فصل 18

18

Los Angeles, 2012

I WAS IN A PANIC. WE WERE HOSTING, AS WE HAD FOR YEARS, ABOUT a dozen adults and four kids under the age of ten, and the second draft of my seven-thousand-word story was due Tuesday. A few days before, I’d sent out SOS e-mails, brief and frank pleas for help that I hoped would be understood. “Dinner rolls. Butter.” Thanksgiving always makes me nostalgic for the Midwest. But the day was sunny and unusually brisk, the kind of California autumn afternoon when, if you concentrate on your friend’s gray cardigan and the forkful of pumpkin pie in your mouth and the snippet of NFL commentary running in the background, you can forget the bougainvillea and the wet swimsuits drying over the backyard chairs; you can imagine that you live somewhere where the seasons actually change. I wasn’t myself though. Impatience roiled. I made a bigger deal than I needed to that Patton bought an undersize turkey. When we went around the table and said what we were thankful for, I forgot the holiday for a moment and shut my eyes, thinking about a wish. After dinner the kids piled together on the couch and watched The Wizard of Oz. I stayed out of the room. Little kids have big emotions, and mine needed reining in.

That Saturday Patton took Alice for the day, and I hunkered down in my office on the second floor to revise and write. About four o’clock in the afternoon, the front doorbell rang. We get a lot of deliveries, and I had in fact already answered the door a couple of times that day and signed for packages. I was irritated at yet another interruption. Normally I’d ignore it and let them leave the package at the door. Usually, just to be sure, I walk over to our bedroom window and peek out, and yes, there’s the back of the Fed Ex deliveryman, our front gate closing behind him.

I’m not sure what made me get up this time, but I walked a few steps down our curving staircase and called out, “Who is it?” No one replied. I went to our bedroom window and peeked out. A slim, young African American kid in a pink shirt and tie was walking away from our house. I had the strong sense he was a teenager; maybe I saw him in profile for a moment. I guessed he was selling magazine subscriptions door to door, and let the drape fall. I went back to work and didn’t think more about it.

About forty-five minutes later, I got up and grabbed my car keys. I’d made plans to meet Patton and Alice for an early dinner at one of our favorite restaurants in the neighborhood. I made sure the doors were locked and headed out to my car parked on the street. When I was about halfway down our walk I saw out of the corner of my eye the figure of a young man off to my left, walking very slowly with his back to me in front of my next-door neighbor’s house.

I’m not sure I would have noted him if his body language hadn’t been so unusual. He froze completely when I came bounding out of the house. He was a young African American kid, not the same kid who’d rung our door, but similarly dressed in a pastel blue shirt and tie. He kept his body still and craned his neck ever so slightly in my direction. I hesitated. I thought again about teenagers selling magazine subscriptions, and wondered if he was gauging me as a possible customer. But I knew it was weirder than that. His body language was so off. I got into my car and drove away, and as I did I picked up my phone to call the police. I pressed 9 and 1. But what was I going to say? Suspicious young black kid? That felt racist and like an overreaction. I canceled the call. They weren’t doing anything overtly criminal. Still, I hit the brakes and yanked the wheel to the left, making a quick U-turn back to our house. It couldn’t have been more than forty-five seconds, but neither kid was on the street. Dusk was making it harder to see. I figured they’d rung someone’s bell, begun the magazine pitch, and been invited in. I headed to the restaurant.

The following night, I was upstairs when I heard the doorbell ring and Patton greet someone at the front door. “Michelle!” he called. I came down. Our next-door neighbor, Tony, was standing there.

Tony was the first neighbor we’d met when we’d bought our house two and a half years earlier. We hadn’t moved in yet, and I was at the house with our contractor, talking about renovations, when an attractive man in his forties peeked in at the front door and introduced himself. My memory is that he was gregarious and a little self-effacing. The previous owner had been a recluse, and Tony had never seen the inside of the house. He was curious. I told him go ahead, walk around. I thought from his outgoing demeanor that we’d end up being friends, the way you imagine things when you’re picturing your life in a new space. He told me he was recently divorced, and his teenage daughter was going to live with him and attend the local all-girls Catholic high school. He was renting the house next door.

But our relationship, while always friendly, never blossomed into a real friendship. We waved and made occasional small talk. When we first moved in, Patton and I talked about how we should have a get-together in our backyard and meet all the neighbors. Our intentions were good. We kept talking about it but then getting waylaid. The house was always being worked on, or one of us was traveling. But when Alice’s ball flew over the fence into their yard, Tony and his daughter always graciously returned it. When I found a motherless baby pigeon on the curb in front of their house and fashioned a nest from a wicker basket and leaves and fastened it to a tree branch, Tony came out and smiled at me. “You’re a good person,” he said. I liked him. But our interactions were relegated to comings and goings, to moments between dog walking and toddler wrangling.

My second-floor office faces their house; a distance of only about fifteen feet separates us. I’ve become accustomed to the rhythms of their lives. In the late afternoons I hear their front door slam, and Tony’s daughter, who has a beautiful voice, begins to sing. I always mean to tell her what a beautiful voice she has. I always forget.

Tony was at our front door because he wanted to tell us that they’d been robbed yesterday.

“I think I know what happened,” I said, and motioned for him to sit down on our living room couch. I explained the doorbell and no answer, and what I saw. He nodded; the elderly couple that lived on the other side of Tony had seen the same kids hauling bags out of Tony’s house. They got in through the kitchen window and completely ransacked the place. The cops told him it’s a common ruse used by teams of petty thieves on holiday weekends. Ring and see if anyone’s home; if no one answers, break in.

“It’s just iPads and computers,” Tony said. “But I keep thinking, what if my daughter had been home alone? What might have happened then?”

At the word “daughter” his voice quavered. His eyes welled. So did mine.

“You don’t have to explain,” I said. “It’s such a violation.” I reached out and put my hand on his.

“Michelle’s a crime writer,” Patton said.

Tony looked surprised.

“I don’t even know what you do,” he said.

From now on, the three of us told each other, we’ll look out for each other. We’d alert each other when we were going out of town. We’d be better neighbors, we promised.

Later that night, I kept going over the events of the last few days in my head. I thought about the intimacy of that moment in the living room, the unexpected surge of emotion we shared with Tony.

“We don’t even know his last name,” I said to Patton.

I HAVE A NIGHTLY RITUAL WITH ALICE, WHO IS A TROUBLED SLEEPER and has terrifying dreams. Every night before falling asleep, she’ll call out for me to come into her bedroom.

“I don’t want to have a dream,” she says. I brush her sandy hair back, put my hand on her forehead, and look straight into her big brown eyes.

“You are not going to have a dream,” I tell her, with crisp, confident enunciation. Her body releases its tension, and she goes to sleep. I leave the room, hoping that what I promised but have no control over will be true.

That’s what we do. All of us. We make well-intentioned promises of protection we can’t always keep.

I’ll look out for you.

But then you hear a scream and you decide it’s some teenagers playing around. A young man jumping a fence is taking a shortcut. The gunshot at three a.m. is a firecracker or a car backfiring. You sit up in bed for a startled moment. Awaiting you is the cold, hard floor and a conversation that may lead nowhere; you collapse onto your warm pillow, and turn back to sleep.

Sirens wake you later.

I saw Tony walking his big white dog this afternoon and waved at him from outside my car, in between fumbling for my keys and remembering something I had to do.

I still don’t know his last name.