Between yesterday’s post and today’s, a lot of things happened and I will address them all. But yesterday I came face to face with the unanswered question of why any of this is happening to us?

Yesterday I went to a body shop to get a damage assessment of our car, which Maggie had keyed all the way around and then smashed a tail light. As the manager of the body shop circled my car, he stopped and looked me right in the eye: “What’d you do to her?”

I said that our neighbor was mentally ill and was going after us. That this was the most criminal of her attacks, although it wasn’t actually the one that bothered us most. He wasn’t convinced and I could see his point. We must have done something. It’s a perfectly good question, and I sputtered trying to answer it. “She’s crazy,” I said. “She’s in the mental ward right now.” That satisfied him somewhat.

He examined the car—two other guys came around—and I was gratified at their horror at the damage. The scratch crawled up and then down the hood—there was no way this could be explained away as an accident. I said that we weren’t going to fix it because two days before the keying happened, we had leased a new car and this was going to be traded in.

Why was I bothering? None of what Maggie had done to us made sense, and I was hot, and my mask kept slipping. I kept adjusting it (which Calvin would have been mad at me about) and I was the only person wearing one. To make things even weirder, the street we were on was very atypical for New York City, even for Queens. The body shop sits right below a unpaved, single-lane road that went over the top of a hill. Driving up this hill from either direction meant that you could not see anything coming at you; if another car was coming up the other side of the hill it was a guaranteed collision.

On top of the hill was the Steinway mansion, a castle-like structure occupying the highest point around, providing a view of the Steinway piano factory, the water treatment plant (which can be extremely smelly), and Rikers Island. And yet it was charming in a sewage-y, dangerous, overgrown way.

I pitched my next answer as he walked around the car. “Our neighbor used to work in TV and my husband works in TV and she’s obsessed with him having a job in TV. She’s always fixated on it.” And then I told him where we lived and his eyes lit up.

He asked me if she had a light green Camry. “Yes!” I said. “You know her?”

He did. It turned out she had corralled one of his employees when the guy was on his lunch hour and asked him to make her keys. She’d been locked out. The guy assumed she meant car keys, because he was wearing a t-shirt with the body shop logo, but she actually meant her house. “We don’t do house keys,” the guy said. “We do cars. And my guy was on lunch!”

“She drives up and down this street going a 100 miles an hour,” he continued. “Up and down.”

I could see the allure. It was a fun street plus it had the death-wish single-lane hill. “She’s drunk all day,” I told him. “You can call the cops too.”

I left with an extensive estimate of damage ($3k) for no charge and advice on what to do if she calls the building inspector on us. Many of the houses in Queens are not up to code. “You don’t have to let them in to your house unless they have a search warrant,” he said. “My parents have a crazy neighbor and he called the building department and my mom—she’s an old Greek lady, what can you do?—let them in and they had a bathroom in the basement. It cost them fifteen thousand dollars.”

Nice guy, but I couldn’t get the question out of my mind. Maybe it was too peaceful at home, since Maggie was still in the hospital. But what did we do to Maggie? Why does she hate us so much that she attacks us? Will we ever figure it out? Does it actually even matter? Will people who hear this story automatically think we did something to deserve it?