The Missing Place (40 page)

Already it was hard to remember why he'd fought so hard, but
the road that brought him to that place was a long one. T.L.'s earliest memories were colored by his mother's inexhaustible longing for a different life, a life that didn't include him. He'd wanted a mother, a father, a brother, a dog—instead he'd gotten Myron. Things, needless to say, looked different now. How long would T.L. have lasted with a baby, a girl he barely knew, a couple of shitty jobs cobbled together to make the rent, while they pretended to be a family? How long before he became as taciturn, as resigned as Myron?

The chief must have drawn his own conclusions, coming close to the mark on his own. Elizabeth must have backed off her story. Maybe she'd even confessed to making the bruises herself. That would explain why T.L. was never accused or held, why Weyant hadn't barred him from walking out of the police station. Why the Mitchells' lawyers kept their distance.

T.L. couldn't help wondering what version of the truth Elizabeth had saved for Paul. It would have been a convincing one, artfully delivered. She would have given it everything she had—the story she spun, the promises she made—since her entire future depended on whether he believed her. As long as he had known her, the thing she'd wanted more than anything in the world was to escape Lawton, and now, with some sort of sleight-of-hand, she had made it happen.

T.L. was left with an emptiness where the entire last year should have been, lodged in his memories, the stories he would someday tell his children and his wife. T.L. had won a scholarship and dated a pretty girl and helped take the baseball team to the state finals, and seen his uncle look old for the first time. For another boy, in another place, these events would have slowly taken on the patina of nostalgia: the girl would grow prettier, the game-winning triple would be epic, the friends he went on the class trip to Bismarck with would be
legend. But for T.L. it was like all of those things had happened to someone else.

He remembered a night with Elizabeth, the second time they'd had sex. T.L. had peeled the condom off as discreetly as possible, shoving it into the Walmart bag he kept in the truck for trash. He'd shifted his body so Elizabeth wouldn't be pressed uncomfortably up against the door handle. Outside, the stars over the rolling hills were sharp as needles, the moon full and heavy on the horizon, and T.L. had cradled Elizabeth in his arms as they stared out at the sky together.

“A night like this, you could think this was the most beautiful place on earth,” he'd said.

“This?” Elizabeth had said sleepily. “But there's nothing here. Just miles and miles of nothing.”

Now he realized that she was already way beyond him, that these stars would never be enough for her, that she had always been dreaming of leaving.

June

THE TEXT ARRIVED
at six forty-two on an early June evening when Colleen was at a BodyPump class. She didn't see it until nearly eight, when she'd finished the class and stayed behind to talk with one of the other women, and then swung by Safeway for three bottles of the pinot noir she had been drinking lately and the steel-cut oatmeal Andy ate every morning for breakfast. She had arrived home and put the groceries away and looked in on Andy, who was working in his office, and then stood at the foot of the stairs with her hand on the newel post listening, as she so often did in the evenings, to the sound of the television upstairs.

The upper floor of the house had become Paul and Elizabeth's quarters. It hadn't taken very long at all for the dynamic of the house to shift, for it to no longer be all right for Colleen to go upstairs with a load of laundry or a package of toilet paper for the linen closet. Elizabeth had moved in nearly two months ago, and now, at twenty-eight weeks, she finally looked like a woman expecting a baby, her stomach tight as a melon, jutting in front of her thin frame. Colleen had taken Elizabeth to her hairdresser, where they'd used a vegetable-based rinse to cover up the bad bleach job, and given her a few layers around her face. She no longer looked like a Midwestern mall rat but like a girl who might be headed back to Penn in the fall,
a girl who wore corduroy jeans and angora sweaters. Unless you looked at her stomach.

Elizabeth and Paul were unfailingly polite to Colleen and Andy, and that was a relief, wasn't it? Only they didn't go out, didn't call Paul's old friends, hadn't taken Colleen's suggestion to check out the events page at Sudbury Community College where Paul would be going in the fall. They studied together—Paul had two math classes he was trying to get out of the way over the summer, and Elizabeth was getting ready to take the GED, since she'd stopped going to school after everything that happened.

Colleen had been prepared to go easy on Elizabeth, since the rift with her parents was still so fresh. She didn't know the details and hadn't asked, and Elizabeth was starting to talk to her father on the phone again, which was encouraging, even if her mother was apparently still barely speaking to her. Colleen had thought that wedding planning might be a good distraction for Elizabeth, though the wedding wasn't going to happen until Thanksgiving, when many of Colleen and Andy's relatives would be in town. The girl dutifully paged through the bride magazines that Colleen brought her and went to lunch with her at various restaurants that they were considering for the reception. Of course it wouldn't be anything elaborate: the small chapel in the church, a luncheon for fifteen or twenty guests, a few days on the cape with Colleen and Andy watching the baby.

When she wasn't studying, Elizabeth fussed around their rooms and talked to her friends and sisters on the phone and texted and seemed to eat nothing but sliced apples and cheese sandwiches. She and Paul took long walks together, and sometimes Colleen wished she could follow them and find out what they talked about. In the evenings, they watched television together, Paul with a textbook on
his lap and Elizabeth with the Sudoku book Colleen gave her. Their conversations were quiet.

Elizabeth would have made a perfect daughter-in-law if the kids were, say, twenty-six. Or even twenty-three. And maybe if she had been to college, but there would be time for that, later, when the baby was old enough for preschool. Colleen reminded herself every day how much there was to be grateful for, and was she certainly ready to pitch in, but she wasn't up for full-time caregiving. She just didn't think she had it in her, especially once the baby's arrival changed the balance among all of them, and Elizabeth would have opinions and maybe even rules about the baby's care.

Besides, all of that was just a way of avoiding what was really on her mind, of pretending to have the same set of challenges and joys as any other grandmother-to-be, a fantasy she had test-driven at the church women's club golf outing. Some of the women knew what had happened, which meant that by the end of nine holes and cocktail hour,
everyone
knew. The ladies at her table had been unfailingly polite—overly effusive, perhaps, although that may have been the wine—but she still knew they knew.

She'd had decades of experience, after all. She was
that mom
: “You know, the one with that kid . . . ?” Colleen had forged her game face since kindergarten, bearing the weight of it for both her and Andy, and if they ever handed out awards for nodding and smiling like you didn't know what people were saying about your family, she'd take top honors.

Would it ever, ever be her turn? To simply
be
, to shop for a bridal registry with a future daughter-in-law, to sit in a park watching a toddler in a sandbox, without wondering who was watching and talking about her?

But even that wasn't the worst thing that lodged itself like a bitter
seed, deep inside her. Colleen had two concerns about Elizabeth that could keep her up for hours at night. The first, of course, was what she had done to herself . . . the bruises, the pictures she had texted. Colleen had Steve, the detective, to thank for that particular nugget, though it couldn't be proved and had come at the cost of a fair amount of up-front cash for which Steve could not provide a receipt. Someone in the police department had come through, Steve told Andy, someone close to the chief who was nonetheless willing to spill a few details of a case that was dead anyway.

Elizabeth was young, and immature, and maybe not the brightest top in the box, and she must have seen the glow of a better future in Paul's guileless eyes. Only T.L., the clinging boyfriend, stood in the way, and Elizabeth had needed a way around him, and perhaps she'd thought she'd found a solution where no one got hurt besides herself. But to pretend to have been beaten? It was the stuff of tabloids, of soccer sideline gossip, the sort of thing that might happen in Revere or Swampscott but never, ever Sudbury. It hadn't leaked yet, and maybe it never would, but Colleen wouldn't forget. For Paul's sake, she would forgive, but she wouldn't forget.

The second thing was the reserve with which Elizabeth held herself back from Colleen. And now she'd got Paul doing it too. Always polite—never-endingly, eternally polite, so that sometimes Colleen had a rogue impulse to slap the girl across that pretty face, just to get a reaction out of her—but never intimate, the way Colleen always thought she would be with a daughter-in-law. They didn't laugh together, didn't share knowing glances over Paul's little quirks and habits. Instead, Elizabeth and Paul sat together at the dinner table, did all their errands together, pitched in around the house together. Made their decisions together, decisions that excluded Colleen.

Like: They had refused to tell Colleen and Andy if the baby was a boy or a girl after the last ultrasound.

That was the oft-returned-to hurt that Colleen was dwelling on as she stood at the foot of the stairs, listening. The television, their soft voices. Finally Colleen dug in her pocket for her phone, mostly out of boredom. And saw the text:

They found him

BRITTANY HAD PICKED
up right away but was interrupted before Shay could tell her the news. “I'll call you right back, Mom, I just need two minutes to find this invoice before Nan leaves for the day.”

So Shay was left with this heavy, strangling knowledge, barely able to breathe. She had been gluing pale pink crystals in a swirl pattern on a box decorated with tiny decoupaged images of ballet slippers, and her fingertips were crusted with dried glue. She ought to clean them. She had bottles of solvent and lotion on her workbench. At the very least she should put the cap on the glue. It dried so fast.

She sat motionless, the phone dangling from her hand. Through the window she could hear the Cho boys kicking a soccer ball against the side of their garage next door, a sure sign their mom had left them home alone.

Shay had known this day was coming, known that as the lake warmed and the ice thinned, things buried for the winter would break free and come to the surface. She'd set the weather app on her phone for Lawton, and every day—every balmy, sunny central California morning—she stared at the forecast and thought about Taylor, finding his way home.

But now it was real and she was here and he was there and everything that had to happen next felt like a slab of marble pressing
her down. She didn't feel the relief she'd expected. She felt dead. She felt like a better alternative would have been for her to wade into the lake herself and join Taylor in the mud-bottom tomb.

Just yesterday Paul had sent her a prayer he had found somewhere on the Internet. One line of the three verses had stayed with her, echoing in her mind as she dried the dishes last night:
Make my eyes ever behold the red and purple sunset
.

Paul had taken to signing his emails
love.
As in, “Love, Paul and Elizabeth.” She had stared at the word for a long time, wondering if she had a right to it. Or if she even wanted it. Besides the prayers and inspirational quotes he sent, he always said the same thing. He prayed for Taylor and for her every day. He was studying hard—Shay knew that was a reference to his promise to make his life mean something. In the last email he had reported that the baby was a boy, adding that neither he nor Elizabeth cared as long as he was healthy.

Paul was Colleen's son, not hers. Shay hadn't lured him away, not on purpose. She never took his side, never discussed his parents, never did anything but remind him that he was strong enough to get through each day. Shay couldn't help it if Colleen had learned nothing from everything that had happened. Her job was not to teach. Her job had only been to raise her son to be a man, a good man, and she had done that, and she had earned her peace. And if some days peace came in the form of Paul's brief emails, then she would be a fool to question the gift.

She had stood at the sink last night, the evening breeze carrying the scent of star jasmine, and dried the plate that Leila had made for her at day care. Leila's tiny handprint was surrounded by colorful scribbles; one of the staff had lettered her name and “I Love Grandma” around the rim.