The village council make her take the fence down to six feet, so she finds a rolling bar sold out of New Mexico that mounts to the top and keeps animals from scaling it. Another two thousand. She puts it on the backup credit card, which Scott doesn’t check. When he notices the bar, she lies. “That came with the fence. They just got around to putting it on.”
For Alec’s fourth birthday Scott brings home a Big Wheel. Outside for the inaugural ride, Cory catches Scott standing at the top of the driveway instead of the bottom, where he could block the street.
“What are you doing!” She runs out, startling Alec, who thinks it’s him who’s made a mistake. He turns the bike, riding across the grass and into the neighbor’s driveway. The neighbor, Mr. Prout, is backing out of his garage. He stops, smiling amiably. No big deal, your son’s life, his grin implies.
By dinnertime Scott is red with anger.
“Stop it!” he yells at Cory, throwing down his fork. “He was only smiling! Of course he thinks it’s a big deal if he runs over our kid. You’re the one who scared Alec into going off the driveway.”
Cory can barely keep from slapping her husband. “You almost hit Alec with that fork, you fuckhead!”
Alec begins to cry and Cory immediately repents. “I’m sorry, oh honey, I’m sorry. Mama’s not mad. Mama’s just pretending. Smile for Mama.” She kisses his hair, his cheeks, each soft eyebrow, glancing sheepishly at Scott.
“Sorry,” he says, kissing her on the head, then his son. She’s right. The fork did bounce close to Alec’s face.
Midsummer the Prouts retire to Arizona, replaced by a middle-aged couple prone to parties, usually cookouts. The guests who arrive look just like them — thick black hair, dark eyes, olive skin. Some of them look young enough to be the couple’s children. Maybe they’re all family, but Cory can’t tell because they speak a foreign language. On Saturdays she sits in the screened porch or takes Alec outside to play, finds reasons to linger at the fence line listening to their musical chatter. Googling their last name, she discovers it’s Persian, another word for Iranian, almost certainly Shiite Muslims. Muslims usually blow themselves up in busy places. They don’t kill single little boys, right? And Alec’s not going to be taking the bus to school. But what about in school? The neighbors have no small children. She’d feel better if they did. They wouldn’t blow themselves up in their own kids’ school, would they? Of course, they seem very nice. They always smile and wave. Cory knows she’s being ridiculous.
One day, she pulls in the driveway and catches sight of somebody in the backyard, crouching behind the fence. Startled, she runs the car into the side of the garage. Then she sees — it’s a squirrel. He jumps on top of a fence post and stares at her, oddly unperturbed by the crunch of metal against the garage wall. Cory leans over the seat to examine Alec for injuries. He is buckled in tight — new car seat of course, this one researched through Consumer Reports. Whiplash? Concussion? He seems fine, but you can never be sure.
When Scott gets home, he’s angry. “You made me leave work for this? How fast could you have been going? He’s fine. The car’s what I’m worried about.”
•
Late July a coyote digs his way under the fence. “You don’t know that,” Scott says. “It could have been anything. A raccoon.”
“Which carry rabies,” Cory says.
Scott ignores her. It doesn’t matter. She knows a coyote made that hole. It’s too big for a raccoon. And a raccoon would have climbed the fence anyway. The roll bar wasn’t designed to stop them.
She examines the spot he chose, at the end where only pachysandra thrives under a sycamore’s dense shade. Within a week she has the tree cut down, replaced by a row of hawthorn that will reach thirty feet. In front of that she plants two rows of rugosa roses, a barbarously thorned shrub the man at the nursery claimed is “almost impenetrable.” That is the word that makes her buy it — impenetrable. It sounds military.
She tells Scott the village took the tree down and paid for the new bushes. “Some contagious disease I guess.” They’d had the ash borer, so he buys it.
A week later she finds another hole. Thorny twigs broken off the nearby bushes lie about, thin and brittle as uncooked spaghetti.
That night Cory pretends to go to sleep with Scott, then gets up when he begins to snore and takes up watch at the kitchen window. It’s dark, though, and the yard is deep and large. At its furthest point shadows move without divulging their identity. Cory turns on the patio lights, then gets a baseball bat from the garage and stations herself next to the willow, where she’ll be hidden by the weeping branches. They make her think of lynchings and hangings. She imagines waking up to find her son dangling midway up, just another limb vulnerable to the wind.
Cory leans against the trunk, ready, then eventually sits, kept awake on the bony roots. Around her, dozens of broken boughs lie on the ground like snakes in the grass. We’re insulated, she thinks, but falsely. A little drywall, a metal cylinder in a doorframe stands between us and it. We can’t hear it. But it’s always there, the rustling in the woods, the crunch of twigs and old leaves underfoot, the new neighbors whispering below their densely-planted pergola.
Cory creeps over and peers between the branches of an old lilac. The moon illuminates two people, men she’s fairly sure, leaning forward with elbows on their knees, glowing embers in their hands. Cory inhales, trying to identify the scent. Cigarettes? Pipes? Cigars? Pot? Some Iranian thing she’s never heard of? They talk, their heads bent close together, and she strains to catch something comprehensible. Why don’t they speak English? What do they have to hide?
She thinks about the door she has left unlocked, retrieves the extra key from the false sprinkler head and secures the house, then returns the key to its hiding place. If someone kills her out here, she doesn’t want the key on her person.
Summer is her best chance. Knowing that neither Alec nor Scott are prone to wake in the small hours of the night, she spends this time outside, waiting. The sounds, shapes and movements of darkness grow familiar. In a stiff wind, the pine’s branches wave like enormous fans cooling the undergrowth. In the moonlight the neighbors’ forbidden trailer — hidden behind their garage and stacked with boards and lengths of gutter covered by a tarp — looks like a skiff, the tarp its sail, the hitch an emergency oar neglected and soon to slip overboard.
The first time Cory hears rustling in the woods, she readies the bat. The fiftieth time she can tell the difference between the crackles of a methodical, light-footed raccoon and the more infrequent rustles of an owl in flight. When they settle, they hoot, long and low, reassuring her. Every night the murmuring in the Persians’ yard reaches her, humming speech that mingles with the owl’s hoot and the raccoon’s scurrying. It is definitely two men — she’s gotten a moonlit look to confirm. If one is the homeowner, who is the other? No one would visit so late every night, which means he must live with the couple. A boarder? An out-of-work brother? An older son?
Of course Cory gets tired. Five nights outside, seven, eight. Once she falls asleep and wakes near dawn with a pattern like a healed burn impressed on her cheek by the willow’s bark. Sneaking into the house, she stations herself on the couch with a book across her chest, where Scott finds her only half an hour later.
“Couldn’t sleep,” Cory lies. “So I came down to read.”
Alec seems to be crying more often. Is he sick? Another ear infection? The doctor says no. Cory tries to comfort her son, playing his favorite shows and taking him to the park, where he falls and hurts his arm. At the ER they look at her like she might be to blame.