For over two decades, Neil had worked as a nurse in the emergency room at Hennepin County Medical Center. Many people burned out after only a few years, but he stuck to it the way he stuck to everything else. Someone had to extract the rubble out of a motorcycle accident victim’s raw thigh with a pair of tweezers. Someone had to be there to hold the hand of a teenager who’d just had a bottle of sleeping pills pumped out of her stomach. Neil never failed to comfort, even after seeing the fifth gunshot wound on a single day, the third woman with her teeth knocked out. He cleaned and disinfected their wounds. He bandaged them. He administered painkillers and spoke to them in a soft lulling voice. This routine had become such a part of him, he could practically do it with his eyes closed. He often wished he could indeed work blindfolded. In his twenty-five years in the emergency room, he had seen too much pain.
He tried to put it behind him the instant he stepped through his garden gate. In summer, he practiced his flute on the back porch, losing himself for an hour or more, playing Mozart, Debussy, or the Gaelic airs he had learned from his grandfather. But one particular evening, when he sat down to play, a string of obscenities exploded on the other side of the fence. The guy next door was yelling at his girlfriend again.
Neil hadn’t had much luck with neighbors in recent years, now that the neighborhood had become so rough and seedy. In 1969, when he and his former wife Gina had bought this little Victorian house, Cedar-Riverside had been vibrant and alive, the Twin Cities’ answer to Haight-Ashbury. A poet used to live next door. Neil and Gina had kept their back door unlocked to welcome the stream of friends into their kitchen. He used to leave his bicycle out on the porch all night. In those days, Neil could live off his music and odd jobs. He played with a folk band, had gigs in the Triangle, the Riverside Coffee House, and once in Dania Hall. Like so much else, those venues had vanished. Dania Hall had burned to the ground.
Nobody stuck around for long anymore. People moved in and out of the rundown old houses; they came and went in a blur of rowdy parties and blaring television sets. Neil tried to be tolerant, but nothing disturbed him more than loud domestic arguments. His twenty-five years in the emergency room had shown too well where these fights could lead. Lowering his flute, he stared at the trembling leaves of the Virginia creeper he had trained to grow on his eight-foot chain-link fence. It was no good calling 911. That was what he had done during their last fight. The cops had come far too late, and the next day the neighbor, a ratlike young man with a thin face and thinner lips, had told Neil to mind his own goddamn business. The guy was not a person you could argue with. He had informed Neil that he owned a gun and knew how to use it.
On the other side of the fence, a door slammed. The boyfriend took off, leaving the girl behind. A few times Neil had passed her on the sidewalk. He remembered how she had gone bright red in the face when he made eye contact, how she had ducked her head. Now he listened to her jagged sobs. If he were a woman, he could go over and check on her, offer sympathy and support, but he was a man, and her boyfriend was jealous, a gun owner. He raised his flute and began to play, although the peace his music usually provided seemed quite beyond him. Still, he practiced his scales before launching into Debussy. If only his music had the power to obliterate and transform. The sun disappeared over the top of his fence, glittered faintly through the Virginia creeper and chain-links, then faded.
Listening to the Mustang tear out of the driveway, Becky pulled herself up from the bathroom floor and groped for a washcloth, a towel, a bar of the jasmine-scented soap her mother had given her before she gave up on her daughter completely. She wet her hands and lathered her face, splashed herself with cold water, as if this would change anything. The first time he hit her, she had said, “I’m leaving.” But here she was. Stuck. You’re fucked up, she told herself. This could only happen to someone who was hopelessly fucked up.
“I didn’t hit you,” he said the first time. A slap with an open hand didn’t leave a mark, didn’t cause any real damage— it only stung a little. Hank’s dad used to wallop him with a leather belt, used to beat the crap out of him. Hank told her she didn’t know what real hitting was. Once when some guy at the Viking Bar tried to pick a fight, Hank followed him outside and busted his jaw. But slapping her, shaking her, pushing her to the floor or up against a wall—that was small stuff. A few weeks ago, she made the mistake of trying to confide in one of the other waitresses at work, an older woman named Joanne, who just rolled her eyes. “Do you have any idea what a real battered woman looks like?”
