Neighborly

by Ellie Monago

  “Of course,” I say. “Thank you.”

  I keep seeing Yolanda’s guarded face. No, not just guarded. Angry. I don’t know what could have made her look like that. Maybe she and the others are lulling me into a false sense of security, and they’ll roast me on a spit at my own barbecue. They’ve all been writing the notes together, a team-building exercise for the block.

  How ironic that by wanting security for my family, I am the most insecure I’ve ever been in my life. Well, in my adult life, that is.

  Melody swans back into the room, Sadie in her arms. “Ta-da! All fresh and clean.” Sadie’s beside herself, loving the undivided attention.

  I’m overdue for a pump. I whisper that to Doug. “We’re going to get set up in the carriage house,” he announces.

  “Can the little one stay with us?” Melody asks. She bounces Sadie. “Go on, tell them. Say, ‘I want to stay with Grandma!’” Sadie laughs.

  There’s no refusing. I plant a kiss on Sadie’s head as I follow Doug out to the carriage house. Melody stands in the doorway, waving Sadie’s arm. “Come back soon! We’ll miss you!”

  The carriage house has pine floors, a closet with a moth-fighting cedar floor, and a brass bed in the center of the room. That’s it. I find the minimalism refreshing in contrast with the main house. I get my breast pump set up and turn the dial. Doug putters around, hanging our clothes in the closet.

  “Mom said she’s hoping to have some time just the two of you,” he says.

  It jars me a little when he calls her Mom, like she’s my mom, too, like Doug and I are suddenly siblings. Melody asked me to call her Mom at the rehearsal dinner, the day before Doug and I got married. “You’re my daughter now,” she said, holding me in a long embrace that smelled of powdery perfume. I hadn’t yet realized her MO. I thought she’d helped me plan the wedding; I didn’t realize until afterward that she’d hijacked it. Everything was to her taste and specifications. While smothering me in words of support and love, she’d undermined me at every turn. She’d caused me to second-guess anything I liked, with comments like, “Your parents never had a wedding, did they?” or “The nicest place in Haines is a Sheraton.” In the end, she rendered me incapable of making a decision. Then she swooped in and made them for me.

  “She’s hoping the two of you can get closer,” Doug adds.

  I crane my neck to look at him. “Why?”

  “What do you mean, why? You’re her daughter-in-law. She loves you.”

  She loves Sadie, he means. She wants us up here every other weekend instead of once a month, but she hasn’t yet laid down the law. Until now, it’s been only hints. They like us on their turf, which was why I think they never argued for a guest room. That, and we were already way over budget just to get Crayola. Melody was the one who went to bat for the neighborhood, saying she’d never seen a better place to raise children. If she only knew.

  “Stop tensing up around my parents,” Doug says, irritated. “They’re not doing anything to you. My mother couldn’t be nicer.”

  There’s nothing I can say. He’ll never allow for the possibility that his mother’s niceness is a veneer, that it’s part of how she manipulates me.

  It occurs to me that Melody and I actually have more in common than either of us would care to admit. When it comes to Doug, we’re both putting on acts.

  CHAPTER 19

  Showering in the carriage house’s claw-foot tub is no easy feat. The circumference of the tub is such that two thin white shower curtains are encircling and overlapping, and one always seems to be blowing in on me, wrapping itself around my leg like a cold, wet hand.

  I poke my head out to check on Sadie in her car seat. “You OK, little one?” Arghh. I must have heard that term of endearment from Melody fifteen times yesterday before escaping to the privacy of the carriage house.

  Sadie smiles up at me. She’s drunk on all the attention she’s been receiving, not to mention a whopping six ounces of breast milk this morning. Being in Fort Bragg has increased her appetite. Must be the bracing sea air.

  She’s still in her fleece sleep bag, her arms free to wave but her legs zipped up soundly inside. As I watch her, she spits up a small bit of milk. She punctuates this with another smile, not remotely fazed by the unpredictability and mess of her bodily functions. I duck back behind the curtain.

  “I thought it would be good for me to get out of the AV, try to gain some perspective, but I just don’t know.” I keep the singsong lilt in my voice, and I’m sure she’s kicking her legs inside the sleep bag responsively. “I can’t stop thinking about Yolanda and the notes and the openness, wondering how we can make the best of things.” It might help to talk out my feelings, and I can’t do it with Doug, who’s up in the main house. Besides, running monologues are our thing—Sadie’s and mine.

  “I’m glad you like it here, though. Your dad likes it, too. I’m the one who’s out of step.” I push the shower curtain back as it crowds me once more.

  “You probably don’t know what I mean. I hope you never do. I hope you belong wherever you go. Not that you’ll be a follower. That’s no good, either. But it’s easier if you happen to feel the way the majority does. Like your daddy. He’s the kind of person who’s in step wherever he goes. Somehow, what he feels and what he does fit.” If he had it his way, we’d be doing what everyone else is doing in the AV. We might even be on that spreadsheet.

  “No, we don’t see everything the same way. Take your grandmother, for example. He thinks she’s this incredibly sweet, giving person. But really, being seen that way gives her power. It lets her control the people around her, and no one suspects.” Sadie makes a delighted noise. “Exactly! Good girl! You just hold it together out there while Mommy finishes her shower, OK?” That happy noise can be the precursor to terrible things, a sign that she’s close to an emotional edge. My heart speeds up a little, and I start conditioning madly. “Daddy thinks that I’m resisting his mother because I’ve got mommy baggage from my childhood. But the thing is, Sadie, your grandmother pretends she wants to be my mom because then she has license to run my life. Meanwhile, she’s judging me all the time. She wants me to do things her way.”

  Since Sadie hasn’t made another peep, I decide to risk it. I apply shaving cream to my legs, striping them with the razor. “Like last night. Every time I held you, her eyes were on me. Appraising me, wanting me to hand you over to her again. She thinks I’m not good enough. But when she caught my eye, she’d give me this simpering smile, as if you and I were just the cutest things ever together. And when you started crying and I walked you around and sang to you, she was at the ready, like I needed backup.”

  As I rinse my legs, I continue. “I know it’s better for you to believe the best about your grandmother. I just can’t. Sometimes life is harder when you see things clearly.”

  I turn the knobs to off and squeeze the excess water from my hair. A towel intrudes, attached to a hairy forearm. “Doug,” I say. I drop the towel in the tub, and my heart drops along with it. He storms from the room.

  Naked, exposed in more ways than one, I race after him, pleading for him to understand. “Sadie won’t remember anything. I was just thinking out loud, that’s all. I don’t even believe what I was saying.”

  Sadie is wailing at being left behind. Doug stops and stands dead-still in the center of the room, his eyes cold. He’s waiting for me. He wants me to see that look in his eyes, a look that says he could hate me. First the women of the AV. Now Doug.

  Then he walks out, and I crumple to the floor.

  Vows aside, any couple’s love is conditional. In a marriage, what’s tied can be untied. My pretty life can be lost, just as I’ve always half feared.

  No, one look can’t say all that. He was angry. There’s no way he could mean that. He’s my family, the only one I’ve got. Him and Sadie. He knows that.

  Maybe it’s why he chose me. Maybe Melody isn’t the only one whose seeming sweetness is actually power in disguise. Doug picked
me because I was isolated, because I was malleable. Just like Layton.

  That’s only my past and the AV paranoia talking. Doug and I love each other. We both love Sadie. We’re a family. Recent events aside, I know these things to be true.

  I steady myself enough to return to the bathroom. Sadie’s eyes are wet, red, and accusing. She’s asking how I could have left her. “I’m sorry, baby.”

  I wrap the discarded towel around myself, tucking it in, and lift her into my arms. “I’m sorry,” I tell her again. She bleats an extra few times and then drops her head against me, spent. I carry her into the other room and climb into bed. Her body is so limp, so trusting. I wonder if I ever trusted my own mother this much, if she ever held me like this or she just let me cry alone. “I’m not going anywhere,” I say into the top of her sweet-smelling head. “I’ll hold you as long as you need me. Longer.” Within a few minutes, she’s fast asleep, overdue for her morning nap.

  Doug will come back soon, and I’ll apologize. I’ll tell him I didn’t mean a word of it, that it was temporary insanity brought on by stress, and we’ll be fine.

  He’s always been convinced that my resistance to Melody is because of what I never got. Where Melody was supposedly buoyant and thrilled to parent Doug, my mother was perpetually sad and beaten down, paralyzed by depression. My grandmother probably should have raised me herself, but she didn’t want to admit how bad off my mother was. So Grandma just covered for her. We scraped by on public assistance and my grandmother’s handouts. My mother was unfit to be alive, let alone to parent. Doug thinks I don’t know how to be a daughter because I didn’t really have a mother.

  He might not be entirely wrong, but I’ll tell him he’s completely right. Melody is wonderful, and I’m the one with problems. I’ll work hard to fix them and to accept Melody’s love.

  I’ll tell him whatever he needs to hear, because I can’t lose him. I can’t lose my family.

  I carefully lay Sadie down in the bed, surrounding her with pillows on either side so that she can’t roll off. Not that she can roll yet anyway, but you never know when a new skill will kick in. Better safe than sorry.

  Still in just my towel, I locate my phone. As I go to push the text icon, planning to beg Doug’s forgiveness and tell him we can come to Fort Bragg every weekend if that’s what it takes, I accidentally touch the camera instead. Then I freeze.

  There on the screen is a picture of Wyatt and me. More specifically, it’s Wyatt and me, kissing passionately.

  I want to think it was doctored, but despite the darkness, the image remains clear. It would have to be the most perfect photoshopping ever, done on a very tight time line.

  Who took that picture?

  Has Doug seen it?

  And what else could I have done that night to destroy my life that I have no recollection of?

  CHAPTER 20

  “Absolutely,” I tell Melody. “You push the stroller.” I glance at Doug, hoping he’ll notice how magnanimous I’m being toward his mother, praying he’ll forgive me.

  “It’s two of my favorite things: the three of you and the gardens. Or are those four of my favorite things? Scott’s the math wiz.” Melody smiles, the fault lines of her face crinkling. She adjusts the brim of her enormous hat, its own solar system, though it’s a mostly cloudy day. Practically every day is, this far north along the coast at this time of year.

  Doug smiles at her. Since he stared me down in the carriage house, he’s ignored me. He blew off my repeated attempts to apologize. But being Doug, he ignores me in a way that escapes his parents’ attention and thereby makes only me uncomfortable. He manages to be perpetually occupied elsewhere. For example, he’s currently making sure Sadie’s stroller is at the right height for Melody.

  In the time I’ve known him, I’ve never been this close to a breakdown. I’m using every trick Dr. Morrison ever taught me. I even tried to call her, but the number was disconnected, and when I searched for her online, all I found was old practice information. Dr. Morrison has gone out of business. Two therapy sessions for the price of one! Everything must go! Even the couch is for sale, and the soothing pictures of hydrangeas! Anyone need a lifetime’s supply of tissues?

  I’ve deleted the photo, but that doesn’t mean I’m in the clear. Whoever took the picture knows, and if that’s the same person who wrote the notes, then I have no reason to believe they’d be discreet. Someone could tell Doug. He’s been so angry lately. Is that because someone already told him?

  Of all the people to kiss in the alley behind Hound, somehow I picked Wyatt, Doug’s best AV friend and the husband of its most insecure woman. Or did Wyatt pick me? I just don’t understand how it could have happened. I don’t even remember Wyatt being at Hound. I thought it was girls’ night.

  Ketamine, that’s the only explanation. I would never have done that otherwise. I know that much.

  But would Doug understand if I revealed everything? Would he consider me a victim or think I brought this upon myself? For so many years, I blamed myself for inviting the monsters under my bed, like I deserved it. I’ve tried so hard to believe that I deserve better, and Doug’s a part of that. But if I would betray Doug with Wyatt so casually, maybe I was right all along.

  Doug’s eyes are on Melody, who’s in her element on this particular outing. She likes leading us around and seems to feel a pride of ownership in the gardens. She takes charge, striding ahead with Sadie. “You’re going to love the rhododendrons!” she says in a singsong voice. I prefer to think her singsong is more annoying than mine, but Sadie likes hers just as much.

  Because of Sadie’s stroller, we have to keep to the main path. There’s a formal lawn, but the vast swaths of rhododendron bushes along the rim have an untended vibe. Multiple blooms adorn each stem, often with prominent stamens, but the overall impression is still feminine. So conservative Melody loves a hermaphroditic flower. I’d laugh under other circumstances. The bushes of varying hues and heights seem anarchic, like they’re threatening to come forward; they’ll overtake that lawn someday, dammit. They’ll defy the odds. I want to believe in the underdog right about now.

  “I just love the colors,” Melody says. “Don’t you?”

  “I really do.” I try to infuse it with maximum feeling. I’ll be your daughter now, Melody, because my family depends on it.

  Doug refuses to notice. He’s pretending to admire the flowers.

  “Doug, which color do you like best?” I ask. He’ll have to answer me. Engage or risk exposing our dirty laundry.

  “Which do you like, Mom?” He punts it to Melody, his eyes on her. He’s tricky, that one. Like mother, like son. I’m beginning to despair.

  “The deep purple. Right there.” She points and then walks in that direction, pushing the stroller onto the lawn, off-roading. She stumbles.

  “You OK, Mel?” Scott asks, instantly at her side. See, that’s what love looks like, Douglas. Sometimes you have to hold each other up.

  “I’m fine.” She wipes at her white pants, as if she’d fallen, and laughs.

  I take the opportunity to walk over to Doug and weave my arm through his. He can’t shrug me off in front of his parents. “I’m sorry,” I whisper. “For everything.” Might as well cover my bases. “I shouldn’t have said those things to Sadie. You were the one who said I haven’t been myself—”

  “I’m not going to talk about this,” he whispers back. His expression is thunderous as he steps away from me.

  Should I just be up-front about Wyatt and go ahead and confess? I could say I found the picture and have no memory of that part of the night, which is completely true. I just don’t know if he’d believe me.

  He’s so brutally cold right now. I can’t imagine throwing myself on his mercy because he doesn’t appear to have any. For all Melody’s domesticity and supposed sweetness, I don’t think she has any, either. She’s so full of judgment: toward my mother, toward me.

  Oh God, what if he tells his parents what I said? They’ll want
him to divorce me for sure. They can congratulate themselves for having kept me off the Crayola deed. Another woman—a stronger woman, from a good family—would never have let them run the show like I did.

  I stride ahead to where Melody has parked Sadie in front of the deep-purple rhododendrons. I need to continue my kill-her-with-kindness routine. “Let me get Sadie out of the stroller,” I tell Melody. “Then you can walk her around and let her touch things. She loves that.”

  Melody smiles at me. Doug’s not falling for my act, but maybe she is. “That’s a great idea,” she says.

  Sadie was just beginning to drowse, and she erupts when I unfasten and then lift her. “It’s OK.” I toggle her up and down, feeling the rising panic that signals a tactical mistake on my part. “You’re OK, honey. Nothing to worry about.” She disagrees heartily, and she wants everyone in the vicinity to know it. I feel my cheeks flushing.

  “Put her back in the stroller,” Doug commands. “She was happy there.”

  “Now that she’s out, she won’t be happy to go back in,” I counter. I spend nearly every waking minute with her; I’m the one who’d know.

  “Can I take her?” Melody asks. I know that was the reason I removed Sadie from the stroller to begin with, but now it feels like handing her over would only confirm my inadequacy at comforting my own daughter. I have to pull this off. I just have to.

  “I’ve got this,” I say, treating it like an offer that can be refused.

  “Maybe she’s hungry,” Scott says, loud enough to be heard over Sadie. It’s his answer to everything.

  “She just ate,” I nearly shout back. I walk her away from everyone, toward a spot in the center of the grass. I pat her back and hum. She’s not letting me off the hook for this one, no chance. Her cries intensify. Doug and his parents watch and then whisper, like they’re conferring on me, evaluating my fitness as a mother. I want to tell them it’s not normally like this, that Sadie loves dancing cheek to cheek with me. Even Andie commented on just how bonded Sadie and I are. But we get around Doug’s parents and I become the picture of fumbling ineptitude.