The Girl Next Door Read online

  But I knew he wasn’t lying. I remembered Meg not wanting to talk about the accident or the scars and me pushing.

  I knew he wasn’t lying but it was hard to handle.

  We just kept walking together, me not saying anything, just looking at him and not really seeing him either.

  Seeing Meg.

  It was a very special moment.

  I know Meg attained a certain glamour for me then.

  Suddenly it was not just that she was pretty or smart or able to handle herself crossing the brook—she was almost unreal. Like no one I’d ever met or was likely to meet outside of books or the matinee. Like she was fiction, some sort of heroine.

  I pictured her back by the Rock and now I saw this person who was really brave lying next to me. I saw horror. Suffering, survival, disaster.

  Tragedy.

  All this in an instant.

  Probably I had my mouth open. I guess Donny thought I didn’t know what he was talking about.

  “Meg’s parents, numbnuts. Both of ‘em. My mom says they must have died instantly. That they didn’t know what hit ’em.” He snorted. “Fact is, what hit ’em was a Chrysler.”

  And it may have been his rich bad taste that pulled me back to normal.

  “I saw the scar on her arm,” I told him.

  “Yeah, I saw it, too. Neat, huh? You should see Susan’s though. Scars all over the place. Gross. My mom says she’s lucky to be alive.”

  “She probably is.”

  “Anyhow that’s how come we’ve got ’em. There isn’t anybody else. It’s us or some orphanage somewhere.” He smiled. “Lucky them, huh?”

  And then he said something that came back to me later. At the time I guessed it was true enough, but for some reason I remembered it. I remembered it well.

  He said it just as we got to Eddie’s house.

  I see myself standing in the middle of the road about to turn and go back down the hill again, go off by myself somewhere, not wanting any part of Eddie—at least not that day.

  I see Donny turning to throw the words over his shoulder on his way across the lawn to the porch. Casually, but with an odd sort of sincerity about him, as though this were absolute gospel.

  “My mom says Meg’s the lucky one,” he said. “My mom says she got off easy.”

  Chapter Four

  It was a week and a half before I got to see her again apart from a glimpse here and there—taking out the trash once, weeding in the garden. Now that I knew the whole story it was even harder to approach her. I’d never felt sorry. I’d rehearse what I might say to her. But nothing sounded right. What did you say to someone who’d just lost half her family? It stood there like a rock I couldn’t scale. So I avoided her.

  Then my family and I did our yearly duty trip to Sussex County to visit my father’s sister, so for four whole days I didn’t have to think about it. It was almost a relief. I say almost because my parents were less than two years from divorce by then and the trip was awful—three tense days of silence in the car going up and coming back with a lot of phony jolliness in between that was supposed to benefit my aunt and uncle but didn’t. You could see my aunt and uncle looking at one another every now and then as if to say Jesus, get these people out of here.

  They knew. Everybody knew. My parents couldn’t have hidden pennies from a blind man by then.

  But once we were home it was back to wondering about Meg again. I don’t know why it never occurred to me just to forget it, that she might not want to be reminded of her parents’ death any more than I wanted to talk about it. But it didn’t. I figured you had to say something and I couldn’t get it right. It was important to me that I not make an ass of myself over this. It was important to me that I not make an ass of myself in Meg’s eyes period.

  I wondered about Susan too. In nearly two weeks I’d never seen her. That ran contrary to everything I knew. How could you live next door to someone and never see her? I thought about her legs and Donny saying her scars were really bad to look at. Maybe she was afraid to go out. I could relate to that. I’d been spending a lot of time indoors myself these days, avoiding her sister.

  It couldn’t last though. It was the first week of June by then, time for the Kiwanis Karnival.

  To miss the Karnival was like missing summer.

  Directly across from us not half a block away was an old six-room schoolhouse called Central School where we all used to go as little kids, grades one through five. They held the Karnival there on the playground every year. Ever since we were old enough to be allowed to cross the street we’d go over and watch them set up.

  For that one week, being that close, we were the luckiest kids in town.

  Only the concessions were run by the Kiwanis—the food stands, the game booths, the wheels of fortune. The rides were all handled by a professional touring company and run by carnies. To us the carnies were exotic as hell. Rough-looking men and women who worked with Camels stuck between their teeth, squinting against the smoke curling into their eyes, sporting tattoos and calluses and scars and smelling of grease and old sweat. They cursed, they drank Schlitz as they worked. Like us, they were not opposed to spitting lungers in the dirt.

  We loved the Karnival and we loved the carnies. You had to. In a single summer afternoon they would take our playground and transform it from a pair of baseball diamonds, a blacktop, and a soccer field into a brand-new city of canvas and whirling steel. They did it so fast you could hardly believe your eyes. It was magic, and the magicians all had gold-tooth smiles and “I love Velma” etched into their biceps. Irresistible.

  It was still pretty early and when I walked over they were still unpacking the trucks.

  This was when you couldn’t talk to them. They were too busy. Later while they were setting up or testing the machinery you could hand them tools, maybe even get a sip of beer out of them. The local kids were their bread and butter after all. They wanted you to come back that night with friends and family and they were usually friendly. But now you just had to watch and keep out of the way.

  Cheryl and Denise were already there, leaning on the backstop fence behind home plate and staring through the links.

  I stood with them.

  Things seemed tense to me. You could see why. It was only morning but the sky looked dark and threatening. Once, a few years ago, it had rained every night of the Karnival except Thursday. Everybody took a beating when that happened. The grips and carnies worked grimly now, in silence.

  Cheryl and Denise lived up the street across from one another. They were friends but I think only because of what Zelda Gilroy on The Dobie Gillis Show used to call propinquity. They didn’t have much in common. Cheryl was a tall skinny brunette who would probably be pretty a few years later but now she was all arms and legs, taller than I was and two years younger. She had two brothers—Kenny and Malcolm. Malcolm was just a little kid who sometimes played with Woofer. Kenny was almost my age but a year behind me in school.

  All three kids were very quiet and well-behaved. Their parents, the Robertsons, took no shit but I doubt that by nature they were disposed to give any.

  Denise was Eddie’s sister. Another type entirely.

  Denise was edgy, nervous, almost as reckless as her brother, with a marked propensity toward mockery. As though all the world were a bad joke and she was the only one around who knew the punchline.

  “It’s David,” she said. And there was the mockery, just pronouncing my name. I didn’t like it but I ignored it. That was the way to handle Denise. If she got no rise she got no payoff and it made her more normal eventually.

  “Hi Cheryl. Denise. How’re they doing?”

  Denise said, “I think that’s the Tilt-a-Whirl there. Last year that’s where they put the Octopus.”

  “It could still be the Octopus,” said Cheryl.

  “Unh-unh. See those platforms?” She pointed to the wide sheets of metal. “The Tilt-a-Whirl’s got platforms. Wait till they get the cars out. You’ll see.”

/>   She was right. When the cars came out it was the Tilt-a-Whirl. Like her father and her brother Eddie, Denise was good at mechanical things, good with tools.

  “They’re worried about rain,” she said.

  “They’re worried.” said Cheryl. “I’m worried!” She sighed in exasperation. It was very exaggerated. I smiled. There was always something sweetly serious about Cheryl. You just knew her favorite book was Alice in Wonderland. The truth was, I liked her.

  “It won’t rain,” Denise said.

  “How do you know?”

  “It just won’t.” Like she wouldn’t let it.

  “See that there?” She pointed to a huge gray and white truck rolling back to the center of the soccer field. “I bet that’s the Ferris wheel. That’s where they had it last year and the year before. Want to see?”

  “Sure,” I said.

  We skirted the Tilt-a-Whirl and some kiddie boat rides they were unloading on the macadam, walked along the cyclone fence that separated the playground from the brook, cut through a row of tents going up for the ring-toss and bottle-throw and whatever, and came out onto the field. The grips had just opened the doors to the truck. The painted grinning clown head on the doors was split down the middle. They started pulling out the girders.

  It looked like the Ferris wheel all right.

  Denise said, “My dad says somebody fell off last year in Atlantic City. They stood up. You ever stand up?”

  Cheryl frowned. “Of course not.”

  Denise turned to me.

  “I bet you never did, did you?”

  I ignored the tone. Denise always had to work so hard to be such a brat all the time.

  “No,” I said. “Why would I?”

  “Cause it’s fun!”

  She was grinning and she should have been pretty when she grinned. She had good white teeth and a lovely, delicate mouth. But something always went wrong with Denise’s smile. There was always something manic in it. Like she really wasn’t having much fun at all despite what she wanted you to think.

  It also disappeared too fast. It was unnerving.

  It did that now and she said so only I could hear, “I was thinking about The Game before.”

  She looked straight at me very wide-eyed and serious like there was something more to come, something important. I waited. I thought maybe she expected me to answer. I didn’t. Instead, I looked away toward the truck.

  The Game, I thought. Great.

  I didn’t like to think about The Game. But as long as Denise and some of the others were around I supposed I’d have to.

  It started early last summer. A bunch of us—me, Donny, Willie, Woofer, Eddie, Tony and Lou Morino, and finally, later, Denise—used to meet back by the apple orchard to play what we called Commando. We played it so often that soon it was just “The Game.”

  I have no idea who came up with it. Maybe Eddie or the Morinos. It just seemed to happen to us one day and from then on it was just there.

  In The Game one guy was “it.” He was the Commando. His “safe” territory was the orchard. The rest of us were a platoon of soldiers bivouacked a few yards away up on a hill near the brook where, as smaller kids, we’d once played King of the Mountain.

  We were an odd bunch of soldiers in that we had no weapons. We’d lost them, I guess, during some battle. Instead, it was the Commando who had the weapons—apples from the orchard, as many as he could carry.

  In theory, he also had the advantage of surprise. Once he was ready he’d sneak from the orchard through the brush and raid our camp. With luck he could bop at least one of us with an apple before being seen. The apples were bombs. If you got hit with an apple you were dead, you were out of the game. So the object was to hit as many guys as you could before getting caught.

  You always got caught.

  That was the point.

  The Commando never won.

  You got caught because, for one thing, everybody else was sitting on a fairly good-sized hill watching and waiting for you, and unless the grass was very high and you were very lucky, you had to get seen. So much for the element of surprise. Second, it was seven against one, and you had just the single “safe” base back at the orchard yards away. So here you were firing wildly over your shoulder running like crazy back to your base with a bunch of kids like a pack of dogs at your heels, and maybe you’d get one or two or three of them but eventually they’d get you.

  And as I say, that was the point.

  Because the captured Commando got tied to a tree in the grove, arms tied behind his back, legs hitched together.

  He was gagged. He was blindfolded.

  And the survivors could do anything they wanted to him while the others—even the “dead” guys—looked on.

  Sometimes we all went easy and sometimes not.

  The raid took maybe half an hour.

  The capture could take all day.

  At the very least, it was scary.

  Eddie, of course, got away with murder. Half the time you were afraid to capture him. He could turn on you, break the rules, and The Game would become a bloody, violent free-for-all. Or if you did catch him there was always the problem of how to let him go. If you’d done anything to him he didn’t like it was like setting free a swarm of bees.

  Yet it was Eddie who introduced his sister.

  And once Denise was part of it the complexion of The Game changed completely.

  Not at first. At first it was the same as always. Everybody took turns and you got yours and I got mine except there was this girl there.

  But then we started pretending we had to be nice to her. Instead of taking turns we’d let her be whatever she wanted to be. Troops or Commando. Because she was new to The Game, because she was a girl.

  And she started pretending to have this obsession with getting all of us before we got her. Like it was a challenge to her. Every day was finally going to be the day she won at Commando.

  We knew it was impossible. She was a lousy shot for one.

  Denise never won at Commando.

  She was twelve years old. She had curly brown-red hair and her skin was lightly freckled all over.

  She had the small beginnings of breasts, and thick pale prominent nipples.

  I thought of all that now and fixed my eyes on the truck, on the workers and the girders.

  But Denise wouldn’t leave it alone.

  “It’s summer,” she said. “So how come we don’t play?”

  She knew damn well why we didn’t play but she was right too in a way—what had stopped The Game was nothing more than that the weather had gotten too cold. That and the guilt of course.

  “We’re a little old for that now,” I lied.

  She shrugged. “Uh-huh. Maybe. And maybe you guys are chicken.”

  “Could be. I’ve got an idea, though. Why don’t you ask your brother if he’s chicken.”

  She laughed. “Yeah. Sure. Right.”

  The sky was growing darker.

  “It’s going to rain,” said Cheryl.

  The men certainly thought so. Along with the girders they were hauling out canvas tarps, spreading them out in the grass just in case. They were working fast, trying to get the big wheel assembled before the downpour. I recognized one of them from last summer, a wiry blond southerner named Billy Bob or Jimmy Bob something who had handed Eddie a cigarette he asked for. That alone made him memorable. Now he was hammering pieces of the wheel together with a large ball-peen hammer, laughing at something the fat man said beside him. The laugh was high and sharp, almost feminine.

  You could hear the ping of the hammer and the trucks’ gears groaning behind us, you could hear generators running and the grinding of machinery—and then a sudden staccato pop, rain falling hard into the field’s dry hard-packed dirt. “Here it comes!”

  I took my shirt out of my jeans and pulled it up over my head. Cheryl and Denise were already running for the trees.

  My house was closer than theirs. I didn’t really mind the rain. B
ut it was a good excuse to get out of there for a while. Away from Denise.

  I just couldn’t believe she wanted to talk about The Game.

  You could see the rain wouldn’t last. It was coming down too fast, too heavily. Maybe by the time it was over some of the other kids would be hanging around. I could lose her.

  I ran past them huddled beneath the trees.

  “Going home!” I said. Denise’s hair was plastered down over her cheeks and forehead. She was smiling again. Her shirt was soaked clear through.

  I saw Cheryl reach out to me. That long bony wet arm dangling.

  “Can we come?” she yelled. I pretended I didn’t hear. The rain was pretty loud over there in the leaves. I figured Cheryl would get over it. I kept running.

  Denise and Eddie, I thought. Boy. What a pair.

  If anybody is ever gonna get me into trouble it’ll be them. One or the other or both of them. It’s got to be.

  Ruth was on the landing taking in the mail from her mailbox as I ran past her house. She turned in the doorway and smiled and waved to me, as water cascaded down the eaves.

  Chapter Five

  I never learned what bad feeling had come between Ruth and my mother but something had when I was eight or nine.

  Before that, long before Meg and Susan came along, I used to sleep over nights with Donny and Willie and Woofer in the double set of bunk beds they had in their room. Willie had a habit of leaping into bed at night so he’d destroyed a few bunks over the years. Willie was always flinging himself on something. When he was two or three, Ruth said, he’d destroyed his crib completely. The kitchen chairs were all unhinged from his sprawling. But the bunks they had in the bedroom now were tough. They’d survived.

  Since whatever happened between Ruth and my mother I was allowed to stay there only infrequently.

  But I remember those earlier nights when we were kids. We’d cut up laughing in the dark for an hour or two whispering, giggling, spitting over the sides at whoever was on the bottom bunks and then Ruth would come in and yell and we’d go to sleep.

  The nights I liked best were Karnival nights. From the open bedroom window facing the playground we could hear calliope music, screams, the whir and grind of machinery.