Thy Neighbor by Norah Vincent

my forearm, where a drop has fallen. There is nothing on my face.
    â€œI believed him,” I say, “because he was who he was. Because he was my dad.”
    Her eyes are pulling me, and I let them. Her hand has burrowed into mine.
    â€œHe took this huge fear and disgust and worry and he just made it disappear. And no one has ever done that again. No one ever could.”
    It is very late,
    And you are sleeping.
    I watch over you in the dark,
    So that nothing,
    Nothing can harm you.
    Precious girl.
    Perfect girl.
    Can you know how much I love you?
    Will you?
    When we meet at last, as lovers,
    Will you know me?
    In the shadowed light,
    Will you see me in my eyes,
    And yourself there, too?
    Will you take me as your savior?
    Your protector?
    Your father, man of dreams and
    Eye of God?
    Will you?
    And for now?
    For now,
    Will you believe in
    What you have not yet seen?
    Yes.
    I think you will.
    With faith and my words,
    Set down for you,
    What is between us will grow
    And live.
    Our secret.
    In mind.
    Sleep well,
    My dearest love.
    And I will come again,
    Tomorrow or the next day.
    Soon.
    One day I will wake you with kisses,
    And you will spend the day in my arms.

6
    Another note from Pinko today.
    It’s been a while since the first one. So long, actually, that until today I’d written that one off as a fluke, or a prank that Dave had lost interest in. I wouldn’t at all put it past him to have gotten a sample of my handwriting and found a way to Photoshop it to the purpose.
    The pink paper (a pointed choice, I think) has Dave’s sophomoric sense of humor written all over it. He’s always thought that a guy who wears anything but earth tones is a flamer, and ever since my college rose period, he’s never ceased giving me shit about my wardrobe. Not that I’ve stopped wearing the finer shades now and again, mind you. I wouldn’t let the jibes of the behemoth who shopeth at Big and Tall dampen my palette any.
    But, having given it more thought, I’ve pretty much scratched the prankster Dave theory, mostly because Dave couldn’t write a poem—not even a serial killer’s paean to suburbia as slaughterhouse—if his useless lifestyle depended on it.
    He could have cribbed the lines from somewhere, true, but I don’t think he’d even know where to look. Plagiarism does take some finesse with a search engine, which cuts Dave out of the running as surely as a rock-solid alibi. I mean, we’re talking about the guy who honestly believed for most of his adult life that the winged goddess of victory got her name from the sporting goods company, and not the other way around.
    I found the latest poem in the mailbox, again on pink paper, mixed in with all the other junk mail: the Valpak of supermarket coupons, a preapproved offer for a credit card from Sinkhole Bank, a J.Crew catalog (surprise, surprise), and a solicitation from
Taurus
magazine, telling me I’m only ten weeks (and five human growth hormone injections) away from my dream torso.
    This latest installment of the lost verses was hidden among all that pulp, and I might have missed it and tossed it, had it not been wrapped around the one and only envelope I search for every week.
    Yes, indeed. That would be the thin one with the perforated tabs and the parent company logo that looks more like a parking ticket than a paycheck, and practically shouts: “Cash me, ya broke fuck, and for the love of God, buy some toilet paper!”
    There it was. A measly four hundred and seventy-five bucks, and this—God, what can you call it?—this sick-making, pedophiliac’s scrawl. This is really not funny anymore. I don’t know what to think, unless this is somebody’s payback for my spying. Maybe one of the nabes found a camera and somehow traced it back to me. But who? Who would do this? Who could?
    There’s always Jonathan Katz, I suppose, but that’s a long shot. He and his wife, Dorris,