Lisa Gardner - The Neighbor

The black heap on the sidewalk is finally groaning his way back to life.

I cross to the man, roll him over onto his back.

And meet my neighbor, Jason Jones.

“What the fuck are you doing out this time of night?” I demand to know ten minutes later. I’ve managed to drag Jones inside my apartment, where I got him propped up on Mrs. H.’s floral love seat with one ice pack on his head and another against his left ribs.

Guy’s left eye is already half-swollen and there’s a bandage that suggests tonight hasn’t been his first beating of the day.

“Are you a fucking idiot?” I want to know. I’m coming down off my adrenaline high. I pace back and forth in front of the tiny kitchenette, snapping at the green elastic and wishing I could crawl out of my own skin.

“What the hell did you do to your hair?” Jones croaks out.

“Forget my fucking hair. What the hell are you doing skulking around the neighborhood dressed like a suburban ninja? Isn’t the freak show at your house enough for you?”

“You mean the media?”

“Cannibals.”

“Given that I’m one of them, and they’re clearly feeding off me, an apt analogy.”

I scowl harder. In my current mood, I don’t give a rat’s ass for apt analogies. “What the hell are you doing?” I try again.

“Looking for you.”

“Why?”

“You said you saw something the night my wife disappeared. I want to know what you saw.”

“Like you couldn’t just pick up a damn phone and give me a call?”

“Like I couldn’t read your face to see if you were lying while you answered.”

“Please, you can stare me in the eye all you want; you still won’t know if I’m lying.”

“Try me,” he says softly, and there is something in his half-swollen eye then that worries me more than the three bruisers who’d jumped him on the sidewalk.

“Oh yeah?” I try to sound macho. “If you’re so big and tough, why was I the one chasing away the goon squad, then scraping your sorry ass off the pavement?”

“Jumped me from behind,” he says ruefully, adjusting the ice packet. “Who were they, friends of yours?”

“Oh, just a couple of locals who found out there was a registered sex offender in the neighborhood. Come back tomorrow night. Same time, same place, you can probably catch the same show.”

“Feeling sorry for yourself?” he asks quietly.

“Absolutely.”

“That explains the whiskey.”

“I got a whole ’nother bottle. Want some?”

“I don’t drink.”

For some reason, that pisses me off. “Don’t drink, don’t smoke, what do you do?… Goody two, goody two, goody goody two shoes.”

Jones stares at me funny.

“Jesus,” I explode, “it’s Adam Ant. From the eighties? Where’d you grow up, under a rock?”

“In a basement, technically. And you’re too young to remember the eighties.”

Now I shrug uncomfortably, realizing too late how much I’ve given away. “I knew this girl,” I mumble. “Big Adam Ant fan.”

“This the one you raped?” he asks levelly

“Oh shut up! Just shut the fuck up. I’m so sick and tired of everyone pretending to know all about me and my goddamn sex life. It wasn’t like that. It. Was not. Like. That.”

“I looked you up,” he continues, monotone man. “You had sex with a fourteen-year-old girl. That’s statutory rape. So yes, it was like that.”

“I loved her!” I explode.

He stares at me.

“We had something special. It wasn’t all sex. I needed her. She needed me. We were the only two people who cared about each other. That’s special, dammit. That’s love .”

He stares at me.

“Well, it is! You can’t help who you fall in love with. Plain and simple.”

He finally speaks. “Do you know that among hard-core pedophiles, the single largest common denominator is having had their first sexual experience be with an adult while they were under the age of fifteen?”

I close my eyes. “Oh fuck you, too!” I say tiredly. I find the surviving Maker’s Mark on the counter and go to work on the cap, though I’m starting to feel so nauseous that my heart isn’t in it.

“You shouldn’t have touched her,” he continues. “Restraint would’ve been love. Letting her grow up would’ve been love. Not taking advantage of a lonely and vulnerable junior high student would’ve been love. Being friends would’ve been love.”

“You know, you’re welcome to go lay back down on that sidewalk,” I tell him. “I’m sure someone else will come along to rescue you shortly.” But apparently, he isn’t done yet.

“You seduced her. How’d you do it? Drugs, alcohol, pretty words? You thought about it, you planned it. Because you were older, you had maturity and patience on your side. Maybe you waited, picked the right moment. She was sad and lonely about something, and there you were. You offered to rub her back. Maybe you poured her a drink. ‘Just a little drink,’ you told her. ‘It’ll help you relax.’ And maybe she was uncomfortable, maybe she tried to tell you to stop-”

“Shut up,” I tell him, words hard, warning.

He merely nods. “Yep, she definitely asked you to stop. She absolutely asked you to stop, and you didn’t listen. You kept touching and petting, pressing the advantage. What can she do? She’s only fourteen, she doesn’t understand everything she’s feeling, that she wants you to stop, that she wants you to continue, that this isn’t right, that she’s awkward and embarrassed-”

I cross the room in three strides and backhand him across the face. The crack is surprisingly loud. His head snaps to the side. The ice pack falls on top of a doily. He turns back slowly, rubs his chin almost thoughtfully, then picks up the ice pack and returns it to his forehead.

He looks me right in the eye, and I shiver at what I see there. He doesn’t move a muscle. Neither do I.

“Tell me what you saw Wednesday night,” he states quietly.

“A car, driving down the street.”

“What kind of car?”

“The kind with a lot of antennas. Maybe a limo service; it looked like a dark sedan.”

“What did you tell the police?”

“That you’re a homicidal motherfucker,” I spit out. “Trying to offer me up on a serving platter to save your sorry hide.”

He glances at my head, my hands, my forearms. “What did you burn this evening?”

“Anything I wanted to.”

“Do you collect porn, Aidan Brewster?”

“None of your business!”

Jones sets down the ice pack. He stands up in front of me. I fall back. I can’t help it. Those deep dark eyes, rimmed in blood and bruises and God knows what. I have a sense of déjà vu, that I have seen eyes like that before. Maybe in prison. Maybe the first guy who dropped me in a bloody heap and banged the hell out of me. I realize for the first time that something about my neighbor isn’t quite human.

Jones steps forward.

“No,” I hear myself gasp. “I burned love letters, dammit. My own personal notes. I’m telling you, I’m not a pervert!”

His gaze sweeps the room. “Got a computer, Aidan?”

“No, dammit. I’m not allowed. Terms of my parole!”

“Stay off the Internet,” he says. “I’m telling you: One visit to one chat room to say one word to one teenage girl, and I will break you. You will swallow your own tongue just to get away from me.”

“Who the fuck are you?”

He leans down over me. “I’m the one who knows you raped your own stepsister, Aidan. I’m the one who knows exactly why you pay your stepfather a hundred bucks a week. And I’m the one who knows just how much your love will cost your now anorexic victim, for the rest of her sorry life.”