Someone's Watching (2 page)

She carried her bundles past hibiscus bushes and flowering bougainvillea. The neighborhood still had the feel of old Miami Beach. The two-story U-shaped apartment complex had been built in the 1930’s Art Deco style with rounded corners and glass block walls. Rusty air-conditioning units sprouted from the faded seafoam green concrete block walls that surrounded a small swimming pool and cracked, pebbled Chattahoochee deck.

Robbie ran up the outside stairs to her second floor corner apartment. Just down the catwalk, her neighbor Gabriele was fumbling with his house keys, still in his evening clothes. His Dutch-boy platinum blonde wig and white lacy dress made a striking contrast with his long, black, muscular arms. A bit different from the jeans and button-downs he wore when he headed off to teach English at the local college.

“Need some help?” she called to him.

“Robbie. Thank God. Yes, please. Come save my life again. I must have the wrong key.”

Robbie left her groceries in front of her apartment and went to join Gabriele. She examined the keys on his key ring, matching up the brand names with the locks on his door. The top bolt clicked open.

“You’re a miracle worker,” Gabriele said, leaning over to touch one of her beaded, feather earrings. “Are these new? They’re exquisite, just like you.”

“Thank you. I’ll make you a pair.”

“You’re too good to me.” He fluttered his tapered, black fingers in front of his lacy bodice. “First you do my taxes, which, by the way, I promise I’ll keep my records better organized in the future.”

She unlocked the bottom and pushed the door open. “Sure you will.”

He tossed his head, the straight edge of the platinum wig swinging over his shoulder. “You know me too well, girlfriend.” He blew her a kiss. “But if there’s anything you need, just ask. I’m your Galatea—putty in your hands.”

“I thought Pygmalion carved his beloved Galatea out of ivory.”

He grinned. “Someone’s been reading her Ovid.”

“Have a nice beauty sleep, professor.”

Robbie returned to her own door, unbolted the two locks, and went inside with her groceries. It was a great little apartment. Cozy. And cheap. One side overlooked the pool, the other a wide street with a view of other low-rise pastel buildings. Palm trees were everywhere. Very different from the brick high-rise in Boston where Robbie had grown up, a place she could only remember as chilly, dark, and sad.

Matilda purred and rubbed against her ankles.

“Just a sec, kitten.” Robbie put the bundles on the small kitchen table, then scooped up the cat. She buried her face in Matilda’s soft white fur to take in her sunshine smell. “Any calls or visitors?”

Matilda meowed.

She let the cat spring from her arms onto the hardwood floor. Against the living room walls, mismatched bookcases that Robbie had picked up at estate sales overflowed with books, and her white sofa was covered with a thin layer of cat hair. In the center of the room were tables with half-finished necklaces and earrings, trays of colored beads, spools of wires, and plastic bags of feathers.

Jewelry making was the latest in a series of projects Robbie had taken up since she and Jeremy had separated. She was just trying to keep it simple for now—no car, no mortgage, no real job. And definitely no relationships that smelled of a future. Robbie was a little worn out from throwing her heart into something, then having it stabbed and gutted. Some people looked at her funny on hearing she’d once been a CPA on a fast track to corporate success. “And
now you’re a bartender?” they’d say, like she was serving vomit, not alcohol.

But they didn’t understand that the tragic death of Robbie’s mentor had been another deposit of scar tissue on top of old layers that had never healed. And even though Robbie and Jeremy had taken some time to get away from everything, Robbie still occasionally felt a cumulative ache. So for now, jewelry making and bartending were fine. Well, at least they didn’t make her hurt.

Robbie went back into the kitchen alcove and unpacked her groceries—a bag of salad, two boxes of pasta, a jar of spaghetti sauce, coffee, and bananas.

For dinner tonight, she’d have pasta. Just like last night. Maybe Gabriele would want to come over. No. He’d probably be sleeping.

Robbie sat down at the small oak table and picked up the painted ceramic salt and pepper shakers. They were in the shape of a mother and daughter wearing bonnets and dresses with aprons. Robbie used to play with them for hours when she was a child while she waited for her mom to come home from work.

She considered making dinner for Brett. But did she even want to see him tonight? They’d been dating for about a month, and while Brett was a lot of fun, she had to be in the right mood for his frenetic energy.

Should she call Jeremy? They’d told each other they would still be friends, but neither one had gotten in touch with the other in the months they’d been apart. She took out her cell phone and opened it. Just for dinner.

But what if Jeremy misconstrued the call, thinking she wanted to get back together?

She closed the phone. The mother and daughter shakers looked up at her stoically, as they had when she was a child.

A knock on the door startled her. She sat up, alert.

Through the sheer curtains in front of the kitchen window, she
could see a hunched, gray-haired man. No one she knew. He wore a well-cut navy blazer, but hadn’t shaved in a day or so.

She went to the front door. “Can I help you?” she asked through the door.

“Roberta Brooks?” the man asked.

Something crashed inside her.
Roberta Brooks
, a child’s voice in her head repeated.
My name is Roberta Brooks and I live at
—

The walls shifted. Robbie leaned against the door, trying to catch her breath.

“Are you there?” the man asked. “Roberta?”

She knew the voice. She hadn’t heard it in eighteen years. Not since she was seven and he had kissed her goodbye.

“Please let me in. I need to speak with you, Roberta.”

“That’s not my name.”

There was silence for almost a minute. An eternity as she remembered her tears and how she had clung to him.

“I keep forgetting,” he said. “You’re Robbie now. Robbie Ivy. Please let me talk to you, just for a minute.”

Why had he come here? Why after all these years?

She took a deep breath, trying to compose herself, then opened the door.

Blue eyes—so much like her own. They watered at the sight of her.

He’s nothing to you, she told herself.

The black hair had gone gray, and he was shorter than she remembered, only five eight or nine. How he used to tower over her and lift her high into the air. But this man seemed too unsteady to carry much of anything. And his face was wrong—deep wrinkles around his eyes and in his forehead, sagging cheeks that blurred his once-square jaw. A few wild white hairs protruded from his black eyebrows.

“Roberta,” he said, “you’re all grown up.”

Daddy, she wanted to say. Instead, she held herself straight. “What do you want?”

“May I come in?” He seemed to be trying to peer around her. “Just for a minute?”

She glanced behind her at her home, her sanctuary. “I’d rather we talk by the pool.”

“I understand.”

His voice touched a place deep inside her, but she wasn’t going to be taken in by him. Not after how he had treated her and her mother.

They went down to the courtyard and sat on stone benches on opposite sides of a table with an umbrella sticking up through its center. He turned his wedding ring around and around on his finger. His fingers were long and slender and the nails covered the nail bed with almost no white. Just like Robbie’s.

“You have your mother’s voice,” he said, “and the same Boston accent, but you look just like—”

“Would you please tell me why you’re here?”

“It’s just . . . You’re right.” He ran his fingers through his hair. The gesture so familiar. “I’m here because I need your help.”

“My help? How dare you—”

“Please. Let me finish. It’s about your sister.”

“Sister? What are you talking about?”

“Damn.” He looked down at the mildewed mosaic tabletop. “I guess your mother didn’t tell you.”

Robbie’s heart hiccupped. “Tell me what? What are you talking about? I don’t have a sister.”

“But you do. A half sister.”

Not possible. Robbie was an only child. An only child with no mother, an absent father. No family at all.

“Her name is Kaitlin. She just turned eighteen.”

Half sister. Eighteen
. Her father had left them eighteen years ago.

Robbie got up and went to the edge of the pool. A palm frond had fallen into the deep end and shifted ever so slightly as the water burbled.

He came over and stood beside her. “I thought you knew.”

The sting of his words reminded her of when her mom put antiseptic on a cut. Just as then, she forced herself to hold back tears until the pain subsided. All these years she’d had a sister. A little sister named Kaitlin. And no one had told her.

“Kaitlin’s a senior in high school. She came to Miami Beach with some friends a few days ago on her spring break.”

Her sister was here? In Miami?

“But she’s disappeared,” he said.

“Disappeared? What are you talking about?”

“She wasn’t answering her cell phone. Neither was her best friend, Joanne, so I drove here from home this morning. I spoke with the other girls they’d come down with. None of them have seen Kaitlin or Joanne since early Friday.”

A bright green iguana emerged cautiously into the sunlight, then darted back into the bushes.

“I’m sorry to lay this on you,” he said, “but I’m desperate. Kaitlin and her friend are good girls. They’re both going off to college in the fall. Maybe they got in with a bad crowd. I was hoping you’d know where I might begin to look for her.”

“Me?” She turned to him suddenly. “How did you even know where I live?”

He cocked his head, as though surprised by her question. “I’ve always kept an eye on you. I watched you going off to college, then when you took a job down here. I know about what you’ve been through.”

“You know? You know all about me? How can you say you’ve
been watching me my entire life and never tried to contact me?”

“I never wanted to lose you. It wasn’t my choice.”

“No. Stop it. It was your choice. And you can’t come here and act like the last eighteen years didn’t happen. You’re not my father anymore. You lost that right.”

“Dear God, Roberta. I never meant to hurt you.”

“Please, go away. I’m sorry your daughter’s missing, but I can’t help you. Go to the police if you’re worried about her.”

He looked down at the cracked pebbled deck beneath his feet. “I’ve been to the police. They were not encouraging.”

This was not her problem. He was a stranger to her. Both he and his daughter.

“I’m going inside now,” she said. “I hope you find her, but please don’t come to see me again.” She started walking through the hibiscus bushes and palm trees toward the stairs.

“Roberta.” He took a few steps after her. “Please, take this.” He reached into his jacket pocket and held out a small manila envelope.

She grabbed the envelope, then ran up the stairs to her apartment slamming the door behind her. She sank to the floor and began to cry. She cried and cried into Matilda’s soft warm fur until she was spent.

The manila envelope lay beside her. Robbie picked it up. Inside was a piece of paper with typed information—names, addresses, date of birth, height, weight—but it was the picture that caused the breath to snag in her chest.

It was a yearbook photo of a smiling girl with a heart-shaped face, long black hair, prominent dimples, and vivid blue eyes. Kaitlin Brooks, it said on the back.

But Robbie could just as well have been staring at her own high school photo.

This time she didn’t think twice as she punched Jeremy’s number into her cell phone.

He answered on the first ring. “Robbie.”

“I need to talk to you,” she said.

“Where are you?”

“Can you meet me by the old fishing pier?”

“I’m leaving now.”

“Thank you,” Robbie said.

She ran down the stairs and unlocked her bicycle from the stand, afraid to look around. Afraid he may have lingered. That he’d try to talk to her again. But there was no sign of anyone.

She biked through side streets of sun-bleached buildings, then around a crowd of teens in cutoffs and bikini tops crossing Ocean Drive, until she reached the very end of South Beach. It was late afternoon and the sun cast shadows from the low deco hotels over hot pavement the color of dirty bubblegum. People carrying beach chairs and towels were heading back toward their cars. A breeze came off the surf. Robbie stood next to her bike, momentarily disoriented. The smell of coconut oil and ocean air settled her. Jeremy would help her make sense of her feelings. Just like he used to. She locked her bike to a post and went down to South Pointe Park.

This had been Jeremy’s and her favorite place when they’d first returned to Miami after spending last summer traveling cross-country.
For the months they’d been away, it had just been the two of them and they hadn’t needed anyone else. But when they got back to reality in September, Jeremy was restless for a life of people and friends and having fun. It was as though he was trying to cram his entire youth into each day. And she’d remembered what her mother had always told her.
There’s no such thing as forever
. So Robbie had suggested they take a break. Jeremy had protested, but she knew deep inside it was what he needed, maybe even what he wanted. And perhaps on some level, it was what she wanted, too.

Robbie walked down the narrow strip of riprap that jutted into the ocean like a road to nowhere. The packed-sand path ended and she balanced herself as she stepped from boulder to boulder. Several people were fishing from the rocks closest to the water. A short distance away, waves lapped at the barnacle-covered pilings of the old fishing pier, which was no longer accessible. It had been blocked off and looked like a strong wind could take it down.