The Missing Place (24 page)

They'd both gotten out of the car, and when they were done reading the note, neither of them said anything for a moment.

“That
cunt
!” Shay said, and kicked the door, making a small dent in the metal. She turned to Colleen. “She can't go through our stuff! I can't believe she went in there. She had to have been waiting, watching through her little windows, spying on us to see when we left. Goddamn it. She can't kick us out like this.”

Colleen remembered the smell from the first night, the faint skunky odor. She bit down her impatience; it wouldn't help anyone. “Let me talk to her.”

“And say what? She doesn't want us here. It's clear. She knows she can get more money is the only reason she's doing this.”

“And I can
pay
her more! Come on, Shay,
think
for a minute. We
lose this place, we have nothing.” Colleen took a deep breath. Now she had to tell her about the room Andy had found, and it felt like she was giving up the only card she held. Because she couldn't let Andy come now, not if it meant Shay would be without a place to live. “Look, I should have told you earlier. Andy found us a room starting Wednesday. That means we just have to make this work for three more days and we can move into a hotel.”

Shay stared at her. “You weren't going to
tell
me that? What were you planning to do, just move out? Were you even going to leave a note?”

“Shay, listen, I hadn't decided what to do. Andy said he might want to come, I told him I might still want to room with you, if—if we were getting somewhere with the search—”

If we were still speaking to each other
, she didn't say. If she learned to live with the faint accusation in Shay's eyes every time she looked at her. If she could convince Shay—because that's what she had hoped to do, though the understanding didn't come to her until just that moment—that her son was
good
, that he was worthy of Taylor's friendship, of membership in this club that he had chosen for himself, defying her and Andy. That his bid for a life of his own hadn't been a failure.

She'd needed time to make Shay see that. But how? What difference would a few more days make?

“I don't need you,” Shay muttered, backing away. She stalked to the front door of the house, cutting across the frozen lawn. She didn't bother with the bell, just started pounding with her fist.

“She's not home!” Colleen ran to catch up. “There're no lights on and her car is gone. Shay, she's at work.”

“Then I'm going there.”

“Shay, stop! We can't make trouble with her. We can't get the
cops involved in this or they'll be even less likely to help us. If you don't want me to try to talk to her, we need to put our energy into finding somewhere else to stay.”

Shay didn't respond. She walked over to the Explorer, opened the tailgate, and started tossing the garbage bags in, not bothering to brush off the snow first. Colleen helped; she could hear things rattling in the bags. The suitcases were empty; Shay threw them in last. Then she slammed the hatch and went around to the driver's side. “You coming?”

Colleen had barely gotten in the car when Shay revved the engine twice and drove onto the lawn. While Colleen scrambled to get the door shut and her seat belt on, Shay drove to the other side of the lawn and then backed up. The tires spun on the icy grass and the engine whined. Lights went on over the neighbor's porch, but no one came outside.

“Shay, stop it! Come on, you're just making it worse!”

“How could it be worse?” Shay drove over the garden bed, the car lurching as it went over the little decorative fence. She plowed through the bushes, backed up and drove over them again. The branches brushed and scratched against the side of the Explorer, but she kept going until she'd managed to flatten them all.

Colleen said nothing, sitting rigid, braced with her hands on the dashboard. Finally Shay finished with the lawn. Deep gouges had kicked up frozen clumps of grass and dirt. She turned the wheel and Colleen saw it coming, closed her eyes before Shay drove into the mailbox. When she backed up, the thing was leaning nearly to the ground, the pole bent and the concrete pad clinging to the base.

Shay drove around it and out into the street. She stayed to the speed limit as they headed for town.

“I can't believe you did that.”

“I can't believe you wanted to just pay her off! Is that how you solve every problem in your life? Never mind. I guess I already know the answer to that.”

Colleen waited just a beat and then she couldn't help herself. “What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

“That means that instead of being a
mom
to your son, you were so worried about what people would think that you bought his way into everything so you wouldn't have to deal with it! Even in Fairhaven we got a few mothers like you. The other kids don't like their kids, they go out and buy Happy Meals for the whole class. Have parties at the jumping gym and spend more on the goodie bags than I ever spent on Taylor's whole birthday! How much did you have to pay to get him into college? Huh? How much to keep the admissions people from knowing he nearly killed another kid?”

“
Stop it!
” Colleen screamed. “Stop it, oh, God, let me out! Let me out!” She reached for the door, unsnapping her seat belt. She saw the asphalt moving underneath the car as Shay slammed on the brakes, and when her feet hit the ground, the momentum made her stumble. She tottered and fell, the shock of the impact shooting pain through her hip. Her purse had fallen upside down and emptied itself on the street.

“Are you fucking
crazy
?” Shay yelled. “Do you have a death wish?”

“Leave me alone!” Colleen pawed at her wallet, makeup case, keys, stuffing everything back into her purse. “You don't know anything about my relationship with my son!”

“I know that my son told me he was hanging out with Paul as a favor because no one else wanted to!”

“That's a
lie
!” Colleen was on her knees, trying to grab a lipstick that had rolled a few feet away. She tried to stand, slipped and fell
again, this time on her knee. The pain was breathtaking. “Paul had a ton of friends!”

“Maybe back east. You probably bought those too. That's not how it works here. I mean, look
around
you, Colleen. You think anyone's paying these guys to just show up? Everything here you have to earn. Maybe if you'd left him alone, Paul would have finally figured out how to be a man. Maybe that's why he disappeared, he couldn't get away from you even up here!”

Colleen abandoned the lipstick. She finally got to her feet and stumbled toward the sidewalk. They were in front of a storage facility, its parking lot surrounded by tall fencing. She grabbed at the chain link for balance as she tried to get away.

“Are you out of your mind? Get back in the car!” Shay shouted.

Colleen kept walking, tears streaming down her face. She was sobbing, unable to catch her breath. After she'd gone another twenty feet she heard the screech of tires and Shay peeled off down the street.

She thought Shay would turn around, make a U-turn and come back to harangue her some more. To rip at the open wound. Thinking of what she'd said about Paul . . . Colleen couldn't stand it. She covered her ears with her gloved hands and made sounds to cover up her thoughts, horrible wailing sounds of pain, but she couldn't obliterate them.

Ahead, in the next block, was the truck stop where they showered and had breakfast. The sign still blinked SUPER STAR PLAZA
FUEL—SHOWERS—DINER—HOT COFFEE—24 HOURS.
Half a dozen trucks and a few cars were parked on the side; all but one of the pumps were occupied. Even the car wash was going, steam rising into the night as the hot water blasted away the snow and grime and salt.

Colleen shied away from the light. She followed the edge of the
parking lot, along the fencing. The snow covered shapes of dead plants. In the summer, they probably grew geraniums here. Marigolds, begonias. Hardy plants you could buy cheap at the hardware store.

There was a bench, awkwardly placed by a planter that contained nothing but cigarette butts, some of them recent. Colleen brushed the snow off the bench and sat down, hoping no one would glance her way.

After a while, the sobbing slowed. The tissues had fallen out of her purse along with the lipstick, so Colleen had been forced to wipe her nose on her sleeve and the back of her glove. Her hair was matted to her cheeks. She was terribly cold, but she welcomed it, wished for the pain that was setting into her fingertips and toes to spread. She wanted to feel the pain everywhere. Maybe she would freeze to death here. They would find her body frozen to the bench. With her long coat and her hood pulled up, she would look like the Virgin Mary in prayer. And this would be her pietà, her final sign of devotion to Paul. Because in the end, she defended him alone, no matter how much Andy loved him, no matter how he wrestled with his own demons. A boy grows into a man and leaves his father, to return as an equal. But a mother is always his mother.

She remembered holding Paul in her arms when he was a baby, cradling him with that head full of downy dark hair nestled in her elbow, marveling at the beauty of him, the perfection of him. Even as an infant he'd been angry and restless; even then, if Colleen was truly honest with herself, she knew there was something different about him. But look at him! God, he was so beautiful.

Yes. Dying here, now, with this image in her mind, this would not be so bad. God would forgive her this. She had done her best; He would judge her kindly. Andy would move on, eventually. Everyone
would forgive him. They always forgive the men. He would find another woman, who would adore him, who would remind him that it was never his fault, none of it was ever his fault. She might spare Colleen some compassion; she might allow Colleen's photo to stay on the mantel. But deep down she would know what everyone knew: somehow, it was always the mother's fault.

Because what Shay had said before she drove away was true. She
had
tried to buy Paul's way in the world. All the tutors, the personal coaches, the Ivy League summer programs, the therapist and psychiatrists and private school counselors—with what she had paid them, they could have bought a summer home on the Cape. If there were a lever you could pull to flush another child's future away so Paul could have succeeded, she would have been first in line.

And then, at the end, she'd had to face her failure. The expression on Paul's face that morning, as he scrubbed the floor, trying to erase the stain of his own rage—guilt and shame and fear and despair.

Colleen was guilty of so many things. She couldn't stand herself. No matter how much Shay loathed her, Colleen loathed herself more. And somehow, despite all her failings, she'd taught her son one solid lesson: how to loathe himself as well.

Take
me
, Colleen whispered, hoping the wind would carry her plea to God's ears.

SEX WASN'T THE
best form of self-obliteration, but it would do. Especially when the buzz Shay had worked up earlier in the evening had faded, leaving behind its chalky, dulling aftereffects. Shay knew from her hard-drinking days that it was possible to light a second wave and get hammered all over again, even after neglecting the buzz for several hours, but it took work and generally you wanted to stay in one place after, and she wasn't up for either of those things.

When she got back to the Oak Door Tavern, it was eleven thirty and the crowd was holding strong. She found a parking place wedged between two giant pickup trucks and went inside, stepping around a rowdy group of revelers clogging the doorway. She headed for the ladies' room; she'd had to go ever since they were at the trailer.

Thinking about the trailer made her furious all over again. She'd known so many sanctimonious women like Brenda. Go to church on Sunday and judge everyone all week long. Shay'd been used to people judging her since she was just a toddler, when her hippie mother let her hair grow down past her butt and dressed her in Indian-cotton dresses she tie-dyed herself. These days she figured she was a hell of a lot better adjusted than most of the women she knew. She bought a little weed now and then from a boy who'd once mowed her lawn; she had Mack when she wanted a warm body in her bed. She had a beautiful grandbaby, and her daughter and son-in-law came over
every weekend because they
wanted
to, not because they needed a handout or felt obligated.

And she got along great with Taylor, which was more than a lot of those uptight women could say about their relationships with their own kids. Which made her think of Colleen.

The things she'd said. Christ, the things she'd said to Colleen.

After she dried her hands, she reached into the pocket of her jeans and pulled out the poster. Paul was a nice-looking boy. You could tell he was shy from the way he looked at the camera, or rather didn't look at it.

Taylor had taken Paul under his wing the way he always did. He was such a mother hen, always scouting the outskirts of any party for the wallflowers, the tender ones, and folding them into his sparkling orbit. What he had actually said about Paul was that he seemed to be having trouble making friends, but it was because he was
bewildered.
Not disliked, as she'd implied to Colleen. “It's like he's never seen anything like us before, Mom.” Taylor had laughed after telling her about a prank in which Taylor had convinced Paul to drive their shift supervisor's truck up onto a flatbed. Shay hadn't completely understood the story, but she did understand what Taylor was doing, even if
he
didn't—teaching Paul the way things worked, giving him the ticket to belong. Just like when he'd patiently taught Javed Suleman the rules of American football in the backyard before tryouts back in sixth grade. Or Paul's nickname, Whale. Taylor had been the one who gave it to him, and it was his gentle way of showing Paul how to fit in, how his fancy, expensive East Coast clothes weren't doing him any favors in the camp.