“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.
She opens the first door she finds, and it is definitely one of the boys’ rooms. There are bunk beds on the far wall, complete with Spider-Man sheets, and a desk against the window with drawing supplies — Magic Markers and stickers and sheets of faintly brown drawing paper — and the requisite electronic equipment — a laptop, an iPad. There’s a wall of cubbyholes stuffed with essential boy paraphernalia (Trudy remembers them all from Carter’s childhood): a baseball mitt, a bike helmet, a terrarium that now holds pieces of Legos, a deflated basketball, a board game called Tsuro with an elaborate dragon on the lid, and a whole colony of plastic dinosaurs arranged with infinite care into groupings of like kinds. Trudy remembers Carter’s dinosaur phase, which lasted well over a year. Apparently nothing much has changed in that regard. Dinosaurs march in battalions across the wall of cubbies. What she has in front of her is a room any seven-year-old could live in happily. It tells her nothing.
She backs out and tries the room next door. This must be the younger boy’s room, Aidan’s, because there are more remnants from toddlerhood here — a couple of dirty stuffed animals sitting lopsided on top of a bookcase, a brightly colored plastic dump truck filled with tennis balls, a mural of a rainbow painted on the wall above the bed with a leprechaun at the end who looks a lot like Aidan.
Trudy is disappointed and relieved at the same time, relieved that it all looks so normal, disappointed that she hasn’t found any evidence to bolster her belief that something heinous happens in this house. If she’s going to do something, if she’s going to try to help these boys, she needs evidence. And she realizes as she steps back out of Aidan’s room and closes the door that this is exactly why she entered the house in the first place.
There’s one more door in the hallway and it’s closed. She assumes it’s the rodent’s bedroom and she’s tempted to take a look. She contemplates the door, moves toward it, her hand extended, when she hears, “What are you doing?” and she nearly jumps out of her skin.
Fred stands in the hallway, frowning.
“You scared the bejeezus out of me!” Now Trudy can be furious instead of terrified. It’s only Fred.
“You deserve it. What are you doing in here?”
“Something awful happens in this house and I need evidence.” This is said as righteously as Trudy can manage.
Fred doesn’t even answer her. He takes her by the upper arm — she looks down in astonishment at his hand on her biceps — and leads her out, through the living room, the front door, and onto the porch. Next he takes the package from her hands and puts it down on the Doyles’ doorstep. Then he marches her smartly and quickly down the driveway, his grip on her arm tight and insistent.
“There,” he says as he deposits her on her own front porch. In his mind the matter is finished. He turns to the sawhorse he set up that morning and begins to prepare another slat for the fence.
Trudy is left feeling as if she’s been chastised and rescued at the same time, but, true to form, she allows her anger to flood any gratitude she might feel.
“If well-meaning people turn their eyes away when they know something evil is happening, well then … then”—she sputters for a moment and then finds her footing—“then we have the Holocaust!”
Fred, head down, continues to work. He says nothing, hoping Trudy will go into her house and leave him alone. No such luck.
“Children need to be saved. Sometimes even from their own parents.”
“The man yells at his kids. It’s too bad. But there’s nothing you can do.”
And that attitude spins Trudy into overdrive. So cavalier! So unfeeling! So cowardly!
“Don’t you tell me to just sit tight and put up with it!” She’s fairly yelling.
Fred shrugs. He’ll be damned if he’s going to say another word. He takes the cedar plank off the sawhorse and begins to nail it to the supporting crossbars. He hammers longer and harder than he needs to. Trudy stands at his back, fuming, when, above the hammering, they both hear the blasting music of a car radio and turn to see Kevin Doyle speeding up his driveway, the top of his convertible down as always, the cell phone plugged into his ear, of course, the cigar clamped in his yellow teeth and its putrid aroma wafting after him.