Robin Dionne is a reader and writer living in Rhode Island.
Robin Dionne is a reader and writer living in Rhode Island.
Several years ago, I was on the board of a national non-profit organization, and they would occasionally fly me out for meetings and events. I liked to extend my stay by a few days and turn the trip into a tiny vacation away from tiny Rhode Island. It was never anywhere great, but someone else was paying, and I took what I could get.
Early one summer, they offered me a trip to Michigan to join the rest of the board for the yearly conference. I boarded a six am flight out of T.F. Green, and by the time I landed in the country’s saddest city (sorry, Detroit), I had two voicemails.
The first voicemail was from my sort-of boyfriend at the time. We’ll call him Justin, because that’s his actual name and I have absolutely no reason to protect his identity. You’ll agree with me by the end of this story. We had been involved off and on for years, with varying degrees of seriousness. In my mind, it was a summer fling that I had simply neglected to cancel once the leaves started falling. Sheer laziness on my part. In his mind – it was love. Big, serious, love. It wasn’t love, but he was younger than me, and full of fun ideas – things I would never think to do on my own. “Let’s rent a boat! Let’s go fishing at midnight! Let’s follow the train tracks and climb to the roof of an abandoned building and camp out!” My friends and roommates, generous people that they are, did not ask many questions. They should have asked questions.
To give you a little background, the last time I traveled, it was in the middle of a long dark Rhode Island winter. I went south, and Justin stayed behind, probably because I didn’t invite him. Unbeknownst to me, he had invited a dozen friends to build a half-pipe out of snow in my backyard during a blizzard. Drunk and enthusiastic, they shoveled until it was piled to the top of my shed - a good 12-15 feet. The voicemail he left me during that vacation informed me that one of his friends had fallen off the roof on a children’s toy snowboard from Benny’s, was in the hospital and was planning to sue my homeowner’s insurance. When the snow melted in spring, I found myself picking up neon pink plastic snowboard shards and about a hundred Gansett cans. So, you can imagine my hesitation to communicate with him when he wasn’t in my direct line of vision. His voicemail this time said, “Hey, it’s me! Where’s the 100-foot garden hose, and do we have an extra house key? Call me back as soon as you can!” He didn’t disconnect the call before putting the phone down, and I heard a loud banging noise before it cut off. It sounded like hammering. This was not a cause for concern. This was everyday life with Justin.
The second voicemail was from a number I did not recognize. It was my next-door neighbor, a lovely man I now consider a friend. At the time, we were basically strangers, and he had found my phone number by googling me. He said, “Hi Robin- I’m calling from next door – the blue house. We’re kind of worried and there’s a LOT of noise over there. Can you give me a call back?” This…was cause for concern. My revolving door of musician roommates and regular weekday house parties had not endeared me to the rest of the street. The neighbors were real adults, with real jobs – a state trooper, a Johnston narcotics officer who brought the K9 unit home each night, a homeland security agent – and they were so far removed from the kind of living taking place over at #33. I had recently started my own real job, semi-normal people had moved in with me, and I was committed to cleaning up our reputation and fitting into our quiet surroundings.
At this point, I should tell you that I owned this home and though I did have roommates, Justin was not one of them. We didn’t technically live together, but he was an opportunist and spent a lot of time there, watching my dog and eating my food when I was traveling. He was chronically unemployed (I know, I know) and always involved in some sort of scheme. Meanwhile, I was starry-eyed, in love with my work and the fact that I was traveling to draft legislative policy for the National Organization for Women. Obviously, we were the perfect match, one of those couples that you can just tell is going to make it.
After listening to the voicemail, I spent several minutes sitting alone in an airport bar – worrying about who I should call first. I was afraid to talk to my neighbors – we had not had a real conversation in the five years since I moved in. I was afraid to call Justin, because I knew I would not be able to handle whatever it was that I was about to hear. So I did the responsible thing – I drank a second overpriced airport whiskey and called a cab to bring me to my fancy hotel for a nap.
An hour later, I woke up to a missed call – my neighbor again. Fearing the worst, I played the message. He said, ‘I’m sorry; I didn’t realize you were away. We went over and talked to your…boyfriend? Is that your boyfriend? I just wish you had let us know about the tree house in advance so we could talk about it – its overlooking our pool and it is larger than we would like it to be. And the guy you hired to build it is pretty suspicious looking. If we hadn’t talked to Justin, we would have called the cops.”
Questioning every decision I had ever made, I called Justin back. “Hey girl! How’s Detroit? What’s with your neighbors? They’re mad about the tree house.”
“What tree house? WHAT tree house, Justin?”
“The one you said Bill could live in!”
I hung up. I had definitely not said that Bill could live in a tree house in my yard, because I did not even know anyone named Bill.
I called my roommate, Danny, to get the real story. Justin’s version of anything was usually a winding tale, full of holes and half-truths. Danny worked third-shift, and when he came home daily at dawn; he did not go to sleep. He joined his World of Warcraft guild online for early morning raids. His window overlooked the street, and he had heard everything. Danny said he thought it was kind of weird, but he assumed I had agreed to it and he wasn’t about to leave his game to find out. World of Warcraft is serious. His inclination to ignore the situation made sense, because he despised Justin. Danny and I had been friends and lived together for years, and we had agreed to deal with the situation by Danny pretending that Justin did not exist. He told me that before my flight had even left Providence, a cracked up beater of a van appeared out front, with a delivery of rusty nails and free scrap wood, mostly pallets. The driver, Bill, was a mutual friend’s father; newly released from prison, where he had been serving time for a series of violent crimes and robberies – and he fully intended to spend his summer relaxing in a two-story tree house with a water view. The garden hose was for an outdoor shower. The spare house key was in case he got too hot at night and wanted to come inside. Of course.
I flew home a day early, apologized to my neighbors, and spent a week dismantling the splintery Airbnb in my oak tree. My neighbor recently asked me – “Whatever happened to that guy who wore all black that you used to date, the one who set up the drum set in the driveway? Lord Death, we called him.”
Justin? He met a stripper with a trust fund and moved to Sacramento.
Originally written and read for Stranger Stories PVD on November 21, 2019
for bjm