Bad Neighbor

Not two weeks after my husband and I go swimming in Echo Lake, they drag its waters for the corpse of our neighbor. To say neighbor is a bit much for someone who lived outside of shouting distance, let alone screaming distance, from us, but in Montana things tend to be far apart like that. Sentences: we speak slowly. Thoughts, often, are few and far between. And, of course, instances of touch. People are the least of it.

The morning after the search is announced, Rich is scrolling the news on his phone. From his expression—tight, like a dried orange peel—I can tell there’s been an update. “Did they find her?” I ask, although I know what the answer is going to be.

“They found her all right.” He hands me his phone face-up. I skim through the article that describes how they found Loretta Birning’s body; it notes how at first they thought it was a suicide due to the presence of a note and a history of depression, but now there is a murder investigation ongoing. At first, I don’t even question why they have changed from suicide to murder. There’s an image clinging to my mind, that of her body and what it might have looked like at the bottom of the lake. I keep thinking of the phrase sea green—although it doesn’t make sense, because it was a lake they found her in, not the ocean.

“Ghastly,” I say at last.

“Grisly,” he replies.

“You’re saying a grizzly got her?” I barely hear my own voice, the knee-jerk black humor that has lost me so many friends over the years. I’m still trying, for god knows what reason, to picture Loretta’s corpse.

“And tossed her into the water? Nah. A grizzly would have eaten her.”

The day Rich and I swam in the lake, the sky was blue soaked through with white, the reverse of the dark waters lapping our bodies. Around the sides, where it was shallower, we scooped up handfuls of shiny black pebbles, each of them as round and lightless as a pupil. And cold, as though they’d soaked up all of our endless, innumerable winters.

It was my idea to go to the lake. I had been hoping that the warm summer air, or the bright cool shock of the water, or just the newness of the experience would do something to Rich. Would shift our bed back into the space it had occupied in earlier years, back when it was into a place to do things other than sleep and yawn and lie awake staring at the ceiling, mind scraped numb and raw, trying to cry softly enough so that it wouldn’t wake him.

“So the question is,” I say.

And at the same time as I ask, “Who killed her?” Rich asks, “What did she look like when she was in the lake?”

My husband, he knows me too well. When he smiles, it’s all teeth.

 ♢

We only met Loretta once, when we first moved in. She offered us a basket of homemade muffins as a welcome gift. She was wearing a yellow dress with a black sash in the middle, like a deconstructed bumblebee, and her smile was wide and ragged—at one point I caught a flicker of her tongue through the gaps in her teeth, as furtive as the twitch of an insect. 

The muffins turned out to be sour, hard, nearly inedible. “I hope she’s not trying to get rid of us already,” Rich said, making a face. “Aren’t you supposed to develop some kind of deep, burning resentment for your neighbors before you try to knock them off?”

We cackled like two middle-schoolers. Strange, the way everything loops back around to death in the end.

♢

They investigate us, of course. Us and the other four houses within a five-mile circuit of Loretta’s house. There are two officers, a young redhead and an older bald one. Nothing to say other than that we met her once. Nobody really thinks we killed her. Everything is very informal. Despite this, policemen have always intimidated me, and it takes me until the end of the visit to work up the courage to ask why it’s being investigated as murder if Loretta went so far as to leave a suicide note.

“The wounds on her body,” replies the bald officer. “Can’t be anything but murder.”

“Wound,” the younger one corrects. 

The bald cop looks at him sideways. “Yeah. Well. If you want to get specific.”

“What kind of wound?” I ask.

“Decapitation wound,” the young cop tells me, his eyes bright with fascination or enthusiasm. “Nothing a dragging hook coulda done.”

“Her head was cut off?” My hand flies reflexively to my throat, and we all look at it—me in annoyance, the men wearing various shades of amusement. I replace it in my lap, my face prickling. Soon I’ll be saying Oh, heavens! and clutching my pearls. I’m turning into an old woman. (But, Rich—can you blame me?)

“Almost. The line went around the whole front of her throat, everything except the last few inches in the back.” The redheaded cop is really getting into it now. “Didn’t quite make it all the way through.” 

This makes it worse somehow, makes it far gorier than a clean cut. Now I’m picturing Loretta’s body caught on a dragging hook, rising from the water like Jesus emerging from baptism—only for her head to finally roll all the way off and plunge back into the lake, necessitating yet another retrieval. I picture a ruddy-faced officer rubbing a hand over his forehead and muttering, “This is gonna be a long day.”  

“She made us muffins when we moved in,” I offer.

“Were they good?” The bald cop smiles and fingers his pen, as though this might be an important piece of evidence to jot down.

“Oh! Wonderful.” My hand flutters up to my throat again as if to snatch the lie, pull it back down.

♢

A few nights later Rich and I are watching the news, a rare occurrence. Not rare because we’re too sophisticated for television or anything like that—it’s more that so little that happens around here is of note that it’s just not worth keeping up with. 

  Not surprisingly, they’re covering Loretta. “They’ll be milking this story for ages,” I say. Rich doesn’t respond, and when I glance over at him, his expression is heavy with disdain.

“They didn’t say she was almost decapitated.” He doesn’t look at me as he speaks; he’s still watching the screen. As the news segment continues, though, his expression softens. His forehead relaxes, his stomach rises and falls with the ease of deep breathing, and the flickering blue light makes the purse of his lips look something like a smile.

Later, in bed, another rare occurrence: Rich doesn’t roll away toward his side of the bed and immediately start snoring. Rather, he turns towards me. He runs his hands over my waist and pulls my hips towards him, into his circle of body heat. His palms are hot, his fingers insistent. Instantly a hundred lights flicker on inside me, bulbs sparking all down the length of my body. It’s been months is all I can think. It’s been months.

After it began to be months and not days or weeks since the last time, I rehearsed this moment over and over again. I always assumed that, when it finally came, I’d say something snarky and cutting like Finally watched all the porn on the internet?

But I’m silent. All the bitterness I’ve been storing up, all the anger I was prepared to unleash, runs out of me. For the first time in a long time I am lost underneath him, lost to his touch, his weight, his blazing amber eyes, his voice that wraps me in velvet. And for the first time in a long time, we fall asleep still touching.

♢ 

My husband and I lie on the grass and watch the late-summer Montana sky. We hold hands and point out shapes in the clouds like we’re in some wholesome movie. There’s a horse, there’s a train, there’s a boot. There’s a bumblebee.

♢ 

I keep waiting for it to end, keep telling myself things like Nothing gold can stay—but it doesn’t. My husband, by some miracle, keeps reaching for me at night. Keeps turning me towards him or pulling my hips back to him or moving over me, the heat of his body like a wave cresting over the shore, and making love to me like he did when we first started dating.

One night, in between movements, he murmurs into the hollow of my neck: “How did I ever stop fucking you?” 

I feel more than hear myself moan, low, deep in the tunnel of my throat. The vulnerability of the moment lays me bare, makes me beseech him: “Don’t ever stop again.”

“I won’t,” he promises. “I won’t.”

♢

Two weeks later, I find it. It’s stuffed into a crack in the corner: a loop of thin dark wire, sharp enough to cut my fingers. I’m bleeding before I even realize it’s broken my skin.

         It’s trash. Dangerous trash, at that. No reason to keep it other than to gloat. No reason to keep it other than to remember how it made you feel to use it.

♢ 

I remember Rich telling me once, months ago, how easy it is to fake someone else’s handwriting. “I did it all the time as a teenager,” he grinned. “It was a cinch to copy my mom’s signature. Got me out of mandatory community service more than once.”

“Everyone can copy signatures,” I told him, trying to sound unimpressed, although in reality I had never dared to do such a thing. “But you said handwriting. That’s got to be way harder.”

“Not so much. I mean, you’ve got to study how they form the shapes of their letters, right, that’s obvious—but you’ve got to mimic not just the appearance but also the movement of their writing. Hold your hand in the same position that the original writer might have, and pay special attention to the slant and the angle of the letters—are they straight, are they leaning backwards, are they leaning forward.”

♢

I remember a news story that haunted me for ages as a child—a man killed his wife after fifteen years of marriage, dismembered her body and fed it piece by piece to the sea. All those fragments, lost in the waves.

But Loretta wasn’t his wife. I am.   

♢

When Rich fucks me, it makes me feel alive. When he fucks me I know I’m not dead at the bottom of a lake, or on a table in the faceless white chill of an autopsy room, or scattered into pieces in the sea. I’m here, my whole body ringing loud and clear and clean like a bell. I think of the stones I scooped from the lake, their cold and peculiar darkness. I felt like one of those stones for years, but now I know I am not.

And I know I’ll never say anything.

♢

In the end, I know, death will come for us too. And in the same way I was unable to stop imagining what Loretta’s body might look like, I keep picturing Rich and me, our future corpses. I see us lying side by side in the forest, cocooned by moss, rocks, weeds. Although our bodies are motionless, the light, ever mischievous, plays its tricks: it almost looks like our fingers and toes, fuzzy and white as a dream, could be moving in the soft, moss-scented darkness.

We are mostly undisturbed. The animals, the grizzlies and coyotes and others, they know to keep a wide berth. They tread paths far away from us, not eager to have their mouths and stomachs polluted.

But the insects are not so wise. The carrion beetles, their hunger blind and vacuous, sink into our flesh, grow still, and do not emerge. The worms come in greater numbers and find that our meat is only poison. The flies die as they land.

♢

August 21, 2024