Thy Neighbor Read Online Free PDF Page B

mother was dead and went to find her. Maybe her father came and took her. Or maybe it was a pedophile with a ladder and some chloroform. No one knows. But that’s what the candle bulb in the upstairs window is for, I’m sure. For Robin. A reminder. A vigil. A signal, in case she’s out there watching, that says: You’re always welcome home.
    I hardly knew Robin, or even knew of her. By the time she was four or so I had headed off to boarding school and then college, and by the time I came back she was gone. But by all accounts she was a good kid. Sweet. Reserved. Excellent student. Precocious, actually. Read all the time—poetry especially, and stuff that was way, way above a normal elementary schooler’s level. Way above a high schooler’s level.
    I remember my mom telling me about one particular day when she’d gone out to get the mail—the mailboxes are clustered across the street on an easement of the Blooms’ property—and she saw Robin lying out on the Blooms’ lawn reading a copy of what looked like
The Inferno
. My mom knew a thing or two about Dante. She had a PhD from Barnard in English lit, and she was a voracious reader all her life, keeping up with trends in academic and trade publishing. She said she remembered having had enough trouble in her time as a TA getting her freshman charges to read
The Inferno
, let alone understand it. But an eleven-year-old? There was no way.
    She thought she was seeing things, so she asked Robin if she could have a look at the book. Robin handed it over with a shrug. Sure enough, it was the real deal—and the Pinsky translation no less, in a bilingual edition with the English on one page and the Renaissance Italian on the facing one. Both pages were covered with Robin’s childishly looped marginalia.
    Mom was very impressed by this.
    â€œPinsky’s is the only English translation that comes close to preserving the delicate terza rima of the original,” she exclaimed. “It’s subtle and complex, and from what I could see, that kid was getting it. Really getting it. She wasn’t just carrying it around for show, scribbling hearts and love doodles in the white spots. She had actually written the word ‘ TRUST ’ in capital letters next to the first appearance of Virgil’s name.”
    Amazing girl, I guess. And a tortured one, if that’s the reading she was taking refuge in at that age. A really sad story. As sad as my own.
    After my parents died and I took over the house, the Blooms were the only people I felt comfortable with. Not that we spent long afternoons together over tea, but now and again, if we were both outside at the same time and happened to see each other—usually it was Mr. Bloom I’d see—we’d stop and talk for a few minutes.
    We’d stand in one or the other’s driveway, or on the curb near the trash cans and recycling bins that one of us was taking out or bringing in, and we’d talk in that liberating, socially graceless way that people who’ve lost everything do.
    I felt sorry for them. They’d had it rough, losing two girls, and they took it hard—on themselves—as if they’d done something wrong that had made it all turn out so badly. Only they didn’t know what that thing was.
    I felt a kinship with them, too, because they were the only people I knew who had been through anything remotely as painful and inexplicable as I had.
    The Blooms had no more answers than I did, and no more sense of reparation, or expiable fault, which they would have gladly taken as a substitute if it could have brought some relief. But no power can absolve an indiscernible sin. We were like overly conscientious kids in the confessional, feeling the dogmatic heft of human wrongdoing but unable to ferret out our own crimes.
    As a seven- or eight-year-old, when I first started going to confession, I often confessed to things I hadn’t