neighbors – Are We There Yet?

I never met Neibi Brito. And, despite passing it almost daily, I never saw her children playing in the yard of the house in which they lived. I would have noticed. It was a great house, cottage-like and quaint, a small-scale Cape Cod. Someone painted the exterior powder blue. Had I been consulted, powder blue would not have been among my first choices but, accented by white trim, it worked.

My subdivision sits just a block off the main thoroughfare which acts as a sort of suburban life-line. It’s the way I get to the market. It takes me to my son’s school. If I follow it one way, it takes me downtown. The other way takes me to the highway and, from there, I can go anywhere. My house sits on one side of this road and what’s left of Neibi Brito’s powder blue cottage sits, smoldering, on the other.

On Thursday evening, my friend’s teenage daughter reported seeing Neibi running around her front yard. She was screaming and waving her hands. One of her neighbors later explained she was screaming “My babies!”.

A construction worker, drawn by the commotion, stopped and went into action unloading a ladder from the back of his truck. At times like these, communication barriers are of no consequence. Desperation is a universal language.

Seeing the construction worker leaning his ladder against the side of the house, two nineteen-year-old neighbors offered their assistance. By now, flames licked the outer edges of the front window frame, and black smoke billowed towards a street filling with onlookers and distracted rush hour motorists.

The men worked as a team to remove three children from a second story bedroom, through a window, down the ladder, to the ground where it was confirmed that three-year-old Ivan Guevara had died. His four-year-old brother, Isaac Guevara, and eighteen-month-old sister, Stacy Brito, immediately began receiving treatment from paramedics who had arrived on the scene minutes before. They arrived alongside firemen, whose boots flattened the garden hose Ivan Gonzalez had grabbed in hopes of squelching the flames without the assistance of emergency personnel. The last thing Ivan Gonzalez wanted to see was men wearing boots and badges.

As the children were loaded into waiting ambulances, Ivan stood attentive, just outside the vehicle’s gaping back end. The right side of his face oozed anew as soon as he removed the soiled rag with which he dabbed at it. He was missing an eyebrow. He relayed, to the paramedics, his intention to follow the ambulance to the hospital. It was a request made by most fathers; fathers who made awkward attempts at smoothing hair while crooning their children safely inside the emergency room.

Ivan did neither.

Ivan never showed up.

Ivan wasn’t their father.

Ivan was their mother’s boyfriend.

Twenty-six-year-old Ivan Gonzalez was a chemist,

a chemist who cooked methamphetamines,

a chemist who cooked methamphetamines which were later sold by his girlfriend, their mother, twenty-two-year-old Neibi Brito.

And that explains a lot.

That explains the fire.

That explains the $193,000.00 stashed between two slabs of drywall which explains how, despite appearing unemployed, they paid rent for a home in an area that demands anywhere between $1, 200.00 and $700,000.00 per month.

That explains what one neighbor dubbed “unusual activity” at their home.

Tragic as it is, that even explains the “signs of child cruelty” reported in the local newspaper.

What it doesn’t explain is the question the rest of us keep asking, “How could THAT have happened HERE, in THIS neighborhood?”

The question is asked in shock at the realization that our triple digit incomes don’t provide immunity from a “certain element”, which is a good Southern girl’s way of describing illegal immigrants, criminals, drug dealers, child abusers, or any other unsavory individual, or group of individuals, from which we hope to protect ourselves by ensconcing our families inside gated communities, which offer the privilege of being able to touch the house next to yours by simply extending an arm from an upper level window.

Anyone who looked at Neibi Brito, particularly as she wheeled her 2011 Cadillac into her rented driveway, knew she didn’t belong. She was twenty-two. She had three children under the age of five. She lived with a man who was not her children’s father, and neither of them left the house everyday at the same time and returned at a different same time. There was no visible means of support.

I’m not here to point fingers. There’s plenty of blame to go around; from the real estate agent, to the car dealer, to the neighbor so eager to share her suspicions of “unusual activity” on the 6:00 news. Ivan Gonzalez had been arrested just days before as an accessory to a child stabbing case. We could go there. But we won’t.

Three children died, and it doesn’t matter whose fault it was. They’re still dead. What matters is that next time something doesn’t fit, we ask the questions, we be the “buttinsky”, we care.

Suppose a neighbor had shown up on Neibi Brito’s doorstep on moving day? Suppose she carried a basket of muffins, and when Neibi answered the bell, she handed her the muffins and took time to speak to each of the three children pulling at Neibi’s legs? What if she came back, with her daughter in tow, the next day? What if she offered to take the children for a walk, while Neibi had some much needed alone time?

Would a drug dealer have set up a meth lab in Gladys Kravitz’s neighborhood?

Sometimes caring really is a matter of life and death.

They were garage smokers. We could gauge when they woke and what time of night they went to bed by the rise and fall of the garage door.

Joe spent lots of time sitting in a kitchen chair just inside the door. It was an older chair, probably maple, judging by the color of the wood and the half-moon style so popular thirty years ago. Next to the chair sat a tall, gray file cabinet of the same era. I always wondered what was in that cabinet. I wondered if it was happenstance, or the result of a purpose-filled decision that the cabinet was in easy reach of the chair in which Joe spent so much of his time.

I never saw him open the cabinet, but he did other things in that chair. He smoked, of course. Sometimes I saw him raise a beer with his left arm. He’d sacrificed his right to Vietnam. It was there, but half the size of the “good” one. Contracted muscles had rendered his hand useless. Sometimes it twitched when he talked

He talked in that chair, mostly to my son, and mostly about cars; specifically, the 1985 Oldsmobile Cutlass. They both drove one. Josh built his from the ground up, painted it silver, and referred to it as “Girl”. Joe’s was navy blue. Both were pristine.

Sometimes, he had his hair cut in that chair. He sat with a white towel draped over his bony shoulders and smoked with his good arm while Brenda, his wife, sheared him using electric hair clippers. She finished before he did. There wasn’t much to cut.

While spring air still carried winter’s bite, Joe sat several small, plastic greenhouses just outside the garage in the morning sun. He took them inside at night, repeating this ritual for weeks until the ground had warmed enough to plant. His gardens always flourished. Mine paled in comparison.

Their mowers woke me on Saturdays. Joe rode. Brenda pushed. Sometimes they wore pith helmets.

On Sundays, sometime after lunch, they emerged from the open garage carrying sudsy buckets. Hoses were unwound. Thus began a laborious process that entailed spraying water followed by endless circles made by soapy white towels. They used real chamois to dry their cars before opening all four doors to admit the vacuum. Slamming car doors punctuated our dinner conversation before they emptied their buckets on the lawn.

Brenda filled buckets with bleach water. Steam enveloped her hand as she carried a bucket across the lawn towards a park bench that sat between a large pot of silk sunflowers and a birdhouse on a tall, white pole. Once a month she dusted the garden hose with a feather duster, while Joe struggled, one-handed, to control the telescoping pole he used to dust the rafters. She mopped, first the front porch, and then the garage.

Their ritual went unbroken. No visitors interrupted their dusting. They never came home from a long vacation to find their lawn had gone to seed. They didn’t sully their freshly scrubbed front door with a Christmas wreath or mar the freshly mopped porch with a pumpkin. Nothing interfered with their quest for extreme cleanliness, not even Joe’s illness.

Sometimes, as he sat in his chair, a clear, plastic bag of urine peaked out beneath the hem of his khaki shorts.

The procession of cars in a driveway blown clear of autumn debris could mean only one thing. The emergence from the garage of a portly woman wearing a black picture hat over an unflattering black dress left no doubt. An older man joined her. They stood just to the left of the open garage, in front of a carefully maintained flower bed, and waited. Brenda emerged, also in black, and the three left in one car.

Two days later, Joe’s bedroom sat in a pile in front of the open garage. A large, red Salvation Army truck backed up the driveway, and as fast as the two young men loaded items onto the truck, Brenda brought more. Joe’s chair was the last piece loaded.

The Cutlass disappeared, as did Brenda’s Buick. Her shiny new Civic took up very little room inside the empty garage through which an assortment of craftsmen beat a path to Brenda’s door. Custom cabinet makers were followed by electricians who gave way to plumbers who were supplanted by painters who were replaced by roofers.

I watched as she purged him. Immediately, methodically, purposefully, Brenda removed every trace of Joe from her life.

And, the garage door rarely opens.

Category: neighbors

>They’re Still Dead

>Garaged