“A little chaos never hurt anybody,” he said softly, moving Psyche’s foot in a slow, lazy circle, as she watched him, expectant and oddly grown-up, like a patient with a physical therapist. Irina emerged from the bathroom, and I decided to use it too. When I stood up, my legs were on fire with the return of blood.
Wylie said, “It’s not chaos. It’s a calculated gesture.”
“Sure,” Angus said, “that’s what I meant.”
I was surprised to find the bathroom clean and smelling faintly of orange, with signs of Psyche everywhere: a bottle of organic baby shampoo, a spotless tub, a folded stack of unbleached cotton towels. Some water usage was okay, apparently, at least where babies were involved. Lifting the toilet cover, though, I saw that flushing was only an occasional affair. When I returned to the living room Irina and Wylie were conferring and Psyche was standing in Angus’s lap, his hands around her chubby body. She punched him in the face and laughed. He stuck out his tongue and waggled his ears, rolling her gently from side to side, as if his lap were an ocean and his motions the waves.
We didn’t leave the apartment until well past midnight. Irina’s job, she told me, was to stand watch in front of the houses. If anybody showed up she’d distract them, explaining that she was trying to calm her crying baby by walking her around the neighborhood.
“What if the baby isn’t crying?” I said.
“It is often not so difficult to arrange,” she said.
I drove the Caprice, Irina holding Psyche beside me, Berto staring glumly out the window in the backseat. My passengers smelled ripe and organic, like farm animals or produce just starting to rot. I was getting used to it, but rolled my windows down nonetheless. Angus, Wylie, and Stan were ahead of us in the Plumbarama van, and I followed them through traffic, feeling like a spy. There was a weird lightness in my head, neither adrenaline nor dizziness, just the loose, hazy excitement that comes from throwing good sense to the winds. Letting go of things — fear, logic, laziness, whatever — I turned on the radio, and a pop song bounced into the car. Irina swayed along with the beat, Psyche gazing dreamily up at her from her sling.
“You don’t have a car seat for her?” I said.
“No,” Irina answered without stopping her swaying.
The nighttime city was painted in lurid hues. The neon of stores, the lights of intersections, the custom paint jobs and trembling basses of cruising cars. Then ahead of me the purple van signaled a right-hand turn and we left all those colors behind. In a residential neighborhood the streets turned hushed and pasteclass="underline" brown houses, pink flowers, the buttery glow of streetlights. Even the air itself seemed a lighter shade. I switched off the radio. The wind carried the smell of watered gardens into the car.
Psyche cooed and garbled a private language, delivering her own speech on the status of babies in car rides after dark. “Guala, guala,” she said, or words to that effect.
“There’s no gorillas here,” Irina said. “Don’t be silly.”
“That we know of,” Berto said from the back.
The van kept signaling, making lefts and rights through streets that all looked the same to me: row after row of the Albuquerque houses I remembered so clearly, with their flat roofs and windows trimmed in white or turquoise blue. I could picture each one inside, its hardwood floors and tile accents and the phone niche built into the hallway, with a shelf for the phone book carved out beneath it. “What are they doing?” I said.
“You can let us out if you want,” Berto said. In the rearview mirror I could see his glum, jowly face. “We’ll go the rest of the way on foot. If you’re, like, having doubts.”
“Berto,” Irina said.
“I’m just saying, man, she doesn’t have to come.”
“I want to be here.” And as I said it, I realized it was true. I wanted to know if they could get away with it, what would happen after, what conceivable difference any of it could make.
“We don’t even know her,” Berto blurted from the back. “Remember that last chick Angus brought along, Tiffany, when we were trying to break into the computer-chip plant that time? She was freakin’ crazy, man, running around screaming her head off about how we should free the planet, free the animals from the zoo, free the children from the schools. And Wylie was all ‘Shut that woman up!’”
“Berto,” Irina said.
“But Angus just laughed, ’cause he thought it was funny, right, like everything’s funny? Me and Wylie had to drag her away in the end, man.”
“This is different,” Irina said.
“How is it different?” Berto said. He saw me in the rearview mirror and looked away. “Nothing against you, like, specifically or anything.”
“It’s different,” Irina said sweetly, “because this is Lynn.”
Gratitude surged through me, and I turned to her and smiled. Psyche garbled her agreement. I caught Berto’s eye again, and held it. “I’m Wylie’s sister,” I told him.
The van finally pulled to the curb on a street canopied by a tall line of elms and serene with wealth. Porch lights glowed on the faces of tall, gabled houses, reflecting off large, gleaming vehicles parked in the driveways and casting faint circles on lush green lawns. I parked a few feet back and cut the engine. It was almost one in the morning, and I wondered if everybody else had taken naps. Angus, Wylie, and Stan were scurrying across someone’s front yard, keeping to the shadows, carrying a small blue machine I guessed was a pump. Berto scrambled out the back and set off after them, and soon they were climbing a fence at the side of the house, clanging the pump against it, a terrible noise. Down the street, a dog issued a warning howl.
“This is going to end badly,” I said.
“Everything will be fine,” Irina said. She got out of the car and stood beneath the trees, her two hands clasped beneath the base of the sling, and I joined her. In the driveway was a small, sporty Miata.
“Why this house, anyway?” I asked her. I could hear the sound of splashing, Berto cursing, Wylie hissing at him to shut up.
“All these families have two cars at the minimum,” she explained. “Usually one is a large SUV.”
“What if that’s parked in the garage and everybody’s home?”
Irina frowned. “I am thinking this has been part of Wylie’s research. Also the lights.” She reached into the sling and pulled out a piece of graph paper, a chart filled with scratchy handwriting I recognized as Wylie’s. Here he’d listed addresses, the presence of cars and their makes, the times lights went on and off.
“When the house lights follow the same pattern every day, that is when you know they’re on a timer,” Irina said. “And that no one is in the home.”
“Clever,” I said.
She beamed at me. “Yes!”
Then, from the backyard, I suddenly heard water rushing like a river. Glancing at my watch, I couldn’t understand why Irina wasn’t more nervous. Berto emerged from the shadows and fetched something from the back of the van, then dashed off again. It seemed like hours later when Angus and Wylie reappeared, carrying the pump between them, grinning like maniacs.
“Man,” Wylie said, “I wish we had more than one pump.”
“Only so much I could do,” Angus said.
Berto stuck a sign — this was what he’d pulled out of the van, an unfolded piece of cardboard taped to a little wooden cross — into the front lawn: DESERT, it said, in black marker.
Everybody was happy now. We drove on in a convoy to another house, where Irina and I set up at our posts again, the Caprice and the van parked in a cul-de-sac just around the corner. I was almost starting to enjoy myself when the problems started. I was listening to the loud suctioning of the pump — relieved that the houses were spread far apart — when there was a sudden crash, followed by whispers and soft laughter that clearly came from Angus. Berto came running around for some tool in the car, and I asked him what had happened.