Neighborhood Watch

  We’ve tried to make Geoffrey a joke between us. He lives in Los Angeles and writes for television now, a crime show so stupid Marianne has declared it unwatchable, though she has, at least a few times. “Be glad you didn’t see Geoffrey’s show last week,” she’ll say. “A serial killer into dismemberment. That was nice.” I’ve never seen Geoffrey’s show because in here, guards control the remotes and we watch the same lineup every day: Oprah, then Ellen, then the reality shows that we talk about afterward as if we knew these people personally. The article is from Finer Homes Digest.

  “Turn the page,” Marianne says. I gasp. It’s the first time I’ve seen a picture of him in twelve years. The caption below reads, “Geoffrey Steadman and his wife, Renata, chop vegetables on their Ashfield stone countertop.” From Marianne’s updates, I know that he has two daughters—six and four—both adopted from China. In the picture, the two adults face the camera. The girls are seated at the counter opposite them, two tiny heads with straight black hair, shoulder length. I do the math and figure out this means they probably spent at least four years battling infertility, which makes me feel both sorry for them and grateful. He knows now what it’s like, month after endless month, to discover you are once again empty-handed.

  CHAPTER 3

  The first time I met Geoffrey was at my wedding, where he came as Paul’s childhood friend, not yet a published writer, not yet famous, with his mother as his date. Both Paul and I were nervous and ridiculously uncomfortable. During the ceremony we recited our vows so softly we had trouble hearing each other. When Geoffrey stood up to offer a toast at the reception, obviously drunk but still so good-looking and at ease, we breathed a sigh of relief to have the spotlight of attention momentarily off us. He raised a glass, first to Paul for being so unafraid to take this leap, and then to me for making it with him. We felt grateful, caught up by something wondrous and larger than ourselves.

  Four years passed before we heard from Geoffrey again, and by then his life had changed so radically we were surprised, frankly, to get his phone call. He’d published a book of short stories that had been not only a best seller but nominated for a major book award. He’d been photographed in Vanity Fair. At the library we had a hard time keeping our three copies of his book on the shelf. He was famous by then, or at least in our world he seemed so. He was also married, though we hadn’t been invited to the wedding, which took place in Jamaica and was, we were told, family only.

  His voice on the answering machine sounded more subdued than I remembered, as if his new fame had become an embarrassment perhaps. In truth I wondered about this. I liked his writing, but I had to admit that the level of attention he received seemed mystifying to me, unless, as some people suggested, it had to do with the author photo. The picture was arresting, taken from above in an outdoor setting. He looked as if he’d been caught by surprise, playing in some leaves. One review called him “the Marlboro Man of Letters,” and his thick head of wavy hair got its own mention in the New York Times, which called him the most accurate male chronicler of the female experience since Dreiser wrote Sister Carrie, but added, rather petulantly, that it was hard to say if this reflected sensitivity or came as a result of a studied attention to his own hair and looks. By the time he called us, most of the hoopla had died away. He hadn’t won the prize, nor had he come out with the much-anticipated follow-up novel.

  He wanted to see us as soon as possible, he said in his message. The last we’d heard, he was living in Florida with his new wife, Corinne, a biology professor. He told us he was coming to New York and wanted to drive up. Would Friday night be okay?

  Of course, was the answer, and right away we started overplanning the visit. We hired cleaners to do the carpet, and bought too much beer and wine, only to start the evening with Corinne’s face-inflaming allergic reaction to the carpet-cleaning chemicals and Geoffrey’s announcement that he’d quit drinking two years ago. Awkwardly, we moved everything out to the patio while Paul hunted for seltzer.

  To me, Geoffrey’s sobriety was the biggest surprise, but I’d never seen him with anything besides a scotch in his hand. Paul had, of course. He had countless memories from their predrinking days as children when Geoffrey was the spirited boundary tester of their group, the driving force behind the neighborhood golf course fire, the point man on dumping fifty boxes of green Jell-O into the community pool. That night, though, I could tell there would be no reminiscing over childhood pranks, because the real surprise of the evening came early, while Corinne’s face was still a throbbing, angry red that didn’t match her expression, which was demure and sweet. She wasn’t, technically speaking, a beautiful woman, though she had all the trappings to be mistaken for one: long blond hair that fell below her shoulders, low-cut jeans, and the flat chest of a dancer, which I later learned she had been.

  “I’ll tell you why we’re here,” Geoffrey said. “We’re looking for a place to buy a house. I’ve been doing some research and this neighborhood fits most of our criteria.”

  We didn’t answer right away. “We’ve got to get out of Florida,” he added. “Pretty quickly. I thought of this place and you guys.”

  We were surprised, of course. For all the practical rationale we told ourselves when buying this house (Brand-new everything! No home repairs for years!), we also understood the aesthetically depressing reality of our street. These were cookie cutter designs with symmetrical driveways lining a street of identical homes. In the beginning, I loved the identical layouts in such close proximity to one another. I’d wanted the borrowed cups of sugar and the shared lives, but after four years living here, I understood that the idea of having neighbors was nicer sometimes than the reality. So why would someone like Geoffrey choose it?

  “We need to disappear for a while,” he said, as if to answer my unspoken question. “Or I do. I need to eliminate my distractions. Figure out how to concentrate again and—well, you know.” He took a drink of water. “Finish my novel.” Corinne said nothing.

  Because we had no response, he kept going. “I want something like I had as a kid, but I can’t deal with home, you know what I’m saying?”

  Of course we did.

  “You guys are friends. You know me. The real me.” He meant Paul, naturally, though he kindly included me, gesturing with his hand. I worried about Corinne, so silent on all this, but we were flattered. We were better friends than we thought! So close, our life was something Geoffrey wanted to emulate!

  Of course there was more to it than that. While the Steadmans were in the process of putting in two offers and finally buying the house next door to ours, I learned that Geoffrey had had some trouble with the law. Something to do with a hunting accident where a Texas Blue Horn, a bird recently put on the endangered species list, had been accidentally shot and killed in a spray of pink feathers he described as “the most beautiful and tragic sight I’ve ever witnessed.” He’d turned himself in because he didn’t have much choice—there were fourteen witnesses—and then balked at the fine they tried to impose. Fifty thousand dollars. “For a bird,” he said, shaking his head. “Think about it. A bird.”

  Paul and I had our own complications that hovered over our lives, the miscarriages we never mentioned in front of other people, the babies I thought of every time I saw the brownish black stain while changing our sheets. If Geoffrey had his reasons for moving to this neighborhood, I had my own for staying where I was.

  CHAPTER 4

  The reality of my situation can’t be denied. Twelve years ago, I owned a house filled with furniture and belongings that were long ago sold off to pay exorbitant legal expenses. I am being released with no money, no job, no place to live, no clothes, and no car. The working world requires computer skills I don’t have. Everyone will mean well and no one will hire me, knowing where I’ve been and the people I’ve lived with. Jeremy has also made it clear that, though I am not guilty in the state’s eyes, I am also not entirely innocent until my crime is resolved. Only when the real killer is found do
I stand a chance of getting any restitution from the state for the years I’ve lost.

  Jeremy has advised me to take advantage of the opportunity I’ll have following my release. “You’ve got to get going right away. The police may reopen your case, but they won’t spend any time or money drawing attention to their ineptitude twelve years ago.” He’s been going through the files of discovery and reminding me of the facts he believes are most significant. There was no sign of forced entry into Linda Sue’s house, and no fingerprints on the front door, meaning she opened her door to the assailant, who arrived at approximately ten-thirty P.M. Inside her house they found four sets of fingerprints. They were able to identify three of them as the victim’s, Geoffrey’s, and mine. The fourth, with prints throughout the house—in the bathroom, the spare bedroom, upstairs, and downstairs—is unknown. I know food was found on the counter, but there are other details I haven’t heard about before: a tea kettle on the stove still warm when the police arrived, two mugs with tea bags waiting beside it. The murderer was someone she liked well enough to invite in and offer tea to at that hour. No neighbors saw a car drive down the street after ten o’clock, no unknown tire prints were found in the muddy puddle on her driveway. Whoever it was had arrived on foot.

  “In all probability it was someone from the neighborhood,” Jeremy says. “But that doesn’t mean the job is going to be easier. People have moved and they aren’t going to be easy to find.” He hesitates before he says the next thing. “I think Paul will be a good resource. He’s kept his own files, I know, and done some of his own investigation.”

  I nod because he’s right. Good old Paul, who, in the face of finding himself the spouse of an accused murderess, grew a new personality and became obsessed with my defense. If Franklin missed details, it’s hard to imagine that Paul did. He got copies of everything, paid for experts to weigh in on the evidence—the blood spatter pattern, the police collection procedure—and became so fixated that for three years after my conviction he still couldn’t stop talking about it.

  “What else?” I say to Jeremy as he shuffles his papers. I can tell there’s more.

  There is. Some evidence that someone else might have been living in Linda Sue’s house. Two toothbrushes. A pair of men’s shoes.

  That could be only one person.

  “Living there?” I say. My voice sounds unnatural, dry and thin.

  “Evidence of an ongoing presence. Maybe not living there but visiting often enough to have left personal items behind.”

  I know who it is of course, but does this mean Geoffrey was there that night? Did he write me the cat letter because he is finally ready to talk about what happened?

  I suspect Jeremy had a hand in arranging the media waiting outside on the day of my release. I am only the second female exoneree in the last twenty years and the first with no drug history or prior arrest record. I am an example for one of Jeremy’s favorite arguments: This could happen to anyone. In truth, I don’t know if I’m a good candidate for this role. I look nervous and tongue-tied on camera. My glasses reflect the spotlight, making the headline that will roll beneath footage of my release—LIBRARIAN FOUND INNOCENT OF CRIME AFTER TWELVE YEARS IN PRISON—superfluous, I fear. I’m wearing an outfit Jeremy chose from my boxes of old clothes. A peach-colored sweater with a lace collar of the sort Viola, my old boss and the head librarian, favored.

  “There’s also your hair,” Wanda pointed out last night. For two weeks, she avoided any mention of my release by focusing on her exercise regimen and the letters she writes to various men across the highway. For Wanda, who lived too long in a prison of monogamy, juggling three beaux at a time is not unusual. I hadn’t known how this night would go—if we would ignore the box I’d packed in the corner, or if we’d say a proper good-bye to each other.

  “What about my hair?” I said.

  “Well, you can’t see it.” She didn’t mean it unkindly, only as a fact: We have no mirrors in prison. Some women put up tinfoil, others used windows after dark. Later that night, Wanda got permission to use a pair of scissors and give me the first real haircut I’d had in a decade. She cut away all the frizzy gray and left me with a cap of silver white. I could tell from my reflection in the window that I looked much better, like a sprightly Peter Pan.

  This morning when I walked down our corridor for the last time, carrying my box, everyone whistled when they saw my hair. “Better than the braids! ’Member those?” Justine called out. She’d been in twice as long as I had and she was right. For a few years in the beginning, I grew my hair very long and wore it in braids. “You go and have a good life for all of us,” she said, and laughed, her eyes watering a little.

  “You’re a bitch if you think you deserve this,” Taneesha snapped from the corner.

  “Let her go, Taneesha,” Wanda called, standing beside me. “You go on.”

  That was all we said for a good-bye.

  Stepping outside the prison fence for the first time in twelve years, Jeremy at my side, is dizzying in a way I didn’t expect. We walk silently up to the gate and to a crowd of reporters waiting just beyond. We need my picture in the morning paper, Jeremy has said, making no comment about my new look except to say, “Betsy, my God, your hair,” which I take to mean this isn’t the style he would have chosen for me.

  The reporters ask if I’m angry that the state has offered me no restitution for the years I spent wrongfully incarcerated. Jeremy and I have gone over my answers. I’m supposed to sound grateful that a justice system capable of such errors is also capable of correcting its mistakes. I’m supposed to say, Yes, I will fight for restitution, without sounding too angry. The best exonerees are the ones who talk about their imprisonment as a spiritual awakening. “My body has been in prison, but not my heart!” the last one screamed into the microphone at his press conference, one fist raised in the air. His name was Bruce Whitman and he was white, too, imprisoned sixteen years ago for the murder of a girlfriend when he was nineteen years old. Now he’s a bespectacled, balding thirty-five-year-old who has spent his adult life in a jail cell writing poetry that recently found a publisher. I heard that his picture was in Time magazine, and that on the day of his release, seventy people gathered and cheered for so long the reporters had to cut short their questions about charges still pending.

  The crowd waiting for me is smaller. Mostly reporters—about fifteen—plus a TV crew and a few people from Jeremy’s office. I recognize only a few faces personally, which isn’t a surprise. I don’t have the extended family Bruce had. The weeping aunts, the cousins, the army of relatives who never gave up hope. The only person I have is Marianne, in her arms, standing alone, a bouquet of flowers.

  “How does it feel to be out?” one reporter calls as flashes go off.

  I smile for the cameras. Great, I mouth.

  “What’s the first thing you want to do when you get home?”

  They don’t realize that no one who’s been in prison for twelve years still has a home. “Sleep late and drink some good coffee in the morning.” I’ve prepared this line and practiced it with Jeremy, who smiles beside me.

  “Do you think you’ll get your old job back?”

  It’s been more than ten years since I’ve heard from anyone I worked with at the library. “I don’t have any firm plans yet. I’ll need a job, of course.” Jeremy has urged me to say this in the hope that it might produce an offer.

  Though I wrote my statement, Jeremy has revised it a little. Last night, he explained: “The main point here is that you’re grateful to be given your life back. That you’re looking forward to simple pleasures—pizza, movies, watching the sunset. Yes, you’ll be suing the state if they don’t come up with a reasonable offer soon, but that’s not the most important thing on your mind right now. Much better if you don’t seem too angry at this point.”

  I deliver my words with Jeremy’s instructions in my mind: Be aware of the TV camera but don’t look into it. “Twelve years ago, I left behind family and frien
ds to enter this prison on what we now understand was a false conviction for a crime I had no part in. I am neither bitter nor broken by this experience. I have learned much about the fortitude of the human spirit and I believe I have survived with my own intact. I also understand the hard work has just begun. Reclaiming my old life won’t be easy. Part of my new job will be fighting for justice in our system. I am one of countless men and women still sit behind bars, innocent of the crimes they are serving time for.”

  Cameras flash as my halting voice limps to the end of this statement that I deliver without any of the emotion it needs to pack a punch.

  The crowd has grown slightly. For a second I look up and think I see Paul standing in the back, looking up at me hopefully. It’s hard to be sure because the flashes leave spots dancing in front of me. When my eyes clear, the shadow no longer looks like Paul but like Leo, which I know is impossible. And then whoever it is disappears again. My brain is playing tricks on me, imagining that I’m not standing here alone, facing my future with no one beside me.

  CHAPTER 5

  Getting into Marianne’s car, I feel a little like a refugee from some natural disaster. I have one battered cardboard box containing the handmade presents I’ve received over the years: a paper towel roll kaleidoscope, a collage of shirtless men that Wanda made to cheer us up when we hadn’t seen a real one in a while. I have these things but no purse, no wallet, no money, no ID except the inmate tag I’ve worn around my neck for a decade.

  “One thing at a time,” Jeremy told me when I pointed out that my driver’s license expired ten years ago. “You don’t need a license until you’ve got a car.” It’s overwhelming to contemplate. If I ever land a job interview how will I get to it? “First things first,” he said. “You know what you need to do.”

  I do. In the car I ask Marianne if she remembers Linda Sue having a cat. She startles for a moment. “A cat,” she says. “Why do you ask that?”