You Can't Tell, You Just Can't Tell

I wanted to see the house where the old woman died. Two blocks over and four blocks down. Past the park. I didn’t know her. I was out walking the dog and decided I wanted to see the house. I told myself it would be like paying respects to walk past it, from across the street. Stop a moment, bow my head as though I am saying a prayer to the god she believed in.

That’s what I read. That she was very involved with the church. Went to mass every day. Helped out with church events. It reminded me of my own mother who does the same. At least I think she still does, the mass every day part. The other I know she does, the helping with events and such. Only this woman was 82 years old. That’s ten years older than my mother. Only ten years. Now that I think about it, it’s not that much.

I walk one block past and think it will be okay to go back and circle the block with the terrace on my right. That way, the dog won’t be peeing on trees or pooping on the terrace lawn while I am doing the paying respects thing. The funeral service is at ten today, and I imagine there will be a lot of people there who didn’t even know the woman, but are so upset by her having been murdered in their quiet little town that they will show up. They will want to show their support for her having been alive, or to show how upset they are about her being murdered, or maybe it’s just because it’s something to do when you don’t know how else to respond to something as totally out of control as two teenage boys breaking into her home and murdering her.

I look around the neighborhood as I walk. I would say it’s no different than my neighborhood, being only a few blocks away, but it is. It’s more run-down. The houses are smaller and not as neatly kept. There are more crappy cars in driveways and on the streets. It’s a little bit different, but not much.

I hit the street corner and I can see her house from where I stand. It’s 402, so it’s only the second house in. I don’t stop walking. It’s a simple little bungalow style. It’s tan. It’s close to its neighbors on either side. Someone from inside the house called 911. That’s how the police knew to come. The boys were still in the house, with credit cards, cash, jewelry. She must have been dead then. They were still there while she was dead on the floor, or wherever they left her.

I don’t turn down the street. I don’t want to walk past. I turn and go the other way, cross the street, and realize I’m right in the neighborhood where a woman was murdered. It’s a murder neighborhood now. I won’t tell my husband I’ve been here. He didn’t want to ride past on our bikes the other night. He didn’t really want to read about it in the paper. He can turn off that morbid fascination and honestly not want to know. But still, I think he wouldn’t be happy to know I had walked through the neighborhood. He gets upset when he looks at the weekly crimestoppers map in the paper and sees that there have been street assaults where I go running every morning. “It could be two drunks fighting over the last beer at a party,” I say, “not muggers attacking strangers.” He wants to see police reports to be sure.

There’s no way you can tell that a neighborhood has had a murder. Or a rape. Or houses a child molester. Not just by looking at it. There’s no way. How can a person know? Maybe that’s why I came here. Just to see if I could tell. If I could be the one to say, “Oh yeah, right there. Right there you should have known this could have happened in your neighborhood.” But there’s no way.

The sky is grey and sunny at the same time, which means the rain will move in after sunrise. The morning birds are singing and flitting from one green leafy branch among the canopy of trees to the next. Children are shuffling their way to the final days of school. And I am here, a woman out walking her dog, so that anyone driving by can see me and know what we all don’t know, just how something like this could have happened here and why we didn’t see it coming.