The Neighbors Are Watching

by Debra Ginsberg

  Allison turned the channel. A list of school closures appeared on the screen. She was momentarily relieved that it didn’t seem very long, but relief quickly turned to panic when she realized that there were too many closures to show at once. The screen blinked and scrolled, showing more names. Everything was closed, including the school where she taught, which was literally down the street. Allison hit the remote again. A newscaster was explaining the difference between voluntary and mandatory evacuations. It didn’t bode well, Allison thought, if people didn’t understand either one of those concepts. To help drive the point home, the news anchor displayed a list of communities in the path of the Witch Fire where voluntary evacuations were suggested and which would, if the weather continued as predicted, likely be subject to mandatory evacuations later in the day. It didn’t take very long for Allison to notice that her own neighborhood was on the list. So Joe was wrong. It seemed that this time, fire was determined to burn its way right into the ocean.

  Allison set the remote down next to her coffee cup and walked over to the foyer where she kept her cell phone. There were no messages from Joe, but then there was no reason for him to have called her cell phone. He would have called the house phone if he’d wanted to tell her anything, like where he was. She hit the speed dial number for his phone and listened to it ring. When his voice mail picked up, she was unprepared.

  “Joe …” she began and hesitated. What did she want to tell him? To come home? To take control of something? Allison waited too long and lost the connection. Well, she thought, he’d have to figure it out.

  There was a scrape and rattle at the front door. She opened it without thinking and allowed a strong gust of wind to blow ashy bougainvillea leaves into her foyer. A large palm frond had broken off the tree next to their house and blown into their door. Allison didn’t bother to move it. She stepped over it and peered down the street. Aside from the ugly debris scattered everywhere and the apocalyptic color of the air, Fuller Court looked much the same as it did every Monday morning after its residents had left for work and school; quiet and unremarkable. Allison didn’t see any signs of panic or even any signs of life. She stepped back, kicking the frond out of her way, and was about to close the door behind her when she saw something so odd it made her stop. She stood in the doorway, her gaze fixed.

  Dick Werner had appeared as if from nowhere and was standing in the middle of the street. He was wearing a T-shirt and sweatpants and holding something in his hand—Allison couldn’t tell exactly what it was from this distance. She squinted, tried to make it out. Something rubbery and dark. It was a flip-flop, Allison realized suddenly. Just one. She raised her eyes to Dick’s face. He was turned toward her house. He was staring right at her. Allison jumped, slammed the door shut, and slid the dead bolt that they almost never used. Her heart was thumping overtime. What the hell was he doing out there? Allison shook her head as if to clear it. Her heart slowed. She slid back the dead bolt and opened the door again, just a crack, which, if this were a movie, was exactly the wrong thing to be doing. In the movies, that false sense of security was always followed by carnage. But of course it wasn’t a movie, despite the drama her life had become, and Allison saw nothing. In the minute she’d had the door closed, he’d vanished. Well, not vanished, Allison thought, just gone back into his house.

  “Stupid,” she said out loud. She coughed and closed the door a second time. The air was becoming too thick to breathe. In the living room, the television was still blaring. In the few moments she’d spent peering at Dick Werner, the anchors seemed to have spun themselves into full catastrophe mode, their voices sharp with alarm. Allison didn’t know if it was the fear she heard in their controlled voices, the smoke-filled air, or just the bitterness of the coffee on her tongue, but something inside her tipped. She’d had enough.

  She didn’t bother to turn the television off or place her coffee cup in the sink. She went upstairs, moving faster than she had in months, and into her bedroom. She changed into a pair of jeans and a loose cotton sweater and forced her too-long hair into a ponytail. She grabbed her purse, her prescriptions, and the slim wad of emergency cash she kept stashed in her dresser drawer and ran downstairs. Allison snatched her keys, hanging on a hook next to the front door, and picked up her cell phone. She dialed Joe once more and waited impatiently for his voice mail to pick up.

  “Joe,” she said, hearing the breathlessness in her voice and trying her best to quell it, “I’m leaving. I’m not staying here and waiting to go up in flames. You decide what you want to do.” She paused. “Or take,” she said. “You decide what to take because I don’t have anything.”

  Allison clicked off and threw the phone into her purse. She was almost out—almost gone—and then she remembered. She walked over to Diana’s closed door and put her hand up as if to knock and held it there, hesitating. “Diana?” she said. No response. She tried again. “Diana? I’m leaving, okay?” Nothing. They must both be out cold, she thought. She’d heard the baby crying late, late into the night. Well, she wasn’t going to risk waking up either one of them. Joe would be coming home soon. Joe could deal with it. For once. She turned, keys in hand, and walked fast to the garage. She made sure to lock the door behind her.

  You couldn’t be too careful.

  chapter 11

  When his phone rang, flashing Allison’s number for the second time, Joe was sitting in his unmoving car on Del Mar Heights Road at the end of a line doubled back behind a gas station. He could have answered it—his hands were quite free—but he just let it ring until it stopped. Saturated and speechless with guilt, he couldn’t even think about talking to Allison. It was a problem. Joe had never had an affair before and he didn’t know what he was doing or how he was supposed to act. It was one thing to lapse once, but he’d moved into an entirely different place with Jessalyn and the territory was wholly unfamiliar. Joe heard the chirping tone alerting him that Allison had left another message. He picked up his phone and held it. But no, he wasn’t even going to listen to the messages. He simply wasn’t ready. He’d listen to it, he decided, after he filled up the tank and was on his way home.

  Joe turned on the car radio and shifted through his presets until he found a station that actually seemed to be broadcasting live. All the talk was about fire and how it was shaping up to be the worst in San Diego history. The fires were being fanned by the Santa Anas and were spreading west at an uncontrollable pace. No containment in sight. Evacuations on a massive scale. Beautiful homes in danger or already destroyed. Joe had experienced California fire season often enough not to go into an immediate state of alarm, but this one sounded particularly bad. Now they were saying that the fires—there were at least two and maybe more—had been burning for twenty-four hours.

  Joe had missed a good portion of those hours holed up with Jessalyn; the world condensed into the small hot space created by their bodies. Outside, the landscape had been going up in flames. Good thing he wasn’t a religious man, Joe thought, because if he were, this conflagration—a direct punishment for his sins—would surely have driven him to some sort of ill-advised confession. He didn’t know what he was going to tell Allison, but confession wasn’t part of it. He knew that much at least, even if Jessalyn seemed to have some doubt.

  “I don’t know if you’re cut out for this, Joe,” she’d said last night. She was sitting on the bed, naked. She’d been waiting for him. He’d just gotten there and was strangely anxious, hesitant.

  “What makes you say that?” he’d asked her. She shrugged. “I’m here,” she said, “and you’re there. Maybe you don’t really want to do this.”

  “Let’s not talk about it,” Joe said, pulling off his shirt. And they hadn’t.

  Joe wondered if she’d left the hotel yet and tried to figure out what he would do if by some quirk of timing they pulled into their driveways at the same time. The thought made him sweaty and anxious. Maybe Jessalyn was right after all.

  By the time he could even pull up close
enough to see that only two pumps were actually operational, Joe had been sitting in the gas line for forty-five minutes. The scene was like something out of one of those low-budget disaster movies, everyone scrambling before the onslaught of tsunami, meteor, or alien attack. People were frazzled and yelling at one another. There was a worst-case scenario every-man-for-himself feeling of panic in the smoky air. Joe saw a woman in sweatpants and a tank top exiting the gas station’s convenience store burdened under the weight of several liters of bottled water, a giant-sized slushy, and an oversized bag of potato chips. Food of the apocalypse, he thought. More of the same followed; people getting out of their cars and heading into the convenience store, coming out with bad coffee, water, candy bars, mini powdered donuts, soft drinks … and diapers. Joe didn’t know that places like these sold diapers. But of course he’d never paid attention to that kind of thing before. He’d never had to.

  The diapers forced Joe to think about Diana and the baby. A bitter mixture of remorse and resentment rose up in his chest, burning his throat. He still wasn’t entirely sure whether Diana knew about him and Jessalyn. He couldn’t forget the judgmental look she’d given him that day on the driveway when she’d gone into labor, as if she knew where he’d been and what he’d been doing and was prepared to use it against him. She could have, Joe thought, she’d had plenty of opportunities over the last few weeks. But there was a bit of quid pro quo as well, as far as that went. Before they left for the hospital, he told her to brush her teeth and change her clothes. “You stink of pot smoke,” he told her. “Probably not a great idea to show up at the hospital like that.”

  “I wasn’t smoking it,” she said. “I was in the room with it is all.”

  “Right,” he told her, “of course.”

  He’d given her a pass then and hadn’t pressed it. From her perspective that had to count for something. Not that he expected any big gifts next time Father’s Day rolled around.

  Joe rubbed his eyes, which were stinging from all the smoke in the air. He felt like he’d tried to do right by Diana, he really did. It wasn’t her fault that Yvonne hadn’t bothered to tell her about her own father until this most inappropriate time and then sent her off to him when she was at her most vulnerable. He understood all of that. And although he never would have raised her the way Yvonne had—had she put any limits on Diana at all?—he knew that this too was not Diana’s doing, and he had tried to steer her in the right direction, had tried to … well, be a father to her wasn’t quite right. It was too late for him to be a real father to her, and Diana was already predisposed to dislike him, but he had tried to be paternal at least. He had tried to get to know her—as difficult as that was considering the circumstances and Allison’s unyielding resistance—but she’d gravitated right away to that hopeless Kevin and there wasn’t anything he could have done to pry her away from him once she’d made up her mind that she was in love with him. What idiocy. It was exactly those kinds of bad choices that had gotten her knocked up in the first place. Well, that and poor parenting.

  Joe felt bitterness rising in his throat again. He opened the glove compartment and rooted around for an antacid. No luck, though he could have sworn he’d left a roll of Tums in there only last week. Par for the course, Joe thought, because it seemed the world at large was conspiring to make him feel as bad as possible, literally and figuratively. Sure, some of it had to do with his chickens coming home to roost, but in general he didn’t deserve the kind of consistently shitty hand fate was dealing him these days.

  Take this bullshit with the Werners for a start. Goddamn Dick was so deluded he actually thought Diana was a bad influence on Kevin. The man had gone as far as to threaten a restraining order. Against Diana! And of course the real problem was that Dick was a frustrated blowhard with a fat-assed wife who probably never gave him any satisfaction (assuming of course Dick’s dick even worked), and then all of a sudden his reject druggie son starts getting cozy with a beautiful girl who also happened to be African American. That’s what really set Dick off. Joe knew it and Dick knew Joe knew it. This wasn’t about two stupid kids thinking they loved each other; it was about Dick’s racism. That Dick was an equal opportunity bigot didn’t make it any better. Joe cringed when he remembered the misogynistic comments Dick had dropped from time to time about Sam and Gloria. Really mean-spirited, childish stuff. And now that Dick’s Church Lady wife had gotten involved, who knew what kind of venom the Werners were spewing all over town. They couldn’t make trouble for him—it was almost impossible to impugn the reputation of a restaurant manager—but they could make things difficult for Allison. She worked at an elementary school and those overprotective, self-righteous, litigious parents were just looking for an excuse to get angry about something.

  And there was that vague threat Dick had made about calling Child Protective Services, although on what grounds Joe couldn’t imagine. Still, a visit from CPS was the last thing any one of them needed. And if there was one thing Joe had learned in his life, it was that you could never underestimate the power of bigotry and stupidity.

  And then there was the baby herself. Zoë. Joe had to admit that he liked the name—somehow it suited the tiny little thing. He also wondered about how close that name was to his own and if that had factored into Diana’s decision. He hadn’t been happy at first that she’d named the baby at all because that meant she was going to keep it—that she’d never been serious about the adoption. Then again, Joe hadn’t expected the sharp twinge of emotion he’d felt when he looked at the baby for the first time either.

  They were in the hospital. Joe had checked Diana in and stayed in the waiting room while she was in labor. She’d told him he could go—that she’d call him when she needed a ride home—but Joe saw that for the fake bravado it was and told her of course he was going to stay. He happened to be off work that day anyway and she should have someone there. She hadn’t called her mother. And Kevin was nowhere to be seen, fortunately. He identified himself to the nurse as Diana’s father and was very relieved when nobody asked him to stay in the delivery room. He called Allison, who still wasn’t home, and left a message telling her what was going on. It hadn’t taken as long as he’d thought. He’d heard all kinds of horror stories of labor going on for days and nights, but a few hours after they’d checked in, during which time Joe read several magazines cover to cover and watched an entire news cycle on the waiting room television, a big square-bodied nurse came out to tell Joe that Diana had delivered a girl and that both mother and baby were fine. Then the nurse smiled and added, “Your daughter’s a pretty tough cookie, you know that? Not one complaint out of her the whole time. She did a great job. You should tell her.” Joe couldn’t tell if the comment was a compliment or a reproach. She told Joe that Diana and the baby were being moved to another floor and he could go see them both in a few minutes. “Congratulations, Grandpa,” she said. Joe gave her a quizzical look. Diana and the baby weren’t supposed to be together. Even he knew a new mother shouldn’t bond with a baby she meant to give up for adoption. That’s when he realized there wasn’t going to be an adoption—and that maybe Diana had known that all along.

  He still hadn’t decided what he was going to say to her when he went downstairs to her room or even what his attitude should be. It was going to complicate things if she insisted on keeping the baby, but one way or another she had to go home. They all knew that baby or no, Diana wasn’t going to be happy living with him and Allison, even if Allison would allow such a thing to happen. That part of the plan was rock solid and Diana knew it. As far as he could tell she’d barely spoken to her mother since she’d arrived—if at all. But they were going to have to patch it up—especially if Diana was planning to keep the baby. That was what he was thinking when he walked into the room, and what went out of his head almost immediately after he saw Diana, exhausted and limp in her bed, holding on to the tiny swaddled bundle as if someone would rip it from her at any moment.

  “Are you okay?” he asked
her. Diana nodded, too tired to speak. Joe pulled a chair up next to the bed. “The nurse said you did great,” he offered. Diana didn’t smile. There were dark circles under her eyes and her face seemed drained of blood. She turned a little in the bed so that she could tip the bundle toward Joe.

  “This is Zoë,” she said, peeling back the edge of the receiving blanket. Joe looked at the miniature red mouth and curly lashed eyes shut tight against a bright new world. You could see the shape of the nose already, he thought, the nose all three of them shared. He had the same shock of recognition as when he’d first seen himself in Diana—the obviousness of kin. He felt a strong protective urge—a need to shelter both of them—and a not entirely comfortable tenderness toward this little brand-new being. “Her name means life,” Diana said. The word stirred a strange mix of emotions in Joe, and he felt his throat tightening. He wondered how different all of their lives would have been if he had made a different choice all those years ago. If he’d stayed with Yvonne—even married her. But he still believed, even now looking at this child—these children—that none of it had been his choice to make. And once again a woman was making a choice that would decide his own fate without him having any say in it at all. So he’d made the one choice that was irrevocably his and had plunged into a full-scale affair with Jessalyn. And this, Joe thought, was how it had come to be four weeks later and still nothing had been resolved with Diana, Zoë, or Allison.

  Although the thought of it increased the acid in his gorge, Joe realized he was going to have to schedule a family discussion. They were all going to have to sit down and talk about the Werners, Kevin, Yvonne, and getting Diana back home. And then, after that, he was going to have to have a real conversation with Allison about their marriage. Where Jessalyn fit into all of this he didn’t know. He was just so tired of feeling bad about everything. At least with Jessalyn he had a chance to feel good, if only for a few moments.