“Lewis already asked me for her address. Shit, Jo, I can’t do this right now. We’ve got all hell breaking loose around here. I’m sorry about Yvette, and yeah, we’ll take care of her as soon as we can, but right now we’ve got innocent lives to save, and three fronts to fight on. So it’ll just have to wait.” He sounded grim, but determined. “I’m sorry.”
“Yeah.” I tasted ashes. “I understand. Thanks.”
“Wait, tell me—”
I hung up on him. Immediately, the phone began to ring. Caller ID, auto callback, something like that. I let it clamor for attention and sat, thinking hard.
“They’re not gonna help,” Kevin said. He was sitting up, draped over the back of the couch, acne-spotted chin propped on thin arms. “I knew it. Nobody ever helps. Well, fuck her anyway. We can go anywhere, right? Do anything? I don’t need her. She can just do whatever.”
Lewis had asked for the address. He knew that Yvette was involved. But he was going over there hurt, disadvantaged, and she had David to use as a weapon…
“We’re going back,” I said.
Even from across the room, I saw Kevin’s morose expression turn mulish. “In your dreams.”
“Kevin, we have to go back. It’s up to us to stop her—”
“From screwing your boyfriend?” He blew a raspberry and flopped back down on the couch, out of sight. His voice stayed annoyingly stubborn. “No. Not gonna happen.”
“She’ll come after you.”
“No she won’t. She’s got what she wanted. Me, she’s just as happy to be rid of.” Leather creaked as he stretched. “You know what this place needs? A bitchen big-screen TV. With adult channels.”
Indirect. I ignored it. “Kevin—”
“I want a big-screen TV. With adult channels.”
I screamed inside with frustration. I could have wasted time optioning him to death—Standard or widescreen? Brand name? Model number? — but time was something I no longer had. I just used the power he poured inside of me to find the biggest, most ostentatious TV I could find and transport it to an empty wall in the apartment. Plugged it into main power. Created an invisible satellite hookup. Materialized a remote control on the coffee table. “Anything else?”
“DVD.”
I gave him that. I also skipped the intermediate steps and gave him a cutting-edge sound system, big honkin‘ speakers, a full CD rack based on the most recent Billboard charts, headphones, amplifiers, every movie in the last twenty years (at his age, he wouldn’t care about anything else).
“Bitchen,” Kevin said, awestruck. He got up to fiddle with the remote. “Whoa.”
“Let me go,” I said. He froze, hands still twisting knobs. “Kevin, please. I’m asking you as a friend. Let me go and do something.”
“Friend?” he echoed. There was something lost and little-boy in that word, something fragile. “I don’t even know your real name.”
“Joanne,” I said quietly. “My name is Joanne.”
“Huh.” He pulled out a CD and examined it. “I liked Lilith better.”
“Kevin…”
I watched his shoulders hunch together under the threadbare, ripped T-shirt, remembered his stepmother’s love of S&M… S, probably, in his case. He’d never had a friend, at least not since Yvette came into his life. Alone. Scared. In pain.
I could bully him into anything I wanted. I would, if I had to, for David. But it would haunt me worse than anything else I’d ever done.
“If you’re really my friend, you won’t go,” he said. “You’d stay here. Take care of me.”
How young had he been, the first time she’d hurt him? The quaver I heard in his voice was the cry of a child too small to understand why it was happening. Bitch. I ached with the need to do something to her, anything, to even the score. I understood David’s black fury now, when he’d seen her at the funeral. He’d had a close, unclean relationship with her for too long not to hate her.
I walked around the couch to where Kevin was randomly picking up CDs and sliding them back into the rack, hands shaking.
I put my arms around him. For a frozen second it was like embracing a corpse—no response at all— and then I felt his muscles relax and huddle into me, accepting the comfort. He smelled bad, but I didn’t have to breathe if I didn’t want to. I wondered how much of his slovenly approach to hygiene and housekeeping was designed to keep the perfectly coifed, house-proud Yvette at a distance.
I caressed his oily, lank hair and whispered, “Kevin, I am your friend. And I’ll come back to you. Just please, let me save him. You don’t want to leave him there. You know what’ll happen to him. You’ve seen it. You’ve felt it. You have the power to save somebody, Kevin. Use it.”