The Missing Place (42 page)

She made a show of looking at her wrist, though she hadn't worn a watch in years.

“Yes,” Colleen said softly. “Of course. We don't want to keep them waiting.”

After that Colleen didn't try so hard. She led Shay out to the parking lot to a dirty white car. It had a crack in the windshield and smelled of cigarettes. Grime was crusted in the console. “This is a rental?” Shay said, not bothering to hide her disgust. “Hope you didn't pay much for it.”

She stole glances at Colleen as they drove toward downtown. Her face was pinched and tense. Good—that felt like a small victory. If Colleen was a smoker, she'd be wanting one now. As for herself, Shay had stayed off them completely since going back to California. She thought it would be hard to quit, but it wasn't. The idea of smoking held no more appeal than eating cardboard. She wasn't drinking much, either, and Brittany had to remind her to eat when she stopped by. Shay's only coping indulgence was Mack: seeing him whenever he could get away, taking him to bed without preamble,
fucking him as hard as she could and crying after, his sweet bewildered face hovering over her in concern. But even that had died down. She hadn't bothered to let Mack know about Taylor.

“
Here?
” Shay snorted. They were back at the police station. Behind the brick-and-glass box was a building Shay had taken for the utility plant: pale cinder block with a ramp leading up to the entrance.

Colleen parked and waited for Shay to get out of the car before she did. They walked together toward the entrance, Shay keeping some distance between them. A dozen yards from the ramp, she stopped.

“I don't think I want you there,” she said, but then it hit her, and she suddenly had trouble breathing. Inside this building were the poor tattered remains that were all that was left of her beloved, her best loved. She would gather him in her arms if she could, she wouldn't mind the condition of the body, she had already endured the worst. Except, what then?

Tomorrow she would fly home, and in the plane would be a sealed casket packed in a plain brown box provided by the airline. It had been explained to her by the man from the mortuary Andy had made arrangements with. He had been patient, repeating himself several times until Robert gently took the phone from Shay and wrote everything down neatly on a sheet torn from the grocery list pad on the fridge. So yes. She knew the logistics.

But that wasn't what made the terrible hole inside her. What, then? After he was transferred to the casket Brittany and Robert were picking out today, after the service, after he was lowered into the plot next to her mother—it had been purchased long ago by her father, but he ended up being buried with his second wife—after the
stone was laid and the flowers placed there and everyone had gone home and Shay finally took off the black dress and Brittany and Robert took Leila home—what
then
?

“Oh, God,” she said, stumbling against Colleen. And Colleen caught her.

INSIDE WAS AN
officer Shay vaguely recognized. “I made sure they waited,” he said. “I talked to your son-in-law. The papers are all ready. You only have to go as far as this front office. Tomorrow everything's going to be taken care of for you, you can get back on the plane and then on the other end the other company is going to handle it from there.”

It took only about ten minutes. The staff, one woman and one man, didn't meet her eyes as they guided her through where to sign. The officer stood beside her. Colleen stood against the wall, clutching her purse like her life depended on it, a strange little grimace on her face. When Shay pushed back her chair, finished at last, she realized that Colleen was trying not to cry.

“Thank you,” she said stiffly on the way back to the car. She let Colleen open the passenger door for her.

“You must be tired,” Colleen said falteringly. “Coming all that way.”

Shay shrugged.

“I was thinking . . . would you like to have dinner? We could go somewhere quiet, where we could talk.”

“Like Swann's?” Shay barked out a harsh laugh. “That would be great. We'll invite Kristine to sit down with us after her shift.”

“No, no, that isn't—” Shay could see how uncomfortable she was making Colleen, but it was too hard to care. “I just thought,
somewhere that we could take our time. I mean it wouldn't even have to be, we could stay in the room, get room service.”

“Which room, mine or yours? Since you guys got two. What did that cost, anyway? What's my tab up to?” She had heard that the cost of transporting a body could run as high as five thousand dollars, a figure that made her mouth go dry. Robert was trying to deal with the insurance company, to see what might be covered, and Shay had backed completely away from the details.

Maybe that was what was making her feel guilty: between Andy and Robert, the two of them were handling everything. Shay was used to taking care of herself. She'd been on her own since she was eighteen. Sometimes she screwed up, but she was usually as proud of surviving the mistakes as she was of her successes.

She turned away from Colleen, suddenly stiff. She had pushed too far. She was—at least the fragile part of her that still experienced normal feelings, that still participated in the world around her even while the rest of her drowned in grief—sorry for what she was doing.

And grateful. Yes. She could still do gratitude, though it was a rusty tool, degraded from lack of use.

She watched the town go by outside her window. There . . . the gas station where she'd left Colleen on the curb. In the concrete planters were marigolds and petunias. An old man in a greasy white apron tied over his jeans stood outside, washing the windows with Windex and crumpled newspaper. Shay knew that trick—best way to clean glass with no smears. There, on the left, was the lumberyard. The shack in the middle had been demolished, and in its place was a sign announcing
COMING SOON LUXURY 1- AND 2-BEDROOM APARTMENTS ALL THE AMENITIES LEASING THIS FALL
. It was hard to believe that an apartment complex would go up in the next six months—around Fairhaven, there were half-finished projects that had been
abandoned after the housing crash, weeds growing up between the lots.

Soon Colleen pulled up at the Hyatt.

“For old times' sake?” Shay said. Making the joke was an effort. An olive branch.

Colleen glanced at her, eyes wounded, looking for the barb. Ready for the blade. “Andy just wanted you to have somewhere comfortable,” she mumbled. “Listen, whatever you need, I'm here. If all you want is”—her voice hitched, and she coughed in an effort to cover it—“is to be left alone, I understand. Maybe in the morning, you might . . . I mean, if you want to talk, you have my cell number and I'll just be in my room. And of course I'll take you to the airport. I've got all your flight details and—”

“Colleen.” Shay cut her off, then didn't know what else to say. “It's okay,” she finally managed. “Give me fifteen minutes to splash some water on my face, maybe we can find a place in this town where no one knows us.”

That was supposed to be a joke too, but it was clear Colleen didn't get it. She nodded and ducked her chin. When she got out of the car she held onto the doorframe for support, like an old woman.

COLLEEN WAITED FOR
Shay's text, eyeing the minifridge. Inside, she already knew, was a split of Sutter Home chardonnay and another of Riesling. Neither was her first choice. Either would do.

Last week, she'd white-knuckled her way through three consecutive nights with no wine. She'd scared herself Sunday night, when she'd waited until Andy was in bed and there were no sounds from upstairs, and then drunk what was left of one bottle and another full one of her pinot noir. At twelve fifty-four, when she was finally stumbling to bed, she'd had the foresight to take one of the bottles to the garage and shove it underneath a pile of mail and newspapers in the recycling bin. That way there was only one empty in the kitchen bin.

Not that any of them had noticed. She did her drinking quietly. A glass with dinner, or not; she didn't need it then. It was bedtime that drove her need, the prospect of a long night with nothing but nightmares for company. At first, she'd convinced herself it was better than relying on the Ambien, and that the two, sometimes three brimming glasses of the ruby-colored wine were a reasonable substitute.

But Monday morning she was hungover. She woke with her face on a drool-damp patch of pillow, Andy in the shower and her head thick and aching. It wasn't even six, but she knew she'd never get back to sleep, so she got up and brushed her teeth twice, combed
her hair and washed her face, and promised herself she was done. It was a long and difficult day, her fatigue made worse by the tremors and dizziness, not to mention the headache.

That night she'd gone to bed at ten with a stack of magazines. Andy was reading, his glasses sliding down his nose, the cover of his hardback crackling every time he turned the page. Colleen stared at images of kitchens and living rooms, beautifully decorated, and tried not to think about the wine sitting downstairs in its familiar bottle. The peeling of the copper-colored foil, the swirl up the sides of her bell-shaped glass. The taste on her tongue, smooth and rich, a promise. The first lovely tendrils of numb.

She didn't need it. She wasn't an alcoholic. But when she turned out the light and lay, open-eyed, in the darkness, her heart raced with something like fear.

Tuesday and Wednesday, she convinced herself she didn't miss it. It had just been an ill-advised self-soothing spree, a temporary bump in a single-glass-most-nights habit.

But Thursday, the half glass she allowed herself turned back into several, and now here she was again.

A text buzzed.
Ready to go, meet u in lobby

She shot her reflection in the mirror a quick, determined smile and ran her fingers through her hair.
I'm here for
her, she reminded herself.
I can do this for her.

“HOW'D YOU FIND
this place?” Shay said, setting her laminated menu on the scarred pine table and looking around the room. The restaurant was small and dim, its walls covered with fake paneling and beer advertising signs. It was called the Honey Do, and they'd spotted the blinking neon chicken from the road, fifteen miles from
Lawton and past the turnoff for Turnerville, just as the Yelp review had promised. They'd gotten the last empty table.

Colleen felt her cheeks flush. “I did a little research,” she said, not adding that in her purse was a neatly folded piece of paper with a list of half a dozen restaurants.

There was just this to get through. Being there for Shay. It was going to be uncomfortable. Downright painful, even, but Colleen was ready to do the right thing. It wasn't just that she was the one whose child had survived. She wanted to think that even if their roles were reversed (no, she couldn't allow her mind to go there, couldn't imagine Paul being the one under the ice all of those months, Paul thrashing in terror as the darkness closed over his head and the ice water filled his lungs), she would still have felt some sort of . . .

What was it, exactly?
Kinship
was the word that came to mind, but she and Shay were no closer to being kin now than when they first met. They were different in so many ways, and enduring misery together hadn't changed that. Colleen ducked her head, pretending to read the menu, to hide the twitch in her eyelid.
Friendship.
That was the word she had been thinking. She wanted to believe Shay was her friend. Even more, she wanted—desperately—for Shay to consider
her
a friend.

“We could split the chicken and catfish platter,” she said brightly. “It comes with hush puppies and onion rings.”

“Jesus, we could just roll our arteries in cornmeal and pan-fry them,” Shay said, but she didn't object. When the waitress came over to their table, Shay ordered a carafe of house white wine without consulting with Colleen. “I need a drink,” she explained, handing her menu over.