The Neighbor

3

When we climbed the steps and set foot on the porch, we saw that the front door stood ajar. The sun remained slightly to the east, hot light slanting under the eaves and painting a bright rhomboid on the floor. We stood on that illumined patch of gray-painted boards, as if on a trap door, while Amalia held the plate of cookies and I pressed the bell push. No one responded to the chimes, and I rang again.

After I’d rung the bell a third time, when it seemed obvious that no one was home, Amalia said, “So maybe it was a burglar last night. In spite of all the lights. I mean, a burglar wouldn’t care about leaving the door open after himself.”

Through the four-inch gap between door and jamb, I could see the shallow, shadowy foyer and the darker living room beyond. “Then why would a burglar bother to turn off the lights? Maybe something’s wrong, someone needs help.”

“We can’t just barge in, Malcolm.”

“Then what’re we gonna do?”

Leaning close to the door, she called out, “Hello? Anyone home?”

The answering silence was worthy of our father when he stood on our back porch eating his breakfast sandwich.

Amalia called out again, and when no one responded, she pushed the door inward, so that we had a better view of the cramped foyer and the living room, where everything appeared to be furnished as it had been when Mr. Clockenwall had been alive. In the month since his passing, no one had come to dispose of his belongings.

After my sister called out again, louder than before, I said, “Maybe we should go home and call the police and report a burglary.”

“But if there hasn’t been a burglary, can you imagine the hell they’ll put us through for making that call?”

By “they,” she didn’t mean the police. Our mother liked nothing more than having a legitimate reason to criticize us. She’d peck and peck and peck at you for the littlest mistake, until you thought she was going to keep at it until you were nothing but bones. And our old man, who couldn’t stand the sound of our mother’s voice when she was in attack mode, would shout at Amalia and me, as if we were the ones making all the noise: “I’m just tryin’ to watch a little TV here and forget what a shitty day I had at work, okay? Is that okay with you two, is it?”

Repeating her admonition to me, I said, “We can’t barge in.”

“No, we can’t,” she agreed, as she stepped across the threshold with the plate of cookies. “But remember how Mr. Clockenwall wasn’t found for a whole day after he died. Someone might need help.”

I followed her, of course. I would have followed my saintly sister through the gates of Hell; by comparison, the house next door wasn’t particularly forbidding.

Although the sheers hanging over the windows allowed a little daylight to enter, the living room remained cloaked in shadows, a silent solemn chamber in which you might have expected to find a cadaver casketed for viewing.

Amalia flipped a wall switch that turned on a lamp beside an armchair.

A film of dust sheathed the table on which the lamp stood. A pair of reading glasses lay beside a paperback that Mr. Clockenwall might have meant to read before his day turned as bad as any day could be. There were no signs of vandalism.

“We live next door,” Amalia called out. “We came to say hello.” She waited, listening. Then: “Hello? Is everything all right?”

In the kitchen, the refrigerator hummed. Breakfast dishes were on the table, a smear of egg yolk having turned hard and dark on the plate. Toast crumbs littered the Formica surface. The heart attack had felled Mr. Clockenwall here, perhaps as he’d risen from his meal, and no one had cleaned up after the coroner’s van took the body away.

“It’s terrible to live alone,” Amalia said.

The sadness in her voice seemed genuine, though Clockenwall had not been a man who reached out to his neighbors or sought in any way to alleviate his loneliness, if in fact he was lonely. He had been polite; and if he happened to be in his yard when you were in yours, he would spend a few minutes in agreeable conversation over the fence. No one considered him aloof or cold, only shy and on occasion melancholy. Some felt that perhaps in his past lay a tragedy with which he had never been able to make his peace, that the only companion with which he felt comfortable was sorrow.

Amalia was somewhat distressed. “Somebody should have cleaned up these dishes and emptied the refrigerator before things in it spoiled. Leaving it like this … it’s just wrong.”

I shrugged. “Maybe no one cared about him.”

My sister seemed to care about everyone, even making excuses for our parents at their worst, but now she said nothing.

I sighed. “Tell me you don’t mean we should clean this up.”

As she was about to answer, her attitude abruptly changed. She turned with a start and said, “Who, what?”

Perplexed, I said, “What — who, what?”

She frowned. “You didn’t hear that?”

“No. What didn’t I hear?”

“He said, ‘Melinda. Sweet Melinda.’ ”

“Who said?”

“It sounded like Mr. Clockenwall.”

When I was younger and my sister was not yet perfect, she had enjoyed spooking me by reporting with great conviction things like, Dad didn’t realize I was there, and he took off his face and under it was this lizard face! Or on one occasion, Oh, God, I saw Mom eating live spiders! She was so convincing that I needed about a year to become immune to her bizarre declarations, and for another year I pretended to believe them because it was such fun. Then she became interested in boys and lost interest in scaring me, although I was never so scared by any of her hoaxes as by a couple of the idiot guys she dated; even in those days, however, she was too smart to go out with a psychopathic maniac more than twice.

“Mr. Clockenwall is dead and buried,” I reminded her.

“I know he’s dead and buried.” Holding the plate of cookies with her left hand, she rubbed the back of her neck with the right, as if smoothing away gooseflesh. “Or at least he’s dead.”

“I’m not nine anymore, sis.”

“What’s that mean?”

“I know Mom eats only dead spiders.”

“I’m not joking with you, Malcolm.” As before, she startled and turned, as if toward a voice that I couldn’t hear.

“What now?”

“He said it again. ‘Sweet Melinda.’ ”

Suddenly she set out as if in search of the speaker, turning on lights as we entered each new space, and I followed her through the rest of the ground floor, turning off the lights in our wake. When we arrived at the front of the house once more, Amalia peered up the stairs toward the gloomy realm on the higher floor.

After she stood transfixed for a long moment, her face clenched with revulsion, and I asked what was happening now, and she said, “He’s disgusting. Obscene. Sick.”

Suspicious but half believing, I said, “What?”

“I won’t repeat what he said,” she declared, and she hurried out through the open front door.

I stood at the foot of the stairs, gazing up, wondering if she might be yanking my chain or if she might be serious, when I heard heavy footsteps in the upper hallway. And then a creaking arose from the stairs, as though somebody was moving from one tread to the next. The landing at the head of the lower flight creaked, too, and made a cracking noise, as if an old board had splintered a little under a punishing weight. The shadows on the stairs were not so deep that they could have concealed anyone. Whoever descended toward me, if anyone did, was no more apparent to the eye than Claude Rains in that old movie The Invisible Man.

Bad things happened to good people when invisible men or their equivalent were around. I quickly left the house, pulled the front door shut behind me, and joined Amalia as she descended the porch steps and hurried along the front walk.

As we passed through the gate, I said, “What was that about?”

“I don’t want to talk about it now.”

“When do you want to talk about it?”

“I’ll let you know,” she assured me as she turned toward home.

I said, “I guess we’ll have to eat those cookies ourselves.”

“Yeah. She doesn’t want them with walnuts.”

“And he doesn’t want them with chocolate chips. And I don’t think the new neighbor has any interest in cookies at all.”

“There isn’t a new neighbor,” Amalia declared as we hurried alongside our house, under the limbs of the twisted sycamore.

“There’s something,” I said, glancing over the fence at the Clockenwall place.