Good Neighbors

by Joanne Serling

  “Thank God we had the weekend sitter with us,” Paige continued more cheerily. “I told Camille to put the dress in the machine, throw out the underwear, and get Winnie ready for bed!”

  “Poor Winnie,” I said, trying to let Paige know that Winnie deserved sympathy. “She’s missing the party.”

  “Don’t worry!” Paige said with a wave of her hand. “Winnie doesn’t even know the difference!” Laughing a little. Her cheeks turning pinker. I hoped she didn’t mean this, even though it bothered me that she kept insisting on it. That Winnie didn’t need or want the same things the other kids did. Or that she didn’t deserve them.

  “Are you guys going away for Christmas?” Lorraine asked, looking from Paige to her cousin, desperate, no doubt, to change the subject. She didn’t want to hear any more about Winnie’s poopy pants. She didn’t want to have to contemplate whether it was right or wrong to leave Winnie home. She wanted to enjoy the party. She wanted us to have a festive evening with memories and laughter that could be documented in Drew’s end-of-year video. The one we watched every January. The one that was proof of our friendship and our shared happiness.

  “She will probably have digestive problems for the rest of her life,” Paige said, not taking the hint, or taking it and shoving it aside. Paige a marathon talker when she wanted to be. Or maybe she was just determined for us to understand something about Winnie.

  “Winnie had giardia when she arrived, which is why she’s so skinny,” Paige continued, her cousin nodding in agreement. “It may affect her learning and development long term. We can’t know yet,” Paige said, sadness and defeat creeping in beside her anger and frustration. Finally.

  All of us murmuring support. All of us telling her, “It will work out,” while next to me, Paige started to cry. Lorraine rising to hug her. Nela’s face softer as she caught my eye. Nela’s five-year-old Sebastian full of delays himself, rarely speaking on his own, his twin, Matias, seeming to do everything for him. Nela denying every diagnosis she’d ever been given—about apraxia and selective mutism—telling us she hated the experts and was convinced that kids grew out of things. Which didn’t mean she wasn’t terrified.

  Paige wiping at her eyes with a cocktail napkin, then telling us, “You guys are like family.”

  Which I knew she meant and which I wanted to be true for her. Eager to forgive her earlier callousness, even as I told myself there was nothing to forgive.

  * * *

  At dinner, Paige’s cousin said she loved my china. “Do you mind that I’m looking up the label?” she asked, laughing lightly as she turned over my grandmother’s salad plate, the bone white complemented by a burgundy border and small flecks of silver.

  “Of course not,” I said. Proud of my grandmother’s Noritake china. Pleased I’d brought one beautiful thing from my past life into this one.

  “Are you planning on buying it?” Paige called down the long table, suddenly aware of what her cousin was doing, laughing lightly, embarrassed but not really. Her spirits higher than they were in the living room. Her mood relaxed and more carefree than I’d anticipated. Was she enjoying herself? I hoped so. I couldn’t tell for certain. There was too much commotion. Next to me Anne put the plate down while Drew’s brother started to tell a story about a trip to Punta Cana with a girlfriend who dropped dead in the morning. Which morning? Of the trip? This morning? Why was he telling us this?

  Drew appearing to understand it, rubbing his beard, smiling like it was an amusing anecdote and not a dark one. Children running in from the living room, where the sitter was supposed to be containing them. Lucas proclaiming that everyone loved his noodles and asking if it was time for dessert yet, a sugar cookie in each hand, which infuriated me and caused me to snatch one of them from his fist. The cookie crumbling and dirtying the table in a way that made Lucas start crying and me feel ashamed of my aggressive demeanor. My festive mood temporarily spoiled as I reached for more wine and tried to forget about my poor parenting.

  Paige at the head of the table, telling a story now. Paige explaining about all the holidays she’d spent in Los Angeles with her family. “I don’t think I saw a white Christmas until we moved to the East Coast. Remember, Anne?” she asked. “All those suites my dad got at the Peninsula?” Anne nodding next to me. Paige smiling happily toward her cousin. Relaxed and nostalgic. Even though Paige had once told me her parents spent too much. That her father had had to keep working as a lawyer long after age sixty to pay for their extravagant lifestyle. The fact popping into my mind unbidden, then shoved aside just as quickly. Why couldn’t I un-know the things she had told me?

  We drank more wine, helped ourselves to seconds. Stories were told or retold. The first time Paige met Gene’s parents; how she’d made cookies with salt instead of sugar. The time Drew’s mother insisted on hosting thirty-four cousins for Thanksgiving in her one-bedroom apartment. Jay relaying the first time he met my mother, how he accidentally elbowed her in the eye, causing a shiner by morning. My mother coming down in the morning with an eye patch, pretending to be a pirate, making French toast and insisting he walk the plank for his breakfast. The promise of a new chapter hovering with the idea of a new family member. The happiness of that visit rising up like a swarm of mosquitoes. Almost painful.

  Around me, people continued to compete for air, for attention, for the most humorous anecdote. I got up to check on the warm apple compote. Arranging dessert dishes. Pressing coffee on people even though no one really wanted it. The dessert soon finished. Lorraine’s son Jesse asleep on my carpet. Drew capturing all the kids in the family room on his video camera, then snapping photos in my kitchen while I doled out leftovers in Tupperware containers. The kids whining in my overly bright kitchen, tired, refusing to leave even though they were sagging, barely able to keep their eyes open. Jesse hunched over in his down parka like an old man. Only Cameron alert. Cameron protesting loudly that Sophia had said the Chanukas bushes were ugly. Sophia looking exactly like Nela, her dark brows furrowed, her face closed off, silent.

  We said our good-byes. The kids suddenly rushing out into the night air, shouting to each other, eager to make their words soar over the frosted lawns and quiet houses, their voices pure and loud beneath the dark and cloudy sky.

  HIDE-AND-SEEK

  AS SOON AS THE party was over, the food complimented and the quantity groaned about, things returned to the way they had been before. Paige hiding out. Paige ignoring us. Paige busy or else resting while Gene ferried the kids about on the weekends. Gene, Cameron, and Winnie sometimes walking around the neighborhood on Sundays. Happy to join us if we invited them. Which I did whenever they passed by my kitchen window. Eager to engage with Winnie, to draw with her or bake something simple. Lucas willing to participate so long as the dessert contained chocolate. Josh and Cameron happy to decorate. Winnie always saying, “Yes, please,” and “Thank you,” as I handed her a wooden spoon or lent her my apron. Her personality lovely to be around, even if it was troubling to contemplate. Her seemingly endless desire to please. Her inability to more fully communicate. Gene never acknowledging Paige’s absence or how much I obviously enjoyed his new daughter. Even though I sensed that it weighed on him. His easy jocularity more muted. His body sometimes resting on our kitchen stools while his eyes looked outward, seeing nothing.

  * * *

  Soon it was March. The ground frozen but snowless. Cameron not around; Winnie joining the boys in a game of hide-and-seek. Josh and Winnie crouching behind a thin, wintry bush in the backyard, obvious, fully in sight. Somewhere in the front yard, Lucas was counting loudly. His voice shrieking as he got closer to twenty, the numbers climbing faster and louder. He was at eighteen, then nineteen, then twenty. “I’m coming!” he hollered, shouting out toward the bare trees, mottled grass, and cool white air that surrounded him.

  I grabbed Josh’s hand, motioned to Winnie to follow us, then raced with them toward the corner of the backyard, pointing to the shed where we stored our bikes and balls and law
n equipment.

  “Here, squat down,” I said to Josh behind the shed. “Winnie, come look,” I said, pulling her next to me. “He won’t think to look here,” I whispered to her, squeezing Winnie’s narrow shoulder and kissing her downy cheek. Winnie adorable in her purple quilted jacket, the color bringing out the pink in her complexion. Her beauty and grace fulfilling my exact fantasy of how it would be to have a daughter: easy to love, a pleasure to influence. Already imagining myself like a favored aunt to Winnie. Someone who would be there for her always.

  “Don’t make a noise,” I whispered, smiling at Winnie and Josh crouched down in total seriousness, their heads bowed, their legs like haunches. I dashed out from behind the shed and walked toward the driveway; I’d rightly guessed that Lucas was making his way from the front of the house to the back.

  “Tell me the truth. Where are they?” Lucas asked when he saw me walking toward him.

  I smiled. I laughed. I held my palms up and said, “I have no idea!”

  “I know you do!” Lucas insisted, stomping his foot. “Why won’t you tell me?”

  I laughed again. Lucas knew me so well. That I loved to keep a secret. It was one of my best traits, I had once told him, even though I doubted he knew fully what this meant.

  “Give me a hint!” Lucas whined, stomping his foot some more, balling his hands into fists, his cheeks flaming with cold. I made the zipper sign across my lips and walked away to join Gene and Jay at the end of the driveway, leaving Lucas to pout and then continue his uneven, rocking gait toward the back of the house. In the driveway, the men were talking about Gene’s business. They were always talking business; there was nothing else between them, really.

  “How long you think before Lucas finds them?” I interrupted, not caring whether a credit line should be refinanced, what the company’s current receivables were.

  “Never,” Jay said absentmindedly, no doubt still trying to figure out how he could shave a half point or more off an interest payment.

  “Not much of a seeker, but then, Winnie’s not much of a hider,” joked Gene, no doubt done with the refinancing question or just not that interested in it to begin with. Gene’s role in the business murky to me, which always made me wonder if he even understood a word Jay was saying. Which was unfair and unkind, and which I tried to cover up by asking, “Where are Paige and Cameron?” Realizing as soon as I’d said it that this was the exact wrong thing to bring up.

  “School uniforms,” he said. Too quickly? I sensed he was uncomfortable and wished I hadn’t asked it.

  “Makes sense!” I said, hoping to stop him from straining further. Wondering how to change the subject when I heard Gene’s cell phone ringing. Gene holding up a finger, answering his phone, talking in his businessman voice.

  “I’ll watch Winnie,” I mouthed after a minute, motioning for him to go take the call in the privacy of his home, to leave the hide-and-seek and mothering to me.

  A hesitation. A pause. Then finally nodding in my direction and walking toward the end of our cul-de-sac, his head bowed, the phone pressed close to his ear.

  Almost immediately, Jay asking, “Can I be excused?”

  I rolled my eyes. I said, “Why?”

  “To read,” Jay said, referring no doubt to his doomsday websites: the ones that said the recent recession was just the beginning of the soon-to-arrive end. The ones that said the government was colluding against its citizens, threatening to deceive them.

  “Why do you want to read all that stuff?” I asked, already exasperated.

  “Because this country is completely fucked up, and the government is lying about it!” Jay said, predictably.

  I rolled my eyes. His extremism irritating. Even though I knew it was how he made his money. Being the contrarian. Recommending original investment strategies.

  “You’re going to wake up one day and it’s going to cost two thousand dollars to buy a hamburger,” Jay insisted. “And believe me, you’ll wish you’d listened then.”

  He was quite possibly right. He was quite possibly wrong. But what was it he proposed that I do about it? That any of us do about it? There was only so much you could control. So much you could plan for. The rest, most of it good, some of it awful, was up to chance. You had to assume that something horrible was going to happen to you someday—likely soon, definitely not never—and that when it did, you would have the brains and the fortitude to survive it. It was Jay’s great good fortune and colossal naïveté that had prevented him from knowing all this already. Even though at another level, he’d known it his whole life and was forever trying to guard against it. The unfairness of the world. The way the people who were supposed to protect you and love you could let you down.

  “Well?” Jay asked, as though his statement about economic collapse wasn’t merely rhetorical but demanded immediate action by me. With a furrowed brow I prepared to say something demeaning. About how he didn’t know anything about politics. Or world history. Which I knew was ridiculous. We’d met in a foreign policy class at Amherst! But before I could speak, there was shrieking followed by laughter. We both turned and saw Winnie running across the driveway, Josh behind her, followed by Lucas, who was chasing them both, shouting something unintelligible and vaguely threatening about getting them. Jay turning to watch, wondering, no doubt, whether there was any way that Lucas could catch Josh. Lucas older, but Josh already swifter. All of it on account of some amorphous developmental delay we still couldn’t figure out.

  “He’s never going to catch up,” Jay muttered, stuffing his hands in his pockets, his own body lean and athletic.

  “It doesn’t matter,” I said, glad they were running, hoping they might be tired by bedtime. More shrieking. Then something louder. A cry. Jay and I running toward the corner of the front yard just in time to see that Winnie had tripped over a branch, falling into a tree trunk. Lucas falling on top of her, his head tangled near her knees. I ran toward them, Jay behind me, my heart racing, terrified of what I would find. Did Winnie crack her skull? Break her neck? And then, there it was. The blood. Winnie’s mouth gushing it.

  I must have stood in the spot and screamed. Clutched my hair. Done nothing but make noise and create more chaos. I couldn’t think. I was terrible with emergencies. Jay was terrible with blood, even now standing with his back toward me, saying, “I can’t look!”

  “Go get towels!” I finally screamed at Jay, turning toward Lucas, who was already disentangling himself from Winnie, his body upright and seemingly unharmed while Winnie lay on the ground mewing like a cat. Josh standing over Winnie, his eyes wide with wonder and fright.

  “I think I stepped on her,” Lucas said, then started to cry.

  I didn’t want him to cry. I didn’t want to console him at a time like this. I wanted him to be quiet for once. To not be needy! Which was ridiculous. He was eight years old. I couldn’t help it. “Go sit on the steps!” I yelled.

  “Take your voice down,” Jay said gently, squeezing my shoulder, telling the boys to go sit on the porch, handing me the napkins he’d gotten instead of the towels. Which was infuriating! I squatted down beside Winnie, smoothing her hair and placing the napkins gently over her mouth, telling her to hold them there and press a little if she could, doubting that pressing would do much good. The blood was copious, mottled, and thick. The napkins soaked and useless almost immediately.

  “Call Gene!” I yelled over my shoulder, knowing my voice was too loud, that I was scaring Winnie, but unable to control my hysteria. Jay dialing Gene, waiting as it rang and rang. Where was he?

  “Do you think we should call an ambulance?” Jay finally asked.

  There was silence while we thought about it. The embarrassment of calling 911. The shriek of the sirens and the commotion on our lawn. Doors open. Families on stoops and in doorways. But I didn’t feel comfortable driving her to the hospital, either. What if she bled to death from her mouth injury?

  Jay called 911. We waited.

  “Winnie, you’re goi
ng to be okay, do you hear me?” I asked, my voice cracking, tears working their way into it.

  Whimpering from Winnie, who was still on the ground.

  “Winnie, I want to take you to the doctor. To make it all better. Okay?” I said, rubbing her arm, squeezing her shoulder gently toward me. Now that help was coming, I felt less scared and hysterical.

  Winnie seemed to nod or at least fall in closer to me. I held her like that, half hugging, half leaning, until the ambulance came and we loaded her up, me riding with Winnie, Jay staying behind with the boys. Which seemed unfair and stupid to me. Given how bad I was with emergencies. Which made perfect sense to Jay, who couldn’t deal with the blood.

  * * *

  “Two chipped teeth, a cut to the gum, a pretty big gash in her lower lip, but no head injuries,” the doctor, or the doctor’s assistant, said, mumbling into his clipboard, not bothering to introduce himself to me or to Winnie when he entered our cubicle. Which annoyed me. I was standing at the side of the bed, holding Winnie’s hand, the nurse already having taken her temperature and blood pressure and assuring me that she wouldn’t bleed to death.

  “Can you tell me again how this happened?” the man continued, mumbling, then looking up at me in a way that made me nervous. As if he thought I did this to her!

  “I’m not her mother. I’m the neighbor,” I said, as if that explained everything.

  The man shrugged and continued to stare at me with his pudgy, bearded face, his demeanor young and boyish. He was, I suddenly realized, at least ten years younger than me, which for some reason only stoked my frustration. I doubted he was even a parent!