Neighbors Read online

  Kendall had never forgiven her mother for how hard she’d been on her father for the accident, and she rarely came to San Francisco now. It depressed her to see the house where she and Justin had grown up. His room was kept as a shrine, and her mother was shut away from the world and living like a ghost. The two caretakers, Jack and Debbie, gave her the creeps, and acted like they owned the house, which her mother didn’t seem to notice. And as a result of Kendall staying away, Meredith treated Debbie almost like a daughter. Debbie was only four years older than Kendall. Meredith could easily have been her mother, and they lived in the same house and saw each other every day. Her contact with Kendall was minimal, and they had drifted apart, much to Meredith’s regret.

  * * *

  —

  Meredith’s immensely successful career had ended when Justin died. She remained behind closed doors for two years, mourning her son’s death. It was another three before she felt even remotely like herself again. She never forgave Scott for not keeping his promise not to let Justin sail the boat alone. He had obviously ventured too far from the shore, and when the storm came up suddenly, the boat had capsized in huge waves, far from the coast, and he drowned. She’d had nightmares about it for years, and finally, slowly, achingly made her peace with it.

  By then, making movies was no longer of any interest to her. She and Scott had invested her money wisely, she had few needs and didn’t have to work. Pursuing her own stardom seemed like a travesty to her after her son’s death, and without actually intending to, she became a recluse. She went for days without speaking to anyone except for a few words to Jack and Debbie, who efficiently kept the world at bay, as she had instructed them to. They shielded her from the public life she no longer wanted any part of.

  For the first five years after Justin’s death, Meredith noticed little of her surroundings and didn’t care about them. She never noticed that a few paintings had disappeared from the walls of her living room since she rarely entered the room, and paid no attention to what was there. When Debbie told her that several of her fur coats had been stolen by a maid she’d hired, Meredith didn’t care and let Debbie fire the maid. She couldn’t imagine wearing anything that glamorous again. She lived in blue jeans now, and old parkas when it was cold, and she sat in the garden. She wore sneakers or her gardening boots. When she went for her long walks, no one recognized her. People in the area knew who lived in the house, what had happened, and that she almost never left the grounds anymore. It was one of those tragedies that happen in life, and from which some people don’t recover. Apparently, Meredith was one of them.

  Her career had come to a screeching halt when she was forty-nine, and the rest of her life with it. She shut out her friends, had no family except Kendall, who lived three thousand miles away with her husband and daughter, had her own busy life, and almost never came to San Francisco anymore. Kendall remained close to her father, and excluded her mother from her life. Her husband’s betrayal with Silvana, her son’s death, and her daughter siding with her father and abandoning her were cruel blows for anyone to weather, and drove Meredith deep into solitude.

  Fourteen years after Justin’s death, at sixty-three, Meredith lived quietly and was content to do so. Her agent died before she ever spoke to him again, and she had refused to see him before that. She had no interest in working again or being the star she had been.

  She was no longer tormented by Justin’s death. She had learned to live with it, and accept it. She believed she would see him again one day. She didn’t travel, and was content to stay in San Francisco, in the house where Justin had lived his whole short life. His room was untouched, on the top floor of the house. She rarely went into it now, except to look for something, a photograph or something of his. She just liked knowing that the room was there, and still looked the same as it had when he lived. Nothing in the house had changed in fourteen years. It gave her the illusion that time had stood still after Justin’s death. But the years drifted by nonetheless.

  * * *

  —

  Jack and Debbie had become Meredith’s protectors, her shield against the world and prying eyes, and took free advantage of it, for their own benefit, which Meredith didn’t question or even notice. They had decided to let the hedge grow taller, and no one could see behind her walls. For the first five years, Meredith had been morbidly depressed. Now she was a quiet woman with a famous past, a tragic story, content to walk in her own garden, or drive herself to the beach on blustery days, for fresh air, with the wind on her face. She had no desire for companionship, or the friends she hadn’t seen in years. Their lives were too different from hers now.

  Meredith had watched some of the movies Scott had directed recently, and was surprised by how good they were, and relieved that he wasn’t in them. She had no desire to see Scott’s face again, all the photographs of him in the house had long since disappeared. There were photographs of Justin everywhere, at every age, for his brief fourteen years, and of Kendall, though more of him. Debbie spoke to Meredith of Justin with reverence, and made herself essential for Meredith’s comfort. She knew how she liked everything, what she liked to eat, and when, and how she liked it served, how she liked her bed turned down, the kind of books she liked to read, and supplied them. Debbie introduced her to several new TV series, and watched them with her. Debbie had become a filter for her, screening out everything Meredith didn’t want to deal with and making her life easy, while Jack assured her that he kept her safe, and she believed him. The world seemed dangerous and unfamiliar to her now. Meredith hadn’t meant to become dependent on them, but without intending to, she had. They made everything so easy for her, and she was grateful to them. They hadn’t abandoned her, which Scott and Kendall had. They had even woven heavy netting through the main gate, so the curious couldn’t look in. She was something of a legend in the neighborhood, the big movie star whose son had died and had become a recluse.

  “They probably think I’m some kind of witch by now,” Meredith said sometimes, laughing about it. At sixty-three, she was still beautiful, with the huge blue eyes her fans had loved and remembered, sandy blond hair, and the elegant, delicate face. She was still very attractive, energetic, and in good shape, and didn’t look her age. She spent hours gardening, which she enjoyed, and reading.

  She had been in the garden all morning, trimming her roses, despite the heat. Heat waves were rare in San Francisco, and she had enjoyed it. She was wearing a big floppy straw hat when she came into the kitchen for something to drink, and smiled at Debbie, who was making Meredith’s favorite chopped salad for lunch. She had kept her figure, although in the early years of her seclusion she had been too thin, and Debbie had to coax her to eat. Everything the devoted couple did proved to Meredith again and again how much they cared about her, and how kindhearted they were. More so than her daughter, who hardly even called her, sometimes not for months at a time. Meredith felt her loss acutely.

  “Wow, it’s hot out there,” she said and smiled at Debbie. It had been a long foggy summer, and the September heat was a nice change. “It’s real Indian summer,” she said, grabbing a bottle of cold water from the fridge and taking a long drink.

  “Earthquake weather,” Debbie said, handing her a glass, as Meredith shook her head. She didn’t need one.

  “I hope not,” Meredith said, setting the bottle down. “I’ve lived here for twenty-eight years, and there’s never been a major earthquake, thank God,” Meredith said. “We missed the one in ’89 by four years. That sounded pretty nasty.” It still shocked her to realize that Justin had been gone for half the time she’d lived in San Francisco now. He would have been twenty-eight if he’d lived, which was harder to imagine. In her mind’s eye, he would always be a boy of fourteen. She remembered him smiling, and laughing, and playing pranks on her. He’d been playful, and happy, and funny. It gave her comfort to know that she and Scott had given him a happy childhood, with no
sorrows until the divorce. The memories of him were gentle now, not of the imagined horror of the day he drowned.

  “This house won’t move an inch if there ever was a quake,” Jack said, as he walked into the kitchen for a glass of water himself. He and Debbie were forty-four years old now. They hadn’t weathered the years as well as she had. Meredith hardly looked older than they did, and had fewer lines in her face and around her eyes than Debbie, who always had a slightly hard expression, bleached her own hair a brassy blond, and always seemed to have an inch of dark roots before she dyed it again. Jack was growing bald and had a beer belly, which always surprised Meredith, since he wasn’t a drinker, as far as she knew, and Debbie had put on more than a few pounds. Meredith was still naturally slim, with a good figure since aside from her daily walks, she went to a yoga class in the neighborhood, where no one ever recognized her. She had become comfortable with her solitude, embraced it, and at night she read voraciously. She and Debbie would talk about the books the next day. Debbie had never been a big reader, but she knew it was a way of bonding with Meredith, so she read what she knew Meredith liked. It seemed odd, but they had become her best friends.

  * * *

  —

  The house was over a hundred years old, and made of stone. It was the largest house in San Francisco, sitting on a sizeable plot of land, which took up half a block. Between the gate and the hedge, and the imposing structure and grounds, people who were unfamiliar with the neighborhood wondered who lived there. Jack’s comment about the house reminded her of something from the distant past.

  “Speaking of earthquakes, do we still have the emergency supplies for one? We were worried about earthquakes when we moved here, and we stocked up a bunch of tents, and rope and crowbars, and some canned food, bottled water, and first aid supplies, and put them in the garden shed. Do we still keep them up to date?” She used to keep clothes for Justin out there too, when he was small, but after they’d lived there for several years, they stopped worrying about earthquakes, and had forgotten about updating the supplies. She hadn’t thought of them in years. “We had battery-operated lanterns too.” She also remembered that Scott had wanted to keep a gun with the supplies too, in case anyone tried to loot the house, but she wouldn’t let him. They’d kept an envelope of cash in the safe for emergencies. She still did, for when she occasionally needed petty cash to give Jack or Debbie.

  “I keep up with the first aid supplies, and the tools,” Jack answered her. “I donated the tents to a homeless shelter years ago. We wouldn’t want people camping out on the grounds anyway. And I threw the clothes away.” She nodded, knowing they were Justin’s from when he was a child. “And we have all the food and water we need in the house, if there ever is a quake. We keep the house well stocked.” Debbie kept a large supply of meat they froze, and canned goods. “We don’t need to feed the neighborhood,” he said with a stern expression, implying he was protecting her from curious strangers. “We have everything we need for us, to keep going for a long time. The house is sitting on granite, you’d barely notice a quake here, and we have an emergency generator if we lose power,” he said confidently. Scott had it installed when they bought the house.

  The rest of the houses on the block were handsome Victorians, all wooden structures. They were lovely, though less solid, and might not fare as well. Meredith had never met her neighbors, and didn’t want to. Scott had been more neighborly and concerned about the neighborhood in an earthquake when they moved in, but her life had changed radically since then. She had no idea who lived on her block in the string of pretty Victorian houses, and she suspected Jack and Debbie didn’t either. They were even more reclusive than she was, and always seemed suspicious of their neighbors and passersby who tried to peek through the gate. They shielded and protected her.

  She sat down to lunch with them at the kitchen table, as she did every day. Meredith ate her meals with them now, and had for many years. It didn’t seem right to cause Debbie extra work, serving her in the dining room for just one person, and it seemed unfriendly, given how kind they’d been to her, at the hardest time in her life, through the divorce and her son’s death. They made up for the fact that she never saw her daughter. At first, she had taken her meals on a tray in her study, but for years now, she had eaten lunch and dinner with Jack and Debbie, even though their backgrounds and histories were different from hers. They had grown up simply in poor families, never went past high school. Debbie had graduated, Jack dropped out in tenth grade, and were almost twenty years younger than she. But they had become her only friends. Sometimes Debbie watched one of their favorite TV series with her in the den. It was more fun than watching alone, and they could talk about it afterward. Jack didn’t like the shows they watched. He pooh-poohed them, and would go to their apartment to watch sports, which Debbie hated. She and Meredith liked the same TV shows, and read the same books, because Debbie made the effort to do so. She was more intellectually ambitious than Jack. In some ways, she was like a daughter to Meredith, or a sister or a friend. Jack was more taciturn, a man of few words, and less chatty than Debbie, who engaged Meredith in conversation, and so was better company. He was bright, but not talkative.

  Meredith went back out to the garden after lunch, to finish her gardening. She didn’t mind the heat. She liked it. Debbie came out to check on her progress around four o’clock, and brought her a glass of ice-cold lemonade. Meredith accepted it gratefully and smiled at her. She took a long drink and drank half the contents of the glass before she stopped.

  “My God, that’s good. I was dying of thirst, but I didn’t want to stop and come inside.” She had tossed her hat on a garden chair, and was enjoying the sun on her face.

  “Your roses are looking beautiful,” Debbie complimented her, and Meredith was pleased.

  “I never thought I’d be spending my days gardening. I actually enjoy it.” She cut a particularly lush dark red rose and handed it to Debbie, and the two women exchanged a warm smile. They were entirely different. Meredith came from a distinguished family, though not from great wealth. But she had an aristocratic air and innate grace. Debbie had grown up in abject poverty, in a trailer park, and still looked it. There was a coarseness to her, with her bad dye job and black roots. And yet, Meredith believed that they understood each other, and were friends. “I’ve been thinking about taking a Chinese cooking class, since we all like Chinese food so much. There’s no reason why you should have to cook every night,” she said generously. Except that Meredith was her employer, and Debbie was paid to cook. Since they spent so much time together, it was easy to forget that. The boundaries got blurred when you lived in such close proximity and saw no one else.

  Debbie went back in the house a few minutes later. It was too hot outside for her, and the air had gotten humid, heavy, and muggy. It really did feel like what people called earthquake weather, but Meredith knew it was just a myth. She’d never heard any evidence that the weather had been muggy during the 1906 quake, which was the biggest one of all. The ’89 quake happened during the World Series, so it might have been hot and humid then too. Meredith wasn’t worried about it. It was just trivial conversation, something to say about the weather.

  As she picked up her basket of gardening tools at five o’clock, she thought of calling Kendall that night. Meredith still made the effort. They hadn’t talked in a long time. Kendall rarely called her. The last time they’d spoken, Kendall had been battling with her nineteen-year-old daughter who wanted to drop out of college at NYU and not go back for junior year. She hated school, although she was majoring in drama at the Tisch School at NYU.

  If she had dropped out, she was following in her mother’s footsteps. Kendall had done her junior year in Florence, for her year abroad. She’d been twenty, had fallen madly in love with George Holbrook, the eldest son of an important and very wealthy banking family in New York. They were both students in Florence at the same time. Afterwar
d, Kendall had refused to go back to Columbia. They had gotten engaged at Christmas and married a few months later. Kendall was stubborn. She never went back to school. Both sets of parents had been afraid the marriage wouldn’t last and thought they were too young to get married. But twenty years later, they were still together and Kendall said they were happy. They’d had a baby, Julia, ten months after their wedding day, which didn’t seem prudent to Meredith either, to rush into becoming parents, especially so young, but Kendall always did what she wanted, and she and George were a good match as it turned out. They were conservative, very social, and somewhat stuffy, in Meredith’s opinion.

  Kendall was on all the important charity committees in New York. George’s parents hadn’t been thrilled that Kendall came from a family of actors, and Kendall had never gone back to school or worked. She was the classic society wife, which their daughter, Julia, detested. Julia wanted to follow in her grandparents’ footsteps, go to L.A. and try to become an actress. She wanted to try her wings and fly, and her parents weren’t happy about it. Meredith smiled, thinking about it. It was Kendall’s turn now to have a daughter rebel, take off, and reject everything her parents stood for and had achieved.

  Kendall had never liked her parents’ acting careers, particularly since their work had taken them away from her so often when she was young. She also didn’t like her parents being so recognizable and well-known. She hated their being stopped on the street by strangers for autographs. Meredith didn’t deny that she had been on location a lot of the time. Kendall had been born just when Meredith was first becoming a major star. Justin was born twelve years later, when she was more mature and could handle it better. She was just as busy, but Justin never seemed to mind their absences the way Kendall had, or their being recognized. Sometimes he even liked it and often said he was proud of them. Kendall wasn’t. She was embarrassed and jealous of her mother, although Meredith was discreet, and never made a fuss about her fame, which was impressive, given what a big star she was.