The Neighbor's Secret

by L. Alison Heller

  Although my SIL swears the tensions had been brewing before

  And I know from firsthand observation that they are not as refined as are we, the classy ladies of Cottonwood

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Annie used her fingernail to scrape off the last stubborn spot of marinara sauce caked onto the lasagna pan. She set it on the drying rack.

  The house was so quiet.

  It was only seven thirty on Friday night. Mike was at work. Laurel was sleeping at Sierra’s house, and Hank had just gone to bed to be well-rested for his Fall Fest performance.

  Annie stretched out on the couch and picked up the book club book. She couldn’t get into this one, had spent ten minutes rereading a single paragraph describing the gnarled tree branches in the deep dark forest. When her phone binged, she eagerly grabbed it from the side table.

  A social media post from Janine.

  PSAT prep:

  Fall Fest set up:

  Time to curl up with a good book and a cuppa, ladies! #livingthedream #momentofcalm #bookclubmama!

  PSAT prep?

  Even though she was alone in the room, Annie shook her head. Katie was in middle school.

  Childhood should be preserved, Annie always counseled parents, don’t tangle up your ambitions in their futures. Laurel was at the top of her class, but working hard, Annie had always believed, was an honest expression of Laurel’s identity.

  Last week, though, Laurel had failed to turn in an English paper.

  Annie only learned about it when Laurel’s teacher referenced it in the teachers’ lounge. He’d assumed it was a mistake. Questioned about it by Annie, however, Laurel had shrugged.

  I’ll take the fail, she’d said.

  With great self-control, Annie had managed not to spout clichés at Laurel, but they’d been right there on her twitchy lips: you’re not seeing the big picture, ninth grade is right around the corner and it COUNTS, these are the mistakes that IMPACT YOUR FUTURE.

  And, ugh, the feelings that churned inside Annie for the rest of the night: disappointment and frustration bordering on hysteria. The sinking pit-in-her-stomach certainty that Laurel was perhaps like Annie after all.

  Annie picked up the book again. Deb called this kind of novel dingbat lit.

  The main character Fiona was so hysterical that she could barely make a pot of coffee without fainting. When she suspected someone of being a murderer, did she call the police?

  No, Fiona went alone to visit the murder suspect, and Annie hated herself for caring when Fiona wound up chloroformed and bound in the trunk of a car. What did you expect, Fiona?

  These are the mistakes that impact your future.

  Some of Laurel’s recent decisions would fit well in a dingbat-lit novel.

  Skipping off to the mall without telling a parent, her surly I’ll take the fail. And she had started to dress like Sierra. Teeny miniskirts. Caked-on eye makeup.

  Well, that was a little dramatic. Laurel had worn that outfit once.

  Fiona, Annie reminded herself, was a fictional character. Laurel was nothing like Fiona: she was smart, much smarter than Annie ever had been.

  Well—Laurel was book smart, which didn’t mean she hadn’t inherited a self-destructive streak.

  That was the flip side of Cottonwood: these kids were adored, but they were coddled house cats. For all of Annie’s complaints about the benign neglect of her own childhood, at least she’d had freedom to learn by trial and error.

  Annie was so grateful to hear Hank’s footsteps in the hall that she didn’t even tell him to get back to bed.

  “What’s up?”

  “I’m too excited to sleep.”

  The second graders always performed a few song-and-dance numbers at Fall Fest, and Hank and his classmates had been practicing since September.

  He spread his arms wide. “I have the whole room to myself. I don’t really miss Laurel. At all.”

  “I won’t tell her.”

  “She can’t try to lock me out, and before bed, she won’t play that stupid song fifteen million times and she won’t wake me up at two in the morning either.”

  “Laurel wakes you up at two in the morning?”

  “She turns on her bed lamp and types all night.”

  “What is she typing?”

  “She said it was research.”

  “Homework?”

  Hank shrugged. He had a well-earned reputation for hyperbole. Laurel had probably woken him up once at ten. Nonetheless, the Perleys’ one big rule was: no screens in the bedroom.

  “Want another tuck-in?” Annie asked.

  “Okay,” Hank said agreeably.

  She followed him into the bedroom, smoothed the covers over him with one gentle yank. Annie felt a tug of guilt about how small the room was.

  Maybe Laurel’s recent prickliness was about lack of privacy. Annie had always told herself that Cottonwood Estates was worth any sacrifice in space. But an almost fourteen-year-old having to share to share a bunk bed with her seven-year-old brother wasn’t ideal.

  “Did you invite Mrs. Meeker to Fall Fest?” Hank asked. “She’s really excited about my dance.”

  Too crowded, Lena had said to Annie, and her eyes had begged for the conversation to end. “She can’t make it,” Annie said, “but we’ll send pictures.”

  “She told me she’s going to buy me a skateboard.”

  Annie sighed. “You have to stop asking her for things, Hank.”

  “She said it makes her happy.”

  “Even so.” Lena and her brother Ernie had done enough for the Perleys. Due entirely to Ernie’s connections and word of mouth, Mike’s restaurant was booked through next month. There’s definite buzz, Mike had said, buzz buzz buzz. Hank had pretended to be a bee for the entire rest of the night.

  “At least try to limit your requests,” she said.

  “I’ll try,” Hank said, in a tone of voice that made clear he couldn’t promise anything. “Night.”

  “Night.”

  Annie flicked off the light and, on her way out of the room, lifted the grab handle of Laurel’s backpack, which had been left by the door.

  An eighth grader a few years back had—unbeknownst to her parents or therapist until the girl fainted in world history—spent hours each day studying evil websites that glamorized anorexia: how to abuse laxatives and count calories and binge and purge. She’d missed the entire rest of the school year. It always struck Annie how entirely clueless the parents had been.

  The friends had known, though. The friends always knew.

  But Laurel didn’t have an eating disorder. Her appetite, larger than even Mike’s, was a running family joke. Last night, she’d downed three helpings of lasagna with a huge side of salad and then belched healthily, because she’d known it would make Hank laugh until he fell off his chair.

  Unless it was disordered to eat so much? Had they drawn too much attention to her big appetite, made it a thing?

  That swirling anxious feeling Annie had while reading about Fiona was because she knew something was off with Laurel. She just didn’t know what.

  Laurel did seem self-conscious in her body, at least compared to Sierra. When she’d worn the miniskirt, she’d hunched over, tugged down the skirt.

  And when Annie had asked Laurel what flavor cake she wanted for her birthday in a few weeks, Laurel had claimed to not need a cake at all.

  Most teenage girls were uncomfortable in their bodies, though, and maybe Laurel was experimenting, trying to shed childhood traditions in favor of more grown-up ones.

  None of it meant that Laurel had an eating disorder.

  Annie shouldn’t make up issues. Laurel enjoyed food, she wasn’t obsessed by it.

  (Which is probably exactly what the family of the girl who had been hospitalized had thought.)

  The computer part—the late-night typing—was troubling. And what did research mean anyway? There were any number of horrible places on the World Wide Web where a teenaged girl might conduct “r
esearch.”

  Annie had just seen a news report about a police officer who’d made a fake profile for a fourteen-year-old girl. Within hours, literally hundreds of creepy older men had contacted her.

  Laurel knew all of the stranger-danger rules, had sat through a billion school assemblies about internet safety and Annie had drilled them in at home, of course—but what did every parent say after their child had emptied her piggy bank to run off to some motel room with a total stranger?

  If this happened to us, it could happen to ANYONE.

  But it didn’t happen to anyone. It happened to kids with distracted parents. Kids without boundaries. Kids who had a hole of need inside of them.

  A memory broke free from deep inside of Annie, floated up to consciousness.

  His cold hand pressed against her bare knee. A mocking peal of laughter slipped through the open window from outside.

  In a frantic swoop, she zipped open Laurel’s backpack and shook out its contents on the couch, fired up her computer, typed in the password—the family rule was that passwords were shared, and even though now Annie wanted to congratulate herself for sticking to that rule, she didn’t deserve any praise.

  Why had she not checked over Laurel’s shoulder?

  Parents were instructed to make clear to their children: this is my computer, not yours, but Annie and Mike believed that their children deserved privacy, which was a form of respect, and Laurel was a good kid and—see? Look.

  Her online search history seemed innocent and appropriate: Wikipedia. Science journals and how-to videos about makeup application and bleaching her hair to better hold dye. Her school notebooks still told the story of an engaged student: equations and paragraphs about Greek mythology and a complicated table with rows and columns of letters: A, A, AB.

  Cryptology? Some sort of Boolean language?

  Now that Annie could see all of Laurel’s homework—the books and the notebooks and that chart spread over the couch—she had to agree it was a lot.

  The leftover lasagna was a brick in her stomach. Annie turned on the kettle for mint tea.

  Laurel was almost fourteen. It was normal to be moody with her family. She had solid friendships, and had failed to turn in one assignment. There was no eating disorder, nor any evidence of a lurking predator.

  Scurry off, chickens. Nowhere to roost here!

  The whistle on the kettle blew and Annie switched off the stove, reached for a chamomile bag instead of mint to better ease the acidic burn that had risen in the back of her mouth.

  But even after she sipped it, the sour taste in the back of her mouth grew thicker.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  “Fall Fest.” Melanie’s voice through the phone was raspy from a cold. “I’ll never forget Fall Fest because that’s where we saw the Nearys. The mom and son, remember?”

  Lena closed her eyes.

  She regretted how she’d presented Annie’s invitation to Melanie like a little gift. My new friend Annie wants me to go to Fall Fest.

  The subtext was that Melanie didn’t need to worry so much about Lena’s loneliness because, see? Lena had been invited to something!

  (Maybe Lena had also been showing off. Hearing about Melanie’s social calendar—her golf dates and cocktail and girls’ lunches and couples’ cruises—gave Lena a hollow left-out feeling.)

  “You can’t remember?” Melanie sounded worried. “It’s happening to me too. I couldn’t think of my second-grade teacher’s name last week. I loved her so much, I wanted to be her when I grew up, and it’s just—poof—gone.”

  “It’s okay, Mel.”

  “Let me help. Bill had a conference downtown, so I came to stay with you, and Rachel was three or four. We got to the park early, before all the events started and there they were, the Nearys. The boy had golden hair cut in bangs and a bob, like Little Lord Fauntleroy. It seared into my mind because you don’t see that haircut every day.”

  Lena wished she remembered the haircut. She had a different memory of the boy seared into her mind.

  “Remember,” Melanie continued, “that Rachel was obsessed with clamming, because of that book you read her every night, you know, Goodnight Sam the Clam or whatever it was called?”

  “I remember the book.”

  “And she insisted on bringing this little red bucket to the riverbank to fill with clams, which were really rocks. The boy thought she was hilarious. His mom said something like, creativity in motion and then complimented you for nurturing it. It was sweet but a little woo-woo, you know. You and I managed to keep a straight face, but when she left, excuse me, sneezing—”

  For a brief and merciful moment, Melanie stopped talking.

  “Where do unsneezed sneezes go? Anyway—you told me she was one of those magical supermoms, who sewed her own clothing and baked bread and probably made daisy crowns instead of turning on the TV. Meanwhile, you’d just screamed at Rachel for tracking in mud on the white carpet, and oops, excuse me, sneezing—”

  Melanie sneezed, neat and tidy, three times in succession. “Ugh, this cold.”

  “Bless you. I told you all that?”

  “You tell me everything, sweetie.”

  No, I don’t.

  Once, Lena had believed Melanie to be the type of friend to accept deep dark secrets without judgment, but back then, Lena’s secrets hadn’t been particularly dark or deep. There had been moments when Lena had felt a pull to come clean to Mel, but it had never been worth the risk of losing her.

  “Do you remember it now?” Melanie said. “I hate that feeling, one black hole where there used to be knowledge. It’s irrevocable proof that it’s all downhill from here, baby.”

  Lena did remember how, for Fall Fest, she and Rachel would wake up early and get a box of éclairs from the French pastry place on Main Street. They set up chairs and a blanket on the banks of the river, a safe space away from the gazebo because when Rachel was little, crowds made her tense.

  And she could never forget the clamming phase.

  “Only child,” Lena would explain with a laugh, but Rachel really had been exceptionally creative, before Lena messed with her head—or maybe all parents thought their children were creative.

  Probably all children were creative.

  Lena certainly remembered Gary Neary’s not-yet-ex-wife and son: how they had the same compact peppiness, the way they always seemed delighted with each other.

  She even remembered thinking Gary’s wife gorgeous, not because of her features, which were a little too pointy, but because of her vitality—that outdoorsy glow and sparkling eyes and her obvious unabashed love for her son. Lena had once bought a ridiculous pair of patterned tights after seeing Gary’s ex look adorable in a similar pair. (A look, it turned out, that Lena could not pull off. The tights had worn Lena, not the other way around.)

  Lena wanted to ask Melanie if she’d mentioned Gary at that Fall Fest. Back then, she had only been vaguely aware of him as a dry and craggy local dentist. Once, when Dr. Marconis was out on maternity leave, Gary Neary had subbed in, put his gentle gloved hands right in Lena’s mouth. Gary remembered that, too; they laughed about it.

  When Lena had taken the time to think about the Nearys’ marriage, she had incorrectly thought that they must complement each other in the way a steady rock would ground a free spirit, that their family dinners were full of song and laughter and that on summer evenings they all went outside to make fairy traps out of dewy spiderwebs, play in the sprinklers, make those daisy-chain crowns.

  Nope, Gary said later. The marriage was never horrible, but even the divorce had been more plodding than fiery. When Lena painted the picture of his ex as a free-spirit earth-mother pioneer, Gary had replied that whatever personality Lena had dreamed up, it was nothing like the woman he’d been married to.

  Still, there had at one point been love between Gary and his ex. The bonds of family certainly had been stronger than Gary made it sound—Lena had observed that by the way they had leaned against each other at
the funeral, bound forever by a joint grief no one else could understand.

  “Games are supposed to help with memory loss,” Melanie said. “Crosswords and anagrams. We should start doing them.”

  “Maybe.”

  “Are you okay, Lena?” Melanie’s voice was tentative. “I was being an idiot, wasn’t I, prattling on about poor little Brian. I should’ve stopped myself.”

  Even if she had amnesia, Lena would never forget his name.

  “It was Bryce,” she whispered. “Bryce Neary.”

  * * *

  “Wait,” Jen said. “Abe wants to go to Fall Fest?”

  “The whole gang is going,” Colin said. “It’s supposed to be great.”

  Gang? There was a gang?

  Jen and Abe had been about to start dinner when their doorbell rang.

  “That’s probably Colin,” Abe had said.

  “The teacher?” Jen said, but Abe was already at the door and indeed, there, under their portico light, stood Colin from the Kingdom School. He held up a giant book about video game programming.

  He had, he explained, promised Abe that he’d look for it in the used book shop right by the music store on Main Street and bring it by if he found it.

  “Ten tomorrow, right?” he’d said.

  Apparently, the Kingdom School kids had planned to meet up at Fall Fest. The group would find each other on the riverbank. Colin would bring a picnic blanket and some instruments because everyone seemed pretty excited about learning some chords, and he’d heard there was an epic burrito stand.

  “You know that Fall Fest will be crowded?” Jen asked Abe. “Crowds and gross porta-potties and children who sing loudly and off-key?”

  “It’ll be fun, Mom.” Abe patted her arm as though she were the persnickety one. “Colin, do you like rotisserie chicken? We were just about to eat dinner.”

  “Abe, it’s late,” Jen said. “Colin might have already eaten.”

  “He’s always starving.” Abe snorted. “He eats my leftovers at school every day. Don’t get mad, Mom.”

  “Why would I get mad?”

  “You got upset when Isabella would eat my lunch.”