Chapter Three Tessa #2
“Tessa.” Claire waves. The other mothers smile politely, eager to return to their gossip.
Although we meet regularly at the playground and Busy Bee classes, happy hour in each other’s gardens, Claire’s the only one of the mothers I was friends with before we had children.
We live directly across Linnie Canal, with a constant view into each other’s homes.
Before we met, I knew what time she woke up, the cut of the silk caftan she wore as she made breakfast. And she knew the same of me.
Up and down the canals, people know the habits of those who live across from them.
Unless, of course, you keep your blinds and shutters closed, which almost no one besides Judy does.
By some unspoken code, we offer our lives to the tourists who ogle and the neighbors across the canal who pretend not to look, neighbors who go out of their way to stay strangers.
Except Claire. A few weeks after we moved in, she knocked on my door, holding two cups of coffee.
If I’m going to know how you take your coffee, we may as well share in a cup, she said, handing one to me. We’ve been friends ever since.
Claire’s a muralist. It sounds like one of the made-up jobs many people along the canals have—spiritual coach, water sommelier, astrologer.
Jewelry designer, even. I hate that our neighbors think my art is little more than a hobby.
My company is profitable; it’s just not Venice Canals profitable.
But Claire has painted the sides of corporate buildings from Santa Monica to Silicon Valley, strategically choosing stock over cash payments.
Her husband, Dan the hoverer, is a producer, which in LA can mean anything.
In Dan’s case, it means indie movies funded by his wife’s fake-sounding job and a glass house that he lords over, despite said wife paying the mortgage.
I hope my dislike of Dan isn’t as transparent to Claire as it seems to me.
It must not be, if she’s still my friend.
Or maybe she doesn’t care what anyone thinks of their arrangement.
Claire abandons the herd and kisses me on both cheeks. She bends down to unbuckle Jasper from his stroller straps, saving me the indignity of having to squat. The second Claire lifts him out of his seat, he takes off for the slide, his favorite activity at the park.
She weaves her arm through mine, and we make our way to the mothers. “Can you believe this morning?”
“It’s terrible,” Ines chimes in, her tone suggesting that it isn’t terrible so much as titillating.
Ines was a studio exec before she had twin boys, now in kindergarten.
Followed by another boy, Javier, when they tried for a girl.
If they’d come to me, Gabe says every time we see her wrangling three rambunctious boys, I would have made sure it was a girl.
Ines was thirty-eight when she had the twins, so Gabe assumes she must have gone to someone.
His clinic, Longevity Fertility, specializes in women of advanced maternal age and has the highest successful birth rate on the West Coast. There are some thirty-eight-year-old women who can conceive on their own, I often remind him.
When all you see is couples struggling with fertility, particularly older women, you forget that the human species has existed this long because it’s capable of reproducing on its own.
“Terrible,” Erin chimes in. Erin’s the youngest of us mothers, though still over thirty. How she and her musician husband afford the canals remains a mystery. I’m not sure she ever worked, even before she had her daughter, Freddie.
“I saw the medical examiner collecting evidence from her body,” Erin continues, glancing over at Freddie, who’s strapped into the baby swing beside Summer’s. “I’m pretty sure that means something.”
Her? I thought it was a man, although I have no idea why. Maybe it felt better to assume a person drunk or high enough to stumble into the canals was a man.
“You think she was murdered?” Ines asks loudly, then clamps her hand over her mouth.
Murdered? Reflexively, I search for Jasper.
He’s too far away to hear us. He’s on a loop: toddle up the stairs, down the slide, up the stairs again.
My head spins in the way I’ve come to identify as low blood pressure.
Although pregnancy typically raises your blood pressure, mine is naturally low, and the drop now makes me dizzy.
“They always send a medical examiner when someone dies.” Claire walks over to the swings to give Summer and Freddie a push. When she returns to our huddle, Claire nudges Erin. “You watch too much CSI.”
Claire’s words do little to reassure me. Could someone—a woman—really have been murdered right outside my home? I lean against the fence, steadying my breath.
“T., you okay?” Claire asks. I’m bent over, doing yogic breaths. The mothers swivel in unison.
“Are you having contractions?” The uptick in Ines’s voice betrays her excitement. First a murder, now a labor at the playground? It’s turning out to be an exciting Wednesday.
I rub the straining ligaments beneath my belly, the sharp cramps not entirely unlike contractions. “Just low blood pressure.”
“Come. Sit.” Claire guides me to the curb beneath the ficus tree. It wasn’t until I was pregnant and needed a seat that I realized the park doesn’t have a bench. Nothing on the canals is designed for families, not even the playground.
I remain seated after my blood pressure has stabilized, distancing myself from my friends’ conversation, which they manage to sustain despite having no concrete information, just conjectures about who she was, who was after her, how she might have been killed.
Claire occasionally tells them to settle down, clearly more amused than troubled by their wild speculations.
This woman, whoever she was, isn’t real to them.
She isn’t real to me either. She can’t be.
If I begin to think of her as a daughter or a mother or both, I’ll grow breathless and dizzy again.
It’s too much. Maybe it’s too much for the other mothers too.
Maybe their gossip isn’t insensitive. Maybe it’s self-protective.
We stay at the playground until Jasper starts rubbing his eyes, involuntarily admitting that he’s ready for his morning nap. Surely the police are gone by now. Surely it’s safe to go home. Safe. My choice of word startles me.
Although the park is only two blocks from our house, it’s long enough for Jasper to fall asleep and ruin his nap.
I push him quickly, prompting shooting twinges along my left side, and quiz him on the colors of the clouds, the flowers, the houses.
Anything to keep him awake. The walkways are as empty as usual on a gray Wednesday morning in early June.
I don’t have to play chicken with anyone.
Up ahead, two cops guide traffic along the bridge. The crowd has vanished. A single officer guards the police tape along the saltbushes, the empty canal below.
I walk up to the officer and ask him what happened. He sees my stomach, then glances quickly at Jasper, trying to gauge my level of interest.
“We live here.” I point to our home. This gets his attention.
“Has my partner spoken to you?” His name tag reads S. Gonzales, and his badge lists him as an LAPD officer but not a detective. That must be a good sign, right? He’d be a detective if it was a murder. For the first time, I wish I watched more cop shows.
“About what?”
“Just a routine investigation. We’re determining whether anyone in the area saw anything.”
Jasper points at the officer’s badge. “Shine. Shine.”
The cop nods to my son before he reaches into his pocket for a notepad. “Can you tell me your name and address?”
“Sure. It’s Tessa Irons. We live here at 225 Linnie Canal.”
Officer Gonzales asks me about the last twenty-four hours, if we saw or heard anything unusual. As I repeat my day back to him, I can hear how incredibly dull my life sounds. When it’s clear to him we don’t know anything, he asks if we have cameras on our property.
“Just a Ring on the front door.” I point toward the alley on the opposite side of our house. While our mailing address is along the canal, the front door faces the alley, Court D. drivers get confused all the time. Half the reason we know our neighbors is because we’re constantly trading packages.
“What about there?” He points to the camera above our French doors.
“It isn’t connected.”
During the pandemic, many of the houses along the canals were empty as people retreated to their second homes.
The tourists were few, and break-ins were at an all-time high.
In an anxious moment, I bought a camera for our patio.
Gabe got as far as putting it up but never linked it to the internet.
Then, as the break-ins declined and the tourists returned, it never became a priority.
The presence of the camera seemed deterrent enough.
“We’ll need a copy of the footage from your Ring camera. You can email it to me.” He reaches into his pocket, then hands me his card.
“Was she murdered?” I peer down at Jasper, expecting a worried expression.
But he doesn’t know that word. Besides, he’s more interested in his big toe, which he’s managed to unearth from his shoe and sock.
His sock rests on the path beside the stroller.
I’m not about to squat in front of Officer Gonzales to retrieve it. I have no idea where his shoe is.
Officer Gonzales bends down to collect the sock and hands it to me. “I see the rumor mill has started.”
“A few moms at the playground think it’s more than a rumor.”
He sighs. “Leave it to the PTA to get everyone hysterical.”
Immediately he flinches, realizing that he’s called a bunch of mothers hysterical. To a pregnant woman, no less. “Sorry. My wife would slap me for saying that.”