The Missing Place (35 page)

The tall one had wrested the bat free. He flung it toward shore, and the sound of it skittering across the ice reminded T.L. of pickup hockey games, a handful of boys and a single chipped puck, half of them with branches for sticks. “Paul!” the guy yelled again, holding onto his friend's sleeve. “Enough!”

“It's not enough until I know he's going to stay away from her,” he said, kicking T.L. as he tried to crawl sideways out of the way. He reached for the guy's foot as he landed another kick, and held on. He slid and fell, his friend losing his grip on him, and landed on T.L.,
causing waves of agony through his battered hip. As he writhed in pain, the guy went for his throat, clutching and shoving. T.L. tried to push him off, but he had leverage, his knee on his gut.

It happened without thought—T.L. arced his wrist out and then slammed it into the other man's side, into the puffy orange down coat. It was only when it lodged fast that he realized what he'd done. He let go immediately, the handle protruding from the jacket only for a second as the guy lurched clumsily off of him, before falling to the ice. A blooming spot of red appeared on the torn fabric of the coat.

T.L. had no idea how badly he had wounded the man, but he was coming toward him again, ignoring the injury, so that had to be good, right? T.L. scrambled on his hands and knees like a crab, trying to ignore the pain, and it wasn't until the lake sighed and splintered again that he realized he had been heading backward. The wrong way.

“Watch out!” he yelled, because if they didn't get off the cracking ice, they were all dead. The injured man went still, cocking his head, and T.L. knew he heard it too. The cracking was splintering and racing toward them along invisible fissures and fault lines below the opaque white surface. Underneath, the black water was hungry for them.

He went flat on his stomach, arms and legs spread like a child making snow angels, and T.L. knew he'd learned the same thing, wherever he came from. How not to die when the ice reaches for you.

The other one hadn't.

He was looking at his feet, dumbfounded, as the first large crack split the ice and the water rushed over his boots. At first that was all it was, an inch or two, flooding the listing plane of ice. T.L. was already scrambling backward, body pressed flat and legs and arms extended, his weight distributed as widely as possible. The injured man
was flat on his stomach too, but he wasn't moving. He was screaming and reaching for his friend.

“
Get down get down get down
—”

But he didn't. And then the ice took him.

“HE ALMOST DIDN'T
make it,” T.L. said. Someone had put a plastic cup of water in front of him. He was thirsty, his throat raw and his lips dry and cracking. But he didn't reach for the water.

“Who? Paul?” Weyant had barely reacted to the story, fixing him with that unblinking gaze. Jack Cook seemed to be trying to stay awake, his eyelids drooping more than usual. Only Myron looked upset, putting his hand flat against his sternum and swallowing hard.

“Paul. Yes. When Taylor went in, Paul was back two, three feet from where the ice broke. He went forward a few inches and I turned back around. I thought—I don't know, I guess I thought maybe I could grab his boots and pull him, keep him from going in. But, you know . . .”

“He'd been
beating
you.” Finally unable to restrain himself, Myron burst out. “He was irrational. You would have been crazy to help, he could have got you both killed.”

T.L. didn't meet his uncle's gaze. He pressed his teeth together, welcomed the ache in his skull. “He tried to reach out for Taylor, but Taylor was fighting the water. You know. Doing everything wrong.”

No one said anything, but everyone in the room could visualize what had happened. It took only ninety seconds in the water before you had no chance of saving yourself.

“What did you do after, Theodore?”

The chief's voice had a hard edge. The name was jarring in a small way; no one had called T.L. by his given name since he was a
child. Even his driver's license said T.L. Weyant knew that; when Elizabeth had brought him to dinner, he'd shook his hand and stared him down and said “T.L.” as though it was a curse.

“I . . . went to my truck.”

“When you left, you believed that Taylor was dead and Paul was injured.”

“Hey,” Myron said, placing his hand flat on the table. A warning. “Those boys tried to
kill
him.”

“We don't know that.” Some dull animosity lingered between the two men. “I understand Theodore feared for his life, but Paul and Taylor may have been just trying to send a message. A warning.”

“He said that kid had the bat raised up in two hands, coming down on his skull. You want to tell me that ain't attempted murder?”

“It's okay,” T.L. cut in. “Myron, it's all right.” He shifted his gaze back to the chief. “I got off the ice, first thing. That's what I learned to do. Once it starts to go, you don't know where it reaches to. I stayed down until I was close to the shore. Then I got up and I ran to my truck.”

He crawled and slithered and felt the ice's angry drumline pounding its finale through his body. Ice got in his mouth and scraped his face and caked every crevice of his clothes, and Paul was yelling something that T.L. couldn't make out. Panic, that was for sure, terror and grief.

T.L. had never watched a man die on the ice, but there was that winter when the deer broke through and three of them watched from the shore, him and Mark and Keith. They'd been getting high around a driftwood fire, the joint burning down to nothing as they watched, transfixed by the sheer desperation in the deer's thrashing, the stillness when it finally gave up and sank, something he would never forget.

When he finally stood up and ran for the truck, he didn't turn around. He slipped and fell on the slope up from the shore. When he tried to get his keys out of his pocket, his hand was numb and clumsy. He didn't look back when he drove away: after revving the engine twice, he turned the heat to full blast, letting the harsh sound block out everything else except the snowy road ahead.

“So that's it. He told you everything.”

“You didn't tell anyone what happened.” Weyant ignored Myron, watching T.L.

T.L. shook his head. “No one.”

“Even though a boy was
dead.
”

“Sir.” T.L. held his gaze. “I know how you feel about me. You've hated me ever since I first went out with your daughter. If I came in here and told you I got into a fight, and one of the other guys is dead, you think I'm going to expect you'll believe my side?”

He was breathing hard. The recording device made a
whir-click
, but otherwise the room was silent.

Weyant reached across the table and shut off the recorder. He pushed back his chair.

“You're wrong,” he said tonelessly. “I haven't hated you since you took my daughter out. I've hated you since the day you were born.”

COLLEEN WOKE AGAIN
and there was light seeping through the windows. Morning, then, finally. She'd been lying on a vinyl couch in the hospital waiting room. Earlier, when she was tossing and turning, there were other people here. An old woman with a scarf wrapped round and round her neck, who sat with knitting on her lap, unmoving. Later, a big man with a T-shirt that didn't cover his belly came and sat next to her, faint music coming from his earbuds. Angry, cacophonous music, turned up so loud Colleen could hear it across the room.

They were both gone now. She sat up, feeling the ache in her hips, the cottony bad taste of sleep in her mouth. Her phone was on the end table, where she'd left it so she wouldn't miss a call. But there was only a text from Andy:
Got on 2:00 arr. Lawton 4:58. Got car. Call when you get this.

She dialed, glancing around the waiting room. The nurse at the desk was turned away from her, talking softly on the phone. It was a different one from earlier.

“Andy,” she said, the minute he picked up.

“How are you?”

“I'm—I'm fine, I guess. A little achy from sleeping on the couch.”

“They didn't give you a cot? Or one of those bed chairs?”

“They didn't let me stay in the room. They've got—there's a police
officer there. Sitting outside.” With the straight-backed chair, the paunch, the radio—just what you'd expect.

“Aw, hell. Did you ever get to talk to him at all?”

“For a few minutes.” She blinked at the memory. “He was pretty out of it. He just said . . .”

He had an IV taped to his arm, a bag slowly dripping. Equipment glowing in the dim room. His eyes were swollen and heavy. When he looked at her, it took a moment for him to focus. The first thing he said: “I'm going to marry her. When I get out.”

“He thinks he's going to jail,” she said quietly.

She had tried to call Andy in the middle of the chaos at the fishing shack, after they loaded Paul into the ambulance, but she didn't have cell reception. The police let her drive Shay's car out, after she agreed that she wouldn't try to keep pace with the ambulance. She kept her eyes on the road and the speedometer, and as she drove she murmured a prayer, over and over:
Thank you, God. Oh, thank you, God.
It wasn't until she was in the hospital parking lot that she tried Andy again. He'd answered right away—he was already up and getting ready to go to the office—and she'd said, “He's all right, Paul is alive,” and then both of them were talking and crying at once.

It had been a moment of such pure joy, a moment that was lost to memory now, with reality shadowed over with doubt and dread. How quickly she had gone from gratitude that her son was alive to worry about what came next.

“Colleen, I'm not going in today. I'll leave for the airport around noon and I'll come straight to the hotel when I land. Remember, it's the Homewood Suites, right? Will you be able to get over there and get checked in?”

It took her a moment to catch up, and then she remembered.
The room Vicki had found, just a few days ago when everything had been different.

Her things were still in the other room, the one Shay had gotten for them. Shay: there, alone. At least, Colleen assumed she was still there; it was where the cops took her last night. Had they stayed to make sure she was all right?

What did it say about Colleen that she had not bothered to wonder, all the long night on the waiting room couch, how Shay was doing, in her first hours as the mother of a dead child?

“Andy, I need you to do something. Before you get on the plane.”

“What?”

“Get Shay's daughter on a flight. And her son-in-law if he can come, and their daughter. Can you do that?”

There was a pause. “Colleen . . . last night you said . . . with everything that happened, and the police being involved—”

“Taylor is
dead.
” She was impatient now, even though she knew she had no right to be. “I know. But it wasn't Paul's fault. It
wasn't.
”

“Colleen . . .”

Colleen gripped the phone harder and hunched over. The nurse was talking to someone else now, paying her no attention. She could smell coffee coming from somewhere down the hall.

Last night it had all tumbled out, Andy trying to get her to slow down, to sort out the facts. The
facts.
What had it mattered then? Their son was
alive.
Taylor was dead, and that was all she knew.

In the few short moments that she had spent in Paul's hospital room, she hadn't learned much. She touched his face, kissed his forehead, smoothed his hair back. He asked for water and she held the bent straw to his lips. He didn't seem especially glad she was there. She thought he might have gone back to sleep, but then his eyes fluttered open and he looked at her and said, “It's all my fault.”
But that couldn't be. Elizabeth said it was all
her
fault.
He did this for us, the baby.

Taylor had drowned, and there had been another boy there. Why hadn't she asked Elizabeth the rest? What could have possibly happened that night? And worst of all, why did Paul think he was responsible?

The other boy. The one who ran away. He was complicit. Paul had been there when the tragedy happened, and he felt guilty about it and ashamed. He thought he was letting his parents down again, letting himself down. And he was sensitive. No one ever understood that Paul felt everything more deeply than most people. So even if it wasn't his fault that Taylor had died, he would blame himself. It would all get sorted out, and maybe they had all played some part, maybe they all bore some responsibility, but eventually Paul would come to understand that he alone hadn't made it happen.

Darren Terry's face came into her mind, the face she never allowed herself to think about. His yearbook picture, taken before it happened. Everyone acted like
that
was black and white, but it wasn't. It was shades of gray. Darren, and he wasn't the only one, had tormented Paul, pushed and pushed until something had to give.