Good Neighbors(81)

She remembered sitting with Gertie, confessing so much. Her words, every one, a gasp for breath from a drowning woman. And then Gertie’d seen her for what she was. She’d seen the dirty murk monster inside her. She’d pushed Rhea back down into it. Tried to drown her. Rhea’d had no other option but to fight back.

She remembered the way Shelly had always watched her, as if seeing what she could not. What she would never see. The holes. The missing things that made her incomplete, and the murky things that made her disgusting. The wrong things in a house of wrong. She remembered a brush, a thrumping into the quiet, to contain those revelations. To hold them still.

She remembered smashing her daughter’s Pain Box against the wrong person’s head.

These memories came at her like gunshots and she saw clearly, what she was and what she had done. She saw herself as something knotted and too large. A raging thing. She and the murk were the same. It was time to unburden. If she could not do it the one way, through time, she would do it the other way. She must confess.

She considered doing this. Today. She imagined Bianchi in his midpriced suit, hiding his grin. She imagined Gertie, at last given permission to retaliate, screaming at Rhea, the veins in her graceful neck taut as a barking dog’s. She pictured all of Maple Street, pointing and whispering. Her house would be like a prison. She’d sit center, the object of all that opprobrium.

Your fault, they would say.

But it wasn’t true. It wasn’t her fault. Someone else had done this.

A wave of terror bathed her. This was too much. She preferred the nothing. The murk unfurled then, heavy and glistening. It swallowed her.

She blinked, wet-eyed, over the papers and photos before her. Did not recognize them, or remember having brought them out. Put them away and stood. Left her office and turned out the light.





116 Maple Street


Monday, August 2

Gertie woke to a strange, empty room. She oriented quickly. Found the note on the nightstand. It read:

Gone to get Shelly.



She put on her shoes, brushed her hair, put it in a ponytail, and washed her face. Invented these ablutions as a means of keeping calm. Of taking a breath and staving off panic. She didn’t want to collapse again.

She got her keys and her wallet. Her phone. She called Detective Bianchi even though the sun had only started to rise. “Julia sneaked out. She’s at the hole looking for Shelly, I think. I’m going there now.”

Then she got on the road, back to Maple Street.





Sterling Park


Monday, August 2

Those with lights shined Julia’s path. It reminded her of those movies they showed in woodshop class—archaeological digs in faraway places, exposed to modern air for the first time in thousands of years. The smell thickened with acid sweetness. The walls were vast, stretching far wider than the hole’s mouth, and honey-combed by the wear of composite metals. To prevent collapse, hydraulic steel barriers shored the hole’s wide sides. These appeared sturdy, mechanical, and clean, even though bitumen seeped over the steel and red-painted pistons that ran the length between them and held them in place. The ladder ran down along the middle.

She was wearing her dad’s Hawaiian shirt again. It felt like a kind of synchronicity. Like going back in time. Her Toms sneakers went squish-squish. She got to the bottom where the ladder ended on a ledge, made room. The rest came down. They shined their phones. The water was ice cold and ankle deep.

Just a single path led downslope and they followed it, leaving the dawn behind. They went deeper, beyond the safety of the hydraulic barriers that prevented cave-in. Like bats, they could feel the hollow up ahead before they saw it: an absence. Their lights shined the path—a black, scaffolded shoring tunnel, made just for people to walk single file. They knew intuitively that it wasn’t big enough to prevent cave-in, but if the walls gave way, it might protect them long enough until someone found and rescued them. The tunnel was about two feet deep with springwater because the dredge they’d used to keep it clear was gone, the hole slated for fill later today. Straight ahead through the tunnel was the only direction to go.

“Here,” Charlie said, pointing. “It’s a current.”

“So, let’s follow,” Dave said, serious and awed.

Julia walked atop the tunnel’s steel girding that led to cool water. Girding was above, too—narrow steel beams like an animal cage. She grazed a top bar with her shoulder and it was ice cold.

Squish-splash. She went down for maybe five hundred feet. She could hear only the single-file splashing behind her, and the rushing of water. At last, the girding beams ended. Nothing was shored. All that was left was an unsupported tunnel of dirt and sand that weaved beneath Sterling Park. They shined their lights into the last section, where the water was higher and the tunnel much smaller. The current pulled them toward it.

If there was a cave-in here, nothing would save them.

She braced herself, holding to the last of the steel girding. Her thighs and toes were numb. Her heart pounded hard. She kept hoping her body would get tired, forced into calmness by exhaustion. For how long can a person stay so wired?

“This could cave in,” she said. “People should only keep going if they want to.” She looked back at them, let the light blind her, so they could see her face. So they could know that she forgave them whatever they’d said or done. They didn’t have to prove anything.