Neighborhood Watch (v5.0) Read online

  Trish’s brother, John, was the one most people noticed first. The smartest boy at the middle school and probably the oddest. He could solve a Rubik’s Cube in under a minute but couldn’t, when pressed, clip his own fingernails. He had a nervous personality and a habit of licking his lips and then spitting when he spoke. I know Marianne worried about John for most of his childhood. She got him out of PE classes, and had the mandatory swim test required for graduation waived so that the valedictorian of the class could get a diploma. He never learned to drive a car or ride a bike. Once I saw him struggle for ten minutes to open a bag of potato chips.

  Marianne tells me that these days he works as a software designer and lives in Alabama. She sees him twice a year and says he’s become a churchgoer. “Apparently he’s always wanted some type of community. I never realized that. I’ve asked him does it really have to be a church and he says, ‘Yes, Mother, it does.’”

  Trish, though, I never hear about. No old stories about her childhood. No verbalized regrets. It’s as if Trish has died and there is no need to keep repeating the fact. I’ll also say this, though: There were times—not every visit, but often enough—when Marianne would lose her train of thought midstory and her stare would grow vacant, whatever she’d been about to say gone. I thought of Trish then, and assumed she was part of whatever it was Marianne hadn’t said.

  It made me sad because I remember Trish well as such a bookish and appealing girl. In my early days, when I worked in the children’s room of the library, Marianne brought her often and let her check out ten books, the maximum number allowed per card. They were always returned before their due date, and I could tell by the way Trish fingered their spines that she’d read every one. She was a little odd, like her brother. When she was eight she joined a project I organized making shoe box dioramas of famous places in literature. I left the choice up to the children, and we received some wonderful ones: Pooh’s Corner; Wilbur’s barnyard pen; the Borrowers’ home, with thread-spool tables and matchbox beds. Then Trish showed up with the most elaborate diorama of all, what looked like mounded Play-Doh hills dotted with flowers and a small dollhouse hospital bed in the corner. “It’s Yr,” Marianne whispered after I’d studied it for a while without a guess. “From I Never Promised You a Rose Garden.”

  I looked at her, confused. Trish had read a book about the imaginary world of a schizophrenic seventeen-year-old living in a mental institution? I assumed Marianne was joking. She smiled sheepishly. “Sometimes they let her check out from the adult room. I don’t know if it’s a bad idea. I don’t know how much she understands.”

  Trish smiled as she slid her diorama onto the table beside Laura Ingalls Wilder’s log cabin home. She seemed delighted with her project, grinning fiercely as she straightened the title card out. I looked back at Marianne, who studied her daughter. I could almost read her hopeful thought—Maybe it’s fine.

  I didn’t stay in the children’s room for long after that. Though I never made the request and nothing was ever directly said (to me, anyway), after my third miscarriage it was understood that I’d be better placed elsewhere. After that, I saw Trish at the library only occasionally, and I was usually shy, as I was with all the children, never quite sure if they would remember me. Trish surprised me, though, starting a conversation herself. Once she asked if my hand got tired stamping books. Another time, what the best part of being a librarian was. The question surprised me. Who’d ever heard of a child asking an adult a question about her life? I asked her, “Do you want to be a librarian?”

  She beamed. “Not at all,” she whispered. “I want to be a writer.”

  I thought about Trish in prison sometimes, when my mind wandered to children I’d known and liked in the past, but I asked Marianne about her only once, enough to know I shouldn’t again. “She’s gone from our lives,” Marianne said. “Cut herself off from us.” It was clear enough that the choice was Trish’s and not her parents’.

  Now I look at Trish’s bookshelves filled with ceramic animals and, behind them, her childhood books—some predictable, many not. I recognize a few fantasy titles, some sci-fi, the vampire books that were just coming out when I left.

  At one end of the shelf I see Middlemarch by George Eliot. My favorite book in college, and more than five hundred pages long. Was it possible Trish had read this as a teenager? Was she that precocious? I pull it out and then my breath catches at the inscription I find on the first page:

  To Trish—

  I loved this when I was your age.

  Friends Always (I hope),

  Geoffrey Steadman

  CHAPTER 6

  I can still remember the first time I saw Geoffrey at my library: He came in and stood by our “Hot Books” shelf, seven-day loans on popular fiction. I was working in the back office, out of view, but I watched carefully as he looked around, as if he’d come in not for books but for something else. I could have gone out there on any excuse. I waited five minutes, then ten, to see what he would do. After fifteen minutes, he left.

  Two days later, he returned while I was shelving an overflowing return cart, struggling with a rolling ladder that hadn’t been working for a while. “Let me get that,” he said, taking the book from my hand, tall enough to reach the shelf without help.

  “You know Dewey!” I said too loud, after he’d placed it properly. I tried to laugh as if I’d made a joke because Dewey is so often the punch line of librarian jokes. We all have more mugs with “Librarians Dewey it in the Stacks” than we know what to do with.

  “Yes,” he said, grabbing a book and reaching up again, so close I could smell his musk deodorant. He told me he was here to do some research. “I’m trying to write something from a teenage girl’s point of view, except now I realize I know almost nothing about teenage girls.”

  His eyes were so blue and clear it was hard to look at them for long. I told him I knew a little bit about teenage girls—or what they read, anyway. “And of course I was one once,” I added. Was that too flirtatious? It’s true that I wouldn’t have said it standing at the front desk with my colleagues around, sorting through request slips, listening to everything. “I was a bookish girl. Not very popular,” I admitted. “Mostly I sat around watching people who had more friends than I did.”

  He smiled. “That’s exactly what I need. A girl who’s an observer, a watcher of everything. Can you remember your life at age fourteen?”

  All too well, unfortunately, but I didn’t tell him that. Nor did I admit that bookish and unpopular would have been kind adjectives to describe me at that age. I was also surly and difficult, given to wearing layers of black and writing bleak, angry poetry.

  “I’m happy to give you the books I read at that age,” I told him, thinking I’d amend the list and leave off Go Ask Alice. I composed a cheery list of Judy Blumes and classics: Jane Eyre, To Kill a Mocking-bird, Little Women, Gone With the Wind. The same books, I realize now, that are sitting on Trish’s shelf. This makes no sense. Was he using me to befriend her? She was twelve when he moved in, fifteen by the time we all left. What kind of friendship could they have possibly had?

  “This is great,” Geoffrey said that first day, checking out five of my recommendations and reading them all inside of a week. I started thinking of more, reading a few myself, storing up anecdotes to tell him on the days when he came in. Eventually I told him the truth about my adolescence: “I don’t think I was invited to a single party until I got to college and forced myself to do a personality makeover. I found an article in a magazine that walked me through it.”

  He clapped his hands and laughed. “A personality makeover. I love it. Does Paul know about this?”

  I stopped short for a second. Paul didn’t know all of it, or not in any detail. I’d never told him about my sleepwalking episodes because the episodes seemed to be behind me. I told myself it was a temporary matter, more connected to the stress of school than to any deep-seated psychosis.

  I got called away before I could answ
er. “Look,” Geoffrey said later, resting his books on my desk. “I’d like to hear more of your story if I could. All the re-creating yourself fits right in with what I’m doing.”

  I smiled and mouthed, How about later? pointing to the line behind him. For the rest of the day, I reconstructed my old stories. I made up funny details and forgot what was true and what wasn’t because that seemed less important than getting in his book.

  Eventually he started finding his own books. “What do you think of this one, Bets?” he’d say, assuming I’d read everything, though, like many librarians, I’d become someone who talked about books more than I read them. I could tell you which writers had the longest wait lists. I could recommend books I’d never read based on the request slips I’d processed. Geoffrey changed all that, reminding me of the books I loved as a girl. When he asked me what my favorite book of all time was and I told him Middlemarch, he included it in that day’s stack of books. That night I opened my copy for the first time in years, reread a few passages, and wondered why I’d named this book so quickly, and if it wasn’t all just a little depressing: Dorothea with all her do-gooder sincerity and her terrible marriage to Casaubon, the phony writer and academic. Now I wonder what Geoffrey had thought when he read it. Did he see pieces of himself in that character? Apparently not if he passed the book on to Trish, but why would he have done that?

  I remember how nervous I was to discuss the book with him. In college I’d wept over it, how Dorothea with her good intentions ended up with so little, and in the end, dead. Rereading it, it seemed more frightening than sad: a childless woman filling the emptiness at the center of her life with gossamer plans and projects to help the poor. What would Geoffrey know about me and my delusions of importance—my dream that what I did at the library mattered to people, mattered to anyone—after he read it? I felt embarrassed about the whole thing until the day I looked up from my desk at work and saw him standing there with tears in his eyes. “Oh, Bets, what a book,” he said. “I cried at the end and I never do that.”

  After that, we tried to have something we were both reading at the same time. His favorite book was Sometimes a Great Notion by Ken Kesey, and I did what you never see a librarian do: I sat at the front desk with a book open, reading it. I wanted to love it—he’d loved my suggestions—and in the end I did, or pretended I did, anyway. Geoffrey said reading books with me took him back to the time before they’d become a complicated pleasure. Reading new ones now meant he knew the writer or the writer’s agent, and inevitably those threads of connection made him uneasy; not with jealousy, I didn’t think, but with a self-consciousness I could hardly believe the first time I saw it.

  “Sometimes I wonder if I’m just a copier,” he said. He didn’t say any more and I didn’t ask what he meant, though now, of course, I understand.

  At the trial, witnesses reported seeing him at the library as often as three times a week. His library records put it closer to once a week, though naturally there were days he came in without checking books out. Gretchen, another assistant librarian, bitter about my promotion over her, described Geoffrey as almost constantly standing at my desk or walking beside my shelving cart. This was a dig, too, as any librarian will tell you. Shelving should have been my lowest priority, a job easily relegated to students or volunteers.

  “What did you think, overhearing their conversations?” the DA asked Gretchen.

  “I felt embarrassed mostly,” Gretchen said. “They were a little sophomoric, the way they went on about books. I wondered how much she was trying to impress him.”

  “Can you define sophomoric?” The DA sounded annoyed. First rule for witnesses: Don’t talk above the jury’s heads.

  “When someone tries to sound smarter than they are.”

  I don’t think Gretchen hated me all those years we worked side by side before Geoffrey came along to interrupt the quiet and skew the balance. I think she hated her life, which included a husband she didn’t seem to like and a live-in mother-in-law. Geoffrey represented a pleasure most of us had long ago stopped imagining. A man stopping by to say hello, to lean across our beige desk and make a joke. Of course I sounded sophomoric at times. Who wouldn’t? Now I wonder who else he was manipulating, giving up portions of his writing day to.

  “Did it ever sound like flirting?” the same lawyer asked Viola.

  “In my mind, any conversation that goes on longer than it technically needs to while working is a flirtation. So, yes.” Viola sounded so unlike herself saying this, I wondered if she’d written it down somewhere and memorized her line.

  “Did it seem sexual to you?”

  “Oh, no.” Her eye flicked over for a second to mine. “I never saw that.”

  In the end, my coworkers did me far more harm than good, though I don’t blame them. They were librarians, keen observers with sharp memories. During the trial, I’ll admit, I liked hearing their stories—the validation, after everything, that my friendship with Geoffrey hadn’t all been in my head.

  It surprised me that no one ever mentioned how we started eating lunch in the garden behind the library. We never planned our meetings, we just wandered outside and found each other. We’d eat and talk as if we were in the middle of a longer story we could never finish. “So where were we?” Geoffrey might say when I sat down. “Oh, right. Tenth-grade English. Your first lesbian teacher.”

  He told his own stories, full of teen-boy pranks where he was the ringleader and Paul was a background player. Neither of them had been good athletes, which meant they never joined Little League or Pee Wee football. The afternoons of their youth were free for trolling through the woods at the end of their street. “We built teepees and stored food and berries to live off of if we ever had to.”

  I loved hearing his stories. The ones Paul told were mostly from high school, after Geoffrey had already become a star writer for the newspaper with a column titled “In Steadman’s Stead.” “All the school jokes came from his columns,” Paul told me. “The principal quoted them, the teachers, everyone.” Alone with me, Geoffrey told stories that predated the discovery of his writing talent. Maybe for obvious reasons. His career was stalled; he faced an uncertain future. But sometimes I wondered if there might be more to it, if for some reason every reminder of his writing life was painful to him.

  I remember the lunch hour when I told Geoffrey the truth about my father’s illness, how he’d had bleak patches on and off throughout my childhood, and then, at the age of forty-four, drove himself to the hospital in the middle of the night and told them he hadn’t slept in fourteen days. He stayed there a month and came home a changed man: heavier, paler, with hands that trembled too much to open the vials of pills he’d returned with. We didn’t know what to say to the stranger he’d become. For months, his only conversation was about nurses and fellow patients from the hospital. “Eventually we got used to it,” I told Geoffrey, looking not at him but at a spray of orange daylilies. “He never went back to work after that. Never drove. Never left the house really, except to go out in the yard a bit. He loved to garden. That’s what he did when he met my mother.”

  I’d rarely spoken about my father the way I did with Geoffrey that day, revealing facts that are unimaginable for people who haven’t lived with mental illness. He never worked again. Never left the house. “Sometimes I think he was criminally overmedicated in that hospital and never had the courage to wean himself.” Geoffrey nodded. Part of me felt insecure at having spoken so candidly, part of me wondered, If I offer more details, will he use them? “He stopped drinking alcohol because of the meds and instead put cough syrup into his tea. At night if his hands were shaking too much, I did it for him.”

  “Hmm,” he said, closing his eyes and nodding.

  I hoped he was thinking: Good detail. Usable. “You have an incredible memory,” he once said, which kept me talking. The irony is that I did have an unusual memory. I could recall the names of old teachers, of classmates I hardly knew, details about what the popular
girls said as they lined up the apples slices and cottage cheese they ate for lunch.

  I remembered everything except for the episodes I forgot completely.

  Eventually I told him the truth about my parasomnia episodes, though I framed it as a thing of the distant past. “I used to be quite a sleepwalker,” I said.

  “Really? What was that like?”

  “Usually I’d wake up and be in my sister’s room, trying to take her things.”

  “You’d steal in your sleep! I love it!”

  “She’d yell at me and that would be that.”

  He laughed and clapped like an audience waiting for an encore. This was how we’d portrayed ourselves to each other, as smart and flawed people, perpetual outsiders trying to fit in. “Eventually it got a little creepier than that,” I admitted. “Food started disappearing in the middle of the night and I wouldn’t remember anything, but I’d know that I’d eaten it.”

  His smile faded a fraction into concern. “What kind of food?”

  “Bulky things. Half a loaf of bread. A stack of crackers. In the morning I’d wake up covered in crumbs.” I wanted to strike the right note, get him to laugh again.

  He didn’t. “Wow. Did your parents know?”

  “Not really. They thought we had a terrible problem with mice.” This was initially true. Then they assumed my father was to blame. “I’m pretty sure it stopped when I was in high school, but about halfway through college it started again.” I wasn’t sure why I was telling him this when I’d never told anyone before. “I was living in a suite with five other girls. We had a mini-fridge. I remember moving in and seeing all that food and thinking, I wonder if this is going to be a problem?”

  I tried to make it a funny story, though I knew it wasn’t. I didn’t know the other girls well. I was coming off the loneliest year of my life. Geoffrey’s smile said it was fine, he was ready to laugh, so I kept going: “Sure enough, the first week a package of hot dogs disappeared in the middle of the night. There was a wrapper in the garbage and no sign that any of them had been cooked. Another morning I woke up and discovered I’d eaten a stick of butter.”