The Neighbors Are Watching (31 page)

When she got to her mother’s house in Pasadena late that Monday afternoon of the fires, Allison fully expected to stay there indefinitely. It had been a brutal drive, hot and gritty, the freeway jam-packed and choked with smoke blowing in from every direction. The tension and growing panic of all the drivers combined to create a giant hovering cloud of impending disaster. The usually two-hour trip took Allison four and a half hours, and her already-fried nerves were completely shorted out by the time she got there. To make matters worse, she was technically still drunk from the night before despite the coffee she’d consumed that morning. It was nothing short of a divine piece of luck that she hadn’t been stopped by the CHP at any point on that harrowing drive because she probably couldn’t have passed a field sobriety test. Not to mention that she’d left her house looking like a cross between a bag lady and a mental patient on a weekend pass. Not sexy, not together, but an accurate representation of what she was at that point—a mad housewife. The cops would have seen that instantly.

She’d called her mother from the road and had anticipated that she would be greeted with instant and unreserved love, support, and a safe
haven when she got there, but that was not at all what she got when she knocked hard against her mother’s cheerful yellow door.

“What’s going on, Allie?” her mother said, first thing. “What is all of this about?”

“I have nowhere else to go, Mom.” It was meant to sound plaintive, but even Allison could tell it was just coming off as surly.

“Where’s Joe?” was the next question, one that Allison was never able to answer to her mother’s satisfaction. She had always believed that her mother was unequivocally on her side and would defend her to the death if necessary, so it was an unpleasant shock when her mother seemed to take the opposite approach when Allison showed up at her house.

“What is this really about?” her mother asked. “It’s been months since that girl came to live with you, and you haven’t moved beyond the fact that he didn’t tell you he had a daughter. It’s self-indulgent, Allie. Move on or move out.”

“I can’t believe you aren’t behind me on this.”

“But I
am
. You’re feeling so sorry for yourself you can’t even see how much behind you I am.” And then she dealt an even worse blow. “I love you, but I can’t let you stay here forever, Allie.”

“How long is forever, Mom?”

Allison retired to the pink and sea foam green bedroom in which she’d spent much of her childhood, lay on the same bed where she’d dreamed of so many happy endings, and pressed her fingers into her eyes to keep from seeing all the ugly images that kept playing behind her closed lids. It was a long, bad night—the first in more than she could count without a drink to dull the edges—and made somehow inexplicably worse by the fact that Joe had left only one message on her cell phone. She didn’t want to talk to him—she’d left him, after all, and was debating making that a permanent state. He’d lied to her, betrayed her, and was possibly cheating on her. And yet. Lying there in the dark, hungry and hollow in every way, Allison felt bereft and completely alone.

Why wouldn’t he call? She was his
wife
.

The calls came later, of course—angry and increasingly desperate messages piling up on her phone.
Where is Diana? What happened between the two of you? Why did you leave the baby by herself? Diana is missing. When are you coming home? Diana is missing and the police need to talk to you. What is going on, Allison? Call me. Allison, you have to call me
.

But those messages didn’t change Allison’s mind, nor did the terse conversations she had with Joe when she finally called him back. She might not have come home—she might have tried to persuade her mother to let her stay—at least through the holidays. What changed her mind—what compelled Allison to get into her car and go home—was the message from Joe telling her that Yvonne had come to stay at their house.

Allison startled at the sound of the kettle. She turned off the gas and in the absence of whistling heard Zoë crying in what Allison now perversely thought of as Diana’s bedroom. When Diana had actually been living here and up through the moment that Yvonne had left a week ago, Allison had thought of it only as the guest bedroom. Allison waited a moment to see if Joe was going to go check on the baby but realized he was probably upstairs and out of earshot, so she quickly washed and dried her hands at the kitchen sink and hurried into the bedroom.

The room was dark but for the tiny glow of a fairy princess nightlight near Zoë’s little basket, which was sitting on Diana’s made-up bed. Allison couldn’t call it Yvonne’s bed even though she’d been its most recent inhabitant. While she had been staying at the house, Yvonne had gotten up with Zoë, but now that she’d gone back to Las Vegas (temporarily, Allison reminded herself), Allison and Joe had moved the crib upstairs into their bedroom and had been taking turns getting up and feeding her. For Allison, this was perhaps the strangest twist in a life that hadn’t seemed her own since that hot July day when she’d come home to find Diana standing
in her driveway. That she and Joe were even sharing the same bed was peculiar enough, but that they were jointly caring for Zoë—that they were capable of it—was still stunning to her.

Allison wasn’t sure how it had happened. But somehow they’d fallen into a pattern of preparing formula, stacking diapers, and wordlessly alternating shifts. They hadn’t had any kind of discussion about it and Joe hadn’t even asked her if she was willing. He’d just assumed she wasn’t. But when Zoë started crying the first night after Yvonne left, Allison went over to her and picked her up. She still didn’t know why she’d done it because there had been no thought in it at all—it was just movement and … instinct. The thing was, Zoë wasn’t a difficult newborn. She woke when she had to, did what she needed, and promptly went back to sleep. Even Joe could handle that. And, Allison had to concede, he handled it quite well.

Light from the hall spilled into the bedroom so Allison didn’t bother turning on the lamp, just went over to the basket and fished out the baby. Laying her on the bed, Allison changed her and noticed that she already needed a bigger size of diapers. They grew so fast at this stage. She wasn’t going to fit in that basket for much longer, Allison thought. They might have to get a second crib and they definitely needed a baby monitor.

As she scooped up the small bundle, Allison had another flashback to the day she’d left. They’d been happening with increasing frequency, and no small amount of paranoia. Nobody had accused her of anything outright—they couldn’t—but the blame was there, implicit.

I didn’t abandon the baby. Diana was here. I was sure of it
.

But she hadn’t checked, had she?

Joe and the police had asked her more than once why she hadn’t opened the door. Why hadn’t she gone in to tell Diana that she was leaving? She would have seen that Diana was gone and that the baby was by herself. Why hadn’t she gone in to check? Allison’s answer was that she simply didn’t think she needed to. They’d all been up late the night before. She let them sleep. She assumed that Joe would be back momentarily. She left. That was all.

Zoë whimpered, turning her head toward Allison’s body, her mouth searching for the bottle. “Okay, okay, sshh,” Allison crooned, rocking her. “We’ll get you fed. Hush, sweetie, we’ll get you taken care of.” As if she knew the bottle was coming, Zoë quieted a little, her cries turning into little yelps. Another scene flitted across Allison’s mind: Diana half-dressed and out of it, struggling to nurse her baby.
I can’t do this
. That was what Diana had said—Allison could hear the echo of the words in her memory. It was true, Allison hadn’t been a big help to Diana. Hadn’t been any help at all. But Allison wondered now if it would have made a difference even if she’d been the second coming of Mother Theresa. Diana was too young and maybe she was just unsuited for motherhood. She couldn’t do it. Being female and able to bear a child didn’t make you automatically capable of raising one. That writing had always been on the wall with Diana. Joe, Yvonne, Sam, and anyone else could pass all kinds of silent judgment on Allison for her attitude toward Diana, but they couldn’t change that truth. In the end, it was Allison who had spent the most time with Diana these past few months, even if it wasn’t exactly
quality
time, and Allison who had seen most clearly that Diana wanted out. But that didn’t make any of this Allison’s fault.

She walked with Zoë to the kitchen where a series of sterilized, formula-filled bottles were ready and waiting. Allison had taken control of this too. She knew how much to have on hand and when to take them out of the fridge to warm. She never used the microwave to heat them. She knew how much formula Zoë should be consuming and what temperature was ideal. You didn’t run an elementary-school classroom for as long as she had and not know how to be organized. It was easy to hold the baby now—to feed her. Allison didn’t understand why she hadn’t been able to do this before Diana had gone missing, or why it now felt almost like second nature. There was the drinking, of course, but that didn’t account for all of it—maybe not even for any of it. There was something else that had broken the barrier for Allison, something that now allowed her to take charge of this infant as if … but no, she wasn’t Zoë’s mother. She looked
down at the little face as she positioned the bottle just so in Zoë’s mouth. You could see Diana there, of course, and maybe as she got older, Zoë would come to resemble her more. But the person this baby really looked like was Joe. It was a startling resemblance.

“Do you need some help? I can take her—finish feeding her.”

Joe was standing in the kitchen doorway, freshly showered and shaved and smelling vaguely of something citrusy. Limes, Allison thought.

“I’m okay for now,” she said. “Everything’s ready to go. Except the cups. I just need to put some cups on the table. People should be getting here soon. If you want to take her …”

“It’s okay. You go sit down. I’ll get the cups.”

Allison nodded, carried Zoë out to the living room, and sat down on the couch. Something had happened to her husband in the time she’d been holed up in her mother’s house that had made him subtly but fundamentally different. She had sensed it the moment she arrived back home, but Allison, who was still wrestling with her emotions, didn’t yet understand the exact nature of the change. Outwardly, there was little that was unusual about him, but the small things that were different seemed significant to Allison. He had lost weight for one thing, and even though she knew he hadn’t been going to the gym or dieting, he looked leaner. He also looked tired, which could be explained by the long days and sleepless nights he’d been having, but there was something beyond just fatigue or even exhaustion in his eyes. When he thought nobody was looking—as had happened several times over the last few days—Joe had taken to staring at some fixed point in space that only he could see. In those moments, Allison thought, he looked haunted. There were other times, when he was rocking or feeding the baby, when Allison saw the corners of his mouth turn down as if he were about to cry.

She had never seen Joe cry.

Even though he never showed any trace of tears, the suggestion of them alone was enough to shock her. But he didn’t always seem sad. At times his jaw clenched and his eyes flashed, and Allison could swear he
was waging an inward battle against his own thoughts. He seemed, Allison thought, like a man who was undergoing a seismic shift within his own belief system—as if something in his brain had been permanently rearranged.

It was impossible for Allison to tell how any of this affected how Joe felt about
her
. Over the last few months, their marriage had become an unrecognizable form of what they’d built over the last eight years—a Jackson Pollock reinterpretation of a Renoir—so she hardly knew whether Joe was reacting to the old Allison, the Allison she’d become when Diana came into their lives, or the Allison he wanted her to be. Nor did she know which one of those iterations she most closely resembled now anyway. He was careful with her and often solicitous. Yet there was also resentment just under the surface—a sort of simmering anger that he sometimes had to work to keep at bay. And under all of that—buried in a place she was sure he didn’t want her to see, Allison sensed that Joe was hurt.

They were in some sort of slow crisis mode now, juggling Zoë’s care and trying to help the police find Diana with Joe’s work schedule and bills that had grown out of control, too absorbed in the immediacy of these needs to talk about anything deeper than what needed to be done in the next twenty-four hours. Allison knew that eventually—probably sooner than later—something would give way and they would have to talk. Not a quiet compartmentalized conversation but a big, messy, painful extraction of the truth.

Zoë had finished more than half her bottle so Allison put the baby against her shoulder and rubbed her back in gentle circles until she heard the burp. Allison repositioned her for the rest of her meal, but she could tell that Zoë wasn’t going to get through it. She was milk-drunk and sleepy, eyes closed and mouth tugging weakly at the nipple. Within a couple of minutes, she was out cold. Allison looked at her finely veined, almost translucent eyelids and wondered what she was seeing behind them—if it was all fuzzy shapes and shades of gray or whether there were vivid colors and detail. What did this tiny thing dream of? Allison stood up slowly so as not
to wake her. Looking up, she saw that Joe was standing at the table, three mismatched brightly colored mugs in his hand, staring at her. She didn’t know how to read the look in his eyes. There was so much emotion there it was almost fierce. But not angry. Was there love in it? Hate? Allison couldn’t tell, but for a moment it froze her, weak-kneed, where she stood.

“Do you think these are okay?” he said, finally, holding out the mugs. But Allison could tell that was not at all the question he wanted to ask.

“Fine, sure,” she said. “We have some paper cups too. But those are fine.” Allison willed herself to move. “She’s asleep. I’ll go put her down.”