The Missing Place (38 page)

“Then
why
don't you
?” The words shot out of her. Shay clapped her hand over her mouth, horrified. How could she really have just said that?

She backed away from the bed, tripping against the same chair, nearly falling. She stumbled out of the room, gasping for breath. There was no one in the hallway and she bent at the waist, leaning against the wall, feeling like she might throw up.
God.
Was that what she really wanted? For Paul to be dead? If they both died, would it somehow make it even?

She wanted so much to hate him. She
did
hate him. He had stolen the most precious thing in the world from her and she could kill him with her own hands, she could take a dull knife and stab it into him, over and over, until he was dead . . .

Except that this wasn't him, this wasn't Paul. Not the Paul she expected him to be. The boy in the hospital bed looked like the pictures
Colleen had showed her, with those long eyelashes and that tentative mouth and that thick dark hair. But he wasn't ruthless and he wasn't crazy. His eyes weren't empty. There was no guile there, only desperate sadness.

“Mrs. Capparelli . . .” There was a clattering in the room. Shay went in without thinking. Paul had managed to sit up and was trying to get out of the bed. He'd lowered the side bar and pushed off the covers, and she could see a spreading rusty stain on the bandage around his waist.

“What are you
doing
?” she demanded, putting her hands on his shoulders and pushing him back against the bed. “I'm calling a nurse.”

“No—wait.
Please.
”

She froze, standing over him the way she had stood over both her children on days when they stayed home sick from school, when they had fevers and the flu and chicken pox, wanting to tuck the covers back around him.

“If you want me to kill myself, I will,” he said quickly. “I just need . . . I would just ask that you not take it out on my parents. Please. They . . . I've already hurt them too bad.”

“Oh,” she said. A wave of exhaustion as palpable as a seizure passed through her. She sat down on the edge of the bed.

“I loved Taylor,” he went on. “I never told him that. He was my best friend. I was scared—because, you know, I've had friends before, where they didn't end up being what I thought, where they weren't really there for me when things got bad. But Taylor, he was the best. Everybody loved him, Mrs. Capparelli.” He swallowed again, as if he couldn't get his throat to work right. “Everybody wanted to be like him. He was funny. He made everyone laugh. And it was like it always got fun when he was there. We could all be sitting
around doing nothing, and Taylor would come in and then everyone was laughing and . . .”

He wiped at his eyes with his hands. “And I couldn't believe he wanted to be friends with me,” he said, his voice cracking. “And Elizabeth—when I found out she was only seventeen, and I didn't know what to do, and Taylor said,
Do you love her?
He kept telling me if I loved her, then everything would be all right, that love was the only thing that mattered. And that was before I even knew she was pregnant. And then . . . I was so worried about what my parents would say, and what we'd do, how we would make things work, with a baby, and he told me about you.”

“
Me?
” Shay said. “What do you mean?”

“He told me you got pregnant with his sister by accident and did your best anyway, and found someone to love and it wasn't perfect but it was a good family, and even though he lost his dad and you didn't have much money, he never felt like he was missing out on anything. He made me feel like it would be okay.”

Shay's eyes welled with tears. She grabbed the box of tissues from the bedside table. “He was special,” she said, dabbing at her eyes. “He was such an old soul. I can't believe it. I thought . . . I thought he'd come back to California once he got tired of working up here, that he'd save some money for a fresh start near me and his sister.”

The plan she had come here with, to make Paul tell her everything and then, somehow, to figure out how to hurt him and his family the worst way possible, had splintered into shards.

“I'm getting the nurse, you should be looked at,” she said. “I just need to know what happened. Why you went there that day and what you were fighting about.”

Paul blinked. “It wasn't her fault,” he said. “She was scared.”

“Whose fault? Elizabeth's?”

“Yes. She got beat up bad, she showed me pictures. She was worried about the baby. She told me T.L. did it. He thought . . . he thought the baby was his. But it wasn't. Elizabeth didn't know what to do, she said I should talk some sense into him, scare him enough to make him leave her alone.

“That's all I wanted to do,” he said, his eyes pleading. “Just to make him understand, once and for all. That she was with
me
now. That we were having the baby and he had to leave us alone.”

“Wait wait wait,” Shay said. “
Who
beat her?”

“T.L. did.” Paul's breathing had steadied again, but that spreading stain, that couldn't be good. “They used to go out. He was in love with her but she didn't love him anymore. She was with
me.
But the timing . . .” His face flushed, in embarrassment or anger, she couldn't tell. “He thought the baby was his. But it isn't. When Elizabeth tried to tell him she was with me, he wouldn't leave her alone. He kept bothering her, telling her that he wanted her back. One day he came when she was walking home from school, and she went with him, just to talk. And things . . . they got out of control and he hurt her. He left bruises, up here and here.” He touched his upper arm, the top of his rib cage.

“He was careful, it was places no one would see. But she texted me the pictures. He could have hurt the baby. I had to do something.”

Shay's mind raced, trying to factor all of this into the story. It had gotten away from her, shifting and changing, taking what she knew and making it into something different. She didn't know how she was supposed to feel now. “Do you still have those pictures?”

“No. I got rid of the phone. I smashed it and got one of those prepaid ones. I wasn't thinking real well, after . . . you know, when I left.”

“But Elizabeth might have them.”

“Why?” He fixed her with his pretty olive-colored eyes. “I figure he's paid enough. He hasn't bothered her again, not once since then. That's all we wanted. Just for him to leave her alone. And now it's just me that has to make up for all the rest. For Taylor.”

Shay gripped the side of the chair. The metal was cold and sharp. These chairs were shit—you'd think they could put something a little better in a hospital room, where people watched their loved ones suffer. Where they prayed and castigated themselves and wished for do-overs, for another chance.

“Court might not see it that way,” she whispered, the words a struggle to get out. “If he hurt her . . . that's something they'd think about.”

She wasn't actually sure. It was getting too complicated. It wasn't black and white anymore. The blame had been what she held on to, a hard, furious kernel that was as real as her own flesh. But now it had splintered like the view in a kaleidoscope, all the pieces winking and mirroring one another, mocking her.

“If she was afraid for her life, or the baby's life. And you were . . . trying to protect her.” The words were like chalk in her mouth. “And Taylor was just there to help you.”

“I wanted to take a gun,” Paul said. “Taylor had one. His dad's.”

“Oh, Jesus,” Shay said. How could he have been so stupid? That thing had been locked up in the case Frank had made for it, a plywood box bolted to the garage wall. She hadn't looked at it for years. Knew where the keys were, of course, because you don't fuck around with that sort of thing with kids in the house.

Evidently Taylor had known where the keys were too.

“It was just for hunting,” Paul said hastily. “Our friend Luther—he was going to hunt duck, he invited us to come along. I . . . couldn't, I mean, I've never shot anything.”

“Taylor didn't tell me,” Shay said, shaking her head. “I should have gotten rid of that thing years ago. There just, there wasn't that much that belonged to his father, and I don't know, I thought someday he or Brittany might want it. Fuck.”

“He always had his dad's army tags on,” Paul said, fingering an imaginary chain around his neck. “Anyway, I asked him to bring the gun and he said no way. If it wasn't for that, I would have had it and I could have shot him. Only . . .”

His voice grew thick and hoarse. “Taylor's dead so maybe it would have been better. I would have killed T.L. and gone to jail for murder, but Taylor would still be here. I mean, how do you even figure that out?”

Shay sighed, trying to do the mental calculus. One boy or another. One life or another. It was too much to think about, too big. She laid a hand on the mattress, the sheets thin and cool under her touch. After a moment she moved her hand to his arm. Paul's skin was hot, hotter than she thought it should be. She had to get that nurse.

“You can't,” she said softly. “That sort of thing, only God can sort it out. But losing you too, that doesn't add up, it doesn't help. Leave it now, let's figure out how to move on.”

“But I'll never be able to make it up,” Paul said. “I'll never be able to do enough.”

“You don't know that,” Shay said. “You got a whole life ahead of you still. See what you can do with it.”

SHAY WAS DIGGING
in her purse for her keys when the elevator doors opened and Colleen was standing there. Their eyes met, and for a moment Shay forgot everything. Colleen looked terrible, her
eyes sunken and her hair greasy and lank. Behind her was a tall man with short gray hair and round glasses. Andy—exactly what she would have expected.

“What are you doing here?” Colleen demanded.

Then everything fell back into place, the terrible truth. The things that couldn't be undone.

Colleen moved toward her, stumbling, zombielike. She grabbed for Shay and Shay jerked her arm away.

“Were you in there? With Paul?” Her voice rose into a shriek. Spittle collected in the corners of her colorless lips. Andy tried to pull her away, but she shook off his hand. “Who let you in there?”

“You don't control him,” Shay shot back. “Or me. You don't control
anything.
”

She shoved past Colleen and Andy as the elevator doors started to close. She stabbed the buttons and watched Colleen stumble down the hall, her purse dangling from her thin arm. Her Walmart boots had already torn and a piece of the faux fur was flapping loose. One pant leg had come free and sagged along the floor, soiled and ragged.

There was little evidence of the woman who'd arrived in Lawton just a few days ago. All the polish, all the refinement had been stripped away.

And what about me?
Shay thought, as the elevator descended.
Who am I now?

March

“I'M GOING WHETHER
you come or not,” T.L. finally said, the only way he knew to end the argument.

Myron was convinced the meeting would lead to nothing but trouble. For a while he insisted he wasn't coming unless Jack Cook came too. But when T.L. was getting ready for school that morning, filling his commuter mug from the old coffeemaker, Myron came into the kitchen dressed in his good sweater and khaki pants.

“I'll meet you over at the place,” he said. He wouldn't say
Ricky's
. He thought the restaurant was a ridiculous place to meet, with its banks of big-screen TVs and baskets of sticky hot wings and beers as big as a carton of orange juice.

But T.L. had chosen it for a reason. When he pulled into the parking lot at three forty-five, fifteen minutes before Andy Mitchell had asked to meet, most of the parking spots were empty. At seven forty-five that evening, the lot would be packed and overflow would be taking up half the church parking lot next door. But for now, most of Ricky's customers were either working or sleeping.

When T.L. was a kid, the restaurant had been a Chuck E. Cheese's. He hadn't been invited to many birthday parties that didn't take place in someone's living room on the reservation. But a kid
from a soccer camp had invited him, the mom standing at the door of the place greeting the parents and kids as they arrived. Myron had carefully wiped his boots on the mat at the door, handing over the clumsily wrapped gift, a plastic dart set he bought at the drugstore, and then stood there looking like he didn't know what happened next. The mom had given Myron a thin smile and told him that he was welcome to stay, there was plenty of punch and cake. T.L. had wanted nothing more than for Myron to leave.