Janette Turner Hospital
Afterlife of a stolen child
From The Georgia Review
1. Darien
Chance of thunderstorms was the forecast and so naturally Simon offered to drive Melanie and the children into town. All the mothers in Bayside made a social thing out of daily shopping, nothing more than a status notch in my humble opinion — my viewpoint being that of observant neighbor — and the Goldbergs certainly cared about status in a conspicuously nonchalant way. The daily trip to the butcher, the baker, the greengrocer, and the beeswax-candle-maker signified leisure and summer and Long Island and the right sort of environmental angst. The mothers shopped for locally grown vegetables and free-range chickens and fresh-baked artisanal bread. The town market was a half mile inland from the Goldbergs’ house, the dunes and the beach 200 yards the other way.
People walked or rode bikes. Bayside was so tranquil, the summer regulars said, that you could hear the cedar shakes swell when it rained, yet Simon could always imagine 101 forms of harm. He was a city boy, used to knowing what to watch for, what to listen for. Serenity made him nervous. I can vouch for this. I visited them once (before the event) in their unnecessarily large apartment on the Upper West Side. There I saw Simon almost at ease.
I visited their Manhattan place afterward too, just once, to offer condolence.
There was an edgy quality to that meeting, although it was before the police declared me a “person of interest.”
It is perhaps relevant to explain that I was not the owner of the house next door in the Hamptons. For that momentous year I was subletting. I am a nomad by instinct, I come and go, and for that very reason I adapt quickly to each new address. I am a listener and I am a watcher and I’d wager that within a few weeks I know as much of everyone’s business as the long-term residents know.
“You could get drenched,” Simon said to Melanie on that day in Bayside, the day that would make headlines in the News and the Post.
“So?” she said.
Simon sighed and rolled his eyes at me. We were on opposite sides of the hedge between the summer houses, both spraying for powdery mildew and black sooty mold. “The long walk in wet clothes,” he explained as to a child. “Pneumonia.”
“Nonsense.” Melanie was clipping the rain cover to the double stroller, each fastener snapping shut with a thock, a very satisfying and reassuring sound. “If it rains, I’ll roll this down and they won’t get a drop on them. See?” She demonstrated and Simon set down the sprayer and walked over to the shell-grit path. “And as for me,” Melanie said, “I’ve always adored walking in the rain.” She began humming that old Johnny Ray song and they both peered through the plastic windshield at their children. I couldn’t see very well from beyond the hedge, so I’m guessing here. Six-month-old Jessica was fast asleep, her little soft-boned form slumped low in the canvas seat. Joshua, whose second birthday they had so recently celebrated, pawed at the plastic from inside.
“He doesn’t like it,” Simon said. “He feels trapped.”
“Don’t be silly.” Melanie made a funny face at Joshua through the plastic and Josh laughed and perhaps he made a funny face back. “Anyway,” she said, rolling the plastic back up and securing it in two canvas loops, “we probably won’t even need it. You know how incredibly local these thunderstorms are. It can be raining on one side of the street and not on the other.”
That, Simon thought — and I always knew what he was thinking; I zeroed in on him as a confider of secrets within twenty-four hours; I have a talent for picking victims — that was precisely what was so alarming: the sheer arbitrariness of harm, the way it could touch down like the flick of a whip, random, focused, and deadly. “I wish you’d let me drive you,” he said. “If there’s lightning, you’re not to shelter under a tree.”
Melanie laughed. “You want to keep us all in cotton wool.” She stood on tiptoe to kiss him. “Poor Simon. Here we are giving you a whole morning to work on your book and you’re going to waste it on worry.”
“I’m spraying for mold,” he said. “And then I’m mowing. You’ll be back before I get to my book.”
“We’ll go to Joan’s for lunch. We’ll spend the afternoon there. You can have the whole day.”
I watched Simon bend over to kiss the sleeping Jessica on her forehead. When he leaned toward Joshua, his son squirmed and giggled and pulled his T-shirt up over his face.
“You haven’t shaved,” Melanie said. “You’re scratching him.”
Simon tugged at the soft cotton shirt, pulled it back from over his son’s eyes. “I see you,” he said, and his son squealed with hyperexcited glee.
“Say bye to Daddy,” Melanie said.
Simon waved. He watched till they turned the corner before he came back to the hedge.
“I know you think I’m neurotic,” he said, “but they seem intolerably fragile to me.”
I went on spraying. It wasn’t the kind of statement that required a response.
Simon steamrollered on in his melancholy academic way, as he usually did and does. “Harm seems so arbitrary. So... malevolent. It terrifies me.”
“I’ve got a dental appointment in town,” I said, as much to shut off the spigot of his pathetic and privileged anxiety as anything else. “Later this morning. I’ll keep an eye on them for you.”
2. Melanie
“I don’t like that man,” she tells the children. “He watches us. We’re going to have to get shades on our windows.” She wipes a thin film of salt from her cheek. The sea breeze, deceptively cool on the beach, turns sticky on the landward side of the dunes. Her sweat is dripping into her eyes. It stings. “Maybe we should have taken your daddy’s offer, Joshua,” she says. “It’s so hot. I hope it does pour. Wouldn’t that be lovely, punkin? I just adore walking in the rain.”
The walk seems twice as long on sultry days.
“We’ll go to Joan’s house after the shopping,” she says. “We can all cool off in her pool.”
Melanie has an easy elegance about her. She wears white linen pants and a racer-back navy top. Her sandals are Birkenstocks. She swims and jogs and plays tennis. She has worked on getting her waistline back since Jessica’s birth, but the truth is, already she is toying with the idea of getting pregnant again. There is something so gorgeously languid about that fecund state. It must be the earth-mother syndrome.