Cal was in the shower; he had five minutes before the timer went off and the hot water turned cold again. She could hear him singing the song about the doggy in the window; it had been playing the last time they went to the Central Shopping Plaza. His voice sounded decent—deep yet sweet—but it was so unlike him that she laughed. How appropriate. He wasn’t Cal anymore, anyway. She was supposed to call him Gray.
Frida had not been sleeping well since they’d arrived. Apparently, a memory-foam mattress and two semifirm hypoallergenic pillows couldn’t help Frida sleep through the humidifier sighing on its pedestal across the room or the bothersome glow of streetlights outside. The fridge downstairs liked to make ice at two in the morning, and at dawn, the paperboy came down the block on his bicycle; Frida could hear him every day as he pulled copies of the newsletter out of his canvas bag and threw them onto the lawns. From the bedroom window it looked like a tiny white flute had been tossed onto the dewy grass below.
Last night had been especially tough. The police had taken the neighbor’s son away. They’d been stealthy about it, or as stealthy as you can be when you’re throwing a grown man into the back of an armored vehicle. Mrs. Doyle’s son had been picked up because he was a drug addict. That was obvious; his downward spiral had saddened the whole neighborhood. For five years, Frida was told, he’d been the basketball coach for Pines West. Two years ago they’d won the championship, played against five other Communities in the Western and Northwest Territories. Frida had gotten used to saying that: the Territories. They were technically still part of the U.S., but those two letters sounded so antiquated, so inaccurate.
“It’s not like the United States government contributes anything to our well-being,” Cal once said to Mrs. Doyle. He was very good at repeating rhetoric from the newsletter, but in a way that sounded fresh. “They can’t tax us if we don’t depend on them for anything. Besides, the government’s a wreck.”
It had been clear that Mrs. Doyle’s son wasn’t doing well. For one, he kept skipping practice—his players dribbling balls listlessly for an hour before heading home—and sometimes he’d go missing for days. Some claimed that the latter wasn’t true, that Mrs. Doyle had been hiding him in her basement, to protect him from his urges, or to keep anyone from seeing him high. But that couldn’t be, because she was the one who had told the authorities. “It’s best for him,” she told Frida. “And for everyone. We can’t have drugs crossing into our borders.”
Frida didn’t know if it was heroin or crack or what, but people were getting it into Pines, and the authorities wanted to eradicate the problem as quickly as they could. Their philosophy was: get rid of the customer base to get rid of the product. Anyone who didn’t follow the rules was thrown out. Easy as pie, people said. The good residents of Pines weren’t paying luxury rates to live among criminals. The damaged ones were not welcome.
She ran her legs against the sheets and plowed her cheek into her pillow—she couldn’t get enough of this pillow.
Someone had to be doing undercover work to try to identify the smugglers, Frida thought.
That, or the authorities were funneling the drugs into Pines themselves. They would sniff out the weak ones, the Problem Children, as everyone called them, no matter their age. She wanted to ask Cal about it, but he was worried—paranoid maybe—that the cameras and microphones on every street corner would pick up their conversations, even inside their home, and so she kept quiet. If she wanted to talk to him about anything serious, Cal would only allow it if they sat on the fuzzy blue mat in their downstairs bathroom with the shower running. Besides the walk-in closet, it was the only room in their house without a window, and Cal preferred it because they could run the loud ceiling vent to further mask their conversation. Frida had to lean forward to hear what Cal was telling her.
The signs were posted at every corner: SMILE, YOU’RE ON CAMERA. She used to see that same message at liquor stores and trashy clothing shops in L.A., except these had been custom-made for Pines, the words written in a navy-blue cursive; beneath them a doll stared out with large, blue eyes. If Frida didn’t know better, she might want one of those signs to hang above her fireplace. They were stylish. The Design Department at Pines was the best in the Western Territory.