The Good Neighbor Read online

  She nodded. “I would die if Luke went missing.”

  “I know.”

  “At least I don’t have to worry about that as much at his age.” She laughed. “But now there are other things to worry about. Mistakes that will affect him forever.”

  I nodded.

  “His dad wants me to give him an ultimatum. Full-time school or a job. Otherwise, he has to move out.”

  “Well, his dad’s not here, so…” I glanced at the door leading to the courtyard. I wasn’t sure if I’d heard a sound or I was just anxious to know whether the police had an update. I hated standing here wasting time talking about Luke. He wasn’t the one in danger. Even if Nicole thought he was in some sort of existential danger.

  “I feel like I need to let him find his own way. Not push too hard. But his father wants me to give him a wake-up call. If we did that, I know Luke would end up living on the street. I don’t understand why people think that’s a solution. A lot of my friends say the same thing, don’t make it easy for them to stay. He just needs some goals, purpose. That’s all. But they want me to—”

  “It doesn’t seem right,” I said.

  “It’s too harsh. It takes kids longer to grow up now. Life is more complicated. In some ways they grow up faster. They know more than I ever did at that age. But at the same time, there are more challenges.”

  “Like what?”

  “All the jobs are in computers. Luke isn’t interested in computers. Except playing games.” She laughed. Her expression changed, a look of guilt washing across her mouth and eyes. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t be thinking about such petty things. I mean, they’re not petty, but right now, compared with Brittany…”

  “It’s okay. You’re worried. Besides, we can’t do anything until we hear what the police say.”

  “Do you think I’m wrong? About Luke?”

  “I don’t know. If you are, it’s not as if other people know what they’re talking about. You know him best. I think you’re doing the right thing. Keeping him close, letting him know he can talk to you. We need each other’s support.”

  “I agree completely.”

  I glanced over my shoulder toward the courtyard door again, willing it to open. I pulled out my phone. Forty minutes since everyone had gathered in my living room. I could sense from the fading conversation they’d all be leaving soon.

  I turned my attention back to Nicole. She was scrolling through her phone. She tucked her hair behind her right ear and tapped her phone. Was she reading messages from Luke? He hadn’t shown up to help with the search. Why not? Maybe he knew something and he didn’t want to be put on the spot.

  9

  Crystal

  I keep thinking I’m going to get my act together. I see lots of motivational people on TV. I even listen to some of those preachers who say you can have whatever you want. I try to believe, but it never works out. It works out for a lot of other people. Thousands of people, probably millions or more. They say you have to believe. You have to believe in yourself and God or some higher power. Maybe you’re born with that, some kind of believing gene.

  Not having a job to go to doesn’t help with getting my act together, but I have too much pain to work anymore, so I’m on disability. It’s fine. I couldn’t sit at a desk welcoming visitors into the office building where I used to work. My back hurts all the time. Unbearable pain. People don’t believe me when I say that, but it truly is unbearable. Some days I have to lie on the couch and pretty much fast because getting up to make lunch or even get a glass of water or a snack hurts so bad I can’t breathe.

  The TV and my phone, that’s what keeps me company. There’s lots of interesting stuff in the world, so the days fly by. I like seeing what’s going on with everyone else. Reading stories online or hearing interviews, I think about the mistakes people make. I think a lot about mistakes.

  That’s what’s appealing about some of the shows. I like where they talk to regular people and you hear what’s going on in their lives. There’s a lot of pain out there in the world. There’s emotional pain, which is so much worse than physical pain. I know about that too. But when I listen to the shit some of these people have been through, my emotional pain is a little easier to take. They talk about husbands who were gunned down in fights or stuck in prison for killing someone else you loved, couples screaming at each other every day, parents who say all kinds of awful things or do awful things to their kids, people cheating, stealing from their family…I could go on and on.

  How these preachers honestly believe there is a God out there helping, I have no idea. I suppose it’s that believing gene. And because things worked out for them, they think it will for everyone.

  If there is a God and He answers prayers, would all these people, millions of people, be in pain?

  I think not.

  Honestly, it makes me feel better when I see other people suffering. I’m not gloating or wishing evil on anyone, but I do feel better. I know that I’m not alone. I might be alone in my house, but I’m not alone in the world. I’m not the only person who fucked up her life. I’m not the only person who needed oxy to get through the night…and the day. And now, more than oxy.

  It helps. Maybe that’s why these shows are on, that’s why the internet is a good thing. People like me can watch these women, mostly, talk about their dramas. I can watch them cry and beat themselves up, and I can forgive them in my head. I can talk to them, telling them it will be okay. They’re strong, they can survive this. I’d probably make a good motivational preacher. I wouldn’t give false hope, but I’d tell them they would make it through. Somehow.

  I talk out loud to the TV. You never know, maybe on some psychic, cosmic level they can hear me, or at least feel my energy that I’m with them.

  Some of their mistakes can be fixed. If you’re fighting with your husband or your sister-in-law, one of you can extend the olive branch. Compromise. People need to compromise more. It would go a long way to fixing some of the bad stuff in this world.

  There are some mistakes that cannot be fixed. Not ever. You do something bad, something really bad, and you can’t take it back. You can say shit and then say you didn’t mean it. That works in some situations. Doing bad stuff is harder to take back. Even if it wasn’t bad at first, and it just turned bad before you realized what was happening. Because sometimes it really is just a mistake, an accident.

  I think about the worst mistake of my life. The kind of mistake that could not be fixed. A counselor can help you, or a preacher can set you on the right path after you fuck up, but not always. Some mistakes last forever.

  There are good days and bad with pain. On the good days, I do get out of the house, sometimes. For one thing, I gotta go out to pick up my Apache. It’s not like they home deliver.

  I’m not a junkie. I’m not. I hate that I have to buy fentanyl to help with my pain. That doesn’t make me a junkie.

  Things happen in life, and before you know it, you’re walking down a long dark road you didn’t know you’d turned onto. That car accident ruined my life. Head-on, and it was not at all my fault. Some drunk asshole. I knew what had happened the minute I turned to look at my sweet hubby and saw his head bent in a way that a head cannot ever do on its own.

  I wished I’d died. Instead, I got stuck with a concussion, two days in the hospital, and pain in my left hip and back that hurt like a motherfucker. I never talked like that before the accident, but there is no other word to describe that pain.

  At first, the doctors were really nice. They gave me oxy and they didn’t even look at me funny when I said I needed the prescription refilled. They sent me to physical therapy, which hurt as bad as the original pain and never improved anything. Then they said I wasn’t really trying. They said I was depressed because my husband died. They said I needed to wean myself onto ibuprofen and get counseling and more PT. What a joke.

  Finally, they said I couldn’t get the oxy anymore. A friend of mine had some left from her oral surgery, and she
let me have the last few pills. I found a few other friends who had half a bottle here, a third of a bottle there.

  And then it was gone.

  People do crazy things when they’re desperate. When the pain is too much. No one knows until they face the kind of pain that you can’t live with. The doctors never had to experience unbearable pain. What do they know?

  What was I supposed to do? Oxy took away the pain. I didn’t hurt quite so bad on the inside, aching for Barry, feeling like I murdered him. I stopped using that word. I heard on a talk show you should say nice things to yourself. So I started doing that. I called it what it was—an accident. Not my fault.

  This was a good day.

  I took a long shower and rinsed my hair with apple-scented conditioner. I wore jeans and my Uggs and a pink T-shirt that said Angel in silver glitter.

  The guy who sells me Apache hangs out on the loading dock behind the discount store at the far end of the mall. It faces an empty field, and the freeway runs along one side, so except for the delivery trucks, which come at scheduled times, no one is ever out there.

  I think he works on the loading dock for that store, but I’m not sure. I just know him and he knows me, but it’s not like we talk about what’s going on in our lives.

  It was a hot, muggy day. The sky was streaked with white clouds, so much white you could only see strips of blue like it had all been torn up and scattered all over the place. I drove to the mall. I shouldn’t ever drive because it brings back bad memories, and because I’m not in the most alert state, but I hate taking the bus. You have to wait forever, and some creep always tries to hit on you. I make sure to drive slowly, always using my blinkers, braking in plenty of time, and not ever going through a light after it turns yellow. I keep a good distance from the car ahead. I’m probably safer than most other drivers. I never text or talk on the phone.

  Moe was there. That’s his name. Like he thinks he’s one of the Three Stooges. Like he thinks he won’t ever get caught if he uses a dumb name that’s not real. Whatever. If Moe is who he wants to be, Moe is what I’ll call him.

  I paid him and he gave me my stuff. I felt calmer just having it in my purse.

  I walked down the ramp from the loading dock, and because Ugg boots aren’t the best for walking on slopes, I twisted my ankle slightly.

  I looked up and saw a girl standing in the field. She took my breath away. I knew, I just knew she was lost, maybe one of those missing kids who escaped from her abductor. She was thin and beautiful. She had long blond hair, paler and more beautiful than mine.

  As fast as those loose boots and my sore ankle would let me, I started walking toward her. When I got to the edge of the field, Moe yelled at me. I turned and he waved both his arms like he was trying to tell me not to go out there. I ignored him. I turned to keep going, but the girl was gone. I started to cry.

  The minute I got home, after I gave myself a boost, I called the police—the nonemergency line. They get pissed when you call 9-1-1 too much. They’ll actually hang up on you if you keep calling 9-1-1 and they find out your emergency is not that urgent, in their opinion.

  Of course, they treated me like shit like they do every single time I talk to them. Condescending, asking what I’d taken that day, being rude and arrogant and disinterested. I could almost hear the smothered laugh in the cop’s voice. Before the connection ended, I did hear someone laugh in the background.

  10

  Brittany: Before

  Being homeschooled wasn’t awful. Some of the kids I knew in my homeschool group where we lived before hated it. They said we were freaks. They didn’t like that they had to spend all day with their parents, listen to their parents teach them about everything as if they were experts on the entire world. They said they needed to mix it up, and getting math lessons from one of the other moms or a trip to the aquarium with someone else’s dad didn’t count.

  The younger kids loved it, and my friends agreed they’d liked it when they were little. Now that all the other kids our age were starting high school, everything was different. We would never get to go to dances, or cut class, or hang out at the bleachers after school. Some of my friends who had the preternatural ability to imagine themselves all grown up knew they would be abnormal adults as well. When conversations turned toward memories of school days, we’d be shut out. Things that people learned from their peers when adults weren’t around would be missing from our brains.

  I liked being homeschooled. It made me feel secure. For some reason I couldn’t understand, I didn’t like to go out of the house much, not without my parents. Maybe there was something defective about me. I was happy though. I liked learning. And I liked that it was just Mom and me, and sometimes Dad, learning about the world. Sometimes they learned things right alongside me. I liked that I could ask all the questions I wanted without having to listen to other kids asking stupid questions. I liked how they explained things that some adults didn’t even understand. My parents are smart. My mom studied English literature and got her master’s degree. She worked for an online magazine for a while. My dad has a degree in economics and an MBA. He runs his own HR consulting firm.

  When I have questions, they help me research them on the internet. They don’t let me use the computer alone, which is restrictive for someone my age, but I get it. I know there are a lot of bad things online. Horrible things. Deviant things. While I might go to school in my own classroom down the hall from my bedroom, I don’t live in a cave.

  Once, I wanted to know more about fish that live in the deepest parts of the ocean, fish that look like they were invented for a movie featuring aliens. My mom sat beside me for two hours, helping me find more information and photographs online. She was as excited to learn about those creatures as I was.

  My mom believes homeschooling is important because it’s self-directed. I get to study topics that I’m interested in with more depth. This doesn’t mean other areas are skimped on, but it makes me smarter and makes me understand the world with more depth than other people do. It makes me excited about learning instead of sitting in a classroom, bored to death, memorizing things I don’t care about.

  A lot of people would call my parents overprotective. I’m an only child, so all their attention is on me. But I feel protected and loved. I know they’re crazy about me, and that makes me feel good. I think they’re the best parents in the world.

  Even though I’m okay about being homeschooled, about being kept away from bad influences and bad people and kids who get into trouble—serious trouble that can have lifelong consequences—after a while I did start to think it would be nice to get out more than I did. It wasn’t completely my parents keeping me from going out on my own. I had bad dreams that sometimes scared me because they seemed so real, they seemed to be telling me the world was even scarier than my parents said. One dream, really. I dreamt that I was lying in bed. I opened my eyes and looked at my window. A face was pressed against the glass. Although it wasn’t a particularly scary face, just knowing it was there scared me. Knowing those eyes stared at me while I slept gave me the creeps. The rest of the person’s body, even their hair, was blended into the darkness. All I saw was the pale skin and those staring eyes, the pupils bleeding into the whites. Watching me.

  At some point, I started wanting to meet people who weren’t like me. People whose parents didn’t look at the world exactly the same way as mine did. I wanted to know how other people lived and thought.

  My mom said there was plenty of time for that. Later.

  I was really close to my mom when I was a little kid. We did everything together. I don’t remember having a lot of friends my age when I was five or six, but I was happy. We did a lot of fun things together. We baked all kinds of treats, and I learned how to cook grilled cheese sandwiches and make tossed green salads. I got to chop vegetables and stir things in pots to help make dinner. I got to paint and sketch and do crafts with her.

  I was never lonely or bored.

  My dad taug
ht me to ride a bike, and my mom taught me how to jump rope. She took me ice-skating at an indoor rink. She taught me all kinds of card games. The homeschool group did lots of fun things. We had barbecues and trips to the beach and weekend camping trips.

  I never thought about not being happy. I don’t even think the word happy came into my head.

  The weird thing about being homeschooled is you know a lot and you know nothing. I knew a lot about literature and math, about history and science, plants and animals. I could name a lot of trees and birds and flowers. I even learned about different religions, as much as a kid can learn about things like that.

  At the same time, you could say I was naïve. I knew that word from spelling tests. I knew the definition of naïve. But we never talked about what it meant in relationship to me and how I was growing up. And yes, now I know, I was naïve about how the world works. I was naïve about real life. I knew a lot about the natural world and what happened in the past, and what happened in the novels and movies I was allowed. The rest of it, all the things you need to know to actually live day to day? I didn’t know much of anything at all.

  11

  Luke

  Friday night. The worst day of the week. I tried to escape the house on Friday nights at dinnertime whenever I could because my mom went into a pit of analyzing everything wrong with her life once the workweek was over. She wanted a family dinner, and she wanted to cook something nice, and she wanted me to be there and converse and not be on my phone. Most of the time, when she ran into a dead-end analyzing her own life, she turned on me.

  During the school year and summer school, she wanted every single detail about school. After that was why hadn’t I found a job. She wanted to know if there were any girls in the picture, and what kind of girls I found appealing, and if there weren’t any girls, why not? I thought it was obvious why there were no girls. I didn’t have a job and I lived with my mother.