None of my neighbors stepped forward to testify in my defense. Surely I’m not the only person who remembers this much. “Why didn’t you?”

  “We were scared, Betsy. That’s all.”

  “Scared of what?”

  “What if you had gotten off and it happened again?”

  It’s interesting that in talking to people ostensibly on my behalf, Geoffrey managed to convince everyone of my guilt.

  Downstairs I find Marianne chopping vegetables for dinner. I don’t want to think about my conversation with Helen, or the possibilities it has opened up, so I ask where Trish is living these days. Too late, I remember what a loaded subject this is. She lifts the hand holding the knife and pushes hair off her forehead with the inside of her wrist. “Last I heard, Trish was up north. She had some problems after you left. Nothing to do with you. It had been coming on for a while. Roland and I didn’t see what was happening until it was too late.”

  “See what?”

  “How angry Trish was with us. How she was doing certain things to express that anger.” I think of the cigarette I saw Trish smoking at the bus stop. “It was much worse than most people realized. She had a breakdown and had to be hospitalized, off and on, for a year or so. Afterward, she lived in a halfway house for young adults with mental illness. Five years ago she moved into her own apartment, which everyone was happy about. Or I was, anyway. She was living on her own. I was ecstatic.”

  I can see from her face that this isn’t the hard part of the story. “After she moved out, I went to see her. I thought the visit went fine but at the end she asked me not to come back. She said I made her crazy. That being around me put her in danger of relapsing.”

  I realize I have had a fantasy this whole time—that Trish’s break with her parents might have had something to do with me. That our stories were connected somehow. Maybe she tried to defend me and was ostracized for doing so. Maybe her mother has taken me in out of remorse and with the hope that it might bring her daughter back. Now I wonder where I got that idea when the truth is both simpler and sadder than that.

  “She asked me not to have any contact with her at all and I said all right. I’ve honored my
promise.”

  In prison, when I imagined life with my children, I tried to make them as real as possible, with the problems and challenges that real children face. I gave one asthma and Charlotte, my youngest, a learning disability. Not that I wished hard times on any of them, but because I understood that real parenting brought hard dilemmas. Some children hover adoringly forever, others want nothing from you but their freedom. I know that. I’ve been watching mothers with their children all my life. I’ve never thought it would be easy, but I also never pictured heartbreak like this: estrangement, mental illness, love that grows an edge and expresses itself only in the pain it inflicts.

  “You haven’t talked to her in five years?”

  Marianne drops a handful of mushrooms into a pan of hot oil. “That’s right.”

  It was five years ago that Marianne first came to visit me in prison, giving no reason beyond “I’ve been thinking about you, dear. We all have.” But now it makes sense. The regularity of her visits, the sudden involvement. It did have something to do with Trish. She was doing what her child had asked her to do, filling a void, finding a way to leave Trish alone.

  “Do you know if she works?”

  “We’ve assumed we’d hear from her if money was an issue and we haven’t. So my guess is, yes, she’s found work doing something.” Isn’t she curious what it might be? What her smart, passionate daughter has become? “It’s hard for me to imagine. So I prefer not to.”

  I’m only a mother in my dreams. I don’t know what this is like or how it feels.

  When dinner is finally ready there’s so much food I suggest inviting Roland. “Oh, my,” Marianne says, as if this had never occurred to her. “Yes, I suppose we could.”

  When she makes no move to go down, I do it myself, knock softly and whisper, “Roland?” in the dark cement foyer outside his apartment.

  He throws open the door, a pen in his mouth, his glasses pushed up on his head. “Yes, Betsy. Hi.” He’s clearly distracted by whatever he’s working on.

  “Marianne and I were wondering if you’d like to join us for dinner. We’ve made a whole pot of spaghetti. Too much for the two of us.”

  He’s already moved back to his desk to finish writing down whatever thought I interrupted. When he’s done, he looks up as if he’s only just heard what I said. “You want me to have dinner with you?”

  “Yes. Marianne and I.”

  “Ah.” He nods and smiles in a way I can’t read. “I’m guessing this isn’t her idea.”

  “Well, no, but we’d both like you to join us.”

  He shakes his head, pats his pockets, and looks down at what he’s wearing: flip-flop sandals, drawstring pants that could double as pajamas, an old T-shirt that says UC BERKELEY: FIVE OR SIX OF THE BEST YEARS OF YOUR LIFE. “Should I change my clothes?”

  Ten minutes later he appears at the kitchen door wearing khaki pants and black dress shoes with bright white athletic socks. His T-shirt is the same, as if halfway through dressing he decided not to try too hard. “Marianne. Betsy.” He nods at each of us. “I thank you for this surprising invitation.”

  Marianne stares at him. “Oh, please, Roland.”

  All through dinner I can’t help thinking how odd it is that Marianne, who still prizes putting on a good show, no longer bothers pretending she likes her husband much. When I ask about his work, she rolls her eyes, sighs ostentatiously, and reaches for the basket of bread. I’ve never forgotten that time when he almost told me what he was working on and then stopped himself. Over the years I’ve tried to figure it out. I’ve read articles in the outdated magazines in our library—Science Digest, National Geographic—thinking of Roland, my mind full of questions. What does he think of wind turbine potential? Did he ever get solar panels heating more than a few gallons of water? Now I wonder about the sketches I saw on his drafting table this morning and how the apparatus drawn looked like nothing associated with solar. Has he been toiling away on his “breakthrough” for the last fifteen years? I know some of the latest on alternative energy developments: hybrid cars, biomass, hydrogen-powered fuel cells. I’ll admit that I don’t understand most of it, but I know some of the vocabulary at least. “Are you doing anything with this biomass these days? That seems interesting.”

  “It is,” Roland says. “I’ve always loved the concept of it. Practically, though, for large-scale use, it has lots of problems. It uses a lot of fuel, doesn’t burn very clean.”

  “What about ethanol?”

  “Ethanol, yes. Another good idea with kinks to be worked out. But you’ve been keeping up, I see.”

  I blush a little and glance at Marianne, who seems to be interested in neither the conversation nor the possibility that we may be flirting a little bit. “I have, as a matter of fact. Prison doesn’t mean you can’t read a few magazines. It just means you read ones that are four years old.”

  “I see.” He smiles. “So you haven’t heard yet about cow-manure cars.”

  “What?”

  “He’s joking,” Marianne says. Her first contribution to the conversation. “Roland’s tried a couple of these alternative-fuel cars. What no one ever likes to mention is the smell. We had one for a while and it was like driving around with a dead body in the trunk. You had to wear a face mask to sit inside it.”

  “You had to.”

  “Trish threw up, Roland. It wasn’t my imagination.”

  “No, I’ll grant you. We had some odor issues.”

  I wonder about this marriage that feels suddenly so reminiscent of my own parents, locked together in a house neither one of them could bring themselves to leave. “I think a couple of the prison vans were hybrids. That’s what was printed on the door anyway. I tried to ask some people about it, but I never got any answers.” I’m offering this as a way to get past the tension between them, but it’s too strange a story to help much. Instead of clearing the air, it’s just reminded everyone of where I’ve been, sitting shackled on benches behind drivers who never answered my questions. No story of my recent life will apply here.

  “I’m not working on fuel converters anymore, or any of that engine-related stuff. I’m back to an old project, actually. Something I think I mentioned to you once.”

  Marianne shoots him a look. “Roland.”

  “What? She asked, Marianne. She’s interested in knowing what’s going on in this house.”

  Whatever it is, Marianne clearly doesn’t want me to hear it. “Betsy has her own issues she’s working on now. She doesn’t need to get all caught up hearing you explain what you’re working on for the next hour.”

  This seems uncharacteristically cruel, dismissive of both Roland and me. “I am interested,” I say. “I’ve always been curious about your work.”

  “Basically it has to do with electrolysis. I’m trying to work out some more efficient energy conversion mechanisms, that’s all. Where instead of capturing fifty percent, we get seventy or eighty percent.” He keeps explaining for a while—that one of the great untold energy mishaps is the vast amounts that are wasted at the source. “It’s true for all of them, coal, hydrogen, nuclear. Half the energy they create gets wasted in the conversion process.”

  The longer he talks, the more eager Marianne seems to move off this subject. Finally she all but interrupts him. “I told Roland I was fine paying for these projects as long as he kept living here. And I am. I’m fine. I’d rather have him here doing his crazy work in the basement than have to move myself into one of those security condominiums where the whole neighborhood votes on whether you can put up shutters. No, thank you.”

  For a long time after this, no one speaks.

  Suddenly, Marianne has admitted so much that it only seems to dawn on her afterward what she’s said. They truly have no marriage. He is little more than a border kept on to hold her paranoid imaginings at bay for the moment. Sitting cross from them, it strikes me as so sad I feel tears rise up to my eyes.

  In prison, my release-readjustment counselor told me to expect
mood swings in the beginning: “You think you’re supposed to feel happy right away, but I’m not sure it works like that for most people.” The truth is that I don’t remember happiness very well—the buoyancy of it, the head rush. The components of my old days—walking to work on nice spring days, noticing flowers, remarking on a news story to Paul at night—all seem as hollow as the plasterboard walls in the house of my childhood home, as empty as this marriage I am now living too close to. How well did Paul and I know each other? What did I feel for him except gratitude that he asked so few questions and so readily accepted the surface answers I gave? Sitting here with Marianne and Roland, I feel like weeping not for them but for myself. Was my marriage any better than this? Yes, we had sex (lots of it in our procreation efforts), but when we came up empty-handed, could we think what to say to each other? Would I know what a better marriage should feel like?

  During my first years in prison I had an odd habit of drawing closer to the women who seemed the most intractably insane: the masturbators, the self-talkers, the ones who couldn’t be given a pencil without trying to cut themselves with it. Though I didn’t want to be associated with them, I felt comforted standing in the vicinity of their crazy displays. This is real, I would think. Here’s genuine sadness right here. Later, I was drawn to the motormouths who told endless stories of the men they’d loved and the crimes they’d commit all over again. I wanted to know if I was even in their league of self-abnegation. Had I loved Geoffrey so much that I unconsciously committed this crime to save him? Was I even capable of that?

  Obviously the jury thought I was, but I doubted my capacity for the depth of feeling such an act would require. Even as I wrote letters protesting my innocence, I envied those who’d owned up to their terrible crimes and carried Bibles around the way they once wielded firearms. They knew the blackened edges of their heart, the bilious taste of their own rage fomenting. Watching those women sob and tear at their own clothes taught me something. I admired them. Crazy as they seemed, I did.