“Me too, but if I take Benadryl, I’m hungover in the morning and can barely make a sandwich for my son’s lunch.”
She smiles politely, but this is the ER. It’s all about turnover and, like a waitress already thinking about her next table’s tip, she wants me out. She rolls off her blue gloves and tosses them in the trash to indicate we are almost done here. “I’m going to grab the syringes, and then you’ll be all set. Do you have any questions?”
“I teach preschool. Can I go to work Monday?”
“Yes. You’ll be scabbed over by then. To be cautious, keep your scratches covered with bandages.” She smiles. “Were you hoping I’d ban you from work for the week?”
“No.” Her joke draws a nervous sweat from my skin, cutting to my insecurities regarding how I am perceived. Do I give off that white trash vibe? “Are the shots painful? In the stomach?” I’ve heard urban legends about rabies shots.
“No. Rabies shots haven’t been given in the stomach since the eighties. Just a shot in the arm. And I’ll inject antibodies near the wound. You’ll do fine.” She taps my knee once. “I’ll be back in a few minutes.” She pulls open the curtain, then the sliding glass door. She exits quickly, graceful as a dancer.
My kids’ vaccines are always injected by a nurse. That the doctor is preparing my vaccine makes the situation seem dire. Iodine soap stink hangs heavy in the air. My stomach is tight, my skin is cold and clammy. The ER is freezing.
“I am not making this up,” I say to the nurse.
She smiles and gently backhands the flab on my upper arm like we’ve been sitting at a bar together for hours. “You wouldn’t believe how many times we hear that in the ER. Guy came in last week with a peanut butter jar up his ass. Said he fell on it. Swore up and down he wasn’t making it up.”
My eyes go wide.
“It was a sixteen-ounce jar, but still. Men. They’re sick, I tell you.”
“The bats weren’t attacking me, per se. I think I was in their way.”
“I believe you,” she says. “I heard they found bats inside several homes in Arbor Ridge Ponds. I bet some deranged, bat-loving lunatic is behind the population climb, roosting them in his house, carving bat houses and setting them about his yard, fantasizing he’s going to become a vampire. Bats are supposed to be dying off, I thought. White-nose syndrome, my ass.”
I smile, and tension eases in my shoulders. Even though hospitals and their staff make my skin crawl, women like this make all of life’s problems manageable. I need to shrink this woman and put her in my purse so she can blurt amusing aphorisms throughout my day and depreciate my worries. Politicians and diapers should be changed often and for the same reasons! In forty years, thousands of old ladies will be running around with tattoos!
She continues, “People are crazy, I tell you. My neighbors, I’ve known these people ten years; I’ve shared an ungodly number of wine bottles with these people, as you do with neighbors. Last month my neighbor lets it slip they’re into suspension.” She smacks my arm flab again. “Like, suspending from their body piercings.” She’s shaking her head. “This couple, they’re in their fifties. You think you know your neighbors, but you don’t.”
My stomach clenches. Inside thirty seconds, I come up with four unlikely but possible scenarios resulting in one of my sleeping children dying, and I have a fifth idea in the works.
I want out of here. I hoist my purse into my lap and reach inside for my cell phone, overwhelmed by an urge to check on Valerie and the kids.
4
THE SKIN PEELED BACK
The kids are sleeping, same as when I left.
Of course they are. Why would you expect otherwise?
After Valerie leaves, I stand over Chloe’s bed and listen to her breathe. She’s on her front with her knees tucked under her chest, balled up like a baby, and I match my breathing to the rise and fall of her small, curved back. I hover too long, waiting for her rhythmic breathing to falter, waiting to catch her case of sudden unexplained death in childhood, SIDS’s ugly cousin. I reluctantly retreat and peek in Wyatt’s room. The pale bottom of his big foot, soft and flawless, sticks off the end of his loft bed. I want to kiss it.
Healthy and safe, I tell myself in the voice of a seasoned cop who is trying to calm a frantic parent. I head into my room, grab my laptop, and climb into bed.
It’s going to be another restless night. My pulse is acute, and my worries are rolling downhill like a cartoon snowball, gaining bulk and urgency.
I open my laptop and search Leland Ernest. Nothing comes up. Well, three obituaries pop up, but those are unrelated to my neighbor, obviously. My neighbor has no online presence. No Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn. No school history, work history, or reported arrest. I’ve searched online the past few nights, hoping the Kilkenny police will report on suspects, hoping someone will mention my neighbor.
My neighbor.
When you buy a house, you have a pre-made list of questions—How long is the commute? How much you will have to spend on repairs? How old is the roof? Has there been mold? How much traffic is there on the street out front? How many showers? Does the house emanate a pleasant feng shui vibe?—but the huge question mark, the major unknown, the one thing you absolutely can’t control or fully investigate is your neighbors.
To each of your days, they can add sudden, unexpected joy or debilitating terror. They can provide an onion in a pinch or they can steal your sense of freedom. Since I moved into this house months ago, I’ve only talked to five or six people on my street. Creepy Leland and Scary Lou are two of them. While I managed to nab a house with two bathtubs, my neighbors suck.
It’s been five days since I met Lou.
I’d been fetching Wyatt’s bicycle from down the street.
Wyatt’s chain had twitched off, and he’d fallen. He’d abandoned the bike and limped home with scrapes on his palms and knees like mashed strawberries.
Damn second-hand, third-rate bike.
I was stretching the bike chain back onto the chainring, my fingers and palms sticky with gear grease, grass pressing into my knees, when a man said, “Hey,” his tone loud and crotchety like he was going to let me have it.
Feeling at once bold and exhausted, I turned toward him. “Yeah?”
He wore slides over black socks pulled up high and a white T-shirt tucked into khaki shorts. His old man outfit clashed with his turquoise sweatband, which cinched his flyaway, graying hair. He must be a sweater. The hair above his sweatband lifted a little in the evening breeze. I didn’t peg him for an expressive guy who wanted a splash of color to mix things up. Had to be a penny-pincher who’d found a use for his wife’s decades-old sweatband. His hand was bandaged. I aged him around sixty so I assumed he’d had a biopsy of a suspicious mole.
His dog barked behind the screen door, everything dingy and shadowed inside the house. It was a husky mix of the lean, wolfish variety and sounded like it wanted to pick a fight. Hands on hips, the man said, “Your next-door neighbor is a suspect.”
Talk about going in rough and dry. This guy had no foreplay talk, and it took a moment to get my bearings. “Suspect of what?”
“You know, that Boone girl.”