Horrors Behind the Tidy Landscape

It is a strange feeling to live around the corner from a house where a man was shot to death.

The papers reported the “victim” (not neighbor) was found by his “roommate” at 11 o’clock at night.

I was home.

What was I doing when the fatal shots tore open his flesh? Did he scream?

I didn’t hear anything. Wouldn’t have known that a killing occurred except that the sheriff’s investigation squad cordoned off the quiet cul-de-sac with yellow crime-scene tape.

I scoured the papers for information. They say there was no obvious evidence of a burglary or home-invasion robbery. No motive. No suspects. Don’t panic, they say.

Of course, there’s curbside gossip. Perhaps a jealous lover. A bad business deal. Drugs. You know how neighbors are about folks they don’t know. That man moved in just weeks before he died.

I didn’t know him. I never had coffee in his kitchen, nor beer on his front porch. Never picked up his newspapers when he was on vacation. (Did he ever go on vacation?)

I suppose I couldn’t even say for sure if I ever saw him.

Yet I have a squeamishness about his misfortune that I cannot shake. This feeling wakes me up in the dark before dawn. I rise out of sleep and then I remember. A man was shot in his home in my neighborhood.

The lace curtain next to my bed rustles in the breeze at this hour. I don’t know why, but I strain to listen. I inhale deeply as if divining clues from the wind.

Is someone watching the police watch the house?

I shudder and creep my toes across the king-sized bed, seeking out my husband’s warm knees. He sleeps soundly. Another man’s tragedy. Not his own.

I listen to the night sounds and wonder if the killer stayed in town or drove far, far away. Are those footsteps on the sidewalk?

I hear only a distant dog. A car. Silence.

It is not unusual for me to hear sounds in the night that aren’t really there.

The summer of the Night Stalker, when I tossed sleeplessly because of the heat and hysteria, I would hear cars, imaginary cars cruising the streets, looking for a house that might in that criminal’s deranged mind call out, “Enter here and wreak havoc.”

“You’re silly,” my husband said. “That guy isn’t anywhere near here.”

When Richard Ramirez did break into a house less than two miles from mine and then shot the man who lived there and raped his girlfriend, I wished I didn’t have to say, “See? I told you this guy was a maniac and might show up anywhere. See?”

The Night Stalker was caught, and I could sleep at night.

Never again in my neighborhood, I hoped.

The next time the night spoke to me, I heard ululating, the wails of grief from a mother who had lost her young son. He died at home from a rare and terrible disease.

I knew that woman. I had baby-sat her son before he got sick. Our families are still friends.

And when I awoke with her on my mind those nights in the weeks after her boy died, I’d whisper shushes to her on the wind. I knew the cries were nothing more than my midnight imagination, but I knew her grief was stark as high noon.

Months later, I asked this woman if she ever keened into the night. Told her what I thought I’d heard. She said she never wailed loud enough for my ears. Said she was a quiet, desperate griever. We cried. I silently prayed that that kind of tragedy wouldn’t ever happen again. Not in my neighborhood.

One bright spring morning, a man down the street committed suicide. I woke up because I heard his wife’s shrieks five houses away. I never heard night noises from that house, though. The day sound was enough.

I don’t live in a bad neighborhood. There’s a homeowners association that will send you letters if your yard looks too weedy or if you park your RV in the driveway too long. There’s a blue-ribbon school, a women’s club, a swimming pool and tennis courts. And of course, there are nice houses. Rows and rows of boxes with curb appeal and charm, two-story filing cabinets hiding scraps of lives, most of which I know nothing about.

Maybe it’s better that way.

Maybe not.