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 th
is 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.”
“Okay,” Joe said.
“I think I’ll put her upstairs,” Allison said. “In the crib. It might get loud down here. We’ll just … We can go check on her.”
“That’s probably a good idea,” he said. He was still holding the cups. Still staring at her.
“You know, we should get a baby monitor. We really need one.”
“You’re right,” he said. “I can pick one up tomorrow.”
“Or I can.”
“Okay.”
Allison climbed the stairs softly, careful not to jostle. The crib was between the bed and the closet, necessitating a sideways turn to get around. Allison lay the baby down on her back and adjusted her blankets so that she was all wrapped up burrito-style. She let her hand linger on Zoë for a moment, feeling the rise and fall of her chest, making sure that her breathing felt regular. She thought about the notion that the number of breaths you were meant to draw in your lifetime was predetermined when you were born and wondered how many had been allotted to this child.
Downstairs, the doorbell rang. She heard Joe open the door and then the muffled sound of voices, male and female. She couldn’t tell who it was. She lingered a moment longer with the baby. She wasn’t in a hurry to see the people downstairs—to talk to them and ingratiate herself while they regarded her with suspicion and derision. It was almost funny, Allison thought, of all the people in this neighborhood—on this block—she was the one who everyone now looked down on. Not Dorothy or Dick, who had done a pathetic job raising their only child; not Sam and Gloria, who had lost custody of their children; not even Jessalyn Martin, the neighborhood slut. Of course, Allison had no proof of her neighbors’ opinion of her because nobody had said anything to her face, but she knew. She could tell. In her absence, Joe, with his missing daughter and AWOL wife, had become the object of everyone’s sympathy while she’d become the villain. Well, not everyone’s—Dick Werner was still as big an asshole as ever, even if he no longer seemed as if he wanted to do Joe bodily harm. But the others …
Allison left the bedroom door open and walked out to the landing. She hesitated at the top of the stairs, that urge for a drink pressing into her consciousness again, and took one deep breath, then another. After the third, Allison reminded herself that the whole focused breathing thing was nonsense. All it did was make her dizzy. And it wasn’t going to make a single minute of the next couple of hours any easier.
When she got downstairs, Joe was standing at the dining room table with Sam and Gloria, although none of them were eating or drinking or even looking as if they might. Sam and Gloria were both dressed entirely in black: a button-down shirt and slacks for Sam and a fitted T-shirt and yoga pants for Gloria. They looked as if they’d come to a wake, albeit a casual one, and Allison found it distasteful. Beyond that, Allison, who hadn’t seen the two of them together in some time, was startled by the change in their appearances. Sam, who had been pretty thin to begin with, had lost too much weight and looked gaunt and brittle. There were hollows under her sharp cheekbones and dark half moons under her eyes. Gloria had gone in the other direction. She’d been in great shape and really well toned the last time Allison had noticed but now looked big and chunky. The tight T-shirt she was wearing only served to highlight a new roll of flesh at the top of her hips, and her too-short, unstylish haircut emphasized the puffiness in her face. In inches, she wasn’t that much taller than Sam, but she appeared so much larger that it almost seemed as if she were casting a shadow over the other woman. The only place they matched, Allison thought, was in their expressions. Both of them looked completely miserable.
“Hi, Sam, Gloria,” Allison said. “Thanks for coming. Can I get you some coffee or tea?”
Sam smiled and said she was fine, but Gloria asked for coffee. “I’ll get it, Allison,” Joe said and disappeared into the kitchen.
Sam regarded Allison warily as one might a pit bull. Allison did a quick search of her memory to figure out specifically what she might have done or said to Sam to warrant that look, but came up empty. “How’s the baby?” Sam asked. “Everything okay? Do you need anything?”
Allison struggled to keep from frowning. Joe had told her how helpful Sam had been while she was gone—how often she’d taken care of Zoë. How she had rescued Zoë for that matter after Allison had abandoned her to an empty house in the middle of a natural disaster. He hadn’t said that last part out loud of course, but the subtext was always there and it was deafening. Allison could imagine what Joe might have said to Sam about her or about their marriage in her absence, but she would never really know for sure. She wouldn’t have thought Joe capable of gossip, but then she’d never have predicted his illegitimate daughter showing up either.
“She’s doing fine,” Allison said. “I just fed her. She’s asleep upstairs.”
“Is she eating well and everything?”
“Seems to be.” Allison heard irritation creeping into her voice and worked to remove it. “And she’s sleeping well.”
“That’s good. She’s probably due for her shots, isn’t she? Do you have a pediatrician for her? I can recommend one. You know, it’s so important that they get the shots on time. So many parents—”
“Sam?” Gloria sidled up to Sam and cut her off, her hand on Sam’s shoulder. Allison noticed that she was squeezing it just a little, even though her face remained impassive. Sam sighed and moved out from under her hand. It was a call and response with no words at all—the kind couples were so good at. The kind she and Joe hadn’t done for so long.
Joe appeared with the coffeepot and filled a mug for Gloria. “Sam?” he said. “Allison?”
Sam and Allison both shook their heads. Joe filled a mug with coffee for himself and set the pot down on the table. Gloria took a noisy gulp and reached across the table for a cookie. There followed a period of seconds—it couldn’t have been a whole minute, Allison thought—that defined the phrase awkward silence. It was the type of moment that made one wish for a distraction on the order of gunfire. Or an earthquake.
“So what have you heard new, Joe?” Sam asked, finally. “Anything from Garcia or Williams? Have they had any response to that piece on the news?”
Allison felt her entire body tense up. It made her uncomfortable that Sam referred by name to the detectives who were handling Diana’s case. It signified a familiarity beyond what was necessary, Allison thought. Of course, as the person who had found Zoë alone and alerted everyone to Diana’s absence, Sam was de facto involved up to her eyeballs. It had been Sam’s idea to push for the “missing girl” news story, even though the detectives that Sam was so chummy with had suggested it first. Sam had come up with the sympathetic angle—Diana was not just another wayward teenager but a new mom with a precious little baby who had disappeared from a nice neighborhood during one of the worst disasters in county history. Here was her father, grave and composed, general manager of an extremely popular local restaurant and a familiar figure in the community. And here was her attractive mother, distressed and pleading with anyone who had any information to please share it. And here was the neighborhood: quiet, decent, a lovely place with caring, supportive neighbors like Sam and Dorothy. It was altogether a stunning piece of fiction, Allison thought. The only thing accurate about it was that Diana was missing. Allison had been left
out of that entire spot. Not that she wanted any part of it, but her exclusion seemed to highlight the negative if not accusatory attitude of everyone around her. And why the hell was Sam so friendly with Detectives Garcia and Williams? Paranoid fear crawled through Allison and she longed again for the blur of alcohol.
“There’s nothing really new,” Joe said. “It’s harder, I guess, because she didn’t really know anyone here. Her ‘known acquaintances’ were pretty limited. But they are still working on it. Detective Garcia assured me that they won’t give up on it. On her.”
“He seems like a good guy,” Sam said.
Allison looked up as Sam was finishing this sentence and caught Gloria’s eyes. She looked as rattled by this conversation as Allison did.
“But I was going to wait for everyone else to get here,” Joe said, “and then I’ll go over everything. What they’re doing.”
“Who else is coming?” Gloria asked.
“I asked everyone,” Allison said, clearing the sudden frog in her throat. “Sorry, I mean, I asked Dorothy to ask everyone. She’s got the good contacts, so I figured she’d be able to get people rounded up.” That sounded wrong, Allison thought, like it was some kind of rodeo. She hadn’t meant it to sound like that. She avoided eye contact with Sam.
“How’s Yvonne doing?” Sam asked. Gloria rolled her eyes—Allison saw it plainly—and reached for a crescent roll. There was something really off about these two, Allison thought. Something beyond just a quarrel or a bad day.
“I’m going to make myself some tea,” Allison said, avoiding the Yvonne question completely. “I’ll be right back. Maybe you all want to go sit down in the living room? It might be a little more comfortable.” Let Joe take over for a minute, she thought. Let him fill Sam in on Yvonne’s well being. Why she even wanted to know was an irritation to Allison. Was there any part of her life Sam hadn’t crawled into?
The Neighbors Are Watching Page 25