Annie Perley paused and reddened slightly. Another correction from the off-site handler. There was something unsavory to discuss, Lena sensed. Presumably, the Fierce Walker had not knocked on the door to talk about Lena’s book selections and lack of commitment to exercise.
“Can I help you with something, Annie?” Lena said.
“No, no, I’m just here because. Well”—Annie Perley mashed her lips together for a moment, summoning courage to deliver unwelcome news—“there’s a penis on your mailbox.”
It sounded physically impossible, but Lena found herself following Annie across the driveway. There was something so resolute and directed about her.
At the mailbox, Annie raised her eyebrows grimly. Voilà.
Thick lines of aerosol black paint covered Lena’s custom copper mailbox. “I think it’s a face?” Lena said. “With a really long nose?”
Annie shook her head and tapped her fingernail against the copper. There was a decisive ping.
“Only one hole,” she said.
“Oh.” Lena frowned. As far as uninvited penises went, it had a disarmingly cheerful innocence. “It’s kind of friendly-looking.”
“It’s those big round puppy eyes,” Annie said with a sigh, as though the penis was just being manipulative and couldn’t be trusted.
Other properties had been hit, too. Lena, Annie explained—again with that intense eye contact—should not take it personally. Lena was about to respond that of course she didn’t take it personally, but then she realized that she did. The universe had taken a while to deliver a mailbox penis to Lena, but now that it had, her only question was: Why the delay?
“I can help you try to get it off,” Annie offered. She smacked her forehead as the double meaning hit her. “Sorry. I just meant—what I’m trying to say is I can help you remove it.”
Annie’s laugh was a wave of nervous high-pitched giggles and her cheeks reddened to a lovely deep pink. Years ago, Lena, who had been quite social (mind-bogglingly social! flitting around, hosting parties, fiddling, fiddling, fiddling while Rome burned) would have identified this warm magnet pull toward Annie Perley and thought: new friend.
She would have invited Annie to her next party, deposited her in a conversation with someone fun and lively, offered a gougère just out of the oven, fragrant and steaming.
Everyone had always gone crazy for Lena’s gougères and she had become increasingly nutty about getting them perfect. You’re missing the party, Tim would accuse.
And what had Gary Neary joked that night? The gorgeous gougères. Lena had giggled like it was high comedy, just like Annie Perley was doing now.
This was the problem with meeting new people: they dredged up old recollections, even when they didn’t mean to. Lena had never been able to conclusively destroy the unwelcome memories, but her occasional therapist Dr. Friendly had taught her a visualization process—flatten the memory like a trash compactor would, note its diminishment, move on.
She thought desperately of five minutes in the future when Annie would be gone and Lena could curl up on her couch with Odile.
But Annie, flushed and still hopelessly giggling at the wordplay, didn’t appear to be going anywhere. She clutched Lena’s arm and wiped her eyes and bent over and her sunglasses clattered down from the front of her shirt to the lawn, which only intensified Annie’s laughter.
Lena regarded the penis’s goofy face. It was funny. And so was Annie, doubled over with laughter, grasping helplessly onto the grass for her sunglasses. If Annie’s chortles were fizzy champagne, Lena’s were a vintage car engine sputtering a bit before roaring to life.
A voice floated up from somewhere deep within Lena. “Would you like to come in for coffee, Annie?”
Annie wiped her eyes with the back of her wrists. The invitation hovered between them like a balloon that Lena wished she could pop.
She’d been too forward, hadn’t she? Lena was so out of practice, but the way Annie gravely studied Lena’s house behind them—as if Lena had proposed becoming roommates instead of a warm beverage—wasn’t right either.
“I’m due at the school by ten thirty,” Annie said. “But for a little while, why not?”
Lena thought that Annie sounded disappointed in her own response, as if she had at her fingertips a million reasons why not, but had for some reason been powerless to use them.
CHAPTER THREE
“This is total crap,” Paul said.
Jen’s mouth had been open in formation of an apology to Principal Dutton, to Harper, to the entire school community for what Abe had done.
She shut it. Apparently, they were taking a different approach.
Paul sat next to her at the small conference table in Dutton’s office. A craggy blue vein pulsed at his temple. Across from them, Dutton blinked his watery gray eyes. White flakes covered the shoulders of his navy sport coat and Jen felt an automatic stab of embarrassment for him.
No! Dutton was the enemy. A curse on him: dandruff in perpetuity.
“Without any real witnesses, how do we even know that Abe stabbed this kid,” Paul said. “You just said the teacher—”
“Mr. Marley,” Jen said quietly.
“Mr. Marley.” Paul spat out the name, which Mr. Marley deserved. Another enemy, he was lazy and tired and, according to Abe, completely oblivious of the cruel middle school shenanigans occurring on the daily under his watch. Art period was like Lord of the Flies at peak pig-killing hour. “Mr. Marley admitted he didn’t see any of it, so we’re relying on the word of that girl, who is essentially Harper French’s henchman—”
“Veronica,” Jen added.
She always got a jealous thrill when Paul went on the attack in these Abe meetings. Jen either dissolved in tears, which was of no help to Abe, or slipped into Girl Friday mode, like now, helpfully supplying the details.
At two in the morning, however, Jen would jolt awake with righteous anger and imagine doing a series of roundhouse kicks straight to Dutton’s solar plexus until he begged for mercy.
(No wonder Abe had stabbed someone. So much repressed anger in his DNA.)
“Veronica and Harper have been taunting Abe for months,” Paul said, “so don’t give me this bullshit about your zero-tolerance policy.”
Jen folded her arms over her chest. Yeah: what he said.
There was a reason Paul had climbed so high up the corporate ladder: the man knew how to brawl, facts be damned.
Dutton was no match. He was pasty and crumbly, and his gaze skipped and dipped across the room.
“You seem to be stuck on the issue of if the stabbing happened,” Dutton said.
Jen had misjudged. His voice was not crumbly at all. It was firm and calm.
“Abe admitted it. His report was nearly identical to Harper’s: they were both at the art-supply table and Harper took the beads that Abe was reaching for—well, Abe says he already had them in hand, but even taking him at his word, I think we can all agree that stabbing a classmate with an X-Acto knife is hardly an acceptable reaction.”
He looked between Jen and Paul with gentle disappointment. “And I’m sure you’re not suggesting that Foothill’s zero-tolerance policy—which your entire family signed—is inapplicable to a stabbing?”
Paul’s left shoulder jerked in a half shrug.
Last fall, when the three of them had sat around this same table and talked, harmoniously, about the importance of safe spaces, Jen and Paul had been thrilled to hear about the zero-tolerance policy.
(Why had she been thrilled? Although many emotions had coursed through Jen this morning, shock was not one.)
Right now, she felt above emotion, weightless and drifty and almost bored by Dutton’s enumeration of Abe’s struggles during his short tenure at Foothills: running out of class, his lack of social engagement, ditto academic engagement, such a shame for a boy who tested so high, not to mention the destruction of the trash can in the boys’ bathroom last spring.
Any of those, and certainly the trash
can incident, Dutton pointed out, would have been enough to trigger the zero-tolerance policy.
Jen’s floating feeling intensified into a case of the spins. She gripped Paul’s knee and he placed his hand over hers, which helped to ground her for a moment.
If she shut off a part of her brain and listened to Dutton, it did seem logical that stabbing a child with an X-Acto knife would be grounds for expulsion, didn’t it?
Yes!
No!
Jen had lost the ability to judge.
What was this dizziness? Was Jen having a stroke? And if she were, would the school rescind Abe’s expulsion? Jen pictured Dutton standing over her, grave-faced and apologizing.
A stroke might be worth it if it shut up Dutton, who was still going: Abe’s lack of affect, the volatile moods. The quicksilver friendships (such poetry, Dutton!). We don’t know, Dutton was saying, what will set Abe off and his reactions to things are so—he paused to access the right word.
Violent, Jen thought, but Dutton settled on out-of-proportion.
Abe was growing into the type of person Dr. Scofield had warned her about.
(Dr. Scofield? Where had that come from?)
Jen and Paul had spent an hour tops with the man, nearly a decade before. They’d cycled through so many experts that year: neuropsychologists and developmental pediatricians and therapists. Every single one had slapped on a different diagnosis.
Scofield had been the worst. He had been a child himself, barely out of grad school, with slicked-back hair and sockless loafers and no bedside manner. Jen had spent half of the meeting mesmerized by the thick caterpillar hairs around his ankles. Something (masochism?) had made Jen keep his business card, though, place it in the top drawer of her bureau, slipped within the socks.
She’d purged so many papers before they’d moved from California last year but not Scofield’s card, so don’t go playing all coy, Jen, about why the name “Scofield” might pop into your head after Abe has stabbed a classmate.
Not just any classmate, perfect little Harper French, who had once left a Popsicle on Jen’s white chenille couch. It had melted, orange and sticky, into the middle of a cushion, and Jen had pretended she didn’t care. “It’s just a thing, sweetie,” she’d said with a laugh. “An object. My fault for buying white.”
There was a knock on the door. Mr. Marley appeared, as low-energy as ever, in one of his ubiquitous homemade tie-dyed shirts.
“Abe has cleaned out his locker,” he said. “Not much in there.”
Abe stood hunch-shouldered right outside the doorway, clutching the almost-empty cardboard box. He looked pale and uncertain and ah, yes, here came the prick of tears.
So much for seventh grade. If Jen ever got a do-over in life, she might pick that moment with the Popsicle and the couch, and scream obscenities at Harper French until her voice was raw.
She was aware people would disapprove of this: you weren’t supposed to hold a grudge against a child. But it was basic animal instinct: when a Canada goose sensed a threat to her gosling, she attacked.
Jen stood up, did not apologize for the indelicate screech of her chair scraping the linoleum. She walked over to Abe and put her arm protectively around his shoulder, which felt bony and delicate.
“We’re leaving,” she said.
No one dared say one word as she, Abe, and Paul brushed past Dutton and Mr. Marley. They strode out of the office and down the hall, heads held high. For a moment, as they walked out of the front doors into the cloudless sunny day, Jen tasted triumph.
Jen and Paul had arrived separately and even their brief logistical conversation in the parking lot—I’ll take Abe, meet you at home—didn’t puncture the mood.
She and Abe walked to the car in silence, arms linked. She peeled out of the visitors’ spot like a renegade. Hasta la vista, suckers! To make Abe smile, she punched the gas and careened too quickly down the road from the school.
It was when Jen braked for the stop sign that the reality of Abe’s expulsion hit.
What on earth now?
Homeschooling, she supposed.
Given Paul’s travel schedule, the logistics would fall on Jen. When they’d moved from California, she had not minded giving up her teaching job. Jen had dropped so many balls in the process of juggling Abe’s needs with her schedule, and she’d always felt like she was neglecting someone or something.
But that didn’t mean she was ending her career. A few months ago, Jen had received a small grant from the Mellon Kramer Fund to research a book on ethology, the study of animal behavior under natural conditions.
With a little focus and attention, the project could be incredibly fulfilling, and Jen had been relying on the uninterrupted hours when Abe was at school.
And now?
“Well,” Abe said. “That was an eventful morning.”
With the morning light streaming behind him through the car window, he looked like an angel.
Jen and Paul were each rather ordinary-looking, but somehow Jen’s round features and Paul’s sharp angles had come together to create in Abe one physically stunning person. Even when he was an infant, Jen had marveled at those rosebud lips, that symmetrical bone structure, those sharp-edged cheekbones—who knew a baby could even have cheekbones—her son was a beauty! The world’s secret doors would open, people would warm to him, want to give him the benefit of the doubt.
Almost immediately after came the worries: But life comes so easily for the beautiful; what if he never develops inner strength or grit? And will beauty make him more vulnerable to pedophiles?
New parents were the most clueless people in the whole wide world.
Abe’s stunning looks had turned out to be the least remarkable thing about him. And if Jen had believed beauty mattered before, now she knew better. It was the unseen stuff: character, adaptability, resolve, the ability to connect with others. You were born with those buffers. Or you weren’t and even the most patient and committed parent (Jen was not) couldn’t teach them.
Jen knew exactly why she’d kept Scofield’s card. He had colonized her brain with five little words, planted a Big Red Flag right there in her amygdala.
Abe had turned toward the window and Jen watched his profile, the line of his chiseled jaw under his warm amber skin. He’d refused a summer haircut and his long swoopy bangs made him look like a pop star.
Jen wished there was a way to know for certain what he was thinking.
“Even if Harper was being awful,” she said, “hurting her—violence—is never the answer.”
Abe nodded.
“It could have been really, really bad, Abe.”
Abe’s dark eyes showed consternation and he raked his fingers through those boy-band bangs.
What had concerned Scofield, the “Big Red Flag,” hadn’t been the hamster’s injuries. Kids were clumsy and impulsive, he said, they made mistakes. It was that after he’d hurt the rodent, Abe had showed a startling lack of remorse.
And that had been only a rodent.
“You could have permanently damaged Harper’s arm,” Jen said. Her voice was wobbly as she realized the truth of this. “Severed a nerve or an artery.”
Abe’s leg jiggled up and down until Jen placed a flattened palm on his knee. He turned back to face her.
“Harper French,” he said finally, his voice certain, “pretty much got what she deserved.”
And then Abe gave Jen the tiniest of tiny smiles, so minuscule that she could almost pretend to have missed it.
CHAPTER FOUR
“The internet tells us”—Annie glanced at her phone screen—“that it’s nearly impossible to remove paint from copper.”
“How helpful,” Lena said from the kitchen.
Based on all of the clattering and opened cabinets, Annie suspected something complicated was in the works.
She was perched tentatively on Lena’s giant, cream-colored L-shaped sofa. The house still screamed wealth: Annie’s palms rested on soft suede cushions. Dramatic vei
ns zigged and zagged through the marble kitchen. The art on the walls was colorful and bold and unexpected, like it belonged in a museum.
Behind Annie was a floor-to-ceiling bookcase, done in a gorgeous light-grained wood. On almost every shelf, planted among the book spines was at least one framed photograph of Rachel Meeker. Annie desperately wanted to turn around and gawk at them. Instead, she forced herself off the couch and walked over to the windows to check on Yellow, who’d been quarantined on Lena’s lawn.
Yellow sniffed Lena’s rosebushes in a familiar way that made Annie silently plead with the dog to not soil them, or the grass, which was lush and entirely free from brown patches. Even now, in late summer, Lena probably had the funds to water the entire thing all night, every night.
She looked out to the north, where Highway Five snaked through the valley like a concrete river. Annie remembered how years before, at the swim-team party, some of the kids had attempted to identify the roofs of their houses in the valley below.
“Paint thinner might work,” Lena said as she popped up from behind one of the kitchen islands. “I don’t think I have any, though.”
“I’ll check our garage,” Annie said. “Are you sure I can’t help you out back there?”
“Almost done.” Lena was using kitchen shears to snip mint leaves off their stems. She smiled politely. “You said you’re due at the school?”
“Sandstone K-8. I work three and a half days a week as a counselor, you know, socio-emotional stuff or disciplinary problems. If there’s a trauma in the family—”
It was horrible timing, but Annie couldn’t stop herself from just then glancing at a photo of Rachel. The girl’s large serious dark eyes were like a beacon, poor thing, and oh my goodness, had Lena caught Annie staring?
“What a great book selection,” Annie said quickly.
“I used to have a separate library upstairs,” Lena said, “but I was always grabbing books to read in here and stacking them all around and I finally realized, why not just make a library wall?”
Annie suppressed a smile. Why not indeed?
The Neighbor's Secret Page 2
