The Best Horror of the Year. Volume 4

YOU BECOME THE NEIGHBORHOOD Glen Hirshberg

“How’d it start?” Mom asks, taking a step back toward the curb. Her long-fingered hands have curled up at her sides like smacked daddy longlegs, and her braid has come loose and swings back and forth, gray and heavy, across her back. “How’d it start? How do I know?”

She tears her eyes away from the little triplex, just for a moment, and looks at me. I flinch, start to take her hand, but I’m afraid to. For so many years, after we left here, I’d see that expression bubble up, triggered by nothing: a bus sighing on a nearby streetcorner, or the sight of a tent-sukka billowing off the side of someone’s porch, or a flying beetle landing on her hand, or a summer wind. Then she’d start screaming at me, or whoever was near. Even then, I knew it wasn’t really me, and that did help, some.

Behind her, the sunset has ignited the smog, and the evening redness rises on the horizon behind the hazy towers of Century City, barely visible less than a mile from here. The traffic on Olympic is Sunday-evening sparse, the noise and the heat of it lapping around us rather than crashing down, the way it mostly did when we lived here. Low tide.

“I’m sorry,” I murmur, starting back around the corner toward the side-street where we parked. “I didn’t mean to bring you here. I actually forgot this place was so near. I just thought you’d want to see the building where Danny and I are going to be liv—”

“Do you remember the turtle?” my mother asks. And then she just folds her legs under her and sits down in the square of grass in front of the triplex. The angry expression has vanished. But there are tears. “Ry? Do you remember?”

She pats the grass. My legs are bare under my skirt, and if I sit there, they’re going to itch. I do it anyway. For a moment, I wonder what whoever currently lives in the front apartment will think, two women camped on their lawn with their backs to the traffic and their eyes riveted to those bay windows like paparazzi. But if the existing tenants are anything like we were, they’ll never open those curtains — too many cars passing, too stark a reminder of the carbon monoxide seeping through every little gap in the walls and window frames — so they’ll never see us.

All at once, I do remember. And I find myself glancing toward the hedge, then the back alley where the dumpster is, half-expecting to see that little, darker-green hump in the grass. That tiny, wrinkled head turned slightly sideways. “So it can see the sky.” That’s what Evie used to tell me.

“A hundred years after we die,” I say.

“What?” snaps my mother.

“Sorry. It’s what she used to say. Evie. She said that turtle of hers could live 250 years. She’d already had it for like twenty. She said we could come back here a hundred years after we die and there it would be. Just being.”

“Evie,” my mother says, and for the first time all night — in a long while, really, at least around me — she offers up her gentle, close-lipped smile. Her softest one, that I loved so much when I was little, and lost when we left here. “Oh, God, Ry, you should have seen her.”

“Mom, you used to make me call her Adopted Grandma. Didn’t she walk me home from nursery school when you were at work? I saw her all the time.”

“Not this time, you didn’t. Oh, wow.” To my amazement, my mother starts to laugh. Right on cue, from all the way down Olympic, comes a whiff of ocean breeze, just strong enough to blow out the laughter like a candle. Her shoulders tremble, though she can’t possibly be cold. My shins have begun to itch.

I put my palms in the grass and make to stand, saying, “Well, I guess we should go.”

But my mother is still smiling. At least, I think she is. “You asked how it started.”

“Yeah. I did.”

“Maybe this is it. I mean, obviously, it’s not the beginning, it had to have been in full swing by then, but this is the first one I really remember. This is as close to the beginning as I can get.”

Her shoulders tremble again. “Leyton,” she says. “Mr. Busby, I mean…”

“I know who you meant, Mom.”

“I actually don’t know why he didn’t blame me. Because it was kind of my fault.”

I sigh, roll my head back on my neck to watch the ribbons of orange run the rim of the sky like a brush fire along a ridge. My mother follows my eyes up, and she goes rigid. She says something, too, but I can’t make it out. I sigh again. “I’m not sure this qualifies as starting at the beginning.”

“Mr. Busby’d moved in… I don’t know… six months before? Fall of ’95. I think.”

“Did Evie always hate him?”

“I don’t think she ever hated him, Ry.”

“What are you talking about? Why else would—”

“She hated his being here. Totally different, in this case.”

“Okay. Why did she hate him being here?”

My mom looks at me, and I want to weep. I’ve never actually seen the expression I unleash on her every fifteen minutes or so during our Sunday-night outings. But I suspect it looks like that. If that’s true, at least my mother can’t be as fragile as she generally appears.

“Why do you think?” she asks.

“Yeah. Okay. I just meant that that always surprised me about Evie. She seemed so open about everything, and everyone. Always talking about the Clintons, and propositions, and Greenpeace. I’m pretty sure she taught me all those words.”

My mother nods. I’m still surprised she’s let us sit here this long. “I think the riots really spooked her. Remember, she was eighty-four years old. She’d lived here a long, long time. For most of that, this neighborhood was one hundred percent Jews.”

“A lulav in every window,” I say, and my mother laughs.

“An etrog on every plate. Where’d she even get that? I’ve never seen an etrog on anyone’s plate. Have you?”

I laugh, too. And my surprise tilts toward amazement. I am sitting with my mother in front of our childhood home — the one we left for the last time in an ambulance, with my mother in restraints and screaming — and we’re laughing.

“So anyway,” my mother says. “Here’s our coal-skinned new retiree neighbor Mr. Busby, walking around the yard all the time in his half-buttoned, purple satin shirts—”

“That’s right, those shirts!”

“—with his barrel chest stuck out. And there’s little Evie, trapped upstairs tending to Stan — that was her husband — who was pretty much just a pool to pour morphine in by then. So mostly, she just stared out the window.”

“‘You become the neighborhood,’” I say, gliding my hands across the tops of the blades of grass, feeling their chemically treated ends prickle like gelled hair. “Do you remember her saying that?”

My mother pauses a moment, then shakes her head. “No, actually.”

I do. More than once. Though I can’t remember when. And even now, I don’t know what it means.

My mother shakes her head again, but harder, like a dog shedding water. “You know, I really do have no idea how the pranks started. I think he might have brought her up a cold shrimp platter the first weekend he lived here. As a new-neighbor gesture, you know, not realizing. I don’t think he’d ever met a Jew before, either, let alone known anything about keeping Kosher. But not long after that, she got him the gift subscription to Hustler, with the note that said ‘To go with your shirts.’ Then he hid a bunch of those black, rubber June bugs all over that sukka she put up every year around back, on strings so he could make them scuttle across her little folding picnic table. Do you remember any of that?”

I shake my head. “Just the picnic table. And ears of corn? Did she hang ears of corn in there?”

“He put rubber bugs in those, too. After that, it was on. Seemed like one of them came up with a new torture for the other every single week.”

Instead of smiling some more, my mother starts muttering again. At least now I can hear her. “She was so lonely,” she says. “They both were.” Then some things that I don’t catch. The sky purples over our heads, and the breeze brushes past.

“So, this one time…” I finally prod.

She looks surprised, as though she thought she’d still been talking to me. Her braid swings like the tongue of a bell, and her body vibrates. “Sorry. Yes. This one time. I assume she got the clothes from Madolyn, Tell me you remember Madolyn.”

“Good God, how could I forget them,” I say, and my mother says them right with me, holding her hands a good two feet in front of her breasts, and there we are smiling again. Mother and daughter. We glance together across the street toward Madolyn’s duplex. “You don’t think she still lives there?” I ask.

My mother doesn’t respond.

“Whose ex was she again? The Family Affair guy?”

“Not him. The one from the knock-off. With the beard.”

“Oh my God, Mom, do you remember what she told me? When I was just sitting out here with the turtle, minding my seven year-old business? She came across the street in this tiny black dress, and she had to have been as old as Mr. Busby, right? Sixty, at least.”

“Older,” says my mother.

“So it’s just me and the turtle, looking at the sky. And here comes Madolyn and her shadows. And she stands over us. And she puts her hands right on her boobs. And then she says…” I try for a smoker’s rasp, though it doesn’t quite come off. “ Just remember, Girlie. I got these for the husband. But I kept ’em for me.” And then she turned around and went right back home.”

My mother just nods, and takes a long time doing it. Her voice comes out sad. “That would be Madolyn. She was always so nice.”

Nice?

More silence. Another sudden, nervous glance up in the air from my mother, and I know this can’t last long. “Sorry I interrupted. You said Evie got something from her?”

“Oh. Right. Very possibly the same little black dress you just mentioned.”

“What are you talking about?”

“And some fishnets. And some red lipstick. And some stilettos. Jesus, Ry, they had to have been seven inches high.”

“Wait… she borrowed that stuff for herself? To wear?”

“For Mr. Busby.”

At the gurgle in my throat, my mom actually grins. “It was horrible, really. And ingenious. You wouldn’t think that sweet old woman… Mr. Busby’s daughter was worried about him skulking around here by himself. She got him to take out a Personals ad in the L.A. Weekly. I helped him write it. And then I guess, maybe when I was trying to convince Evie to let me watch her husband sleep for a couple hours so she could go out and see a movie or something some evening, I must have let it slip. And that’s what gave her the idea, which is why it was kind of my fault.”

“You’re telling me she answered his ad?”

“Made a date, told him she’d be by to pick him up. She didn’t tell him who she was, of course.”

“She actually went through with it? Went to his door dressed like that? What did he do?”

“I don’t know, exactly. That is, I couldn’t quite see. She made Madolyn and me hide in the hedge. All I could hear over our laughter was his screaming.”

“That’s…” I start, and don’t know how to continue. I want to keep her talking about this forever, or at least long enough for me to get the picture straight in my head. Not of Evie, but of my mother crouched in a hedge with a friend, laughing. “I can’t believe you haven’t told me this before.”

I know it’s the wrong comment even before I finish. My mom’s mouth twists, and her shoulders clench inward. She folds her arms across her chest.

“What happened after that?” I keep my voice light.

“Stan died,” says my mother.

The sun goes, dragging all that color behind it, and around us, the apartment buildings lose their depth like false fronts on a set. Across the street is Beverly Hills. A whole other world. You can tell by the curlicues on the street signs.

Without warning, my mother starts to swell. Her arms come loose and drop to her sides, and her spine arches and her head tilts all the way back as her mouth falls open. The moan seems to surge out of the grass and up her throat, rattling her teeth as it bursts out of her.

“Mom,” I gasp, grabbing for her hand, scrambling up on my knees to try getting an arm around her.

The moan stops. My mother holds her position, completely frozen, like a sculpture of my mother moaning. Then her eyes pop open.

“Do you remember that sound, Ry?”

“Remember it? What the hell are you—”

“You don’t,” she says. “I’m glad.” Then she folds her arms back across her chest and lowers her chin and sits there, holding herself. “I’m so glad.”

Usually, by this point on our Sunday evenings, I’ve dutifully offered up the most innocuous details of my work life and my grad-school plans and my relationship with Danny (since I have no intention of actually bringing Danny), for which my mother trades seemingly grateful nods and sometimes an anecdote about women’s feet from the shoe store where she works. Most weeks, she doesn’t break down, especially if I have her back in her apartment and ensconced in front of her Tivo’d American Idol episodes — all of which she also watched when they were first broadcast — by eight. This is the first night in years where I’ve lost track of the time, even for a little while. And yet, I’m all too aware we’re on dangerous ground.

“Do you want to go home?” I ask gently. I even touch her shoulder, and she doesn’t pull away, though she also doesn’t unclench.

“It usually started around 2 a.m.,” she says. “Sometimes earlier than that. Mostly not, though. You really don’t remember?” There are no tears, now, just a gauntness that seems to have surfaced in her chin and cheeks.

This is what she’ll look like, old, I think, for no good reason.

“The most amazing thing is that I really think she had no idea she was doing it. I think she did it in her sleep. By the third or fourth night after Stan died, I couldn’t sleep at all for knowing it was coming. Somehow, being woken up by that, to that… it was just too much world, too fast.

“There wasn’t any lead up. It came like an earthquake. That sound I just made, only a lot louder. And a thousand times as heartbroken. It went on and on and on, like she didn’t even need to breathe. Then it would stop for maybe an hour, and then there’d be aftershocks, these quicker, more jagged moans. Those were so loud that that suspended light in my bedroom started swinging back and forth. You couldn’t drown them out. I tried the fan. I tried headphones. Nothing worked. It was like they’d crawled inside my head.

“Which reminds me. This was also when the spiders came.”

That, at least, triggers a memory. Up until now, it’s been like watching my mother recount a completely separate life. Part of which she’s made up, or at least exaggerated, because I may have only been seven, and I’ve always slept heavy, but surely I would have heard what she’s describing. And retained it.

But those webs. Everywhere, on everything. “I remember them,” I say.

Mostly, I remember the wolf spider outside our front door. We had bougainvillea climbing the iron grating on either side of our little stoop. And for months that spring and early summer — the last months we lived here — this one bulbous, pregnant wolf spider would weave a new web between them every single night. We discovered the web the first time when I raced out the door one morning, headed for the park, and wrapped most of the strands around my face. I don’t think I started screaming until my mom did, and she didn’t start, she later said, until she saw the spider itself dangling just under my earlobe like some outsized, nightmare earring, clawing with its hairy legs as it tried to scuttle up the air into my hair to hide. My mom whacked it into the bushes with her hand, then spent half an hour calming us both down and picking the insect carcasses and threading out of my curls.

We weren’t laughing, then. Or ever, really, about the spiders. There were too many of them, attracted, the tv said, by the freakishly humid spring, the eruption of greenery and insects that draped the hillsides and gardens of midtown L.A. and made it look, for just that short while, like somewhere living things actually belonged.

But we developed a sort of affection for our lone wolf. Or fascination, at least. The way one might for a house ghost. Some nights, before sending me to bed, my mother would bring me to the front couch, draw back those bay-window curtains, flick on the porch light. And there she’d be, gray and translucent and hairy, scuttling back and forth seemingly in mid-air between the columns of bougainvillea, floating on her milky white egg-sac as though it were a balloon. Every morning, we took a broom, said we were sorry, and brought the web down so we could get out of the apartment. But we left the spider herself alone.

“Ry?” says my mother, startling me by brushing a fallen curl out of my eyes. She’s never touched me, much. Not since I was very young. “What are you thinking about?”

I catch myself leaning away and feel bad, but too late. My mother has already withdrawn her hand. I try to smile, get some nostalgia into my voice. I’m surprisingly close to feeling some. I gesture toward the front stoop. “Our furry-legged friend.”

She looks at my hands. Then the front of the apartment. Then she bursts into tears.

“Sorry,” she says fast. “Sorry, sorry, sorry.”

I reach to comfort her. But it never did any good when I was a kid, and it doesn’t now. The sobs grab her by the shoulders and shake her.

They stop sooner than usual, though. And when my mother lowers her hands from her face, there’s a steeliness in her jaw I don’t remember seeing. “I’m just being stupid, as usual,” she says. “It wasn’t really that. It wasn’t real. Obviously. It was just that time, those moans. I hadn’t slept in so long, and those things were crawling over the place, and I missed your fucking asshole father, and…” her voice drops into its murmur. But lo and behold, it climbs back out. She looks at me. “It wasn’t real,” she says. “I want you to know I know.”

I have no idea what to say to that. “We should get you home,” I say eventually.

“Evie came down a few times that week after Stan died. Mostly in the evening, just to sit. You and I used to steal lemons off the trees by that condo complex around the corner, and I made lemonade, and the three of us would come right out here. Right about this time. We’d watch the spiders dancing up the walls and the sun going down and that turtle nosing around in the grass. Mr. Busby was away, I think his daughter’d taken him to Bermuda or something, and it was so quiet around here.

“I kept trying to ask Evie how she was doing, but she wouldn’t talk about it. She talked about maybe going to see her sister in Maine, but not like she was really planning to do it. You showed her our wolf spider. She said there were lots more up under the eaves. She claimed she could hear them on the roof at night, and that she had a resident, too, who hung out by her bedroom window. An even bigger one. She didn’t like its eyes.

“One night, later than usual — I was in a robe, and I’m sure you’d already gone to bed — she knocked on the door in tears and asked me to come out. She was in a robe, too. This horrible cream thing with blue lilies all over it. She was grabbing her arms to her chest.

“‘They’re biting him,’ she kept saying. ‘They’re biting him. My poor Stan.’ Then she showed me her hand. It was all purple on the back, she had this huge spider bite. Really nasty.

“‘Evie, my God, you’ve got to treat that. Come in,’ I told her. But she wouldn’t. She said she had to get back. That they kept climbing on Stan and running around on him. She wasn’t making much sense. Mostly, she was sobbing.

“I do remember one thing. At some point, she just started saying the word ‘Gone.’ And when I’d gotten her some lemonade and held her for a while — and I swear, Ry, she was thinner than you, it was like holding a garden rake except that she was so soft—she stuck her fingers under her glasses and wiped her eyes and said it again. ‘Gone. What do people even mean when they say that? How can someone go? Go where? To me, he’s as here as he ever was. He’s right in the next room.’

“Know the worst part, Ry? What I remember thinking was that that was true. The guy’d been gone for ages. Months and months before he died. In a way, she was right.

“And somehow, between comforting her while she cried and getting her lemonade and wrapping her poor, old, squishy hand, I missed that part about the spiders biting him. I didn’t think a single thing about what that meant until later that night, when Mr. Busby came home from his trip.”

The silence seems almost peaceful at first, an organic lull in the conversation. But it lasts too long. My mother’s staring up toward the windows of the upstairs apartment, and her mouth has formed an O. Her shadow stretches out long beside her on the grass, like a web she’s spun, or gotten stuck in.

“Mom. Seriously. I don’t need another moan-demonstration.”

She blinks as though I’ve dumped water over her head. As though she has no idea what I’m talking about. Yet again, I feel horrible. But this has gone on for so many years.

“I didn’t know he was back,” she says. “I mean, we were friendly, he even had me bring in his mail sometimes. But it wasn’t like with Evie. He kind of kept to himself.

“If I’d known he was back, I would have warned him. But I didn’t, and right on time at about 2:40 a.m., Evie went off. It was particularly horrible that night. God, Ry. Lying there in the dark, I think I started doing it along with her, under my breath, just to keep from going crazy. Only then — remember, I hadn’t slept through the night since Stan died, so for maybe eight days running — I started thinking maybe it was me making the sounds, and that really freaked me out. And then the music exploded.”

And there it is again. A surprising wisp of smile floating over her face. “His choice was inspired, in a way. I mean, he must have put some thought into it, after the moans woke him up. All of a sudden, these fat, thudding drums boom out his windows. And this bass. Buum, buum, buum-bumm, dugga-dugga. Rattled that picture of you on the Griffith Park merry-go-round right off my wall.

“I could hear him yelling, too. Mr. Busby. ‘Hear that?’ he was shouting. ‘Cause I’m sure hearing you, Old Bat.

“You know, you slept through that, too? I swear, Ry, sleeping through the Northridge quake must have trained you, because you never even moved. I jumped up, threw on my robe, and ran around to Mr. Busby’s. He was holding one of his stereo speakers out his living room window, aimed straight up at Evie’s. Every time the bass hit, his whole body quivered like the windshield of a car.

“Well he saw me. I’ll never forget it, he was wearing these flashy green pajamas, I’m pretty sure they were the most reflective article of clothing I’ve ever seen on anyone. And he was having the time of his life. Grinning ear to ear. He was kind of irresistible that way, like a big overgrown lab. In reflective green pajamas. And he shouts to me, ‘Evening, Girl. Think the old woman knows I’m home?’

“‘Stan died,’ I told him.

“Sorry,’ he yelled. ‘Lot of moaning going on. Can’t hear ya.’

“I told him again. That time, he understood. ‘Ah, shit,’ he said, and quivered when the bass hit him. He ducked inside and shut off the music. There were lights on halfway down the block, and Madolyn was out on her lanai, yelling.

“Mr. Busby stuck his head back out, shouting, ‘Yeah, yeah, go back to bed’ to the whole world. Then he threw his hands up to his hair, and he started rooting around and saying ‘Goddamn. Is it on me? Can you see it?’

“I helped him get rid of the rest of the web he’d stuck his face through. Then I got lemonade, and he got a box of Wheat Thins. And we just stood together at his window, all night. Him and me. He kept looking up at Evie’s windows. Sometimes he’d say, ‘So she’s been doing that a lot? That sound? Every night?’ And sometimes he’d say, ‘Poor old bat.’ Finally, sometime around dawn, right when I told him I had work and got up to go in, he said, ‘Hey. Want to see my wheels?’ And he took me around to the driveway to show me the car his daughter had bought him.”

“I’ll bet it was shiny,” I say, though I’m entranced yet again. How is it possible that I know so little about the life my mother led here, before she became the way she is?

“You bet right. And not just shiny. Pink and shiny. And a Jag.”

My jaw drops. “I didn’t know they made pink Jags. Or that anyone on this side of Olympic had that kind of money.”

“His daughter bought it for him. And this is the thing about Leyton Busby, Ry. This is what I think Evie never understood. That was all he wanted to talk about. It was all he cared about. I don’t think he cared about the car itself one little bit. ‘She paid half down,’ he told me. He never even walked around it, he just stood there in his shiny pajamas, which his daughter also bought him, beaming away. ‘Half. To cheer me up, she says. Like I need so much cheering.’”

“But he was cheerier that morning. Just not about the car. I always hoped…” The sudden turn of my mother’s head catches me off-guard. Headlights from a passing car sweep her face, and her eyes flare like fireflies in the gloom. Guilt blows through and past me, faint and salty.

“Well,” says my mother. “I just hope his daughter knew that. Somehow, I got the impression maybe she didn’t.” Shadows have settled back over her face, but I can still feel her eyes on me. Another one of those near-smiles flutters across her lips without landing there. “For a long time, Mr. Busby and I just looked at his car. Once, he said, ‘Watch this,’ and then he jumped from one side of the bumper to the other, then pointed into the paint job. ‘You see that?’ he said. ‘There’s a pink me in there.’ I was about to go inside when he asked, ‘You figure she’s awake? The old bat?’

“I told him I didn’t even know what time it was.

“‘Sun’s up,’ he said. ‘She’s super-old. And I don’t hear moaning, do you?’ When I shook my head, he said, ‘Right. Let’s go see what we can do.’

“I was too surprised to do anything but follow. And… I remember the air, right then. It was so clean. Like it never is here. There were hummingbirds beating around the bougainvillea. And bees buzzing. You could actually see the outlines of all the trees and cars and people, without that haze around them, you know? Everything just seemed so substantial, or something. Like we were really here, for once. If that makes any sense.”

“I actually know exactly what you mean,” I say quietly.

This time, for one moment, that smile actually lands. Beats its wings on her lips. Lifts away again. I want to reach out, snatch it back. But it’s too late already. Again.

“We got upstairs, and Mr. Busby banged on Evie’s door, and he was right, she was up, dressed, had her hair out of her curlers. I think she maybe forgot herself, because she just threw the door open, then shut it halfway real fast, but not fast enough. That’s when I realized Stan was still in there.” Now it’s my turn to stare. My mother’s staring, too. But at the building, not me.

“Mom. What?”

“It’d been eight days. Maybe longer, I don’t know. I just caught a glimpse. The hospital bed, the i.v. stand with the tubing wrapped around it for disposal. And Stan. He was half-curled up in the sheets. This little cocoon husk she’d been married to for sixty-three years.”

“Wait. You mean his body? She kept it?”

“‘Oh my God,’ I remember saying. I tried to elbow Mr. Busby out of the way, but he wasn’t going.

“‘Is that Stan?’ he kept saying. ‘Mary Mother of God, woman, is that Stan?’

“She tried to slam the door on us. But Mr. Busby wedged himself in the frame and wouldn’t let her. I think she hit him. He didn’t budge. She looked terrible. Bloated and pale and patchy. Maybe it was the light, but even her skin had gone gray. She was practically transparent. Like a column of dust motes you could scatter with one hand.

“‘Oh, Evie,’ I told her. ‘Come downstairs. Let me take care of this for you.’

“She didn’t put up much fight. She hit Mr. Busby a few more times. Then she said she’d appreciate that. But that she’d wait up here with Stan.

“So I went down and woke you and showered and looked in the Yellow Pages and found an undertaker who said he’d come. And then I went to work. When I got home, I knocked on Evie’s door, just to check on her, but no one answered.

“And then you got the mumps. And my work went crazy, and I almost lost my job because I kept having to take off to care for you. And your dad got himself thrown in jail again. And the spiders got into everything. And somehow, weeks passed…”

This time, instead of muttering, she goes completely still. Sits there in the grass. Until, with a shriek, she scuttles backwards on her hands, smacking at her legs and jabbing her hands up the sleeves of her summer blouse and raking downward with clawed fingers. Welts well up in her skin and boil over. I try to grab her wrists, but she claws me, too, then scrambles all the way to the sidewalk and stands up.

All this time, she’s kept her eyes glued to the upstairs windows. My tears surprise me. I’m not even sure what they’re for. It’s not like this is atypical behavior.

“Mom,” I whisper. “I’m sorry I brought you here. I didn’t mean to.”

“It wasn’t real,” she says again, spitting the words. “You need to know I know.”

“Okay. I know you know.”

“No you don’t.”

I close my eyes. “Okay, I don’t.”

“Maybe you want to know what I saw. Maybe you should. Maybe then you’d stop looking at me like that.”

“I’m not looking at you like anything,” I sigh, standing to start negotiating her back toward my car.

“That’s what I mean,” she says, starting to cry. “So I’m going to tell you.”

We’ve attracted attention, finally. A curtain has stirred in the apartment next to our old one. Mr. Busby’s old place. And across the side-street, a stoop-backed old woman with a basket on her wrist and a long, white cane has emerged onto the sidewalk. Her hair is some crazy L.A. old-lady color, practically fuchsia in the twilight. She has a hand shading her eyes, as though even the echoes of orange in the west are too bright for her.

“Hey, Mom? We should probably go. I think it’s time to get you home. Simon Cowell and the gang are waiting.”

“I don’t know what made me call them,” she says. “The undertakers.” The sky has gone royal blue, and even the blue is draining away as though it’s being siphoned. The breeze has developed a bite, too, and the old woman across the street has made her way to the crosswalk, and now she’s inching in our direction. She’s thin, all in white, her stoop so pronounced that she almost looks likes a cane herself, for the shadows to lean on.

“Mom?” I say, with even more force than I intend. “I want to go, even if you don’t.”

“I hadn’t seen Evie in a while. I went up and knocked a few times. Mostly, there was no answer. I thought she’d finally gone away to see her sister or something. But then sometimes I’d hear her through the door. She sounded so small. I could hardly understand her.

“Mr. Busby tried a few pranks. ‘Going to lure her out,’ he’d say. ‘Get her blood going. Leyton knows what the ladies need.’ He’d stop every Jehovah’s Witness and Mormon missionary he saw and direct them to Evie’s door. One night around midnight, he came out on the grass with a ukulele and sang ‘Tiny Bubbles’ at the top of his lungs, except he kept saying ‘Tiny Evie’ instead. But she never appeared at the window. We had this possum family that took up residence by the dumpster, and he made a trail with orange peels and lettuce right to her door and got the whole family to camp outside it. But as far as I know, she never saw them.

“And then one day… you were still so sick. I was so worried about you. I’d spent all my summer pay to bail out your dad, and my reward was having him call in a drunken stupor every night to tell me either that he was going to make it up to me, somehow, or that he was going to kill me. Depended what he’d been drinking. I think it must have been the possums that made me even think of it, because to be honest, I didn’t have time or energy to worry about Evie. She’d stopped moaning. But instead, she kept prowling around up there, every single night, at any hour. I think she was barefoot, at least. I could barely hear her. Just these little scratches. Little slides. Back and forth, in little lurches. All blessed night. Just enough to keep me awake. It also made me even more sad. And tired. I’d never been so tired in my whole life. This went on and on.

“Until that one day. The last day.” She takes a huge breath and holds it, as though trying to cure hiccoughs. She does that for so long that her knees start to wobble.

“Mom, come on,” I say.

“I came home.” Her voice shakes. “And I saw the possum family at the top of her steps. And the spider webs all up and down the stairwell, as though no one had used it for years, which was ridiculous. The mailman went up there every day, for one.

“But something about it gave me this weird feeling. And it set me thinking. I hadn’t been invited to Stan’s funeral. Evie hadn’t said anything about it whatsoever. I was sure she would have invited me, or talked to me. I went inside and found the number of the undertakers, and I called them.

“And that’s when I found out. They’d come, alright, on the day I’d summoned them, and knocked at the door. Evie had answered them through it. She said everything was taken care of. And the undertakers said okay and left.

“I hung up. I had no idea what to think. Then you started crying. And your father called. Then he called again. And you cried some more. And I started crying. I think I just switched on the tv and left you in the living room with a popsicle and a blanket and ignored you when you yelled for me. I locked myself in the bedroom to try to get some sleep before Evie started pacing again. I think somehow I must have got some, too. Because this time it was the screaming that woke me up.”

“Jesus,” rasps the old woman in white, right next to us, and I jump forward and whirl around. How is it possible for something that slow to sneak up?

She’s got a crooked, stumpy hand in my mother’s hair. Holding on to her braid, like a child grabbing a cat’s tail.

“It really is you,” she rasps, her voice so honeycombed that it might be the wind talking.

Even then, several stunned seconds pass before I recognize her. And my mother ignores her completely. She just rambles on, as though the woman isn’t even there.

“I hurtled out bed and came racing out the door. I thought it was you, even though it sounded nothing like you. I just felt so bad. So guilty. About so many things.” Tears stream down her face. To my astonishment, she lays her head on the old woman’s shoulder. The woman strokes her braid.

“Madolyn?” I gasp. While thinking, where’s the rest of you? The shapeless dress drops without interruption past her waist. The sight is horrifying to me. Incomprehensible. Sad. Wrong. New York without the Trade Centers.

“It took me a minute to realize the screams were coming from outside. From the driveway.” My mother burrows deeper into Madolyn’s collarbone, which looks bony, now, and can’t be comfortable. “I raced around the building. And there was Mr. Busby, standing by what was left of his Jag.”

Madolyn still holds onto my mother’s braid. I have to stifle an urge to grab her wrist, shake her loose. It’s like my mother is a child’s pull-toy, and as long as Madolyn keeps yanking her hair, she’s got no choice but to keep talking.

“I never thought you’d come back here,” the old woman rasps. “Either one of you. You look good, Ry. Like you made it. I thought you might.”

“They’d broken every single window,” says my mother. “Bashed the windshield to pieces. Stolen all the tires. Knifed the seats.” She speaks faster and faster. One of her hands has snared itself in Madolyn’s dress. “On both sides, into that beautiful pink paint, they’d keyed the words Black Fag.”

I blink. “What? Who?”

“Leyton was just shaking, when he wasn’t shouting. I felt awful. I tried to say something comforting, but he wasn’t having it. I didn’t even hear what he was saying at first. That he was actually accusing Evie of this. And even if I had, it was so crazy. But how could he not be crazy, after that? ‘Oh, Leyton,’ I told him.

“‘Too far,’ he was shouting. ‘Too far, Old Bat. Not funny. Way too far.’ And then…” my mother twitches in place, and Madolyn gives a gentle tug on her braid. “Then…” Again, the twitch and tug. Like she’s stuck.

“Mom,” I say. “Let’s get out of here.”

“He started for the stairs. He was still screaming ‘Old Bat’ at the top of his lungs, and—”

“Come on,” I snarl, yanking her away from Madolyn. A shudder ripples from her neck all the way down into her feet, and she stumbles against me and then straightens up.

She’s holding my hand. Standing tall. Somehow, I’ve forgotten that my mother is taller than me. She’s blinking furiously. She reaches up and at least smears the wetness flooding her face. Only then does she seem to see Madolyn.

“Oh,” she says. “Hello.”

Madolyn eyes her up and down. Her skin is tanning-bed orange, her brow surgically lifted so high that it seems pinned to the crest of her head. She looks like a doll, a Madolyn action-figure, denuded of its most characteristic elements. Sanitized.

“You, on the other hand, don’t look so different from the night you left. I’m sorry to say.”

My mother tries a laugh. As if Madolyn were kidding. “I was just telling Ry the story. It seems so silly, now.”

“Silly,” says Madolyn.

The urge to get my mother away from here, and from this woman, has become overwhelming. I’m way past questioning it. I start to pull her toward the curb. But she digs in her feet and won’t budge.

“I just thought she should know.” She’s practically chirping, trying so hard to sound like an ordinary, comfortable person that it breaks my heart.

“I agree,” says Madolyn. “She should.”

“You know,” my mother says, forces a laugh, waves an airy hand. “What caused me to… it seems so ridiculous, in retrospect. What I thought I saw.”

“Thought?” says Madolyn, very quietly.

“It was just such a hard year for me, you know? Such a terrible time. Watching that poor old woman go completely to pieces. And Leyton stomping around his place and the yard, not knowing what to do with himself or how to go on, and you across the street—” she’s talking to Madolyn, almost accusing her—“in your little mausoleum to yourself, with all those pictures of you and a guy you don’t love on the cover of People or whatever, blown up to cover every inch of wallspace. And that moaning and pacing upstairs every single goddamn night.” She turns to me. “And you. My sweet, sweet daughter. Sitting out here by yourself day after day, with no one to look after you properly. With a turtle for a playmate. We were all so lonely. So, so lonely. I guess I got lonely, too.”

“You become the neighborhood,” I blurt, and tear up again.

“I guess it all just boiled over. Messed up my head. And when Leyton got up the stairs and started banging on that door, screaming for Evie to come out… When he kept banging and banging and banging, while I was screaming for him to stop…

“That’s right, you were there, too, Madolyn. You saw it all happen. My big breakdown.” She laughs that laugh again; it’s horrible, like a CD skipping. “You were there when the door opened.”

Madolyn has straightened over her cane. The botox injections have made actual facial expressions impossible. But her eyes are ice-cold. “Yep,” she says.

“She was there,” my mother tells me, patting my hand. “She helped me when I broke down. When I started screaming. When the paramedics came. You probably called the paramedics, didn’t you, Madolyn? She helped them get me in the ambulance. Made sure they knew about you. I never thanked you for that. How’d I even get that picture in my head, Madolyn? I still don’t know.”

“The one you saw, you mean.”

“The one I thought I saw. When Evie’s door opened.”

“So you think you didn’t see it? Is that what you’re telling me?”

“Mom, please.” My own voice starts to crack. I’m too late, I think. One more time.

“You mean, giant spiderlegs scuttling out onto the landing?” The skipping laugh crescendos. “Grabbing Leyton and yanking him inside?”

“That,” says Madolyn. “And those sounds. Like a cat being ripped inside out while it was still alive.” She nods her fuchsia-haired, copper-skinned head. “Sounds about right to me. Pretty much what I saw and heard.”

My mother stops laughing. Stops breathing again. Sways on her feet. “Stop it,” she says.

With a shrug, Madolyn steps toward her. “I’m just saying your memory matches pretty perfectly with mine.”

“Oh, you bitch.” My mother’s voice is a pig-squeal, now. She’s shaking all over. “Stop right now.”

“You better bring her inside,” Madolyn says to me. “She’s going to collapse.”

“You cunt whore, stop,” squeals my mother, throws her head back, and screams.

“Mom!” I try to grab her, but she jabs her elbows into my ribs, staggers away, and drops to her knees in the grass.

“Say you’re joking,” she hisses. “Say it right now.”

If Madolyn gets any closer to my mother, I’m thinking I will bowl her over. Drive her into the ground, cane, basket and all.

“Get away,” I tell her.

Instead, she plants the cane and sits. My mother folds into a little hump, then tilts sideways against the old woman, and lays her head in her lap.

“There, now,” Madolyn says, and strokes my mother’s braid. And there they sit.

It’s insane, the stupidest sensation of this stupid evening yet. But most of what I feel right then is jealousy. And guilt, for the last fifteen years. Especially the last few. I’ve been old enough to treat my mother differently for a long time, now.

Abruptly, Madolyn lifts the lid of her basket, reaches inside, and pulls out the turtle. I gasp, folding down beside them. My mother lies in Madolyn’s lap and shakes and coos like a baby. Madolyn lays the turtle in the grass, where it begins to nose about. Head sideways. Eying the sky.

“That’s him? Evie’s?” I stammer.

Madolyn nods.

“You saved him?”

“Afterward. Yeah. When the police were done.”

“Police…” I reach my finger in front of the turtle’s nose, the way one does with a kitten. The turtle pulls its head into its shell. Noses out again. Sidles sideways to get at more grass.

Madolyn watches him, too, shaking her head. “I found him under the couch. Under all the webbing.”

In her lap, my mother twitches.

“What the hell are you talking about?” I snap.

“What there was. A lot of ugly smears of God knows what, all over the walls and the floor and even the ceiling. A lot of web. A lot of mess. All the windows smashed out, and wind just whipping everything around. No bodies. Not Stan’s. Not Leyton Busby’s. Not Evie’s. No one’s.”

“Are you…” I don’t want to say it, or think it. Most of all, I don’t want my mother to hear it. It comes out anyway. “Are you seriously saying she was…?”

Madolyn strokes a curved, clawed hand down my mother’s cheek. Her face is so blank, you could project anything there. At the moment, insanely, I’m projecting grandmotherly kindness. The moon has just started to rise behind her, and there’s this white nimbus floating around her fuchsia head.

“Well, that’s one of the possibilities, I suppose,” she says. “I’ve thought of a few others, down the years. Mostly, I try not to think about it, to be honest. All I know for sure is that Evie wasn’t in there when the cops came. No one was. And no one saw or heard from her, or from Leyton Busby, ever again. And that ever since, I’ve been keeping a good watch. I don’t know what for, exactly. But I watch that building real close. The whole neighborhood, really. Just… seems like what I’m here for, maybe. And I keep my own house clean.”

It’s the way my mother’s lying there, I think, that makes me break down and weep. The way her knees have drawn up. The shudders wracking her. “You become the neighborhood,” I whisper.

“Second time you’ve said that,” said Madolyn. “What’s it mean?”

“Hell if I know. Evie used to say it.”

Leaning back on her hands with my mother in her lap and Evie’s turtle nosing around near her hip, Madolyn glances down at what’s left of herself, or maybe my mother, both of them suspended in pale moonlight. Then she looks across the street toward her own home, where she’s lived alone, I’m all but certain, for going on thirty years. Then she looks up at Evie’s windows.

“You know what I think?” Her voice is like a rainstick, a rattlesnake’s warning, a fire going out. Like she’s praying and fighting and giving up all at the same time. “I think maybe if you live long enough, and you see enough…” Again, she glances down. “And you lose enough, and life gets at you enough, and does what it’s going to do…”

Then she looks at me. Actually reaches out and wipes some of my tears away, while the shakes seem to sizzle out of my mother, through the grass like lightning, and up into me.

“Sooner or later, Hon. For better or worse. You become you.”