Neighborly(82)

Here’s another sign: I barely sleep anymore, so this morning I saw (and heard) Gina and Oliver fighting in the street at the crack of dawn. “I was back before the kids woke up!” he was protesting. She grabbed his collar and screamed in his face, “That wasn’t the rule!”

I’ve never seen that side of Gina before. Sure, tightly wound people can spring open, but I never thought Gina would be one of those. And as a couple, Gina and Oliver have always seemed rock solid. I’d assumed that being asexual had some sort of protective aspect to it, like an amulet that would shield her from jealousy. But maybe Tennyson getting it on with Oliver is just too much for her.

I want to go outside and tell Gina it’s casual. I mean, she knows this. Everything with Tennyson is casual. She’s not much for intimate conversation. It’ll be short-lived, too. Tennyson and Vic are the best advertisement for why (and how) openness works. If they’re out in the street fighting tomorrow, it really will be Armageddon.

Then there’s Andie and Nolan. If she’s not actually having an affair with Doug, she’s doing a pretty good job of faking one. I feel like I should do something, help Nolan somehow, but it’s not like he’s any good at talking about feelings. He doesn’t like to admit he has any. But I know how he reveres Andie, and I always thought she felt the same way. If Doug and Andie are together, it will truly be cataclysmic.

Then there’s Wyatt, who seems so distraught every time I see him on the street. I know Yolanda is putting him through the wringer. I set him up, with no conscience. I was just so single-mindedly focused on getting rid of Kat that I never thought twice about sending Yolanda that picture from Kat’s phone. I didn’t care what happened to him. I was that obsessed.

I’m afraid this whole neighborhood is falling apart, that it’s been some gigantic house of cards, and that Kat and Doug were the wind to blow it all down. Or maybe I’m the one who flicked my finger and set it all in motion. My vendetta against Kat, my need to drive her out, is destroying what I love.

All that, and I’ve failed. She’s coming back here anyway. It’s the only home she has, and that’s the only family she knows, and unless I can get Doug to boot her out, I’m stuck with her as my neighbor.

I can’t talk to anyone, can’t get a fresh perspective. My secrets have segregated me from these women whom I’ve come to love. But do they really know me? They don’t even know I’m from Haines. They have no idea who my father is.

Katrina knows me best, if she’d just open her eyes. It’s like she’s blocked me out, pushed me down into the most subterranean part of her subconscious. I feel like even if she changed every feature in her face, I’d still recognize her. I couldn’t help it.

We were best friends for eleven years, from ages six to seventeen. Then there was the accusation about my father, and I went to her, crying my eyes out, not knowing that she would turn around and go to the police and claim he’d done it to her, too.

There weren’t that many victims, and most of them dropped out, until only two remained. One of those was Katrina. She testified against my father, who had treated her like his own daughter for years. She had no dad, she had nothing, and my family took her in. She ate dinner at our house practically every night. All those Saturday night sleepovers. All that compassion we had for her, and she turned around and lied. She destroyed us.

That’s what it was all about: I had the best of everything, and she had so little. I tried to share with her, but that wasn’t enough. She wanted to make sure that I was left with nothing.

My father insisted upon his innocence, but the town was happy to bring him low. He told me that Haines was full of envious people, and I could see it in their bloodthirst. They practically came out with pitchforks. The jury was rigged. That was the only way they could have convicted him.

Having the last name Layton had always been a badge of honor and a source of pride. I’d been from the best family, and now I was a pariah. People looked at me with pity, or with contempt, or disgust, treating me like I was contaminated. The whispers. The ostracism. The loneliness of trying to defend someone who everyone said was indefensible. But he wasn’t! He was my dad. He was a good man, and I couldn’t say that out loud anymore. No one wanted to hear it.

Katrina had gotten her wish. She’d turned me into an undesirable. Just like she was.

I was so angry. All the therapy in the world couldn’t stop the anger.

Really, the therapy made it worse. Being told I was in denial, having to hear the lies from the newspaper about how he groomed all those kids, and sometimes, I have to admit, she even got me to doubt him. There were times I thought that eight was a lot of victims, and that they were all telling versions of the same story, and that one of those victims was a girl I had loved. There were times in therapy when I started to wonder if it could have happened, and times since. I know my father. My heart knows him.

But I can’t see him anymore. He’s still in prison. I can’t visit because the last time I did, I sat across from him and—I would never admit this out loud—I had the feeling that maybe he really was capable of what they’d said. I’ve gone back over that again and again, and I honestly don’t know what changed. It wasn’t like he confessed. But after he was out of my sight, I revisited all my childhood memories, the way he was with me and the way he was with Katrina, and I knew the truth again: that Katrina and the others had set him up, for their own bizarre reasons.