The Perfect Neighbors (2 page)

“Great idea,” Susan said. “I'll bring a few bottles of Chardonnay. Last time Gigi ran out.”

“Maybe she didn't think it would be good for her husband's
congressional campaign to have a dozen drunk women lurching out of his house,” Kellie mused.

“Oh, come on, it never hurt Bill Clinton,” Susan said. “How's this for a plan: we'll get Tessa drunk and she'll spill all her deep, dark secrets.”

“I'm in,” Kellie said, laughing.

Chapter Two

Newport Cove Listserv Digest

*Halloween party & parade!

It isn't too early to begin planning for everyone's favorite holiday—­Halloween! This year at our annual Newport Cove party we'll have a moon bounce, tasty treats for all (including gluten and nut free!), and a parade through our neighborhood for all of our little goblins and ghosts! “Opal” the fortune-­teller may make a surprise visit to read fortunes (please remind your children to refrain from pulling on Opal's hair so we avoid painful incidents like last year's)! Please email Shannon Dockser if you'd like to volunteer for the snack committee or activities committee. —Sincerely, Shannon Dockser, Newport Cove Manager

*Re: Honda Mechanic?

I don't have a Honda, but I bring my Chrysler LeBaron into Michael at Auto Repair Unlimited. He's a well-mannered young man, not like some these days, and his prices are reasonable. —Tally White, Iris Lane

*Re: Dog Poop

I'd like to second the comment by Mrs. Reiserman. I can't imagine any Newport Cove residents would be so uncourteous as to leave canine filth in their neighbors' yards, but several times a year I step into something most unpleasant
when I'm out gardening and have to hose it off my shoe. Let's all try to be better neighbors. —Ralph Zapruder, Blossom Street

•  •  •

Gigi Kennedy rolled over in bed, lazily stretching out an arm and connecting with a cold sheet instead of a warm body.

She yawned and blinked and the world came into focus. Her nightstand with a hefty political memoir and a treatise about microbusiness loans stacked atop the juicy novel she'd been yearning to read—but hadn't found the time—for weeks. An expensive pot of eye cream that she'd begun to use religiously, though she suspected the cost was due to the French name rather than the quality of the ingredients. And her monthly planner filled with scribbled reminders of phone calls she needed to make, places she needed to be, people she needed to woo.

She despised that planner with its bright red cover.

Red signaled power, according to the image consultant her husband, Joe, had hired. Apparently crow's-feet did not, and the eye cream had been delivered to her along with the business card of a hairdresser who'd banished the strands of gray from Gigi's auburn locks before trimming off eight inches.

“Oh,” she'd murmured, staring in the mirror when he'd spun her around with the flourish of a game show host. She'd always worn her hair down to her bra strap, and it had never bothered her that it got big and frizzy in the humidity. She'd liked the easy, bohemian style. But the hairdresser had applied a horrible-smelling chemical that made it look sleek and shiny and not at all like her.

Her mother had burst into laughter when she'd seen Gigi. “I'm sorry, honey,” she'd said. “It's just that you look like a”—Gigi had waited patiently as her mother had succumbed to more giggles—“like a shorn sheep!”

Two years of therapy, and her mom could still light up her buttons faster than a toddler at an elevator control panel.

Gigi yawned again and checked the bedside clock. Not even six a.m.

“I wish they all could be California girls,” Joe's off-key voice warbled over the rush of the shower.

Careful
, she thought.
Don't want to alienate the voters on the East Coast.

When she and Joe had first met, back in college, he was famous for sleeping through his morning classes. Not missing them, but actually sleeping in the last row, his head bobbing, an occasional snore whistling through his nostrils. Now Joe woke up at five a.m. to run three miles before drinking a green smoothie, standing up, while he read the papers.

But she'd changed, too. Didn't everyone say the key to a happy marriage was changing together? Or maybe it was growing together. In any case, she'd begun to match Joe's runs with her own Zumba and Pilates classes, and now that he eschewed dessert, so did she. So technically, they were shrinking together. Except for the chips and brownies she snuck from the snack drawer reserved for the kids' lunches, but she gobbled those standing up and buried the evidence in the trash can, so they obviously didn't count.

The kids. She climbed out of bed and reached for her robe. She needed to make sure this morning went smoothly, to avoid stepping on any of the emotional bombs her teenaged daughter Melanie loved to lob in her path. Late this afternoon a photographer was coming over to capture a family photo for Joe's congressional campaign brochure and website. Their twelve-year-old, Julia, would cooperate. Of course she would; Julia had been a happy, gurgling infant whose disposition had never changed. She was an honor roll student and captain of the soccer team. Julia would put on the sundress Gigi had laid out and brush her hair without being asked. But fifteen-year-old Melanie . . . well, the best case was that she'd demand
to wear all black and refuse to take out her nose ring. Gigi wouldn't think about the worst case until she'd fortified herself with coffee.

She'd make Melanie's favorite banana-pecan pancakes, the ones her daughter had adored when she was a little girl, Gigi decided.

She padded into the kitchen, her feet hitting cold tile, wishing she'd put on socks but feeling too tired to go back upstairs for a pair. She stroked the head of their sleepy golden retriever, Felix, before popping a pod of Starbucks Breakfast Blend into the Keurig. While her coffee spurted into a mug, she reached into the pantry for ingredients and began lining them up on the counter: flour, bananas, milk . . . She was dropping a pat of butter into the warm skillet when she sensed a presence behind her.

“Your hair looks ridiculous.”

“Good morning, honey,” Gigi said, trying to block annoyance from her tone. She smoothed down a few spiky bangs that seemed determined to defy gravity. “I'm making pancakes.”

“I'm not hungry,” Melanie said.

Gigi turned off the burner.

“How about just a banana, then?” she said. Melanie wouldn't get a break for lunch until almost noon. She had to eat something.

“I said I'm not hungry.”

Gigi flinched. If her husband routinely spoke to her in that tone, she'd divorce him. If a friend did, she'd cut off contact. Only Melanie, with her sad eyes and defiant expression, could heap emotional abuse on her mother.

Still, she couldn't let Melanie get away with acting like a brat.

“Watch your tone,” Gigi said, but when she caught a glimpse of Melanie's face, she regretted snapping back. Her daughter was clearly in pain.

When had Melanie's kohl-rimmed eyes changed? They looked to Gigi like black mussel shells. There was something in the center of those eyes reminiscent of the glistening fragility of a pearl, but try as she might, Gigi couldn't crack through the hard exterior and reach it.

Melanie grabbed her backpack off the kitchen table and shoved her binder inside.

“You don't have to be at school for almost an hour,” Gigi pointed out.

“Raven is picking me up.”

Raven. It couldn't possibly be a real name, could it? Gigi wasn't even sure if Raven was a girl or a boy, and an early glimpse of him/her hadn't helped clear things up. Raven hid behind a sweep of dark hair and seemed incapable of smiling. Gigi wanted to ask Melanie, but was afraid of her reaction.

Melanie was almost out the door. She hadn't eaten. She looked tired. She was wearing a long-sleeved shirt and black jeans and the mercury was expected to reach 80 today.

“Honey? Do you want to change your shirt? It's supposed to get pretty hot.”

“God! Can you just stop nagging me?” The door slammed on Melanie's final word.

Gigi sank into a chair, blinking hard. Felix nudged her hand with his cold nose and she curled an arm around him, grateful for the comfort.

Gigi knew that whenever she reached out to touch her daughter, or asked Melanie to put away her phone and talk, Melanie viewed Gigi as a giant chicken relentlessly pecking at her. She could see it in the way Melanie shrank from her, or exited a room moments after Gigi entered.

Whenever she spoke to Melanie, all her daughter heard was this:
Peck, peck, peck
.

Why couldn't she hear what Gigi was really saying?
I love you, I love you, I love you.

Chapter Three

Before Newport Cove

WHEN HER DAUGHTER, BREE,
was just seven months old, Tessa called 911 for the first time.

It was a rainy day, and the house had felt stuffy, so Tessa had walked upstairs to open a window. She'd left Bree on the living room rug, encircled by toys.

She'd been gone for sixty seconds, she'd insisted later. Ninety at most. She couldn't get the timeline exactly straight, though. Had she paused to pick up Harry's dirty socks off the bathroom floor and toss them in the hamper, or had she done that earlier in the day? She might've shaken out the comforter and smoothed it over the sheets instead of leaving it crumpled. An unmade bed had always nagged at Tessa.

The truth was, she had no idea how long she'd left Bree alone. Jagged patches of time had begun to disappear from her memory, like sinkholes forming in the fog of her exhaustion. Bree hadn't slept through the night, not even once, since coming home from the hospital. Bree was fussy. Sensitive. Spirited. Whatever the politically correct term was nowa
days. Instead of nursing contentedly, like all the other babies in their Mommy and Me class, Bree always took a few sips, then yanked herself away from Tessa's breast as if she'd been scalded.

“It must be something in your diet,” a lactation consultant had said, looking at Tessa with accusing eyes. “Are you eating a lot of broccoli? Chocolate? Caffeine?”

Tessa had mutely shaken her head at each fresh charge. She wasn't eating much of anything other than toast and water and bananas. She was far too tired to cook, and she'd gone off coffee during her first trimester and certainly knew enough to avoid drinking too much of it while breastfeeding. Still, Tessa was certain she was the source of her daughter's misery. Tessa would pace the house in the middle of the night with a squalling Bree in her arms, mindlessly chanting nursery rhymes, timing the beat to the throbbing in her head. Harry had been working for a software development firm back then and his job had required him to travel nearly every week, so she couldn't even hand off the baby for a break.

Tessa had wanted a child so desperately. She'd endured two miscarriages before having Bree, the second when she was nearly twenty weeks into her pregnancy. She'd tried to do everything right. She'd read a dozen books on child development. She'd washed Bree's tiny onesies in Dreft before folding them into the drawers of her pink-and-white dresser. She'd spent an entire weekend crafting the butterfly mobile that hung over Bree's crib. Yet every time she looked down at Bree's red, miserable face, she
felt as if she was failing her daughter.

When Bree turned four months old, Tessa finally gave up breastfeeding. Whenever she hid a carton of formula in her grocery cart, she'd felt like she was stashing crack beneath her romaine lettuce and organic chicken. Breast was best—­everyone knew that.

But miraculously, the formula had seemed to help. Bree had begun to cry less. She'd actually slept for a blissful five-hour
stretch one night. She'd even begun to bestow a gummy little grin on Tessa that could've been gas but Tessa decided was a smile.

“Maybe it was just colic,” Tessa had said to Harry two weeks before it happened. He'd returned home from yet another business trip and had picked up Thai food on the way in from the airport. Tessa's last shower was a distant memory—two, maybe three days earlier? She'd been wearing one of the drawstring pants and shapeless cotton T-shirts that had become her wardrobe staples. But as she'd crunched into a spring roll and taken a sip of cold, crisp wine, she'd felt the bright stirrings of hope.

“The worst is probably over,” she'd said as she watched Harry feed Bree bites of a steamed yam. Bree had inherited her father's sweet tooth—she spit out green vegetables but at least she loved pears and yams.

As soon as Tessa had uttered those words, she'd felt an icy twinge work its way down her spine. She'd tempted bad fortune. And sure enough, it arrived the next day when Bree's cries took on a sharper, more pained tenor, so alarming Tessa that she'd rushed Bree to the pediatrician's office.

“She's teething already. An early achiever!” the doctor had joked as he'd examined Bree. He had white hair and a round belly, like Santa. His kids were all grown; he probably slept deeply for eight hours every night. Tessa hated him and his jolly laugh more than a little bit.

Baby Motrin didn't help, not nearly enough. The tooth took forever to come in and no sooner had it broken the surface than the one next to it began to embark on its jagged, torturous path through Bree's soft mouth.

Tessa rubbed Baby Orajel on Bree's red, raw gums, and gave her cold rings to gnaw on, but Bree seemed to feel pain so intensely! Every cry was a jab to Tessa's heart. Bree began waking up every three hours again, bleating the plaintive cry of a kitten. Tessa's vision grew blurry. Most of her meals were
bowls of soggy cereal gobbled over the sink. Once, at a stoplight, the blare of a horn jerked her awake. She'd glanced back at Bree, safely asleep in her car seat, and she'd shuddered. What if her foot had slipped off the brake? She drank more coffee—three, four, sometimes five cups a day.

The mornings were the worst. Tessa would blearily look around at the cluttered kitchen, at the bottles she needed to wash, at the clothes she needed to launder and fold, at the counters she should declutter, and feel herself sliding into a gray gloom. She'd always been organized; she'd worked as an accountant. She'd untangled complicated taxes for clients, she'd unloaded the dishwasher with one hand while cooking a stir-fry with the other, she'd effortlessly kept a running mental to-do list with a dozen revolving items. She'd run three half-marathons! But she couldn't manage one tiny baby and her house, even with—and here was the truly embarrassing part—monthly maid service. Sometimes Tessa felt like her cleaning woman, who was middle-aged and had four kids, was judging her as she lugged the vacuum cleaner up the stairs and emptied Tessa's overflowing trash cans:
Get it together, lady.

So on that rainy, stuffy afternoon, things were blurry. Sixty to ninety seconds? It seemed like the limit on how long a conscientious mother—a good mother—would leave her baby alone.

It was quiet when Tessa had come back downstairs. Bree was exactly where Tessa had left her, playing with wooden stacking blocks, chosen because they were made with natural materials and nontoxic paints and were too big to be choking hazards.

Bree had been making a funny face. Her mouth had been twisting like it sometimes did when Tessa tried to spoon in pureed green vegetables. Tessa had come closer and seen her purse lying next to Bree instead of on the chair where she'd left it, its contents spilled out. Her hairbrush. Her wallet. The
bottle of Advil, with a few of its tiny mauve pills dotting the carpet.

Advil, with its sweet coating.

Bree had been reaching for a pill on the carpet. Tessa had pried it out of her tiny hand and Bree had opened her mouth to scream.

Bree's tiny tongue had been stained mauve.

“No,” Tessa had whispered. She'd run to the phone to dial the emergency number.

“Send an ambulance!” she'd gasped.

The ensuing minutes blurred by: the frantic trip to the hospital, punctuated by the laconic wail of the ambulance's siren, the EMTs bending over Bree's tiny body, taking her vitals, the young doctor shining a light into Bree's eyes while quizzing Tessa.

“You don't know how many she took? Didn't you check the bottle to see how many were left?” he'd asked.

“No, but the EMTs said I should bring it so you could check the ingredients . . . ,” Tessa had said.

The doctor had snatched the little plastic bottle out of her hand. “It says it holds sixty.” He'd shaken the pills out onto the stark white hospital sheet, his index finger jabbing at each one like an accusation. “There are still fifty in there. Was it a new bottle?”

Tessa had shaken her head. “No. I—I remember I took two right before I went upstairs. I must not have closed the lid properly.”

“Did you check the floor to see if any were there?”

“No,” Tessa had whispered. “Wait—yes. There were some on the carpet.”

“How many?” the doctor had demanded.

Tessa had closed her eyes. “Um . . . five?”

“So the most she ingested was three,” the doctor had said. “Less if the bottle had already been open when you took two. Was the bottle already open?”

Tessa had nodded, her mind feeling thick as it struggled to grasp the simple subtraction problem. “Um . . . it might have been. I think so.”

The doctor had exhaled loudly. He had patients who needed him. He didn't have time for this nonsense.

“She probably spit it out once she sucked off the coating; it's pretty bitter inside,” he'd said. “I doubt she even ingested one.”

Bree had been maybe two minutes away from having her soft little stomach pumped, all because of Tessa's inattention. The doctor's expression had changed as he'd stared at her, probably wondering if she was one of those women who faked her children's illnesses to get attention. Then he'd walked away without a single word.

As Tessa had left the hospital, Harry had called her cell phone, responding to the frantic message she'd left.

“I'll fly back tonight,” he'd said, even after she'd reassured him that Bree was safe. Tessa had wondered if he still trusted her with their baby.

She'd hung up and looked around. To her left was a big parking lot; to her right, a busy street. But there were no cabs in sight, and even if she'd spotted one, it wouldn't have a car seat. She had no idea how she was going to get home.

She felt her throat constrict.
I'm sorry
, she'd thought, looking down at her baby.

A moment later, Bree had begun to screech in her arms.

Six months later, Tessa called 911 again.