The People Next Door Page 21

  She trotted down with a roll of trash bags, steeling herself in the event she had to scrub blood (and Rita Larson’s wine) from the carpet. She did not remember seeing Tami bleeding profusely, but she assumed there would be a hell of a mess. If not here, surely in the Larsons’ car on the ride home. Or was it the ride to Boulder Community Hospital? Urgent Care, anyway.

  When she got to the bottom of the stairway and turned the corner, she was stricken. She had not grasped the level of destruction fifteen second- and third-graders could leave in their wake. It seemed, in a sickening way, the perfect snapshot of her daughter’s chaotic mind.

  Twelve hundred square feet of balloons, napkins, cups, plastic silverware, finger paints, kazoos, plastic trinkets, and smashed candy necklaces. Herds of hand-size stuffed animals purchased as takeaways for ‘Guests of Briela Nash’ (because in this sensitive age, every child went home a winner, one child’s birthday was every child’s birthday) were torn, flung, forgotten, gutted, poised in positions of grave injury and imaginary copulation. There were ribbons, paper hats, streaks of glitter, and blown soap bubble residue. All over the basement. In every corner. Piled knee-high. It was a damp dominion reeking of wet crepe paper, artificial sugar, and bubble-gum farts. It was too much to absorb in one flyover. It was the Hurricane Katrina of birthday parties. She wanted to burn the house down.

  No, it couldn’t be that bad, she thought, pausing on the stairs. But it was that bad, she realized as she waded in again. Like rioters in a burning cell block, the kids had together succumbed to hysteria and uncorked the unholy.

  Grape punch barf streaked the walls. The dish lamp had been toppled. Under the pool table, a cold blackened tofurter was being devoured by the Nash’s Yorkshire terrier, Thom, who, unbeknownst to anyone, just twenty-seven minutes ago, having found himself locked inside this amazing new jungle of smells and snacks and debris with no exit to the backyard, had happily and silently urinated into honors math student and chess prodigy Eli Werner’s forgotten North Face sherpa vest. The crafts table appeared to be ground zero for a 64-count box of Crayolas that had been chewed, swallowed, and shat out by Ronald McDonald. The couch cushions were a fort, the small flat-panel TV over the wet bar was cracked, and the papery cheese whiz guts of six dozen string poppers was spewed fucking everywhere.

  Absorbing this aftermath like a state governor composing her plea for FEMA funds, Amy asked herself the question all parents eventually come around to.

  Was it worth it? Did it make my child happy? Will she look back on this day and wipe a tear from her eye as she says the magic words: ‘Thank you, Mom. I had the greatest childhood any daughter could ask for. I’ll never forget how much you sacrificed so that I could become the woman I am today.’

  The answer to that question was a sick joke. If Briela remembered any of this beyond next week, it would be a miracle, or in this case a blessing. Because the truth was she had hated it as much as her mother had hated it. Hadn’t she? Ordering the save-the-date cards and envelopes from the printer, the errands and shopping, the decision to allow (force) Briela to design the cake (it would be educational, empowering!), the useless reminders barked at Mick a month ago, cross-referencing all of the snacks with the submitted allergies lists, the racing around town on her lunch hour to get every fucking detail just right, all of it leading up to the main event (Visa total: $1486.73 @ 24.99% APR). Wasn’t this excess of excitement and consumption and the disgusting bath of presents and treats and total sensory overload at least half of the reason Briela had gone off the deep end?

  In other words, wasn’t it all really Amy’s fault?

  Something was stirring in the corner, beneath a shrub of wrapping paper. Amy froze, drawing it out. A locket of blonde hair emerged, followed by a single blue eye. A heavy chuff of breath.

  No.

  No way.

  ‘Oh, you better not,’ Amy whispered.

  The birthday girl was supposed to be in exile, in her room, stewing in guilt and awaiting her sentencing.

  ‘Briela? Briela!’

  The daughter prairie-dogged up, party debris sticking to her ruined yellow dress. She was panting hotly, tiny fists bunched at her diaphragm.

  ‘You did this?’ But it wasn’t really a question now. ‘You did all this!’

  While Amy was talking with Melanie in the kitchen, Briela had staged a prison break and come back down to have herself an absolute Jesus camp blowout.

  ‘Answer me!’

  As if in reply, Briela screamed, darting around the sofa as she went hellbent for election across the rec room, whooping in some demented combination of glee and manic terror, daring her mother to give chase.

  Amy dared. ‘Come back here right now! Briela! Brie—’

  A door slammed between them. Briela had locked herself in the guest suite bathroom. But she did not have the foresight to lock the second door, the one on the laundry room side, and Amy barged in. At which point B knew she was in truly deep shit, screamed once and collapsed under the towel rack.

  Amy carried her out of the basement, back to her bedroom. She sat Briela on the bed, and counted to twenty, kneeling before her daughter.

  ‘All right. There’s no need to holler. Just tell me, honey. Why did you do it?’

  Briela was shaking her head. Her eyes were unfocused.

  ‘Why did you hurt Tami?’

  ‘No, no, no …’

  ‘Yes. Don’t lie to me, Briela. Everyone saw what happened.’

  ‘I didn’t! The boy was scaring me. It was the people with Daddy! Where’s Daddy?’

  Amy sat back on her feet. She’d heard this before, and now it was scaring her. The girl really believed someone was hurting her father. ‘What people, Briela? Why are you so worried about Daddy?’

  Briela stopped crying and looked up, over Amy’s head. For the tiniest fraction of a second, the girl’s eyes pooled with fear, and then it retreated, sinking deep inside and her expression neutralized, settling into exhaustion.

  Amy turned to find Cassandra Render standing in the hallway.

  ‘Amy? Is everything all right?’

  Amy stood up too fast and plopped down on B’s bed, and barely managed to keep from fainting. She looked up again, just to make sure she was seeing things correctly.

  Cassandra Render had straightened her hair with a hot iron. She wore the same new peach blouse with an embroidery motif of flower petals, deep blue denim skirt, and brown leather gladiator sandals which perfectly showcased her new lavender-sparkle pedicure. It was like looking into a funhouse mirror, the kind that makes fat people thin. For a moment, but only a moment, Amy was certain that Cassandra Render was not real, but a reflection, a spirit, some kind of visitor who had attached herself to them and would not let go until she had taken possession of Amy’s soul.

  ‘Sorry I’m so late,’ Cass said. ‘Adolph wasn’t feeling well today. I had to stay with him until Ingrid volunteered to watch him for a couple of hours. I saw everyone leaving early and I got worried. Is there anything I can do to help?’

  Amy laughed and laughed and soon was crying.

  ‘Ssshhh, shush, now,’ Cass said, sitting on the bed, running her hand over Amy’s hair. ‘Don’t you worry about them. They have no right to judge you. You’re a wonderful mother. Vince went to help Mick. He’ll be home soon and all of this will get better. I promise.’

  Almost as an afterthought, Cass said, ‘I think we need to have a little talk about the other woman too. Melanie. She’s been putting her nose where it doesn’t belong and she’s only going to cause more trouble for you.’

  Amy was too spent to comment. Behind her, lying on her side, Briela was looking up at Cassandra, studying her with great intensity.

  42

  Mick set the alarm and locked the door. The stencil on the Straw’s front window said Monday–Saturday 11–1, Sundays noon–11, but by 8:45 the dining room and bar were empty and there was no point to any of it. He ordered Carlos to turn off the grill and forget about racking the dishes, t
old Reggie and Jamie to leave the chairs down. The cleaning crew would be in at eight and he would handle the deposit tomorrow. He tipped them out and packed the remaining (thin) leafery of cash into a rubber bank bag and stowed it in the safe. He shooed them out through the kitchen, breaking down cardboard boxes and watching over the back bay until they had all gotten into their vehicles safely. Reggie’s Lac bass-thumped off across the lot, revealing someone’s topless blue Jeep parked in the corner. Mick didn’t recognize it, but it could have belonged to one of the drunks who’d decided not to drive home tonight.

  ‘Night, Mick.’ His star waved as she stamped over to her Civic.

  ‘Good night, Jamie.’

  One final pass through the restaurant, and then it was lights out. Confirming that the alarm’s ‘activated’ light was blinking, Mick was stabbed by the realization that – barring a windfall of some two hundred thousand dollars – he would perform this ritual only another nineteen or twenty times. Thirty days, Sapphire had said. And unless Mick struck back at the accountant soon (Maybe tonight, how about it, champ? Do you feel up for a short drive out to Longmont? What are you waiting for? Let’s go put the fear of God into that silver-haired bastard …), he would find himself on the other side of Fourth of July weekend without a lifeline, and then he would never again lock up his own restaurant.

  Someone else’s, perhaps, but not the restaurant his parents had built and seen prosper for some thirty years before handing the keys over to their only son. Not the place Mick had played race cars under the tables, falling asleep in booths while Mom ran a pencil in her ledger. Not the place he’d washed enough dishes to buy his first car, the ’78 blue Trans Am he never should have sold. Not the place Dad had hosted after-prom parties for Mick and his friends, and helped cater the Buffaloes under Coach McCartney’s national championship reign.

  Not the very restaurant where, one fateful April lunch hour fifteen years ago, a knock-out grad student had come in to borrow a quarter for the pay phone, broke, in tears, looking to call a wrecker to get her mom’s Datsun wagon into the shop before her mom got back from spending the weekend with her jerk boyfriend in Estes Park. Hockey-stick legs growing out her stacked cork wedges, gumball blue eyes under long blonde hair that fell to the middle of her back – it was something closely related to love at first sight. Mick had done his best to get her laughing again while she nursed a hard-luck Michelob on the house, then drove her to the auto-parts store and charged the parts to his dad’s account. The bearded heart-attack-on-wheels with greased mitts behind the auto-parts counter giving Mick a raised eyebrow and the pervert grin, Mick nodding back, I know, I know, don’t fuck this one up for me, just find that goddamn part. Back at the restaurant, he’d handed her a huge dish of coffee ice cream and changed out the Datsun’s solenoid in the Straw’s parking lot while she hovered around and spilled her tales of woe and all he asked in return was her phone number. She had a boyfriend, a serious one, but ‘the dufus’ didn’t ask her to move to Arizona with him, so what did Mick think that meant, right? She was supposed to marry Dufus in Tucson that September, but did that deter our hero? Two months later she called Dufus and said she was sending the ring back UPS. Seven months later, after a lot of pulling but not enough praying, Amy was pregnant with Kyle. The wedding had followed quickly, but it was real. He never doubted that their love had been real.

  His family was real. His failure was real.

  That era of apple pie and mom and dad and Last Straw magic was over. That air of here, the best days of your lives will happen right here vitality that perhaps one in a thousand bars manages to capture, was gone. It was his home, his real home, and the sight of it tonight, dark and half-looted, put a mighty hurt in his heart.

  He turned away, heading for his truck. The parking lot was as black as a city park until it reached the grocery store and strip mall on the far side. He watched the Albertson’s sign flicker and blink out, eleven on the nose. Mick always parked somewhere in the empty middle, leaving nearer spaces for his customers, but that was a useless habit now. Blue Thunder was waiting for him, the tiny red alarm bulb on the dash beckoning, another beacon in the relay of his commute. At home he would disarm a third, in the mud room, at last the captain safely ashore.

  He walked head down, the truck fifty paces off.

  His conscience fired one last warning across the bow. A bit past the legal limit, boss? How many whiskey sours did we have? Five? Seven? No. Maybe. Sure, but if he called Amy for a ride, she would just browbeat him, and he’d have to ask her for another ride back in the morning, and that would start another day off with a breakfast of cold resentment. And just when, exactly, was the right time to tell your family that the organism which sustained 75 per cent of their existence was dead?

  So, no. No phone calls, no rides. He might’ve been so tired he couldn’t hold his head all the way up, but he could drive a couple miles. The Diagonal was empty this time of night. He was a bar man. Alcohol no longer affected him.

  His running shoe ground a stray piece of bottle glass.

  Six paces from his truck.

  Three.

  Mick fingered his keyring, dipping into the miniature Broncos helmet Briela had given him last Father’s Day. The helmet squirted from his grip, he juggled the ring spastically, the brass wad fell to the ground. He stared at it.

  Is that some sort of a sign, old man?

  As he bent, a sharp aluminum clink echoed behind him. He recognized it at once, for it was a childhood sound, not easily forgotten. Flinty and cruel, it was the sound an Easton aluminum baseball bat made connecting with the long ball (or falling on warm summer asphalt). Mick’s had been a thirty-one-incher with a brushed blue finish and a sticky rubber sleeve, his father’s benediction for Pony League.

  He scooped his keys and turned to face them. There were three, spread in a narrowing net. Hardly more than high-school kids, but wired for high voltage. Black combat boots, warm-up jackets zipped to the chin, cold eyes in expressionless masks. They requested nothing, offered him no bargain. Mick was not a large man, but he was a former state champion wrestler, fit from working on his feet, and he could still carry a half-barrel on one shoulder.

  I wasn’t imagining it. It was a vision, another episode like the one about Sapphire, and the other one about Myra. Terry Fielding, or some force borrowing his likeness, came to warn me, just in the nick of time. Whatever happened to me, whatever is going on inside me, it has the power to change the course of my hours, my days, my life. But I didn’t pay attention and now I am in deep shit.

  ‘This is gonna be too fuckin’ easy,’ the smallest one said. ‘I almost feel bad for you, know’msayin’?’

  The two of them might not be a problem, but the third was a freak. A tall Hispanic with four shoulders and no neck, some kind of bloated-faced goon. The Easton belonged to the short one on the left, bleached hair under a red-and-blue Avalanche cap. I know why things are the way they are, Render had told him in the yard. I know why the others come, preying on you. They are out there right now. They have a nose for weakness, and they will keep coming for you and it will get messier unless you allow me to help you.

  Vince Render, whatever he was, was involved in all of this. Everything that had happened since that day on the lake, it had to do with the people next door.

  ‘Only three?’ Mick said. ‘I guess the other Mous keteers had a curfew.’

  They didn’t laugh. The bat changed hands once it all went in motion, and it went in motion quickly.

  43

  After hugging Amy goodbye, Melanie Smith had closed the front door softly behind her and stepped out onto the curving sidewalk. She walked head down, her heart broken for Amy. Rita Larson was the kind of mother who pretended to be above the stress of parenting, but it was a charade. Melanie knew that the Larsons had been financially reeling since Rita’s husband, Don, lost his position as a project manager at Ball Aerospace, after NASA shelved its latest project and withdrew the firm’s funding. Rita’s back was agains
t a wall here, and if she no longer had health insurance to pay for the injury (which was probably minor but had looked bad enough to scare any parent into shark-infested litigation), she was going to come at Amy and Mick, as Melanie’s mother used to say, with both barrels loaded, tits on fire.

  Melanie had been trying to remember the name of that ex-boyfriend (well, he was really more of a two- or three-night stand) she’d met a few years ago in Denver, a small claims lawyer and proud ambulance chaser, when a shadow fell over her feet and she almost bumped into the psycho. She jerked in surprise, halted.

  A thin woman with black hair was staring at her with beady eyes the color of tin. She was six inches shorter than Melanie and yet her stance was defiant, as if she had no intention of making room for her on the sidewalk.

  ‘Oh, excuse me,’ Melanie said. ‘The party just ended. Are you here to pick up your child?’ But she couldn’t be, because all of them were gone.

  ‘No.’

  Melanie waited for the woman to elaborate. Finally said, ‘Okay. Now’s not a good time, so maybe—’

  ‘You should leave now,’ the woman said. Her voice was soft and she was not smiling. ‘You don’t belong here.’

  For a moment Melanie was too stunned to respond. Who was this woman? A friend of Rita’s, one who had already heard about the accident and come back to rip into Amy? But it had just happened, no way the news had spread unless Rita was tweeting about the party on her way to Urgent Care. During this lull she noticed that the woman wore the same blouse as Amy. And the same skirt. And sandals. And her hair was flat, shining as if recently oiled.

  Melanie laughed. ‘I’m sorry, what? Is this a joke?’

  The woman did not answer but her eyes seemed to darken, the tin deepening to charcoal beneath brows plucked down to broken black toothpicks.

  Melanie tried again. ‘You’re a friend of Amy’s? Have we met?’

  ‘Cassandra Render.’ The woman’s chin jutted forth. ‘I am her best friend.’