Hauntings: The Neighborhood

By Gwen Goodkin

The notice was blunt, straightforward and, as far as Gwen was concerned, had a lot of nerve. A lot of damn nerve.

We are holding a meeting at your house. Tomorrow night at 7.

– The Neighborhood

“Did you see this?” Gwen asked Jose.

“See what?”

“This note on our door.” She read it to him, then: “The Neighborhood? Who the fuck is that?”

“The neighbors on the street?”

“We don’t have a neighborhood association,” she said. “Is that what they’re meeting about? Forming an association? To talk about safety issues? There have been a lot of break-ins lately.”

“Did you tell them they could meet here?” he asked.

“Absolutely not! And – they put a huge gaping hole in our door. With a spike! That door is solid wood. It cost thousands of dollars. Can you imagine if we did that to Jeff and Cynthia’s house?”

Jose was distracted with work – ‘putting out fires’ and dealing with emergencies. Gwen had often complained about this, his level of distraction, always putting work first in his mind (“If everything’s an emergency, nothing’s an emergency” she said, or “Is anyone dying? No? Then it’s not an emergency.”)

“Just text Cynthia and see what’s going on,” he said.

“I wonder if she even knows!” But Gwen texted her and, even though she saw the flashing dots of a reply, the dots stopped and she never heard back from Cynthia.

            Exactly as the notice said, at seven the next evening, there was a loud bang on the door and a shouted, “Time for the meeting, José Nuñez.” The Colonel made a show of pronouncing Jose’s name in Spanish, with an emphasis on the é, rather than in the slow American way – Ho-say.

            Jose and Gwen were cleaning up the kitchen after dinner. The girls were playing Fair with their stuffed animals. They’d brought the various building sets up from their bedrooms to the family room. They made a barn area with magnetic tiles and their animals were competing for gold medals in races. The girls had eased into a world of imagination and were thoroughly enjoying themselves. So much so that they forgot to bicker and argue.

            The bang on the door stopped everything. Gwen and Jose turned to look at each other.

            “I’ll tell them if they want a meeting, they’ll need to go somewhere else.” Jose went down the stairs and opened the front door. Gwen moved from the kitchen to the family room next to the girls.

            Jose opened the door and started to say, “Hey, guys?” but was suddenly knocked to the ground, shouting, “Gwen, call the police!”

            Gwen ran to the kitchen to get her phone, but the men were already up the stairs blocking her way.

            “José,” said the Colonel, emphasizing the é. “We are the police.”

            Things had been strained between the neighbors after the country’s new leader came to power. Half sent him money to help ensure he came to power, others just voiced their agreement with him, and then there were those who didn’t support him. Some had learned early to stay quiet about it, so as not to get in arguments. They were busy putting out their own fires and didn’t have time to devote to verbal spats. Then there were people like Gwen and Jose. People who openly despised the new leader, his proud displays of corruption, his insecurity wrapped in bravado.

If Gwen and Jose hadn’t been so busy, so focused on themselves and the tasks of the day, they would have seen their neighbors glancing at them, speaking in hushed voices. The neighbors still waved and smiled – big smiles, too big – but they’d stopped having conversations with them, even to discuss the annoying neighbor kid who raced his loud truck down the street in the middle of the night. Gwen had said to Cynthia: “Okay, we get it. You’re angry at the world. Can you quit yelling it at us every night with your piece of shit truck?” Cynthia laughed, but that had been months earlier and they hadn’t spoken since.

            In the week before the notice mauled their door, Gwen’s attention had been drawn to an orange stencil spray-painted on the utility poles:

            She had asked the mother of her daughter’s friend, Kyla Blake, about it at a moms’ night out. Kyla stammered through her discomfort, left for the restroom, then sat in a chair on the opposite side of the table for the rest of the night.

A few days later, Gwen found the stencil painted in front of their house on the street, but with an X above it.

            “Are they paving the road soon?” she asked Jose.

            “Either that or it could be the utility company,” he said. “They mark up the street sometimes.”

            The next day – the day of the notice – as Gwen was driving her daughters home from school, she saw it painted in front of another house and stopped the van.

            “Isn’t that Mia’s house?” she asked her daughter.

            “Yes, I’m pretty sure it is.”

            Mia’s parents weren’t American. Her father was Swedish, her mother Nigerian. Gwen’s logic wanted to make a connection, but her heart convinced her it was just coincidence. Then she saw another stencil in front of Colton’s house. His mothers had just gone through a divorce. That raised the hairs on Gwen’s neck. She made a mental note to talk to Jose about it, but she found the notice and that became her focus.

            The men who dragged the Nuñez family outside wore full desert camo, flak jackets emblazoned with AIM – the acronym for the national immigration agency – and a beltful of weapons. Gwen was confused when she saw who was gathered in front of their house. Some were families from their daughters’ school, families who didn’t live in their neighborhood.

            “Why are the Lindens here?” Gwen asked Jose in a quiet voice. “And the Blakes.”

            “I have no idea.”

            “There’s an armored vehicle? A goddamn humvee with a machine gun?” said Gwen.

            Jose didn’t answer because the Colonel began to speak.

            “We are here in this neighborhood – this neighborhood many of us want to live in, but have been denied a place in due to social forces aligned against us – to reclaim our space from those less deserving.”

            It was nearing dusk. More people were arriving, some were using their phone lights to see. Some to record what was happening. Jose was bleeding from his nose, pinned between two men. The two older girls were holding onto Gwen’s side as she held the youngest in her arms. She saw her friends in the neighborhood wearing concerned looks, and yet, not offering any sign of help.

            “What we want to know, José, is how you were able to afford this house.”

            “None of your fucking business, you fucking asshole.”

A man punched Jose in the jaw. “No one disrespects the Colonel.”

“It’s not just my business,” said the Colonel. “It’s everyone’s business.”

“I earned every single penny I have. Every single one.”

            “By selling drugs? Are you the son of a Mexican drug cartel?”

Jose laughed. “You would think that.”

“And, Mrs. Nuñez. You’re Jewish, is that correct?”

“Like, one eighth.”

“So, yes. You are.”

“What does that – ”

“Never mind. Where were you born, José?”

“On the far side of a high, metal fence.”

“And where exactly is that?”

“Inside your skull where your brain should be.”

The Colonel held up a hand to stop one of his men from beating up Jose. “Tell me, José. How could you build a house in the nicest part of town and I, a man who served his country for thirty years, can’t buy a house in this very town?”

            “It’s called Capitalism, Einstein. Go read a book. Or, better yet, buy some stock.”

            “Okay. Party’s over.” The Colonel turned to the crowd. “You are all here because you’ve answered the call for Reclamation. It begins now.”

            The Colonel approached the middle daughter, the darkest of the three. Gwen pulled her daughter in closer.

“Come on, little one,” said the Colonel. He led her away, holding her hand. Gwen didn’t understand why, but, as an American, of course she assumed the best. She thought he was moving the children away from the stares of the crowd and shielding them from further stress.

Instead the Colonel pulled out a pistol and shot her in the head. She collapsed on the grass, blood pulsing out of her wound with each slowing heartbeat. He murdered her in front of her screaming parents to torture them, force them to watch her die so they would understand what would happen to them – to all of them – by the meeting’s end. 

Gwen’s friend in the neighborhood shouted, “No! Oh my god, why?”

The Colonel’s men shot her. Her husband yelled and rushed the Colonel. He was killed, too. Anyone who screamed was shot. There were snipers on the roofs of the neighbors – the houses of those who supported the new leader. Gwen noticed suddenly Cynthia and Jeff weren’t there. In fact none of her immediate neighbors were.

            The chaos that had bubbled up after the first shooting became an unsettling calm.

            “The only way we can carry out our mission is if everyone is of one mind. One mission, one mind,” he said.

            “One mission, one mind,” replied the crowd.

The Colonel pulled the next lightest daughter – brown-haired, brown-eyed, white-skinned – from her mother’s grip, hand from straining hand, and carried her kicking and wailing in one arm, then shot her as casually as he’d tuck a newspaper to his side. He dropped her severely quiet body on the grass and turned back to the three remaining members of the Nuñez family.

Jose was regaining consciousness on the ground. He had been knocked out by one of the Colonel’s henchman just after the first girl was shot. Gwen knew he would be next to die, after seeing two of his daughters now dead. He would attempt to tackle the Colonel and be shot dead. Gwen now focused all of her attention on her youngest daughter, touching her curls, rubbing her lips across her soft cheek, breathing in her baby smell. Gwen would kill her herself before she’d let him touch her.

Most of us imagine that in the final moments of life, a person reflects on those she loved most. Not the case. With Gwen at least. What she did was spend her final moments cursing herself for being so naïve in dangerous times, for not recognizing the world had changed and that women were no longer allowed to voice opinions, especially those that diverged from the majority of men. She cursed herself for standing up to the Colonel all those months before, at a neighborhood party, to tell him his leader was a traitor and a criminal. She should have recognized the Colonel’s blind loyalty to the leader. As the Colonel relayed conspiracy theories about the previous leader, a man completely opposite of the current one, Gwen laughed at how bizarre it all seemed. The Colonel wasn’t used to being laughed at. He wanted to be obeyed, addressed as “sir.”

But this was California, after all, and Gwen felt safe to voice divergent opinions. She had been educated in a time when women were encouraged to express themselves, loudly if necessary. But the rules had shifted, much like the fault line they lived on. And as with all fault line activity, little earthquakes went unnoticed. Until they added up to a big earthquake. So on a late summer evening, in what seemed like the most unlikely place – on a tucked-away street in a small California beach town – Reclamations began at the Nuñez house.

            Gwen was so consumed by her youngest, she didn’t see Jose get shot when he lunged at the Colonel. It was just Gwen and the baby now. The blondes. She kept the baby calm by shielding her view, pressing her temple into the crook of Gwen’s neck. She pinned the baby’s head lightly with her chin, as mothers do, and inhaled the pink shampoo smell of her hair. Gwen felt an odd sense of gratitude that it was an overcast day. Clouds moved through the neighborhood, between the houses, still at ocean level. If the sun had been full on her face, it would have been too much – the brightness. And yet, she could catch a glimpse of the ocean from where she stood just in front of her house. It was still her house. For a few more moments anyway.

            Years ago, Gwen had told Jose the house was a truth mirror. When a person stepped inside for the first time, it showed you their true self. She’d brought one of her friends to the site after the foundation had been laid. The friend walked around the dirt for the majority of the time with her mouth open and her nose wrinkled. She said obvious things like, “It’s – big,” and, “You have a view.” Other friends treated her exactly the same, just came inside and had the same conversation they’d always had – kids, other parents, school. Another friend walked around and shrugged. “Yeah, okay. It’s a bathroom.” Shrug. “Bedroom.” Shrug. Some friends invited themselves over often, yet never extended a return invitation. Gwen complained about this to her friend, who said, “Did you ever notice how everyone’s house is being remodeled? They can never invite anyone over.” Gwen and her friend laughed. It was the same friend who didn’t change when they built the house. In her case, the truth mirror was just a mirror. She was who she said she was, which was becoming a rarity in this town. Gwen thought about that friend, as she stood in front of her own house with most of her family dead, and wondered where she was, but couldn’t put energy into caring anymore.                                     

            She was no longer focused on the Colonel or the neighbors who’d gathered to watch. It was as if her mind had already transcended life and moved into a state somewhere between wakefulness and dreaming. No one existed outside of her daughter. Gwen couldn’t say if she even existed anymore. The fog snaked toward them. Gwen couldn’t be certain if she was standing anymore or floating. When the first child had been murdered, it was as if her bones had been pulled from her body, then with the second, her muscles.

The Colonel was bald and stocky. Exactly how anyone would expect him to look, like he’d seen a picture of a colonel and decided many years prior to mold himself into one. “But now, Mrs. Nuñez,” said the Colonel. “It’s time for you to choose. You or the little one.”

Gwen didn’t answer him. She wouldn’t play his game.

“If you choose the little one, you could save her.”

She knew this was a lie. The last bit of self he dangled in front of her like a strip of jerky. She began to hum a song she’d made up for her girls when they were babies. “Good morning to you, good morning to you. Have a happy, happy, happy, happy morning. Ya hoo.”

            The Colonel turned to the crowd. “Who will raise this child? The one with blonde hair and green eyes. Soon to be an orphan. Who?”

            Amanda Linden raised her hand.

            The Colonel made a motion at the neighboring rooftop. Amanda Linden was a heap on the ground before she knew what hit.

            “The correct answer is no one. Because this child is not pure. She is the worst one. She can pass for pure blood but isn’t. Do not be deceived! In this mission, trickery and deception are the true enemies. One mission, one mind.”

            “One mission, one mind,” said the crowd.

            Gwen was hyper focused on the trees, flowers, birdsong. She breathed in the saltwater air.

            “Now we come to who will earn this house and how.” The Colonel held up his gun and turned toward Gwen and the baby. “Who will finish the job we all began?” he asked. “Whoever completes the mission becomes the new owner.”  

            Gwen saw a few hands go up in the crowd. One belonged to Kyla Blake.

            “A woman! Commendable,” said the Colonel. He had his back to Gwen, holding his gun at his side. She looked into her baby’s eyes and said, “Let’s get this over with,” and the baby communicated to her without words, nose to nose, that it was okay. She forgave her.

All that time they’d spent after birth, rearranging themselves into two separate bodies, now undone. They were back together as one self, their existence distilled to the touch of their skin, the adoration in their eyes.

Gwen held the baby tight to her chest and ran full-speed into the Colonel’s back. They crashed into him, fell to the grass, cool and sharp – a strange comfort. Bullets punched through their ribs and exploded their heart, but they felt only the first shock of pain as they left the earth to join the fog.

—

Gwen Goodkin is the author of the short story collection, ‘A Place Remote,’ published by West Virginia University Press. She has won the Folio Editor’s Prize for Fiction as well as the John Steinbeck Award for Fiction. For more information, visit gwengoodkin.com