When No One Is Watching

by Alyssa Cole

  “I’m okay!” he calls out.

  I drop back onto the couch pillows and take a deep breath. There’s no chance in hell that I can actually relax, but I try to collect my thoughts, which have scattered like fish in the koi pond at Prospect Park running from an off-leash dog.

  My gaze darts back and forth around the living room, really absorbing the differences between my house and this one. The paint is new, and looks like the thousand-thread-count sheets of paint. There are little glass terrariums everywhere—when I stopped in one of the new boutiques that’s opened up, the smallest one with a tiny succulent was fifty bucks.

  An eight-by-ten of Michelle Obama sits on the mantelpiece, and a giant painting of an old white dude hangs above it, the kind you see in the lobbies of banks and government buildings. It’s one of those paintings where the beady eyes follow you anywhere you move in a room.

  It jump-starts my nervousness and I get up, creep over to the window, and peek through the curtains, the icy breeze of the air conditioner blowing over my face and calming me a bit. The moving truck is still parked there but appears to be empty, and no one is outside Mr. Perkins’s place.

  When I lean closer to the window so I can see a little farther down the street, my thumb rests against the air conditioner and comes away sticky.

  I bend down, blink against the cold air hitting my eyes, and then freeze in my crouched position.

  There’s a tacky spot in the shape of a heart on the front of the air conditioner. And when I check the make and model . . . it’s the same as Drea’s.

  I remember her purple-tipped fingers pressing the sticker onto the air conditioner after I’d helped her install it.

  “Now it’ll spread the love. Get it? Get it?”

  My brain refuses to process the importance of the heart-shaped glue mark, or the fact that the air conditioner that’s gone from Drea’s room is now here at Theo’s house. Fyodor, who worked for the Russian mob at some point. Who tried to grift a major corporation. Who offered to pick the lock to get into Mr. Perkins’s house.

  Who clearly would do anything for money.

  Theo, who helpfully pointed out that all of this shit had started up when the VerenTech deal went through, who found the perfect pieces of evidence to support my conspiracy theories, but who’d left out the fact that he’d elbowed his way into my research and my life at the exact same time.

  Dammit.

  I’d watched Theo through his window sometimes—had he been watching me? These real estate companies would do seemingly anything to get their hands on people’s properties. If I thought a company would murder, it wasn’t that far of a stretch to believe they could hire a moderately attractive man to spend a few days seducing a lonely, broken woman before finishing the job.

  Nausea roils my stomach at the thought, but it’s as possible as anything else in this trash fire of a world.

  Something lights up to my left, drawing my attention from the internal scream I’m swallowing, and I glance over to see an iPad on the lower level of the perfectly distressed couch-side table. I don’t even pretend not to be interested—that was what I did with Marcus at first, averting my eyes when a message popped up on his screen. It’s supposedly bad to snoop, but Theo’s own admission plays in my head.

  “I . . . am a liar.”

  I lean over the arm of the couch and tilt the iPad so I can see the messages coming in under a conversation labeled Honeycheeks.

  They’re getting settled into the Perkins place. I still think we’re moving too quickly. People are going to notice.

  Sydney is too unreliable to pose a real threat, but I’m taking care of her today. I was going to earlier, but they just had to bring that damned dog with them. Charlie said they wanted the house AND the dog, but I thought his wife would wait until after we were done to trot it out.

  You know how she is with dogs.

  I hate rushing things too, but I’m not in charge here. Besides, my father is pretty sure even if they all notice, it won’t matter. Other corps have razed entire towns. In the past, they’ve dropped bombs, polluted water. No one cares, lmao.

  True. I could record myself shooting one of them in the face and get off scot-free, lmfao. No one will pay any attention to this.

  I hate that she’s in my house. Gross.

  Sorry. I had to make a decision after she ran into the street. She’ll be handled ASAP.

  Good. She was so mean to me!

  Hurry up. Your little cowgirl wants to ride and if you finish fast enough we can fit it in before the meeting.

  I’ll try, tonight’s revitalization is going to be pretty intense—we have to get everything contained so it lines up with the parade. Everyone already associates it with violence so it’ll provide even more cover.

  You’ll have to wait a few hours for this . Keep yourself entertained—and send pictures.

  A picture comes through almost immediately: Ponytail Lululemon, Theo’s supposed ex-girlfriend, half-naked in a nasty-looking public bathroom mirror with her hip jutting out to give the illusion of ass where there is none.

  The clanking of cups in the kitchen signals that I’ve read enough. I tiptoe toward the living room door. Luckily, the house adheres to the rules of New Brooklyn; the flooring is new and doesn’t squeak like at my place, and there’s one of those big-ass mirrors in the hallway so I can see what that traitorous motherfucker is doing in the kitchen.

  Theo has a box of tea in one hand and his phone in the other, tapping with his thumb.

  I’ve panicked a lot over the last few weeks, and the last few hours. I’ve relived past betrayals and uncovered one and now two more. Mommy and many of my neighbors are gone, directly or indirectly thanks to this company, and if the word rejuvenation means what I think it means, more of us will be gone soon.

  Right now, if I cry one more tear, or give in to panic, I might as well just let Theo kill me right here and leave my neighbors and friends for dead.

  My last fuck disintegrates uneventfully, but in its wake it leaves the knowledge of what I have to do. Of what Mommy would want me to do.

  “Don’t let them take my house.”

  I head back to the duffel and grab it—it’s his, but it contains what little evidence I have and also: Fuck him. If I can inconvenience him a little bit, good.

  A sharp white edge of paper sticks out of the side pocket and I push it in more deeply, then quickly tug it out to peek at it. It’s a business card. Motherfucking Bill Bil, for BVT Realty.

  The same company Theo just acted surprised to learn was part of VerenTech.

  Okay.

  I’m not being paranoid. The one person I thought was on my side is not. Again. I refuse to feel upset—this is what I get for depending on everyone else to help me. This is what I get for not being strong enough to do things on my own.

  That ends now.

  I grab the duffel and quietly jog to the door.

  “You want honey?” Theo calls out.

  I don’t know if he repeats himself because my response is the quiet click of the door closing after me.

  Gifford Place OurHood/privateusergroup/Rejuvenation

  Review of the door-cam footage, store surveillance, and the in-app microphone override make it clear that we can’t wait any longer. We can find another explanation, but if we don’t move now, the entire project is in jeopardy. Geolocation shows Green is moving toward the house marked next for clearance.

  Chapter 19

  Sydney

  I JOG ACROSS THE STREET IN THE DARKENING EVENING LIGHT, hiding between parked cars to watch a black sedan with tinted windows that slows, then keeps driving. Was it Drew? What would happen if I ended up in the back seat of his car again? I doubt he’d let me out this time, and a key between my fingers probably won’t cut it.

  Toby barks from somewhere behind me, and I turn and look up. On either side of my house, Mommy’s house, the brownstones are inhabited by strangers who are no longer just new neighbors, but likely people who want to do me h
arm.

  A siren whines to life a few blocks away and I flinch. The roar of a jet engine overhead makes me wonder if they might have drones watching us.

  Everything seems like it might be a means to hurt me. Every. Goddamn. Thing.

  Laughter tinkles through the window of Josie and Terry’s house, and that’s the rage straw on the camel’s back for me.

  I came back to Brooklyn to find home, and these bastards have taken even the comfort of the familiar from me. Taken my mother’s dignity, and my best friend’s loyalty, and my community. I can never get those things back, and they think they’ll get away with it because no one cares.

  They don’t count my pain, our pain, in their idea of care.

  They’re gonna learn today.

  I jog up the stairs to my front door, the key slipping out of the lock two times before I manage to turn it.

  Once the door is shut and locked behind me, I stand for a moment and take several deep breaths, filling my nose with the familiar scent of potpourri, wood polish, and dust that always made coming home feel real. Even though it’s the opposite of what I would normally do, I slip on the pair of old Timbs I usually wear while gardening and never wear into the house. I don’t know what’s going on, and you can’t stomp someone with Old Navy flip-flops.

  I jog up to Mommy’s apartment, and when I open the door, I’m hit with the stale, stifling hot air of an un-air-conditioned top floor. Sweat beads on my brow as I close the door and engage the multiple locks. The duffel bag rests against my hip as I scan the apartment, and a sudden vibration makes me jump about a foot in the air before I realize it’s my phone.

  Fucking Theo.

  My jaw clenches and I beeline for Mommy’s bedroom, the one place in the house I haven’t been since that night. The room is simple, light blue with a dark wood bedroom set and a rarely used vanity, the kind with lightbulbs around the mirror. It made me feel so glamorous as a kid when I’d sit in front of it, cataloguing the features that were so similar to those of the woman I thought was the prettiest in the world, and sneaking dabs of her lipstick and blush.

  It’s dark in the room, even though the blinds aren’t closed—it’s already evening, somehow, as if time has stopped making sense along with everything else I thought I knew.

  Her bedroom window sits in the faux-parapet, the high tower, where I can look down on those who might come to get me. Where I once watched my friends pretend to battle to save me.

  No one’s fighting for that job now.

  I stand in the doorway, staring down at Mommy’s bed, my teeth pressed together so hard that I feel like they might crumble. The bed is bare except for its mattress cover because we used her favorite blanket to wrap her up.

  Drea had helped, had given me the recommendation for the lawyers, had promised to help me fight to keep the house. She said she didn’t know why Mommy had agreed to sign over the house, and Mommy had never mentioned Drea pressuring her—but pressure wasn’t always blatant.

  Drea’d betrayed us, gotten paid, pretended to care, and then left me to fight this alone.

  Has she pretended to be my friend all this time? Has she hated me all these years when I’d thought of her as a sister? Did she tell them where the body was, and that’s why Mommy is missing?

  Wait. Theo is the one who told me her body wasn’t there. That might be a lie too. Everything could be a lie.

  I purposefully unclench my jaw and take a deep breath. No time for memories, or for questions.

  I’m in Mommy’s room for a reason.

  I head for her closet, pull down one of the familiar blue cookie tins as the persistent vibration of my phone purrs in the duffel on the window seat. No, this tin is too light. Must be her sewing things. I place it back on the shelf—Mommy did not tolerate me digging through her belongings and I learned as a child to put things back exactly as they were.

  I find what I’m looking for in the fourth cookie tin I pick up, the heaviest one, the one with things rolling around like marbles inside.

  I place it on the bed, sweat rolling down my temples and pooling beneath my titties from the top-floor heat of this room, and fight with the slightly rusted lid, eventually winning the battle. The lid pulls free and there it is. Mommy’s little silver revolver. It’s not shiny anymore, how I remember it, and it’s old enough that people would clown me if I posted a pic of it on social media, but I’m not pulling it out for social media clout.

  My grandfather had given the gun to her when she’d come up north, but she’d known how to use it since she could walk. That’s what she told me, at least. Her parents taught her how to hunt for food, and how to protect herself when the white boys from town got bored and came cruising through their neighborhood looking to do evil, or if the Brown boys she’d grown up with suddenly didn’t understand the word no.

  I pick it up, the heft of it a familiar comfort that grounds me in the swirling tornado of my thoughts and fears. Mommy taught me how to use it early, and then taught me never to touch it unless there was an emergency.

  I think she’d agree this counts, given what I know of her definition of emergency.

  Fitzroy told us the story of Mommy making a man dance at the end of this gun during the blackout. He probably didn’t know she’d run my daddy off the same way. I only found out the truth toward the end of things. We’d been watching Goodfellas in her bed, and during the scene where Karen shoves a gun into Henry’s mouth as he’s sleeping after she finds out he’s cheating, Mommy laughed so hard she’d lost her breath. I forced her to take a few sips of water and asked what was so funny.

  “Just . . . memories. That’s how your daddy woke up after the first and last time he hit me,” she said, her gaze soft and unfocused and the slightest smile on her face.

  “I wish I’d told you that earlier. How to treat men who want to make you small, crush you under their heel.” She looked into my eyes, her gaze loving but hard. “I put my gun in your daddy’s mouth and I made him apologize. And then I told him, ‘If you ever hit me again, you better kill me, because next time I won’t hesitate to pull this trigger.’ He left not long after that. Before he knew about you.”

  I grasp the bullets from the box in the tin with clumsy fingers and load them into the chamber, thinking of all the people who think they can hurt everybody else with no consequence. Most times they’re right. They live long, successful lives while using other people’s necks as ladder rungs.

  I don’t have a plan just yet, but this is not going to be one of those times, if I can help it. I’m not going to let VerenTech, Josie and Terry, Ponytail Lululemon, or anyone else continue to take what’s mine.

  Something flashes into my eyes through the window as I push the chamber back into place with the heel of my hand. Theo is in his window across the street, eyes wide and waving around a mirror with a flashlight pointed at it, some kind of Boy Scout trick to get my attention. I give him the finger, jamming it up into the air hard and then pressing it to the glass as my rage at his betrayal flares up in me.

  I expected him to have dropped the act already, but his hair is on end and his face is flushed as he tosses the mirror and picks up his phone, waving his other arm and pointing at me, waving and then pointing at the phone. I can see that confused brow knit of his from all the way over here.

  I shake my head, pissed off that he has the nerve to look legitimately distressed, but I don’t take my eyes off him even as I stick the Ziploc baggie of bullets into my pocket.

  He bangs his windowpane and because his window is open, I hear him when he yells something in frustration.

  “Please!”

  And because I’m not my mother’s daughter, just her diluted progeny, I second-guess myself. One doubt is all it takes. I pick up the phone when it vibrates again.

  “Sydney, what the—” He reins himself in, and through the window I see him drop his hand onto his hip in an almost comical way. “You need to get out of your house now. He’s downstairs. Can you go down a fire escape? He’s in
the house.”

  His panic hits me like a wave through the phone, so real, or maybe, like the phone call that trapped my mother, just some fast talking designed to lure me into a trap. Theo knows how to do that—talk and talk and make you feel safe.

  “Who is he? Why should I believe you after your little conversation with Kim? I saw you texting her while you were in the kitchen! I read the messages.”

  I watch him, expecting him to show some sign that the jig is up, but his exasperated expression doesn’t change. “I remembered where I’d first heard the name VerenTech and was looking up something. What messages?”

  “The ones that popped up on the iPad in the living room, honeycheeks. Next to Drea’s air conditioner. The one missing from her room.”

  “That’s Kim’s iPad. And her new air conditioner.” He shakes his head. “And ‘honeycheeks’ has never been in my vocabulary. The closest I’ve gotten is ‘Howdy Doody.’”

  I want to believe him so badly it hurts. The possibility that everyone has betrayed me is too much to deal with.

  Theo suddenly dives mostly out of view, then the top of his head from his eyes up returns. “He’s on the second floor now, in Drea’s apartment. The fake Con Ed guy. He was in the cab of the moving truck and I saw him get out and go into your house. Please.” His voice breaks. “I know we’re in this insane situation and nothing makes sense, but I wasn’t talking to Kim. I have no idea what Kim has to do with any of this. I like you and I wouldn’t try to hurt you. The only thing I did is—”

  “What? What did you do?”

  “I’ve been stealing from the rich people in the surrounding neighborhoods,” he says in a rush. “Not like Robin Hood, the money was for me. The uptick in car break-ins and house burglaries people have been talking about was me. And one of the guys I use to fence the stuff asked me if I had any leads on real estate. I told him there was an empty lot.”

  “What?” My grip on the gun tightens.

  “He asked me if I knew any places going for cheap in my neighborhood, to keep an eye out because he’d heard the VerenTech deal was going to go through. I told him there was an empty lot being used as a garden because I assumed he’d ask to buy like a regular person. I don’t know if he had anything to do with this stuff, I swear. I swear, Syd.”