Boy Still Missing (30 page)

Leon shrugged. “Sure.”

“It’s very important that I get this envelope to Dominick. But he’s not home, and I have to run. If I leave it with you, do you promise to give it to him the moment he comes home?”

“Okay,” Leon said, already planning to rip open the envelope the second she left, for no other reason than to bust my balls. Only he had no idea what he was about to find. That envelope was like a prize from Bob Barker himself. A washer and dryer. A shiny blue car behind a shimmering gold curtain. The price was right.

I saw Edie’s hand put the envelope in his. She squeezed his fingers closed around it, and Leon loved her touch, the way I had, even if she was pregnant. “Make sure,” Edie said before walking off. “It’s very important.”

As my mind blurred around the image of Edie driving away toward New York City, I removed that can of Dr Pepper from the back of my head. The bleeding seemed to have stopped.

Jeanny had put Sophie to bed, and she stretched out next to me. It was our last night together. I didn’t want to think about Edie or Leon anymore. As difficult as it was, I mustered up all my energy and forced myself to put that bullshit out of my mind so I could concentrate on her. The most important person in my life at the moment. When I turned toward Jeanny, though, her eyes looked heavy, weighed down by sadness.

“What’s wrong?” I asked.

“Nothing.”

“What?” I said.

“I guess as much as I’m glad that you’ve decided to take Sophie back, I’m also going to miss our time here.”

I pulled her close to me and felt my body responding the way it always did next to hers. That heat. That tightening in my chest. I didn’t
kiss her, but my lips were close enough to hers that I could have. “Me, too,” I told her.

We lay there looking into each other’s eyes. My hand traced the curve of her hip up past her tickle of ribs to the soft skin of her neck. The feel of her body made the ache in my head fade away just enough for me to feel comfortable again. I thought back to that first night with Jeanny in the motel and remembered how uncertain I’d been about being ready for more with her. But I knew now that I was. And something told me she felt the same.

This was all I said: “Do you want to?”

Shy for once, Jeanny simply nodded.

Yes.

I took her hand, and we stood, walked through those closets into the next room. Any leftover shock that might have remained in the air from our unwanted visitors had gone, and it felt like our place again.

Nobody else’s.

To be safe, I locked the front door before lying out on the bed beside Jeanny. We stayed there for a long while, just being with each other. Then I lifted Jeanny’s hair and kissed the back of her neck. Made an invisible necklace of kisses all the way around her. Put my tongue against her ear and licked at the curves, down into the darkness of her, tasting her salty skin. In a way I felt grateful to Edie for that night she had let me kiss her, because I realized I had to keep control, not to let go before I could enjoy this and Jeanny could, too.

My body relaxed into the moment, and I held on.

I tugged Jeanny’s shirt over her shoulders and unsnapped those baggy jeans she was wearing. Stood at the foot of the bed. Slid them off her. Started to undress myself, but she wanted to do it for me.

Slowly.

Carefully.

Unlike the way I felt with Edie, I wasn’t embarrassed about my body. An easiness filled me as I stood there in front of Jeanny. And when I was completely naked, she kissed my bare chest, and my mouth went dry.

I let my body decide what to do next.

Gently my hands pushed Jeanny back onto the bed as she stared up at me. My knees knelt on the edge of the mattress. My palms pressed against her breasts. My mouth moved between them, kissing the hard bones of her chest. Jeanny arched herself, lifting her smooth stomach so that I could run my hands along the front of her, down past her belly button. My fingers slipped inside her. I found myself short of breath and wanting more air. The look on Jeanny’s face was sweet and daring, her eyes glued to mine the whole while I touched her. Until finally I pulled my fingers away and put my lips and tongue between her legs. Kissed her there. Tasted her. I stopped to look at her face, and her eyes were still watching me, wanting more, so I kept going, and she made the slightest of sounds.

A breathy exhalation that sounded like relief.

A sudden high-pitched crinkle of her voice that came every few seconds.

I loved every moment of this, and I wanted Jeanny to love it, too.

Her hands stroked my hair, staying clear of that cut from the dresser, until I pulled my mouth away and moved up next to her on the pillow again. I whispered these words: “I think I’m in love with you.”

Jeanny pressed her mouth to my ear and said, “I think I’m in love with you.”

After a while of staying just like that, I told her about the pack of Trojans Ed had given me courtesy of Leon that first night. “So I have some in the other room,” I said, a bit nervous about it still. “But I don’t want you to think I’ve been planning this whole thing from the start.”

“I know about them,” Jeanny told me and smiled just a little. “I don’t think I’ll forget the look on your face when he put them in your hand.”

“You knew?” I said.

She nodded yes. “I pretended to be busy with the baby to spare us both.”

We laughed, and I kissed her. Kissed her again.

I went into the next room, those balloon ribbons brushing my shoul
ders as I walked. Knelt by the bed and dug out the box from underneath. Came back through the closets. It took me a minute, but I got the package open and managed to get one of them on me without too much fumbling. We kissed some more, and I lay on top of Jeanny. She helped me to put myself inside her.

“Are you okay?” I asked as she looked up at me.

“Yes,” Jeanny said. “Are you?”

“Yeah.” Since we were both new at this, our bodies took a while to find a rhythm. But soon it felt good. And once I got used to the sensation and the motion, it felt even better. It felt great. I tried my best to keep control as we moved. But it became more and more difficult. Jeanny’s mouth was on my ear. Her hands were on my back. My tongue moved against the skin of her neck. And finally my body let go, and we both collapsed—sweaty and breathless on the bed.

A moment of nothing but our breathing.

Sweating.

One more kiss, and then Sophie started fussing in the next room as if she had been politely waiting for us to finish up in here.

“That baby has the world’s worst timing,” I said.

“If you’ll excuse me,” Jeanny said, nudging out from under me. “I can calm her down a lot faster than you. No offense.”

“None taken,” I said before rolling off her. “But you better come right back.”

I hated the interruption, but I felt grateful for the chance to watch Jeanny’s body from behind as she walked into the next room. Her hair was pulled around one shoulder. And the skin on her back was eggshell white with a dark mole down by her waist. Her legs were longer than I had realized before. She seemed so different to me from that girl I first spotted at the police station.

She was beautiful, I thought.

She was the girl I loved.

When Jeanny came back into the room with Sophie wearing only a diaper, she suggested we turn on the TV to catch the weather report for
our morning mission. “Not to break the mood,” she said. “But we better start thinking about tomorrow.”

I knew she was right, so I turned on the TV and found the six o’clock news. We climbed under the covers with Sophie between us and held her tiny hands as we watched. The TV in this room had a serious sound problem. It shot up in volume, then down at random moments. One minute the anchorman sounded as if he were shouting his report about Nixon. And the next we could barely hear him. Kind of annoying, but Jeanny and I had gotten used to it.

As we lay there together—the three of us skin to skin, like some sort of natural-born creation, a family—I found myself thinking of that first night in the room again, the way I had been so nervous with Jeanny. I remembered all we had talked about, and one unanswered question came to mind. “So do you believe it was fate that we met?” I asked over the rise and fall of the anchorman’s knowing voice.

Jeanny looked at me with those sugary-brown eyes of hers. “I’ve thought about it, and I believe that—” She stopped, looked through the tunnel of open closets into the next room. “Dominick. What’s that?”

On the floor in there I could see the red shimmering light I had dreamed of. A rounded triangle. As big or as little as Sophie herself. We watched it for a moment, and then it began to spread, just like in my dream. I stood and wrapped a blanket around my waist. Jeanny did, too, carrying Sophie. We walked through the closets, and when we were inside the room, Jeanny said, “It’s coming from the window.”

I followed the glow and she was right. Leon had left the curtains open, and red shone in from outside. One step ahead of me, Jeanny went to the window. If her face had been stricken a few hours earlier when she looked out and saw Roget’s car, now it was pure terror. “Oh, my God,” she whispered in shock.

I walked to the window and looked outside.

Down in the parking lot were more cop cars than I could count. More than the night my mother died. Not a single siren, but all the racks on their roofs flashed red. The light bathed the room, drowning Jeanny, Sophie, and me in the glow the way I had dreamed.

That dream had been a sign, too.

The baby may be in danger here with you.

“What are we going to do?” Jeanny asked me, Sophie still quiet in her arms.

Desperate and numb, I walked to the bathroom and looked in the mirror for my mother. One final sign.

Not there.

Behind me I saw two of the survivor balloons. Yellow. Another red one. Their faceless faces looming over my shoulder. I looked away from the mirror, away from them, and stepped into the bedroom again. In the next room I could hear that anchorman still, his voice shooting up in volume. “After these brief messages,” he said too loud into the emptiness, “we’ll return with a look back on the Manson murders. Plus Penny Hatfield will fill us in on what to expect from the winter storm that’s blanketing New England.”

I put my arms around Jeanny and Sophie. Felt every part of me shaking. “It can’t end this way,” I found myself saying over and over. “It can’t end this way. It can’t end this way. It can’t end this way.”

The phone rang, and the two of us jumped.

“They’re calling us,” I said. “Don’t answer it.”

“Dominick,” Jeanny said, her voice taut with nerves, “we have to give up and hand Sophie over. If you explain why you took her, they might not be too hard on you.”

“They’re going to put me in jail,” I said, and my voice cracked the way it had when it finally changed last summer. I could feel tears rolling down my cheeks as I said those words again: “They’re going to put me in jail.”

“The police are out there anyway. If we don’t answer this call, they’ll just come knocking,” she said over the phone, which rang and rang and rang. “Do we agree that we should answer it?”

I nodded yes, and my eyes poured out more tears.

“I love you,” Jeanny said, crying, too. “Somehow this is going to be okay.”

She walked across the room and picked up the phone. “Hello.”

She waited, then said, “The baby is fine. Yes. Hold on.”

Jeanny held the receiver out to me. “Dominick. It’s for you. But it’s not the police.”

“Who is it?” I asked.

“Take it,” she said. “You’ll see.”

I took the phone. Held it to my ear. Whispered, “Hello.”

“Dominick,” I heard a voice say, flat and cold. “It’s Edie. And I want my baby.”

M
y mother and Marnie always used to talk about thinking with their hearts versus thinking with their heads. But neither of them ever mentioned being led by their souls. That’s what guided me the night that caravan of Holedo police officers and Massachusetts state troopers surrounded the motel. As I gripped the heavy black phone receiver, and snow spit fast and frantic from the sky outside the window, and the crimson cop-car lights splashed the walls of our room, I made a life-altering decision to try one final time to fix things for my mother so that her spirit could be set free.

But first the coming years of my life spilled before me. A messy gray puddle that reflected nothing but the most dismal future. I would be arrested, I would go to court, I would be sentenced and thrown into a juvenile prison for years. The strange thing was, once my mind settled on that scenario and released itself of the initial shock—handcuffs, court,
prison—none of it sounded as unfair or even as scary as I had first thought. In my heart I felt certain that I deserved to be punished for ruining so many lives.

But that was my head and heart thinking.

Here’s what happened in my soul.

I stood there, not speaking, as Edie rushed on, “Dominick? Dominick? I know you hear me. I asked the police to give you this chance to come out on your own. Just hang up the phone and step outside the door. Give me my baby back…” That’s when the pitiful tragedy of my mother’s life filled me up like the helium in one of those balloons above my head. A strange, invisible something that sent me floating over it all. My consciousness, my soul, blew backward through time, then back more, then forward, forward again. I heard a clacking sound and realized it was my mother fumbling with the phone so many nights before. Dialing Marnie in the storm. I could hear her voice, which was almost all breath. A rush of air and wind. Terror beneath.

Something’s wrong,
she said.

I’m bleeding,
she said.

Then came an electric white flash like the fuzz of television static between channels, and I could see her standing in the lobby of a fancy New York building. A brittle, breakable expression on her face. A shiny silver present in her hands. Dozens of green plastic toy soldiers jumbled around in that box. Hard, pointy bodies with weapons forever attached to their skin. Pushed together in the darkness. Ready and waiting for war. Only those men would have to wait in there without air for too long. Unopened.

Again a blaze of white light and static, and I could feel myself being pushed down the long tunnel between her legs into the harsh brightness of the world. The gooey dew of new life on my skin. The tinny, metal sound of hospital instruments close by. My mother held my small body to her breast and cried. I was her hope, her fresh start. I was everything new to her.
Look at him,
she said to the nurses and doctors.
Oh, just look at him.

A final white blur of heat and motion, and I was back where I started. Where it ended for my mother. I could see her body splayed on the floor
beneath me. A slim silver probe snaked inside her. A river, a lake, an ocean of blood. Roget stood. He promised. He lied.

Be right back.

Be right back.

Be right back.

Nothing but her breath and blood after he left. She was a woman—like so many women—whose choices narrowed still more. A tunnel ahead of her grew smaller and smaller. Darker and darker. Then, after what seemed like too long for her to find any sort of strength, her hand moved toward the phone. Again I heard the clack and clatter of Marnie’s number being dialed. Again I heard my mother’s voice like a long, lonely wind cutting across the driest desert.

He said he would be right back.

But I know he’s gone for good.

How quickly can you come?

After those words something in me burst. I felt dropped back down into the world of the here and now. Into the motel room, where my choices were narrowing, too. My soul felt gutted and hollowed. A carved pumpkin scraped of its stringy orange insides and filled with the hot, burning light of a white wax candle. That flame was anger, rage, resentment. The only thing left in the fast decay of my life. I saw a time lapse of two unlashed eyes collapsing in on themselves. A mouth rotted into a disfigured smile. A decomposed orange head tossed into the woods and forgotten.

Me.

My life.

And that’s when I heard something deep inside me—not my head or my heart speaking, but some deeper part of myself that I decided was my soul—echoing these words:

After all of your mother’s suffering, the only son she raised will be locked up. The man who left her alone to die will put him there, then walk away scot-free. One more sad fact of her life, her legacy, that you couldn’t stop.

That feeling or message or premonition or whatever it was stoked the flame inside me, and my resolve flickered, burned hot and bright, then swept over me like a raging fire.

You have their attention.

Use it to prove Roget’s guilt somehow.

For your mother’s sake.

“Is my baby okay?” Edie was asking, her voice losing its flatness, turning wobbly, uneven. “Please tell me she’s okay.”

“The baby is fine,” I heard myself say to her. Now I was the one who sounded flat, even. I could hear Edie crying on the other end of the line. Relief. Panic. Anger. All of it breaking her down. I let her weakness feed my flames, making me stronger, more steadfast in what I had to do. Jeanny was watching me with wide-open eyes as she cradled Sophie in her arms. I turned my back to her. “Where are you?” I asked.

“Down in the office. Dominick, please just come out.”

Questions. There were so many I wanted answered, and they spewed from my mouth helter-skelter: “Who were those men in your apartment in New York? Why did you leave Holedo? Who is Sophie’s father?”

Edie sniffled, took a breath. “What are you talking about? Your father is Sophie’s father. I told you that.”

“Why did you leave?” I asked, not letting up until I got the information I wanted.

“Your father kept threatening me. More than I ever told you.” Edie’s voice had grown exasperated, impatient, hysterical. I imagined her face flushed with anxiety, her hand tugging her hair, clutching, pulling as she spoke. “He beat the shit out of me once, and I was afraid of him. Of what else he might do to me. It wasn’t fair to get you any more involved than you already were. So I couldn’t tell you where I was going. I had to just leave you the money and get out.”

My mind filled with the image of Edie’s beaten face that day last fall. A puff of purple skin under her eye like smeared makeup. I remembered the way my father had clocked his fist in the air above me before I left home. The way he had growled, then punched the wall of my bedroom. Boom. Boom. Boom. I wasn’t afraid of him, but Edie had been. Enough
for her to leave town without telling me where she was going because she didn’t want me to get hurt, too.

“I apologized in the letter I left you,” Edie said. “But I don’t understand why you’ve done all this. Why would you take my baby? Why? Why?”

The answer to that question was lodged inside me, tangled up like a wet ball of hair in the pink mouth of a cat. I could never get it out. The words to explain what I had done would only sound knotted and confused. The dots I had connected over the last month of my life wouldn’t draw a picture clear enough for her to see. In my head I heard Leon’s voice reading Edie’s letter to me that day I had called him from my uncle’s apartment.

Dominick,

I don’t know why you left without saying good-bye last night. But I want you to know that I’m sorry if what’s about to happen will hurt you. I needed a friend during this lonely time, and you were an angel. Someday I hope you’ll forgive me. Someday I hope you’ll understand.

Love, Edie

Had Leon given me the cash, I might have forgiven her someday. I might have been able to understand just as she had written.

It was his fault.

It was her fault.

It was my fault.

“What about that phone call I overheard—” I started to ask, but Edie interrupted.

“Enough, Dominick! If you don’t come outside in the next minute,” she shouted, tired of our Q&A, launching threats, “I’m not going to be able to stop the police from coming in there after you.”

I ignored her, kept digging. “I heard you on the phone that last night at your house. I heard you say that you would find a way to get rid of me.”

“For Christ’s sake, Dominick! Why are you bringing up all this bullshit? I’m telling you that the police are going to come in there!”

“Why did you say it?” I asked her.

Edie was quiet a moment, then she sighed, surrendered to my question. “You were my boyfriend’s son. I was in a bad situation, and I counted on you more than I should have. My friend kept telling me I had to stop it. I don’t know what else you want to hear.”

“Is your friend one of those guys who was at your apartment in Hell’s Kitchen? Is one of them your boyfriend?”

“Hardly,” she said. “They’re each other’s boyfriend. They helped me leave Holedo. I was supposed to stay at a hotel in the Village, but I went into labor on the drive down. They found me that apartment when I got out of the hospital. Christ. Why am I even fucking telling you any of this? I want my kid.” Edie stopped herself, took a deep breath, tried one last time to reason with me. “Sophie’s middle name is Dominick. Do you know that? I gave her your name because of all you did for me. Doesn’t that prove anything?”

“I did a lot for you, Edie. But it cost me. It cost me my mother’s life. I took that money from her. She needed it to go away and get an abortion. But it was gone. She died in this room because that money was missing. Because of what I did to help you.”

Edie was quiet again. “Dominick. I am sorry. I am so, so sorry.”

“Me, too,” I said, holding back my tears.

“But there’s been enough tragedies. Please end this and come outside.”

“You have to understand,” I told her, feeling the heat of my resolve burning inside me. “I did something for you. Now you have to do something for me. Me and my mother.”

“What are you talking about?”

“You’ll see,” I told her and put down the phone.

It started ringing again almost instantly. Out in the parking lot car doors slammed. I slid the dresser in front of the door and walked through the closets into the next room. Jeanny kept calling to me, but I didn’t
answer her. The TV volume was doing a steady rise and fall, and I could hear bits and pieces of that anchorman recounting the brutal details of those Manson murders.
A house in California…A summer night…Sharon Tate…The last thing anyone ever expected…

My next moves were mechanical:

Open the drawer by the bed.

Open the Bible.

Pull out the pistol.

The bullets, too.

“Dominick, what are you doing?” Jeanny stood in the doorway of the closet, holding Sophie. The blanket she had draped around her naked body was coming undone. Mine, too. “I thought you got rid of that thing.”

“I kept it just in case,” I told her over the blare of the television. “And I’m glad I did, because I’m not giving up. They’re going to put me in jail. So I might as well right some of the wrongs of my mother’s life while I’m at it.” I pushed the cylinder open and slid a bullet into each of the holes the way my father had taught me so many years ago. I walked to the window as Jeanny stared at me, her mouth dropped in disbelief.

“Dominick, don’t!” she yelled. “Stop it! Don’t do this!”

The television eased down to normal volume again, and I could hear Penny Hatfield talking in a regretful voice about low-pressure zones, plowed roads, predictions of when we’d see the sun again. Outside, two troopers walked toward the stairs as the rest of the officers waited by their cars, backing them up.

Now or never, I told myself.

I reached my hand up to the window, pushed it open. Into the cold, hushed air of the storm, I screamed, “I’ve got a gun!” My voice didn’t come out loud enough to be threatening, so I shouted again, “I’ve got a gun, and I will use it if you don’t give me what I want!”

This time my words were unmistakable, sure and steady, as if I did this sort of thing all the time. The two troopers stopped, stared back toward the crowd of other officers, waiting for a sign as to whether or not they should proceed.

I decided to give them that sign.

I stuck the blunt nose of the pistol through the window. Aimed into the snowy gray sky above the woods across the street. The same woods where Roget had chased after me, scooped me up, and carried me back to his car as my leg bled. I pressed my finger to the trigger, and my hand shook. Then I heard my father say,
Just hold her steady. Don’t be afraid of her.

And I wasn’t afraid anymore.

The shaking stopped. I fired.

The sound was a hundred balloons popping all at once, ringing in my ears.

Jeanny had carried Sophie into the other room, and I could hear them both crying in there. Other than that, in the moments after I shot the gun, the police in the parking lot were silent. I watched them stare up at the place in the red glow of their cop-car lights. Only their radios chirped out a staticky voice that said, “We have a ten-fifty-five at the Holedo Motel. We have a ten-fifty-five at the Holedo Motel.”

Finally Roget said, “The kid’s got a gun,” loud enough for me to hear the dismay in his voice.

Something in the air changed after that. I believed it was because they realized that I was in control of this situation. Not them. Edie emerged from the office and walked across the parking lot, an officer’s arm draped over her shoulders. She was crying, and despite everything, I felt torn apart by all the misunderstandings that the collision of our lives had caused. But I told myself that she would get her baby soon enough, and the tears would stop.