Lisa Gardner - The Neighbor

I wanted to fuck until I couldn’t remember my own name, until I screamed with rage and need. I wanted to fuck until my own head exploded and the darkness finally went away.

I took my time making my final choice for the evening. Not one of the old guys. They were good for buying drinks, but would probably drop dead of a heart attack trying to keep up with a girl like me. I went with one of the young college studs. All hard muscle and raging testosterone and silly, I-can’t-believe-she’s-really-leaving-with-me grin.

I let him take me back to his dorm, where I showed him things you could do while hanging from the underside of a bunk bed. When I was done with him, I fucked his roommate, too. Bachelor number one was too far gone to complain, and his roommate, a geeky nerd with no muscle tone at all, was extremely grateful and useful in his own way.

I left shortly after dawn. I hung my hot pink thong on the doorknob as a little souvenir, then walked to the T stop and caught the subway back to my hotel Doorman ‘bout had a fit when he saw me. Probably thought I was a hooker-or, excuse me, a high-class call girl, which now that I think about it, would’ve been a decent line of work for me. But I already had my room key, so he had no choice but to let me in.

I went up to my room, brushed my teeth, showered, brushed my teeth again, and fell onto the bed. I slept for five hours without moving a muscle. I slept like the dead. And when I woke up, I felt sane for the first time in months.

So I did the sensible thing. I balled up the skirt, the heels, the halter top, and threw them away. I showered yet again, scrubbing at my hands, which smelled of semen and sweat and lime-twisted vodka. Then I smoothed orange-scented lotion over my bruised ribs, my whisker-burned thighs, my bite-marked shoulder And I dressed back into my gray cords and lavender turtleneck and headed home to my husband.

I’ll be good, I told myself, all the way back to Southie. I’ll be good from now on.

But I already knew that I’d do it again.

The truth is, it’s not so hard to live a lie.

I greeted my husband with a kiss on the cheek. Jason returned the peck and inquired politely about my weekend.

“I feel much better now,” I told him honestly.

“I’m glad,” he said, and I understood, just by looking into his dark eyes, that he knew exactly what I had done. But I didn’t say another word, and neither did he. That is all part of how you live a lie-you don’t acknowledge it. You let it remain like an elephant, standing in the middle of the room.

I went upstairs. Unpacked my bag. Picked up my daughter and rocked with her tucked against my chest. And I discovered, whore or no whore, adulteress or not an adulteress, my daughter felt exactly the same, smelled exactly the same, loved me exactly the same, as I sat there, reading her Runaway Bunny and kissing her softly on top of the head.

I spent the next week dressing and undressing only when I was alone, as a form of courtesy. Jason spent the next week hunched over the computer until the odd hours of the morning, obviously avoiding me.

Sometime around the seventh or eighth night, once the bite marks had healed and I was still waking up to an empty bed, I decided this had gone on long enough. I loved Jason. I really did. And I believed he loved me. He really did. He was just never going to have sex with me. The irony of all ironies. The one man who finally showed me respect, compassion, and understanding was the one man who didn’t want my body at all. But love is still love, right? And according to The Beatles, isn’t that all we’ll ever need ?

I put on my bathrobe and crept downstairs to ask my husband to come back to bed. I found him, as usual, hunched over the family computer.

I noticed that his cheeks were flushed, his eyes overbright. He had, spread out in front of him, all kinds of financial papers, including an online application for a credit card.

“Get the fuck out of here,” he told me sharply, and given his tone of voice, I did exactly as he asked.

Four hours later, we sat side by side at the kitchen bar, both eating bowls of cereal, Ree cooing away in the automatic swing, and neither of us saying a word.

He chewed. I chewed. Then he reached over and, very slowly, took my hand. We were okay again, just like that. Until the next time I had to disappear into a hotel room, I supposed. Until the next time he needed to disappear into the computer.

I wonder if the darkness grew inside his head. I wonder if he ever smelled decaying roses and cursed the color of his eyes or the feel of his own skin. But I didn’t ask him. I would never ask him.

First rule of lying, remember? You never acknowledge it.

And it occurred to me, over a bowl of soggy cereal, that I could live like this. Compartmentalized. There, but separate. Together, but alone. Loving, but isolated. This is how I had been living most of my life, after all. In a household where my mother might appear in the middle of the night to do unspeakable things with a hairbrush. Then hours later, we’d sit across from one another sharing a platter of buttermilk biscuits for breakfast.

My mother had prepared me well for this life.

I glanced over at my husband, crunching away on Cheerios. I wondered who had prepared him.

The Boston Police Department’s press conference started at 9:03 A.M. And Jason knew the second it ended, because his cell phone rang.

He hadn’t watched the briefing. Once he’d wiped his daughter’s tears and fed one very demanding Mr. Smith, he’d loaded both his daughter and the cat into Sandy’s Volvo. Mr. Smith had sprawled out in a sunny spot and gone immediately to sleep, the rare cat who actually liked car rides. Ree, in turn, sat in her booster seat, clutching Lil’ Bunny to her chest while she stared at Mr. Smith as if she were willing him to stay put.

Jason drove. Mostly because he needed to move. He felt as if he were on the open plains of Kansas, watching a twister touch down and helpless to get out of its path. He could only watch the sky darken, feel the first whip of hurricane-force winds against his face.

The cops had held a press conference. The media machine was now slowly but surely roaring to life. There was nothing he could do about it. There was nothing anyone could do.

His phone rang again. He eyed his screen, feeling his sense of fatalism swell.

Using the rearview mirror, he glanced at his daughter again, the serious look on her face as she tried to find happiness in watching her cat sleep when what she wanted most in the world was to hug her mother.

He flipped the phone open and held it to his ear.

“Hello, Greg.”

“Holy shit,” the senior news editor of the Boston Daily exploded in his ear. “Why didn’t you tell us, Jason? Hell, we’re like family. We woulda understood.”

“It’s been a trying time,” Jason said automatically, feeling the words come out by rote as they had before, so long ago. Wanna be on the front page ? All it will cost you is your life. Or maybe your child’s. Or maybe your wife’s.

“What’s the deal here, Jason? And I’m not talking editor to reporter. You know I wouldn’t do that to you.” Another lie. There would be many lies in the days to come. “I’m talking as a member of your journalistic family, the guy who’s seen the photos of your family and knows how much you love them. Are you doin’ all right?”

“I’m taking it one day at a time,” Jason recited evenly.