The Neighbors Are Watching (19 page)

“Here you go,” Dorothy said, handing Sam the phone numbers she’d copied. “I’m sure it’s just a misunderstanding. They’ll probably be home any minute now.”

Sam looked at Dorothy with an expression that suggested she thought Dorothy was a hopelessly lost cause. “Are you going to leave?” she asked. “You know we’re under mandatory evacuation here, right?”

“Thanks,” Dick said, “but you don’t need to worry about us too. Looks like you’ve got your hands pretty full.”

“Wow. I sure do,” Sam said, sarcasm making her words sound sharp and pointed. “And thank you for all your help, Dick. I’ll let myself out.”

Dorothy’s head had started to throb in earnest and her throat felt tight and dry. “Dick,” she said, after she’d locked the door behind Sam, “I really think we should go. I’m going to call some hotels.”

“Suit yourself. I’m getting a beer,” Dick said and headed to the kitchen.

Dorothy went into the living room, overwhelmed by a weariness so crushing she could barely propel herself to the couch. If she could just sit for a moment and relax, she thought, she would be fine. Just a minute was all she needed. Dorothy slumped onto the couch, her head turned toward the television. Just one second, she thought. Just one.

The doorbell was ringing again. Dorothy sat up, disoriented. Her mouth was parched and her head felt like it weighed a hundred pounds. How long had she been out? It couldn’t have been long because Dick was still sitting at the table—no, getting up to go to the door now—and the news looked exactly the same. She heard Dick open the door.

“Good evening, Officers, what can I do for you?”

Dorothy’s heart seized in her chest and she froze on the couch. Blood rushed in her ears so loudly she couldn’t make out what Dick was saying. She remembered the pills she’d put in her bra and thought about shoveling all of them into her mouth. She was terrified, couldn’t breathe. She had to get up, get
out
. She eyed the back door, tried to figure how long it would take her to get there and how she would open the sliding glass door without making any noise. Her heart was pounding, shaking her whole body.

The front door slammed shut. Dick appeared in the living room, holding a can of beer in his hand. “That was the police,” he said. Dorothy could only manage a nod. “They’re going around telling people to leave.” Dorothy tried to speak, but all that came out was a strangled hiccup. “What’s the matter with you, Dot?”

“Please, Dick,” she said and heard her voice tremble. “Can we please go now?”

“Dorothy …”

And then Dorothy did something that she hadn’t done for years, maybe even decades—she started crying, big heaving sobs. “Please,” she wept, “please.”

“
Okay
, Dorothy, okay. Jesus.” Dick looked at her with a mixture of concern and puzzlement. “Why don’t you call … No, why don’t you just get some stuff together and let’s just go then, okay? I’ll go wake up Kevin and get him going. Okay, Dot?”

Dorothy nodded again and wiped her eyes with the sleeve of her top. Her scalp prickled as if she were being stuck by a thousand tiny needles. “Okay,” she said, shuddering. Dick went upstairs and Dorothy lifted herself from the couch. It took a second for her to understand the confusing mix of physical sensations she felt—cold, damp, sticky—and then she looked down at the dark stain on the couch and put her hand to her pants. She’d wet herself.

The first thing to do was go to the laundry room where there was surely a clean pair of sweatpants in the dryer. Then she would worry about the couch. Dorothy’s cheeks burned, though whether with fever or shame she couldn’t tell. But there was no time to figure it out. Dorothy almost wept with relief when she saw the pair of sweatpants sitting on top of the dryer waiting for her. Jumbled thoughts raced through her head. She was trying to untangle them, trying to think through surging adrenaline.

But now Dick was yelling down at her—a sharp edge of sheer panic in his voice that she’d never heard before.

“Dorothy, call 911!
He’s not breathing!
CALL 911!”

He’s not breathing
.

Dorothy ran for the phone.

S
am wiped her kitchen windowsill hard but it made no difference because the glass itself was filthy and coated with a thick layer of grit. And it wasn’t just the windows; everything was dirty. It felt as if she’d been trying to clean up forever instead of a mere three days. It was a losing battle. Evidence of the fires was everywhere. Soot had covered every surface, collected in every doorway, blown down every road, and been tracked into every house. And that was the least of it. The entire county was traumatized in one way or another. Thousands of people were now homeless or had lost their businesses. A few lost souls had died. And one … One had just disappeared.

Goddamn it
, she thought.
Where was Diana? Where had she gone
?

Sam looked over to her kitchen table where tiny Zoë lay in the Moses baby basket that Sam herself had supplied. She was still asleep, but Sam’s maternal instinct told her that she would soon be awake and needing the bottle that was warming in a bowl of hot water. She peered into the basket, adjusting the thick pink blanket slightly. Such a pretty baby, Sam thought, and then, there it was again—that peculiar mixture of anxiety, joy, and possessiveness she felt with Zoë now. It had started the moment she’d taken her from Joe’s house
—rescued
her—and deepened over the course of that night. She knew she was forming a dangerously strong
attachment to Zoë, but she felt powerless to stop it. And it wasn’t just because this baby was unusually helpless or unusually lovely, there was something special about this little one.

Sam looked at her miniature features: the perfect bow mouth, tiny nose that you could see even now was going to be exactly like Diana’s, dark curly eyelashes and dimpled cheeks the exact color of a late summer peach. Zoë had none of the reddened, wrinkled, alarmed look of most newborns, who often seemed startled and not entirely happy about being thrust into the world. Instead she appeared peaceful, at least in sleep, and … was
resigned
the right word? Sam thought she was probably projecting too much onto this brand-new person, but still that was the impression she got.

At first, Sam just assumed she was so drawn to Zoë because she reminded Sam of her own lost daughter. There had to be some of that in it, but it was only part of the whole. Zoë made Sam want to reach outside of herself and help someone else, or contribute to the greater good. Sam couldn’t quite verbalize it, even to herself, but it was something along those lines. She also felt the need to shield Zoë, knowing the turmoil into which she’d been born. And now, with Diana missing …

Sam’s heart contracted at the thought of where Diana might be or what could have happened to her. Joe was still saying he was sure she’d run away, but Sam suspected that was his guilt speaking. He’d waited too long, it was as simple as that.

It had felt so wrong at first—taking the baby with them when she and Gloria evacuated on Monday night. What if Diana had just gone to let off a little steam somewhere (
very
bad idea, but she was a teenager and not, Sam now realized, a particularly mature one) and came back to find her baby missing? What if she thought the baby had been kidnapped? Sam couldn’t imagine how panicked Diana would be, but in the end Sam didn’t feel there was anything else she could have done. The whole day and night was so strange and ominous, from the moment she’d walked up to the house and heard the baby crying right through the time when she, Gloria,
and Zoë piled into what had to be the last motel room available in the only part of the county that wasn’t on fire. There was something so wrong about it all. As flighty as she could be, Sam couldn’t believe Diana would leave her baby alone in the house. Nor could she imagine Allison doing that. She’d been sure Diana was with Kevin. And maybe she had been. Maybe she was there and Dick just didn’t … But no, she knew now that wasn’t possible. Still, Dick and Dorothy both seemed really odd and tetchy that night. What the hell went on in that house? Sam couldn’t begin to guess.

She hadn’t been able to reach Joe until late Tuesday, when they were all allowed to return home. Sam told him what had happened and he just kept saying, “I’m sorry,” over and over. No explanations, no offers of information. That was when Sam realized that he didn’t know where Diana was either. She’d volunteered to keep Zoë for another night, since he was utterly unprepared to take care of a baby of any age, let alone a newborn. But by Wednesday, when she went over to his house again, he was still alone and he still hadn’t contacted the police.

“Would it be okay if you kept her tonight too, Sam?” he asked. “It’s just … I really have to work. I was going to ask Je—um, I know someone who could probably watch her, but you’re really good with her and …”

“No, Joe, of course I don’t mind, but you have to find Diana. I don’t understand why—”

“I really appreciate you doing this, Sam,” he said. “I know it’s an incredible imposition and you’ve done so much already.”

He was on his way to work, hair slicked back, collar up, and wafting cologne. He’d obviously just showered and shaved, but his shirt was already stained with dark circles of perspiration. He seemed to have become grayer at the temples, but Sam thought she could have been imagining that. His face was pinched and thin and it was clear from the puffiness around his eyes that he hadn’t been sleeping much.

“I said I’m happy to do it, Joe. I offered, remember? But Joe, when are you going to—”

“It’s just that I have to work,” he continued as if she’d said nothing at all, “and Allison—” He caught himself, but it was too late.

“Allison what?”

A flush darkened Joe’s face. “Allison has decided to stay with her mother for a while. In L.A. It’s a bad time, but …” His tone was calm, but he bit his lip, a small gesture of the frustration he must have been feeling. “She’s been having kind of a hard time with things lately. It hasn’t been easy for her, all this with Diana. But I … I’m pretty sure she’ll be home soon and then I’m sure she’ll be able to help with the baby.” But, Sam noted, Joe didn’t even pretend to sound as if he believed this. “Anyway, Diana will be back by then.” He looked at Sam pleadingly then, as if he could will her into buying into whatever fantasy he had constructed.

“Joe,” she’d told him, “this is serious. You need to talk to the police. What are you waiting for?”

“I know where she is, Sam,” he’d said. “She’s with that degenerate Kevin Werner. I don’t know where Dick and Dorothy are—it’s all been such a mess with these fires—but as soon as I find them—”

“Have you spoken to her, Joe? Because if you haven’t—”

“Come on,” he said, “there’s nowhere else she could be.”

“I told you, I went over there Monday night. She wasn’t there.”

“Are you totally sure about that?”

“Joe …”

“Okay,” he’d said, his hands raised in a gesture of surrender. “If she isn’t back by tomorrow morning … Look, I know she’s with him, Sam. With
them
. Goddamn Dick.”

Sam had let it go then, although she didn’t know why—then or now. Perhaps she too wanted to believe that Diana had run off with Kevin. Because even that pathetic scenario was preferable to some of the alternatives. Perhaps part of it was simply sympathy for Joe. He was trying very hard to keep it together, but he was cracking badly under the sudden pressures of his life. Sam doubted he’d ever had to deal with anything even as remotely
troubling in his entire life as what he was going through now. Part of her felt he deserved it because he’d brought every bit of his current suffering upon himself. But her more compassionate side recognized that he was flailing and in way over his head.

Or maybe, and Sam didn’t even want to admit this to herself, she just wanted to keep Zoë a little longer.

So she’d collected diapers, blankets, and bottles from Diana’s room—all the while depressed to find that Diana had accumulated so little in the way of baby clothes and toys and all the small things that people gave you when you had a new baby. Maybe, she’d thought as she bundled all the items together, Diana really had just resorted to her most immature teenage self and taken off with Kevin. Then again, maybe she’d just run away. Diana could have been suffering from postpartum depression and just flipped out. Sam had been turning these theories over in her head endlessly since Monday afternoon when she’d discovered Zoë screaming her head off all alone in that house, but they still didn’t sit any easier or make any more sense. Unless she’d been completely off base about Diana, the girl was just upset and confused about her life; anyone in her position would be. And it was clear how much she loved Zoë. To Sam, Diana was many things—determined, frightened, naive, and willful to name just a few—but never depressed and never desperate.

Still, as late as Wednesday, Sam was willing to believe that she was wrong about that too. One never really knew what went on inside the hearts of other people, even those hearts you thought you knew as well as your own. But on Thursday (dear god, Sam thought, was that only
yesterday
?) the Werners came home and the landscape shifted once again.

She hadn’t gotten the full story because Joe had been terse at best. He’d come to pick up Zoë late in the afternoon looking anxious and jittery. She and Gloria had been arguing. Sam couldn’t even remember now over what. It was some small thing—whose turn it was to unload the dishwasher or something like that—that had blown up into a fight about
something else entirely. The air was charged with tension and anger when Gloria let Joe in, but he didn’t seem to notice and launched immediately into his speech.

“Well, she’s not with Kevin,” he said. “At least not right now. That stupid kid is in the hospital. They wouldn’t tell me anything, but it’s obvious he overdosed on something.”

“Who’s in the hospital, Joe?”

“Kevin,” Joe said. “But you know what really amazes me? That even now, that asshole has the gall to try to pin this on Diana.”

“Where is Diana, Joe?” Sam asked, but she could tell that the only thing Joe knew for sure was that what remained of his world was about to fall apart. “I don’t know,” he said. “But Dick knows, I’m sure of it. And that kid of his knows too. He wouldn’t even tell me what hospital Kevin’s in.”