After a while I start. I get the sense the girls are waiting for me to speak anyway. I exhale long and hard and close my eyes for a moment.
‘I can’t believe she’s gone,’ I say. ‘I mean, gone for good. It doesn’t feel real.’
Sunny nods, her pretty blue eyes so sad. Juanita leans over and rests her head on my shoulder. Connie doesn’t bounce or move. She just sighs real deep and says, ‘I know. I can’t believe it, either.’
I’m scared to know the answer, but I ask how Johnny’s doing and what else has been happening in the neighborhood.
‘Johnny can barely get out of bed he’s so damn depressed,’ says Connie. ‘Not that I blame him.’ She pauses and takes a drag of her cigarette. ‘It’s the first time in my life I ever saw my brother cry, if you want to know the truth.’
I remember that afternoon in the Treadway house after he learned about the baby and read Diane’s letter, and I ache for him and the pain he’s in. I imagine his eyes filling with tears, and I hope he lets them fall sometimes.
‘Connie,’ I say, ‘I know Johnny has Diane’s letter. The one where she told him about the baby? You know about that, right?’
‘Yes,’ Connie says. ‘He let me read it, too. He sleeps with it under his pillow.’
‘Gosh, how romantic,’ Sunny whispers. ‘And how sad.’
‘Yeah, it is,’ I say, my throat aching with sadness as I speak. ‘Listen, I don’t know if it will help him to hear this, but he should know … those last few hours when Diane was waiting for him … she was so excited. She went outside that night because she wanted their first kiss after everything to be under the moon and not inside that creepy house.’
Connie lights another cigarette. ‘I’m gonna tell him,’ she says, a rare softness in her voice. ‘I bet it makes him feel better, don’t you think? Or would it make him feel worse? I’m not sure.’
At that we all look at each other, mulling over her questions in our heads.
‘I think you should tell him,’ says Juanita, her voice strong and clear. ‘It will hurt, but in the end, I think he’ll be glad to know it.’ Sunny nods in agreement.
‘I wish the fuzz had at least given him back the letter he wrote her,’ Connie adds. ‘Diane had it on her when she died. I wonder what happened to it.’
‘I wonder what it said,’ I respond, trying to imagine what Johnny might have scribbled down in those final moments, unable to know that it would be his last chance to communicate with the girl he loved.
‘I don’t think he’ll ever tell me,’ Connie answers. ‘Anyway, he shouldn’t. It was just for her.’
I think – not for the last time, I’m sure – of the little baby out in the world who’s a part of Johnny and a part of Diane. I make a silent wish that maybe one day, somehow, Johnny will get to look into that baby’s face and see Diane in it.
‘It’s so good she got to read that letter,’ I say. ‘It made her eyes light up when she did.’
‘I’ll tell Johnny that, too,’ Connie says, and our gazes meet for a good long while.
‘What about Ray and all those boys?’ I ask at last. ‘What happened that night after I passed out?’ I’m ready to know. All these days that I’ve spent avoiding the newspaper and the television news broadcasts, and Grandma and Mama have been shielding me from them, but now I’m curious.
The girls trade glances. Finally, Juanita speaks. ‘Well, of course we weren’t there to see it, but we found out later through the grapevine that Johnny started beating the tar out of all of them until the cops came.’
‘As he should have,’ mutters Connie.
‘And the car that …’ I can’t bring myself to say the words.
‘The driver didn’t get charged,’ Sunny says. ‘There’s no way he could’ve stopped in time. It was the boys’ fault, but nothing’s happening to them because I don’t know if they can really prove it. It all got written off as some wild accident.’
‘The cops just want to close the whole deal,’ I say. ‘Now they can say they solved what happened at Winkler’s without a lot of fuss.’ I tell the girls about the two detectives who came to my house. ‘It’s all over now in their minds, I guess.’ The police may consider this case closed, but I know what’s happened the past few weeks has changed me, which means it’s far from really over. At least the fuzz never found a way to try and pin what happened to Preston on me or anyone else from the neighborhood.
‘I never want to look at Ray Swanson’s rotten face again,’ says Sunny. ‘He can drop dead as far as I’m concerned.’
We smoke for a while until Juanita breaks the silence. ‘I wonder … if Diane’s parents had wanted to do something about it, don’t you think they could have? I mean, they’re from River Oaks. They know important people. Don’t you think they could have gone after Ray and Butch and all those boys if they’d really wanted to?’
I remember my nighttime chats with Diane in the abandoned house, the candle illuminating her face as she talked about being nothing but a disaster and a disappointment to her folks. About being a doll in a dollhouse.
‘It’s hard to imagine,’ I say, ‘but maybe they’re glad she’s out of sight for good now. They don’t have to ship her off to an aunt’s house or some awful place up in Dallas to hide her from their rich friends.’
Juanita and Sunny nod, but Connie just says, ‘It’s not that hard to imagine, really.’ And after that nobody says anything for a while.
‘Evie?’ I hear my grandmother’s voice from the front of our house. ‘Evie, are you hungry for dinner? Your mother will be home soon.’
‘In a minute, Grandma!’ I shout. Then I look at my girls. My friends. My best friends. One of us is missing, but the rest of us are here. And I’m never going to let them go.
Almost like she’s reading my mind, Connie speaks up. ‘I want to say – in case there was any question – that Diane was one of us.’ She stubs her cigarette out in the dirt. ‘I’ll never forget her. I swear to God I never will.’
‘Same,’ says Sunny.
‘Same,’ says Juanita.
‘I swear it, too,’ I say, and I stay outside with my friends a little bit longer, leaning into them, not even needing to talk. Not even wanting to. I stay so long that Grandma has to come outside and holler for me twice.
EPILOGUE
Glenwood cemetery is beautiful and green, even in mid-December, covered in oaks and pines and nestled right up against Buffalo Bayou. It’s where the rich people of Houston are laid to rest. My best friend Diane Farris didn’t have a public funeral. I only found out she was buried at Glenwood in a small family ceremony because that’s what it said in the paper. It was Mama who discovered this information, not long after our heart-to-heart. She came and sat on my bed, holding the folded Houston Post in her hands as she told me. And then she let me cry into her arms for a long time until her blouse was damp with my tears.
‘I’m so sorry, Ladybug,’ my mother kept saying, pushing my hair back with her tender hands, like she was trying to brush the pain away. All I could think about was how Diane had never known a mother like mine, and how unfair that was.