The Good Neighbor (2 page)

“Pull over!” said Francie, although Colt was already doing it. They parked at the side of the road, not daring the driveway,

just looking up at the house. Then, after they’d sat in silence for several moments, she said to her husband, “I’d love to live here someday.”

She expected him to make fun of her for this, but instead, to her astonishment, he said:

“Yeah, so would I.”

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❚ ❚ ❚

One could see that this house was old, cut patiently by hand from living hardwood and frozen stone. There was a wraparound porch, ornamented with Victorian-style gingerbread cutouts and a swing on a chain, but the gingerbread was new and pretentious, clearly out of place. Whoever had put it there was trying too hard, Francie thought. If it was up to her, she’d take it down. There were
three
sto ries, plus what looked to be an attic, or a half-story of some sort. A small round window hinted that it might be interesting up there.

“That’s where they kept the demonic stepchild,” said Colt. “Until it killed all of them in their sleep.”

“Shut up,” said Francie. “Don’t ruin it.”
Like you ruin everything else
, she thought.

“Can a place like this actually be
empty
?” Colt wondered.

Timidly, they got out of the car and headed across the vast front lawn. Nobody came out to see what they wanted. No dogs barked. They went up the steps, Francie first, fearless now, and she pounded on the door. Without waiting for an answer, she went to one of the windows and put her face up to it, shading her eyes from the glare on the wrinkled old glass. She already knew that everyone was gone.

“Don’t be so nosy,” said Colt. “Maw and Paw will come after us with a shotgun.”

“It’s vacant,” said Francie. “Nobody lives here.”

She showed Colt the sitting room. Clean outlines on the walls and floor proved that it had been occupied in exactly the same way for a long time, and then had suddenly been emptied all at once, like a sink whose plug had been pulled.

“They were all murdered,” Colt said darkly. “I can tell.”

“They were
not
,” said Francie. Normally it worked when Colt was trying to scare her, but this time she knew he was lying. “It’s got a . . . a feel to it. Alive. They liked it here.”

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OWALSKI

“They? They who?”

“Everyone. Right down to the cats,” she said. “Even the mice were happy.”

“I wonder if it has termites,” said Colt. “Probably does.”

Without bothering to stop and ask each other what they were doing, they wandered around to the back.

❚ ❚ ❚

Colt and Francie hadn’t been in the market for a house. They lived in the city and had no intention of leaving it, in any permanent sense; they had only been out for a drive, which was Francie’s whimsical idea, because she was sick of breathing truck exhaust and wanted to go for a walk somewhere quiet. Again, to her sur prise, Colt had agreed. Usually, he didn’t want to be bothered with leaving the city. It seemed to take all morning just to get ready, and then they had to go a mile to the garage where he kept his beloved car, and then drive in weekend traffic through the Hol land Tunnel, across New Jersey, through the Delaware Water Gap and into Pennsylvania, which was where they both knew they would end up that day, though they hadn’t discussed it. Pennsyl vania held a kind of magic for Francie, because it was woodsy and quiet, or so she thought of it, and also because it reminded her of a childhood that hadn’t quite happened but easily could have. She even liked the way the word sounded, rolling out of her mouth like a cheekful of liquid silver:
Pennsylvania.

Colt never thought about Pennsylvania in poetic terms. He simply hadn’t driven his car, a rebuilt 1970 Camaro with a two- hundred horsepower V-8, in a whole month, and he was aching to feel it open up on the road underneath him. The engine and body of the car had a way of vibrating together at a certain speed— miniscule waves of motion shuddering throughout the whole ma chine, intersecting with each other perfectly and canceling each other out—so that it felt, for brief moments, like the car wasn’t

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even moving at all, when in reality it was roaring along like a bat out of hell. It was like hitting the sweet spot on a baseball bat or a golf club. Depending on the temperature, it happened at around seventy-seven miles per hour, and Colt loved this feeling so much that sometimes he fell asleep thinking about it.

❚ ❚ ❚

When they went around to the back of the house and saw what was there, they gasped. Francie reached for Colt’s hand. Their eyes, so accustomed to the unnatural foreshortening of the urban horizon, felt at first as though they were being stretched, cartoon- like, out of their heads. It didn’t seem possible that all this space could go with one house. The yard simply went on and on until it disappeared, the end of it hidden by a thick blur of trees that, for all they knew, might even be part of the property. Think of it! they said to each other. Owning trees! It was too good to be true. About a hundred yards from the house, and hidden behind it, there was a barn, velvet with age—a rough and unsteady creation of the last century that would certainly not make it through the next. It was already halfway through the process of collapsing, and seemed to have halted now merely out of surprise, or embar rassment. There was also a small and weathered fruit orchard con sisting of perhaps two dozen trees, organized not in neat rows but all in a huddle, like old men having a fire drill. Near them was a lit tle pond, overgrown with algae and reeds. As they approached, they heard the sound of dozens of tiny divers taking refuge in the

murky water.

“What’s that noise?” said Colt. “Fish?”

“It’s not a noise, it’s a sound. And it’s not fish, it’s frogs,” said Francie, who knew about such things. Sweet memories of her childhood again came back to her, whether real or not, she couldn’t say, and she wiped her eyes. Colt had grown up in the city, and when, at that moment, Francie realized he’d spent his

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entire life without ever once hearing the sounds of frog-song on a midsummer night, she felt something not unlike pity, but with a sharper edge, whereas once upon a time she might have found it amusing that he didn’t know frogs from fish.

“They’re scared of us,” she explained.

“I wonder how many acres this is,” said Colt. He spun around slowly, scanning the horizon. “There are,” he announced, “no neighbors, except that one house on that hill. Which you can barely see. It’s quiet.” He said “quiet” with trepidation, like one beginning a bold experiment. The house he pointed to was indeed scarcely visible, though Francie knew that, in country terms, the owners had probably considered themselves to be practically rub bing elbows. They would have known each other ’s every intimate detail, every irregular thought. They would have been neighbors all their lives. They might even have been related.

“It’s perfect,” she said. “Isn’t it?”

Colt shrugged. “There’s enough room back here for a whole golf course, practically.”

“No! An English country garden.”

“I could at least put in a putting green.” “Cross-country skiing in winter.”

“Jesus,” said Colt, “we could build a whole
resort
back here.” “Let’s not,” said Francie.

“Are we moving?” asked Colt. “Somehow, when I got up this morning . . .”

“Can we at least talk about it?” Francie asked in return, know ing that he had already convinced himself, and that therefore the hardest part of it was already done.

❚ ❚ ❚

Leaving the driveway in the Camaro, pausing to let pass a pickup truck that was weighed down with various items of junk, they

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noticed what they hadn’t earlier: a battered, rusty mailbox, lean ing like a drunk away from the road.

“Hold on,” said Francie. She got out and went to look at the name as the driver of the pickup truck slowed curiously, peered at them from under a baseball hat, and sped up again. On the door of the truck were written the words
FLEBBERMAN TOWING
. Colt could tell what he was thinking:
Strangers
. He felt unnerved. In the city, people were not supposed to notice each other that obvi ously.

“It says ‘Musgrove,’ ” Francie called, kneeling next to the rust- red, loaf-shaped mailbox. She hadn’t noticed the pickup truck. “Or at least it used to say that.” She got back in the car. “You can still see the paint. Barely. It was the Musgrove house,” she said.

“Yeah, I heard you,” Colt said.

His tone was sarcastic and impatient. Francie wondered, hurt, what had happened in the preceding three seconds to make him suddenly testy. They’d gotten through the whole morning with out a fight. For a Saturday, the only full day of the week they spent together, that was pretty good. She couldn’t have under stood that it was the driver of the pickup truck, staring at Colt in what he had already come to think of as his own driveway. He’d wanted to challenge the man, but he was gone too soon, and now he had adrenaline in his system, which made him touchy. To pun ish him, she kept her daydreams to herself for the next fifteen minutes. But they were both too excited to stay quiet for long, and soon they were chattering like schoolchildren on holiday as they wended their way back toward the city. She even got Colt to apologize, though he didn’t understand what for.

2
‌

The End of the Golden Age

T
he next Monday was September 25, 2000, a date that would later bear particular significance in Francie’s and Colt’s minds as a

kind of freeze-frame snapshot of the planetary alignments that had determined the course of their future; it was a picture of late youth to regard in their geriatric years, when they would look back on themselves as they once were, and wonder what strange forces had caused everything to change. After all, no one is more attuned to the vagaries of the universe than poets, of whom Francie generously considered herself one—despite the fact that she had written perhaps ten poems in nine years, all of them fail ures of inspiration and style. And for Colt’s part, there is no self- respecting financial trader who doesn’t hold at least a little stock in the mysterious powers of the cosmos; they all understand that no part of the universe is unconnected to any other part, that when you pull one string down another goes up, that all things under the sun, eventually, are reflected in the market, and that the market, in fact, is really only a reflection of everything, a model of the universe in miniature. Hence the good-luck charm he wore

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discreetly around his neck, tucked into his shirt—a simple gold ring on a chain, to remind him that all was one, and that success was only a fingernail’s breadth away.

This was Coltrane and Francie, in a nutshell, on the day they waited in the driveway of the house for the real estate agent, who was late; and their entire futures hung balanced, like a triangle standing on its apex, ready to topple one way or the other.

❚ ❚ ❚

Francie and Colt had met almost ten years earlier, during Francie’s big post-graduate fling in New York. That trip was only supposed to last most of the summer, nine sultry weeks of big-city indepen dence before heading back home to earn a master ’s degree in Eng lish literature or poetry, or maybe even a doctorate; but somehow it had turned into almost a decade of being someone’s wife, in a city that still felt strange. She still wasn’t sure how it had hap pened, either. That is, she knew the facts of it, but not the mean ing behind it—if there was any meaning to be found.

The facts were that through the influence of one of her profes sors, she had been “awarded” an unpaid internship at the Metro politan Museum of Art, which meant that she’d been granted the privilege of standing stock still every day amid the glassy-eyed fowl and plump nudes of the Renaissance painting exhibit, her feet screaming, her spirit slipping further each day into darkness and despair. And then Colt had come and rescued her. She’d no ticed him because he was tall, and she’d fallen in love with him be cause he knew how to take charge. What did she know? In many of the novels she’d read, people got married for far less than that. Yet she had not seen herself as an urban housewife, which was what she had become, and it was at moments like this, when the triangle was about to topple, that she looked back at the preceding years and shook her head.

Francie had graduated from the University of Indianapolis in

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June of 1991, putting an end to four years of blissful extended in fancy, a period she thought of now as her Golden Age. She had never left home before. Even while at school, she continued to live with her family, ostensibly because it was cheaper but really be cause she was afraid to leave. And also, there was Michael, her baby brother—not really a baby, but five years her junior, whom all the kids picked on and who needed her protection and comfort. When he was ten, Michael had developed a penchant for getting beaten up. He seemed to attract bullies like a light attracts moths, and Francie was the only one he could complain to; their father would just whap him on the back of the head and tell him to be a man, their mother would only worry ineffectually, the teachers didn’t care. What would Mikey do if he couldn’t crawl into Francie’s bed every night after the lights were out, whimpering the litany of wrongs committed against him that day?