The Neighbors (27 page)

If Mickey had been able to peel his eyes open and bear witness to the scene, Red was sure he would have roared with laughter. Each second that ticked away was a second closer to waking up, a second closer to Mickey’s saving himself from poetic justice. If he roused before Red found what he was looking for, he’d be saved by his own mess, delivered from a premature grave by chaos rather than kindness. This was irony at its best.

While Mickey tried to surface, Red flung the contents of each drawer onto the floor by the handful. He would have marveled at the senselessness of the stuff he was pawing through if his pulse
weren’t rattling his brain—fast-food coupons and Starbucks receipts, loose music CDs and a copy of
American Psycho
. For the first time in his life, he could hardly see through his own dread. As careful as Harlow was in constructing this steel trap of a room, she hadn’t splurged on restraints. There was no point. All the boys who ended up here were already dead; and if Mickey Fitch came to, Red was as good as dead too. There would be no plea bargain, no leniency for his case. If Mickey Fitch woke up, he’d grab Red by both sides of his head and twist. The last thing Red would hear would be the breaking of his own neck.

Naturally, the last place Red checked was the place he should have looked first: a one-hundred-count box of syringes sat at the bottom of the cabinet that housed Harlow’s endless supply of “milk”—the same cabinet that had been at his elbow the entire time he was sitting there, watching Mickey sleep.

“Son of a bitch!” he barked, snatching the box up, tearing at its cardboard lid. It wriggled its way out of his grasp, the contents spilling out, detonating like a faulty bottle rocket, exploding against the ground. He scrambled to grab one in midair, feeling like Wile E. Coyote just before that dim cartoon canine plunged off a desert cliff.

Mickey’s arm twitched, sending Red headlong into a fit of panic. Snatching one of the syringes off the floor, he grabbed for an ampoule of anesthetic, uncapped the needle with his teeth, and stabbed the needle through the plastic vial before pulling back the plunger. Ready to stab the needle into Mickey’s neck, he stopped himself, remembering all the medical shows he’d watched over the years. Taking a steadying breath, he tapped the syringe and pushed the air bubbles out.

And in his hesitation, at that very moment, Mickey Fitch opened his eyes to the world.

B
y his seventeenth year, Isaac Ward’s unconditional love had run out, and Harlow knew it. He had pulled away from her years before—a growing distance Red blamed on adolescence and rebellion. But Isaac’s eyes told a different story. He’d endured a life of secrets, just like his mother had, and he hated her for putting him in that position. The way he looked at her made Harlow wither: his gaze accusatory, heavy with condemnation. She had defiled him, and he had no intention of forgiving her.

At first, Harlow tried to ignore his glares, but Isaac’s eyes were deep. They pulled her under, threatening to drown her in an ocean of guilt. His critical glances reached beyond the scope of his own abuse—and reached into Harlow’s past, pointing out all of her indiscretions. His biting gaze, along with the way he turned away from her when she came close, it caught her by the ears and rubbed her nose in her sins. Suddenly, she could hardly look at her only child, because she didn’t see Isaac anymore. She saw herself, her own anger toward her father. She saw a broken life—one that had left a hole in her heart.

She was disgusting. A sinner. A wicked, wretched, horrible woman who was bound for hell. And that infuriated her, because it wasn’t her fault. Reggie Beaumont was to blame.

Everyone had admired him as he beamed the word of God into living rooms; he was the white knight of televangelism. But the world forgot that knights wore armor, and beneath that armor there was sinning flesh and lecherous blood. Reggie Beaumont hid behind a veil of faith, and his daughter was the only one who knew his secret.

She had denied it for years, blaming fuzzy memories on bad dreams. The dream was always the same: a bedroom door opening in the dead of night, a pink ruffled comforter being pulled aside, Daddy whispering into her ear that Jesus loved her while her skull knocked against the headboard.

It was Danny Wilson’s fault too, the boy who had been nothing but a gentleman—until he got Harlow back to his apartment. It was the fault of the highwayman who’d left her mother along the road for dead, and now it was Isaac himself, with his unrelenting gaze.
They
had turned her into a monster. If she could only erase them all, she’d be free of the guilt; she could shrug off the stigma and finally go on with her life.

The problem was, Reggie Beaumont was dead, burned to death while he slept. Harlow had watched the flames lick up the sides of her childhood home before turning away, only a week from her wedding day. Danny Wilson was dead, pummeled to death with his prized baseball trophy. The man who’d killed her mother had never been apprehended. Harlow could only hope he had left this world with Bridget Beaumont’s screams reverberating inside his skull.

Isaac was the only one left.

She hadn’t been fancy with it, and maybe that was the problem. Walking in on him while he brushed his teeth, she grabbed him by the back of the neck and jammed his toothbrush down his throat. Startled, he stumbled backward in bare feet, his hands
desperately groping at his neck when he should have been shoving his fingers into his mouth. He gasped for air, his face contorting in ways she’d never seen before—a mixture of pain and surprise, terror and disbelief. When the bathroom rug curled beneath his feet, Isaac lost his balance.

Watching him tumble with bated anticipation, she thought his fall was oddly graceful; he twisted in midair like Mikhail Baryshnikov, coming to an abrupt stop when his temple met the corner of the tub.

Isaac’s blood trickled from the corner of his mouth, his nose, his ears, pooling along the joints of the bathroom tile, cross-hatching the stark-white floor with crimson veins. The delicacy of that pattern was almost artistic—bloody filigree curling across an unspoiled canvas. When Danny had fallen at her feet, a weight had been lifted from her shoulders. She killed, and for a second, the pain was gone. But now she felt nothing. No release. No absolution. Nothing but more emptiness, an emptiness that went on forever.

Harlow took a seat on the edge of the tub while Isaac bled onto the bathroom floor. Chewing on the pad of her thumb, she wasn’t thinking about what she’d done; she wasn’t thinking about her father or her son. She was thinking about the hollowness she felt, and how she must have done it wrong.

She had to get another boy. She had to try again.

She had to try over and over again until she got it right.

Drew considered jumping in his truck and taking off, but he didn’t want to give Harlow the wrong impression. He felt hideous after what had transpired in the master bedroom the night before—but that was his fault, not Harlow’s. He should have never let it go as far as it had. Harlow was lonely. He could hardly hold her responsible for what had happened.

But that didn’t change the fact that he desperately wanted out, wanted to fly away with the wind like Dorothy. He didn’t want to sit at Harlow’s kitchen table, and he didn’t want to listen to Frank Sinatra. If he had to listen to one more Rat Pack tune, he was going to lose his fucking mind.

And so, needing escape but not wanting to run away like his own father had, Andrew settled for the next best thing: the front yard. He slipped into the garage and prepped Red’s push mower for another morning of work. The wind was bad, but he couldn’t stay inside for another second. Watching Harlow flit about the kitchen didn’t feel the same anymore. The idea of having ruined something amazing turned his stomach. He was afraid the fairy tale was over, that he had destroyed it by getting too close.

The garage on Cedar had been a wreck, full of cobwebs and old tools that Rick had left behind. It had been a disaster before he disappeared; a virtual cacophony of random instruments—piles of chrome-plated wrenches and pliers, screwdrivers and mismatched sockets. As a kid, Drew would sit on a padded stool and watch his dad work on the Chevy, but he always got bored and left before he could learn anything: Rick spent more time hunting for the right tools than he did using them.

Red’s garage was in an entirely different hemisphere, one that Andrew had previously marveled at, but now, for whatever reason, it gave him the chills. The place was meticulous—not a single screw out of place or a single tool left on the workbench. Even the floor was spotless, coated with a gray oil-repelling sealant. If Red did anything besides read the paper and mow the lawn, it was keeping the garage as pristine as a showroom. And what struck Drew as odd was that Red didn’t seem the garage-lurking type. Andrew thought back to Harlow’s confession—that the house was a lie. Maybe Red was a lie as well.

He crossed the length of the garage to the mower propped neatly against the wall. If anything, he could spend half the day in the wind, waiting for the inevitable tornado to suck him up
into the sky. He couldn’t get his thoughts out of his head, imagining what his mother would say if she found out about Harlow, wondering what Emily would do if she knew he had slept with someone so much older—that he’d tied her down like some twisted rapist and still managed to be turned on.

“You’re fucking pathetic,” he muttered to himself, rubbing the palms of his hands against the front of his shirt, trying to cleanse himself of what he’d done.

He shuddered, pulled the mower from its spot, and rolled it out of the garage and down the driveway to the side of the picket fence. Its wheels sank into grass that didn’t need cutting, but he’d be damned if he wasn’t going to cut it anyway. Narrowing his eyes against the wind, he was determined, convinced that completing this task would turn him back into the guy he used to be.

“Andy?” Harlow peeked out the front door. “Jesus, what are you doing out here?” Her soft curls flew into her eyes, blinding her. She fought them, pushing them out of her face.

Her voice put him on edge. He wanted to face her head-on and scream for her to stop talking, just don’t say anything, just please don’t talk anymore. But he didn’t scream; he turned and answered instead.

“The lawn needs mowing.”

“What?” She stared at him. “Are you crazy? It absolutely does
not
need cutting,” Harlow protested. “You can’t stay out here. Get back inside.”

“It needs it,” he insisted, and he began to push the mower along.

Harlow hovered in front of the door for a long while before disappearing inside, and the relief he felt when she was out of view was so overwhelming it actually disturbed him.

But he knew Harlow well enough to know she wasn’t going to give up. A moment later, she stepped onto the patio for the second time, poised herself on the bottom step of the porch stairs,
and crossed her arms over her chest, bracing herself against the inevitable tornado that would be born of the clouds overhead.

“What’s this about?” she asked, her expression nonplussed, annoyance peppering her tone.

“This?” Drew asked.

“This.” She motioned to the yard. “Don’t play dumb. I read men like you read comic books.”

“It’s my job,” he reminded her, backpedaling to a relationship they both knew was gone.

“It was,” she agreed, “but it isn’t anymore.”

Andrew opened his mouth to both question and protest, but she cut him off before he could get a word out.

“You heard Red; you’re fired. Now put that thing away and come inside before the storm takes you with it.”

Drew furrowed his eyebrows at the mower. His attention slowly shifted to Mick’s place. Gazing at it, he felt weak with longing. He wanted to be back there in that mess, in the dusty darkness that smelled of stale sheets. Amid the dirty carpet and the makeshift curtains, there had been freedom—gritty and muddled perhaps, but freedom all the same.

“Andrew.”

Harlow’s voice slithered around him from behind, curling around his neck like a noose.

“I’m waiting.”

This wasn’t the woman who brought him cookies when he first moved in; nor was it the woman he had burgers with the night before; it wasn’t the person who had begged him to stay with her while a black van loomed in the distance. This was someone different, a third personality: not motherly and loving, not vulnerable and girlish, but demanding, secretly deviant. He turned to look at her, disquiet accentuating his features like a punctuation mark.

“We’ll get someone else to do it,” she told him. “Some kid. Later.”

Pivoting on the hard soles of her shoes, she stepped back inside, leaving Drew feeling vacant, as though every last bit of insight into the situation had poured out of him onto the lawn, swept away by the storm. Because she
had
hired some kid to do it, and that kid had been him.

Which left the question, who the hell was he now?