By Barbara Westwood Diehl
Wanda likes to think of herself as a citizen on patrol. From her bedroom window, she watches one of the McGuire kids. A tiny girl in a Dora the Explorer t-shirt, flower barrettes clipped all over her head, poking around the trash cans in the Lemmon Street alley. Looking for who knows what. A tough little thing, this McGuire. Like a blue chicory flower in the concrete. Pops out of nowhere.
Wanda raises the Venetian blinds, opens the window, and props it up with a volume of Britannica so it won’t come crashing down. Through her binoculars, she watches the child wander up and down the alley, tugging the plastic handle of a pull-toy behind her, one of those toys with popping balls, like the Pop-O-Matic board game Wanda played with her kids when they were little. Trouble, that was the name of it.
Every few feet, the pull-toy hits a bump in the concrete and falls on its side. The little girl pops it right back up again. Keeps those balls popping. Like yellow ragwort, purple thistle, up from the cracks.
Wanda swings her binoculars up and down the alley. Not one adult in sight. Neglect is what it is. Criminal. But she remembers what Jo Dean always says. She owns half the little box houses on the alley, so she should know. What Jo Dean says about their lives—you may have the best of intentions, but people don’t take kindly to being fixed. A citizen on patrol doesn’t fix people. But the Pop-O-Matic pull-toy pops something loose in Wanda. Trouble. That game of pressing a plastic bubble and moving the pieces around the board toward home. Home. She wants the girl to go home.
She hears the crunch of tires rounding the corner from Carey Street onto Lemmon. It’s a convertible, a big one, yellow hood the length of a house, with music pulsing so loudly the driver couldn’t possibly hear the Pop-O-Matic or see a chicory-sized kid in the sun glare of metal cans.
Wanda sticks her head out through the Britannica-propped window and screams, “Stop. You’ll hit the baby.” But the driver doesn’t stop.
She pushes away from the chair, binoculars swinging from the strap around her neck, and runs down the carpeted stairs. Her hand glides along the polished rail and she rounds the landing—pushing away the image of a tiny body against a car grill—to the stairs to the first floor to the foyer and on through the house. She bursts through the kitchen door and runs along the brick walk and out through the gate onto Lemmon Street.
The car has stopped. The music is still pulsing loudly enough to rattle the aluminum trash can lids, and Wanda feels her heart pressing in on her. About to pop. The driver is slouched sideways in his seat with an arm slung over his door. A McGuire. Although Wanda is only a hood’s length from them, he doesn’t seem to see her.
Where is the child? That child with barrettes in her dandelion hair? Wanda’s eyes sweep the front of the car and the alley. No child. With her heart still fighting the music, she bends down and looks under the car. Not there.
Then she hears it. The Pop-O-Matic popping. The toy emerges from behind a mattress leaning against a house, popping blue, red, and yellow balls. Then the child herself.
Wanda exhales. Her heart still isn’t right, and her vision is a cloud of blue, red, and yellow. The binoculars strap around her neck is choking her. She lifts them up and over her head, and they fall from her hand onto the hood of the car, where they leave a dent like closed eyes.
The man in the convertible rises above the windshield and the damage and all her good intentions and raises a hand toward Wanda. Flash of metal in his fingers. Pop. Now she has his attention. Pop.
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Barbara Westwood Diehl is senior editor of The Baltimore Review. Her fiction and poetry appear in a variety of journals, including Fractured Lit, South Florida Poetry Journal, Poetry South, Painted Bride Quarterly, Five South, Allium, Split Rock Review, Blink-Ink, Midway, Free State Review, Ghost Parachute, Pithead Chapel, and New World Writing Quarterly.