The Neighbors Are Watching

by Debra Ginsberg

  “Can I help you find something?”

  Another needy salesperson stood in front of Joe demanding his attention. This one appeared to be in her seventies and seemed to have materialized from nowhere. He wondered why he was getting such personal attention today when he wanted it least. It went beyond the scope of daily ironies and into something else. Perhaps he was the only shopper in the store or perhaps it was so unusual to see a man in the jewelry or infants’ departments that the salespeople just couldn’t resist. But he’d had enough of trying to explain himself or what he was looking for. It wasn’t really fair that he burden this grandmother, but he’d resisted once already and now it was like the urge to throw up after food poisoning—he couldn’t stop himself.

  “I need a funeral dress for a baby,” he said. “Can you help me with that?”

  The woman’s face blanched and she looked so alarmed that Joe wanted to bite back his words. She started to stammer and he realized that she thought the baby in question was deceased.

  “She’s almost five months old,” he said. “About this big.” He held his hands apart the approximate distance of Zoë’s length. “It’s not for her funeral,” he added.

  “Ohhh.” The saleswoman sighed. Her relief was so intense it was palpable. The air between them seemed to warm up and ripple.

  “It’s for her mother’s funeral,” Joe said. “She’s my granddaughter. Her mother was my daughter. That’s who died.” He watched as the woman struggled to keep herself composed, tried to rein in the naked dismay contorting her face, and failed. Joe couldn’t understand why he was being such a prick—or even why he was sharing any of these personal details. It wasn’t making him feel any better. And yet. “So I need something nice for the baby to wear.”

  “I’m so … We have …” She lifted her hands as if she were going to wring them. “I’m so very sorry for your loss,” she said. “It must be just …”

  “It is,” he said. “Yes.”

  “I don’t know whether … what I mean is, we have some spring dresses for babies, but I don’t think that would be right, and I don’t know if … we do have some other, christening-type of dresses that might—”

  “Fine,” Joe said. It was his own fault. He could have said nothing. He could have let it be. He let the saleswoman guide him over to the dresses she described—white satin monstrosities that he would never put Zoë in—but he bought one anyway because he felt so bad about what he’d said or the way he’d said it or for just being who he was. And then he added a white satin headband decorated with tiny pink roses to go with it and why not throw in one of those terry-cloth one-piece outfits as well. Yes, the one with the ducks on it, sure. She wrapped everything in tissue paper with great care, taking so much longer than Joe wanted her to, but he was afraid now to say anything at all. When she finally handed him the shopping bag he was almost vibrating with the need to get out of there.

  “I am so sorry,” she whispered, touching his hand lightly with hers. There were tears shining in her eyes.

  “Thank you,” he said.

  She blinked and the tears fell and that, finally, was Joe’s undoing. He turned and half-ran to the escalator and then pushed past people to jog his way down, out through the men’s department without so much as looking at a suit, raced past the storefronts and food court and open-air vendors to his car, threw his shopping bags inside, and peeled out of the parking lot. He drove north, avoiding the freeway, taking Torrey Pines Road instead, passing the hospital where Zoë was born, the greenery and biotech firms lining the road, and breaking through at last to the ocean.

  There were plenty of empty parking spaces at the beach on this mild February morning, so Joe took the first one he could after turning off the road. He got out of the car in such a hurry, he almost tripped and fell on the rocks that he had to scramble down to get to the sand. Once at the bottom he slowed his step a little, walking the short distance to the water’s edge. He stood there for a moment, the marine air stinging his eyes, his body trembling or shivering, he couldn’t tell, and then he bent down and took off his shoes and socks. He walked in a little farther, let the water wash his feet. The sound of white crashing waves filled his head with welcome noise. He hadn’t been here on the beach for what seemed a lifetime. He lived three miles from the shoreline and saw the Pacific sparkling from the big Luna Piena patio every day, and yet he managed to avoid the beach most of the time. Every time he realized that and found his way to the surf he wondered why that was.

  At first, when he’d suggested cremation, he’d thought that he’d like to scatter Diana’s ashes here. In the short time he’d known her, Diana hadn’t shown very much interest in the ocean, but he had some kind of poetic notion about her being born near the sea, then moving to the desert, and coming back to rest in the water. He wanted to think that Diana would have appreciated the sentiment—maybe even agreed with it—but the truth was that he didn’t know what Diana had thought or felt about anything. And now he never would, no matter what anyone said about her. They all had their thoughts about who Diana was—Kevin did, and Sam and even Yvonne, who should have known her better than anyone. In a way, they all had greater claims to her than he did, but they hadn’t understood her any better than he. And what tortured Joe even more was that if he had known, if he had even suspected … maybe he could have saved her.

  Why? The question sliced at his brain again.

  Why hadn’t the kid gone for help? He was scared, yes, of course, and guilty for supplying her with drugs—supplying half the fucking neighborhood, it turned out—and in a panic, but that didn’t explain the rest of it; it didn’t explain how he’d disposed of her or that he’d kept his mouth shut for almost three months, saying nothing—nothing—until they found that phone and he was forced to come out with it. The kid had sat in Joe’s house as calm as a summer day, kindly translating for his mother, the picture of respect, all the while knowing exactly what had happened to Diana. What kind of ice-blooded freak could do that? When he thought of Diana scared and slipping into unconsciousness—dying—and having that person be the last face she ever saw, Joe wanted to tear him apart with his bare hands.

  His brain raging, Joe suddenly remembered something Diana had said. The memory came at him clear and complete like a video clip embedded in his brain. She was sitting at the dining room table with a glass of iced tea, balancing it on her giant belly beneath which Zoë squirmed. It was the hottest part of the day, midafternoon, and she was holding her hair away from her neck. Joe was getting ready to leave for work, already counting covers and assigning waiter stations in his head.

  “Doesn’t that noise bother you?” Diana asked him.

  “I don’t hear anything,” Joe said.

  “Really? That piano? You can’t hear it?”

  Joe strained and then as if trying to pick out one color from a mosaic, like the tests they gave you at the DMV, he managed to separate out the sound of a piano from all the other ambient noise coming in from the open windows. “I guess,” he said. “It’s not very loud.”

  “I can’t believe you don’t hear that,” she said and lifted the glass to her forehead, pressed it there. “It’s so awful.”

  “Doesn’t sound so bad.”

  “He can play, it’s not that,” Diana said. “It’s just there’s so much anger in it. He sounds like he hates the piano and the music and everything. And he does it every day. It drives me crazy. I mean it.”

  “Well I don’t know why it bothers you so much, it’s not that loud. It’s not like you’re right next door or anything.”

  “You shouldn’t touch an instrument if you hate it like that,” she said. “It’s bad juju.”

  Had he laughed when she’d said that? Joe couldn’t remember because that was the place where the video clip ended. He hit rewind in his mind, watched her again, that face so young, so much like his. Bad juju.

  Did she already know him by then? Had they spoken? Was he already a connection?

  The tide swi
rled around his ankles and pulled back out, taking sand and seaweed with it. Joe’s hands had tightened into fists. He unclenched them, backed up, and sat down heavily on a dry patch. The sun hit him straight on and warm. It was noon. There were no shadows. He stared into the surf, hypnotized by the rhythm of the breaking waves. He didn’t move when the tide reached him, didn’t care if he got wet. It didn’t matter if he got soaked. It was only saltwater and sand. Nothing that could kill you.

  Sometimes Joe tried to rationalize his own ignorance by reminding himself that the police had questioned the kid and his parents and had found nothing suspicious. And who would have? Nobody interacted with that family at all. Even Dorothy, who made it her business to know everything about everybody on their block, was a blank when it came to the Suns. When they moved out in December, it was as if they’d never existed.

  Except that wasn’t quite right. Kevin knew all about that kid. And he’d said nothing either. Joe picked up a chipped sand dollar and ran his thumb over the surface, pressing harder and harder until eventually he broke through the shell, the sharp edges scraping him. Allison had told him many times that it was pointless to get angry at Kevin, who was scared and trying to protect himself. He really did love Diana in his way and didn’t know that she had gone over to see Sun that day. He’d been too busy obliterating himself. There was a cruel Romeo and Juliet irony there, Joe supposed, but he couldn’t find it in himself to appreciate it.

  Joe managed to stay rational. He understood that Kevin wasn’t to blame. Still, he didn’t feel bad for Kevin when the boy had to recount his story with more detail about how Diana had rejected him in the end. Nor did Joe care how scared Kevin was when he finally admitted that his major drug supplier lived right across the street and that Diana knew that. Joe was not disturbed that Kevin would have to live for the rest of his life with the guilt of his part in Diana’s death, however unknowing that part might have been. Because Kevin did have some responsibility. He hadn’t come clean about where he’d gotten his drugs—or let on that Diana even knew the Sun kid well enough to get them from him herself—until it was too late for any kind of evidence to be found.

  By then the new owners had moved into the Suns’ house and the place had been thoroughly cleaned. Not that there was any cause to search it. There were no witnesses, nobody who had ever seen Diana interact with the kid. At least Kevin’s story about the drug dealing got support from others. It seemed that a good number of his neighbors knew the kid was dealing out of his nice little house with its nice basketball hoop and its nice piano. Joe made a decision then to make the neighbors his business. There was no chance of him becoming a vigilante—he simply didn’t have it in him—but he was going to be around. He was going to be watching.

  And he started by getting to know the family who’d bought the Suns’ house. The Mitchells—Tom, Susan, and their eleven-year-old twin boys, Boston and Benjamin—were an unremarkable group. She seemed a typical soccer mom (and indeed the boys played soccer—excelled, to hear her tell it) with her comfortable jeans and state school sweatshirt, and he was an engineer who planned one day to open his own brewery. When he first met them, Joe thought they seemed perfect for the neighborhood—beige, pre-designed, and socially acceptable. But then Joe remembered how little he’d really known about his neighbors until recently and how so many of them turned out to be the opposite of that mold, so he started dropping by the Mitchells’ just to say hello, to share a beer with Tom, to ask how they were settling in.

  Inevitably, Joe found himself talking about Diana, and though he didn’t want to implicate anyone, he couldn’t stop himself from talking about how he wished he’d paid better attention to what was happening on his own street and how it seemed like a cliché but appearances really were deceiving. The Mitchells were sympathetic. Susan said she couldn’t imagine what it must be like. One day, Joe brought Zoë around to “introduce” her. He thought he saw twin wrinkles of surprise crease Tom’s and Susan’s foreheads when they saw her and vanish quickly in an impressive matching display of propriety.

  “Her grandmother actually lives across the street,” Joe said. “Have you met her yet? Yvonne?”

  “Oh, Yvonne. No, I don’t think we have, have we, Tom?”

  By then, right after Christmas, Yvonne had made her move from Las Vegas permanent. She’d been coming back and forth and, after the first time, staying with Joe and Allison was uncomfortable for everyone. It was convenient, though probably not for Sam, that Gloria ended up moving out just as Yvonne decided to stay in San Diego for good.

  “Yes,” Joe said. “She just moved in with Sam. Sam has a boy about the same age as yours. They might know each other from school.”

  He’d probably made a nuisance of himself at the Mitchells’, Joe thought, but if he hadn’t—if he hadn’t made it a point to let them know who he was, they might not have given the cell phone a second thought when Boston or Benjamin discovered it hidden behind boxes and a stack of two-by-fours in the garage. And they would not have known how significant it was, and they would not have rushed over to Joe’s house in person, breathlessly presenting the phone as if it were a live grenade with a look of hope and dread in their eyes: Could this be something? Could it be hers?

  Without realizing it, Joe had dug his hands into the wet sand and was crushing it in his fists as if to make cement. He wasn’t the one who took the call in the end. It was Allison who answered the phone that time, but he’d been home. He heard her in the kitchen talking but couldn’t make out any of her words. He remembered now that he had been thinking it was the first cool day he could remember. It had been so hot for so long and even Christmas felt tropical. But that day all the windows were closed and the house was still chilly inside. They might even have to turn on the heat at some point, Joe had thought. And then Allison was standing there in front of him, holding the phone to her heart. As soon as he saw her face, he knew what was coming.

  “It’s Detective Garcia,” she said and handed him the phone. “They found her, Joe.”

  Mr. and Mrs. Sun denied any and all knowledge that their son was selling drugs or that they’d ever seen Diana anywhere near their property. They went as far as to claim that the kid was covering for someone else, that somehow he’d been framed. In the end, though, it was the kid who’d led the detectives to the body. To Diana. It was tragic, the detectives told Joe, but the kid’s version of what had happened matched the evidence and the coroner’s report. Finally, that was the only truth remaining.

  Joe was sobbing now, his dirty hands held to his eyes and his whole body shaking. He couldn’t stop it or control it, couldn’t rein in the wails that were coming out of him or the tears flooding his face, so he just put his head down and gave in to it. He didn’t know how long it went on and he didn’t look up to see if anyone else had witnessed his breakdown. At the end of it, he felt raw and shredded and somehow interminably worse, as if admitting his grief had somehow increased his culpability. So many things he had left undone. So many things he couldn’t make up for.

  Joe stood and brushed as much sand off his pants as he could. He didn’t bother to put his shoes and socks back on. He was going to need a long shower and maybe even a nap before he went to work tonight. He worked evenings almost exclusively now that Allison was back at work during the day so that they could take turns with Zoë and not have to farm her out to a sitter. Yvonne and Sam took her sometimes too, but Zoë lived with them and soon she would legally be their daughter and that was where she belonged. But the late nights were starting to take a toll on him. It used to be easier, he thought. Like almost everything.

  He drove shoeless through Carmel Valley, his naked foot feeling overly sensitive and itchy against the gas pedal. The neighborhood was quiet and looked clean. It had rained the other day—a major event these days—and now the eucalyptus and agapanthus looked freshly scrubbed. It had taken months for all the soot and ash to clear out, but it was finally gone. At least in all the places you could see.

 
; Allison had an in-service day from school, so she was at home with Zoë. He took the small box containing her heart charm and pushed it deep inside his pocket so that she wouldn’t see it. He’d have to remember to hide it somewhere so it would be a surprise for Valentine’s Day. He’d have to remember to get a card. He had to do these things because even though they felt like pretending, he sensed they were necessary. He would never be able to feel normal again if he didn’t go through the motions of life in a normal way.

  Allison was sitting with Zoë at the dining room table when he came in. The baby was in a little chair that fastened onto the edge of the table. She would need a proper highchair soon, Joe thought. There was an empty bottle and the smallest bowl Joe had ever seen sitting in front of Allison. Zoë turned to him as soon as he walked in, her eyes wide and oddly serious, and Allison looked up. Both of them seemed to be covered with flecks of beige cereal.

  “I thought I’d try her on some rice,” Allison said, smiling, “but she’s clearly not ready. Hey, what happened to you? You’re all sandy.”

  “I took a little detour after the mall,” he said, “and went to the beach. I really needed a minute.”

  Allison nodded. Zoë opened her little mouth and closed it. He reached over and ran his hand over her curly head, then remembered it was all sandy and dirty and felt stupid for not thinking about that before he touched her. “I really needed to get a suit,” he said. “I don’t have anything that’s right for the funeral.”