JASON STARR - Panic Attack

Dana said, “I hope you’re right, but I didn’t get that vibe. I think if he had any suspects he would’ve- Can you please listen to me for God’s sake?”

“I’m sorry,” Adam said, still looking at his phone. “I have important stuff to take care of.”

“I don’t get it,” she said. “Why do you even care about work right now?”

“What am I supposed to do? Not go on with my life?”

“You act like… I don’t know… like you don’t care. I mean, I’m telling you I’m worried. I’m afraid he’s going to come back tonight and-”

“He’s not coming back.”

“How do you know?”

“Because why would he? That’s a surefire way to get caught, rob the place you already robbed.”

“Yeah, and what makes you think the guy’s a freaking Rhodes scholar? We’re talking about a criminal here, for God’s sake. He’s not necessarily thinking logically.”

Adam considered this, then said, “Even if he does come back, he’s not getting in. We’re changing the locks in an hour, the alarm guy’s coming down later to change the code. There’s no way anybody’s getting into this house again.”

“You don’t know th- And can you stop staring at that thing?” she nearly screamed. “It’s so goddamn rude.”

Now he looked at her and said, “What? What do you want me to do?”

“I’m scared,” she said. “I don’t think it’s enough.”

“It’s a state- of- the- art alarm system.”

“That didn’t help us last night.”

“Okay, I have an idea, let’s get a watchdog.”

He was saying this facetiously. She was allergic to dogs, and he knew she had no intention of taking immunotherapy shots for the rest of her life.

“Maybe we should move,” she said.

“What?” He couldn’t believe she was even suggesting this. She knew how much he loved the house, how much it meant to him.

“The house is worth a lot now,” she said. “Marissa’s out of school, will be on her own eventually, and I’ve been wanting to move anyway. We could move someplace small, a condo maybe in the city or-”

“You’re out of your mind,” Adam said.

“Why does wanting to move mean I’m out of my mind?”

“Because our house was robbed,” he said, “it’s not like it’s been contaminated with nuclear waste. How many other houses in the neighborhood have been robbed over the past couple of years? Did everybody else just pack up and move?”

“Everybody else didn’t kill one of the robbers.”

Adam glared at her hard and said, “Okay, here we go, finally, I knew this was coming. I’d appreciate it if you stopped it with your passive- aggressiveness and evasiveness. If you have something to say, please just come out and say it.”

“You know exactly what I want to say.”

“Then what’re you waiting for? Come on, let’s go, I want to hear it.”

Her lips moved and her mouth started to open a few times, as if she were about to speak, but she kept catching herself. Then she finally let out a deep breath and said, “This is ridiculous,” and marched out of the room melodramatically.

“Brilliant,” Adam said, and he picked up a pillow off the settee and flung it across the room. Then his BlackBerry started ringing and he saw lauren on the caller ID. Snapping into his upbeat work persona, he said, “Hey, Lauren, what a coincidence, I was just about to shoot you off an e-mail.”

From the very beginning, the Blooms had been very good to Gabriela. Twelve years ago, when she came to New York from Ec ua dor, she was just nineteen and very shy, and she spoke only a few words of English, and she didn’t think she’d ever find a good job in America. But the Blooms hired her because Gabriela’s sister, Beatrice, who was working for another family in Forest Hills Gardens, told them that Gabriela was a good maid and asked them to please give her a chance. Gabriela was very grateful to the Blooms for giving her a good job when no else would, and she always told them how she hoped to repay them someday.

Although Gabriela had worked as a maid for two years at home in Quito, she’d never had to clean a house the size of the Blooms’. The first day she felt like such a fool; she didn’t even know how to turn on the vacuum cleaner. Some families might’ve lost patience and fired her right away, but the Blooms were very kind and understanding. The first few days, Mrs. Bloom cleaned the whole house with her, explaining how everything was done and where everything went, and she didn’t lose patience at all even though Gabriela couldn’t understand most of what she was saying.

When Gabriela started to work for the Blooms, Marissa was just ten years old, in fourth grade. Marissa had a babysitter who still took care of her part of the time, but sometimes when the babysitter was sick Mrs. Bloom would ask Gabriela to go pick Marissa up from school or take her to play with her friends. Gabriela liked Marissa, she was such a sweet little girl, and she liked Mr. Bloom, too. Sometimes he sat down with her in the kitchen and helped her with her English, teaching her new words. He was a very good man who worked hard and who loved his family very much. She hoped that someday she could find a man for herself like Mr. Bloom and have a family as nice as his.

Her first few months in New York, Gabriela was living with Beatrice and her family in Jackson Heights, Queens, sharing a room with Beatrice’s daughter. But then at a party one night she met a Brazilian man named Angel. He was very handsome and a very hard worker. He was a waiter at a diner in Manhattan, but he had big dreams. He wanted to open his own restaurant one day. He took her dancing in the Village a few times, and he knew how to do the mambo. They started doing everything together- going out all the time, going to Jones Beach, or just staying home at his apartment- and that summer he got her pregnant. He didn’t want to get married, which was okay with her. He was young, just twenty, and she knew how scared young guys got. She thought she’d have the baby and then in a couple of years they’d get married.

But when Gabriela was getting ready to have her baby, Angel disappeared. At first she thought something bad happened to him; maybe he got hurt or something. The people at the diner said they didn’t know where he was, he just stopped coming to work. She got Beatrice’s husband, Manny, to go looking for him, but he couldn’t find him anywhere, and then she called the police. They said that chances were he probably just ran away. She couldn’t believe that Angel would do something like that, but then, a few days before she had to go to the hospital, Manny found out from one of Angel’s friends that Angel was living in the Bronx with a new girlfriend.

Gabriela had her baby, a beautiful girl, Manuela, named after Gabriela’s grandmother. She was worried that it would be hard to work and take care of her baby at the same time, but the Blooms were so nice, letting her take Manuela to work with her every day. The Blooms got her more work with other families in the neighborhood, and pretty soon she was working five days a week, making enough money to move into her own apartment in Jackson Heights. For the next few years, Gabriela was working hard, making money, but it was hard not having a man in her life and a father for Manuela.

When Manuela was about five years old, Gabriela met Juan. He was forty- two, his wife had died of cancer, and he had two boys. He wasn’t very handsome- he was fat and had a big crooked nose- but he was a very good man and he loved Gabriela and always bought her flowers and told her how beautiful she was. When he asked her to marry him, she said yes.

Everything seemed so happy; she finally had a good man to take care of her and her daughter. Then, one morning, she was working at the Blooms’ when she got a phone call from her sister. Beatrice was screaming hysterically, “Dios mio, Dios mio, Dios mio!” and then she told Gabriela that a taxi had hit Juan while he was crossing a street in Manhattan. Mrs. Bloom took Gabriela to the hospital, but when they got there Juan was already dead.