The New Neighbor (30 page)

Z
oe could easily
be mistaken for a student here, and so there’s no reason for her to feel like a conspicuous interloper as she walks into the campus bookstore. She lingers near the entrance, touching the books on display. She keeps her head down, hoping the girl behind the cash register won’t ask if she needs help. She’s avoided all nonessential interactions with other people for so many months now that she’s grown terrified of them. Interactions. People. She feels an immense gratitude toward Margaret, for seeming to understand that. For knowing what to do.

Step one: buy a toy for Milo, if she can find the toys without asking where they are.

Two older women come in, talking loudly, then hushing their voices as soon as they’re inside. Professor types in cardigans. She’s noticed that female professors really seem to favor cardigans, even when the weather’s a little too warm for them. She’s listening to their talk only because they’re too near to avoid it, but it’s kind of interesting to hear one of them telling the other how much she hates one of her students, which she does in a normal voice, except at first she whispers his name, after that saying only
he
. Suddenly she breaks off her complaining and says, “Oh my God! I finally saw Jennifer!”

Zoe goes still.

“You did? Pretty great, right?”

“So great. She’s amazing. She really did get that knot out of my shoulder.”

The other woman sighs. “I have to book her again.”

“I already made another appointment. I wanted to do it, like, tomorrow, but I made myself wait two weeks, because it does cost money.”

“Did she have any mystical visions?”

The first woman laughs. She says, “No, not really,” but it’s obvious this is a lie.

The second woman says, “She’s really intuitive. She knew immediately about . . .” The women are walking as they’re talking, and Zoe doesn’t catch the rest. Did the second woman know the first woman was lying? Or could she really not tell? Maybe it would be better to go through life not being able to tell.

Zoe is angry. Maybe that’s strange. She’s grown used to feeling what she’s probably not supposed to feel. She’s out of step with what’s normal. It’s not for these women to talk about her mother, with Zoe standing there a stranger. Her supposedly amazing mother. She and her mother fled the same history, and how did her mother arrive at amazing? She could follow these women and tell them exactly where her mother came from, if she were the sort of person her mother thinks she is. Instead she picks up a guide to Sewanee hiking, because it’s right in front of her, and pages through it, dimly registering its pretty pictures until the urge to unmask her mother dissipates. That is not what she came here to do.

She skirts the edges of the store until she finds something she thinks Milo would like: a little tiger in a sweatshirt that says
SEWANEE.
A four-year-old has not yet outgrown stuffed animals, right? She starts to walk toward the registers with her purchase, but it comes to her that step one leads directly to step two, and her pace slows. Now that she has the gift for her brother, it will be time to go. “Let’s go, Margaret,” she’ll say heartily, and then she’ll help the old woman out to her car, and they’ll drive a little ways down the road. She asked this morning if they could walk there, and Margaret said, “Well, you could, but I’m afraid I can’t.”

That’s all that was said about the plan to see her mother. Another thing for which Zoe is grateful. Margaret isn’t pressuring her toward action, urging her on her way. Far from it. Margaret seems content to fuss over her, to treat her like an invited guest. She said she would make Zoe hot chocolate when she got back, which breaks Zoe’s heart a little, because it reminds her she’s not a child. Still, Margaret knows her intentions. Margaret knows who she is, and why she’s here, and so in her presence Zoe can’t help but know these things, too.

The girl at the cash register has lifted her head and spotted Zoe approaching, and so now she has to proceed, like a normal person would. She buys the tiger. But she isn’t ready for step two, which is delivery. She goes back to buy the hiking guide.

She chooses a hike almost at random and drives to the overlook where it starts. Green’s View, it’s called. There’s a car parked on the other side of the circle, engine running, some guy gazing out at the vista. Zoe wishes he weren’t there, but she can park right by the trail access, and though the guy might look at her, she doesn’t have to see him do it. Because of him she doesn’t pause to contemplate the view, lovely as it is, but goes ahead and starts picking her way down the steep and narrow trail. It takes her into a hollow of early wildflowers and enormous boulders, the boulders like castoffs from another planet. At the bottom she tilts her head back to gaze up at where she started; it seems impossibly far away. The trail winds on, and she follows it. Down here she has a blessed sense of being completely unobserved.

Up ahead, just off the trail, she notices a large piece of rusted metal. She’s puzzling over its nature and origin—there’s no access to this place except by trail—when she happens to look beyond it, back toward the bluff, and sees an entire car. Or the ruins of one. She’s not even surprised, the car so incongruous she can barely register belief in its existence. It’s upright on its wheels, its roof more or less intact, but the front is smashed so that it yawns like an unhinged jaw. The steering column stands to the side, stuck into the earth, a circle on a pole. It looks like a flower. She clambers up rocks toward the car, and then sees beyond it a second one. This one landed upside-down, rests there in pitiful permanent exposure of its rusty undercarriage. Next to it a strip of red metal. Bright red. Why do some things keep their color, while others get worn away? The car on its wheels has the low-slung look of a seventies hot rod. Inside it the front seat is visible, retaining its pale upholstery.

There is no way for these cars to have come here except in a plunge off the cliff. Glorious or horrifying, depending on the director and the score. Or maybe comical, if the cars were empty. She sees no bloodstains on the seats. Surely even if a body had been extracted long ago, there would still be stains. She looks up again at the top of the cliff. It must be several hundred feet up. Maybe some drunk college kids pushed the cars off the edge, then scrambled carelessly down the trail, slipping and sliding and laughing at their flirtation with peril, to see what they had done. Maybe this is even the most likely scenario. Or the cars might have nothing to do with each other, the second leaping years after the first. Still she imagines one fleeing, the other in pursuit, faster and faster toward the edge of the world, until both of them flew off.

M
ilo and Ben
play with cars on the floor—smashing them together, saying ow, ow, ow—while Jennifer and Megan sit at Jennifer’s table over tea, syrup-coated plates pushed to the side. Jennifer made French toast. Sebastian is shooting a wedding and will be gone all day and late into the evening; Megan as usual has ungovernable stacks of unfinished work. Jennifer offered to take Ben for part of the day so Megan could catch up, but Megan’s guilt wouldn’t allow this. Brunch was the compromise. Jennifer isn’t solving Megan’s problems but distracting her from them, which sometimes is enough. And she thinks in an hour or so, if the boys are still playing well together, she might persuade Megan to go get some work done, because she really is overwhelmed, poor thing, and Jennifer would like to help. She worries about Megan. She feels for her a deep tenderness that extends often to Ben and, at times, to Sebastian. She would like to be an agent of good to them. She would like Milo to grow up with a friend he can’t remember not knowing, as close as he’ll come to a sibling. And she’s happy to have settled, herself, into friendship. With Megan she doesn’t feel like she has to guard against her own tenderness. Megan won’t use it against her.

“They’re so cute, aren’t they?” Megan says, smiling down at the boys with pleased fondness. Ben at that moment lifts a car high in the air, as if it’s flying backward from a collision, and utters a long low-pitched scream.

Jennifer almost makes a joke about the juxtaposition of Megan’s comment and Ben’s pantomime of violence, but instead she just agrees. She’s leery of accidentally invoking the face-stabbing incident, which has, thankfully, been forgotten, or at least receded far enough into the background that they can all pretend not to see it there.

Jennifer yawns, covers her mouth, says excuse me. Megan laughs at her. “You yawn like a cat,” she says.

“How does a cat yawn?”

“Hugely. Like, with its whole face. Its eyes squinched up. You’ve never seen a cat yawn?”

“I guess I have. I must have.”

“Surely everyone on earth has seen a cat yawn.”

Milo says, “I haven’t,” proving once again that children are most likely to be listening to adults when they don’t appear to be.

“I haven’t, either,” Ben says in proud agreement.

“You’ve seen a cat yawn, Benjy,” Megan says. “Think about the lions at the zoo.”

“They show their teeth,” Ben says.

“That’s right.”

“They have huuuuuge mouths,” Milo adds.

“Do I have a huge mouth?” Jennifer asks, feeling an absurd spasm of adolescent self-consciousness.

“Mommy has a huge mouth!” Milo says.

“No, it’s not huge,” Megan says in mock-scolding. “It’s totally normal sized.” She takes a sip of her tea and shoots a teasing sidelong grin at Jennifer. “For a giant.”

Jennifer is about to retort, but then she hears a sound that surprises her: tires on her gravel drive. What she was about to say she’ll never afterward be able to remember. Megan raises her eyebrows, listening. “Who could that be?” Jennifer says.

“You’re not expecting anyone?” Megan says.

She shakes her head.

“Maybe it’s a package,” Megan says. “Maybe you need to sign.”

“I didn’t order anything.”

The boys are at the front window. “It’s a car,” Milo reports. From outside comes the sound of doors shutting. Jennifer could get up to go look, but she doesn’t want to. She has a bad feeling about this, which she struggles to ignore. In an ordinary life, people sometimes drop by. Except they don’t anymore, not since cell phones. “It’s a girl,” Milo says.

“What girl?” Jennifer asks.

Milo shrugs, turning away from the window. “I don’t know,” he says. “Some girl.”

“What girl?” Jennifer pushes up from the table.

“I don’t know, Mommy,” Milo says, in a cheerful singsong, losing interest now that Jennifer’s is engaged.

There’s a knock on the door. A loud, insistent knock,
one two three
. Jennifer and Megan look at each other like the police have arrived. “Why am I freaked out?” Megan asks.

Jennifer moves toward the door, but Milo is right there, and quicker, and he opens it. “Who are
you
?” he says.

And Zoe says, “I’m Zoe, silly,” and then she drops to her knees and pulls Milo into a hug.

Milo yanks out of the hug, looks at Jennifer for help. “Mommy,” he says.

Zoe crouches there, looking at him entreatingly, empty armed. “Milo,” she says, “don’t you know who I am?”

Zoe. Her beautiful daughter, her angry girl. She rises now and looks at Jennifer. Jennifer flinches, then tries to disguise the flinch by holding her whole self absolutely still. Her daughter’s gaze is a spotlight, blinding and insistent. Accusatory. It has always hurt to look at her, and now it aches. She looks past her daughter, expecting to see her mother-in-law waving custody papers, a lawyer, the police. But Zoe is the only one here. Does that mean she’s the only one coming? Or is she the advance guard?

“Who
are
you?” Milo asks.

Behind Jennifer, Megan has risen, clearly aware that something strange and fraught is happening. “Ben,” she says quietly, “come here,” and Ben just does it, no demand she justify her order, not a word of protest.

“He doesn’t know who I am?” Zoe looks at Jennifer in puzzlement.

“Mommy!” Milo demands. “Who
is
she?” He steps closer to Jennifer, tugging on her hand.

“I’m your sister,” Zoe says. “You’re my brother.”

“I don’t have a brother,” Milo says.

“No, you don’t. You have a sister.”

“I don’t have a sister.”

“Of course you do, silly,” Zoe says. “I brought you this.” She holds out a little stuffed tiger.

But Milo won’t take it, pressing his body into his mother’s side, his brow intensely furrowed, his lower jaw stuck out. “Mommy!” he says.

Jennifer would like to embrace Zoe, then carry her out the door. But that is not possible. What is possible? What should Jennifer do? She feels a sharp longing for five minutes ago. “She’s just pretending, sweetie,” Jennifer says. “You’ve never had a sister. You’re an only child.”

At this, Zoe takes a stumbling step back, her face wiped of all its passionate certitude. Not since she was a small child, not even after Tommy died, has Jennifer seen her this vulnerable, seen her express a sadness that wasn’t three parts rage. But she has to save the child it’s possible to save. She crouches to look at Milo. “I need to talk to this girl,” she says. “Can you go play in your room?”

Milo shoots a nervous glance at Zoe. “Can I watch TV?”

“Yes, you go watch TV,” Jennifer says, and Milo clatters up the stairs.

“Can I go, too?” Ben asks, and Megan says, “No, sweetie, we should leave.” He protests, and she opens her mouth to speak again, but at the same time Zoe says to her, “Did she not tell you about me?”

“No,” Megan says.

“Because I’m not pretending.”

“No,” Megan says. “I can see that.”

“I’m her daughter.”

Jennifer looks at Megan, who is looking back at her. “I don’t understand,” Megan says. From upstairs, to Jennifer’s relief, comes the loud blare of a raucous TV show.

“Her name isn’t Jennifer Young,” Zoe says. “It’s Jennifer Carrasco.”

“Really?” Megan asks Jennifer.

“Really,” Zoe says. “She must have changed it so no one could look her up.” Suddenly she turns to Jennifer. “Say something,” she demands. She waits, then turns back to Megan. “People think she killed my father.”