The Neighbors Are Watching (16 page)

Allison bristled, her back stiffening, but somehow her arms reached out. Diana placed the small, struggling weight there and ran to the kitchen. Allison clutched the baby, trying to contain her small limbs. The baby worked her tiny red mouth, her chest heaving from the effort of all that crying. Allison repositioned her, her hand under the baby’s sweaty head, and held her close. For a moment everything stopped—the wailing, the wind, and her own breathing. But there was no peace in the silence. All Allison could think was that this was not her baby, not her life, and not what she had asked for. By the time Diana returned with a small bottle of milk, the baby was squirming again and Allison was desperate for a drink or for sleep or for anything that would turn off her brain. She handed the baby back to Diana without a word and practically ran upstairs to her own bedroom.

At two in the morning, she was still awake and listening to the wind rage. And Joe, who’d been gone all night, was still missing in action. He’d said he’d be working late, something about supervising inventory. At least she thought that’s what he’d said when he’d left sometime in the afternoon.
Lying in the dark, she struggled to recall his exact words, wishing that she’d paid better attention. Something about him had been off. As the picture formed in her mind, she remembered thinking that it was his clothes—more casual than his usual work attire. He wasn’t wearing a jacket and tie as he always did when he worked dinners. He was wearing slacks and a short-sleeved rayon shirt. It was an outfit just this side of lounge lizard. He’d said something about it too.… That was when the explanation about inventory came in, she recalled. It was odd, because Allison hadn’t said a word about how he looked. She was already distracted by the wind and the threat of fire it was bringing. But something about the vaguely sleazy overall impression he left her with set off some faint alarm in her brain.

Allison put her cup down on the coffee table and switched the channel. Evacuations were being called for. East County was burning. A reverse 911 system was in place. People were being called and told to get out now.

What time had she fallen asleep last night?

It had to have been close to dawn and she couldn’t have been out for more than a few hours. She’d woken up perspiring and disoriented. She couldn’t remember now whether or not she’d dreamed that Joe had come home. He wasn’t sleeping next to her, but his side of the bed was rumpled as if he’d been in it. It was light outside, but hard to tell what time it was. She rolled over and looked at the clock. It was 9:00
AM
. She got out of bed, went downstairs, and put on a pot of coffee. The view from the kitchen window was frightening. The air was orange and thick with smoky grit. Leaves and palm fronds everywhere. She looked in the garage. Joe’s car was gone. Diana’s door was closed. Quiet.

The news was showing aerial shots of the fire consuming everything in its path. There were two fires, they said, and both had names. The Witch Fire was the one heading straight toward them, jumping freeways and roaring into canyons.

Maybe Joe was having an affair.

Allison took the thought out and looked at it for a moment, wondering how she felt about it. It wasn’t as if, over the years they’d been married,
she hadn’t speculated. He had plenty of opportunity at work between cute little waitresses and lusty patrons. Allison had spent some time at the Luna Piena bar and she knew what went on. Joe flirted, an occupational necessity, and got plenty of response. And he’d met
her
at the restaurant, after all. There had been times when it had crossed her mind, when she thought about how easy it would be to give in to the right amount of coaxing, which, face it, didn’t need to be much at all for almost any man. But either she was stupid or just not a jealous enough person because Allison never seriously entertained the idea that Joe was seeing someone else.

No, it wasn’t stupidity, it was trust. Until July, they’d had a happy marriage. Not too happy, not falsely happy, and not unrealistically happy either. And because of that, theirs was a more solid marriage than most, Allison thought. But there was something else as well. Joe was a dozen years older than Allison. He’d lived a whole adult life full of women and affairs when he met her. He knew who he was and hadn’t been stuck in a marriage that he’d grown out of or been ditched by a wife who stopped loving him at some point. He’d waited. And when he met Allison he was ready and he knew what he wanted. He was honest about telling her when he found a woman attractive and she never minded. So, no, she never really worried about him wandering. She trusted him.

Had
trusted him.

But obviously there was plenty about Joe and the women in his past that Allison hadn’t known—or bothered to find out. Why not an affair now then? Allison still didn’t know how she felt about this. It was as if her capacity for emotion related to Joe had been surgically removed or at least delayed until Diana left. Joe had promised Allison that would happen. She was still waiting—her entire life on hold—but he had told her to be patient. Now that they were embroiled in this nastiness with the Werners, they’d moved a fraction of an inch closer in purpose.
United
was way too strong a word, but at least they were both in agreement about their distaste for the Werners and their desire to put an end to the ugly situation they’d been caught in. And ending it required Diana leaving for good. Allison
hadn’t thought much beyond that single point, but she knew that it would involve deciding whether or not she and Joe still had a salvageable marriage.

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.

W
hen 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.