When I was young, my neighbors buried their house. I had been in the house before it was buried, because Tim Fisher and I had the same bus stop and we were kind of friends. We never had the same teachers, but we sat in seats on the bus across the aisle from each other and walked home together most days. Sometimes, he shared cookies his mom made, decadent saltine crackers soaked in butter and salt with chocolate on top and toffee bits sprinkled in. My mom never allowed treats like that in our house. I’m salivating thinking of them now.
Some days before the burial we’d stop in at the house, where he had video games I wasn’t normally allowed to play and other snacks like sodas I couldn’t always drink. We didn’t go crazy. I never even stayed for long, maybe an hour, because that was all I could spare before my mom would be home too. Sometimes Tim would ask me if I couldn’t stay longer, or if I could come over on the weekend instead so we could have more time for games. Once, he wanted to go outside with me and play catch with his dog. I told him I was afraid of the dog running away.
“He won’t run away even though we don’t have a fence,” Tim had said. “He’s good like that.” But that wasn’t the real problem, and Tim knew it, and I knew he knew it, and I didn’t even have the guts to tell him that. The real thing was my dad’s office window faced their backyard, and he would see what I’d been doing before Mom got home. The real thing was my parents didn’t want me over there, even though nobody had ever actually said so. I just knew I couldn’t ask them. In any case, we stayed in his house in the living room, played a video game for a little bit and then I went home like I usually did. We never did play with the dog outside. I can’t even remember the dog’s name.
I don’t know what set the Fisher family apart when they first moved in. They arrived later than many in the neighborhood, sometime the previous winter, so Tim was the new boy in school halfway through the year. That’s never easy. Tim’s father didn’t have a strange job. It was something suit-and-tie as far as I could tell, similar to many of the breadwinners of the neighborhood. His mother worked too; she was a hairdresser. Yet my father didn’t invite Mr. Fisher to golf with his business friends when he could help it; my mother didn’t include Mrs. Fisher in her and our other neighbor friend Renée’s Friday wine nights. If I asked to have Tim over, the answer was almost always no, even when Renée’s daughters were allowed. There were small differences I know bothered everyone, though as a child I couldn’t see why they mattered, and I hope I don’t think they matter now. So it just must have been something that set them apart at first that I couldn’t see which made everything afterward so harsh.
The school year ended, summer passed, and the Fishers’ house abruptly disappeared one day from their lot. Renee was the one who noticed; my mother got a call while I was eating a piece of toast.
“What do you mean, look out from the garage?” my mother was saying into the phone. “Hold on, I’m on the old landline.”
She put down the wired phone and I heard the garage opening a moment later. When she returned, she accidentally knocked the phone off the counter in her haste to get back. She hauled it up by the wire. “Renée, I’ll be right over.”
My mother hurried my breakfast and slipped my jacket and backpack on. It was the first day of a new school year, but the mornings were already beginning to cool. My mother marched me through dewy grass toward the Fishers’ yard, where of course the house was gone. I thought it looked the way a recently unsaddled horse might – relieved, unburdened.
Renée was there with her twin daughters, freckled girls who picked on one another when Renée wasn’t looking. “Rob left for work already, otherwise I’d send him in to investigate,” Renée said to my mother.
“What do you mean, in?” asked my mother. “Shouldn’t we just call the police?”
“Oh, that I already did,” said Renee. “I meant into that jungle they call a garden.”
My mother visibly relaxed at the news that the police were on their way. “Let me give my husband a ring. He can be here in five.”
But before she could even raise her phone to dial, I heard the creak of metal from between a clump of rosebushes, and from there flipped up a large metal hatch. There was a “Bye, Mom,” and a shouted “watch the hatch!” and then Tim was scrambling up and out, his backpack on, his mouth thin.
He approached us five. “Hi, Sean. Hi, Mrs. Thorne.” He was always so polite. He greeted Renée and her daughters the same way. “Why are you on our lawn?”
And then the police cars rounded the corner, lights flashing but not making a sound.
Before they moved underground, my mother often tried to avoid the Fishers but didn’t always succeed. Her feeling of social obligation sometimes got her in the end, especially when the Fishers were being what anyone else might see as kind. Once, Mrs. Fisher offered to my mother to cut my hair for free, the same day she was doing Tim’s.
I remember my mother was hesitant to accept. “We have a regular place, I wouldn’t want to disappoint them,” she had said, a weak attempt at graciousness that Tim’s mother all too easily overturned. Tim’s mom sat me and him next to each other in high chairs in her kitchen. The elegant sweep of the cape over me, and the snick of her scissors in my ear. When it was done, she held mirrors in front of both of us. I expected our haircuts to be exactly the same, but they weren’t.
My mother watched it done, and she chatted with Mrs. Fisher as she worked–about the weather, the neighborhood, their husbands, the challenges of raising kids. Tim and I were quiet. He didn’t fidget at all.
As we were leaving, my mom tried to pay Mrs. Fisher for the haircut anyway, which embarrassed me deeply. Mrs. Fisher waved it away. “It’s what neighbors do,” she said. My mother laughed and returned the cash to her purse, but she gripped my hand very tightly the whole way across our yard.
We had left their front door open, and when I looked back, I could see through into the kitchen. Mrs. Fisher was sweeping up all the hair, mine indistinguishable from Tim’s.
Aboveground, Mr. Fisher had a beautiful garden, the one Renee always said was a jungle. I saw him tending to it early in the mornings before school and every evening after he got home from work, even if it was dark out. There were large and fragrant roses, ranging from jewel tones to soft pastels. Forget-me-nots bloomed in a riotous layer beneath the rosebushes in the summer. They were choking some of the other plants and covering ground he was hoping to use for bulbs eventually, daffodils and hyacinths and tulips. I only know the names because Mr. Fisher once patiently explained them all to me. You have to plant daffodils in the fall if you want to see them in spring, he told me. They have to suffer the cold below to emerge when it’s time.
There was a vegetable garden, too, mostly roots. Carrots, beets, rutabagas, everything for a stew. Onions, garlic, shallots, alliums that made my eyes water. Watermelons that would swell into existence and just as soon disappear, turning up chopped up bloody on the Fishers’ kitchen counter in the weeks after. It wasn’t as contained as my parents and the other neighbors would’ve liked it to be; my mother once complained that gardening encouraged groundhogs and other burrowing vermin to wreck their own yards as well as theirs. The other neighbors mowed their lawns aggressively, and more than once I saw Renée call out to Mr. Fisher from atop her tractor mower, asking if he needed her to just carry on over the border between their properties and get it done for him. He used to laugh and wave her off.
Our own landscaping was lifeless compared to theirs. Pruned shrubs which reminded me of poodles trembling in the wake of a shave. No riotous flowers. Nothing I could eat, either, not even dandelions, since my mother had a gardener come by to pluck those away at the root. I didn’t know I could eat dandelions until Tim told me. But our landscaping looked a lot like Renée’s and everybody else’s, and that was the way my parents liked it.