The Neighbors Are Watching (27 page)

Diana had been getting so weird. She told him she loved him. But he never had the courage to ask her
how
she loved him—as a boyfriend, a brother, or just a friend. Okay, not a brother. Diana acted a lot of different ways, but not like a sister. Sisters and brothers didn’t do what they’d done. Or what she’d let him do. But friends did. Friends with benefits. That was always what he was afraid they were. But it felt so good to have her close, to have her there. To talk to her. He never wanted to ruin it. He would have given her anything, would have done anything to keep it just like that forever.

Kevin rolled over and instinctively reached for his cell phone to call her. And then he remembered. His father had cut off his cell phone. And Diana was gone. The pain in his chest got sharper. He wanted to talk to her so badly. He
needed
to talk to her. He remembered what she said and it hurt all over again.
Don’t call me for a while. It’s better if we don’t hang out right now
.

He pressed his knuckles into his closed eyes, but he couldn’t get rid of the pictures in his brain. He was kissing her for the first time again, over and over. He couldn’t stop remembering and it was killing him. She never asked him if he’d been with another girl before her. She knew and she didn’t care.

“It’s fine,” she said. “It’s all fine. Better like this.”

He didn’t know what he was doing, but it didn’t matter. She was so beautiful. He was never going to be with a girl as beautiful as Diana ever again. He knew this with a kind of dead certainty, and it made him want to punch a hole in the wall. If only he had the energy or the will.

It was his idea that he and Diana should get married. He knew it sounded stupid and ridiculous—why would she want to raise her baby with a loser like him?—but she didn’t say no, at least not at first. Diana didn’t really have a plan for what to do when Zoë was born. All she knew was that she didn’t want to “give her away like a puppy I don’t have room for in my house.” But at the same time, she never really prepared herself to be a mother. Not that Kevin knew what getting prepared meant, but it involved more than just waiting around until you gave birth. Because that’s what it seemed like she was doing. Maybe it was because she was trying to convince the Montanas that she was planning to give the baby up for adoption. Diana said Joe and Allison were insisting on adoption, and they would probably kick her out of the house if she told them that she wanted to keep the baby, so she had to keep pretending. But then Diana changed the story and said it was really Allison who was pressuring her to give the baby up for adoption. She said Allison was the world’s biggest bitch and would probably kill her
and
the baby if she thought she could get away with it. “No, seriously,” Diana told Kevin when he laughed at this (sometimes it was hard to know when Diana was kidding or when she wanted to amuse you with what she was saying), “she’s evil. You should see the way she looks at me when she thinks nobody’s looking.”

Diana could be very convincing when she wanted to be. Kevin had known Allison since elementary school (he still thought of her as
Mrs. Montana
most of the time) and couldn’t imagine her as the evil stepmother that Diana made her out to be, but who knew what went on in people’s houses when there was nobody else around to watch what they were doing? And you only had to look inside his own house—at his own fucked-up family—to know that was true. So he believed Diana when she said Allison was out to get her and Joe didn’t really care what happened to her. And he believed her when she said she could never go home because her own mother was worse than Joe, Allison, Kevin’s father, and any other shitty parent you wanted to throw in all wrapped into one. Her mother was so cold she kicked her pregnant daughter out of her house. What kind of mother did a thing like that? Kevin didn’t know if his own father could even be that cold—he couldn’t imagine it, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t possible. He did know a thing or two about what it felt like to have a parent who didn’t like you or want you around. Nobody could force Diana to give up her baby, he was pretty sure of that, but it didn’t mean they couldn’t make her life totally miserable. And that was where
he
came in. It wasn’t so crazy to think that they could be together, was it? He could get a job somewhere, couldn’t he?

But then Zoë was born and everything changed with Diana. It didn’t happen all at the same time, but from the minute she got the first labor pains he could see something turn in her. They were here—right here on his bed—when it happened. It was a Sunday afternoon and they were alone in the house. She was leaning into him, heavy on his chest, his arms around her, his hands on her belly, feeling the baby roll around and kick his fingers. Then he felt her take in a quick breath like you did when you felt a sharp pain. Her belly was hard as a rock.

“What?” he said. “What is it?”

“Nothing,” she said after a minute. “Nothing.” She relaxed a little, asked him for a hit of weed. He was going to ask her if she thought that was
the best thing to be doing, but he thought better of it and just gave her some. There was a damp spot on his T-shirt where she’d been leaning against him and he could see that her face was shiny with sweat.

“It’s so fucking hot,” she said. “Don’t you have AC?”

“My dad doesn’t let my mom turn it on ever,” he said. “He says it’s too expensive. He says it never gets so hot that you need AC, you can just open a window.”

“Well open the fucking window then.”

“It’s open.”

She laughed a little and then leaned over, taking another one of those breaths, this time with a little groan.

“Is it the baby?” he said.

She waited until it passed and then she looked up at him through the long curls that fell across her face. That’s when he saw it—she was different. Scared and trying not to show it—retreating inside herself. “I think I have to go,” she said.

“I’m going to come with you.”

“No!”

“Why not?”

“You can’t, Kevin, you just can’t, okay?”

“Let me come with you. Let me help you.”

“Trust me on this, okay? You don’t want to come with me.” She put her hands on her belly and looked down. “I’m going to go … go get my … I’m going to get Joe,” she said. And then she just left him there. He didn’t follow her. He should have. He felt bad about that. He sat looking out his bedroom window after she left. He could see a good way up the street and he sat there and waited. Pretty soon, though not as soon as he would have thought, he saw the two of them—Joe and Diana—heading out to the hospital. Right after that he saw Sun come out and start tossing baskets. So he went outside like he was going somewhere and pretended that he’d just happened to notice Sun out there and had decided to go say
hey. Sun saw him, gave him the questioning look, and Kevin nodded. Sun passed him the ball. Kevin took a shot and missed.

“Nobody’s home,” Kevin said. “So you can come over.”

“Okay,” Sun said. “You need anything extra?”

“The usual,” Kevin said, trying to look as if he didn’t care and wasn’t desperate.

“Is Diana over?” Sun asked and tipped his head toward Kevin’s house.

“Nah, she’s …” But Kevin stopped himself. He didn’t want to tell Sun where Diana had gone or what she was doing. “…  not there,” he finished.

It was hours later—the middle of the night—he was fucked up, passed out for who knows how long, when he heard his phone go off. Diana had sent him a text message.

its a girl. zoe. we’re good. c u soon
.

He didn’t see Diana again for days. Maybe it was a week, he wasn’t sure. He went to school and came home. He sent her text messages. Sometimes she answered, sometimes she didn’t. And then one day she sent him a text telling him to come over. He snuck around the back and then went in through her bedroom window—good thing it was on the ground floor—to avoid being seen by anyone. It was a mess. And it was so weird to see her all skinny without her big belly. She looked tired, like she’d been awake for days, and she was all jittery. He knew what she wanted—she didn’t even have to ask—and he gave it to her.

It was funny, he thought now, that they had never talked about Zoë’s daddy. It was the one thing that Diana never volunteered and he never felt comfortable asking her about it even though they talked about everything else. Kevin didn’t know if the dude was a boyfriend, just some guy she met, or somebody else’s boyfriend. Or husband. Shit like that happened all the time. He knew that girl Lori in last year’s English class who slept with one of her father’s friends (disgusting) and then got pregnant. Everyone was
talking about it. The gossip got so bad Lori had to transfer out of school at the end of the year. He didn’t want to believe that Diana had done something like that, but he didn’t know. And maybe he didn’t want to ask because he was afraid she would say she was in love with the guy and going back to be with him. All he knew was that if Zoë was his baby, he’d step up and be a man about it. Sometimes, he fantasized that Zoë
was
his—it wasn’t that hard to do. You couldn’t really tell what she was going to look like yet, she was too small, but Kevin had checked her little mouth and chin and he thought they looked a little like his. Enough like his. He wondered if Zoë’s father even knew she existed. Maybe Diana hadn’t even told him.

He should have asked her. Why hadn’t he?

But after Zoë was born it got harder to talk to Diana about anything. She was sometimes frazzled and sometimes just stared off into space like she was in a trance. Having Zoë seemed to have really freaked her out. That’s when he offered to marry her.

He felt really stupid about that now. Because even though she seemed to go along with it for a minute, he didn’t think she was ever really into it or ever meant to try to be with him. She was just treading water. And he was pretty sure she’d gone back to taking pills or whatever so that she could even herself out. He didn’t blame her, really. Diana’s life was fucked up even if she did love Zoë. No wonder she’d run away. Well,
if
she’d run away. But he couldn’t believe that anything had happened to her. Diana could take care of herself pretty well, he was sure of that. He reached for his phone again without thinking only to find it gone once more.

“FUCK!” The music was up so loud he couldn’t even hear the sound of his own voice. He turned it up even louder, so loud it wasn’t music anymore, just screaming vibrations in his head. But it didn’t help. Nothing fucking helped anymore.

Kevin didn’t know where Diana had gone, but he wasn’t that surprised
that she hadn’t taken Zoë with her. Not really. Kevin thought Diana always knew that it was going to be hard for her to take care of Zoë properly. He thought that was what bothered her more than anything. And now he couldn’t help her at all, even if he wanted to. He couldn’t call her, even if he was going to ignore her plea for him to leave her alone. And she couldn’t call him because his fucking father had cut off his fucking phone.

But then he thought,
fuck her anyway
. Bitch.

Kevin’s eyes felt hot and there was a pain in his forehead. He was crying. He was fucking
crying
. God, he didn’t
deserve
to live. He pulled his earbuds out of his ear and threw them, iPod still attached, off the edge of his bed. Then he got up off the bed, walked to his window, and looked through the blinds at Sun’s basketball hoop across the street. Their window was open and he could hear Sun whaling away on the piano. He didn’t get why Sun kept practicing even though he hated the fucking piano so much. He’d asked about it once and Sun had said, “My mom gets on me to do it,” but that never seemed like enough of a reason to Kevin. He hadn’t been able to get over to Sun’s for fucking months, it felt like. Too many people watching his every move. Well, fuck it, he was over this shit—he was going over there right now, even though Sun didn’t like it when he just came to the door. Too bad. Sun had a product and he was so looking to buy.

There were footsteps outside his door (which both his parents had told him to keep open, but fuck that, he wasn’t an animal) and then the sound of the knob rattling. Kevin turned his head.

“Mom, wh—” But it wasn’t his mother, it was their neighbor Sam from next door. It was so weird to see her standing in his bedroom that Kevin was rendered speechless. His first thought was that she must be in the wrong house. But then he looked at her face and his second thought was that something was very wrong.

“Hi, Kevin,” she said. “Your mom asked me to come up and get you. There are a couple of detectives downstairs.”

Kevin just stared at her, his brain having real difficulty putting all the pieces together.

“They want to talk to you,” Sam said.

Kevin felt the pain in his chest turn cold and heavy. “Why?”

“They want to talk to you about Diana.”

S
am stood in front of the nearly empty refrigerator and felt the surprise of unwelcome tears welling in her eyes. She couldn’t tell exactly what had caused them—the barren crisper or that she’d just realized that Thanksgiving, usually her favorite holiday, was around the corner and was likely going to be one of the worst days in a long, bad year.
Annus horribilis
. Wasn’t that what the queen of England had called it when all her princes broke up with their wives and her castle burned? Sam thought about castles burning and heard the strains of Neil Young in her head. What was the title of that song?

“Don’t Let It Bring You Down.”

Yet faced with the prospect of celebrating Thanksgiving without Connor, Sam couldn’t help but feel immensely brought down. She could have fought Noah about this—she was supposed to have Connor for the holidays—because he’d reneged on his part of the agreement by scheduling a surprise trip to Hawaii for Thanksgiving, but ultimately all that would do was upset Connor, who quite obviously favored a trip to the islands rather than a sad, strained dinner with his mother. Not to mention Gloria, who would likely cause Connor even more discomfort now that he and Justin were no longer friends. This detail, that Connor had lost a friend who had been like a brother to him since preschool, bothered Sam as much
as anything else that had happened since she and Noah had separated. It wasn’t a big deal, Noah had assured her, kids changed loyalties regularly and the two of them were just expanding their friendships with others, and it wasn’t as if they’d had a falling out or anything and Connor didn’t seem at all upset over it. But Sam didn’t believe any of this. She believed, rather, that Frank had completely poisoned Justin against Connor if not outright banned Connor from his house, and maybe Noah had “encouraged” Connor to find other friends as well. No doubt Frank and Noah had gotten together on the visitation schedule so that now the boys visited their mothers on alternate days or weekends so there was almost no overlap. Not that either boy spent much time with them anyway. She thought about how happy those boys had been with each other—how they had shared everything—and her heart broke.