Scottie looks normal, fine actually, except for the darkness in her eyes.  She stands on my front porch.  The air outside is crisp.    

“You all right?”  I ask.

She blinks.  The skin on her face is light and pure as porcelain. 

“I need to use your phone.”

“Okay!”

A loud growl drowns me out and we hear a crash, like thunder, through my wall.

Scottie pushes at me. “Shut the door.”

I press the door back into its frame.  It is the first time since I’ve moved in that it doesn’t stick and I think of the heat that has slammed me -- head to toe -- each time I’ve opened that door.   Now I can see a subtle shadow to the light on the leaves that are still a vibrant green.  They block my view of the brick houses across the street.

I stand in bare feet and point to the wall where she lives on the other side.  

“What the hell was that?”  

Scottie shrugs, “Phone?” nodding at the kitchen toward the back of my house where it hangs on the wall.

“Go ahead.”

The growling next door comes through the wall again, along with what sounds like glass shattering.

“What the hell’s going on?”

She holds the receiver in her thin fingers.  She has pink nails with white tips, and she is looking down at my kitchen floor, listening to the receiver.

I have never heard anything like that from her house before.  I think of the sound of her television late at night.   I know Scottie watches David Letterman.  I can still hear the low droning sound of his voice through the wall, after I’ve turned him off on my television.   

Though it is muffled, I know it is Letterman’s voice and that tells me that Scotty is still up.

I fall asleep thinking of watching David Letterman with her.  I dream about her body; pure white skin, like a marble statue.  And I think of how it must feel, light as air.

“Yes, an emergency.  Yes.  Domestic abuse,” she is talking into the phone and the skin on my neck tickles uncomfortably as I hear her speak.

It is quiet next door.  The walls are silent.

Scottie hands me the receiver, “They want to talk to you.”

I have to step close to her to place the receiver on my ear; its cord is taut.

Scottie smells of oranges and I think of the large, navel tangerines that rolled out of my stocking on Christmas morning.  The cloth on the stocking was red flannel and “Jesse” was stitched in faded green thread across the wide white velvet border.  Soft. 

The stocking always thrilled me when I hung it with my sister, Marni, on the fireplace mantel in the main room of our house.  On Christmas morning, we dumped out the contents, new toothbrushes, matchbox cars for me, nail polish and barrettes for my sister, small bottles of deodorant wrapped in felt Santa suits with cards that said, Not that you do, just so you won’t. 

And oranges; two each for Marni and me.

Scottie has lips like Marni’s.  She is pressing a finger to hers right now, biting a tiny slice of skin that sticks up, a light, translucent piece of her lip.  I think of how that might taste, whether I’ll ever get a chance to find out.

“Nine-one-one operator.  What is your emergency?”

“There is a disturbance next door.”  I say, my eyes sweeping from Scottie’s lips to her dark, sad eyes.  She looks back at me; stark blue irises in pulpy purple sockets.  The skin around her bruised eyes is almost the same color as her lips.

“Address please.”

I tell her and replace the receiver on the wall with a click.

A horrific boom vibrates through my house. 

When I moved here from Massachusetts, I wanted to live in a comforting neighborhood.  The community the realtor showed me was green with lots of trees and small, tidy lawns.

“Baltimore’s working class neighborhoods have street long dwellings of homes – all connected like these – with marble steps.  No shade,” she told me.

“There aren’t any marble steps on these houses,” she smiled.

I nodded, the history didn’t interest me.  I just wanted to live in a place where people smiled, nodded and waved.   

On the other side of the house’s front walk, by a large tree with a thick trunk and flowers in white and orange blooming in its shade, two women sat in shorts and polo shirts in Adirondack chairs.   The one I later realized was Scottie, waved.

“Hey!” I waved back.

All the houses were shaded by tall trees that stood in a row on the edge of each lawn.

“Were the trees planted there on purpose?”  I asked.

“Yes, the community planner placed a sycamore at the edge of each property.  Some haven’t survived, so the owners have replaced them with maples, purple plums, cedars, willows.”   The realtor stepped onto the porch that looked like it had been made with sparkling chips of stone mixed with cement.

“Here we go,” she said, turning the key with a click.  But the door was stuck.  She leaned her beige linen shoulder against the bright red door.

“Let me,” I said.

I gave the door a shove and it swung open.

Inside, the first thing I saw was an ornamental wooden ball at the bottom of the front staircase’s banister.  It reminded me of the front staircase in my home in Massachusetts.

My Baltimore home has the original furnace and no air conditioning.  Five or six of us live in one long brick structure, separated by thick, well built walls.  But they are not sound proof.  All our secrets are revealed through our shared walls. 

My first night here, I hung a curtain in my tub, so I could take a shower.  I was grimy with sweat.  The night was as warm as the day had been.  When I’d opened all the windows, nothing moved through the screens.   I needed an air conditioner.   

An urgent “Uh, uh, uh” sound came through the wall as I snapped the holders into the top of the shower curtain.  It was unmistakable.  My neighbors were fucking.  There was a bedroom on the other side of my bathroom wall. 

I heard the earthy, guttural moan of a woman.  It startled and thrilled me at the same time.    

The next morning, I walked down my path toward my car, parked on the curb in front of my tiny lawn.  I glanced at the front porch of the house on the other side of my bathroom wall.   A clay pot of blue and yellow flowers stood on the porch next to the top step.    

Scottie is breathing so hard right now I can see her breasts move up and down under her t-shirt.  It has been ripped at the neck.  An ugly, ragged hole.  

“Thanks,” Scottie says, leaning into me and threading an arm around my middle.  She is short.  I can rest my chin on the top of her head; the scent of oranges is faint.  My heart is beating quickly and I put an arm around her shoulder.

The door rattles.

“Oh God!”  she says, clinging to me, her breasts are against my stomach; warm.  I can feel their soft shape and my penis swells.  

My doorbell doesn’t work properly.  I release Scottie to go peer through the round window in my door.  Six officers in uniform are standing on my porch.  

They all wear short sleeved, dark blue shirts and I realize one of them is female.  When I swing open the door, she nods at Scottie, “Ma’am.”

My first Sunday morning in Baltimore, I heard a short rap on my front door.   When I pulled open the door, a fragrant cinnamon cake covered in clear plastic was resting on my woven welcome mat with a Baltimore Sun.

I was in my boxers, but I saw her, standing near the tree next door, spraying water in an arc that spread like a fan over half of the flowers blooming in the tree’s shade.

“Morning!”  Scottie waved to me with the hand that was not holding the hose.  Her ample breasts moved with her arm.   I thought of the sounds I’d heard through the bathroom wall.

“Thank you!”  I croaked, holding up the cinnamon cake. 

“You’re welcome,” she said and she smiled.  Bright, white perfect teeth.

“So, you two know each other?” an officer with a metal paper holder nods from one of us to the other.  Two of the officers have left.  I hear them knocking on Scottie’s front door.     

I look at Scottie who speaks in a laugh, “Well, we’re neighbors, of course!”  

“No! No!”  Scuffling sounds seep through the wall.  One of the officers talks into a black box and pushes my screen door open, standing on my porch.

I think of the officer who came with the ambulance that cold, snowy night when they took my sister, Marni away on a stretcher.  Her furry, tan L. L. Bean slippers hung out the end of the white blanket that covered her.  I stood at the foot of our front staircase, in our hallway, terrified, like I feel now.

“One of you lives next door, correct?”

I shiver though my scalp is damp with sweat.

“I do,” Scottie says.

Through my bay window, I can see the officers outside, talking to a guy with a long, dark ponytail.

“Is that person an intruder, Ma’am?” 

“No, he’s my brother.” 

Looking at Scottie, I think of Marni, again.

She was two years older than me and she kept mysterious bottles on her little dressing table.  She’d sit with her back to the mirror, facing me on her bed.  I’d lean on all of her pillows bunched up behind me.  In the large oval frame, I could see the back of her head.  Her hair was several shades of brown.  I felt like I was in another universe, a private world.  No one else but Marni and me.  She’d turn and pick up one of the bottles; the stench of nail polish would float through the air.  Marni would pull out the top with a quick flick of her wrist.  She’d draw the brush along her fingernail; the same pink with white lines that Scottie has. 

Our house in Massachusetts was much bigger than this Baltimore rowhouse and it had so much land around it, we didn’t have neighbors.  Upstairs, Marni got the room over the garage and she had her own stairway.  It went down to the kitchen and she could slip out the back door.  Her room was a few steps below the second floor of the main house and my bedroom.  One of my doors opened to that back stairway, too.  My other door lead to the front hall and staircase. 

Marni and I would sneak off down that back staircase, grabbing the old fishing poles that we stuck in an umbrella bucket by the back door.  We’d head out to Borders Pond at the far end of our property, down a hill that started at the end of our fenced yard.  We’d flick the latch on the gate and head along the cool, shady moss covered ground.  The pond was surrounded by pines that smelled of Christmas and it was all ours.  We’d thread our lines with lure hooks, earnest in our quest when we were in grade school.   Silently, we’d wait for a bite.  I remember how the insects and birds filled the air; the sound of our lures plunking into the water.  

We’d spend hours at the pond; Marni and me.  As we grew older, we would break our silences, whispering to each other.   She was in love with Paul McCartney and I wanted to be Keith Richards.  Eventually, I brought some pot to Border’s Pond and we gave up fishing altogether, making a pact not to tell anyone.

 “Ma’am?  Do you want to press charges?” 

Scottie is biting her pink and white fingernail.  She looks out my front window and closes her eyes before she says, “Yes.”

I step away from her.

“Ok, then.  I’ll need to take a statement,” the officer opens his metal box.

“I don’t want to talk here,” Scottie says, looking at me as she speaks.  Her eyes are wet.

“Fine,” the officer slams the metal box shut.  “Thanks,” he says to me.

I nod. 

They walk past me out my front door and I shut it again, smoothly in its frame.

I watched them carry Marni away on the stretcher, a large red stain of blood had seeped through the blanket.   She was seventeen when she died.   

That blood stained blanket with which they covered Marni still haunts me. 

“You have to do it for me, Jesse,” she’d said, lying on the cold floor of her bedroom, a clean, white bath towel beneath her.  Mick Jagger was singing “Jumping Jack Flash” on her stereo.  The garage under Marni’s room was frigid and she needed a space heater.  It stood – a barrel shaped contraption – under the gabled window overlooking the driveway. 

I knelt on the hardwood floor, the cold penetrating my legs through my knees, and pinched the lure hook off the line of the fishing rod.  Marni raised her butt off the towel, bunching her skirt with two fists.    

“I can’t, Marni,” I whispered.

“You have to Jess!”  she raised her head from the floor, leaning on her elbows.  “I heard it’s easy to do, just thread it in.”

Mick was shouting about “gas – gas – gas.”

“Is the volume up as high as it can go?” she asked.

I nodded at her.

She grabbed my hand and I leaned down to kiss her.  The kiss was quick.   Dry.  I thought of her tongue, how she used to dart it around my mouth, tracing the back of my teeth.    

I held my breath, parting her legs with my fingers.   As I pushed the fishing rod inside her, my mind was somewhere else.  The soft quiet at Border’s Pond, the warm air, the water.   She did not scream until I was out the door, down the back stairs.  I sat on a kitchen stool, a glass of milk in front of me, pretending to eat tollhouse cookies when my mother raced down the back steps and plucked the phone’s receiver off the wall. 

“What happened?”  I croaked, feigning ignorance.

My mom ignored me, gasping and crying into the phone’s receiver, “Quick, please come quickly.  My daughter’s bleeding…”

I waited for the ambulance by the front door, sitting on the bottom step of the main staircase.  Forcing myself to stay in the front hall, I clutched the ball on the top of the banister while the paramedics went to fetch her.  Relief washed over me when they finally emerged at the top of the stairs; efficient and serious, the paramedics would take care of her.    

Locking my eyes on hers, I smiled at Marni as they carried her down the stairs.  The color of Marni’s eyes was the same blue/gray as the slate on the roof of my Baltimore rowhouse.