The Neighbor's Secret

by L. Alison Heller

  Lena’s floaty green dress. Rachel leaned over the bar, her giant eyes watching Bryce.

  She’d been just a few years older than Laurel. What was Rachel like now? The more Annie tried to look past the question, the bigger it became.

  If Annie saw for herself that Rachel was okay, maybe the tide could do its job, sweep up the beached wreckage and wash it back out to sea.

  “The DJ will be under a tree.” Lena sighed. “If Laurel still insists on a DJ and not a live band.”

  “Laurel insists on a DJ,” Laurel said, grinning. “It’s going to look awesome. Can you imagine, Mom?”

  “Yep,” Annie said. Could she ever.

  FIFTEEN YEARS EARLIER

  Bryce was being Bryce.

  It was taking him forever to get Annie’s orange juice from the bar because he was working overtime to charm the sour-faced girl behind it.

  He still looked the high school track star. When he flung his lean arms sloppily to emphasize a point, his short sleeve slipped to expose a long tendon, the slight bulge of his biceps.

  Annie clocked the girl responding to his goofy chuckle, how her obsidian eyes glinted and she swallowed quickly. Her smile lingered for a minute after Bryce bounded back to Annie, two glasses in hand.

  “You made a new friend,” Annie said.

  “Who?” He handed Annie the juice. “Rachel?”

  Rachel Meeker? Annie stole a longer glance.

  Rachel’s features were thick bold lines. They overpowered the planes of her face, and while she’d probably grow into them, right now she looked too severe. Or maybe she was mad, somehow knew that Annie was about to break her heart.

  “What are we looking at?” Bryce said in a stage whisper.

  “Rachel Meeker,” Annie whispered back. “I think she has a thing for you.”

  “Not age-appropriate,” Bryce said. He shook his head clumsily and held a finger in the air. “But I was telling her, as I will tell you, Annie, that after this, there’s a party down the hill. At Dan’s. No. Dave’s.” He closed his eyes, bit his lip, swayed very slightly. “I forgot the kid’s name. The kid with the rabbits, you know? Chris’s cousin. He’s got a hutch for them, an actual rabbit hutch.”

  “You’re drunk.” Annie felt annoyed at his sloppiness, left behind by it, which was hardly fair. She ignored her phone, which was trembling in her bag.

  “Not as drunk as I will be,” Bryce said with indignation. “I’ve got the whole night planned. Should we ask Rachel for a bottle?”

  Annie didn’t understand why she suddenly felt so guilty watching Rachel Meeker behind the bar. With her doting mother and ornate braids and perfect princess bedroom, she did not need any sympathy.

  Shaken, Annie took a delicate sip of orange juice, returned her attention to Bryce, who hiccupped, pointed clumsily at her chiming bag.

  His brow furrowed. “You gonna get that?”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  For the book club meeting, Janine had transformed her living room into an art studio where the women could create their own still-life paintings. Their subject was a vase of flowers and a glass half filled with Deb Gallegos’s themed drink (Untitled—Pernod and champagne and lemon juice).

  Later, the group would agree that while the experience had been lovely, they wouldn’t re-create it. Everyone had been too contemplative, a bit in their own orbit.

  Deb pushed her chair closer to Annie. “This isn’t book club,” she muttered, “it’s study hall. We should’ve gotten a live model.” She glanced at Annie’s painting. “You’re a terrible artist.”

  Annie had to agree. Her canvas looked like blueberries on toast. “I know,” she said. “Wasn’t this supposed to be empowering?”

  “Speaking of nudes,” Deb whispered, “have you heard of the hot untouchable?”

  Annie shook her head. It was difficult sometimes to keep up with Deb.

  “I overhead Sierra on the phone asking ‘is the hot untouchable coming to the party.’ She won’t tell me who she was talking to. Is Laurel seeing anyone?”

  Annie frowned. “Laurel’s been spending time at Abe Pagano’s house. But I don’t think—”

  Deb’s brows lowered to indicate that no, she couldn’t picture the pairing either. “Haley seemed the likely candidate anyway. But I had to ask.”

  “Definitely Haley.”

  “But it was strange. Sierra usually has a compulsion to tell me things, so I’m a little proud of her—maybe she’s finally learned to keep a secret—but I’m also dying to know. What qualities would make a teenager untouchable? I really hope it’s not something class-based. Are we raising elitist snobs or—”

  “What are we whispering about?” Janine popped her head over the easel.

  “Laurel’s party,” Deb said.

  “Oh yes,” Janine sighed. “Poor Katie has a bit of the green-eyed grouchies. How’s the planning going? Anything I can do to help?”

  Janine’s forlorn look indicated that perhaps Katie wasn’t the jealous one after all.

  “Lena’s a powerhouse,” Annie marveled. “She’s got it more than covered.”

  All three of them looked ahead to Lena, who gracefully dabbed at her canvas.

  “The party is way bigger than Laurel,” Annie said. “It’s not even about her anymore. Tell Katie that it’s really for everyone at this point.”

  MAY

  To: “The Best Book Club in the World”

  From: proudmamabooklover3@hmail.com

  Ladies … drumroll please!… it’s (SOB) our Final Book Club Meeting of the Year!!!!

  The book: IPHIGENIA, based on the Greek Myth of the daughter of Agamemnon, sacrificed by her own Father so that he could start the Trojan War, avenged by her Mother, who was then murdered by Iphigenia’s siblings—her own children. (And I thought Christmas at my in-law’s was awkward!)

  The place: Priya’s house at 7:30.

  The food: It is our much-anticipated MULTI-CULTI NIGHT, when we celebrate the Melting Pot, oops I mean SALAD BOWL, that is Cottonwood Estates! Bring your appetite and sense of adventure and of course: a dish from your heritage!

  LET’S CELEBRATE OUR DIFFERENCES, LADIES, AND OUR UNITY!

  Thank you everyone for making this the BEST. YEAR. EVER!!! Words cannot express how much I treasure this incredible community of ours! I better stop—I’m starting to tear up right here at the computer! Mwah, mwah!

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  There were only two days left until the party.

  “Final countdown,” Annie chirped as she handed Lena the caftan she’d just tried on. The arms and shoulders had fit her perfectly, just like Lena had pictured when she had bought it.

  “Not a surprise that it needs to be hemmed,” Annie said with a nervous giggle as Lena looped the thread onto her sewing machine. “Everything needs to be hemmed on me!”

  She paced back and forth along the perimeter of Lena’s crafting room. Lena wanted to send her on a made-up errand, clear the room of her jittery energy.

  “I’ll have Laurel try her dress on too when she gets home from Abe’s, where she is again,” Annie said.

  Lena looked up. There had been a sharp note in Annie’s voice. “Is everything still okay?”

  “Great.” Annie was still pacing. “She’s talking to us again. I don’t know why I feel so … bottled up this week. Do you think it’s the party?”

  Lena pressed the sewing machine’s pedal. “Maybe.”

  “Why are you so calm?”

  “Hilde the party planner,” Lena said. “She’s a dynamo. You’ll see when you meet her.”

  Lena remembered how she used to wake up with a jolt the morning of a party with a weird stage fright, task lists multiplying in her head.

  You seem more plugged in, Melanie had said a few weeks ago. I think it’s because you’ve given yourself permission to live.

  Melanie was almost right. Lena had given herself permission to forget.

  All of these years, Lena had confused grief and guilt, but the grief
was not Lena’s, it never had been, and the guilt was self-generated. It could be ditched by the side of the road, it turned out, to become smaller and smaller in the rearview, until it was practically indistinguishable from the rest of the landscape.

  Annie had stopped her pacing to stand uncomfortably close to Lena’s shoulder. The way she peered at the hemming process made it impossible for Lena to concentrate.

  Lena pointed to the stitch in the caftan. “I don’t think the thread matches.”

  Annie sucked in her lips noisily. The smack reverberated in Lena’s ear. “Looks fine to me.”

  “If you don’t mind,” Lena said, “could you grab some extra thread from the closet? Top of the stairs, third door on the right, middle shelf, in a wicker basket.”

  Annie repeated the instructions, flashed a thumbs-up, left the room.

  “Take your time,” Lena called after her. “Just grab all the pinks.”

  Relieved, she returned to the hemming.

  Upon closer examination, Lena saw the thread color was a little off. She leaned over the dress, carefully ripped out the stitches.

  * * *

  “I’m leaning toward going to that academic conference I told you about,” Jen said. “The one in June.”

  She and Paul were in the car, driving home from an impromptu date night at a downtown sushi spot. Through the windshield, the moon was large and full, and the sky around it an electric blue.

  “You should go,” Paul said.

  Jen glanced over to the passenger seat. “I’d be away for five days.”

  “So?”

  “Is it that easy?”

  “Sure.”

  Jen did have a light optimistic feeling that it might be that easy, that the Paganos might be approaching something close to balance.

  Since March—right around the time Abe had become friends with Laurel—there had been nary a square of toilet paper hung from a tree in all of Cottonwood Estates. Her worry that Abe was the vandal seemed a million years behind them, just like that horrible meeting at Foothills with Dutton.

  In retrospect, she was almost grateful for it—and even for that uncomfortable call with Scofield—because they were now in a better place, with a small but legitimate circle of support.

  Abe had two friends, if you counted Colin. He had Dr. Shapiro and Nan and the Kingdom School, which had its faults but was a good fit.

  And Jen had the women of book club, not the Hitchcockian murder of crows she had imagined in darker moments, but more a circle of clucking mother hens.

  As she turned into their driveway, Jen realized that the spot between her scapulae, usually rock-hard, was relaxed. Her entire body felt warm and content.

  There were less complicated children out there, but there were also parents who might have handled it all better. In the name of protecting Abe, Jen had lost nuance, self-awareness, her career: everything that had made Jen Jen.

  Almost everything. When Maxine Das had recalled Jen as the tigress from graduate school, Jen hadn’t initially recognized herself because all of that fire and drive wasn’t channeled toward the pursuit of tenure anymore.

  It had all been repurposed, focused on Abe.

  Jen had been stuck in tigress mode for years. But there were reinforcements now. Maybe the beast could finally loosen her hold.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  Annie found the spools of thread exactly where Lena had directed her, in a large wicker basket, lined neatly and color-coordinated in rainbow order. She scooped up all of the ones that might be construed as pink.

  The upstairs hallway smelled like Lena’s perfume and fresh paint. Annie remembered more on the walls, which now seemed stark. Rachel’s room was only a few feet down the hall. Annie walked toward it, keeping her footsteps soft and slow. She pressed her weight against the doorknob, and twisted it open.

  It was still a teenaged girl’s bedroom. Mint-green duvet and oversized pink fluffy pillow shams. The same giant giraffe in the corner. On the bedside table was Rachel’s eleventh-grade summer reading: The Great Gatsby, The Taming of the Shrew. A gray sweatshirt was folded over the back of the desk chair, like Rachel was about to shrug into it, plop down on the bed.

  Over the desk was a giant posterboard collage. Images of Olympic medals, swimmers diving into pools and standing on winner’s podiums. Excellence, Rachel had cut-and-pasted. Champion. Winner. 100 Fly.

  Annie had had no idea that Rachel was so obsessed with swimming. What else didn’t she know?

  She wanted to rifle through the desk drawers, spread everything out on Rachel’s bed and spend the rest of the evening poring through it, but she forced herself to leave before Lena would notice she’d been gone too long.

  * * *

  “Could these work?” Annie said.

  She had returned from upstairs mellowed, and she carefully lined up the pink spools, and inexplicably a red and two purple ones, next to the sewing machine, for Lena’s examination.

  When Lena heard the ascending scales of her ringtone, she looked around the sewing-machine table for her phone.

  “It’s over here.” Annie darted to the shelves across the room, picked up the phone. “Oh my god. Oh my god.”

  “What?” Lena said.

  “Oh. My. God. It’s Rachel!” Annie’s face flushed pink and she hopped in place like a sweepstakes winner. “Rachel would like to video chat!”

  In a clumsy rush, Lena rose from her stool. Her knees jostled the sewing machine, and the caftan slipped to the floor along with the seven unraveling spools of thread.

  Lena had the sensation that she, too, was falling, head over heels over head. Her feet tangled in the caftan’s silk and she watched helplessly as Annie reached out a fingertip to press Accept.

  “Well, hello, Rachel Meeker,” Annie said into the phone. “How are you?”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  Jen found Abe alone in his room, stretched out on his bed with his computer on his lap. He was so absorbed in his programming that he didn’t notice her in the doorway.

  She smiled, watching him type, chuckle at the screen. “What’s so funny?”

  He slammed shut the top of the computer. “Nothing.”

  “Where’s your Foxhole buddy?” Jen pointed to the beanbag chair.

  “Do you mean Laurel Perley?” Abe said. “She’s not my Foxhole buddy.”

  “Oh? What’s her title then?”

  “Either a nullity”—Abe tilted his head—“or an enemy.”

  “But, but, but,” Jen sputtered, “she was just here, debating which takeout place to order from.”

  “Everyone needs fuel,” he said flatly. “Sharing a physical location does not confirm friendship.”

  “What happened this time?”

  “You saw what you wanted to see.”

  “Laurel’s a sweet kid, Abe. She’s not Harper French, and if you can’t maintain a friendship with her, then—”

  “Laurel is more like Harper French than you think. Remember how Harper used to smile and feign kindness only to lure me into the group so they could be really mean to me?”

  “You’re saying that Laurel lures you into a group to be mean?” Jen looked around the empty room. “What group?”

  “Laurel has ulterior motives. She is false pretense personified.”

  “I don’t even know what that means.”

  “I’m happy to stop talking about it.”

  “What happened?”

  “I told her to leave.”

  “But why? Was there a disagreement? Did you ask Colin to help mediate whatever it was?”

  “Colin.” Abe snorted. “I’ve started to doubt his intelligence.”

  “Abe, you get stuck in patterns with people, and if you don’t learn how to change them—”

  “Then I won’t have a pretend friend like Laurel, who excels at acting all phony-nice.”

  “After his appointment, I’m sure Colin will help smooth things over, whatever this is.”

  “What appointment?” />
  “Remember, for his ulcer? Mrs. Gallegos got him an appointment with that doctor and he’s taking the next couple of days off.”

  “What ulcer?”

  “Abe! He’s been walking around like this.” Jen hunched over in pain. “How did you miss it?”

  “I don’t need him to smooth things over. I have a plan.”

  Jen felt light-headed. She gripped the molding around his doorway for support.

  “It’s legal,” Abe clarified. “On a literal level, no one will be harmed.”

  “They better not be, if you have any desire to get your hands on that monitor.”

  Abe scowled at her. “You always side with everyone else. It’s a bit unmaternal. And no matter what you think, I have the right to express my anger.”

  “Anger about what?”

  “Using people is not okay, and Laurel needs to understand that.”

  “Using you? But for what?”

  “This conversation is going nowhere,” he said.

  Jen couldn’t really argue with that.

  CHAPTER FORTY

  “I’m sorry,” Rachel Meeker said. Her face filled the phone screen. Her heavy eyebrows were lifted in confusion. “I’m trying to reach my mom?”

  “She’s right here.” Annie swung the phone around so Rachel could see Lena. “I’m her friend Annie.”

  “Okay?” Rachel’s lips bent in a small polite smile.

  She looked fine, Annie decided. Her hair had been chopped very short, which required confidence, didn’t it? Her eyes were big and dark and worried, but that was probably because Annie was gawking at her.

  “Has your mom told you about this party she’s throwing for Laurel? Oops, you probably don’t know who Laurel is, she’s my daughter. You haven’t met her yet, why would you have, that’d be silly, what a silly thing for me to say.”

  “Yes,” Rachel said slowly.

  Yes what?

  Annie was aware she was talking too much, but Rachel wasn’t saying enough. “If I look familiar,” Annie said, “we were on swim team together a million years ago. You were like, seven or something.”