Chapter 3
Is it the most tired trope in suspense fiction—the reclusive woman observing her neighbors from the comfort of her home? He would know; he reads enough of it. Highsmith is his favorite, although he can’t think of when she ever employed that particular trope.
How does he know all this? Because that’s the twist, if you haven’t already guessed it. Here in Hawthorne Heights, it’s not that she, the recluse, watches everyone else. Henry watches her.
He watches them both. The wife and her husband. The unhappy couple.
Henry has no idea what it’s like to be part of a couple like them.
They are beautiful, but it’s funny—a little unsettling, honestly—how much they look like they could be brother and sister: twin glossy, brunette heads, features symmetrical and attractive, which Henry can see even from a distance.
Even their house is symmetrical and neat, a brick-front colonial with pale-green shutters.
The wife bought pansies for the planters that hang from the eaves of the front porch.
A repairman came by on Tuesday to work on the left garage door.
But there’s a stilted sort of energy about the house, an aura of unease.
They’re a couple with problems and history. They aren’t happy.
Henry assumes they were happy at some point. Aren’t all couples happy at some point? Otherwise, how did they end up here, rings glinting on their fingers, living in a suburban house in the enviable and mundane neighborhood of Hawthorne Heights?
Forsythia and azaleas bloom along driveways and sidewalks, and the sky is a cloudless blue. The unhappy couple heads out for a Saturday-morning walk. It’s late May. They’re still new to the neighborhood; their routine is taking shape.
They walk quickly, as though to discourage any chatter or pleasantries from neighbors who happen to be out. They’re enigmatic and aloof, which only makes them more attractive. They don’t smile, nor do they speak—not to each other, not to anyone—as they pass the windows of Henry’s house.
The husband’s hair is lush, and Henry hates him for it.
Henry is only twenty-eight, yet his own hair, the color of a muddy puddle of rainwater, is thinning at the crown, not thick enough that he could style it to conceal the wink of his scalp.
To compensate, he’s recently grown a tidy beard and mustache.
He thinks it’s an improvement, but his mother doesn’t.
He catches her staring at him sometimes, her thoughts elsewhere, lips tugging downward in an expression of disappointment, or disbelief, as though she isn’t quite sure when or how he came to be old enough to have facial hair at all.
“What are you doing?”
Henry startles, spins around. It’s his mom, of course. She’s been sneaking up on him for as long as he can remember.
“Nothing,” he says. He drops his hand, lets the curtain fall closed. It’s linen and scratchy, peppered with dog hair, although the dog died last year and they haven’t gotten a new one. His mother should launder them, vacuum them. He doesn’t tell her this.
She frowns then, as though he said what he was thinking. But he didn’t, and that isn’t why she’s frowning. She just doesn’t like that he’s standing here, in front of the window, telling her “Nothing,” when it’s clearly not nothing.
He doesn’t like it any more than she does. It’s been months. It feels much longer. It feels like he’s been here forever, like he never left, like he might never be able to leave.
Maybe he still lives with his parents, but he’s no longer a child. Henry steps past his mother. He moves around her as he leaves the living room, staring straight through her as though she does not exist at all.