Objects of My Affection (26 page)

Daniel hands me a turkey sandwich on a folded paper towel. “I did the best I could with what little was in the fridge. I see your grocery-shopping habits haven't improved any.”

“Says the man who still had a jar of mustard from college when I met him.”

“It did come as quite the shock when you told me it was supposed to be yellow.” He sits on the other end of the couch while I tug myself up to sit cross-legged. “So how are you holding up?”

“I vacillate between wanting to kill Ash and being terrified he's dead in a ditch somewhere.”

He gives me a sympathetic look. “You have every right to be angry. Especially after all you've done for him.”

Though Daniel has a point, I have to resist the urge to defend Ash. As I rearrange the turkey and lettuce leaf on my sandwich to stall on a response, there's a knock on the door.

“Looks like your date is here. I'm off. Keep me posted.” Daniel's brows knit together. “On Ash, I mean.”

As if I'd give him the dirty details on my date? As if there's still going to be a date? Besides, it's too early to be Niko picking me up.

“Come in,” I shout before Daniel has a chance to get up.

The door pushes open, and it's Marva. She's holding a bottle of liquor, and she steps in, gazing around the room, which is heaped with boxes. “I like what you've done with the place,” she says.

“I don't want to brag,” I say, “but it was my idea to set the couch horizontally instead of vertically.”

“It's been years since I've been back here. I used this as my studio.”

“I wondered if you did!” Daniel says, then immediately looks guilty, as if he'd giggled at a funeral. “Please … here,” he says to Marva, standing up. “Have a seat. I'll leave you two to talk.”

Marva takes his place on the couch. “You needn't leave. I won't be long.” She pulls shot glasses from a pocket in her sweater jacket. Setting them on a crate I've been using as a coffee table, she pours three shots.

“Thanks, Marva, but I don't know if I can—”

“This is fifty-year-old Scotch. Of course you can.” She tosses her shot back. Daniel reaches down, grabs one, and does the same. I pick the last one up and—what the heck—down it in one gulp. Although I'd braced myself for the usual burn, this goes down warm and smooth. Guess that's the difference between half-a-century-old Scotch and Jose Cuervo.

Marva pours another round but leaves the shot glasses on the table. “So I gather that your boy checked himself out of rehab.”

“This morning. Apparently he walked out the door like he was running to the 7-Eleven and not in fact throwing away all I'd worked for. And now I have no clue where he might be.”

“You're planning to look for him?”

“Of course.”

“Why?”

I stare at her, flummoxed.
“Why?”

“Do you even know the reason he left the rehab center?”

“No.”

Daniel leans against the wall, hands in his pockets, and sighs before speaking. “His therapist told me they'd been getting into some tough issues in therapy. That Ash didn't want to deal with it.”

“You didn't tell me that,” I say.

He shrugs. “Thought I'd wait until you weren't passing out all over the place.”

“What kind of issues?” I ask.

“Don't know. He wouldn't elaborate.”

“I'm not typically one to offer platitudes,” Marva says, shifting about clumsily on the couch so she's facing me. “But perhaps all of this is meant to be. If your son feels that rehab isn't for him, maybe it's not. Some people have to carve their own paths.”

“That would be fine,” I say. “Except his path was going nowhere but down.”

She scowls. “This whole war on drugs has gotten entirely out of hand. There's a reason people take them, and, frankly, it's because it's fun. At times even mind-expanding. Are you going to tell me you've never done any?”

Daniel shakes his head. “As much as I admire you, Marva, you're barking up the wrong tree on that one. Lucy here is the picture of innocence.”

“I'm not entirely naive,” I say. “I smoked pot here and there in college, but that's not the point. Ash isn't a guy who sometimes does drugs. There's nothing recreational about it. He's … well, he's an addict.”

Though I'm responding to Marva, my eyes lift to meet Daniel's. He's staring at me with such surprise you'd think I'd popped naked from a cake. He opens his mouth to say something, but Marva pipes in, “People said that about me, too. What the hell do they know? They want to slap a label on you so they can shove you onto whatever shelf they want. Ridiculous. Yes, I did coke.” Her face takes on a dreamy look. “And, oh, we used to take pills by the handful. They'd be out in
bowls at parties. Like candy! I had a particular fondness for these little pink ones. Of course this was the seventies. And the eighties, too, come to think of it. At any rate, I suppose some people need to go to rehab and talk endlessly and join hands and sing ‘Kumbaya' to move on with their lives. For others, they simply need to decide the party is over.”

“And that's what happened with you?” Daniel asks. “You hit rock bottom?”

“Heavens no. That sounds so ugly. There was no rock bottom. I lost something important to me. That's what it took to decide enough was enough.”

In my current state, my usual politeness filters are gone and I bluntly ask, “What did you lose?”

She studies me for a moment, then she claps her hands on her knees and hoists herself up. “It's not of consequence. And I didn't come out here to wax philosophical. I came to offer you the use of my private investigator.” She hands me a piece of paper with the name Larry Mackenlively and a phone number scrawled on it. “I figured you'd want to hunt down your son. You strike me as the type.”

“Thanks, Marva, but I can't afford a PI. Aren't they expensive?”

“He's doing work for me—he can do a bit of poking around for you. Tell him I approved adding you to my retainer. I'll consider it a business investment. After all, I've got a deadline to meet, and you won't be of any benefit to me if you're preoccupied fretting about your son.” Even with her glibness, there's no missing Marva's generosity.

She turns to leave, but then stops. “Oh, what the hell.” She picks up the other shot she'd poured herself and slugs it back. “My liver is going to hate me in the morning.”

I'm already reaching for my cell phone to call the PI. Ash has a five-hour head start—which is entirely my fault, I realize with a flush of guilt. If I hadn't been finagling a date from Niko, I wouldn't have ignored my phone when Dr. Paul called. “I hope you don't mind that I won't be coming in to work tomorrow,” I tell Marva.

“You worked all weekend, of course it's not a problem. Frankly, I was starting to wonder if you had any sort of social life at all.”

“She does,” Daniel says, his voice flat. “I'd better get going, too. Mind if I walk you out, Marva?”

“And they say chivalry is dead.” She turns her attention to me. “Mackenlively is excellent at what he does, but don't worry if your son doesn't turn up right away. He will when he's ready. They always do.”

“Not always,” I say, punching in the phone number. “That's what scares me.”

“My dear, I realize you're going to do what you feel you need to do. But you're constantly harping on me to let go. Perhaps it's time you learn to do the same.”

Ash is not some old, wobbly dresser that I'm hanging on to for no good reason, I want to say, but I'm feeling too indebted to Marva at the moment to argue. I let her words hang there, as if she—of all people—has anything of value to say about parenting.

After she and Daniel go, I leave a message for the PI. I text Niko and cancel our date. Then I polish off the other shot, followed by the one Daniel left behind. While I'm at it, I pour another. My liver will probably hate me tomorrow, too, along with my head, but for now, I'm quite content to go numb.

L
arry Mackenlively strikes me as too large to be a PI—heavyset, over six feet tall, with a rugged, angular face and thick mustache. Awkwardly perched as he is on the tiny coffee-shop chair, I can't imagine him on stakeout for hours at a time in a car, if that's what they do. He pulls out a spiral notebook. “Let me get some info from you,” he says after we've exchanged pleasantries. “I've got a fellow nearby in the Tampa area who can do the footwork. Did you bring a picture?”

I slide across the table my one photo of Ash.

“Nice-looking kid,” he says, picking it up. “Any changes since this was taken? Haircuts? Tattoos? Scars?”

“None that I know of.” I feel myself blanch as I take a sip of my coffee. My stomach is none too happy after last night's liquor-fest. When Larry returned my call this morning at eight, I could barely
get a “Hello” out as I dove for the phone. My mouth felt as if I'd swallowed the dust bunnies from beneath Marva's bed. For the next fifteen minutes, I fill him in on Ash's drug history, the intervention, and my conversations with Dr. Paul about Ash's progress.

Mackenlively leans back, and the chair whimpers beneath him. “So here's the part where I get you to do my job for me. Where do you figure he went?”

“I honestly don't know. With eighty dollars on him, he didn't go far.”

“You'd be surprised. That could take him quite a ways on a bus. And if he's got a thumb, he could have hitched a ride. Which is the problem. He could be anywhere, or he could be fifty yards away from the rehab having a burger at a McDonald's.” The discouragement I'm feeling must show on my face because he pats my hand. “I'm not saying it's going to be impossible to find him. Just pointing out the challenges. So tell me, is there any chance Ash is coming home?”

I wince at the word since we don't really have a home anymore. “I don't know.”

“Does he have a girlfriend here?”

“No. Although …” I remember my conversation with Samantha at the bowling alley. “There is a girl here he wrote to while he was in rehab, but they only dated briefly, and that was a while ago.”

“That could be important. Here's the thing. I'll have my guy check hospitals, jails, bus stations—the usual. He can interview businesses right around the area of the rehab. See if anyone remembers seeing your son. What would be ideal is if we can hone in on his location. Otherwise the area we're searching is the entire United States of America. That's a big net to cast.”

Fighting tears, I stare outside the window at a harried mom wrestling her toddler into a stroller. “You're not sounding hopeful.”

“We'll do what we can do. We could get lucky. It would help if you could put out feelers on your end. Call the ex-girlfriend and see if she's heard from him. Call his friends. I'll do what I can, but your contacts may prove more valuable than mine. There's a very good
chance Ash is going to get in touch with somebody. They usually do. To get money. For a place to stay. To buy him a bus ticket. Eighty dollars isn't going to last long.”

“Especially if he's used it to buy drugs,” I say glumly.

“That's a possibility, but I'm a glass-half-full sort of person myself. So we're going to proceed as if he's simply a young man that you'd like to find. Does he have a Facebook account by chance? Maybe he's logged on. Some of these kids are so dense, they post their whereabouts right there on their status.”

“He won't friend me.”

He nods. “My daughter unfriended me. Apparently I commented on her wall too much.”

As he scratches something in his steno pad, I make a mental note to ask Heather if she'll have DJ check Ash's Facebook page. Beyond that, I'm feeling utterly impotent. “This might sound crazy,” I say, “but what if I head down to Florida? Poke around myself.”

“Not crazy, but if you're asking my opinion, you're better off staying here. Put his friends to work spying for you. Some won't do it—that annoying way teenagers feel they have to protect one another—but his true friends will be concerned about him. Hey, your son might surprise you and contact you on his own.”

“Doubtful,” I say, but I nonetheless feel for my phone in my pocket.

“Stranger things have happened. If he calls, try to get him to tell you where he is. An address. At least a city. The best you can hope for is that he'll ask for money. Whatever you do, don't deposit it into an account. Buy him a plane ticket home, and book it yourself. That way you can meet him at the airport so he can't wriggle away. Or if he wants money, say you'll wire it. He'll have to give you an address. Then call me right away.”

“Then do I wire it?” Larry's coaching is making me nervous, as if I were being asked to pose as a spy to draw secrets from the Russians.

“No, but tell him that you are so he'll stay put. That'll give you time to—” He stops. “What do you plan to do once you locate your son?”

I feel myself blinking at him. It's a simple question, yet I don't have the answer. “I just want to talk to him. First off, to see that he hasn't done anything drastic. Tell him I love him, that I'm proud of his progress but that he needs to go back to rehab and finish up.”

“Will they take him back?”

“If they have an opening. They told me this morning they'll try to hold it, but they can't guarantee.”

“So you'll send him someplace else if they don't?”

“If I win the lottery. Otherwise, I don't have the money to pay for a new one. The Willows was cash up front. Ash stayed long enough that we don't get a refund, but not long enough to make it through recovery.”

“Then let's get to work finding your boy ASAP.”

After that, Larry gives me my homework of contacting Ash's friends—a clear case of be careful what you wish for. Although I'd desperately wanted a task to do, I was hoping for one with less humiliation. As we get up to leave, he says, “If you hear anything—even if it seems irrelevant—call me. That's what I'm here for. Got it?”