Deena Goldstone - Tell Me One Thing

The children are now pushing each other and shoving as boys do while Brenda clomps along to her car, cell phone to her ear. Trudy hears her saying, “They came back at $769,000.… I know … I know … that’s not much movement. We could try a counter at $740,000.… Okay, think about it and call me back. Remember, they have an open house tomorrow, so we should make a decision before that.… Right, just call me.…”

They have reached the street, and although Brenda has opened the back door of her car for the boys to climb in, they have escalated their roughhousing and are now chasing each other around the car and giggling. She is having a hard time ending her conversation and riding herd on the boys at the same time.

She’s gesturing to the kids— Get in the car —and saying to her client, “Good … This is the way it goes.… No, no, it isn’t personal.… Take the personal out of it—”

And then Trudy hears the Yeller slam the front door and come onto the porch and yell at his wife, “Brenda! What in holy hell are you doing?!”

All three of them freeze — the wife and the two boys, who are by now in the middle of the street. Hurriedly, Brenda gets off the phone and starts to usher the boys into the car, but that is not enough for Kevin Doyle. He stomps down the driveway and in full view of Trudy, who has moved to the living room window to get a better view, begins to berate his wife.

“What are you doing? What the hell are you doing?! You weren’t even looking, were you?! Where were the boys? In the middle of the fucking street! That’s where they were!”

“Kevin,” she says quietly as she stands by the driver’s door, but that does nothing to derail the assault.

“You want them dead, is that it?! You want them run over by a car? Were you even watching?!”

The wife stands there without speaking, her eyes on his ugly face, waiting this out.

“I thought you went to college. I thought you had some brains in your skull.” And then he roars, “Those boys are going to be killed and it’s going to be on your head!”

He turns and walks back into the house and slams the door, damage done, humiliation complete. There’s a stunned silence on the street, like an intake of breath; even the birds have been frozen into muteness.

Brenda closes the back door of her car, makes sure the boys buckle up, gets into the driver’s seat, and drives away.

Trudy lowers herself into her armchair and contemplates what she just saw. She’s totally unfamiliar with that kind of behavior. Oh, she knows people scream at their wives and children, but she’s never experienced that kind of vitriol firsthand. Her parents weren’t screamers. Brian almost never raised his voice. The cruelty of Kevin Doyle’s words is what undoes her and makes her fear for the boys. Why is he always telling them to “get in the house”? What happens in that house? If he’s capable of that kind of anger against his wife in a public place, in full view of the neighborhood, what does he do to those boys once the doors are shut and the curtains pulled? What can she do about it?

She has no answer, but as often happens, Life provides an opening. One day soon after the ugly incident in the street, Trudy decides to come home for lunch, something she hasn’t done for the past year. When Brian was alive, they would make dates and meet at the house for lunch and whatever developed after that. Since his death, it’s been too hard to be in their empty house at lunchtime, some part of her still waiting to hear Brian’s car pull up into the driveway and his eager voice call out as he stepped into the kitchen, “Here I am!” as if he were delivering his person as a present, gift-wrapped expressly for her.

But this day she decides to find some courage and go home. There was a classroom of second graders at the library all morning, and Trudy could use a few minutes of peace and quiet.

As she walks up her brick path, she sees Fred at work on the fence, now close to halfway done, and a brown wrapped package on her front porch. She can’t think of a single person who would be sending her something, and when she picks it up she sees that it is, in fact, addressed to the Doyles but deposited on her porch.

She goes to Fred, package in hand. “Did you see who brought this?”

“UPS.”

“But it belongs next door.”

“No one’s home next door. The guy asked me if he could leave it here. I said yes.”

“Why did you do that?” she asks him sharply. “Now I have to talk to them.”

“No, you don’t. Put it on their porch. The UPS guy doesn’t care.”

“All right.”

“I’m going home for lunch,” he tells her as he stands up, dusts off his threadbare jeans, worn to white at the knees. “I’ll be back in thirty minutes.”

Trudy watches him cross the street, open his front door, and enter the house. She stares at the package in her hands. It’s innocuous looking, about the size of a cake box, stamped and sent from the post office. Put it on the front porch and be done with it , she tells herself. And she makes her way up the Doyles’ driveway and onto their porch, where she stands, package in hand, pondering.

Behind the barrier of his living room drapes, Fred scrutinizes her, the need to eat lunch forgotten in his need to watch Trudy. What is this crazy lady going to do now? He watches her ring the doorbell — once, twice, and wait. Didn’t he explicitly tell her no one was home? Why doesn’t she just put the package down and leave? Ah, now he sees why.

Trudy puts her hand on the Doyles’ doorknob. She can’t believe she’s doing this — is she committing breaking and entering? — but she can’t seem to stop herself. The door opens. She bets one of the boys forgot to “lock the damn door!” as the Yeller is always shouting.

She looks quickly behind her, scanning the street. Is she being observed? If anyone asks her, she’ll just say she’s being neighborly, putting the package inside the front door to keep it safe. That’s good. That will work. And then she slips inside the house.

Fred, from the safety of his living room, shakes his head. What a stupid thing for her to do. She could get into a lot of trouble.

Trudy stands with her back against the front door, package in hand, and surveys the living room. Her heart is pounding away in her chest, bombarding her with what she assumes is terror but could also be excitement.

What she sees is a long, narrow room that fits horizontally across the front of the house. There’s a fireplace against the street-facing wall and sliding glass doors on the opposite wall out to a U-shaped patio. The furniture is all oversize, as if giants lived there — a huge leather couch that would swallow Trudy up if she deigned to sit in it, her feet not even hitting the floor, and two high-backed armchairs appropriate for a nineteenth-century gentlemen’s club. The furniture is grouped to face the fireplace. The rest of the room is empty except for small oil paintings of common scenes — apple picking, sailboats on a choppy sea, a farmhouse — positioned high up on the wall. Only the giant rodent can see them , Trudy thinks as her eyes scan the room, a cold and sterile space, no warmth or bright colors or pillows on the sofa, or even rugs on the floor, but nothing out of the ordinary. She’s not going to learn anything by standing in this room.

Trudy knows she should back out, put the package down on the front doorstep, and walk quickly back to her house, but she can’t. She needs to see the boys’ bedrooms. Seeing where they sleep will give her vital information, she’s sure of it.

It looks like the bedrooms are off to the left, in their own separate wing. She crosses the living room and makes a right turn into a hallway. Now she’s really done it. There is simply no explanation for being so far into the house. If one of them comes home and finds her, she’s done for. But that doesn’t stop her. She feels her eyesight sharpen. She knows that’s impossible, but that’s what it feels like. And her hearing gets more acute. Everything feels like it’s happening on another planet, one where the elements in the atmosphere combine differently and all objects are more sharp edged and all sounds explode into her ears. There’s something thrilling about it.