I live alone and spend Christmas quietly at home. My neighbors in the condo across the way decorated their home with garland and lights and stockings hanging across the top of the large sliding doors which are standard for our buildings. I was satisfied with the amount of vicarious cheer visible to me in their illuminated windows. We are pretty much visible to each other in the evenings when our floor to ceiling vertical blinds are open. Our living rooms and kitchens become a single well-lit stage. Even though you may never meet, after several years you begin to imagine a kind of relationship with people whose movements become subconsciously familiar.
I was reading a book about eight o’clock on Christmas Eve when I heard yelling. I figured it was a reveler who had too much to drink but there was something different about the sound. There was no joy in it and as I focused my hearing I began to hear the horror in the voice. I stepped out onto my porch and saw the ambulance and police cars which must have arrived silently. In the parking lot of my neighbor’s building was a small crowd and one hysterical woman in the middle. She was screaming questions and each time her voice would rise to a terrible wail which turned me cold.
I noticed my neighbors were casually milling about in their festive condominium in what appeared to be a Christmas party (I was momentarily envious) and I wondered why they were oblivious to the horrible drama unfolding outside. It dawned on me slowly, as realizations come to observers in little packets of understanding, that the people milling about in my neighbor’s condo were police officers and paramedics. The woman screaming was from the condo across the way, and when my heat pump cut off I could make out the words “Where did he get a gun?!..Where did he get a gun?!”
Now I began to wonder who the victim was. Was it the older man whom I imagined to be the father? Or was it the younger man whom I imagined to be the son? The window of the master bedroom was open and illuminated and I could see the flashes of the camera recording the scene in the corner where I knew the bathroom to be. I became fixated on the unfolding scene and eventually the body was carried to the center of the living room, lifted to a gurney, and an examination was begun. The procedure was framed from my perspective by the row of stockings, strings of lights, one side of a Christmas tree, and other decorations, and the morbid tableau was complete.
I assumed it was the husband/father and that became clear when the boy returned the next day to collect some things.
The lights are dark now across the way, and I have to say it cast quite a pall over the Holiday. I heard from another neighbor that it was a shotgun and now I can’t help thinking about the likely gruesome scene in the bathroom so near. Because our floor plans are identical I can’t avoid the visualization.
That’s enough.
I can’t imagine what the boy and the woman are going through. Christmas, at the very least, will become a painful anniversary.
Take care of each other and don’t let things go too far. I don’t want to hear screams like that ever again.
Oh, Ex that’s really… shitty. The poor family.