Good Neighbors(31)
After all the neighbors went home that night; after Fred Atlas put his sick wife, Bethany, to bed and headed to the Wildes to check in and say, What happened out there was absurd, but was told, Thanks anyway. Nobody’s much in the mood for a visit by Arlo, who’d felt betrayed that his only real friend on Maple Street had not spoken out; after the Ponti men, Sai Singh, and Dominick Ottomanelli conferenced about how they might better have handled the situation, and good thing it hadn’t been Shelly, but it was a dry run upon which they could improve; after Peter Benchley conducted his mirror therapy, then took an extra Oxy to calm his hurting, phantom legs; after Fritz Schroeder muttered something quick and polite about a new scent he was working on, then took the Mercedes out of Maple Street; after screens tuned to static because it was better than nothing were shut down, and every remaining family was tucked in its own fold; after the rescue crew at last gave up, covering the hole with new and thicker wood, hammered by wide and deep rivets, sealing it off for the first time since Shelly had fallen inside, and going home. Long after all these things, Rhea Schroeder’s murk bubbled up.
Grief was not an emotion Rhea cared to entertain. It was a cockroach that waited until she turned out the lights, scampered in the dark.
In the light, she was all about blame.
Shelly’s fall had been an accident, but accidents have causes. The flimsy slab over a mammoth hole was negligent. She could sue the police department. The sinkhole by rights ought to have been filled long ago. She could sue the town. And why had the children been out there to begin with? Whose bad judgment had they followed? She still remembered the expression on Shelly’s face as she’d run from the crowd of chasing adults. She’d seemed so spooked.
Was it possible she’d been running from someone? Might her house contain a clue?
She searched the basement first. She passed the pile of bricks in the laundry room, which had once made up the front walk. She opened the closet full of empty wine bottles, added two more. Fruit flies buzzed, laying eggs in the wet slurry at the glassy bottoms.
Nothing.
She stalked the kitchen, slammed dirty plates into the sink where they broke like sand dollars. She tore down the toile drapes because they were ugly. Tacky. Twenty years old. Up the stairs, to her bedroom that she hated, which she shared with a man she only then realized she couldn’t stand. A man who wasn’t home. Because when important things happened, Fritz Schroeder was never there.
“Stay in your rooms!” she shouted along the hall. Doors shut quietly, no hands visible, as if dispossessed of authors.
She opened cabinets and closets in Shelly’s room, flinging out all that belonged to her bright, sensitive daughter. The pretty red winter coat; the homemade snow globe with a Sculpey snowman inside; the black knoll of shed braids sawed away with dull safety scissors; the horsehair brush, the goddamned brush.
She stripped the sheets so they floated, pregnant with old ghosts of the child who’d once slept beneath them. She turned the mattress. She shook every book, unleashing ticket stubs and class notes passed between schoolgirls, emblazoned with hearts, and even one from a boy—Dave Harrison—asking if she’d sneak out to meet him at midnight at 7-Eleven.
Shelly.
The bottom drawer of Shelly’s desk was locked. She used a hammer to smash it open. Inside was nothing. An emptiness. She yanked out the drawer, and then all the other drawers. She overturned the entire desk. Something that was stuck to the back tore away. A tin lockbox. Written across green-and-pink-snowflake-patterned masking tape it read: Pain Box.
She yanked. Couldn’t open it without the key. So she tapped it with the hammer. The frame bent. She stopped. There might be something fragile in there. Something just like Shelly. She took it, along with the other evidence, back down to the main floor. She hid the Pain Box in her office.
Then she slammed the brush and cut hair in the sink and poured lighter fluid all over, along with the broken dishes beneath. She hoisted the stepping stool and ripped out the ceiling fire alarm as it sounded, tearing batteries loose from their holsters. She poured more lighter fluid until the blaze was deep blue at its roots, the hair perfect, protein-scented kindling. She poured until the bristles turned to ash and the polyurethane melted and the compressed wood went to char. She did this until the sink itself was ruined.
A proper mess. Stinking and flamboyant. The char was the center, blue and orange and red flaming out, like entering a black hole. She followed with her eyes and with her mind, a kind of unburdening. She was spiriting Shelly to the safety of the other side, a game with time itself.
All the while, she thought: Someone else was to blame for all that was happening. She had not done this.
Thursday, July 22
Shelly Schroeder. Shelly Schroeder.
What happened to you?
For the people of Maple Street, the scream and the slap that followed stayed fresh in their minds. I’m sorry, they remembered. Sorry for what?
A bright girl. Brittle, too, with rough, bully edges—in a family that large, there’s bound to be one of them. The people of Maple Street agreed she wasn’t a black sheep. She came from too good a family for that. Rhea paid too much attention, helped too much with homework, rallied too much for the PTA. Fritz was too well respected, devoted in his quiet way to supporting his family. No, this was just a phase Shelly would have outgrown by high school, all the more resilient for having expunged it from her system.