The Best Horror of the Year. Volume 4

“It says here that the dead man was believed to carry an English passport but the body was too badly burned to be identified. Next of kin have yet to be informed.”

“They’ll soon sort that out,” Jerry said, without much interest.

Murdock, who seemed to be very pleased about something, perhaps just himself, said, “I expect they already have done.”

Downstairs, sounding faintly mournful and further away than it actually was, a phone began to ring.

YOU BECOME THE NEIGHBORHOOD Glen Hirshberg

“How’d it start?” Mom asks, taking a step back toward the curb. Her long-fingered hands have curled up at her sides like smacked daddy longlegs, and her braid has come loose and swings back and forth, gray and heavy, across her back. “How’d it start? How do I know?”

She tears her eyes away from the little triplex, just for a moment, and looks at me. I flinch, start to take her hand, but I’m afraid to. For so many years, after we left here, I’d see that expression bubble up, triggered by nothing: a bus sighing on a nearby streetcorner, or the sight of a tent-sukka billowing off the side of someone’s porch, or a flying beetle landing on her hand, or a summer wind. Then she’d start screaming at me, or whoever was near. Even then, I knew it wasn’t really me, and that did help, some.

Behind her, the sunset has ignited the smog, and the evening redness rises on the horizon behind the hazy towers of Century City, barely visible less than a mile from here. The traffic on Olympic is Sunday-evening sparse, the noise and the heat of it lapping around us rather than crashing down, the way it mostly did when we lived here. Low tide.

“I’m sorry,” I murmur, starting back around the corner toward the side-street where we parked. “I didn’t mean to bring you here. I actually forgot this place was so near. I just thought you’d want to see the building where Danny and I are going to be liv—”

“Do you remember the turtle?” my mother asks. And then she just folds her legs under her and sits down in the square of grass in front of the triplex. The angry expression has vanished. But there are tears. “Ry? Do you remember?”

She pats the grass. My legs are bare under my skirt, and if I sit there, they’re going to itch. I do it anyway. For a moment, I wonder what whoever currently lives in the front apartment will think, two women camped on their lawn with their backs to the traffic and their eyes riveted to those bay windows like paparazzi. But if the existing tenants are anything like we were, they’ll never open those curtains — too many cars passing, too stark a reminder of the carbon monoxide seeping through every little gap in the walls and window frames — so they’ll never see us.

All at once, I do remember. And I find myself glancing toward the hedge, then the back alley where the dumpster is, half-expecting to see that little, darker-green hump in the grass. That tiny, wrinkled head turned slightly sideways. “So it can see the sky.” That’s what Evie used to tell me.

“A hundred years after we die,” I say.

“What?” snaps my mother.

“Sorry. It’s what she used to say. Evie. She said that turtle of hers could live 250 years. She’d already had it for like twenty. She said we could come back here a hundred years after we die and there it would be. Just being.”

“Evie,” my mother says, and for the first time all night — in a long while, really, at least around me — she offers up her gentle, close-lipped smile. Her softest one, that I loved so much when I was little, and lost when we left here. “Oh, God, Ry, you should have seen her.”

“Mom, you used to make me call her Adopted Grandma. Didn’t she walk me home from nursery school when you were at work? I saw her all the time.”

“Not this time, you didn’t. Oh, wow.” To my amazement, my mother starts to laugh. Right on cue, from all the way down Olympic, comes a whiff of ocean breeze, just strong enough to blow out the laughter like a candle. Her shoulders tremble, though she can’t possibly be cold. My shins have begun to itch.

I put my palms in the grass and make to stand, saying, “Well, I guess we should go.”

But my mother is still smiling. At least, I think she is. “You asked how it started.”

“Yeah. I did.”

“Maybe this is it. I mean, obviously, it’s not the beginning, it had to have been in full swing by then, but this is the first one I really remember. This is as close to the beginning as I can get.”

Her shoulders tremble again. “Leyton,” she says. “Mr. Busby, I mean…”

“I know who you meant, Mom.”

“I actually don’t know why he didn’t blame me. Because it was kind of my fault.”

I sigh, roll my head back on my neck to watch the ribbons of orange run the rim of the sky like a brush fire along a ridge. My mother follows my eyes up, and she goes rigid. She says something, too, but I can’t make it out. I sigh again. “I’m not sure this qualifies as starting at the beginning.”

“Mr. Busby’d moved in… I don’t know… six months before? Fall of ’95. I think.”