The Neighbors Are Watching (25 page)

“Yvonne,” he said, and then there was a long, sweaty pause full of uncertainty and deep-packed regret.

“I got your message,” she said finally. “And I’m guessing that you want Diana to come home?” She cleared her throat and when she spoke again her voice was harder and edged with anger. “Is that right?”

“She’s not there?” Joe asked. “Diana hasn’t come home? I was hoping she might be there. With you.”

There was another pause and this time Joe could feel tension and fear grow and crackle between them. “What’s going on, Joe?” she said at last. “Where’s my daughter?”

He told her, choosing his words as carefully as he could, about the
fires (surely she’d heard about how a half-million people were evacuated from San Diego County?), the confusion afterward, everyone scattered in various places and hotels very hard to come by, and then, when they all came back home after the evacuation orders were lifted … He thought Diana was with one of the neighbors. But when he found out that the baby was with another neighbor …

He stopped and started many times, his voice and story sounding progressively more strained, but Yvonne didn’t interrupt him. It was as if she wanted to pay attention to all the information he was giving so that she could put it together, draw from it, figure out what had happened.

When he finally sputtered out, Yvonne asked him if they’d had an argument. Asked if Joe had told Diana to leave. He heard the accusation in her voice and almost said something about how that was more
her
style because that was how Diana ended up with him in the first place, but he held it back. He was amazed that she could make him angry so quickly like that—it was the kind of conditioned response that Yvonne had always been so good at getting out of him. He told her that there hadn’t been any kind of argument that would have led to Diana running away (he skipped the whole part about telling her not to see Kevin because technically that wasn’t an argument), and he had most certainly not insisted or even asked that she leave. The plan was
ultimately
for Diana to go home, but they hadn’t even discussed that yet. Yvonne asked him if he was sure about that and Joe said he was.

“Well, then why would she leave, Joe?” Yvonne asked.

“Don’t you think you have a better answer to that question than I do?” Joe answered. And that was when Yvonne unleashed the resentment she’d been holding on to for seventeen years. How she’d never asked him for anything, how she’d struggled all these years to raise his daughter, how he never showed any interest at all in his own flesh and blood, how many nights she’d lain awake wondering how that could be so, and now, now this. Joe mostly listened and let her go on. There was no point, he thought, in challenging her.

In the end, the conversation went on so long that Joe’s cell phone was hot and out of bars by the time he hung up. Yvonne had gone from calm to angry to controlled and then finally to a contained sort of panic. She and Joe had agreed on a coordinated plan: She would talk to all of Diana’s friends in Las Vegas in case she had called any of them or, with any luck, had gone to stay with one of them, and Joe would talk to the police, the neighbors, anyone who Diana might have confided in.

“She’s a headstrong girl,” Yvonne said. “I’ve never been able to tell her anything about anything. But she isn’t stupid. She’s never been stupid.”

Joe didn’t know what to add to that, so he just agreed that he didn’t think Diana was stupid at all. And then he said, “I’m sure she’s okay,” but he didn’t sound convincing, even to himself, and he was sure that Yvonne heard him wavering as well. They made a plan to speak again the next day—or sooner if either one of them discovered anything—and take it from there.

It wasn’t until they disconnected that Joe realized they’d only barely mentioned Zoë and that Allison hadn’t come up at all. She had to know he was married, he thought. Certainly, Diana had said something to her about Allison. But no, it was as if everyone else in their lives—including their own grandchild—had disappeared for the length of that awful conversation, leaving just the two of them, their mutual history, and the missing child they’d created together.

Traffic slowed, as it always did, at the split between the 805 and 5 freeways going south. As Joe crawled through the bottleneck, he tried to remember whose idea it had been for him to pick up Yvonne at the airport, why she wasn’t renting a car, and why he’d invited her to stay at his house. It was a ridiculous plan, and when Allison came home (and she was going to
have
to come home eventually, if only to talk to the damn police and pick up her stuff) things were really going to get insane. But he hadn’t really been in a position to say no or even to suggest an alternate plan. Any way you looked at this scenario, he was the bad guy.

Diana hadn’t turned up anywhere Yvonne could find in Las Vegas. She
told him that none of Diana’s friends knew where she was or had even heard from her, in most cases, since she’d left for San Diego. On the other hand, Yvonne said, it wasn’t a very big list. Diana really had only one good friend, Sasha, and they’d had some kind of falling out recently. Joe was no closer to finding Diana either, although he’d gone into a sort of overdrive after he spoke to Yvonne the first time. That was when Yvonne said she was going to come out as soon as she could gather some things together and get the time off. She needed to be there, she said, and yes, of course you do, Joe said. Of course. And now here he was, the sunlight sparkling off Mission Bay to his right, the airport only minutes away, and the reality of Yvonne—in his increasingly surreal life—finally sinking in.

Joe had always thought he possessed a deep, instinctive understanding of women—ironic, considering the shambles all his relationships were in now. He’d grown up with two sisters, who were close to him in both age and temperament and from whom he’d gleaned much about how women truly felt about themselves and about men, especially when they’d all been in high school at the same time. Then his sisters freely shared with Joe what they thought “worked” and what didn’t when it came to guys, what they liked to hear and what they liked to talk about. He watched them struggle too with body image—both of them regularly dieting and despairing over the shapes they’d been born with. Ultimately, he’d decided that women were simply nicer than men, although capable of being just as shallow when it came to judging the opposite sex on looks and image. Both of his sisters lived in Washington State now and he’d drifted into a much more distant relationship with them, but until recently Joe felt what he’d learned from them was still just as relevant as it had been when they were kids. It had helped him so many times at work, dealing with waitresses and female patrons alike. All the girls on staff liked him because he was sensitive to their needs, he complimented them but never hit on them, always knew where to draw the line. You could ask anyone at Luna Piena—they’d all tell you Joe was a stand-up guy.

But now, faced with his missing daughter, the imminent arrival of his
ex, and his angry, disturbed wife, Joe had to admit that he knew far less about what women thought or felt than he’d believed. And then there was Jessalyn. It was she who had convinced him that what little he did know was complete bullshit. There was nothing about her that followed a straight line, from the first encounter they’d had to the most recent—when he’d come to pick up Zoë after asking her to watch the baby for a few hours while he worked.

Sure, maybe it was a little presumptuous of him to ask such a thing considering the status of their relationship, but it was only because he was desperate and didn’t want to leave the baby with Sam
again
. And she could have said no; it wasn’t as if he just dropped Zoë off,
expecting
her to help. Besides, after the two nights they’d spent together in that little bed-and-breakfast, Joe believed that they’d developed a level of intimacy that went beyond a garden-variety affair. He felt indescribably bad about those nights now, of course, because somewhere in between them Diana had gone missing and Allison had abandoned him, but he couldn’t bring himself to regret them. Not yet. And he’d gotten the distinct feeling from Jessalyn that she’d felt the same way. Nothing had been decided, and they hadn’t even discussed where their relationship was headed or even if they
had
a relationship, but it didn’t seem like they needed to. Between lovemaking sessions that were alternately deeply passionate and exhaustingly athletic, they had talked—no, he had talked and she had mostly listened—about incidentals, the little parts of life that you only discussed with someone you were just getting to know when it was just the two of you, alone. Things like what music you listened to and what kinds of crazy requests people made when they went out to eat in a restaurant or how long it took you to complete a Sudoku puzzle. He was touched and impressed by how intently she’d listened to him, how she’d paid attention and seemed genuinely interested. If she wasn’t, it was one of the best acts in the world—which in itself was a testament to her interest in him.

Even later, after that lovely bubble had burst, and he’d had to tell her about how both Diana and Allison were gone, she seemed sympathetic, in
tune with him somehow. And she hadn’t objected to watching Zoë, at least not that he could tell. But when he’d returned to pick up the baby, she seemed to have transformed into an entirely different person: cold, rattled, even a little hostile toward him.

“This was a really bad idea, Joe,” she’d said. “I don’t know why you thought it wouldn’t be, even though it’s my fault for saying yes.” She was holding the baby, rocking her back and forth a little frantically, even though Zoë was asleep.

“Did something happen?” Joe asked. “Is she okay?”

“Of course she’s
okay,
” Jessalyn snapped at him. “But I’m not a nanny or … or a
wife
. That’s not who I am.” Joe noticed then that she looked wrung out and somehow wrong. She was wearing a bathrobe, her hair hanging loose and limp, and her makeup was smudged, showing the dark circles under her eyes. “I don’t do babies, Joe. Okay?”

“I’m sorry,” Joe said, wishing he knew what was really bothering her, “I just thought—”

“No,
I’m
sorry,” she said, going through a lightning-quick change of emotion and becoming suddenly contrite. “I shouldn’t have barked at you and she’s fine—the baby’s fine, I just don’t think we … this …” She ran a hand through her hair, which looked like it was sticking together in clumps, and sighed. “I think maybe we should just cool it for a minute, you know? There’s so much going on and maybe … I don’t know, Joe.”

Like an idiot, he asked, “What do you mean by ‘cool it’?” and immediately regretted the words, more so when he saw how hard her face got after she heard them.

“I can’t,” she said. “I just can’t do this. I think you should go now.”

As he gathered up Zoë and walked across the street to his deserted house, Joe thought about that phrase,
I think you should go now
, and how rarely it was used in real life. You heard it all the time in movies, but real people just didn’t speak like that. And in any case, it was never followed by absolute silence and a man slinking off with a baby. He hadn’t spoken to Jessalyn since then, although it hadn’t been that long. He’d noticed that
she’d made herself pretty scarce, and he wasn’t sure how he felt about that yet. What he did know was that she wasn’t who he’d thought she was. And the immediate corollary to that realization was that he wasn’t even sure who he’d thought she was in the first place. All of which led him right back to the fact that he had completely lost his ability (if he had ever had it) to understand or deal with the women in his life. At least Zoë was too small yet to speak or else he was sure she’d be reading him the riot act too.

He was surprised by how much affection he felt for her, but Joe was by no means comfortable with Zoë. He had zero experience with infants, although over the last few weeks he had at least become acquainted with this one, and he was afraid that every time he handled her he was doing something wrong. The nights that he’d been alone with her had been some of the most difficult he’d ever experienced. Sam had been very decent about showing him the basics of feeding and changing, and in truth she had taken care of Zoë more than he had if you added up all the hours. But despite all of Sam’s help he felt his abilities were entirely inadequate. It wasn’t that he didn’t feel for the little thing, because he found himself increasingly attached to her. She spent what seemed like a lot of time crying, but Sam told him that as infants went, Zoë was one of the calmest she’d ever seen. And there was a biological connection, something that Joe would have scoffed at only a few months ago, but now believed existed on a fundamental level. That tie was powerful and elemental and it bonded him to Zoë in a way he would never have anticipated. He wondered if he would have felt the same way with Diana if he’d known her as an infant. Even though he never doubted that Diana was his daughter, meeting her at seventeen—fully formed and carrying her own child—made a huge difference in how he felt about that relationship. It was the helplessness and total innocence of babies, he supposed, that appealed to you on a deep cellular level and compelled you to take care of them, protect them, and raise them so that your DNA could carry on into future generations. But as much as he was bonding with his granddaughter, Joe felt overwhelmed and unprepared to cope with her needs.

After claiming that Allison’s mother had been burned out of her home, he had asked for and received a few emergency days off from work. It was a total lie, of course, but he didn’t think it was necessary for corporate headquarters—or, for that matter, his staff—to know the details of his spinning-out-of-control life. He hoped against hope that by the time those days ran out Diana would come back, Yvonne could go home, Allison would return, and that they could all dial their lives back to where they were a few short months ago. Joe sighed. He could feel the muscle above his left eye twitching. He hadn’t told Allison that Yvonne was going to be staying at their house. He had barely spoken to Allison since the fires. But still.