A Tale of Two Neighbors
2014:
“What happened to Annie?” I asked her, my feet still in the street, car door swung open. I interrupted the walk they were trying to take before darkness overtook the sky.
“She died.” Like being asked cream or sugar for one’s coffee, without hesitation or a hint of melancholy, she answered quickly. The nonchalant response was disconcerting.
“I know that…” I trailed off, my eyes fixed on the For Sale sign in our yard, embarrassed that I wanted to know the specific details. “I mean, what happened to her?”
Annie was my neighbor. We borrowed her lawnmower one summer when the one we had finally died. The rubber primer rotted to dry dusty pieces and the motor gave in to our negligence. We hadn’t properly cared for it the last winter, tucking it haphazardly under the deck, leaving it exposed between wooden beams.
When we also didn’t have gas in our garage and had to walk back across the street to use hers too, we offered twenty bucks. I expected she wouldn’t accept it, after all it was an ‘it’s-the-thought-that-counts-gesture’, that neighbors do, but she did. She took the $20 in exchange for what she insisted would be “unlimited mower use forever.”
The next day I found a card in my mailbox from her with a coupon to Chipotle for buy one get one burritos. She was funny like that.
When she wasn’t in her yard, I didn’t think much of it. It was getting colder and an early snow had cancelled schools and caused delays early in November. By the time I noticed, she had already been dead for 12 days.
Some weeks she was frenetic, picking clover and crabgrass out of her lawn and edging her sidewalk til thick stripes of soil framed the grass and bare spots dotted the lawn.
Other times, she’d be canvassing the street collecting trash with a plastic grocery bag and cordless phone in her hand, like she was awaiting an important call.
But mostly, she was peculiar, peeking through her front window and quickly disappearing behind a curtain when I’d catch her looking. At night, from my bedroom window, I’d see her standing in the corner of the shades, looking out.
Never raising her eyes from the dog she had tethered to the leash Sandy, my next door neighbor answered me. “They thought suicide, but I think that’s unlikely. She was real close to her family. Probably was drugs. She was on a lot of different meds.”
I came home once to find a rosary enclosed in a gift bag tucked inside my screen door. The note explained the rosary was blessed by Pope John Paul II on a trip she made to Italy years ago and she wanted my newborn daughter to have it so we could remember her when we moved. A week later she was found dead in her home. Sandy said she had been there at least three or four days before anyone found her.
Sandy’s dog pulled on the leash, signaling her intent to continue walking. Her son tugged on his mother’s coat with his gloved hand.
“What are they gonna do with the house?” he asked, bundled in a puffy blue coat and scarf. A few wisps of snow had started to fall as we stood there.
The electricity was shut off and the house was nearly invisible at night, a silhouette lighted only by a streetlamp some doors down. Fake candles in the window gave the impression that someone might have still lived there. The batteries died about a week after they were put up and all that remained before we moved was the dark vacant skeleton of a home. I looked out my bedroom window at night, holding my newborn daughter, and squinted my eyes, expecting to see the curtain move.
2019
We moved in 2015. A bigger house a few blocks away. Same neighborhood, different neighbors.
Our first dinner together in 2016 was meatloaf. The classic kind that German-descendants make around here with onions and ketchup and baked beef or pork smashed into a bread pan. There were garlic potatoes and white bread with butter and a little fold out table set in the middle of their dining room. It was familiar, like stepping back in time and eating dinner with our own grandmothers.
Todd pulled out his portfolio of drawings, pencil and charcoal sketches of landscapes, trains, Cincinnati landmarks, his children “Danny when he was 4”, his wife “this one here is Lydia in her wedding gown 1968.” Lydia’s eyes met Todd’s across the folded table, and they smiled at each other.
Todd and Lydia had lived there for decades before we moved in. Todd, an older man who used a wheelchair, was a porch sitter, overlooking our street below. A nod became a wave, a wave became a “you got a minute?” and from there my children we were picking strawberries from their backyard, giving gifts of dandelion bouquets, and coloring pictures for them. Lydia watchfully eyeing the kids scootering back and forth down the sidewalk of our busy street, yelling from time to time to slow down!, get down!, or turn around!
They had grandkids of their own, at least 7 with more on the way, but it didn’t stop them from bringing back gifts from their vacations for mine – a collection of Disney characters once, coloring books another time. A jumbo bucket of sidewalk chalk another.
When Annie died in 2014, we had no idea. It was twelve days before we noticed.
When Todd died, we mourned. We saw the flashing lights, the fire truck, the coroner.
We walked next door the next day, and hugged Lydia on her porch. We bought a plant, wrote a card, and checked in on her weekly, invited her over for dinner, for a drink, even though we knew she didn’t drink at her age. She declined, graciously, a widow in mourning at her own pace.
Our family room window upstairs looks down into Lydia’s living room below. Some nights, when her son Danny visits, my son, Rowan will see them, his striking resemblance to his father and say “Look Mama! Todd didn’t die! He’s back.”
We talk about how everyone, eventually will die. And that no, Todd isn’t back. We talk about our sweet neighbor Todd and how he used to watch the bees and get our mail the summer the mailman refused to walk past our hive.
And then, we text Lydia and ask if she wants some left-over cake, needs anything from the store.