Good Neighbors Read online

  Rhea saw herself on the nighttime news. Static made the image ribbon. It didn’t look like her. Didn’t sound like her. Her face was wrong.

  Just like that girl from the Hungarian Pastry Shop.

  The hackles along the back of her neck stood on end. She turned, and there was FJ, in the doorway. She had the feeling Ella was there, too, hiding just behind.

  They’d spent the afternoon at the police department. It had gone well. They’d stuck to the proper story. FJ’d been so nervous the whole time that he’d bounced his legs under the table until Bianchi asked him to stop.

  “What?” she now asked.

  He lurched into the room. Eyes red. Unsteady.

  “Are you drunk?”

  “Is Mrs. Wilde’s baby okay?” he asked.

  “You worry too much,” she answered.

  “Mom. It’s all over the news. Why isn’t she home yet? Why’s she still at a hospital?”

  “EF-JAY,” she singsonged.

  His breath was foul. His brown hair napped. “It was supposed to be a warning. Nobody was supposed to get hurt!”

  “Ella! Upstairs! Now!”

  Silence.

  “Ella. I know you’re listening.”

  A small shadow in bare feet squeaked like a mouse from behind the door, then ran. FJ started to talk again. Rhea held up her hand until she heard footsteps above and out of earshot.

  “She’ll tell everyone,” she said.

  “Sorry. I’m sorry. Is it murder?” FJ asked. “Am I a murderer?”

  “Of course not.”

  “The baby’s okay? Mrs. Wilde’s okay?”

  Rhea frowned. Her face was still rippling under static lines on the news, and like a public beheading, it felt all wrong. She wasn’t that strange, angry woman with wrinkles. That woman looked scary! She was the mother of four, a professional, married to a professional. She wore Eileen Fisher. She’d spent seven years as head of the Garden City PTA. She was not a crank, an accuser, an hysteric. She certainly didn’t have the spare time to spearhead a witch hunt like some miserable stay-at-home loser. This was real. She was sounding a very serious alarm.

  Her daughter, her most precious thing, was gone.

  “Why are you worried about Gertie? She hit me! It hurts so much! That woman’s an ox. Do you know what she’s probably doing right now? She’s eating ice cream with her feet propped while everybody hugs her and tells her she’s pretty. The baby’s just fine or that cop would have said something, believe me. He would have called it a possible homicide but he didn’t. Honey, I don’t even think she got hurt. Did you hear all that screaming and carrying on? A woman about to miscarry doesn’t move like that. The EMTs practically had to restrain her to the gurney. She just got histrionic. She’s like that.”

  FJ leaned against the counter. Wracking sobs contracted and expanded in his chest but made no sounds outside. “Oh, they’re all right. They’re all right. They’re all right. They’re all right,” he whispered.

  She walked in his direction. Because of his maleness, she’d always felt a distance from him. Fritz had not filled that space. As a result, FJ had spent most of his childhood alone. It resulted in a romantic streak. He was always chasing girls, breaking his heart against them, imagining this was love.

  “You’re upsetting me,” she said.

  He tucked his chiseled face into giant man hands. He smelled like vodka and he needed a shave. She realized, suddenly, that he’d been missing practice. But he’d still been going out to all those parties.

  “It’s just, what if we’re wrong? What if she just fell? What if it was all an accident?” he asked.

  Rhea’s cheeks turned red. She pounded her bandaged knee with her fist. Sparks overloaded her vision—a slurry of color. She cried out from the pain.

  “Mom!”

  “Well, who do you think did it? Me?”

  “Of course not,” he answered, but there was a flash, a pause. Something hidden.

  “You’re trying to hurt me when I’m already down. You know I’m under all this stress!”

  “No, Mom. Please.”

  She didn’t look at him. The words wouldn’t come out right if she looked at him. “You loved Shelly, didn’t you?”

  “Ah, mom. I was never around. Even when she was little and wanted to play, I was such a jerk. I just wish I’d been—”

  “So many children have come forward with testimony. This is only the beginning. The police won’t help. I know that now. It’s up to us. You and me.”

  FJ placed his hands on the counter and began to sob. The sound filled the room, jarring and baritone.

  “Stop. It hurts me to see you cry like that.”

  “Sorry. I’m sorry.”

  She reached over the refrigerator. Pulled down a bottle of red and got a pint glass. Filled it halfway. “Here,” she said.

  He was too far gone. Didn’t seem to see it.

  She forced it into his hands. “I’ve never done wrong by you. You’re on varsity. You’ve got a full ride. What more could you want?”

  He gulped it down. His lips and teeth went as red as his eyes.

  “Go to bed. You’re overstressed. In another week, when you’re rested, you can start back at practice. I’ll call the coach. I’ll explain. You know how I’m good with that. It’ll be fine. Back to normal in no time.”

  He made this pain grimace that she wasn’t used to seeing on him. Only on Shelly.

  “There’s no fingerprints. You wore gloves. There’s no witnesses except Peter Benchley, and that junkie never saw your face. Trust me, I’ve been through this. They’ve got nothing. They were just trying to scare you today. That Bianchi’s a toad.”

  “Yeah,” he said, soft.

  He needed something from her. She tried to imagine what she’d want to hear right now, if she were in his place. “She adored you. You were so special to her. She thought the sun rose and set by you.”

  “Why? I wasn’t nice to her.”

  “She understood,” Rhea said, and she didn’t know why, but her voice was shaking. “Shelly loved you despite the things you did, and she knew you loved her. She was a very understanding child.”

  FJ started crying again. At last, Rhea came to him. Held him by the waist and he folded over into his smaller mother. He’d been hungry for this. Starved for it. She could tell, and it seemed sad that it had taken tragedy to draw them together. She wished she’d known sooner. They both might have felt less alone.

  “There’s so many ways to make it up to her,” Rhea soothed. “Peter Benchley, to start.” She gave him another squeeze, then disentangled from him, even as he clutched.

  Starbucks

  Tuesday, July 27

  With shoddy reception out on Maple Street, Arlo and the kids stopped off at Starbucks on the way home from the hospital. He bought everybody a mini maple scone, then called that old friend with the house in the Hollywood Hills. Danny Lasson with the Hohner 64. Turned out the number was the same more than fifteen years later.

  Danny picked up on the second ring like no time had passed. “Arlo!” he hooted. “You shiner, how the hell are ya?”

  “Well…” Arlo’s cheeks flushed. Standing by the cream dispensary, he whispered so the kids didn’t hear, though a man pouring about a pound of sugar into his nonfat latte craned his neck. “I’m not a junkie anymore.”

  “Yeah? I heard that. I follow your wife on Facebook. Your children are adorable! When I speak about them I call them the adorables.”

  “What?”

  “I talk about you all the time, man. We were Fred Savage’s Revenge!”

  Arlo shoved an entire scone into his mouth. Then he couldn’t talk. Because it was super dry. The fiftysomething man was listening and pretending not to listen. He put down the sugar and traded it for cinnamon. Shake-shake.

  “What’s happening?” Danny asked, all happy and Hollywood. “What can I do you for?”

  Still chewing, his voice muffled, he blurted, “I thought I’d sell the Grammy. But I fi
gured I should call you first. Out of respect.”

  The man started stirring his latte, which had to be semisolid by now. He was looking at Arlo, trying to place him.

  “Whoa!” Danny cried. “You can’t do that!”

  Arlo walked away from the latte guy, and from his kids, too. He headed for the corner. Stayed there, talked to the wall like the bad kid from Blair Witch. “I know it’s not cool. But I’m in a bind. I thought you should know before it goes on the market.”

  “Did AA put you up to this?”

  “No. There’s all different kinds of addicts. I never had a problem with alcohol. I don’t like it enough to have a problem with it. So the Grammy. So I’m sorry, obviously.”

  “Oh, I forgot! It’s NA, not AA. Are you in NA? Did Narcotics Anonymous put you up to this?” Danny asked, polite and concerned, his lockjawed accent from a tax bracket Arlo had only seen on PBS. Had he always enunciated this much? Where was that inner-city drawl they’d all shared?

  “This is stupid. I’m sorry to interrupt your life. Can I sell the Grammy or what?”

  “You can sell it. I don’t think it’s worth much.”

  Tears burned. He pressed his head against the corner, and he could feel the eyes of the people in Starbucks, including his kids. “Thanks. I appreciate that.”

  “Hold on. I’m at a recording studio. Let me take this outside,” Danny said.

  Arlo waited, forehead against cool plaster. Looked back once, to see that in fact the kids weren’t watching. They were playing slap hands, at which Larry was a master. The latte guy had taken a seat. Was on his phone, but also looking at Arlo, which maybe meant he was looking him up.

  “Okay.” Danny got back on. “That’s better. How are you?”

  “You know. Been better. Been worse.” Arlo’s voice was shaky. Since sobriety, everything felt raw and new and scary, because it was.

  “Want to tell me about it?” Danny asked, the voice of supreme confidence. Arlo remembered now, how they’d gotten that record deal in the first place. Danny had hounded this agent at UTA for months. Written e-mails and even tracked down his cell phone and texted him. It wasn’t an accident when the guy showed up at their first gig at the Music Hall of Williamsburg, and it was no coincidence he’d brought his friend from Virgin Records. Danny, whose parents had owned a restaurant on the Upper West Side, and who’d gone to this private school called Regis (and who Arlo only now realized had exaggerated his street accent to put scrappy Arlo and Chet at ease), had been a self-promotion machine.

  “It’s not drugs. Just real life. I don’t think this is the time to talk about it. It’s been years. It’d be a dick move to call you out of the blue, just to unload.”

  Nobody talked. Arlo felt choked up in all kinds of directions.

  “You’re right. Don’t tell me. But here’s the thing. I don’t mind your selling that Grammy, so don’t think this is about that. The problem is, the Grammy people. If you win an award from them, it’s not legal to sell it. They could fine you.”

  “Oh… Do you want it? Like, a private sale?”

  Another long pause. The latte guy seemed to have found what he was looking for on his phone, because he started playing “Kennedys in the River.” You’d think this was a rare event in Arlo’s life, but it wasn’t. Everybody loved doing that, once they found out. It wasn’t always in a nice way. A lot of middle-aged white men used to play lead guitar in high school bands. A lot of them thought they’d been screwed out of fame.

  “I don’t want to buy it. It’s nothing personal.”

  Arlo nodded into the phone and it occurred to him that when people say it’s not personal, what they mean is: It’s 100 percent personal. “I should say I’m sorry. I messed it up for you guys. I think about it every day. I can live with what I did to myself. But I hate that it broke up the band. I know you made a lot of that professional stuff happen. I never thanked you for getting us signed.”

  Arlo could hear somebody else on Danny’s side of the phone. Some fellow musician, probably. “I don’t think about it,” Danny said.

  “Oh.”

  “What I’m saying is, how often do bands ever stick? We had a great ride. We made some good money. I got my life out here because of ‘Kennedys in the River.’ I’d never have gotten work writing music without that Grammy with our names on it.”

  “That’s really great.”

  “I wish I’d said something. You were so high. I knew it was your dad. But I couldn’t believe somebody would get their own kid hooked, just to steal everything. He was the worst manager. I look back and I wish I’d said something.”

  “Naw.”

  “Yeah. I should have said something.”

  “It’s my fault. I blew it.”

  “I don’t think so. Me and Chet are fine. We’re working the business now. You’re the one who wrote the music.”

  “So, you don’t hate me?”

  “I did. But not anymore. Listen, my sound guy’s giving me the stink eye. I should go.”

  They promised to talk again, which maybe would happen and maybe wouldn’t. Then they got off the line. Arlo was shaking when it was over. Relief and something else. He’d felt enormous shame for a long time, to the point where hearing his own music had been like needles under his skin. But after apologizing to Danny, some of that subsided now.

  Baby, run away with me.

  We’ll shake these blues…

  The song finished playing, and Arlo remembered why it had resonated with so many people. It’s nostalgic for something that isn’t real, and it’s sad about that. Everybody’s nostalgic for glory days that never happened.

  “Kennedys in the River” ended. The latte guy was looking at him with recognition. Arlo nodded as if to say: Yeah. I’m that guy.

  The latte guy’s face scrunched in anger. He pointed the phone at Arlo. “I know you,” he said.

  Like always happened when threatened, Arlo’s hands turned to fists. The latte guy stood from his table and walked backward, phone held higher, like a weapon. Now the barista, the other patrons, and Julia and Larry were looking, too.

  “I know what you did to that little girl!” Latte guy screamed.

  Creedmoor Psychiatric Center

  Wednesday, July 28

  Another day at the hospital. Julia’s parents were angry but not saying why they were angry, which made Julia think they were mad at her. If she’d been faster, grabbed Shelly by the arm or taken the fall instead, this wouldn’t be happening. People wouldn’t be saying bad things. Strange men at Starbucks wouldn’t be yelling. Their house and pictures of their family wouldn’t be on the TV.

  A lot of this was happening because Shelly’s body was missing. Everybody knew, for her dad to prove his innocence, they needed the body.

  After visiting hours, they didn’t go back to Starbucks, because people in Starbucks are crazy and yell crazy things. They did get ice cream at Baskin-Robbins. In cups not cones, even though Julia preferred cones. But her dad did the ordering, and he looked tense as a rubber band about to snap. She’d decided to go with the flow, take the cup.

  Julia got plain vanilla with chocolate sprinkles. Larry got pistachio for the green. Their dad got three scoops of chocolate plus syrup. He acted pretend happy. She hated when he did that. He said all the right, reasonable things, and underneath, you could tell he was boiling.

  “You’re gonna get fat,” Larry told him, deadpan. “Mom says keep the ice cream, spare the syrup, or it’s jelly belly city.”

  Julia leaned forward, just in case she needed to get between her brother and her dad. Just in case he really did snap.

  Arlo threw the ice cream in the garbage, hard, so it passed all the random pink plastic and stuff and sank straight to the bottom. Then he stood in the doorway, waiting for Julia and Larry to follow. So Julia got up and threw away her ice cream, too. She stood next to her dad. Didn’t say anything. Tried not to cry. She’d wanted that ice cream. That ice cream had been the only good thing to happen in weeks.
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  Larry took another bite like nothing was happening. The more nervous he got, the weirder and more obstinate he acted.

  “Get up. Now. We’re leaving,” Arlo said.

  Julia went over to him because right now, Larry was especially her job. If she could take care of him, at least she was doing one thing right. Even if she’d failed Shelly. There wasn’t time to nice-talk him. So she took a chance, grabbed him by the arm and pulled, which worked 90 percent of the time. The other 10 percent, he tweaked. She used too much force. He got taken by surprise and shoved her. Little brothers. She reacted instead of thinking and shoved him back. He fell, landing upright, his ice cream intact.

  The Baskin-Robbins was crowded. Everybody was looking at them, even the people in uniform who worked there. This was bad. They weren’t allowed to fight, especially now that Julia was twelve years old. But the golden rule was Never in Public.

  Larry scrambled to get up. He used Julia’s leg for support and Julia yelped. It looked like more tussling.

  “Let go of each other! NOW!” Arlo shouted.

  Still holding Julia’s leg, Larry froze, too scared to do anything else. Julia tried to shrink inside herself without actually moving her body or looking away or attracting attention.

  Arlo rushed at them in two lanky strides, then jerked Larry up by the arm. He made this grunt that wasn’t pain, but probably sounded like it to strangers. Everybody in the shop got quiet. Somebody took out their phone and pointed. Larry’s pistachio ice cream dropped, and it slimed their clean floor.

  Arlo’s voice went low and rasping. It carried the way lead singers’ voices fill any room, no matter the volume. “Why can’t either of you ever do as told?”

  “Sorry,” Julia whispered.

  “You know you can’t act like this. Not now! What the fuck are you thinking?”

  “I’m so sorry,” Julia said. She could feel the people in the store watching. The green ice cream had smeared. Was all under Larry’s flip-flops, and on his toes, too.

  Arlo ran his hands through his hair, hard, the skin of his forehead pulling back, making stark his receded salt-and-pepper hairline. His Wolf Man tattoo looked like it was scowling.