The Neighbors Are Watching (20 page)

“Joe, I really think it’s time—” Sam began, but Joe cut her off.

“I know, Sam. I know what you think. I’m going to do it. Right now.” He took Zoë from Sam then and gathered up all her things. Sam thought about protesting and offering to keep the baby while Joe went to talk to the police, but was stopped by some odd sense of propriety. Zoë
was
his granddaughter after all, and Sam had no claim to her. That was a mistake, she now realized. Joe had taken Zoë, but he had not gone to the police as he’d said he was going to. Sam didn’t know what he’d done with the rest of his day yesterday, but this morning he was back at her door with Zoë, asking if she could lend a hand once more.

“What did the police say?” Sam asked.

“I’m going over there now,” he answered. Sam was stunned into silence, but Joe filled it quickly. “Look, I was sure she’d be home by now,” he said. “I’ll be back to get the baby after I get done over there.”

Like it was laundry he had to pick up or something, Sam thought. But he’d been gone for hours already. Sam didn’t know whether to consider that a bad sign or an even worse one.

Zoë was stirring. She turned her head, her little hands jerking up and
her mouth opening, forming a cry. Sam reached into the basket and lifted her out before she could get out a full yell. You weren’t supposed to do that, she thought. There were all these “baby whisperers” around now who said that it spoiled babies if you soothed them right away. You were supposed to let them cry. Ridiculous, Sam thought. This baby needed comforting in spades. She adjusted Zoë in her arms and then rocked her for a minute to see if she’d go back to sleep or if she was genuinely hungry. The baby gurgled, flirting with the idea of a solid cry, then hiccupped, then demanded to be fed. Sam sat at the kitchen table—the same spot where she’d served Diana lemonade not even two months ago—and gave Zoë her bottle. Ten years since she’d rocked and fed her own baby, she thought, and it still came so easily. She drifted, narcotized by the small warm weight in her lap and the baby’s sweet smell. It was easy to forget everything else when you were holding a baby—feeding an infant was such an elemental, focused task. Her thoughts, woolly and meandering, began to unravel. And so when Gloria walked into the kitchen in old sweatpants and a torn white T-shirt, she was surprised. It took a few seconds for her to remember that Gloria was home because the community college where she worked was closed for the entire week.

Gloria pulled a bottle of some designer water out of the fridge and drank it in big noisy gulps. She looked over at Sam, then down at the baby. Not for the first time these last few months, Sam could not read Gloria’s expression. She had the impression that Gloria was removing herself by inches and in doing so becoming blurrier and blurrier. Soon, Sam thought, she wouldn’t be able to see Gloria at all.

“What are we into here?” Gloria asked finally.

“What do you mean?” Sam shifted the baby in her arms, gripping her a little tighter. Something in Gloria’s tone made her tense. She could feel her stomach muscles tighten.

“The baby.” She gestured to Zoë. “Are we keeping her?” Gloria smiled to soften the question, an indication to Sam that she was being sarcastic, but there was no mirth or the slightest bit of warmth in it.

“Come on, Glo,” Sam said, and then stopped herself, wondering why she was using this pet name for Gloria and why there was the sound of pleading in her voice. She could feel herself catering to Gloria’s mood again, and it annoyed her. All at once she found herself resentful and irritated at always having to be the patient one, the understanding one. “It’s not a problem to take care of her for a little bit,” she said, her voice hardening. “It’s the least we can do. It’s the least
I
can do.”

“Because I’m the bitch, right? That’s what you’re saying?” She still had that cheerless grimace on her face. For the first time, Sam noticed the beginnings of crow’s feet at Gloria’s eyes.

“No, of course that’s not what I’m saying. Why do you have to be so difficult? This poor baby.… What a way to start a life. Who knows where Diana is? It’s just about having some compassion, you know?”

“I get it,” Gloria said. “I have a kid, remember?” For a moment Gloria just let that hang in the air between them. Sam compressed her lips, holding it in, repressing all the things she could say if she wanted to start another one of their energy-sucking arguments. Gloria finished her water and put the bottle down on the kitchen countertop. She ran her hand over her hair, still getting used to it being so short. Gloria had worn her hair long her entire life—it had been a point of pride with her. Sam felt a physical pang thinking of that beautiful curling hair. She was a stunning woman, Gloria was. It would take more than a bad haircut to spoil her, but that shorn look didn’t suit her. And it certainly didn’t suit Sam.

“Look, Sam,” she said, “I don’t want to get into it again, okay? I don’t want to fight. I just want to know … I want to know why you had to get so involved with all of this? I mean, it’s not like we don’t have enough to deal with ourselves, is it?”

“It’s not about us,” Sam said. “It’s about helping someone else, isn’t it? Why are you so worried about my getting involved, anyway? Can you explain that to me?”

But Gloria didn’t answer. She shuffled over to the table and pulled up a chair next to Sam. She pulled back a corner of Zoë’s blanket and leaned
in to look. Her nearness disrupted the protective bubble that Sam had created around herself and Zoë, and she shifted in her seat. She could smell the faint whiff of yesterday’s beer on Gloria, and it worried her. How many had there been? Sam had gone to bed exhausted at ten and left Gloria watching television and nursing a can of Coors that she’d been working on all evening. Obviously there had been quite a few more. And then Gloria moved her hand, turning it so that she could stroke Zoë’s cheek with her finger, and Sam saw the tattoo for the first time.

It was small, less than an inch long, and very dark on the fair skin of Gloria’s wrist. Sam thought it was a snake at first, curled and ready to strike, but then realized that it was a letter. She was hit with a rush of emotion so intense it brought the prickle of tears to her eyes.
S
as in Sam.

“When did you get
that
?” she asked.

Gloria pulled back her arm reflexively as if Sam had caught her at something criminal and lowered her eyes. But she didn’t get up—didn’t leave. Sam looked at the half-turned face, the graceful curve of her cheekbone, and the slight tremble of her lips and was thrown back in time. The sudden memory unfolded in front of her as clearly as if it were playing on a screen. There was no sound with the picture, just as silent as it had been that hot summer afternoon. They were reclined on the chaises around Gloria’s swimming pool. The boys were playing together somewhere inside the vast walls of her house. The sun was bright on the water and hot on the skin. Gloria’s eyes were shaded with sunglasses. They’d been talking about coyotes and how Gloria could hear them howling at night in the hills around her house. Sam had made a joke about how they were both living in the Wild West. They’d fallen into a stupefied speechlessness—tension growing in the hot air between them. Gloria lifted her shades, her green eyes searching, questioning Sam’s. The answer was there—sudden but somehow inevitable.

Their chairs were very close together, yet Gloria still had to lean over for Sam to hear her whisper, “How long have you known?” Perspiration shone in the hollow of Gloria’s throat. Her long lashes cast thin shadows
under her eyes. Sam moved toward her so slightly, the hesitation there, knowing it was one of those moments that could never be undone or forgotten, but Gloria closed the small distance. Their lips met for the first time, soft and warm, tasting of sugar and suntan lotion. Sam fell, irretrievably lost in the kiss somewhere between the beginning and the end.

They could have stayed like that, Sam thought. They could have turned into a cliché of male fantasy, sneaking steamy afternoons in each other’s marital beds while their children played video games in another room. They could have gone on indefinitely—shopping together, best friends with benefits forever. They could have justified it—it wasn’t cheating because it wasn’t with another man. It could have been the best of all worlds: money, husbands, houses, and sex. Nobody to judge them. No fights and bitterness and poisonous insults that made their children cry. “You could have had everything,” Gloria’s husband had told her. “What would it have cost you to keep it to yourself?”

Because it wasn’t enough for her, Sam thought. Sam never questioned Gloria’s devotion to Justin or even, in the early days, to Frank. Nor did Sam ever doubt the intensity of Gloria’s feelings for her. It was never a game for Gloria, never an experiment. But Gloria’s need was vast and had the gravitational pull of a collapsing sun. She gave of herself, but she took much more, Sam thought. There was something she wanted in exchange for her love now, some form of payment for her pain. But, Sam realized, it was possible that nothing she could give would ever be enough for Gloria.

As if she could hear the thoughts inside Sam’s head, Gloria leaned over the baby and kissed Sam hard on the mouth. “I did it for you,” she said. It took Sam a second to realize she was talking about the tattoo.

“How?” Sam asked. “How did you do it for me?”

“I want you to get one too,” Gloria said, deftly avoiding the question with another demand. Sam lifted Zoë, who had consumed half the formula in her bottle, and started rubbing her back. “They had some nice
Gs
there. You can do a lot with a
G
, you know? I never realized.”

“I’m not going to get a tattoo, Gloria.”

“Why not?”

“Because I’m not seventeen. I didn’t know we had to exchange blood oaths now.”

“You could loosen up a little, Sam. It wouldn’t hurt you.”

Sam sighed and Zoë burped. Sam turned her around and offered her the rest of her bottle. Gloria pushed her chair backward, making it scrape against the floor. The sound startled Zoë, who let out a milky yelp. “Gloria, we need—”

“To talk,” Gloria interrupted. “I know.” She reached up to her head again, her hand searching again for the hair that wasn’t there. “It hasn’t been easy to get to you lately, Sam. I want to talk, I do. But you’ve been obsessed with this baby. You don’t even know how much.”

“It’s only been a couple of days, Gloria.”

“Yeah, but do you see yourself? You’ve gotten all Connor’s things out of storage. All his blankets and his baby clothes—and that basket. It’s like you’re settling in or something, I don’t know. And you’ve had her almost nonstop this whole week. What is it about her, Sam?”

“I can’t do this, Gloria. Not now.”

“I want to get married,” Gloria said suddenly. “And I want us to have a baby. Of our own.”

Sam started laughing, unable to stop herself even though she knew it would probably aggravate Gloria who seemed for all the world to be totally serious.

“This is the problem right here,” Gloria said. “You can’t even listen to what I have to say. Is this funny to you?”

“I just can’t believe what you’re saying. In one breath you tell me I’m obsessed with this baby and I’m getting too attached to her and then you stand there and tell me you want us to have a baby. And get married! To
whom
, Gloria? And how?”

“Okay, okay, not
married
married. But you know what I mean, Sam, don’t pretend you don’t. I want us to have some kind of ceremony. I want us to be
real
. And yes, I think we should have a baby.”

“And that, of course, ensures that we will stay completely low profile,” Sam said. “Wasn’t the idea not to make Frank and Noah angrier than they already are?”

“What can that asshole do to make my life worse?”

“Plenty,” Sam said.

“Can he make me not Justin’s mother? I have a right to live with and be with anyone I want.”

“Gloria, listen—”

“No, Sam,
you
listen. It’s time we stood up for who we are and what we believe in.”

So there it was, Sam thought, the place where Gloria’s need had led her. She realized, with a bitterness she didn’t know she was capable of, that what Gloria meant by “real” was the same as so many misguided heterosexual couples in trouble—let’s get married and have a baby because that will solve everything. Trying to turn it into a political statement as Gloria wanted to do wouldn’t make it any more successful.

Sam looked down at the baby. Despite their not-quiet voices, Zoë had fallen asleep again, the nipple still in her mouth. She lifted her carefully and placed her gently in the basket. Sam’s lower back hurt and her arms were stiff from holding Zoë. Getting old, she thought. That thing about forty being the new thirty was utter bullshit. The forties were killing her. And there was Gloria, ten years behind her, unaware, and not even looking ahead. She had no idea, Sam thought, of how badly your own body could betray you. Never mind individual people—or society in general. The decade between them had never loomed as large as it did now. For a terrifying moment, Sam felt as if she could be Gloria’s mother.

“I love you,” she told Gloria. “I don’t need to stand up for anything else.”

Gloria’s face clouded. “Does that mean you won’t get a tattoo or that you don’t want to marry me?”

Sam tucked the blanket around Zoë. In the end, what was more important
than this little innocent? Once more, she felt a cold twinge of fear for Diana. It didn’t matter whether the girl had run away or been taken, the danger was the same and it was this baby who would suffer the most. It was ridiculous to stand there talking about tattoos while Diana, a teenage mother with an infant, was missing, and the only person who might know her whereabouts was in the hospital coming off an overdose of something he’d probably found in his mother’s medicine cabinet, and nobody seemed particularly alarmed about any of this. Sam turned to Gloria, who was waiting for an answer to her last question, ready to tell her all of this, wanting her to somehow understand without Sam having to explain every little detail, but she didn’t have a chance to let out a single syllable because just as she opened her mouth to speak the doorbell rang, followed by hard knocking, as if the person on the other side couldn’t take any kind of chance of going unheard. Zoë woke up and immediately started wailing.