The first time I drove to her house, across the bridge and into the hills, the sun burst through the fog and the temperature rose. I felt ridiculous in my jeans and thick sweatshirt as a misty sweat broke on my skin. I followed Chloe’s directions, winding higher and higher, thinking, What the hell is this place? The roads got narrower and snakelike, the foliage got thicker, there were hundreds of flowering plants. I glimpsed the bone white of eucalyptus, caught the scent of pine through the window. The trees were different, of course, but the place reminded me of nothing more than the upcountry of Sri Lanka. There was the same sense of driving precariously into the sky, of entering a place both magical and mystical.
There were houses set right on the cliff’s edges, and between them I caught slivers of the sea and the Bay Bridge. Even farther away the Golden Gate stretched into Marin. The city nestled between the bridges with a blanket of fog settling into its crevices. I drove past the address Chloe had given me, parked on a sharply steep climb, and walked back along the tree-fringed road to the house. She threw open the door and said, “Welcome to Montclair.”
Just like that I found myself in a new life. I lived in a room with red walls. Originally I had thought I’d repaint it a hue less intense, less womblike, but soon it felt like exactly what I needed to birth a new life. I had very little: a mattress on the floor, some clothing, and books on anatomy. This was everything I had salvaged from the shipwreck of my marriage.
I saw them from the window first — two little girls in the lavish backyard of the house next door. Around six and eight, though I don’t know much about kids and am terrible at estimating ages, so they could have been older or younger. Of course, later I would come to know everything about them, but at that time they were just two normal kids.
They were running around with their dog, a great fluffy white thing. They were blond, playing Marco Polo. The older girl was blindfolded, she reached her arms out, thin pale arms like the eucalyptus branches above, and stumbled forward blindly feeling for her sister who slipped just out of her grasp. The leaves crunched under their sneakers. I watched for a while. It was a lovely tableau of childhood joy. I felt a pricking under my skin, a terrible and fierce longing. Then I turned away and went back into my new life.
The house we lived in had five bedrooms. There were four of us — Chloe, Shahid, Dina, and me. Chloe had “inherited” it from a friend who had moved to Zimbabwe, gotten married, and settled there. The friend didn’t care that she could rent out the house for four times the price we paid. She didn’t want to bother with locating renters, and this is how we found ourselves able to afford a house in a neighborhood where Governor Jerry Brown lived a few streets away. We were the odd house out — a collection of ragtag, single people of color in a neighborhood of predominately rich white families.
One day at breakfast Chloe asked, “You’ve seen the neighbor kids? The dad’s name is Michael, he’s some kind of computer genius. Have you met the wife? She’s like a Romanian Marilyn Monroe.”
I didn’t tell her that I saw them often. Through a sliver of curtain I could watch the two children, the beautiful wife, and the computer genius. With the intimacy of people who have not met but who live in silent proximity, I knew which car belonged to him, which to her, the times they came and left, who picked up the kids on which days. I watched them in the summer months, him serving breakfast, her in wraparound glasses, the kids and dogs gamboling about.
It was some months later that we first noticed trouble. There were noises from next door; sometimes it sounded like shouting, sometimes screaming, sometimes his or her car would screech away down the hill. The kids barely came out anymore and when I did see them, they were pinched looking, as if what little color they had had drained away. They didn’t chase each other, didn’t play Marco Polo, they just sat on the bench and whispered to each other as if hatching plans, plotting. Sometimes they looked up and I could swear they were staring straight at me. I pulled away from the window, my heart thumping.
Then the dog started barking. At first it lasted only a short time and we were able to ignore it. But one night it went on and on, until the sound penetrated the very walls and ricocheted all around us. It felt like we were trapped in a cage of noise. At times the animal screams would stop and silence would fall, thick and welcome. But just when we had sighed and turned over in our beds, the agonizing noise would resume. At midnight, after the dog had been barking for three straight hours, we gathered in the living room.
“What should we do?”
“I called them. No one picked up,” Chloe informed us.
Shahid said, “What the hell? I have to go to work in the morning.”
“Let’s put a note on their door,” I suggested.
I wrote, Your dog has been barking since 9 p.m. None of us can sleep. Please make it stop. Your neighbors at 482, and offered to put it on the door. And then, in my sweats, armed with the note and bit of sticky tape, I walked out. It was November again. A year had passed since I’d moved in. The air was sharp, the trees dark and crowding overhead, the dog’s anguished voice filling the night.
I pulled my hoodie over my head and walked onto the street. Their door was down steps, shrouded, and no automatic light snapped on, so I was guided not by sight but by my feet on the steps, my hand on the railing. I felt my way to the door, my palms made contact, and with a sigh of relief I reached for the knob. Then there was a different, subtler sound. I spun on my heel and saw a figure towering at the top of the steps and coming quickly toward me. My blood screamed; in a quavering voice I said, “Hello?”
It was the wife, I realized in relief. But then her voice rose: “Who is it? Who’s there? I can see you! Stand right there or I’ll call the police.” A light shone straight into my eyes. “Fucking kids, you people come up from Oakland and think you can just break into our houses. I’m calling the police!”
“No! No, I’m your neighbor. Your dog was barking. I just came to tell you.”
A fumbling with her phone. “What?”
“I’m just your neighbor. Your dog was barking. Look, here’s my note!” I thrust it forth like a guilty school kid caught in the hall after classes have started.
She shone the light at it, said, “Oh... okay. I see... There have been so many break-ins recently. I thought...” Her eyes were still suspicious as they took in my skin, my black hoodie.
Thanksgiving arrived, the first one after my divorce. Chloe and Dina had both invited me to their family meals, but I said that I wanted to spend the day watching Netflix. It was only after they left that I realized I was terribly, awfully lonely. The house was empty, and my room felt claustrophobic, so I fled into the living room, which was cold, though I didn’t want to put on the heater because our bill was already too high. Then the doorbell rang, and somehow I knew it was Michael before he even introduced himself. He was taller than I had thought. He wore a red plaid shirt and was even more handsome up close.
“We saw your car in the drive, and we wanted to say sorry. For the dog. Will you come to dinner? It’ll just be Galina, the kids, and me.”
I saw then that as much as I knew their comings and goings, they too knew which of our cars was which and that I was alone on Thanksgiving. I nodded. “I’ll come. Thank you.”
I went at six, carrying the fanciest bottle of wine I could find in the house. Galina opened the door, smelling of jasmine and musk. When she leaned in close to pat me on the back, I inhaled deeply. She said, “Welcome to our home,” and swept me into the dining room. The floor plan was similar to ours, but this house was much bigger. While we had bits of furniture salvaged from thrift stores, things left behind by an endless succession of roommates, theirs was all luxury, light, and warmth. A fire danced. The entire back wall was huge windows opening onto the lovely garden and the woods beyond, past which was a glorious view of the bay. The children sat at the dining room table like stiff little adults. They seemed even more pale and thin than the last time I’d seen them. Their eyes recognized me, followed me.