The Neighbor's Secret

by L. Alison Heller

  Ah, to be budget-free. You know how the four of us are always jockeying for a turn in the shower, she could blithely ask Mike, why not just add another bathroom?

  Based on the familiar titles on the shelves, Lena’s tastes, like Annie’s, leaned toward historical fiction. Annie didn’t know the particulars of Lena’s days—she was toned and her skin glowed—so obviously she hadn’t gone full-on Miss Havisham, but according to Harriet Nessel, who had lived in Cottonwood Estates forever, Lena had been very in-the-mix before the accident.

  That part, at least, wasn’t Annie’s fault. People were going to react to tragedy however they reacted.

  Annie snuck another peek at Rachel Meeker, who looked right through her. If Annie moved across the room, those round accusing eyes would probably follow wherever she went.

  “I think you’re my reading soul mate,” Annie said.

  “I don’t know what I’d do without books,” Lena said. Her voice, quiet and a little sad, made something pulse quickly in Annie’s heart.

  “Readers are the best people,” Annie said. “Think about it: our hobby is putting ourselves in someone else’s shoes.”

  “I suppose.”

  “My friend Deb always says that book clubs are the gold standard of humanity—whoa.” Annie clapped her hands together as Lena set down the tray on the coffee table. “How lovely is this?”

  Lena had served a platter of tiny round tea cakes, decorated with the sprigs of mint. Two porcelain cups on saucers sat next to a creamer and a precious little sugar bowl with miniature silver tongs for the lumps.

  All this fuss for a neighbor announcing your mailbox had been graffitied? And who had tea cakes just sitting around like this? Rachel’s devastated eyes agreed with Annie that yes, it was exactly as sad and lonely as it seemed.

  Go on, Rachel said, you owe us.

  “Lena,” Annie said brightly as Lena sat down and elegantly crossed one leg over the other. “Speaking of how wonderful readers are, do you know about Cottonwood’s book club?”

  Lena uncrossed her legs, leaned slightly backward. “I’ve seen the emails.”

  “There’s a meeting tonight. You should come—”

  “No,” Lena said simply. “I don’t think book club is for me.”

  Lena caught Annie’s glance at Rachel’s photo. Her brow knit together for a split second.

  “You want to know something funny?” Annie said quickly. “I was on Rachel’s swim team and came to a team dinner here. You’re how I learned about this neighborhood.”

  “What a coincidence.” Lena managed a tight Mona Lisa smile that caused Annie’s insides to feel as pressurized as a shaken soda can. “Isn’t life funny?”

  Annie took a small bite of a tea cake. It had an almond flavor, which had never been her favorite, but she forced herself to chew and swallow. The pieces tumbled down her throat like a rockslide.

  “Yes,” she said. “It is.”

  * * *

  From the craft room window, Lena watched Annie walk-run down the hill with the homely dog, a jaunty bounce in their steps.

  I was on Rachel’s swim team.

  She’d said it so casually.

  A tiny little tremor of a phrase that caused a tsunami of memories: the should I quit swim team phases when Lena had pushed Rachel through, the obsessed years when Rachel had been so consumed that Lena wondered if quitting might have been healthier, how Lena’s fingers had been constantly on fire with the prickly mint of muscle balm for Rachel’s left persnickety shoulder or the sting of oranges sliced for meets, how Rachel’s suits would commandeer the mudroom sink, drifting and submerged like octopi.

  The night Tim died, summer practices had just started up again.

  Rachel came home late for the Meekers’ party, dripped water on the kitchen floor, idly reached out a damp hand to snatch a cube of cheese from the board, as if she had all the time in the world.

  “Are you working the party,” Lena had snapped, “or watering it?”

  Back then, Lena had been worried that Rachel was turning out spoiled, with an underdeveloped sense of personal responsibility. They had been fighting for weeks about whether Rachel, who had just turned sixteen, deserved a brand-new car. The decision felt life-or-death, like Lena was waging a battle for Rachel’s very soul.

  What was that elementary school corrective for when the children got bossy?

  Worry about your own soul, Lena.

  Lena would now give anything in the world to erase that imperious comment—are you working the party or watering it—and replace it with anything Rachel’s heart desired.

  Rachel had returned the cheese cube to the tray, gone upstairs, emerged not long after in that white flowered dress that she would never wear again, her hair slicked into a messy wet braid.

  Maybe Lena’s barb had rolled off Rachel’s back. Or maybe she had decided to save it up as ammunition for some future argument about the car that never got to happen. She had silently finished setting up the food table without complaint, and then—

  Lena forced herself to flatten the memory like it was an empty cardboard box.

  She certainly didn’t want to think about what happened after that.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  It was Abe who remembered.

  “Don’t you have book club tonight?” he asked Jen in a half shout. His headphones were on.

  “I’ll skip.”

  “What?”

  Jen tapped her ear and he pushed off the right earpiece.

  “I’ll stay home with you guys,” she said.

  In the hours since the expulsion, the three of them had been cocooned in the den. Paul worked, Jen pretended to, and Abe had played a loud and violent game of Foxhole, his favorite multiplayer video game.

  All games of Foxhole were loud and violent, but they were also, Jen and Paul told themselves, extremely interactive and thus not a total wash. Going forward, could Foxhole count as PE?

  “I’m fine,” Abe said. “Holla123 says being homeschooled is actually kind of fun.”

  “Go to book club,” Paul said to Jen.

  “Yeah, go,” Abe said, “it’s your one thing, Mom.”

  Jen trotted out her book club membership when she wanted to appear normal. Jen’s mother fretting aloud (again) about how Jen didn’t have a support system since the move? I’ve met some lovely women at book club, Mom!

  Paul breezing in from a business trip with stories of the outside world and pausing to ask gently if Jen talked to anyone, anyone at all while he was gone, about something other than Abe?

  Book club! Everything’s fine, nothing to see here.

  The actual club discussions were fine if a little stale, ditto the reading selections, which were, truth be told, a little on the commercial side for Jen’s tastes, but it was worth her while to attend. Someone in the group had found out that Jen had a Ph.D. and the way they all now looked to Jen for opinions and subtexts?

  She pretended not to need the attention, but she soaked it up, a desperate parading peacock.

  At one of last year’s meetings, she’d gotten loose-tongued tipsy, and tried to come clean to Harriet Nessel. My degree is in organizational psychology, Jen had lectured, not literature.

  “I know,” Harriet said. “You study animals now.”

  “I study the people who study the animals,” Jen had admitted. “It couldn’t be farther from popular fiction.”

  “I guess that depends on your thoughts about the animal/human divide,” Harriet said drolly. “Has so-called civilization removed us as much as we like to think? Food for thought, dear, food for thought.”

  Point: Harriet.

  (Harriet had probably been tipsy, too. The drinks at book club were always shockingly strong.)

  Jen realized that she probably missed teaching more than she had admitted to herself, and even if it wasn’t the cure-all she pretended it was, for the time being, the Cottonwood Book Club was the closest she was going to get to an exchange of ideas.

  Abe and Paul w
ere right. She should go. Jen rushed upstairs to grab a sweater and put on earrings, because the other women always looked so put-together and even though Jen pretended she didn’t care, obviously she did on some deep level—and then, as she stood in front of her bureau, Jen’s hand extended like some horror movie claw to reach into the sock drawer, palm Dr. Scofield’s business card, and slip it into the back pocket of her jeans.

  By the time Jen got to Harriet Nessel’s house, a long line of cars extended far down the street. She pulled behind a dark SUV. Its door opened and Priya Jensen, one of the club’s core members, stepped out, tall and gorgeous as ever. She tossed her silky black hair over her shoulder, waved at Jen, and went inside.

  If Priya or any of the others knew that book club was Jen’s “one thing,” they would probably stage an intervention, albeit one with themed finger sandwiches and a gift bag stuffed with lavender-scented hand lotions and candles.

  Priya and the rest of the book club group regulars—manic Janine Neff and Deb Gallegos, who did the elaborate drinks, and Annie Perley, who reminded Jen of a plucky kid sister from a situation comedy—were constantly planning Fun Events: cocktails and tailgates and ski weekends. All of their kids seemed to be friends and most attended Sandstone K-8, the local public school.

  Before their move, Jen had flown out to visit schools on Abe’s behalf. At Sandstone, she had been struck first by the blindingly aggressive level of activity: everyone—teachers and students—seemed to be kicking balls, or singing and dancing, or hurrying through the halls while talking and laughing. They were shiny-haired, white-toothed, zipped up in brightly colored fleece jackets.

  Jen had walked out before the tour began.

  Foothills Charter School was out-of-district, which had been inconvenient at the time, but was now a blessing. The women of book club wouldn’t have heard any gossip about Abe’s expulsion.

  After Jen’s first book club meeting, Janine made it a point to invite Jen to a barbecue, so Abe could meet the other kiddos his age. While Jen had felt a bizarre pride that she’d faked normalcy convincingly enough to be asked, she had ultimately declined. Abe had no place at a barbecue in this neighborhood.

  Jen wasn’t embarrassed by Abe, but she knew that he invited judgment. The slouch, the slightly forced smile, the intense and stony stare. He was that kid.

  But Abe was so much more than that kid!

  When people put him in a box or alienated him or she saw that inevitable flicker of derision across their faces, Jen burned like a devil doused with holy water.

  Jen wasn’t one of those moms, the kind who insisted her child was perfect, but there was so much hypocrisy. Everyone preached tolerance to difference, but nobody practiced it.

  She was stalling.

  Jen took Scofield’s card from her jeans pocket and held it between her thumb and forefinger. He’d bet big on himself and sprung for the expensive card stock: the thing didn’t even buckle.

  This shouldn’t surprise. Scofield was all about image, with that slicked-back gelled hair and that pungent cologne, probably to mask the odor from those bare feet shoved into loafers. He was immature and brusque and mansplainy and hadn’t let Jen get a word in.

  Jen knew now that it was flat-out wrong to label a child as young as Abe. They could probably find several respected doctors who would agree it had been malpractice.

  Someone must have sued Scofield by now, or maybe his license had been revoked. But even if he was still practicing, Scofield certainly wouldn’t remember Abe.

  And here was Jen, carrying his card from state to state, like some sort of groupie. She considered calling him every time she read the newspapers after a horrific mass assault. The assailants were very frequently a young man, teens or early twenties, isolated and in pain. Inevitably, there had been signs from childhood that he hadn’t fit in, and Jen could not stop herself from reading those signs as a road map, a point of comparison to Abe.

  Jen reminded herself that she, not Scofield, was the world’s foremost expert on Abe.

  She would agree with anyone that Abe’s disposition wasn’t particularly sunny, but Abe wasn’t cruel. And as far as the hamster story went, Jen reassured herself that Abe had always been fine with their cat—if not affectionate, then at least neutral.

  He wasn’t like those young men in the news, Abe just needed to learn how to cope a little better, but—

  What if he never did?

  What did people say about the young man who had taken hostages in the supermarket and the other who had brought assault weapons to the fraternities he had been rejected from?

  They had been loners, too.

  Forgotten shadows in the back of the class, most likely. At root, desperate to connect.

  When Jen read about these lost souls, she felt for them as much as the victims (which was warped: empathy shouldn’t extend where they’d gone). Mostly, though, she felt for their poor parents. What warning signs, what chances to intervene had they missed?

  Two other women walked past Jen’s car, Lolita copies in hand, but she couldn’t let herself go inside until she called Scofield.

  Call him. Nothing else has worked.

  It rang. Once and then again. When the message switched to voicemail, there was his voice—still so young!—and a beep.

  “Dr. Scofield, hello. My name is Jen Chun-Pagano and you saw my son about seven years ago. Long enough ago that you probably don’t remember us.”

  Jen gave her number, cut herself off, hung up.

  Just a rule-out, she told herself. Just to confirm that Scofield was as unhelpful as she and Paul remembered him to be.

  * * *

  The women were already circled around Harriet Nessel’s living room when Jen creaked open the screen door. Thirty heads turned to stare.

  “Jen, sweetie,” Janine said, “grab yourself a glass of Lolita Lemondrop from the kitchen and come on back.”

  “Yes, please,” Jen said, a little too desperately, and the women laughed. The desperate need for alcohol was a running joke with this group.

  When she returned to the living room, giant mason jar in hand, Jen settled into an empty spot on the piano bench next to Annie Perley, who pointed at the Lolita Lemondrop and mouthed, Lethal.

  Jen smiled, nodded, took a gingery sip. It was delicious, actually, with a warm heat that lingered in the back of her throat.

  Janine was explaining excitedly that they would start with introductions! Everyone had to say their favorite book or genre and then something fun and unexpected about herself!

  “For instance,” she said. “I’m Janine!” She stabbed her index finger into her chest with surprising torque. “And my favorite book is The Giving Tree! My something unexpected is that I have a tattoo”—she winked exaggeratedly—“but I’m not telling you ladies where.”

  Through the years, Jen had developed a little game where she imagined how other people might handle raising Abe. The women of book club—there had been a man in the group last year, but he was notably absent tonight, scared off, perhaps, by last spring’s startlingly passionate discussion of that menopause book—had such canned and untested beliefs about “parenting,” namely that any and all behavioral issues should yield to Respectful Discussion and/or Diminished Screen Time and/or Organic Diets.

  Janine was a bragger, especially about her daughter Katie. Would she be putting a spin on whatever material Abe gave her?

  He’s not quite Lizzie Borden yet, but the ER doctor said his blade skills were very advanced. And you should see his work with blasting agents!

  Abe offered plenty of legitimate opportunities for bragging, Jen reminded herself. He was smart, he was creative, he had goals—currently to program an entire video game from scratch. He could be thoughtful, too. He’d reminded her about tonight’s meeting.

  And he had never tortured their cat. At least so far as she knew.

  “Someone’s communing with her Lolita Lemondrop,” Janine sang out, and Jen realized that all of those politely inquiring face
s had turned toward her.

  “Jen,” Janine said, “surprise us! Tell us your secret!”

  None of them, Jen was certain, could even begin to handle her secret.

  “I’m Jen Chun-Pagano,” she managed to say. “And I love Regency fiction. Bodice rippers. The steamier the better. I’m hoping that’s embarrassing enough to also qualify as my something unexpected.”

  Jen’s chest melted into liquid warmth at the group’s kind laughter.

  “Last but not least,” Janine trilled, “our hostess with the mostest. What’s your favorite book, Harriet?”

  Harriet, another book club mainstay, had lived in Cottonwood Estates longer than anyone else in the club. She had a severe gray crop, a perpetual frown, and the belief that every book had one correct interpretation, which it was her job to understand. Ostensibly to further this goal, she brought a yellow legal pad to every book club meeting and spent the entire discussion filling the thing with furiously handwritten notes, as though she were anticipating a test.

  “One favorite book?” Harriet said with skepticism. “That’s impossible to answer.”

  “Genre then? You love your mysteries.”

  “I suppose any amateur sleuth story,” Harriet said. “Or the classics. Can that be our segue, Ms. President, to get on with this month’s selection?”

  Jen largely ignored the Lolita discussion. She had studied the book in high school and college and was already familiar with the role of games, the metacommentary about how Nabokov played with the reader.

  As per usual with Lolita, there were two camps: those who couldn’t get past the molestation and murder and those who thought the ugliness was exactly the point—that the book was a master class in unreliable narration and satire.

  Jen had probably argued both sides in her life, but who cared?

  It had been a mistake to call Scofield. Jen already regretted it.

  She wasn’t even sure that Abe had smiled in the car; he had been subdued all afternoon. And he seemed so relieved to not have to go back to Foothills.

  School must have been even worse for him than Jen had realized.