Good Neighbors(83)
A challenging girl. Smart and kind and fragile and sensitive and wonderful in the ways of wonder. A hero and a villain and a bitch and a savior. Shelly Schroeder, their friend.
They tried to lift her, but the murky pile held her tight. Like cement, it had hardened. But it was Julia and Ella and Charlie and Dave and Mark and Michael and Lainee and Sam, all pulling. Some were scared to touch her, weeping and mewing along with the trapped animals as they did it, but nonetheless doing it.
The muck held tight.
Julia thought about the listening thing that she’d felt all summer. The thing she’d noticed from the very first time she’d come out to the sinkhole. Not a dog. The thing that lived in absence. The lonely thing. It was here now. This was its terrible home, where it trapped the weak and the broken. Because this was Shelly, she lost her fear of it. All that remained was her fury against it.
“You can’t have her!” she shouted.
They pulled again but Shelly did not come free. And then they all shouted it, so loud it echoed through the entire chamber. It pushed out the tunnel and up the hole. It reverberated through Sterling Park. It entered basements and blasted through windows. It went everywhere, each young Rat Pack voice recognizable and distinct and clarion as nothing had been before or ever would be after.
“YOU CAN’T HAVE HER!”
The sound loosened the pile. It shook the chamber and rattled the crevasse. It sent the metal ladder and shoring apparatus singing. It moved even the hole.
Shelly came free.
They plucked her from the murk as if from a watery womb. They carried her out, all hands lifting, even as the secret chamber began to cave. It shriveled upon itself, collapsing in animal screams. As they sped, the crevasse opened for them, liked wilted tulip petals off a bloom, and they were not afraid.
Later, authorities would insist that the children’s collective weight had broken the tunnel’s soft ground, or that their shouting had resculpted the sensitive architecture of the chamber. The children would agree to this, without promoting their own interpretation, that the sinkhole submitted to them, because they had won.
They ferried her back to the opening, as gently as they’d have carried their own bare hearts.
118 Maple Street
Monday, August 2
“You can’t have her!”
Rhea Schroeder woke to those words, and knew. It wasn’t a psychic connection. It wasn’t a mother’s love, though these things did exist. It was simply that she’d known all along that Shelly would be found. Just like that girl, on the floor of the bathroom, her scalp running red.
She’d meant only to hurt herself in the women’s room of the Hungarian Pastry Shop. To kick hard enough to split herself in two. To frighten Aileen, who’d have stayed safe inside her locked stall. She’d have left after that. Returned to her seat and pretended to have been there all along.
In another world, that happened. In another world, she got over her dad’s death. His betrayal, too. She moved on and dated one of those passionate grad students from her class. Her life was clean and perfect in that other world.
But Rhea slammed too hard against the cheap stall door with its sharp metal corners. The lock broke. The small person sitting inside must have been leaning down, head parallel to her hips.
Rhea had yelped in pain as she’d fallen, and then she’d been on the floor, her knee too tender to bend. So she’d scooted against the wall. She’d closed her eyes against the thing inside the half-open stall. The girl’s ebony hair, immobile as a wig. Not Aileen Bloom. An accident. The wrong girl. Bright red ran out, adhering to grout around the baby-blue tiles.
People crammed the women’s room. The mother came first. And then more, including Aileen and the rest of the class. They’d seen Rhea, some running straight for her, to tend to her. Her kneecap had floated just off center. And then they’d seen the blood.
Jessica Sherman.
Who did that to you?
* * *
Gertie Wilde was just parking her car in front of her house when she heard Julia’s voice: “You can’t have her!” More young voices followed, all saying the same thing: You can’t have her!
The sound resonated. It roused Dominick and Linda Ottomanelli, who hadn’t been sleeping anyway. They’d decided that Arlo wasn’t really hurt. Just like Gertie and the brick, he was being hysterical. They’d decided they’d done the right thing in defense of their twins. And yet, they couldn’t sleep.
It woke Sai Singh, Nikita Kaur, and their children who were seriously considering moving to Jackson Heights, where it wasn’t nearly so upwardly mobile but at least you weren’t the only South Indians on the block. And these Americans were fucking drama queens.
It woke Cat, Rich, and Helen Hestia, who’d stayed inside during the beating, and now felt they’d shirked their moral responsibilities. So Rich and Cat had drafted a letter to the New York Times about the mistreatment their daughters had likely received at Arlo Wilde’s hands.
It woke Sally and Margie Walsh, who’d begun to wonder if they’d gotten carried away by all this child abuse talk.
It woke Tim and Jane Harrison, who forgot about the Sharpie line when they exited their divided house, smearing it as they walked.
It woke Adam Harrison, whose best friend, FJ, had cowed him into breaking into a veteran’s painkillers. What FJ did after that, smashing the mirrors and smearing them with his own waste, hadn’t been part of the plan. Adam had been disgusted by it, and by his drunken friend, too. Ever since, he’d popped Oxy at night, just to sleep.