The Family Across the Street by Nicole Trope

1

Logan

Seven hours ago

Logan pulls his van to a stop outside a large house with an emerald-green front lawn, cut short and neat. The hedging in front of the black metal fence is precisely square. An arch over the front gate has ivy curled around it, white flowers dotted here and there in the green foliage.

The van’s temperature gauge reads twenty-four degrees and it’s only seven thirty in the morning. It’s going to be a scorcher of a summer’s day and he’s grateful that he only has to get in and out of the van to deliver his parcels, rather than actually working outside. He takes a deep breath and silently thanks his brother-in-law, Mack, for giving him this chance.

‘I’m doing this for Debbie, mate,’ Mack told him two months ago when he gave him the keys to one of his vans. ‘I’ve always liked you, you know that, but I can’t have anything out of order on your delivery runs. The first complaint I get and you’re out on your ear – okay?’ he said, pulling at the tufts of hair on his chin he insisted on calling a beard.

‘I understand,’ Logan answered, looking up at his tall, skinny brother-in-law and clenching his fists to control the anger he was feeling, knowing it was more humiliation than anger. He was too old to be begging for jobs. If Mack had spoken to him in such a condescending way five years ago, he would have felt the need to belt him one, brother-in-law or not. But that was then and this is now.

He gets out of his van and breathes in the morning heat, suffused with the scent of honeysuckle and something else that could be rotting fruit. The garbage bins line the street, waiting for collection, which explains it. He listens and can hear the hiss, whine and crash of a garbage truck doing its job a few streets away. Best if he gets this delivered and moves out of their way.

A text pings on his phone and he looks down.

Call me.

‘Not likely,’ he mutters and shoves the phone in his pocket, irritated that he can’t seem to get through a day without his past tapping him on the shoulder. His past is why he’s driving a van for Mack and nodding his head each time his brother-in-law tells him he needs to stay on the straight and narrow. His past and his hopes for the future with Debbie, who has the same high cheekbones, blonde hair and hazel eyes as her overprotective older brother but combined with full lips and a dimpled smile. Anna, Mack’s wife, is also tall and thin and blonde. In group photos with Debbie’s family, Logan – with his thick black hair, blue eyes and inked skin – looks like he must have wandered into the frame by mistake.

He slides open the side door of the van and locates the box containing what is clearly a new laptop. It needs to be signed for or he has to leave it at the local post office at the end of the day. He really hopes the owner is home. He hates driving around all day with expensive electronics in the back of the van. The fear of something being stolen and him getting the blame is always there.

Looking through the black metal gate at the front of the house, he admires the profusion of pink and purple in the summer garden and is relieved to see that there is no dog around. Two scooters lie on the grass, one blue and one neon-pink. They look about the same size; the kids who live here must be close in age.

He pushes open the gate and walks up the stone path to a timber front door with a large black handle and a small metal square that must be a peephole. He hits the button on an electronic pad next to the front door and listens as a bell chimes throughout the house – some tune he recognises but can’t place.

He waits, expecting to hear footsteps or kids shouting. It’s a bit early for them to have left for school already and he hopes they’re still home. There’s a school just one street away; he reminds himself to drive carefully through the area for the next couple of hours.

Logan looks around, admiring the large grey pots filled with marigolds by the front door. Their whole flat could fit into just the front garden of this house. The back garden must be even bigger, and he knows there will be a swimming pool and maybe even a tennis court. He feels no envy about this. Everyone has their life to live and their path to follow. He likes where he is right now, despite the boring job and his slightly condescending brother-in-law. He likes that he has a brother-in-law and a job.

He hears a scrape and realises that the peephole has been opened from the inside.

‘Yes?’ says a woman’s voice, hesitant and wary.

‘Yes, I have a delivery here for Katherine West.’ He leans forward a little but he can’t see anything except dark glass.

‘Thanks… thanks… can you just leave it by the door?’

‘Sorry, but it needs to be signed for.’

‘I can’t do that now,’ says the woman.

Logan sighs. If he leaves the computer by the front door and she calls to complain it never got to her, it will mean the end of his job.

‘I really can’t leave it here, ma’am. It has to be signed for. If you need to… get dressed or something, I can wait.’

‘No,’ says the woman. ‘I can’t open the door.’ Her voice is firm, as though she is explaining something to him that he should understand.

He feels his face flush. He is already sweating out here in the morning heat.

‘I can’t leave it here so I’ll have to take it back to your local post office, okay? You can pick it up there any time after five.’ He steps back, ready to go before he says anything stupid. He hates the way some of these people in their big houses look at him. He imagines her thought process as she peers at him through her peephole. She won’t be able to see much except the small skull and crossbones tattoo on his cheekbone but that’s enough for her to make a decision about who he is.

He gets it, but he’s in a uniform and he’s holding the box. He lifts it higher, almost covering his face. A trickle of sweat slides down his spine. The woman doesn’t say anything else, although he can sense she hasn’t moved away from the door. This is not worth it. He turns around.

‘I can’t open the door,’ she repeats. ‘Please just leave the box,’ she says as he steps onto the path to leave. ‘Please understand.’

‘I’ll leave it at the post office – you can collect it after five.’

‘Please…’ Her voice is strained, pleading.

‘I’m sorry, ma’am,’ he says firmly.

He turns again and walks to the front gate, cursing under his breath. Sometimes he feels like the first delivery sets the tone for how the whole day will go. Judging by this one, it’s going to be a stinker.

Back in his van he cranks up the air conditioning and takes a few deep breaths. He mentally counts to twenty, feeling the anger settle and cool inside him. When Aaron first told him about the breathing and the counting, he thought it was crap. But the counsellor asked him to give it a try, and Logan has found that it does actually work. Logan was not the kind of person who took the advice of a psychologist. He wasn’t the kind of person who even went to see a psychologist, unless it was mandated, and it had been mandated by the court. But once he started talking to Aaron, once he stopped sitting in every session with his arms folded, he actually got a lot out of it.

‘Wouldn’t you like someone to know what you’ve been through? Not what you’ve done, but what you’ve been through,’ said Aaron after their third silent session.

‘Maybe I haven’t been through anything,’ Logan said, feeling his jaw tighten.

‘Really?’ Aaron looked around the room, at the pale green walls and the bars on the window. ‘Really?’

Logan scratched at his chin, where he was growing a beard, and said, ‘My father used to slap me across the back of my head and laugh, telling me I was his drunken mistake.’ As he said the words, he saw the look of disgust on his father’s face, the same face he saw in the mirror now. Debbie says that all the ink is so that he looks different to the man who greeted his first tattoo with the words, ‘Makes you even uglier than you were and that’s saying a lot.’

‘I imagine that was difficult to hear,’ said Aaron. ‘How old were you the first time he said it?’

‘Four,’ Logan said. And then he took a deep breath because a ball of pain had lodged itself in his throat. Not for himself but for the four-year-old kid he had been, who had only wanted to show his father his new Tonka truck but had unwittingly interrupted a football game. For the five-year-old boy who listened to his mates talk about fishing with their fathers, knowing that his father preferred mammoth Sunday drinking sessions followed by heavy Monday morning hangovers, preferred a hard slap over a conversation and made his disappointment clear every time he looked at his son. The pain was for all the other ages he had been as well, the list of disappointments piling up until he got to the age that landed him in prison.

‘So perhaps you’ve been through a few things,’ Aaron said mildly.

Logan cracked his knuckles, hot and angry that Aaron had made him think about it. He had never told anyone before, never. But once he started talking, it was hard to stop. He told the man things he thought he had buried for good, anguish that was never meant to see the light of day again. And it helped, as did the exercises Aaron gave him to control his ‘understandable anger’. It made him a better big brother to Maddy as well, because he was able to help her process some of her feelings at being rejected by two people who should never have had children in the first place.

He obviously hasn’t helped his little sister as much as he would have liked to or she wouldn’t have found herself a boyfriend who seems to embody some of the worst aspects of their father. Patrick is a little younger, not as smart as she is and mostly a moocher. He has a nasty sense of humour, once telling Maddy she was the granny in her university class because of her age and was only doing well because the professors felt sorry for her, and then laughing when she looked hurt at the comment. ‘Can’t you take a joke?’ he asked her, and Logan watched her force a smile the same way he and Maddy had been used to doing when they lived at home. ‘Can’t you take a joke?’ their father said when he told Maddy she was turning into a little dumpling after she gained weight in her teen years. ‘Can’t you take a joke?’ he asked Logan when he called Logan ‘Captain Stupid’ after he failed an exam. ‘Can’t you take a joke?’ means the person being insulted is not allowed to get upset. The first time Logan heard a comment like that from Patrick, he looked at Maddy, holding back the need to shake some sense into her, baffled that she couldn’t see the similarities.

Patrick also sulks if he doesn’t get his way. Logan knows from the things Maddy has told him that if Patrick is unhappy, he makes sure she knows it by slamming doors and going quiet. Growing up, Maddy and Logan knew that when their father slammed doors and went silent, someone was going to get hit.

Bur Patrick doesn’t hit Maddy because if he did… Logan drops the thought.

As he prepares to pull off, Katherine West’s refusal to open the door bothers him and he realises that there was something in her voice, something like fear but also a kind of pleading in the last thing she said:‘Please understand.’Why would he need to understand it? She could either open the door or she couldn’t because she wasn’t dressed or she was busy with something. What did she need him to understand?

A shiver runs down his spine. In the time it took her to tell him she couldn’t open the door, the whole delivery could have been done. All she had to do was stick her hand out, so why didn’t she?

In the van with cold air blasting him, Logan experiences a prickling along his skin. He learned early to trust his instincts, to listen to what his body was telling him even if his brain didn’t appear to know what it was.

Instinct tells him there is something wrong. That’s what she was trying to make him understand. Something is going on in there. He looks back at the house, hidden by tall green hedging.

Usually when he delivers to a home with small kids inside, there are excited shrieks as the doorbell rings, and shouting from a mother or father: ‘Don’t open the door!’

But there was only silence from this house.

He meets his own blue eyes in the rear-view mirror and then he shifts the gearstick into drive, pushing his foot down on the brake while he checks his phone for his next delivery and programmes the address into his GPS.

Debbie believes he thinks too much about everything. She’s not wrong. One thing that prison gives you is plenty of time to think. He might be reading way, way too much into this.

‘It’s not your problem, babes,’ he knows Debbie would say, and she’d be right.

‘Not my problem,’ he says aloud and then sets off, attempting to dismiss the woman as the words ‘please understand’ repeat in his head and unease dances inside him.