Jane Harrison agrees. “What I learned from Maple Street is that you can do your best, try your hardest, prep your children for the brightest possible future, and then a monster buys the house next door and ruins everything. The day he moved in, I knew. I could see it in his eyes. Honestly, I know he’s long gone, but those eyes haunt me still.”
“We weren’t crazy,” says Marco Ponti. “We were protecting our own. I only wish we’d done more, sooner.”
Indeed, many of the Maple Street children have failed to thrive. The Ponti boys are in jail. Sarah Kaur ran away from home at twelve. Her older brother Sam Singh dropped out of soccer upon returning to school that fall, though he was expected to join the varsity team. He’s one of many children on the block who never went to college—a rarity for Garden City during that time. Finally, it’s been well publicized that FJ Schroeder’s best friend, Adam Harrison, became a heroin addict. What’s less widely known is that his drug use started that summer.
Given these outcomes, it’s no great leap to theorize that the children were traumatized. My contemporaries posit that the Maple Street murders caused irreparable damage. The children blame themselves for spreading a false narrative about the Wilde family, kindling Rhea’s madness.
But does this theory hold water? The evidence of Arlo’s innocence has never been conclusive. It’s entirely possible that his actions are what haunt the survivors of the Maple Street Massacre. They’re traumatized because, even more than a decade later, they’re too ashamed to reveal what he did to them.
It’s time we reexamine, giving credit where it’s due. In putting a stop to the Wildes, the people of Maple Street were heroes.
120 Maple Street
Monday, July 26
Peter Benchley was out of practice placing calls. He fumbled a few times, therapy mirrors reflecting his movements like silent ghosts.
“Hello? Something’s happening on my block!”
Outside, neighbors with anonymous faces assembled in front of the Wilde house. The moonlight played against their makeshift disguises; a luminescence that was both absorptive and reflective, emitting hues in blue and red. It wasn’t the craziest thing he’d ever seen. In Iraq, a kid with an IED had taken out his commanding officer while civilians watched through broken windows. Some of them had cheered. So yeah, he’d seen some crazy shit, which was how he knew what crazy shit looked like.
“Can you hear me? Send a car to Maple Street.” A bad connection. Too much static. Peter hung up and tried again.
Outside, the moonlight stretched the neighbors’ silhouettes. A slender man with broad shoulders took the lead. A small woman walking slowly, as if in pain, came up beside him. The man wound his arm. Released something heavy in a high arc—
Clink!
Glass broke.
Someone inside the house cried out.
“Help!” Peter panted into the phone.
Crackle.
Crossed signals. All he could hear was Arlo’s static-riddled song: You nod. It doesn’t mean “come in.” He hung up. Tried again.
The woman—it had to be Rhea Schroeder—handed the tall man another piece of ammunition. He wound his arm.
“They’re trying to kill someone!” Peter shouted into his phone, but there wasn’t any connection. He hoisted himself and leaned out. Even as he shouted, he wondered if this was real, or if he’d finally lost the plot. Fifteen years living in his parents’ house, stapled to an Oxy habit that rendered the waking and the sleeping into the same dreamlike chimera.
“I see you, FJ! I see you and I called the cops!” he screamed.
The kid had already released the second brick. Another crash, another cry from inside the house. A pain cry.
In eerie near-unison, the neighbors turned. Their faces reflected the earth and the sky and the houses ahead of them, and he knew that if he got close he would see his distorted self, too. “I see you! I see every one of you!” he bellowed.
Like the night the sinkhole appeared, the people of Maple Street disbursed. Some jogged for their houses, some hid behind hedges. Some, like Rhea Schroeder (who limped just slightly), walked slowly and steadily back toward home. A leisurely pace. Infuriatingly fearless.
Lights went on in the Wilde house.
Then came another panicked yelp, this time from a child in there.
Peter rushed past his therapy mirrors and rolled out to the hall. Considered waking his parents, who slept deep, but they got confused at night. Taking the time to explain would only slow him down. He hoisted himself and went down, down, down the chairlift.
His all-terrain chair waited at the bottom of the stairs. The one he’d saved up his disability for. He hurried. Got in, reached to unlock the front door. Then out and down the ramp to the sidewalk.
As he rolled, he felt eyes. They watched from houses. The gape out there, surrounded by reflective orange cones, seemed also to watch. It felt like being in-country. Like Iraq.