Chapter 5
Eight Months Before Delivery
The daily grind keeps grinding, her cell phone dinging constantly with notifications and updates, a slot machine singing its dark siren song.
In response to bullying at school, Maddy’s hand-flapping has flared up again, straining her tendons and fatiguing her wrist muscles, so now she is wearing forearm braces, which invites more bullying.
This has led to a spate of additional appointments—ortho, therapist, school nurse, teacher, principal—in addition to the other tasks of Westside living.
A broken solar panel results in five phone calls and three rescheduled appointments.
A volunteer shortage at kiss-and-ride drop-off at the elementary school requires Rebecca to pick up two more shifts a week; the school does so much to accommodate Maddy that she always wants to be the first to answer an ask for help.
All this has been negotiated with painstaking inefficiency over text and email in threads and subthreads.
On top of this, she’s working hard to find healthy food that takes less prep time, running through Trader Joe’s to grab premade meals, frozen entrées, and prechopped celery and carrots.
Now she is racing home from her oft-delayed OB/GYN follow-up so she can prep dinner before Maddy’s after-school pickup, free Bao-Bao from his crate, and wait the inexplicable four-hour window required by the HVAC guy. Lurching through traffic, she tries Mark.
As usual these days, he sounds harried when he picks up. “You good?”
“Yep,” she says. “Just wanted to hear your voice.”
“Aw. Nice to hear yours.” Mark drops his register. “Derek’s been on the warpath leading up to quarterlies. I have a Zoom in—shit—two minutes ago. Can I . . .”
“Go. See you tonight.”
“I’ll try to get there to do Maddy’s nigh-night wind-down. But I’m not sure . . .”
“It’s okay. I got it. I’ll save you a plate.”
“Thank you, überWife.”
“You’re welcome, überHusband.”
When she disconnects the call, she feels a surge of sadness and has to tell herself not to come apart. Why? How did she get this fragile? How can life possibly feel this challenging here in affluent Brentwood?
Their neighbor Jackson is up on a ladder fussing with his rain gutters.
His black BMW sits beneath his carport, polished as always, the license plate frame broadcasting his USC fraternity.
As she pulls into her driveway, he hops down and comes flying through the muddy break in the hedge.
A mortgage salesman in his late twenties, he is an unremitting asshole.
Rebecca avoids him at all costs.
“The fuck, Rebecca,” Jackson says as she gathers armfuls of grocery bags from the trunk of her Nissan Quest minivan. “Your fucking pine tree is still dropping shit onto my roof. I have sap in the gutter again and eating through the shingles.”
“I’m sorry,” Rebecca says, the apology out of her mouth before she can reel it in. “We had it trimmed. It’s not over the property line anym—”
“Ever heard of wind, Rebecca? Breeze? I’m still getting debris all over my roof, clogging the drainpipes, gunking up my walkway. It’s expensive as fuck to fix.”
He is standing in her driveway, staring in at her in the garage.
She wants to ask him to leave. Behind him the grand pine tree sways and bristles.
Forked near the base, it pins down their patch of front lawn, a magnificent winged totem.
She loves how unlikely it is here in Brentwood among the usual palms and oaks, the wintry scent of it, how the sun plays through the needles, texturing the air.
In all its mess and glory, it was part of what first drew her to the house.
“Don’t swear at me,” she says meekly.
“Oh, swearing’s the problem.” Jackson waves his hands. “Sorry. Don’t mean to be toxic while I’m busy cleaning up your mess. Again.”
“You can talk to Mark—”
“I’m sick of talking to Mark. Keep your waste product off my property or else—I have a buddy from college who’s a big-time lawyer.”
“There’s nothing illegal about having trees, Jackson.”
“Fine. Fine. Play it that way? I’ll just poison the fucking thing.”
Jackson stomps off.
She is shaken. He has threatened to kill something that she loves, and the brashness of it, the menace and meanness, strikes her somewhere deeper than words.
Heading inside, she dumps the bags on the kitchen island and stands trembling for a moment.
Why didn’t she speak up? If anyone deserves to be frankly and fully told to fuck off, it is Jackson.
She certainly has the wit and bite. She could’ve mocked his inflated terms—waste product, big-time lawyer. She could’ve slapped him down with poised indignation. She could’ve ordered him to get off her property.
But she’d been intimidated. Maybe that’s where Maddy got it, this excessive sensitivity, the surfeit of feeling, an inability to think clearly in the face of cruelty.
She puts the groceries away, feeds Bao-Bao a quarter cup of pellets, moves the laundry to the dryer. Then for the first time in two days she takes a shower.
She tries to awaken her body, but she feels numb.
Defeated, she climbs out, towels off, dresses. In the back of the small walk-in closet sit her half-finished canvases and folded-up easel, abandoned since she was in her third term with Maddy. They stare at her, a nagging rebuke for all the parts of herself she’s been unable to keep up with.
She sits on the bed, takes a few breaths.
Her gaze moves to Mark’s nightstand.
She slides over, opens the drawer. The titanium card glimmers up at her. You’re in charge.
She takes it out.