But for the rest of her life, she would never be entirely sure.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
When Lena Meeker arrived at her very first book club meeting, she handed Jen a lovely bottle of Sancerre and a long white pastry box, both of which were slightly damp. With that meticulously flouncy brown layered hair and perfectly applied makeup, Lena sure didn’t look like Cottonwood’s Great Hermit.
And she smelled amazing, like vanilla roses.
“The box got rained on,” Lena said. “I’m so sorry.”
“Don’t be silly,” Jen said. “Annie, how is everything?”
“Fine, fine.” With noticeable effort, Annie forced her mouth into a tight smile. “Sorry again about the scene at Fall Fest.”
“Don’t be. The apology note from Laurel was totally unnecessary—”
“I should introduce Lena around,” Annie said quickly. She placed a proprietary hand on Lena’s shoulder and steered her into the living room.
Jen followed them, and set down Lena’s box on the coffee table. Deb Gallegos was on the couch, wiggling her fingers in greeting.
“How’s Annie doing?” Jen asked.
Deb hiked her eyebrows. “Apoplectic. Poor Laurel will be in lockdown until she’s thirty. I told Annie that they’d all been drinking, including Sierra. Laurel just put on the biggest show.”
Jen nodded.
“They need to be punished, obviously. But we’ve all been there, and we turned out okay, right?”
“Right.”
“Plus”—Deb lowered her voice—“it’s a teensy bit hypocritical because I’ve heard her school stories, and Annie was no saint. So. What do you think is inside that box?”
It sat in front of them on the coffee table, low and long. Pastries of some sort, Jen thought.
“A severed limb,” Jen said, sotto voce.
They both started to chortle at the image: perfect Lena Meeker with the off-the-shoulder cashmere and those giant diamond earrings and the shiny pink manicure getting splattered as she sawed through bone.
“What are you two laughing about?” Janine said. She was carrying a tray of martini glasses filled with Fiona Stolis, which she carefully set down on the coffee table.
“Dismemberment.”
“Obviously, with this book,” Janine said. She handed them each a martini glass and waved over Lena, handed her one, too.
Lena accepted it with a grateful thank you, and folded herself into the love seat opposite them. Her skin sparkled in a way that seemed unnatural for November.
“I’m opening it,” Deb said, and she hummed a burlesque accompaniment—ba-dum-dum—that drew the others over to watch her unloop the string and ease open the box top.
“Wow,” Deb said.
“Unbelievable,” Priya said.
“I’ve never seen anything like that,” Harriet Nessel said.
“Isn’t she amazing?” Annie said.
Lena smiled, pink and pleased, and spun around the box so all could admire the two dozen cupcakes inside, frosted the same hunter green as The Girl in the Woods. On the top of each one, with sugar and icing, Lena had perfectly replicated the cover art: the forest, the female silhouette, the ragged red font, the whole shebang.
“Did you make those from scratch?” Janine asked in awe. “How long did it take?”
“It really wasn’t too bad.”
A massive clap of thunder broke in a loud crack. Janine shrieked, loud and piercing, and clasped her hand to her mouth.
Everyone froze.
“Janine,” Deb Gallegos said. “Calm yourself.”
“Sorry.” Janine took a shaky nervous gulp from her martini glass. “I am on edge, ladies, since the vandal’s pyrotechnics.”
Janine had put the entire book club on her vandal text chain and bombarded it with updates about the vandal’s latest—he’d torched the Thankfulness Tree erected near the playground every November. The blaze hadn’t spread, but the tree was charred enough that they’d dismantled it for the season.
“This one seemed more political,” Deb said. “A statement against the tyranny of forced gratitude.” Deb glanced worriedly at Janine. “Not that I didn’t love the tree, because I did.”
“Sure, Deb,” Jen said with a wink.
“Deb,” Annie said with an impish grin. “Are you trying to tell us that you’re the vandal?”
“Trust me,” Deb said. “I could light a better fire than that.”
“Don’t joke. Something is off,” Janine said. “With this neighborhood. I can feel it. It’s building. He’s probably out there right now, watching.”
“It is getting out of control,” Harriet said.
“It’s minor property damage.”
“That’s how it starts, though. Property, then animals, then people. Remember how they cut down on graffiti in New York City and the murder rate decreased? It’s all connected.”
“I’m not happy about it either, but let’s keep things in perspective.”
“My kids are terrified. The whole point of living here is so they have a space to be safely independent. The moment Nick and I decided to move here was when we saw Sierra and Laurel walking down to the playground by themselves—”
“We know,” Deb said.
“They were only nine.”
“They were six, Janine, remember, because Katie was five and you were pregnant with the twins.”
“Oh, lord, I was so nauseous after the drive out here, all the twists and turns, but as soon as we saw Laurel and Sierra carefully crossing the street, I knew it was worth it.”
Janine’s Cottonwood Origin Story usually made Annie feel good about her insistence on moving to the neighborhood. The Perleys were short on space, but look what they had gained for their kids: first-class education, a wonderful community.
But tonight, when Deb chuckled and said, “They’re still sneaking off to the playground together, this time with stolen vodka,” Annie felt a blizzard of loss, even though Deb put a supportive hand on Annie’s arm.
Were they supposed to laugh about it?
When Laurel and Sierra had been six, the worries had been: Was she eating a rainbow plate? Was she saying please and thank you? Was she trying her best in soccer practice?
Before Fall Fest, Annie had been worried, yes, about the moodiness, the lapse in grades, but her concerns had been speculative. The drinking made it real: Laurel was in crisis.
Sierra told Deb that Haley had stolen two bottles from her parents’ liquor cabinet—so the idea hadn’t been Laurel’s alone. But only Laurel had gotten so out of control. Only she had been powerless to stop.
What if a lifetime of nurturing was no match for the steady pulse of nature?
“Let’s talk about the book,” Harriet said.
“No one sane would kill as many people as Fiona did,” Priya said. “Not even for their child.”
“But it’s the height of sanity,” Jen said. “What better reason to kill than for your child?”
“I call BS,” Deb finally said. “To actually kill someone? To take a life? You couldn’t go through with it.”
Jen shrugged. “Probably not.”
“Deb”—Harriet paused her frantic note-taking and looked up briefly—“do you mind repeating for the notes, what did you say after ‘I call BS’?”
“Um, that none of us would be capable of killing somone,” Deb said.
The night’s one bright spot was that Lena found the discussion riveting. There was a spark of curiosity in her expression that Annie had never seen before.
* * *
“Everyone was so nice,” Lena said as she and Annie walked down Jen’s dark driveway to Annie’s car.
“I told you,” Annie said.
The storm had moved east and left behind a warm mist. Lena felt the evening’s exhilaration evaporate off her. “And those drinks were very strong.”
“Don’t worry.” Annie paused meaningfully before she opened the passenger door. “I’m fine to drive. I only had a sip.”
As Anni
e backed out of the driveway and turned onto the road, Lena looked out at the blur of lights below them. She rarely went out at night, and forgot how cozy the neighborhood could look after dark, how the house lights dotting the valley seemed so inviting.
“It’s a fun group,” Lena said. She had not admitted to even Melanie how nervous she’d been about book club. She was glad to have brought the cupcakes—they had loved them.
“How was it to see Harriet?”
“Good. She’s still a prolific note-taker.”
“It’s probably mostly gossip,” Annie said dryly. “She’s a bit of an information hoarder. Once, Deb peeked at her notepad and Harriet had scribbled down everything we’d said before the book discussion. Deb said, ‘Harriet, you can’t do that,’ but Harriet wasn’t even embarrassed.”
“She hasn’t changed a bit. Everyone seemed so familiar. They remind me of—”
“Who?”
They reminded Lena of her friends from the neighborhood, a generation before. That zinging heady energy of a group of women at ease with each other. Most of Lena’s friends from before had moved away, which was part life cycle and part, Lena suspected, a reaction to Tim’s accident, which had certainly popped Cottonwood’s bubble of safety.
Life—people—did succumb to patterns and rhythms. The neighborhood was an assembly line. Miniature fungible dolls on a conveyor belt, moving in, moving out. Low-stakes drama and routines year after year after year.
People thought their lives were so important, but they were tiny specks, ants. There were decisions that had seemed mammoth to Lena before, and she saw now they hadn’t mattered in the least.
She swallowed the rough lump in her throat. Sometimes the abstract thought of time passing, all that normalcy, all that minutiae that she’d missed out on, made Lena unbearably sad. Even with a bad marriage, she’d had such a nice little life.
Once she admitted a version of this truth to Dr. Friendly, who had given her a coping trick: look ahead to the concrete future, not back in the rearview mirror.
(Not very sensitive of you, Dr. Friendly, to rely on a car metaphor.)
In the immediate future, Lena would write Jen a thank-you note. She had done a lovely job hosting and decorating, although Lena wouldn’t have picked the floral print wallpaper in the powder room, which was too dark and overpowering for the small space. She knew from her design magazines that the pattern was on-trend, but something softer would have worked better.
They had pulled into Lena’s driveway, but Annie’s pensive expression kept Lena from reaching for the door handle.
“Is it normal?” Annie said. “The drinking? Because everyone acts like it’s some rite of passage.”
As Lena weighed her response, the car’s front seat seemed impossibly tiny.
“I’m not going to lie about the dangers,” she said. “But teenagers are idiots. They try things, they move on. You gave Laurel consequences, and you’re talking to her about it. That’s all you can do.”
Annie’s face screwed up, as if she was collecting courage to confess something. “There’s a family history of alcoholism,” she said in a rough blurt.
“Well,” Lena said gently, “I understand that.”
“You do, don’t you?” Annie’s mouth zipped tight, her eyes alight with a realized bond.
“It’s fairly common. People manage.” Lena felt her cheeks get hot and was glad for the darkness. She desperately wanted to return to the silliness and camaraderie from tonight. The group’s conversation had felt as welcoming as a warm hearth.
“I think they liked the cupcakes,” Lena said quickly. “Do you?”
“They loved the cupcakes,” Annie said. Sharp drops of rain had started up again, plopped onto the windshield.
“I’m planning to go again next month,” Lena said. “And maybe on one of those weekend walks Janine organizes.”
Annie snorted. “Janine will hunt you down if you don’t.”
“She seemed energetic enough to do just that.”
Annie smiled. “She has a confession, you know.”
“What?”
“Sorry. Inside joke.” Annie glanced at Lena. “Every time she gets tipsy and we read a steamy book, which is a lot, Janine confesses that she made out with a woman in college and it was hot and then she laughs about it for like a half hour. No one can figure out why she acts like it’s such a big deal, but fifty bucks she’s doing it right now.”
* * *
“Why do I feel like this.” Jen was aware that her voice was emerging in a Rex Harrison–esque sing-chant. “I only had two Stolis.”
“Two Stolis, two Stolis,” sang Janine.
They were all, except for Harriet, drunk. Jen felt floppy-limbed and silly as she finished Saran-wrapping the Brie, swung open the door to her refrigerator.
“That’s about six shots,” Deb sang, and her voice went up with a screech, like at the end of my dog has fleas. Jen smiled in appreciation before it hit her.
“Six shots? You’re kidding.”
“Six shots,” Deb confirmed with a hiccup.
Harriet, who’d been dutifully stacking into a Tupperware the homemade buckeyes Athena had made in honor of the book’s Ohio scenes, made a disapproving harrumphing noise.
“What did you guys think about the tunnel scene?” Janine said, her voice a little mumbly as she slumped into Jen’s banquette. “With that, what was her name? One thing I’ll say about our girl Fiona. Verrry equal-opportunity. Did I ever tell you guys about in college, when I—hello, and what do we have here?”
Colin and Abe, both in heavy wool coats, had come into the kitchen. Their cheeks were flushed from the cold, and their faces were too serious for the room.
Abe fled upstairs abruptly, but if he’d been rude, the women didn’t seem to notice. They beamed at Colin.
“How was the movie?” Jen said carefully. It felt inappropriate to act tipsy in front of Colin.
“Fine,” Colin said. “Can I help you guys clean up?”
“Don’t worry about it,” Jen said at the same time that Janine hissed something that sounded like, “Yaassssssss.”
With a messily dramatic point of her arm, Janine directed Colin to carry the folding chairs to the closet. When he turned his back, she mimed grabbing his rear.
Cute, she mouthed, and dissolved into giggles. She pointed sloppily under her right eye and mouthed, He’s wearing makeup.
“Janine,” Jen said. “Control yourself.”
Janine saluted and lost her balance and laughed even harder. “Sir,” she asked Colin, “are you in college?”
“Grad school,” Jen said.
“How old is he?”
“Twenty-five,” Colin said quietly.
Jen smiled at him in a way that was intended to transmit it was all silliness, not harassment in the least.
“Twenty-five,” Janine sang. “I remember twenty-five.”
“We’re very pleased for you,” Jen said.
“Wait. Do I?” Janine sounded lost as she stood up and wobbled over to Colin, cupped his chin with her hand. “You are an itty-bitty Goth baby.”
It would have been an awkward moment for most anyone, but later that night, Jen would think of all the different ways that Colin might have reacted.
He might have stepped backward to free himself, or smiled politely or tried to laugh it off or even pushed away Janine, who was half his size. But whether a person became predator or prey had nothing to do with size or strength. It was all mindset.
Becoming a mother—Abe’s mother—had turned Jen into a vulnerability detector. She couldn’t stomach watching someone flail, even fictional characters, even cartoons. Every Bambi, every Dumbo: It’s Abe, her body would scream. That could be Abe.
So, when Colin froze in response to Janine’s touch, when his spooked eyes met Jen’s, she snapped into action.
“Janine, are we going to have to enroll you in sensitivity training?” Jen pulled Janine off Colin and pushed her in the direction of the banqu
ette. “Who’s driving her home?”
“I will,” Priya said.
Collapsed against the soapstone countertop, Janine blew a big sloppy kiss in Priya’s direction. “My hero.”
“I’m so, so sorry,” Jen said to Colin as she walked him to the door. “Are you okay?”
“Fine,” he whispered. “Thank you.”
It took all of her strength to not rub his back as she would have with Abe. Some people just needed a little more help.
* * *
Annie stayed in Lena’s driveway until she saw the lights go on inside.
Whenever Annie brought up Rachel, Lena’s canned reaction reminded Annie of her first job after college, which had been assisting a public relations department.
Yes, Rachel is doing GREAT. And … topic pivot. When someone answered like that, there was always more to the story.
Did Rachel have friends? An explosive temper? Had Rachel’s personality ever changed on a dime? Did Rachel have a problem with addiction?
On the night of the party, Rachel had been tending bar. Even from feet away, Annie could feel her storminess, her general dissatisfaction.
Not to mention that ugly scene at Bryce Neary’s funeral.
Annie wanted Lena to level with her, because she was pretty sure that Lena had insider information: What was regular teen angst and what was something more?
* * *
When Annie got home from book club, she found Laurel stretched out on the couch in the darkened den that smelled faintly of nail polish. Laurel’s headphones were plugged into Mike’s old MP3 player.
“You got that thing to work?” Annie said.
“Necessity is the mother of invention.”
Annie perched on the couch’s arm, squinted at Laurel’s toes. “Is that polish turquoise?”
“This is my life now. Boomer music and painting my nails.”
“You got off easy.”
They had grounded Laurel for only two weeks. Annie wasn’t sure how effective it would be—Laurel still seemed disinclined to reflect on why she was being punished.
“Is it because I work at school?” Annie asked. She lifted Laurel’s feet and scooted underneath them.
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