The Neighbor's Secret

by L. Alison Heller

  “That was different.” Jen felt a low throbbing in her sinuses at the memory. “Isabella was taking advantage.” Colin grimaced as if he’d had a bag or two of chips stolen by Isabella, too.

  “If you truly have enough food,” he said, “I’d love to join you guys.”

  Jen opened the front door as wide as it went. “Come on in.”

  The Paganos did not excel at putting things away. The surfaces in their home were crammed with piles of books and cords for electronics and hastily discarded layers of clothing. Jen always told herself that it wasn’t dirty, just overstuffed, but seeing it now, through the eyes of a guest, she had to admit that it wasn’t exactly clean either.

  Someone needed to do a deep clean before Jen hosted book club next week. Melissa Stoller, who had lived here before, had been a regular member of book club, and the entire group appeared to be creepily invested in Jen’s house.

  Your countertops aren’t granite, Janine had once corrected Jen, they’re soapstone. Melissa selected them to be maintenance free.

  Thank goodness, because now, those soapstone counters were littered with half-empty glasses (or half-full depending on the day), dinner takeout from Breadman’s, and opened boxes of cookies, because sometimes the cookies were the only thing getting Jen through the day, and there was nothing wrong with that, thank you very much.

  “We’re always a little less formal when Paul is traveling,” Jen said by way of apology. She left out that Paul was always traveling.

  “You have a beautiful home,” Colin said with earnest politeness. His affect was Boy Scoutish beneath all the grunge: floppy plaid shirt, faded jeans, the chin-length hair, the cool black nail polish on both pinkies. Again, the kohl line under his eyes.

  “Is Mr. Pagano somewhere exciting?”

  “California,” Abe said with a frown. “I told you that yesterday when we were sitting under the tree outside.”

  “You did?” Colin said. “You can’t blame the rest of us mortals for not having a photographic memory.”

  “Abe, will you set the table?” Jen heard her voice, a little higher, a touch tentative, and wondered if Colin had noticed.

  She wasn’t scared of Abe, she wasn’t, but after thirteen years of treating him with kid gloves, she felt sheepish suddenly demanding he do chores.

  “How many points will I earn?” Abe watched Jen with a hawk’s sharpness.

  “Um. The usual.”

  If their exchange had been awkward, Colin didn’t appear to have noticed. He had drifted over to their banquette to examine the painting above it, which was an abstract triptych, also selected by Melissa Stoller.

  The Kingdom School had not yet asked for any medical records or diagnostic history, and Jen had not yet volunteered Abe’s diagnosis. Every week, after Abe’s therapy session, Dr. Shapiro asked whether she should be in touch with Nan, to provide guidance on Abe’s incentives or challenges.

  Nope, Jen lied. Nan’s on board. She gets it.

  Jen would schlep Abe all over town for whatever counseling Dr. Shapiro recommended. She would break down his chores in charts and point values, but still—something was stopping her from sharing the diagnosis.

  Dr. Shapiro was smart and kind and wise, but she’d spent maybe five hours with Abe before slapping a label on him. Maybe it was accurate, maybe not, but either way, telling Nan was pointless.

  The woman spoke in psalms, and any conversation about conduct disorder would turn into one about lambs or loaves or turning the other cheek or how we were all God’s children.

  So, no. Jen didn’t even feel bad about the omission.

  (Maybe she felt a little bad.)

  “I love this,” Colin said about the abstract triptych.

  “Came with the house,” Jen said. “It’s a mountain.” Janine had informed Jen of that, and also that Melissa Stoller had ordered the piece from a SoHo gallery.

  “Can I show Colin Foxhole?” Abe said.

  “Please,” Colin said, “I’ve heard so much about it and Holla123.”

  “I’ll go summon him,” Abe said.

  After Abe bounded upstairs, Jen said, “Please let me know if Holla123 turns out to be a creepy fifty-year-old man.”

  “What?” Colin’s face was stricken.

  “No, no.” Jen sometimes forgot how to act with people who weren’t Paul. “It was a joke in very poor taste, mostly about how Paul and I should be a little more careful supervising Abe’s online time. Holla123 is a kid from Michigan. Seems sweet enough. So, it’s going okay? At school?”

  “Abe is a great addition.”

  “He is?”

  “Are you surprised?” Colin’s brow crinkled. He raked his hair behind his ears.

  “I’ve never seen him so…” Jen reached for a word that wouldn’t make Abe sound like a total freak. “He’s usually not a fan of big group activities like Fall Fest.”

  “Maybe he’s been overwhelmed at other schools? He’s a really good fit with Kingdom. It’s small, which for a kid like Abe can be much easier to navigate.”

  “A kid like Abe?”

  “Anxious,” Colin said. “Shy. Into his passions. I didn’t mean to assume anything—”

  “No, no,” Jen said, “that’s Abe.”

  “Creating a five-level video game from scratch is pretty ambitious, but I have every faith he’ll do it.”

  “I thought it was supposed to be ten-level.”

  Colin grinned. “We’re in negotiations.”

  “I bumped into Nan the other day,” Jen said, “and she quoted a psalm that I think was about patience? I worried it meant he wasn’t fitting in.”

  Colin bit his lip. “Nan is amazing, but sometimes … I don’t know … the psalms are a little—”

  “Vague,” Jen said diplomatically. Inside, she was screaming, Yes, exactly!

  “Abe is doing fine. I was like him when I was younger—you know, other kids didn’t know what to do with me—and I would have thrived at a place like Kingdom.”

  “Abe might have something called conduct disorder,” Jen said. “We’re still figuring it out.”

  “What’s that?”

  “He has to work a little harder than others to learn empathy and consequences.”

  “Oh.” Colin shrugged. “Doesn’t that describe like half of the people in the world?”

  “It might.” Jen smiled.

  “I don’t mean to make light. People are complicated, though.” Colin swallowed roughly and forced a smile, but it was wistful. “And folks sure do love their labels.”

  “Don’t they just,” Jen said.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  The weather for Fall Fest was aggressively perfect: sunny with a razor of chill in the air. Annie and the other second-grade parents were clustered in front of the gazebo for the best views of their children, who were being ushered up the steps by their teacher, Mrs. Jalonski.

  Hank waved at Annie and she waved back.

  “Annie, Hank’s bow tie is adorable.”

  “Where did you all find such bright green pants? Seriously, all I could find for Finn was that drab olive, poor guy.”

  “Finn looks great,” Annie said with a half glance toward the stage. She scanned the crowd for Laurel and her friends. “All of them do.”

  Mrs. Jalonski approached the microphone, tapped it once officiously, and delivered the annual warning about how all applause must wait until after the entire performance.

  “I love you, Fall Fest,” a lone voice shrieked from over by the river. “Woo-hoo!”

  Light laughter rippled through the crowd. Someone whooped. The two square speakers in the gazebo’s corners crackled and, as if they were zombies controlled by a hive mind, the second-grade parents lifted their phones and pointed their cameras at the stage.

  The background music blared through the town square.

  Form the corn, form, form the corn.

  The moves were pretty simple—jazz hands extended overhead, kick ball change, turn to the side, repeat. Hank was bet
ter than a lot of his classmates, Annie noticed with a surprised pride. One of Mike’s sisters had majored in dance in college, and Annie made a mental note to send her the video, ask if Hank was as good as she suspected.

  “Dying,” one of the parents said. “I’m dying.”

  “‘Form the corn,’ though?” someone whispered. “Are they teaching them science?”

  “More to the point: Are our children glorifying GMOs?”

  “Shhh.”

  Annie snapped a photo and sent it off to Lena and looked around again for Laurel, who really should be here by now.

  People applauded as the song ended, then stopped abruptly as they remembered that clapping was forbidden.

  An exuberant voice broke through the quiet.

  “Live from Fall Fest, the FALL FEST DANCERS. WOO-HOOOOO! WORK IT, Fall Fest dancers! Give us some MORE!”

  A murmur surfed through the crowd. Heads craned toward the noise.

  “YAAASSS. Shake it, shake it, SHAKE IT, FALL FEST DANCING DANCERS!”

  “Yikes,” Finn’s mom said. She arched an eyebrow at Annie, who was too stunned to respond.

  She knew that voice.

  Laurel was on the bank of the river with one hand cupped around her mouth. In her other hand was her pink water bottle, held overhead like a pom-pom. Behind her, her friends were doubled over in laughter.

  The second-grade parents had lifted their cell phones toward the gazebo, where their children were rearranging themselves in a large imperfect circle for the next number.

  Annie’s gaze was pinned to whatever the hell was happening on the riverbank.

  Sierra was attempting to contain Laurel in a clumsy hug as Laurel wriggled in protest. She broke free, shook her arms overhead in a victorious V, and her T-shirt rode up to expose her belly button.

  Sierra tried again, and they toppled in a tangled heap on a family’s picnic blanket. Plates spilled, the parents jumped up, and as Sierra started to help clean up the mess, Laurel crawled on her hands and knees toward their toddler, then rose on her hind legs, hands clawed like a grizzly bear. The child’s mouth opened in a wail as the crowd began to cheer for the second graders, who were taking their final bows.

  Annie glanced guiltily at the stage before looking back toward Laurel, who kneeled in the center of the plaid picnic blanket. She swigged from her pink water bottle, wiped her mouth with her sleeve.

  There was a cold pit of comprehension in Annie’s stomach. Laurel was drunk.

  * * *

  The text that Annie had sent to Lena showed Hank in the town’s gazebo in the throes of a dance step, his knees bent inward awkwardly. It wasn’t fair to blame Annie for sending the picture. She thought she was being nice.

  Which didn’t mean Lena wanted the thing.

  The oven timer buzzed. Lena should check on the cupcakes, but she ignored them. She pressed delete and watched the gazebo and Hank’s knees and the slice of river and the crowds of people gathered for Fall Fest swirl together and swoosh into the trash.

  Very satisfying.

  This was the problem with new friends: they might breezily send pictures of off-limits places, unaware that there were rules to be followed.

  No main street, no town green, no high school, no riverbanks. Places are tricky, Annie. Memories barnacle to them.

  This was the problem with old friends, too. That one conversation with Melanie about Fall Fest had been a signal whistle to long-buried memories: emerge and attack!

  Like the year when Rachel was in middle school and Tim, for some reason, had decided to crash their mother-daughter tradition and tag along to Fall Fest.

  He had acted like a bratty child, sulked when Rachel wanted to hang out with her friends and insisted that they make a leaf pile like they had when she was little. Rachel had played along dutifully, watching patiently as he fell dramatically backward into the pile with a too-loud laugh. He stayed there for a long moment, playing dead.

  Middle school was difficult enough and the last thing Rachel needed was to worry about placating her embarrassing dad. Lena recalled being furious, wishing that Tim wasn’t just playing dead.

  It wasn’t out of the realm for him to have fallen on a rock and knocked himself out, was it? And if he was left there for long enough … well, given hypothermia, rattlesnakes, bears, might he just disappear?

  She remembered feeling a little burst of happiness at the thought. Life would be so much easier without him.

  It started there, Lena’s granting herself permission to imagine, when she needed to, Tim slipping off Waterfall Rock, Tim’s car with failed brakes. The game was figuring out how to off him in a way that would keep her hands as clean as possible.

  All that preparation apparently served her well: when she succeeded in killing him a few years later, Lena didn’t even break a nail.

  * * *

  “That girl is crazy,” Abe said.

  “What?” Jen asked. She was trying to collect errant burrito wrappers into an empty doughnut box and the wind kept blowing them away.

  Jen had purposefully set their blanket down as far away from the stage as possible, but even so, Fall Fest was a sensory explosion. A tiny child had wandered over to the Kingdom School picnic blanket to repeatedly slam the tambourine Colin had brought, and there was a line of kids patiently waiting for a turn with his guitar. And from the gazebo there were the chants of the second graders and the feedback of a PA system that was circa 1952.

  People were shouting and cheering and despite it all, Abe had neither melted down nor insisted they leave.

  “She fell down again,” Abe said with a snicker. Colin and Jen both turned in the direction of his pointed finger.

  About twenty feet away, a teenaged girl lay on her back, singing loudly, her arms raised upward in an attempt to conduct the clouds.

  One of her friends filmed her with a camera phone, while another tried repeatedly to get her up on her feet.

  “Is that Laurel Perley?” Jen said.

  “What is she on?” Abe said.

  Laurel was now upright and sashaying in their direction. She stopped along the way, extended her hand to an older couple sitting in camping chairs. “Madame and Monsieur, voulez-vous enjoy Les Fall Fest Dancers?” she shouted.

  “Oh dear,” Jen said. She stepped in Laurel’s path, and was hit by the sour smell of alcohol. Colin appeared on the other side of Laurel, and together they coaxed her over to their blanket.

  “Laurel, I’m Jen, a friend of your mom, from the neighborhood.”

  “Lucky for you,” Laurel said. “She’s a blast.”

  “Here,” Colin said. He handed Laurel a water bottle. “Take a sip.”

  Laurel held up hers. “I’vealreadygot.”

  “This one is water, though. Good to hydrate.”

  “Excellentidea,” Laurel said. “Big French test on Monday. De l’eau!”

  “Right,” he said.

  She sipped and closed her eyes and then leaned over and got sick on their blanket. Jen awkwardly patted her back.

  “Gross,” Abe said. “Colin, it’s on your pants.”

  Jen hadn’t noticed Annie run up, but suddenly she was on their blanket, too. She yanked away Laurel’s pink water bottle and unscrewed the top, sniffed and gagged.

  “Where did you get this?” Her voice was a hiss.

  “L.L. Bean,” Laurel said. “It’s right on the bottle.” Her laughter turned into ungainly hiccups.

  “She’s going to puke again,” Abe said in a warning tone, “and it’s still on Colin’s pants.”

  “I’m so sorry,” Annie whispered to Jen.

  There were pink spots of humiliation on Annie’s cheeks and her eyes were mortified. Jen felt a complex mixture of empathy and relief that this time, at least, it wasn’t her kid everyone would be talking about.

  “Don’t even worry about it,” Colin said. “It happens.”

  Jen nodded lamely, wished she’d thought to provide reassurance before judgment.

  “I don’
t know what you’re thinking,” Annie said to Laurel. She sounded bewildered as she wrapped her arm around Laurel’s waist and led her away.

  “How old is she?” Colin said.

  “Eighth grade I think,” Jen said.

  “Yikes.” Colin shivered. “That’s messed up.” He’d removed his plaid shirt to dab at the sick stain on his jeans. In his thin white T-shirt, he looked skinny as a teenager. “I had an interview in twenty minutes at Breadman’s Market. Probably better to just bail?”

  “Would it help if I go and explain that you were doused in the name of Good Samaritanism?” Jen said. “They know me. I shop there all the time.”

  “Why are you interviewing?” Abe’s mouth was an accusing straight line. “Are you quitting school?”

  “Never,” Colin said. “Assistant teachers don’t get paid a lot is all. It would just be an after-school job.”

  It was becoming clearer by the day that Colin was good for Abe, and it hit Jen that they could be good for Colin, too.

  “Wait,” Jen said. “What if we hired you from time to time?”

  “You own a market?” Colin said. He and Abe shared a goofy smile.

  “No, but I could use help with pickups and drop-offs and Abe would probably benefit from some help with his independent project—”

  “We could pay Colin to compose music for my game,” Abe said. “He’s actually a decent musician.”

  “Thanks for the compliment,” Colin said. “And I’d much prefer that to bagging groceries. But I’ll do it for free.”

  “Why don’t I at least ask Nan if it’s okay to hire you?”

  If Nan didn’t require medical forms, Jen was pretty sure she would have no objection to helping one of her teaching assistants earn a few extra dollars after school.

  There was probably a perfect psalm for the occasion, something about sharing your wheat bounty with your neighbors.

  “Really?” Colin said. “I wouldn’t want to impose.”

  Jen would later try to reassure herself that her motives were anything but selfish. That warm effusive glow in her chest was the manifestation of generosity. She wasn’t using anyone.