Boy Still Missing (24 page)

“Do you think people will get the point that we live at 88 Dwight Avenue?” I said to Leon, thinking that the
Holedo Herald
really knew how to knock out some Pulitzer Prize–winning journalism. “I mean, it’s a little vague.”

“Huh?” he said, not paying any attention to me.

“Never mind,” I said, wanting to simply keep driving.

And that’s exactly what we did. We drove and drove and drove while
Leon rattled on about his car, which he referred to as a she. She had a dual exhaust system. She had a pistol grip four-speed. She had a four-ten Dana rear end. She could do zero to sixty in 5.8 seconds. The whole time he spoke, I stared out the window at our scenic tour of moonlit Holedo—“the Hole,” as Jeanny had called it. I found myself wondering if one of the houses we passed might be hers and how she had gotten home on foot from the bus station. I imagined her inside one of the windows we breezed by, dreaming of her singing career or her next protest. I imagined—hoped was more like it—that she was thinking of me, too.

We passed the Doghouse.

We drove by the new police station.

We drove by the old police station, still closed, awaiting renovations from Vito Maletti.

When Leon finished yammering about his new set of wheels, I let him in on the entire Edie story. My kiss with her. The money. The baby. I gave him a blow-by-blow right up to the moment I called out to him in the parking lot of the bus station.

He didn’t say anything at first, because he seemed to be thinking. All that silence and brainpower produced, though, was “Whoa, man. That is a lot of heavy shit. What are you going to do now?”

“I need a place to stay until I figure that out. Any suggestions?”

“I’d let you stay at my place. But my mom would have a shit fit about the bambino. She hates kids. Happiest day of her life was when I turned sixteen.”

“That’s okay,” I said. “It’s a little too close to home anyway.”

“Ed’s grandparents have a cabin in the Poconos.”

“Forget it,” I said. “I don’t want him involved with my life.” Marnie was out, too, I realized once I gave it some serious thought. She wouldn’t be able to deal with my taking the baby. I had a desperate, sinking feeling in my stomach. When I looked out the window, we were passing the Holedo Motel. The yellow police tape was gone. Still no cars in the lot. A
NO VACANCY
sign hung out front. The place was empty. I stared at the two sets of cement stairs on each side of the motel, the crooked shutters
on the row of windows. When I caught sight of room 5B, my stomach dropped still more. “Why is the motel closed?” I asked.

“After what happened to your mom, Old Man Fowler freaked. That night he got in his car and took off to Florida for the winter. The cops had everything cleaned up, and they took down the yellow tape a few days after you left. I hear the guy might sell the place.”

“I can stay there with Sophie,” I said, the second the idea occurred to me. It seemed strange and fitting at the same time.

Leon slowed the car down and did a 180. We headed back to the motel, pulled around to the rear of the building so no one would see us from the street. As soon as Leon cut the engine, Sophie began fussing. I rocked her in my arms. “How am I going to get in?”

“Leave that to the pro,” Leon said.

He got out of the car and opened his trunk. I watched him carry a crowbar toward the back office window. It occurred to me that the crowbar might have something to do with his and Ed’s moneymaking scheme. Breaking and entering. Robbing houses. I had my own life of crime to worry about, though, so I decided to mind my own business. Leon examined the window, and my guess was that he was looking for a place to jimmy the thing open. But then he stepped back and held the crowbar in the air like a baseball bat. A second later he swung and gave the window a whack. Glass came crashing down like Edie’s kitchen window had the night I threw that planter at it. Shattering, then silent.

“Open for business!” Leon announced, turning back to me and smiling.

“Jesus Christ, Leon. Couldn’t you have jimmied the lock or something?”

“Do I hear a complaint? Because you and the bambino are going to be mighty cold on the street tonight.”

“I just meant—Forget it. No complaints here.”

“Good,” Leon said. “I like a satisfied customer.” He took a blanket out of his trunk and threw it over the broken glass on the window ledge, then climbed inside. A moment later he came around and opened the back door. “Welcome to the Holedo Motel,” he said.

I stepped through the doorway carrying Sophie and thought of my mother checking in to this place. The newspaper article that ran after she died had quoted Fowler, who was working the desk: “A woman came in and said she needed a room. I didn’t notice anything unusual about her at the time.”

Nothing unusual except that she was about to die.

The office was cold and dark. The walls were covered with pictures of race cars as well as paintings of goldfish that looked like they’d been done with a paint-by-numbers kit. On the desk there was a meatball grinder, three stale brown lumps covered with dried red sauce, a single bite taken out of one end. I guessed Leon hadn’t been exaggerating when he said Fowler freaked out and left in a rush the night my mother died. I imagined him standing up from his meal, shaken and changed by what had happened here, and walking outside to his car. Driving south without so much as packing a suitcase. Leon flicked on a lamp and surveyed the office. Keys to each room hung on a rack by the desk, marked in descending order: 10A, 10B, 9A, 9B, 8A, 8B, and so on. “Would you and your sister like a suite with an ocean view, sir?” Leon said. “Or an economy room overlooking the septic tank?”

“I want to stay in Five-B,” I told him. “My mother’s room.”

Leon stopped for a moment, then scanned the row of hooks, grabbed the one I was asking for. “Are you sure?”

I knew it was a strange request. But I had come this far, and I wanted somehow to be close to my mother. The only way I knew how was to stay in the room where she had breathed her last breath. Maybe part of her—a spirit, a ghost—was still up there, waiting for me to return with the baby. Maybe she’d been leading me here all along. “I’m sure,” I told Leon.

“Okay,” he said and looked down at a sort of switchboard near the desk that reminded me of one an old-fashioned operator might use. Plugging pegs into holes, connecting people all over the world. Leon fiddled with the wires, then flicked a switch at the top of the board. “I believe your phone works now, sir. But there will be a five-dollar surcharge for every minute.”

“Thanks,” I said, trying to smile. We unlocked the front door of the office and peeked outside to be sure no cars were driving past. When there was a break in the traffic, we made our way up the stairs to 5B. The second Leon opened the door, it all came back to me. Marnie moaning and making that indecipherable sound, the police clustered around the stairwell, the way I made a break for the door and shoved myself inside, only to find my mother lying there. That night I had expected it to be Edie inside the room. And I wondered if there had been one brief second of relief that it wasn’t her on the floor, before I realized it was my mother.

The thought made me dizzy.

I sat with Sophie on the bed and looked around. A gold bedspread. Beige lamps on the two wooden nightstands, each with a tattered white shade. The curtains by the window were beige, too, and Leon pulled them shut, draped two blankets over the rod so no one would see the light on up here. A picture of a red stock car at Hogway’s was screwed into the wood-paneled wall. The number “5” painted yellow on the driver’s-side door.

A pretty typical motel room.

No one would ever have guessed what had happened on the floor beside the bed. The blood had all been cleaned up. The stained rug taken away, a flat beige rug put down in its place. I didn’t know why, but I found myself imagining a second accident that would replace that stain with more blood. I could almost see it there. Round, red, and horrifying. Even more permanent than the last. The image sent a shiver loose inside me.

I actually shook.

“You okay?” Leon asked.

“Yeah. It’s freezing in here. That’s all.”

“Got that right,” he said and found the register by the back window, cranked the dial so that the heat started to sputter through the vent.

“I met a girl on the bus today,” I told him, shutting out the image of another bloodstain. Jeanny was the one part of the story I had left out when I filled him in on my life during our cruise around town.

“Who is she?” he asked.

“Her name is Jeanny. I had this feeling about her. Like I knew her already. Or not that exactly, but just that I liked her more than most girls from around here.”

“Big tits?” he said.

“Shut up,” I told him, not wanting to rate Jeanny on his stupid scale. “Why do you and—” I stopped myself from saying “my father,” from saying every other guy out there who had always made me think that being a man meant sizing up a woman like she was a car. I was sick of it. And that wasn’t the type of man I wanted to be anymore. “Why do you always have to act like that?”

“I’m a red-blooded American male, that’s why.”

“So am I. But I don’t want to talk that way about this girl.”

“Sounds like love,” Leon said. “Did you get her number?”

I thought of her walking away, my tongue heavy with words I couldn’t muster. “No. But that’s okay. I don’t need to get her caught up in my bullshit.”

Leon was surveying the room, pushing open the bathroom door, flicking on the light. I could see the pink tiles from where I sat on the bed. He closed the door partway, and I could hear the splashing in the toilet as he took a piss. “You know,” Leon called out, “if this Edie chick is keeping company with dealers from New York, you could be in a lot of danger.”

I didn’t say anything to that. The last thing I needed was another worry. But Leon kept going. “I mean, they could come after you,” he said over what had to be the longest piss I’d ever had the honor of listening to. “They could find you here and kill you. Slit your throat or something.”

“All right already!” I called to him. “I get the point.”

“I’m just trying to warn you,” he said, finishing up in there.

I pulled Joshua’s folder out from under my sweatshirt and set it on the nightstand to read once Leon split. Then I looked at Sophie’s bottle, which was just about empty. I pulled that Enfamil container out of the bag and read the label. It was formula. Almost empty, too.

“Listen,” I said, raising my voice again so Leon could hear me. “I
need another favor. Can you go out and get some baby formula and diapers? Plus some food for me.” I still wasn’t hungry but knew I would be sooner or later. There was a half-size refrigerator in the corner of the room, and I could put things on the window ledge to keep them cool as well.

Leon flushed and stepped out of the bathroom, still zipping himself. “What kind of formula?”

I held up the container for him to see. “Get some of this stuff. Enfamil. Just look in the aisle with the baby supplies, I guess.”

“I’ll hit the store and be right back,” Leon said, looking happy that he had an excuse to leave.

I tried to put Sophie down on the mattress, but she didn’t like the idea, so I picked her up again. “Let me give you some money.”

“Forget it,” Leon told me. “It’s on me.”

“Thanks,” I said, thinking I might as well take him up on his newfound generosity while it lasted. “But go to the grocery store over in Buford. I don’t want anyone around here to see you buying baby supplies. They might get suspicious.”

“Yes, sir,” he said, spinning his keys around his middle finger.

After Leon walked out the door, I turned the lock and slid the chain link in place. I pushed aside the curtain and blankets just enough to watch from the window as his car zipped out of the parking lot and onto the street. When he was gone, I went to the heat register, because the room still felt cold. Leon had set the thing on medium; I turned it up to high. Then I unplugged one of the lamps. With my free hand I picked it up off the nightstand and carried it to the corner of the room away from the front window. I plugged it in there and tilted the shade so the light was dim. Even though Leon had hung those blankets over the window, I didn’t want to take any chances that someone would spot the light from outside.

“Okay, little alien,” I said to Sophie. “Let’s get you settled in.”

I rearranged the four thin pillows on the bed in an attempt to make a border so she wouldn’t roll off when I placed her there. But was she too young to roll over? And did babies sleep on their stomachs or backs? There were so many things about this kid-care business that I didn’t
know. And she was just so small. So breakable. Jeanny’s positive prognosis was already receding in my mind, and I felt afraid that if I even put Sophie down the wrong way, I might hurt her.

Just be careful, I kept saying to myself.

None of my efforts at making a bed for Sophie seemed to matter anyway, because the second I put her down, she started to whine. I had to keep rocking her in my arms, which was starting to feel like exercise. Unfortunately, I had to take a piss, too. But I figured I’d hold it until Leon got back, because I wasn’t sure how I’d manage that one. With Sophie gaining weight in my arms by the second, I made my way around the room, peeking out the window, looking in the bathroom and the closet. In one of the dresser drawers was a phone book and a black Bible like my uncle’s. I flipped the Bible open to a passage:

As the soldiers were about to take Paul into the barracks, he asked the commander, “May I say something to you?”

“Do you speak Greek?” he replied.

“Aren’t you the Egyptian who started a revolt and led four thousand terrorists out into the desert some time ago?”

Paul answered, “I am a Jew, from Tarsus in Cilicia, a citizen of no ordinary city. Please let me speak to the people.”

I didn’t know how that PBS priest and the rest of the holy-rollers found all their opinions about the world in the Bible, because every time I cracked open the good book, I came upon some yawn of a passage like the one I just read. It seemed more like a history book than a set of rules. I tossed the thing back into the drawer, sat on the edge of the bed, and picked up the phone. The long, steady hum of the dial tone made me think of my mother’s last call to Marnie. I imagined her frightened and alone in this room. I imagined her moments before, unlocking the door, nervously collecting the towels from the bathroom and laying them around her. Roget carrying the equipment his doctor friend had given him.