chapter 15
Dorothy hid under the eaves, her back pressed hard against the stucco wall, and drew deeply from her first cigarette in too many years to count. It was very stale, but that didn’t matter at all. She blew out a cloud, watched the breeze waft it over her star jasmine, and inhaled another. No coughing, no awkwardness holding it between her fingers. Smoking, like so many other relinquished bad habits, was like riding a bicycle. It didn’t matter how long it had been, you never forgot how. She held the cigarette to her lips again. She hadn’t realized how much she’d missed this bad old friend until now. For a minute all she had to do was focus on inhaling, exhaling, and feeling the nicotine rush inside her skull. It didn’t stop the thoughts from jamming her brain, but it made them, however briefly, a little more tolerable. At the very least, it gave her something to do and a reason to stand still as she pondered what was surely coming next.
Dorothy had never believed in karma, either as a serious philosophy or a light half-joking explanation for unpleasantness or bad luck. She believed, instead, that it was possible to nullify the past with the present. In her opinion everything had an expiration date and that included actions and events. In other words, if a tree fell in the woods thirty years ago and there was nobody around now who had heard it, then it had never fallen in the first place. It had been imperative for Dorothy to hold fast to this line of thinking in order to form the days, months, and years of her life into her own reality. But that thick layer of protection she’d constructed over time had suddenly thinned into nothing. What went around had indeed come around.
But not all of it.
Dorothy inhaled the last of her cigarette and carefully crushed it out in a small glass ramekin she’d brought outside for this express purpose. The rest of it—maybe even the worst of it—was still on the way. Although, she thought, what had happened with Kevin was already bad enough for this and several other lifetimes.
Dick was with Kevin now. The two of them were investigating an alternative school in which Kevin could finish his senior year and graduate high school. Dorothy had not been invited on this outing. The excuse Dick gave for excluding her was that he needed “man time” alone with his son, but Dorothy knew the real reason was that he blamed her for everything and thought that by shutting her out of this particular decision he could make it all right. Ultimately of course he would have to ask Dorothy what she thought and would have to bring her along for any kind of meeting because Dorothy alone had gone to see teachers, counselors, and principals throughout Kevin’s school years. Dick would have no idea what to do or say—especially when he had to explain why Kevin needed a new school to begin with. Because Dick still didn’t believe that Kevin had a substance abuse problem, even though Kevin had admitted to taking drugs. It was, Dick believed, someone else’s fault: society, Dorothy, even that girl. Especially that girl. As if Kevin were completely lacking in any kind of free will. And as if another school, another location, or another mother would make a difference.
But Dick’s attitude, including his resentment at her failure as a mother, didn’t hurt Dorothy nearly as much as the blame she heaped on herself. To not have noticed—or maybe to have willfully ignored—that Kevin had a drug problem was both inexplicable and unforgivable. How much longer would he have lived if Dick hadn’t gone into his room at that moment and tried to wake him up? And what if she hadn’t insisted that they leave, thus prompting him to go up there in the first place? Dorothy could barely even ask herself those questions, let alone speculate on their answers. Although she’d been almost catatonic with shock and fear at the hospital, she managed to gather that it had been a close call. She couldn’t get the image out of her mind—it flashed in front of her all day and woke her up at night—of her son lying there on his bed, one arm fallen to the floor, his skin so pale, and Dick leaning over him, desperately trying to breathe life into him to keep him alive until the paramedics arrived. She hated to admit it to herself even now, but at that terrible moment as she stood frozen in the doorway watching Dick sweat and work on his son, gasping the command “Breathe!” as if Kevin could hear him, Dorothy was sure that they’d lost him. She sensed the weight of excruciating grief descending on her and knew that she wouldn’t be able to bear it. She gave up. And for that moment of faithless surrender Dorothy’s guilt was the sharpest and most painful. Because even after the paramedics arrived and raced Kevin to the hospital, even after she and Dick stumbled into the brightness of the emergency room and allowed the doctors to take over, she still didn’t believe her son would survive. When a doctor came to tell them that Kevin was okay, Dorothy was surprised. It seemed like a cheat—the last one she would ever be able to get away with.
What was so strange, although of course not surprising, was that in those minutes and hours she and Dick were closer to each other—more intimate and truly married—than they’d ever been before. There wasn’t much talking between the two of them. They stood outside the trauma room, their own separate fears intersecting and blending. At one point Dick took her hand in his and held it. She couldn’t remember the last time he’d done that, if he ever had. She remembered little else of the physical details of those hours, but she could still feel the pressure of his fingers around hers and how cold his hand felt. They were, for once, in complete harmony with each other—on the same wavelength, you might say, although that wave was the size of a tsunami. It reminded her of the day Kevin was born in that very hospital. She’d been dozing with Kevin in his little Isolette next to her. When she woke, Dick had appeared in the room. He was sitting on the chair next to her bed, holding the tiny bundle that was their son and staring at him with a look of complete joy on his face. There was pride there too, Dorothy remembered, and hope. Then Dick looked up and his eyes met hers with such thankfulness and love that Dorothy almost cried. Until that moment outside the trauma room, Dorothy had never felt as joined to her husband.
But that closeness didn’t last. It couldn’t.
As soon as they learned that Kevin was going to survive, but before they knew exactly what had happened to him, Dorothy could feel something inside Dick turn stony and cold. He kept it all together, jaw muscles clenched, as the doctor described how Kevin had overdosed on narcotics and that he’d seen this kind of thing before in kids Kevin’s age and asked them again what if any prescription medications they might have in the house that Kevin could have gotten hold of. Dick managed to answer the questions, and, Dorothy now thought, he must have filled out all the paperwork at the hospital and dealt with the insurance, but she had no memory of any of that. But afterward, so soon afterward, he began to look at Dorothy with accusation.
“How is it possible you didn’t know about this?” he asked.
“How would I have been able to tell?” she asked.
“Because he’s your son,” Dick spat. “You’re supposed to know.”
“But you didn’t see anything either.”
“I’m not his mother, Dorothy! I’m not home with him every day. I work, remember?”
“Dick, if I’d had any idea, don’t you think I would have said something to you?”
“I don’t know, Dorothy, would you have?”
And it went on like that. Pretty soon, though, Dick started assigning the blame for Kevin’s problems to whomever he could think of, including random degenerates who sold drugs to Kevin (he didn’t know who these might be, but he suspected they were spoiled rich kids from Kevin’s school who had too much time and money on their hands) and various “bad influences” that included everyone from Diana to Dorothy herself.
“I thought he was out,” Dorothy repeated over and over again. “I saw him leave. I didn’t even know he was at home until you went up there.”
Of course, Dick hadn’t seen that there was anything wrong with Kevin then either. Dorothy didn’t mention that, but she knew Dick was thinking about it. Still, it didn’t matter who had done what at those moments, because as soon as the immediate crisis was over, the long, grueling cala
mity began.
Dick had restrained himself while Kevin was in the hospital, barely saying anything to his son other than, “We’ll work this all out once you’re out of here,” but Dorothy knew, as she was sure Kevin did too, that Dick was storing all of his anger for their private homecoming. And although Kevin could hardly look at her while he was in the hospital, the few flashes of stark fear she’d seen on his face were enough to convince her that he was dreading his release.
Dorothy took a second cigarette from her ancient pack and lit it. She was going to have to figure out how to dispose of these butts once she’d finished. It was such a minor concern, yet Dorothy fretted inwardly, anxious to hide this evidence of her transgression. She wouldn’t be able to stand up to an interrogation about it—not even one as soft as the one Dick had ultimately given Kevin. Well, maybe soft wasn’t exactly the right word. It was more … suggestive. It was obvious how Dick wanted Kevin to answer. And even after all Kevin had been through, he was able to pick up on that and oblige.
“First of all, what was it, Kevin? What were you taking?” Dick had stood, hands on his hips, stiffly squared off against his completely defenseless son, and Dorothy remembered thinking that her husband would make a really crappy cop.
It was another one of those times when Dorothy was in the room physically yet strangely absent from it at the same time. She’d felt like that before—the last time was when they’d had that dreadful confrontation with Joe and Allison—as if she were a moving image who could see and hear but had no voice or substance.
“Oxy,” Kevin said. Dorothy could see that it wasn’t worth it to him to lie. It was going to come out anyway.
“Oxy? What’s that?”
Kevin sighed as if he could hardly stand to explain such things to his hopelessly out-of-it father, but he managed to get out a brief description of OxyContin: prescription painkillers in pill form. Dick looked baffled.
“Where do you get such a thing?” he asked, and Kevin shrugged. “Around,” he answered.
“What does that mean, ‘around’?”
“You know,” Kevin said. “People have it.”
“Other kids have it?”
“Yeah.”
“Your friends?”
“Yeah.”
“Which friends?”
“You don’t know them, Dad.”
“So, what, you decided to try it once? Is that what happened?”
That was the turning point, Dorothy thought, the moment where Kevin understood fully what his father wanted to hear and gave it to him.
It was only the first time, Kevin told Dick; no, okay, the second time he had tried it, and he didn’t know how strong it was. It was a mistake and he shouldn’t have done it, and yes, he knew it was stupid, but it wasn’t as if he had a problem or anything. Everybody did it. Everybody.
He looked down at his hands almost the entire time he delivered this unimpressive little speech the likes of which had been given to parents since the beginning of time. Dorothy didn’t believe him—not because she didn’t want to but because she couldn’t. Now that the blinders had been removed, it was easy to recognize the signs of dependence in Kevin. How far or deep it went Dorothy didn’t know, but when Kevin lifted his head she could see a familiar hurt in his light blue eyes. How had it gotten there, she wondered. Was it handed down in the blood? Had she … had she passed it to him inside her womb? Guilt rose in her throat, bitter and sharp. Her heart ached for him, but she was too far removed, too buried, too hidden away to say it. To say anything.
And so Dick carried on with his questioning, periodically interrupting himself to interject something about how Kevin would have to be disciplined because he couldn’t expect, after scaring his parents out of their minds (“You almost died, Kevin, do you understand that?”) with his own selfishness and stupidity because he certainly hadn’t been raised that way, to be let off scot-free. There were going to be changes made, big changes. And the first thing was to take him out of that damn school where he was hanging out with all these friends who were giving him those pills, whatever they were called.
“Right,” Kevin said at one point. “It’s definitely the school’s fault.”
Even Kevin knew how ridiculous that was, Dorothy thought.
“You think you’re so smart?” Dick asked. “You want to blame someone else? Me, maybe? Or your mother? Because the two of us have denied you so much? Because you’ve had such a goddamned tough life?”
But it was Dick who was blaming everyone else.
“Sending me to another school’s not going to change anything.”
“What’s that mean? That you’re going to do this again? Is that what you’re saying, Kevin?”
“No, Dad, I told you.… I told you.…”
Dick drew himself up then as Kevin sank farther into the couch. He needed a haircut, Dorothy thought, and some sun. He was so pale, so defeated.
“There’s one more thing,” Dick said, “and you better be very careful how you answer me now, Kevin. I’m only going to warn you once.” He paused dramatically and Dorothy thought she could see Kevin shiver.
“What has that girl got to do with this? Tell me, Kevin, and don’t even think about lying to me.”
Kevin looked up at his father, a tiny spark of defiance lighting his eyes. “What girl, Dad?”
“That—” Dick caught himself and cleared his throat. “That girl down the street. The girl with the baby. You know what girl I’m talking about, Kevin.”
“Diana,” Kevin said. Dorothy could hear the emotion strangled in the back of his throat. “Her name’s Diana.”
“Well?” Dick asked. “What did she have to do with all of this? Is she the one you got those pills from? Is she?”
Kevin shook his head. “Of course not,” he said. “She was—” He clamped his lips abruptly. “No,” he repeated. “And I don’t know why you would even ask that.”
“You don’t know why? Are you kidding me?” Dick clapped his hands together for punctuation. “Everything’s gone downhill around here since that girl arrived. Everything. So I don’t see why you’d be surprised that I ask a question like that. I’m going to ask you again, Kevin, is that who you got the pills from?”
“No.”
“Then who?”
For the briefest moment, Dorothy saw Kevin’s eyes flick toward the front window as if he was worried someone was watching them and then come back to Dick. “I don’t know,” he said. “Just some … people. Some kids at school. I don’t even know if they go to school there. I couldn’t even tell you their names.”
“Kevin, do you know where she is?” Dorothy heard her own voice echoing in her ears.
“Where who is?”
“Diana. Where is she?”
“What do you mean, where is she?” Kevin said. He couldn’t look at her or Dick. He picked at a hole in his jeans and kept his eyes fixed downward.
“She’s missing. Or hiding. Or ran away,” Dick said harshly. “They’re looking for her. They’ve been looking for her and they’re going to ask you if you know where she is. So do you know anything? You’d better tell us if you do.”
But Kevin knew nothing, at least nothing that he shared with them, and Dorothy believed that he was truly in the dark about Diana’s whereabouts. Exactly when he had seen her last was not as clear. Kevin said he hadn’t seen her for a long time, although he couldn’t be specific about when exactly.
“I don’t know,” he kept saying. “Sometime, I don’t know.”
“Well?” Dick pressed on. “Tell us, Kevin. I—we know you’ve seen her.”
Kevin admitted it then—owned up that he and Diana had spent time together even after the edict that they remain apart. But they hadn’t seen each other for a while. And they weren’t together anymore anyway, Kevin added, so Dick didn’t have to worry himself about it any longer.
“Why not?” Dorothy asked, surprising herself with the question. “Why aren’t you together anymore? What happened?”
Dick and Kevin both turned to her, looking perplexed. “What’s it matter?” Kevin said, and in his tone, Dorothy heard everything. For whatever reason, Diana had split up with him and he was heartbroken.
“I don’t know,” Dorothy said, “but maybe it has something to do with why she’s not here anymore. Or where she went.”
“What’s the big deal?” Kevin snorted. “She probably just went home.”
“But why would she leave the baby, Kevin? Do you know anything about that?” Dorothy hadn’t realized how much she’d hoped that Kevin would have an explanation for this until he looked at her, shock and misery plain on his face.
“She left the baby?” Kevin’s voice was small and strained.
“Give it a rest, Dorothy,” Dick barked. “He said he doesn’t know.”
And then Dorothy knew that things were going to get much worse. Because if Kevin didn’t know where Diana had gone, Joe certainly didn’t. And if Joe didn’t, the police were going to get even more involved than they already had. And if the police became involved, they were going to want to talk to everyone.
Dorothy drew deeply from her cigarette, which had finally succeeded in making her feel dizzy and nauseated. Kevin probably knew more than he was saying, but he didn’t know enough.
Where had she gone?
Maybe it wasn’t as easy now, heaven only knew, with cell phones and the Internet, everything traceable to the point where you almost had a computer chip implanted in your skin, but if a person wanted to disappear—just wanted to escape the mess she’d made and start over from scratch, everything fresh and new—it could still be done. Yes, Dorothy believed it could. Diana wouldn’t have gone back to her mother. No, she’d never see her mother again nor any of these people she’d left behind. That would all have to go, as well as her name, the clothes she wore, the way she spoke, the personal history she had once claimed. Those tattoos, Dorothy thought, remembering the snake around one of Diana’s ankles and the apple on the other. Those tattoos would have to go as well. It wouldn’t be difficult. You could do that now. The internal marks were harder to erase, but even those could be covered. Dorothy knew all about that.
The Neighbors Are Watching Page 18