The Perfect Neighbors

by Sarah Pekkanen

  She sat on the couch, watching him go. As she did, a hazy memory returned to her. She’d tried so hard not to think about election night. But something had happened after she’d gotten sick and had collapsed into bed.

  She’d felt something against her forehead. The briefest flutter of a touch, like the wings of a bird grazing her skin. At first she’d thought it was Joe. But she’d opened her eyes, and she’d seen someone bending over to set a glass of water down on her nightstand.

  Her daughter. Melanie.

  • • •

  Newport Cove Listserv Digest

  *Snow shoveler

  I’m looking for someone to keep my sidewalk and driveway clear of snow, should we have any this winter. Will pay $3 per hour. Perfect way for a teenager to get a little extra exercise. —Tally White, Iris Lane

  *Farts!

  I love farts! —Reece Harmon, Daisy Way

  *Re: Farts!

  One of my sons got ahold of my laptop and sent that, obviously. Apologies to all. —Reece Harmon, Daisy Way

  • • •

  “Mom, my teacher said she sent you an email,” Cole announced as he stepped off the school bus.

  “Great,” Susan said. It was probably about a book fair or fruit sale. “I’ll read it as soon as we get home. Should we make our own pizzas for dinner tonight?”

  “Yes!” Cole shouted.

  It was one of their traditions. They bought dough and sauce and cheese from the Italian deli, then Susan put out toppings in little bowls: pepperoni and onion, red peppers and pineapple. Cole liked to make every slice a different flavor.

  Cole bounced along beside her, chatting about what had happened at recess (apparently there was a flagrant violation of the rules at dodgeball that, shockingly, went unnoticed by the playground aide) and the silly book about a snorting pug dog that his teacher had read aloud. Cole loved his teacher. He loved Sparky. He loved this neighborhood. He loved Randall, and he loved his mama. Susan was proud of the fact that she’d never said a single negative thing about Randall or Daphne in his presence. Difficult moments kept piling up, like the one a few weeks earlier, when Cole had brought home a drawing. There was a little stick figure of Cole, and one of Susan holding his hand. On the other side of Cole was Randall and Daphne with a round stomach.

  “MY FAMILY,” he’d written in block letters.

  As much as it pained Susan to see that sketch, there was some sweet running through the bitter. Her little boy was adjusting well. He was excited about having a new sibling—he was positive it would be a boy and he was coming up with a list of names. Susan had learned to clench her jaw so she wouldn’t say, “Actually, he would be your half brother.” The distinction would be important only to her, and Cole might pick up something in her tone that could distress him.

  She’d run through fire for her son. Fling herself in front of a speeding truck to push him out of the way. So she could do this. She could speak well of his father, and smile when Cole talked about the adventures he had at Randall and Daphne’s house. She’d turn away and pretend to cough so Cole wouldn’t see the look on her face when he talked about building a gingerbread house with them (although she’d just bought gingerbread and icing and gumdrops for them to build a house together. That was their tradition, the thing she always did with Cole).

  When they got home, she sliced a Granny Smith apple and spread peanut butter over four saltines, then poured a glass of lemonade and set Cole’s snack out on the kitchen table.

  “After you finish, we’ve got to run out to get stuff for the pizzas,” she said. She took his backpack to the sink and pulled out his lunchbox, giving it a quick rinse to remove all the crumbs and tossing his crumpled milk box and uneaten cheese stick into the trash.

  “Don’t forget the email,” Cole said.

  “Right,” Susan said, flipping open the laptop she’d left on the kitchen table. She frowned. It wasn’t a flyer.

  Mrs. Barrett,

  Would you mind giving me a call at your earliest convenience?

  Thank you!

  Ms. Klopson

  Susan glanced at Cole, who was swinging his feet on his stool as he plowed through his crackers, spewing crumbs all over the table. Despite the breezy exclamation point at the end of the note, an anxious knot formed in her stomach. She picked up the cordless phone.

  “I’m going to check on the laundry,” she said. “Give me a yell if you need anything.”

  She went into the basement and turned on the dryer, even though it contained no clothes. The noise would mask her side of the conversation.

  She dialed the number at the bottom of the email. The area code was unfamiliar and she assumed it was Ms. Klopson’s cell phone number, which seemed to add to the sense of urgency. She couldn’t imagine teachers gave those out freely.

  “Hi, this is Susan Barrett, Cole’s mom,” she said. “I just got your note.”

  “Oh, thank you for calling,” Ms. Klopson said. She was a young woman of about twenty-five, exuberant and smiling—exactly the type of person you’d want teaching your second-grader. “It’s nothing urgent, but a few little things have come up with Cole and I thought you should know. I’m a big believer in parent-teacher communication.”

  “Good,” Susan said. “So am I.”

  “On the playground today, there was a little incident,” Ms. Klopson said. “Cole mentioned your new relationship, and a few of the kids were teasing him, and I thought you’d want to know because he did get very upset, and it’s my policy to call parents whenever a child cries.”

  “Cole cried?” Susan blinked. “About my new relationship?”

  Ms. Klopson misunderstood her tone. “I mean, it’s certainly none of my business who you’re engaged to, and I—”

  “No, no,” Susan interrupted. “I’m not engaged to anyone. That’s why I was confused. What exactly did Cole say?”

  “Oh dear,” Ms. Klopson said. “I should know by now not to believe everything little kids say. They have such rich imaginations! Well, Cole has been telling the other kids that you’re going to marry Steve Kerr.”

  “Steve Kerr . . . his soccer coach?” Susan said, refraining from saying, That kid? Ms. Klopson was just a few years older than him.

  “Cole has been very convincing,” Ms. Klopson said. “He may have a future as a novelist. He says you all raked leaves together last night, and that Steve helped you change a lightbulb that you couldn’t reach.”

  “Cole told you all that?” Susan couldn’t believe it. It was one thing to fib. It was another to construct a multilayered, elaborate fantasy.

  “I’m sure it’s just a phase,” Ms. Klopson said. “I just felt badly for Cole because one of the older boys told Cole that you were too”—Ms. Klopson cut herself off and readjusted her words—“that the age difference between you and Steve was too great, and he ran off the playground crying. I found him hiding in the closet in the classroom.”

  Cole had cried, and she hadn’t been there to comfort him? Susan felt a pang in her chest.

  “He didn’t mention anything about that,” Susan said. “He was in a great mood when he got home.”

  “Kids tend to live in the moment,” Ms. Klopson said. “Most of them, anyway. I wouldn’t worry about it too much.”

  “Thank you,” Susan said, and she slowly put down the phone.

  She stayed frozen in place for a while. If Cole hadn’t had a father in his life, she’d understand why he seemed to be trying to procure one. But Randall was very present. Cole spent one full weekend day and night with Randall, usually Saturdays, and Cole also slept over at Randall’s every Tuesday night. Plus Randall volunteered in Cole’s classroom every Thursday. Randall phoned every night at bedtime to read Cole a story. Cole and Randall spent more time together than some other fathers and sons who lived in the same house.

  It couldn’t be simple he
ro worship of their soccer coach. Susan attended a lot of practices, and while the kids all liked Steve, Cole barely mentioned him.

  What else could it be?

  Susan turned the question over in her mind while beside her the dryer tumbled in fruitless circles, too.

  Cole was grappling with something, but what?

  * * *

  Chapter Eighteen

  * * *

  IN HIGH SCHOOL, TESSA had known a girl named Penelope who was so astonishingly beautiful she didn’t seem human. She looked like she’d stepped out of a cosmetics ad. Every detail, from the curve of her eyebrows to the glossy sweep of strawberry-blond hair to the delicate shape of her collarbone was perfectly etched. Guys stared at her. Girls stared at her. Tessa had even caught a few teachers staring at her, their chalk halting in its movement against the board, before they caught themselves and continued their lessons.

  During her senior year, Penelope had a boyfriend who was already in college, a detail that awarded her even more social currency. She drove a BMW. She wasn’t catty, but she didn’t go out of her way to be nice. She was a golden girl, living an impossibly charmed life. She seemed remote, which wasn’t surprising, because how could mere mortals expect to coexist on the same plane as perfect Penelope?

  Then, three weeks after beginning her freshman year of college, Penelope used a rope to hang herself in her dorm room.

  The first thing that popped into Tessa’s mind when she’d heard the news was: But she was so beautiful!

  You told yourself stories about people, Tessa thought. You took in superficial details and created a narrative: Penelope must have been happy, because she looked so good. But you were usually wrong.

  She’d made the same mistake with Susan. She’d assumed Susan was a Superwoman. Pretty, successful, competent—a strong businesswoman who was also a great mom. Cole was polite and cheerful, and Susan had it all together. When Addison had tripped and skinned his knee on the sidewalk on the way to the bus, Susan had pulled a tiny tube of Neosporin and a Band-Aid from her purse. When Bree was struggling to remember state capitals in preparation for a geography exam, Susan not only recited them all, she gave her mnemonic tips to help her ace the test.

  Now Tessa knew the truth: Susan had secret struggles, too. Sometimes Susan cried so hard that her pretty face twisted and she gasped for air.

  I know, Tessa thought. I’ve done that, too.

  The kids were in the living room, watching a video, while Tessa put together dinner. Harry had been away on business for two nights, and she wanted him to come home to a good meal. They’d been making so much progress lately. Before the incident at Halloween, neither of them had nightmares for a few weeks.

  Tessa cut a butternut squash in half and drizzled each side with olive oil before putting it into the oven, facedown, to roast. She cleaned a chicken and slid slices of lemon and cloves of garlic under its skin before putting it into the oven next to the squash. There would also be rolls, and a big green salad, and hard apple cider for the adults. She’d light a fire, and put on music.

  Superficial details, a voice whispered in her mind, but she ignored it.

  When the phone rang, she was rinsing lettuce. Her hands were wet, so she dried them on the dish towel looped over the stove handle and scooped up the receiver without checking caller ID. That was her first mistake.

  “Tessa!”

  The voice on the other end burst out, bright and bubbly as champagne. Cindy. A friend from her past—from her other life, the one she’d taken for granted, even complained about.

  “I’ve been trying to reach you forever, girl! Seems like you just dropped off the face of the earth.”

  “I’m sorry,” Tessa said, her mind quickly searching for a reason to get off the phone. “Things have been so frantic, with the move, and Harry’s been traveling . . .”

  “Excuses, excuses,” Cindy said, but there was no menace in her tone. Cindy had been the room mother, along with Tessa, for Bree’s first-grade class. They’d gone walking together lots of mornings after taking the kids to school. She’d been a wonderful friend.

  Imitate the school principal doing morning announcements in your Sarah Palin voice! she could still hear Cindy beg, and she could see her friend doubled over in helpless laughter, her shoulders shaking, tears streaming down her face.

  Oh, how Tessa missed her! Suddenly other memories of her former life came rushing back: The little pencil marks on the kitchen doorframe she and Harry had etched to capture their children’s growth—the painters would have covered those up when they’d gotten the house ready to put on the market. The lion she’d stenciled on Addison’s wall to watch over him and protect him while he slept—Larry the Lion was probably gone by now, too. The small angel statue Tessa had bought for the garden, as a remembrance of the two babies she’d lost before they were born. The bushes in their backyard that, for two glorious weeks in late June, were filled to bursting with tart, sweet blackberries—­their family had always vowed they’d pick enough for a pie, but they ended up stripping all the fruit off the branches to gobble down, their fingers and lips staining purple. Those sun-warmed berries were the best thing Tessa had ever tasted.

  Tessa cleared her throat. “I’m glad you called,” she said. She could do this. She could get through a simple conversation; it would be good practice. Cindy had left a few messages on Tessa’s cell, but Tessa hadn’t returned them. Instead she’d written careful emails to Cindy that were designed to appear chatty without revealing anything substantial. She’d read them through several times before hitting send, knowing that anything electronic could always be subpoenaed.

  “How is everything back home?” Tessa asked, thinking she’d keep the focus on Cindy. That way she could talk less. But it was her second mistake.

  Cindy sighed, and Tessa heard the whistle of her teakettle. Cindy constantly drank cinnamon tea because she was in an ongoing struggle to lose ten pounds and she’d heard cinnamon curbed your appetite. Except Cindy added a big spoonful of honey and a dash of cream to her tea, offsetting whatever gains she might make. It was one of the quirky, endearing details that sealed a friendship.

  “It’s been a strange few months,” Cindy said. “The kids all miss Addison and Bree. I don’t know, everyone around here is still pretty freaked out. Detective Robinson comes around and asks questions every now and then. She’s always got that little black notebook out. She was here yesterday and I told her sometimes it just hits me that Danny is gone, and I’m so angry, because I want to—”

  Cindy cut herself off. Tessa knew one of her children must’ve walked into the kitchen.

  “Well, you know,” Cindy continued lightly. “Those photos!”

  Tessa could feel herself shaking. Why had she answered the phone?

  “Yes,” she murmured.

  “But enough about that,” Cindy said. “What’s new with you?”

  Tessa managed to talk for another five minutes before finding an excuse to get off the phone. “I’ll call you next week!” Cindy had said. “Let’s stay in better touch.”

  More memories were roaring back now, fast and hard. Tessa sank onto a chair, her hands clutching her stomach, as images slammed into her: Harry staggering into the kitchen that night, the blood on his shoes, his face so pale . . .

  “Your shoes,” she’d said, pointing to them. Harry had looked down, seen the blood, and slipped them off.

  “I have a plan,” he’d said, his usually rich brown eyes appearing oddly blank. “Follow me.”

  Tessa had been in shock. She’d obediently trailed him up the stairs, feeling as if she’d floated outside of her own body. Harry had gone into their bedroom first, and he’d put his bathrobe over his T-shirt and shorts. He’d tossed Tessa her robe and motioned for her to do the same. Then he walked to the threshold of Bree’s room. Harry had raised a finger to his lips. He’d slowly opened the door and had crept
inside. He’d reached for the alarm clock on Bree’s nightstand. She’d just gotten it the previous Christmas and was inordinately proud of her ability to wake herself up in time for school. As Tessa watched, Harry twisted a knob to flip the numbers back, changing the time from 2:54 a.m. to 12:29 a.m.

  Harry put a hand on Tessa’s shoulder. “Go to the top of the stairs,” he’d whispered.

  “What are you going to do?” she’d asked, but he just gestured for her to move. He stepped into the hallway with her. Then he slammed Bree’s door—hard.

  The noise crashed through the house.

  “Daddy?” Bree had called. She’d always been a light sleeper.

  Harry waited a beat, then opened her door.

  “Sweetie, it’s so late,” he said. “Have you been awake this whole time? Don’t you know what time it is?”

  Bree looked at the clock without waiting for an answer, then her head flopped back on her pillow.

  “Here,” Harry had said. He handed Bree a glass of water from her nightstand. “I bet you’re thirsty. Drink some of this, then you’ll be able to sleep.”

  But as Bree reached for the glass, Harry let it slip from his grasp. It landed on her chest and spilled its contents down her nightgown. She gave a little shriek and sat up. “Daddy, it’s cold!”

  “Oh, sweetie, I’m so sorry,” Harry had said. “Tessa, can you get her a fresh nightgown? Bree, just run into the bathroom and change.”

  Even in her foggy state, Tessa realized what he was doing. If she’d immediately dozed off again, Bree might not even have remembered waking up. So Harry was making sure the details would be lodged in her brain that morning. Bree got up and went into the bathroom, and Harry turned on the hall light, which burned brightly.

  When Bree returned, her voice sounded much more alert.

  “You need to go to sleep,” Harry said. “It’s so late. See what time it is?”

  He pointed at the clock.

  “Look, the clock says one-two-three-four,” Bree said. “It’s twelve thirty-four.”