Read Online Someone Is Watching by Joy Fielding - Free Book Online Page A

I’ve been asleep less than an hour. At least I think it’s been less than an hour since Claire and her daughter left to get groceries. If they were here at all. Maybe they came yesterday or the day before. Perhaps they were never here. Perhaps I only dreamt them.
    I get out of bed, throw an old gray sweater over my shoulders and walk toward the window, grabbing my binoculars from thetop of my nightstand as I go, lifting them to my eyes and adjusting their focus as I scan the exterior of the glass buildings opposite my window and direct them to the street below.
    It’s not quite six o’clock, and the streets are busy, people rushing off in all directions, leaving work, heading home for dinner. I see a man and woman embracing on the corner, then follow them as they continue down the street, arm in arm. From this distance, I can’t make out their faces, but their posture tells me they’re happy, relaxed with one another. I try to remember what that feels like. I can’t.
    Tell me what you see,
a soft voice whispers in my ear. My mother’s voice.
    And just like that, I am transported from the bedroom of my glass house on the twenty-third floor of a downtown high-rise into the master bedroom of my parents’ palatial estate in South Beach. My bare toes sink into the plush white broadloom as I stand by the window and gaze through the binoculars into the spectacular garden beyond, reporting on the exotic variety of birds beyond the glass. It is three years ago, a year since my mother received the devastating diagnosis that the cancer we prayed had disappeared had instead returned and that it was terminal.
    In four months, she will be dead.
    “I see a couple of herons and a gorgeous spoon-billed platypus,” I tell her. “Come.” I move quickly to her side.
    But she is too weak to get out of bed, and I watch her suppress a grimace when I try to move her. She is so frail, I fear she will disintegrate in my hands, like ancient parchment. “I’ll see them next time,” she says, tears filling her eyes. We both know there will be no next time.
    “Would you like me to read to you?” I ask, settling into the small, peach-colored chair beside her bed and opening the mystery novel I’ve been reading to her, a few chapters every day.
    My mother always loved mysteries. When other children were listening to bedtime stories about Snow White and Cinderella, she was reading me the novels of Raymond Chandler and Agatha Christie.
    Now our roles have reversed.
    Occasionally we watch TV, crime shows mostly, anything to keep her mind off her pain and my mind off the fact I am losing her. “It’s uncanny,” she’d tell me, “the way you always know who did it.”
    When did that power desert me?
I wonder as the ringing of the telephone yanks me from the past like a fish hooked at the end of a reel.
    “It’s Finn, at the concierge desk.” I try to still the rapid beating of my heart as he continues. “Your sister and your niece are on their way up with what looks like a year’s supply of groceries.”
    “Thank you.” I realize I’m hungry, that I haven’t eaten anything all day.
    “You can tell them to put the empty carts back into the elevator when they’re done with them,” he says, and I say I will, although seconds later, I have no idea what he said.
    I wait by the door to my apartment, listening for the sounds of the elevator down the hall. I watch through the peephole as Claire and Jade come into view, each pushing a shopping cart, both carts overflowing with bags of groceries.
    “We bought out the store,” Jade announces as I open the door. “Hope you’re not a vegan.”
    “Thought I’d grill us some steaks,” Claire says as she starts unloading her cart. She hands two of the bags to me.
    I stand there, not sure what she expects me to do with them.
    “You can start unpacking,” she tells me.
    I want to tell her that I don’t have the strength, that I don’t know where anything goes, that this whole grocery