The Neighbor

matter. The police will check the database and my name will come up. They’ll arrest me just on principle, and it’s not like I can make bail. They get me, I’m done.” I’m snapping the band again. I can see Mrs. Brenda Jane watching me, and once again force myself to stop.

I can already tell what she’s thinking: And how does this make you feel, Aidan Brewster?

Trapped, I want to scream. Very, very trapped.

“A woman disappeared? In Southie? When did this happen?” Another group member, Gary Provost, speaks up. Gary is a thirty-seven-year-old alcoholic investment manager, who was caught inappropriately touching his friend’s eleven-year-old daughter. His wife left him, taking with her their two sons. His extended family is still not speaking to him. Yet of all of us, he probably has the most hope. For one thing, he still looks like a respected professional, versus a convicted pervert. For another, he seems genuinely remorseful and very dedicated to his recently achieved sobriety. Gary’s a serious one. Quiet but intelligent. Of everyone in the room, I almost like him.

“The woman disappeared last night.”

“I haven’t heard anything on the news.”

“Dunno.” I shrug.

“How old is she?” Wendell asks, cutting to the heart of the matter.

I shrug again. “She’s a mom, so mid-twenties, something like that.”

“That’ll cut you some slack,” Jim offers, “that she’s an adult and all. Plus, you don’t have a history of violence.”

Jim smiles as he says this. Jim is the only Level III sex offender in our group, meaning of all of us, he’s the one the state fears the most. An exhibitionist such as Wendell might have the highest rate of recidivism, but a hard-core pedophile such as Jim is the true monster under the bed. By Jim’s own admission, he’s attracted solely to eight- year-old boys and has probably had inappropriate relationships with thirty-five kids in a span of nearly forty years. He started when he was a fourteen-year-old babysitter. Now, at the age of fifty-five, his own flagging testosterone is finally slowing him down. Plus, the docs got him on a heavy regimen of antidepressants, the side effects of which repress the libido.

As we get to discuss in our weekly meetings, however, it’s very difficult to change sexuality. You can try to teach someone to desire adults, but it’s difficult to “remove” an object from someone’s sexual orientation, or, in other words, teach that same person not to desire kids.

Jim has a tendency to dress in Mister Rogers sweaters and suck on hard butterscotches. From that alone, I’m guessing he still fantasizes mostly about prepubescent boys.

“I don’t know if that will matter,” I say now. “A registered offender is a registered offender. I think they’ll arrest first, ask questions later.”

“No,” Gary the investment manager interjects. “They’ll visit your parole officer first. That’s how it works.”

My parole officer. I blink in surprise. I have totally forgotten about her. I’ve been on parole two years now, and while I am required to check in each month, my own behavior has been so constant I’ve stopped noticing the meetings. Just another bout of paperwork and dutifully signed forms. Guy like me, the whole thing is over and done in about eight minutes. I copy my pay stubs, hand over a letter from my treatment counselor, prove I’ve paid my weekly fees for counseling, etc., and we’re good to go for another thirty days.

“What d’you think your PO will say?” Wendell asks now, eyes narrowing.

“Not much to report.”

“You went to work today?” Mrs. Brenda Jane inquires.

“Yes.”

“No drinking, no drugs, no Internet?”

“I work. I walk. I’m keeping my nose clean.”

“Then you should be fine. Of course, you have the right to a lawyer, so if you start to feel uncomfortable, you should ask for one.”

“I think the husband did it,” I hear myself say. No good reason. Just that whole rationalization thing again. See, I’m not the monster. He is.

My group goes to bat for me, nodding their heads. “Yep, yep,” several reply. “Ain’t it always the husband?”

Wendell still has that smirk on his face. “It’s not like she’s fourteen-” he starts.

“Wendell,” Mrs. Brenda Jane interrupts.

He feigns innocence. “I’m just saying it’s not like she’s a beautiful jail-bait blonde.”

“Mr. Harrington-”

Wendell puts up a meaty hand, finally acknowledging defeat. But then, at the last minute, he turns back to me and finally has something useful to say.

“Hey, kid, you’re still working at the neighborhood chop shop, right? Hope for your sake the missing woman didn’t get her car serviced there.”

In that instant, I can picture Sandra Jones perfectly, standing in front of the industrial gray counter, long blonde hair tucked behind her ears, smiling as she hands over her keys to Vito: “Sure, we can pick it up at five…”

I realize for the second time in my life that I will not be going home again.

CHAPTER EIGHT

What makes a family?

It is a question I have pondered most of my life. I grew up in the typical Southern clan. I had a stay-at-home mom, famous for her meticulously groomed appearance and award-winning rose garden. I had the highly respected father who’d founded his own law firm and worked hard to provide for his two “lovely ladies.” I had two dozen cousins, a passel of aunts and uncles. Enough relatives that the annual family reunions, hosted at my parents’ sprawling home with its acres of green lawn and its wraparound front porch, were less a summer barbecue, and more a three-ring circus.

I spent the first fifteen years of my life smiling obediently as fat aunts pinched my cheeks and told me how much I resembled my mother. I turned in my homework on time so teachers could pat my head and tell me how I made my father proud. I went to church, I babysat my neighbors’ children, I worked after school at the local store, and I smiled and smiled and smiled until my cheeks hurt.

Then I went home, collected the empty gin bottles off the hardwood floors, and pretended I didn’t hear my mama’s drunken taunt from down the hall, “I know something you don’t know. I know something you don’t know…”

When I was two years old, my mama made me eat a lightbulb so she could take me to the doctor and tell him what a naughty girl I was. When I was four, she made me put my thumb in a doorjamb and hold it there while she slammed the door shut, so she could show the doctor how reckless I was. When I was six, she fed me bleach so the doctors could understand just how terrible it was to be my mother

My mama hurt me, time and time again, and no one ever stopped her Did that make us family?

My father suspected, but never asked, even as his drunken wife chased him around the house with knives. Did that make us family?

I knew my mama was actively hurting me and hoping to hurt my father, but I never told. Did that make us family?

My father loved her. Even at a young age, I got that. No matter what Mama did, Papa stood beside her That was marriage, he told me. And she wasn’t always like this, he would add. As if once my mama had been sane, and having been sane once, maybe she could be sane again.

So we would go about our routine, starting each evening with my mother laying out a properly prepared dinner, and ending each meal with her hurling fried chicken, or heaven help us, a leaded crystal glass, at one or both of our heads. Eventually, my father would lead her back to the bedroom, tucking her in with another gin-laced sweet tea.

“You know how she is,” he’d tell me quietly, half excuse, half apology. We would spend the rest of