But there was the baby.… That was a sacrifice so big it gave Dorothy pause.
How could she have left her baby behind?
At that moment, just as Dorothy’s mind formed the question, she heard rustling leaves on Sam’s side of the fence and then what sounded like footsteps. Instinctively, Dorothy crushed what remained of her cigarette in the ramekin and waved the lingering smoke away with her hands.
“Dorothy? I didn’t know you smoked.”
She could just turn away, Dorothy thought. Just take her dead cigarettes and go inside, pretending she hadn’t heard anything or seen Sam peering through an opening in the fence slats looking for conversation. But for once Dorothy was too tired to even move. She could feel the adrenaline surging, signaling fight or flight, but both her body and mind were unresponsive to the call. Her hands were trembling. She stepped out from under the eaves, her legs feeling leaden.
“I don’t smoke,” she said. She could just make out Sam’s face in the narrow opening, but she saw the edges of her smile. For sure Dick didn’t know about this gap in the fence or he would have made sure to close it long ago.
“I know,” Sam said conspiratorially. “I don’t smoke either.”
“No, really,” Dorothy said. “I just … I just found this pack. It’s very old.” She took another step closer to the fence. “And I thought …”
“Yeah,” Sam said. There was another rustle as Sam stepped backward into the pile of leaves collected on her side of the fence. Dorothy thought she was going to back up all the way and retreat into her house, but she didn’t. “Dorothy … Listen, I wanted to ask you …”
Dorothy froze again, trying to figure out how she felt about this encounter, trying to imagine what question Sam could possibly have for her.
“Is Kevin okay?” Sam asked. “I mean, I know it’s not my business, Dorothy, but … I’m a mom too.”
Dorothy felt dizzy again. Little dots of light danced in front of her. There was a bit of a breeze and for that she was very thankful, even though it was still so warm. It was never going to cool down this year. At this rate they’d all be celebrating Christmas on the beach like it was the Fourth of July. She tried to steady herself, but it seemed like the earth beneath her was shifting. Was it an earthquake or was everything else just cracking apart? Something was happening, she thought. Something. Her head started pounding. She was so low on her medication, but she had to take a pill. It was only going to get worse.
“Dorothy?”
“Kevin?” she asked. What to say? Kevin wasn’t okay. Nothing was okay, really, and there was no easy way of packaging that in a short sentence. “Kevin’s home,” she said. “I mean, he’s not home at this very moment, he’s out with Dick. They’re both out right now. But he was … he was in the hospital. He’s home now. I mean, not … Sorry, I said that already.”
“Dorothy, would you mind if I came over for a minute? Would that be okay?”
“Um …” Dorothy tried to think of a reason to say no and couldn’t come up with one.
“Just hold on,” Sam said. “I’m coming right over. Just stay there, okay?”
“Why?” Dorothy asked. “I mean, do you want some coffee or something? Should I make some coffee? I think I have some cake.…”
But Sam had already disappeared from her place at the fence, leaving Dorothy talking to the leaves. Dorothy clenched and unclenched her fingers. The pain in her head was increasing, sharp points pressing into her skull. She looked down at what she was wearing: an old pair of high-waisted jeans with a bleach stain at the left hem and a tired gray T-shirt that was fraying at the sleeves. She really wasn’t prepared for company. And then she thought she should probably go inside and make sure that the kitchen was clean because suddenly she couldn’t remember if she had done the breakfast dishes yet, although she must have because that was when she got the idea to dig into her old can and pull out these stale cigarettes. But before she could turn and walk back into her house, she saw the oddest thing: Sam appeared at the back of her yard, clambering across her star jasmine and holding a baby—yes, a baby, all bundled up in a fluffy white blanket. She walked right up to Dorothy, her eyes looking concerned but also kind.
“Sam,” Dorothy said, “I do have a front door.”
Sam laughed; the sound full of genuine amusement and, Dorothy thought, relief. She reached out with her free hand and clasped Dorothy’s shoulder. “I’m sorry, Dorothy, I know. I just … You seemed a little strange for a minute there. I am sorry.”
Dorothy didn’t move Sam’s hand off her shoulder. It felt warm and comforting somehow. She gestured toward the baby. “Is that—”
The smile faded quickly from Sam’s face. “Diana’s baby,” she said. “I’ve been taking care of her while Joe … It’s been kind of hard for him with Allison gone and … everything.” Sam shifted the baby from her shoulder to the crook of her arm and Dorothy looked in at her sleeping face.
“So little,” Dorothy said, reaching out, despite herself, to stroke the small plump cheek and then stopping just in time when she smelled the residue of stale smoke on her own hand.
“And she hardly cries at all,” Sam said without missing a beat. “She’s so easy.” She rocked back and forth a little. Sam was pretty, Dorothy thought. A little on the thin side, but it suited her. She’d never really noticed that before and she wondered why.
“Have the police talked to Kevin yet, Dorothy?”
“The police?”
“About Diana? Have they? Joe waited so long. The posters are up, but I don’t even think people look at those.”
“Posters?”
“I’m really getting worried about her, Dorothy. This isn’t right. I mean, I don’t think she just took off.”
For a moment, Dorothy couldn’t breathe. It was as if all the air had been sucked out of her lungs and they couldn’t reexpand. She felt as if she were standing on the edge of the Earth with one foot dangling off, about to fall and plunge into space. She opened her mouth and took in a big gulping breath, feeling the oxygen flood her brain. There were, she thought, two very distinct ways of leaping off the edge. It took only a second to decide which one to take.
“Do you want to come inside?” she asked Sam.
november 2007
chapter 16
Joe was already on the freeway headed south toward the airport when he realized that he’d forgotten to move the stack of “Missing” posters off the passenger seat. He hadn’t wanted that to be the first thing Yvonne saw when she got into the car. Leaving one hand on the steering wheel he grabbed the papers and attempted to move them to the backseat. But they weren’t banded together and slid out of his grasp as he reached backward and they fell, splaying out on the floor behind the seat. Perfect, he thought, he’d managed to make it even worse. Now it looked like he was so heartless he couldn’t even be bothered to keep these posters—themselves an indictment of his failure to take care of Diana—in an orderly, respectful pile. He hoped he’d have enough time to stop and deal with them before Yvonne made her way off the plane.
He saw that one of the posters had gotten caught between the seat and the gear shift. He pulled it free, folded it, and slipped it into the glove compartment but not without once again seeing the incredible sadness in the cheaply reproduced photo of Diana. He wished he’d had a better one to offer, but who would have thought he’d need a current photo for the purposes of identification? They weren’t the kind of family that snapped endless shots of one another in every conceivable pose. In the short time Diana had been with them, nobody had felt either familial or particularly photogenic. Had Diana not decided she needed some photos of Zoë, there might not have been one of her either. She’d asked to borrow his digital camera, Joe recalled, only a couple of weeks ago—it was right before the fire, he’d told the police when he’d given them the photo—so she could take pictures of the baby. She’d snapped a few of Zoë and then he’d taken the camera from her and taken a few of them together and one close-up
of Diana. She was looking away from the camera, down at Zoë in her arms, not smiling. It was soft and sad and slightly blurred. Diana didn’t like it and told him to delete the photo, but he kept it anyway. He could never have anticipated that it would end up being the most recent photograph anyone had of her.
Joe felt the toxic combination of guilt, fear, and helplessness churning his stomach into a too-familiar sickness. It was disgraceful, really, that he had only those few photographs of Diana and Zoë to show for the time she’d been living with him. He didn’t know how he’d manage to explain that to Yvonne either, when he saw her. What parent—no matter how late he’d come to the game—didn’t take pictures of his own daughter for the mantel? The truth of the matter was that neither he nor Yvonne was going to win any parenting awards, but Diana hadn’t disappeared from Yvonne’s house; she’d gone missing on his watch. That was a critical difference.
Worse still, and what made Joe feel like a complete asshole, was that he hadn’t formed a strong enough attachment to Diana to even miss her now. Well no, that wasn’t quite right. Her absence filled him with dread, but it wasn’t as if he missed seeing her every morning at breakfast or every evening at dinner. They just hadn’t had enough time or normalcy to develop those routines. Of course he was worried about where she was and what might have happened to her and all kinds of grim scenarios had been going through his head every day and night since she’d been gone. He wasn’t an idiot; he knew that even the best case (that she’d run away) had the potential for a bad outcome, and he couldn’t even bring himself to imagine the worst case. But despite this fear, he wasn’t grief stricken or terrified or moved to any kind of extreme action just so that he could be doing something. Joe knew that these were the kinds of responses that parents of missing children had and he didn’t feel any of them.
He wished—more than he had ever wished for anything in his entire life—that none of this had ever happened. But he wasn’t emotionally devastated. And for this, guilt gnawed at his guts. Because while he couldn’t be faulted for not knowing Diana before she’d arrived at his door that hot July day, he was entirely responsible for not getting closer to her afterward. He didn’t know if they could have created such a deep father-daughter bond in that period, but he regretted now that he hadn’t tried harder. Maybe if they’d developed more of a relationship she wouldn’t have run off. And maybe if he’d gotten to know her better, he would be able to understand why she’d run off. If she’d run off.
Joe knew he respected Diana’s innate toughness and admired what he’d thought was a quick intellect, but there were way too many open questions about her essential nature and personality that he didn’t have answers to because there just hadn’t been time. If she’d grown up with him—even near him—Joe would have known how he felt about Diana. It wouldn’t have even mattered whether or not he liked her because he was her parent and he would have loved her.
But Joe hadn’t had a chance to learn to like her or love her. Not really and not the way he should. And that, of course, was the real problem. Because that kind of uncertainty showed. And maybe it even looked like guilt. He could see it in the faces of the cops when he’d gone to report her missing and then in the attitudes of the detectives, Garcia and Williams, who were assigned to the case. He felt it from Sam when she cared for the baby, which, he admitted, was probably more often than she should considering she wasn’t an actual relative. Why did you wait so long? Why don’t you know where she is? Isn’t she your daughter? That they couldn’t possibly understand the situation didn’t matter. Because how could he be expected to explain it in the first place?
And then there was Yvonne. Whatever subtle accusation he’d felt insinuated by the police or Sam or anyone else who was privy to his personal nightmare was nothing compared to the level of reproach he’d felt coming from Yvonne when he’d finally gotten her on the phone. That call too had been delayed longer than it should have. Although the rational part of him knew it was unlikely, a much bigger part wanted to believe that Diana had just gone home to her mother, and he clung to that belief in the hours and days after the evacuation. Of course he should have called Yvonne right away, he knew that. But …
They hadn’t spoken to each other since Diana had arrived. They’d exchanged some very brief messages through Diana, mostly having to do with health insurance, but hadn’t actually heard each other’s voices. Although Diana hadn’t gone into details, it was obvious that her relationship with her mother was at some kind of low point. Joe didn’t know—and could hardly be expected to know—whether Diana had more than the usual teenage anger and hostility toward her mother, but she did seem, especially as her foolish romance with Kevin had gained traction, particularly hostile and bitter about Yvonne. She’d even said at one point, although Joe couldn’t remember now when it was, that she hated her mother and never wanted to live with her again. He’d taken it for what he assumed it was—typical mother/daughter stuff rooted in whatever psychologists were touting as the latest reason for friction between parents and children—but he’d wondered if there was something else going on between them that went deeper than that. He just didn’t see what could be gained by talking to Yvonne about any of it, though, so he hadn’t tried to contact her on his own until … well, until he had to.
And even then he couldn’t get her on the phone at first. He left a message—halting and weird even to his own ears—giving no details but telling her that she should call him as soon as possible. He waited longer than he thought he’d have to for a call back from her, although he assumed—and Yvonne later confirmed—that she’d tried Diana’s phone first, thinking that she and Joe had gotten into some kind of argument, but got no response. By the time they finally spoke, both of them were edgy and anxious.
It was funny, Joe thought, the things you remembered and those you forgot. It was close on twenty years since he’d seen or spoken to Yvonne, yet her voice, with its low intonations and lilting cadences, brought him right back to the last day they’d spent together. He answered the phone and she said, “Hello, Joe,” and he was back there in that small hot Los Angeles garden apartment they’d shared briefly—the one with the drunken feuding neighbors and the barking dogs—her breath in his ear, whispering and imploring, always wanting something more from him than he was able to give. He remembered it instantly, viscerally, that terrible fight they’d had, both of them screaming ugly things that could never be taken back, then both of them crying, both of them cursing, then kissing and crazy, angry, exquisite sex, and then nothing more to say. But as clear as that was, at the same time he couldn’t remember any specifics about the way she looked other than that she was always stylish, chic, and beautiful. He had an image, of course, glowing and dreamlike from its long storage in his memory, but it was vague—more shape and curve than detail. He couldn’t recall, for example, precisely what color her eyes were. He thought he remembered that they were a kind of burnt amber color, but he couldn’t be sure. He remembered vividly the soft feel of her skin beneath his hands but not how she wore her hair, or any of the exact sentences they had exchanged that last day.
“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 bac
k 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.
The Neighbors Are Watching Page 19