Friends with Secrets: A Novel

Chapter One

NIKKI

Nikki Lassiter stood in the baby formula aisle at Target, weeping softly into the downy hair of the four-week-old baby strapped to her chest. Her five-year-old twins did not notice this emotional breakdown. They were too busy giving glass baby food jars to their three-year-old brother, who joyfully chucked them to the floor from his seat in the shopping cart when his mother turned her back. None of the jars had broken—yet. But it was only 8:47 a.m. The day was still young and ripe for disaster.

The tears made it hard to focus on the endless varieties of formula on display in the shining aisles of Nikki’s vast suburban Target. She scanned the shelves, trying to remember the name of the formula she’d used when her other children were babies, but the words blurred together, shifted, then broke apart again, phonetic clouds drifting across a landscape of extreme fatigue.

She rubbed her forehead and tried to think. Was it Immune Support? Fussiness and Gas? Or Non-GMO DHA? And did DHA make your baby smart? Or was DHA that terrible thing in plastic? No. That was BPA. She’d just read about it in Perfect Mothering magazine as she’d waited in her hospital room for the lactation consultant.

The words Pro-Total Comfort caught her eye. She removed the can from the shelf and examined the label. Nikki was pro total comfort. She was also pro undisturbed sleep and pro being alone in an empty room without another human being touching her for five minutes at a time, but unfortunately these comforts were not available in a can. Which was probably why people used drugs.

She cast a doleful glance at Baby Joe as a septic smell rose in the air, like porta-potties at high noon at an outdoor festival for people with gastrointestinal problems.

After putting Pro-Total Comfort back on the shelf, she reached for Fussiness and Gas. It sounded like the name of one of those children’s musical groups. Here’s another song about dinosaurs from Fussiness and Gas!

The cart was full, but she managed to wedge two cans into the small space between her three-year-old son, Daniel; a box of diapers; and a mountain of school supplies. Blue folders with prongs, red folders without prongs, eight washable markers (not the ten pack), and four highlighters when they only came in packages of three. School-supply shopping was a treasure hunt where you paid $100 to participate and the prize at the end was unfocused anger and a gigantic headache.

It was also a test. Would she be the only mother in the school district unable to track down the clear plastic six-inch ruler? Would her children be mocked for their inadequate, nonconformist school supplies?

Probably not.

But then again . . . what if they were?

Baby Joe stirred in the carrier strapped to her chest, moving his tiny starfish fingers and making the mewling noises only babies can make. She stroked his butterfly-soft cheek, and the back of her eyelids began to burn. He deserved breast milk so he could be ten IQ points smarter and get into Harvard or possibly Stanford, like all the other breastfed babies.

She cast a wary eye at the three formula-fed children she’d already brought into this world. They seemed smart enough. Too smart, actually, with their endless creative arguments about bedtime and why the tooth fairy should bring not just cash but Nintendo Switches too.

Formula was perfectly fine.

Right?

Squeezing her eyes shut, she took a deep breath and fought the hormones flooding her body.

Buck up, buttercup.

She’d inherited this phrase from her sister, a personal trainer who ran predawn open-air boot camps for women who enjoyed being yelled at while they exercised. In her previous life, Nikki had embraced this ethos. People who whined and complained blew deadlines. People who made excuses got scooped by the competition, and people who cried ruined their mascara and made extra work for Roxy, the long-suffering cosmetologist who did hair and makeup for the six and ten o’clock news.

Yet here she was, demoralized and leaking because she’d failed at what the La Leche League called the Womanly Art of Breastfeeding.

Again.

Every time she had a baby, the lactation consultants told her the same beautiful lie, and every time, she fell for it.

Maybe it was because they were so earnest, these women in late middle age with unabashedly graying hair and vaguely biblical names like Rachael or Sarah. They flitted across the maternity ward in linen tunics with patient smiles, like the Virgin Mary with a breast pump.

Ruth was the name of the lactation specialist Nikki had worked with before she and Baby Joe were discharged from the hospital. She’d contorted Nikki’s swollen breast into the correct position and said, “Give breastfeeding a real chance this time. Your body will naturally produce the amount of milk your baby needs. You’ll see.”

And once again, Nikki had seen. Seen Baby Joe’s tiny mouth flung wide like a baby bird’s, screaming with hunger because her recalcitrant breasts refused to supply enough milk.

Now she was back in the Formula Aisle of Shame, celebrating her forty-third birthday with Fussiness and Gas while her children launched baby food grenades at the floor.

She pinched the bridge of her nose as a fresh round of tears trickled down her cheeks.

Stop it.

She was Nikki Lassiter, for God’s sake. Or at least she used to be. Tough as nails. Never cried, never got rattled. Not during tornadoes or prison riots. Not when a gubernatorial candidate’s bigamist past and predilection for public spankings came to light five minutes before the debate she moderated. Not even when Deeply Disturbed Dominic, her scariest stalker, appeared beside her in an empty parking lot after the ten o’clock news.

Heavyset and hulking, Dominic had just been released from prison. Standing beside her car, keys clenched in her fist, Nikki had repressed the useless urge to flee in high heels. Instead, she flashed her most confident smile.

“Would you like to come inside and have a cup of coffee with me?”

He followed her back into the station, where the janitor called the police. She’d made small talk with Dominic until the cops had led him away in handcuffs, screaming her name.

She wiped her eyes with the tail of her Def Leppard T-shirt. That’s who I really am. Calm. Tough. Quick thinking. She was not an unhinged woman with questionable hygiene and leaking breasts who sobbed in big-box stores.

You can do this. You are one insanely talented badass.

That’s what she used to say to the baby anchors, the young rookies who filled in for her on Christmas or Thanksgiving and got nervous when they stared into the teleprompter’s black and unblinking eye.

It always made them laugh, because Nikki did not look like the type of person who called other people anything like that. Nikki looked like the kind of person who organized games of touch football in the backyard after Thanksgiving dinner in a Tide commercial.

This had been the secret to her success. Gus, her old station manager, once told her she was exactly the right degree of attractive. “Not supermodel beautiful, but Girl Next Door Pretty, that’s what viewers want. Clean and symmetrical, like a Beach Boys song.”

But now she was neither and hadn’t been for quite some time. Had she even brushed her teeth this morning? Did morning even exist when you never really went to sleep?

A tear rolled down her cheek, splashing the soft spot on Baby Joe’s perfect head.

Damn hormones.

She closed her eyes and gripped the cart handle. How she longed to be done with all this. To have the dormant body of her eighty-six-year-old grandmother. Or better yet, to be a man, without flaring cramps, blood, and big feelings.

Instead, her body seemed to be launching a sort of reproductive going-away party, an end-of-days orgy of double egg production as her ovaries insisted on creating as much new life as possible in the little time that remained.

And it had worked. Distracted, with five-year-old twin girls, a three-year-old boy, and a full-time job, Nikki had kept putting off her annual visit to the ob-gyn to refill her birth control prescription because surely, she wasn’t going to get pregnant accidentally at age forty-two, right?

She leaned down and nuzzled Baby Joe’s head, inhaling his ineffably wonderful newborn scent. Wrong.