Neighborly(72)

“Hi,” I say listlessly.

There’s a sweetness to Kendall, an innocence, but I wish Sadie had someone a little more seasoned.

Kendall checks Sadie’s vitals. She’s bad at the baby blood pressure cuff and has to redo it. Sadie wakes with an earsplitting cry.

I look up, almost happy. “That’s Sadie’s cry,” I say. “The angry cry. Distinctive as a fingerprint.”

I move behind the Plexiglas cube and put my hands flat against Sadie’s cheeks. I tell her it’ll be OK. The cries continue, louder, if that’s possible, and still, this is the happiest I’ve been since I brought Sadie to the ER. “You tell ’em, girl!” I say.

We listen to the symphony of Sadie’s machines, in concert with the machines behind all the other curtains. My joy fades. Doug should have been back at the hospital a while ago; it doesn’t take two hours to shower. Should I text him and tell him that Sadie did her angry cry? He hasn’t answered my other messages.

“Could you maybe go find Doug for me?” It might seem like a strange request, but it’s not like she’s a threat. She’s not going to seduce Doug in a hospital.

“Where do you think he is?”

“I don’t know. The cafeteria, maybe? Somewhere with his parents? He hasn’t answered my texts.” I’m a little embarrassed to say it. But I can’t leave Sadie alone while I try to find her wayward father. “He’s having trouble with this whole thing.”

“It’s hard having a baby in the hospital, no doubt.”

“I feel like maybe he blames me, because I was the one home with her when she got sick.”

“I’m sure he doesn’t blame you.”

“I didn’t have much of a mother. Melody, Doug’s mother, was apparently the perfect mom.”

An inscrutable expression crosses her face. “No one gets the perfect mom.”

“Melody thinks that I can’t possibly be expected to know what I’m doing because of my own mother. She condescends to me all the time.” What I’m really afraid of is that she’s fueling Doug’s negativity about me. She’s always thought I’d be a disappointment as a mother, and now he does, too. “But maybe Melody’s right. Maybe she would have known her baby was sick much earlier than I did. Maybe I didn’t take care of Sadie the way I should have.”

“You did the best you could, Katrina.”

My head snaps up, and my stomach drops. No one in the AV calls me Katrina.

Seeing my reaction, she explains, “That’s what Melody and Scott called you, when I ran into them in the hospital room.”

It makes sense. But still. “I go by Kat. You know that.”

“You’re a great mom, Kat. You are. The whole block can see it.”

What else can the whole block see, I wonder? Not for the first time.





CHAPTER 26

ELLEN

The anger keeps coming back to me, little aftershocks. I try to stop thinking about what Katrina said about perfect mothers.

I had a perfect mother, and Katrina killed her.

Technically, it was cancer, but it wasn’t even a year after our world came crashing down. I know what really caused her death. It was humiliation. I almost died of it, too.

But I managed to get through, and I became a mother, and that allowed me to let go of so much of the anger. My transformation—both physical and emotional—was complete with that baby in my arms.

The AV helped, too. To come from where I did, with all the losses and pain and the infamy, to a place of initial anonymity and, later, full acceptance and love . . . it brought me back to life. And now Katrina wants to take it away. She wants to co-opt it and make it hers.

I will not let her destroy this new family of mine, the AV family, like she did the last.

Speaking of home, I’ve been neglecting my duties because I’ve been so consumed with Katrina. There’s barely any food in the house, so I have to stop off at Trader Joe’s, where I immediately run into Val and Patrick. It’s the one downside of my new life: when I want to be anonymous again, I can’t really pull it off.

Val asks immediately about Sadie, and she and Patrick both look shaken up when I tell them that there’s been no change.

“I can’t imagine,” Val murmurs.

“Our kids were always so healthy,” Patrick says. While he seems genuinely sad, he can’t keep his eyes from grazing my chest. Maybe what he’s saddest about is that he never got the chance to try and seduce Katrina. Kat—I have to remember to start using that name in my head, otherwise “Katrina” is going to slip out again. I had to do a lot of trust building and damage control to come back from that.

I can never see Val without thinking of the stripper pole she installed in their walk-in closet and the private lessons she took on how to use it. All that, and Patrick still strays. You just can’t keep some people on their leash. Of course, he has permission, but everyone knows—and Patrick must realize—that Val doesn’t want an open marriage. She knows it’s either give permission or he’ll just do it anyway behind her back. Not on the block, we’d respect their opt-out, but there’s a whole world out there.

For a while, the spreadsheet said Val was available for casual flings, no overnights, never in her own bed. According to Brandon, there were no takers, so she changed it to say she was off-limits. Maybe that was for pride’s sake, or maybe she thought that men would want what they couldn’t have and it would create some interest. As far as I know, that never happened.