The Neighbors Are Watching (26 page)

Joe opened his window to let some air into the suddenly stifling car. A gust of smoky wind blew over him. The whole county still smelled like a barbecue gone wrong, he thought. It was going to take forever to get that charred odor out of the air. He was taking the Sassafras exit now, just minutes away from the airport, which was located squarely in the middle of the city. Overhead, planes flew so low over the freeway you could almost see the passengers inside.

It was a forty-five-minute flight from Las Vegas to San Diego, so casual that people flew it in their pajamas and flip-flops. Joe wondered if Yvonne had ever made this flight before and what she was thinking at this very moment. He snaked through the brief traffic jam at the airport entrance and headed to the Southwest Airlines terminal, slowed, and searched for Yvonne in the clumps of people waiting with their bags resting against their legs. He felt a small rush of panic when he realized that he might not recognize her. He felt hot, sweaty, and gritty. His T-shirt was sticking to his back. This was the most cursed fall ever—a season of heat and fire that felt as if it was never going to end. He swept the entrances once more and found nobody who could possibly be Yvonne. He advanced farther, still nothing. There was no place to stop so Joe moved up, preparing to make another loop around the terminal. But just as he was about to merge and disappear into traffic he saw her—completely different and yet somehow
matching his memory exactly—and he swerved right so that he could pull up to the curb.

It took Yvonne a little longer to find him in the thick line of cars picking up and dropping off passengers outside the terminal, so he had a chance to study her a little, make all the internal adjustments he needed, and then compose his face so that he appeared casual and neutral when she finally saw him. The first thing Joe noticed was that she had gained a little weight around her hips and thighs, but not enough for anyone to classify her as overweight. She had been very slender—if not skinny—when he knew her, and now she just looked a little more solid. Her hair was pulled back from her face in a tight twist at the back of her head, which emphasized her high cheekbones but also gave her a severe, almost angry look. He could see the weight of seventeen years in her expression and behind her eyes, even from this distance. There was disappointment there and maybe discontent and worry in the turned-down corners of her mouth. But her skin and her features still looked youthful. You wouldn’t know she was over forty, he thought. Not at all. What surprised him—and it even surprised him that he would notice such a thing—was what she was wearing. Or at least how she was wearing it. She was dressed like a dowdy schoolmarm, a conservative matron much older than she was. He didn’t know which was least attractive—the old-lady brown polyester pants, the cream and tan mix-and-match chiffon blouse with the ruffle at the neck, or the sensible shoes. They all made him think of Geritol and mothballs. The worst thing was that she looked so
dated
and so absolutely opposite the stylish woman he’d known. It was so strange to him that he almost believed the clothes she wore now were a costume for her—some part she was playing in a reality show of someone else’s life.

He was pondering the reasons for this transformation in Yvonne when she finally spied his car, then him, and caught his gaze with her own. There was the briefest look of startled surprise in her eyes, then a deeper recognition, then finally a small, tight smile as she wheeled her bag over to the car. Joe popped the trunk and got out of the driver’s seat, coming around to
meet her, put her bag away, and open the passenger door for her. There was a moment of excruciating awkwardness as they met on the passenger side of the car; neither one of them knew whether to embrace, shake hands, or even touch at all. A warm wind whipped between them carrying the smell of jet fuel with it.

“Hi, Joe,” she said.

“Hello, Yvonne,” he said and gave her a clumsy half embrace with one arm as he reached for her bag with the other. “Let me get this for you. I’ll put it in the trunk.”

“Thanks.”

Joe loaded her suitcase—a flower-patterned cloth affair that made him as sad as the rest of her attire—into the trunk, realizing as he did that he had forgotten to tidy up the posters in the back of the car. He ushered her into the passenger seat, positioning his body so that she wouldn’t be able to see them, and felt like a moron when she had to sidle past him to get in. Finally, he got back in behind the wheel, pulled away from the curb, and merged with the traffic heading out. The inside of the car was full of the smell of gardenia, not mothballs, but also not a scent he’d associated with her. It wasn’t unpleasant, but it made him vaguely uneasy.

“It’s hot,” she said. “It’s like Vegas here.”

“It’s been really bad,” he said. “It just hasn’t let up.” He felt himself sweating again as he flicked quick glances in her direction. He wondered if she’d seen the posters. She couldn’t have or surely they would have skipped the weather altogether, their seventeen-year estrangement notwithstanding.

“You look good, Joe.”

“So do you,” he said quickly. He smiled and looked over at her, longer this time, and realized that it was true. Aside from the clothes, she was still beautiful in that way that had hypnotized him so long ago. And now in her face he also saw Diana for the first time, and it pierced him sharply and unexpectedly. His eyes stung and watered, and for a horrified second he
thought he might be crying. He blinked and quickly shifted his gaze back to the road.

They drove in hot, fraught silence for several minutes. Biting the inside of his lip, Joe stared straight ahead as he navigated back onto the freeway. The traffic was lighter heading north than it had been on the way down. He considered pointing out landmarks along the way, but stopped himself when he realized it would make him sound like a half-assed tour guide. Then he thought about asking Yvonne if she was hungry and wanted to stop somewhere for lunch, even though it was well into the afternoon, but the words and how to phrase them got tangled up in his brain. Something about her physical proximity after all this time was frying his neural circuits. Memories of their time together kept sliding through his mind unbidden: little flashing images of the night they met (at a party when he bummed a cigarette from her), a romantic but interrupted picnic dinner they had on the beach that washed away in a sudden high tide, watching her sleep in the gray light of early morning. These intimate pictures were strange and uncomfortable because at the same time the woman sitting next to him was a stranger.

They were approaching La Jolla when he finally turned to look at her again. He cleared his throat, about to tell her that they’d be home in a few minutes, but the words died in his throat. Yvonne was weeping. Her cheeks were wet and shiny with tears and her mouth trembled with held-back sobs. Her hands were clenched in her lap. Instinctively, he turned his head away as if he had been caught intruding on a moment of private grief, but then looked back at her again, searching for words—any words—that would soothe her. She met his glance, her eyes, the burnt amber color that he had remembered, full of water and sorrow.

“Yvonne …”

“Where is she, Joe? Where is my girl?”

“I don’t … I wish I knew.”

“Why don’t you know? You have to know.
Somebody
has to know!”

“We’re going to find her, Yvonne.”

She wiped her eyes with a quick stroke of her hand and gave him a look so intense he almost recoiled. But he couldn’t read what was in it, couldn’t tell if it was hatred or fear or anger or all of those things. Or none of them. She drew a long shuddering breath and he watched as she composed herself, erasing the anguish from her face.

“You’d better tell me everything,” she said.

K
evin wanted to die.

He lay on his bed with a pillow over his head to block out the light and Kanye blasting through his headphones to block out everything else. He was listening to “Stronger,” a song about overcoming obstacles. But Kevin wasn’t buying that message.

Better to die than try to overcome. Really die—like blackness, never-wake-up die. Finished and over. He didn’t think he was scared. He tried to imagine what it would be like and couldn’t. He knew it wasn’t going to be a tunnel and a white light and angels greeting him on the other side. He knew that because he’d come this close. Maybe he even had died for a minute or two. That’s what his father had said, but Kevin knew he was trying to be as dramatic as possible to get Kevin to understand the fucking
gravity
of his
actions
. Either way, he’d been right there at the doorway to eternity, just hadn’t gone through it. And he didn’t remember anything about getting to that doorway except feeling so fucked up that it seemed like the walls were dissolving. Then there was just nothing until he woke up. The worst wake-up ever. He hadn’t really tried to kill himself—that wasn’t the point—but his very first thought when he came out of that nowhere state was disappointment that he hadn’t succeeded in doing it. What kind
of loser couldn’t even get an overdose right? Exactly. Which made him think that if he actually
tried
to do it he might fuck it up even worse. If only just wishing you were dead was enough to kill you. But then, Kevin guessed, the world would probably be full of dead people. Because as far as he could tell, nobody on Earth was having a particularly good time.

Barring death, Kevin wanted desperately to get high. That he couldn’t—that he was being watched and monitored like he was under house arrest or something compounded his misery to the point that it almost hurt. No, it
did
hurt. He could feel the pain spreading through his rib cage and all the way to his heart. Unless that was still the bruising caused by his father’s aggressive attempt at CPR. The asshole probably
tried
to break his ribs.

“You owe me your life
twice,
” he had told Kevin when they’d gotten home from the hospital. “I
gave
you life and then I
saved
your life. I don’t think you understand that.”

Kevin didn’t think it was possible to despise his father more than he had that night at the Montanas’ when the man had ordered him home like he was a little boy on the playground, disrespecting him down to his bones. But when he’d said that about Kevin owing him double for the very breath he took, Kevin felt his hate grow, gaining the force and gravity of a black hole, sucking in all the other feelings he might ever have had for his father and destroying them completely.

He wished the man weren’t his biological father so that he’d have a valid excuse for loathing him this much. If only his mother had had an affair and he was the secret result. He didn’t look much like his dad, so it was possible. On the other hand, he didn’t look much like his mother either, except that their eyes were the same color blue and they both sunburned easily. But that could apply to anyone, really. And his mother wasn’t the type to have an affair—she lived in fear of his father as it was. She’d never have the kind of guts it took to pull off something like an affair and pass off someone else’s baby as his. Still, it was a fantasy Kevin spun regularly, the kind of thing that he’d actually consider a gift from his mother if
only she would offer it. But no. He was stuck with the fucking son of a bitch.

His mother had really screwed up on that one.

But Kevin didn’t hate his mother for that. He didn’t hate her, period. And if he really thought about it, he wasn’t even truly angry at her. What he couldn’t believe was how she refused to stand up for him with his father. He didn’t know what to call the feeling this gave him, but it was worse than anger or hate, and he couldn’t do anything to get rid of it. He wished his mother would realize what an asshole his father really was and just leave him. He treated her so badly—why couldn’t she see that? She just rolled over every time his father barked at her to do something or made fun of her in some little way that she didn’t seem to get or care about. The worst thing, though, and what had been happening ever since Kevin could remember, was that she never,
never
had his back even when she
knew
he was in the right. A long time ago, he had been able to talk to his mother about what was going on in his life and she seemed to listen to him. She even seemed to understand how he felt about things and more often than not she took his side. But then when it came time to defend him to his dad, she always just folded up and disappeared. He could never figure out why because when she disagreed with his father about other things—and yes, they were little things like when to do yard work and what to have for dinner—she didn’t have a problem saying so. But when his father and he were involved, she just seemed to go blank, turn off inside, and not come back until everything was all smoothed over. It was such a betrayal.

He’d never been able to tell anyone about this because he thought it made him sound like such a baby—until Diana. She had her own theories. “You know your mom’s totally wasted, right?” she said one day after talking to his mother in the kitchen.

“What are you talking about?” he said, half-laughing because Diana was always throwing crazy shit out there like that.

“I’m serious,” Diana said. “I don’t know what it is, but she’s on something. Don’t you know? More importantly, where can we get some?”

“No way,” he said. Diana smiled and shrugged like whatever he wanted to believe was fine with her. But now he was thinking maybe she was on to something because maybe that disconnected blankness of his mother’s had some kind of chemical explanation. And if there was one thing Diana knew about, it was being wasted. She knew about every prescription drug there was and she had plenty of stories about getting trashed on almost all of them. She was an expert—made his own experiences look like kindergarten shit. Diana really, really loved to get high and she talked about it all the time. But she was pretty good about resisting before Zoë came. She was trying … and she wasn’t doing any of the really strong shit while she was pregnant, just a little weed and not really anything else. At least never with him. He wouldn’t have let her anyway. That’s what nobody seemed to understand—he’d done his best to protect Diana. She’d been through so much shit in her life, she really needed somebody. How did that make
him
a bad influence on
her
? He was a
good
influence before Zoë came. But after Zoë … He didn’t know.