Good Neighbors(30)

Shelly Schroeder, Shelly Schroeder.

First emerged three men in wet suits. They rolled out, apparatus weighing their hinds, flashlights bleaching the dark. These handed their ropes to another set of men, who attached them to a winding crank where more men turned the wheel. The rescue crew peeled off their second skins with solemnity. The crank got stuck. The men crawled to the hole and leaned on flattened bellies. They freed a black zipped bag and hoisted it to the bitumen-rich surface.

“Back away. It’s not her,” the lead crewman shouted. But they knew this couldn’t be true. It had to be her. The bag was too big to be anything else. They gathered, the news crews among them. Dominick Ottomanelli, Sai Singh, and the Ponti men pushed to the front. Using their bodies as barricades, they protected the Schroeders from the sight.

Pushed to the back, the Schroeders’ only son, FJ, found Larry Wilde alone. In his nervousness, Larry had tucked Robot Boy inside his green shorts. FJ approached with such slow, heavy steps that it seemed his body was a weeping sponge.

“Freak. Should have been you.”

While the Ottomanelli children and the entire Harrison family heard this cruelty, none corrected. They would later bristle at the memory, thinking they should have.

“It’s not her,” one of the men in thick neoprene announced. “Go home.”

But Rhea wouldn’t be stopped. What else could it be? She charged through the Ponti men to get to the body, her family following, and unzipped the bag.

They could all see what was inside: a German shepherd. His long pelt was slick with sand oil. His paws were bloody, nails missing from trying to smash his way free. Most unnerving, the cocktail of chemicals and cold had kept him perfectly preserved. A fossil of exactly the thing he had been eleven days before, trapped in time.

Fritz Schroeder looked away. Ella Schroeder began to cry. It was unclear whether her tears were relief or exhaustion. Then, Rhea. It wasn’t simply the corpse that unnerved her. It was its perfect preservation. She imagined Shelly, discovered this way. Her raw body exposed for all to witness. Rhea staggered, hands flapping, unable, somehow, to understand what she was seeing: the wet fur, the pink tongue, the open, rolled-back eyes.

She faced the crowd, expression beseeching, and wailed, sonorous as an echo through a great canyon. It shuddered across the crescent and down the hole, too. Those who heard were unmoored by its upwind. Unsettled, not just in space, but in their very identities. They watched this woman, but did not come to her. There was so much space around her, unfilled.

Shelly Schroeder. Shelly Schroeder.

What happened to you?

Rhea’s mad, witless focus took root in just one person: Gertie Wilde. Still screaming, she staggered in Gertie’s direction. How apt this unity, they thought. The mother of the living child and the mother of the missing one, taking solace. What a perfect convergence from which healing could begin.

But instead of holding Rhea, Gertie flinched. “I’m so sorry,” Gertie muttered. “But at least…”

Slap!

Rhea open-handed Gertie across the face. The sound was final. Cathartic, rendering the terrible unknown of these last horrible eleven days into something concrete. (Shelly Schroeder! Shelly Schroeder!)

It took a second before the blood. Rhea’s large diamond, turned inward, had snagged a piece of Gertie’s perfect cheek.

“Jesus Christ! Get the fuck away from my wife!” Arlo barked.

Gertie braced his tattooed arm and held him back. “It’s okay,” she mewed, her voice small and childlike. Disturbingly reminiscent of baby talk.

Shaking with violent intent, Arlo took a beat to calm down. Too long.

Linda Ottomanelli came to Rhea’s side. She clutched Rhea’s hand. “You need to go,” she told Arlo and, by association, the entire Wilde brood.

The Wildes hunched, self-conscious and shamed. None came to their rescue. None could summon the correct words. And so, they slinked back to 116 with their children, shutting their door behind them.

Except for Peter Benchley, who rolled back home in disgust, the rest of the neighbors remained. Though they intended only to pay witness, their presence issued validation to Rhea’s slap. They chatted with the rescue crew and consoled the Schroeders and offered licorice to sick Bethany, who gagged at the sight of her dog being zipped and packed as evidence. They remained until their own disquiet calmed. Because it was Rhea they stayed with, and because they were empathetic people, it was Rhea’s side that they saw. What harm did a simple slap do Gertie, the woman whose children had survived?

Really, it was Arlo who’d scared them more. He’d seemed so angry. So quietly violent. Even Gertie had shrunk in fear beside him.

Shelly Schroeder.

What happened to you?

That night, the neighbors ruminated over the events of the day. They remembered that terrible wail, punctuated by a shocking slap, like an arrow pointing blame. They recalled the shortened, most repeatable version of what Gertie had said: I’m so sorry. They remembered Arlo, shaking with disproportionate rage.

SHELLY SCHROEDER! SHELLY SCHROEDER! SHELLY SCHROEDER!

In the dark, unsettled quiet, they would know that there was something deeper to this story, something as yet unrevealed: Sorry for what?



* * *




Directed against the wrong person, violence assumes a will of its own. It wants to continue to hurt that person, as if to right the wrong, as if, in some way, to provoke violence in kind, thereby coercing its own legitimacy.