They looted the fridge, grabbing the stuff they could microwave at the extended-stay, plus apples and frozen cherries. They took the gun. They locked the door behind them. Julia took the back seat again. She slunk down again, too, so that all she could see was sky.
Arlo and Gertie packed the trunk. It hurt her back to move but she did it anyway. As they packed these things up, the patrolman left the block. After that, the neighbors began to appear. They didn’t come out of their houses. They were too cowardly for that now. They brushed aside curtains and peered through windows, no breeze on that unbearably hot Sunday afternoon.
Arlo glared from one house to the next, trying to catch a single eye. The Walshes, the Harrisons, Pontis, Schroeders, Singhs-Kaurs, Hestias, and the Ottomanellis. Unabashed, they met his gaze. The people of Maple Street. They’d won. He and his family would never come back to this place they’d dreamed about. This place that was supposed to be their golden ticket. Maple Street had deemed them not good enough. And now they were gloating about it.
You reach a certain point, and there’s no going back. It’s a place so hot that logic breaks down.
“I could kill them,” Gertie said, and that was all he needed.
* * *
The safety was on. That was the important thing to keep in mind. He hadn’t wanted to hurt anybody; he’d just wanted to scare them. Because he’d finally understood what they wanted. This wasn’t about Shelly. It wasn’t about rape. It was about his tattoos. It was about Gertie’s accent. It was about Julia, stealing those Parliaments, and Larry’s Robot Boy. It was about their crappy lawn, and their Slip ’N Slide, and the ludicrous music of a has-been.
He and Gertie had dared try to become one of the All-Americans. They’d had the audacity to move to Garden City, and for that all of Maple Street had wanted to punish them. To tear up their family. To erase them. They’d won that. Arlo was ready to surrender. If that was all they wanted, he might have left quietly. Sold 116 at a loss, taken the family, and never come back.
But now that they had their hooks in, they wanted more than erasure. In order to prove themselves right, to soothe their own guilty consciences, they wanted the Wilde family’s total evisceration. They wanted Julia in foster care and Larry dead. Gertie in a mental institution, the baby wrenched from her belly and delivered to strangers. Arlo back in jail and on the needle, because nothing else was left.
That’s what they wanted, and they couldn’t have it. He couldn’t let them win.
* * *
At first, the people of Maple Street probably didn’t see what he was holding. He didn’t carry it like a cop, but like a first-time fisherman loosely gripping slimy bait.
He veered from the Passat and in their direction, walking through oil so thick now that grass and pavement were no longer visible. Faces looked out. He hadn’t planned to do anything. Had just wanted them to know that he was carrying. That if they tried to burn down his house tonight, or come after Larry at the hospital, or call the cops on Gertie, bearing false witness that she’d attacked Larry in the night, he’d be ready.
He started with the Walshes. Stood at the edge of their walk. No trespassing with a firearm involved. Sally peered out from her den. He smiled in a friendly way while holding the thing daintily, safety on. “Hey!” he cried. “Thanks for breaking my kid’s skull last night. You’ve been great neighbors.”
Kept walking.
Next the Hestias. The parents both took marijuana for their anxiety, which they baked into cookies and offered for dessert at dinner parties, like they thought they were the first people on earth to turn addiction into social convention. They treated their daughters like their best friends, confiding frustrations and work problems, and the frequency with which they had sex. They considered themselves hip. Cutting edge. They listened to Eminem. They didn’t tell people what they did for a living, and sometimes lied about it, claiming to be doctors. That was because they worked for the insurance company that managed the greatest number of World Trade Center victims in New York. The company was famous now, for denying dust as causation. Trade Center dust, they’d argued in court, with science backed by people like the Hestias, might be no worse than regular dust. They’d tied the money up for years while the sick had died and continued to die of heart failure, emphysema, and cancer. The world was falling apart. They were making it worse. There was a hole in the middle of the park that kept puking black bile. But the Hestias had this idea that Arlo and his family were the real threats. Fucking Brooklyn accents were the problem.