The Missing Place

by Sophie Littlefield

  The other mother. She’d known there was one—assumed, anyway—and it was even on the list Shay was keeping, written on the outside of a manila file folder. “Other parents”—it was right below “Call Lawrence.” Lawrence was Brittany’s husband’s uncle, a lawyer. Shay had met him at a wedding. Maybe he could help somehow.

  But Shay hadn’t gotten that far on the list yet. By the second day Taylor didn’t call her, she knew something was wrong. By the third day, she was frantic. She quit her job on the eighth day, after the guy at Hunter-Cole stopped taking her calls and the police sergeant who’d been assigned her case told her tersely that he’d let her know the minute they had anything and to stop calling. And on the morning of the ninth day, before the sun rose in California, she was on the road, drinking truck-stop coffee and listening to preachers on the radio.

  Twenty-two hours in the car, with just a few hours’ sleep in her backseat at rest stops—a trip like that wasn’t for the weak. Shay had a hundred and thirty-five dollars in her purse and her last paycheck ought to hit her account tomorrow. It wasn’t much, but she’d been down that far plenty of times before and frankly it didn’t scare her much.

  What scared her was the fact that North Dakota seemed to have swallowed up her baby—whom she’d raised tough like her, tough enough to play the last quarter against Noble Hills with a torn oblique—and left no trace behind.

  But fuck North Dakota. Fuck the cops and fuck the oil company and fuck everyone and everything that stood between her and what she needed. Shay would not stop until she found her son—or died trying.

  four

  T.L. WAITED FOR the sound of Myron’s key in the front door. It didn’t come until twenty minutes after midnight, and T.L. did the math quickly in his head. Ten minutes to close the store, ten to get to Griffon’s, ten to get home—so his uncle would have been at the bar only forty-five minutes.

  When had it all turned upside down like this, with Myron going out late and T.L. waiting up like a nervous housewife? Of course T.L. knew exactly when. On the day that changed everything. Only it wasn’t that simple, was it? Because if he’d never met her . . . if the Wolves varsity baseball team hadn’t made the finals in the NDHSA West tournament . . . if she hadn’t shaken her blue-and-silver pom-poms in the frosty spring air as he came up to bat for what would turn out to be the game-winning triple.

  If he hadn’t got that hit—surely then. T.L. knew what he could do and what he couldn’t. The triple was a fluke. He could draw an eastern cottontail so realistic it looked like it might leap off the page; he could unload and stack three dozen eight-pound baler bags of ice into the freezer in ten minutes; he could rattle off the name of every elder who’d served on the tribal business council since 1997, the year his mother died and Myron took him in. But what he could not do, on an ordinary day, was capture the attention of a blond-haired, blue-eyed pom-pom girl from Lawton High and so impress her that she got her friends to give him her phone number. The triple had made the difference: there were several hundred people in the Lawton High stadium, more than had turned out for any other game of the season, stamping their feet in the stands and shouting. Nearly forty of those people packed the visitors’ area, Myron and his buddies and a few of the guys’ moms, and they all started chanting “T.L.” Then someone on the other side picked it up, and his name echoed back and forth across the field, and everything in the world had seemed possible, including a girl like Elizabeth walking across the parking lot toward him after the game.

  Right there. That would have been the moment to freeze in time.

  T.L. leaned up on his elbows. The curtains didn’t close all the way, and light from the parking lot leaked through, casting a narrow stripe of yellow across his bed. That stripe had been there for thirteen of his nineteen years. He had once driven his Matchbox cars along it, long after Myron told him to go to sleep.

  He heard Myron’s keys landing in the dish on the hall table, his boots heavy on the linoleum, a glass of water being poured at the sink, seconds later the empty glass being set down on the counter. The walls in the house were thin, the doors hollow. Myron had bought the place for nothing, after the first boom was only a memory, when he got back from serving in the Gulf: a shitty house set back on a badly poured parking lot with a two-pump service station and convenience store fronting the highway. Myron struggled for years, but now it was boom times again and the location, right past the turn-in for the reservation, was genius: shift workers passing by four times a day, on the way to the rigs, on the way back to town. They might not always gas up, but they stopped for cigarettes, tall boys and jerky and sleeves of cashews, cupcakes and skin magazines and Red Bulls.

  Myron’s boots, on the way to his room. Steady. Slow. Worn-down . . . T.L. could hear it in the tread. Pausing outside T.L.’s door, only for a moment.

  Forty-five minutes at Griffon’s, for Myron that was one beer. He might not even have finished it. T.L. lay back down and closed his eyes. He’d sleep now. This new vigilance, as unfamiliar as a Sunday suit, wasn’t costing him any rest that he’d be getting anyway, not with the shadows and specters and fears that jammed his mind. Myron had come home drunk only a handful of times, and he was a calm drunk, usually getting a ride home. Besides, if his uncle decided to start leaving his money on the bar, what could T.L. have done about it?

  He had no idea, but he still had to be vigilant. Someone had to stay on guard. To keep hidden things hidden and danger at bay. T.L. was a man now, and he meant to do a man’s job.

  five

  COLLEEN WOKE TO the remains of some fitful dream splintering and vanishing, leaving behind only a scattered sense of dread. Next came the terrible realization that Paul was missing, the running calculus of his absence ticking up automatically to nine days, and she felt the loss of him like a gaping hole inside her.

  Only after the waking and remembering did her other senses kick in. Everything was wrong and unfamiliar. The surface she was lying on was cold and hard. The air she breathed held an unpleasant mélange of her own odor and faint notes of spoiled milk and industrial cleaner. And there was a rumbling that she not only heard but also felt, a mechanical, knocking-engine sound.

  Generator. Colleen remembered. She opened her eyes and recognized the inside of the motor home faintly lit with gloomy dawn. There, maybe eight feet away, was Shay, huddled into a lump under a pile of clothes and a single blanket. Guiltily, Colleen realized she had the lion’s share of the blankets, a fact she hadn’t registered last night, when the whiskey had gone down all too easily, followed by a fluster of preparations in which she hadn’t exactly participated. She hadn’t been drunk. But she hadn’t been sober, either. Nothing but the protein bar and the half sandwich, the milk Shay insisted that she drink, and the whiskey. Then peeing and brushing her teeth in that tiny closet of a bathroom. In fact the last lucid thought Colleen remembered having was to wonder where the water went when she flushed, while she rinsed the toothpaste down the sink.

  No, wait. A hand-lettered sign taped to the mirror—Sharpie on a lined index card—read USE AS LEAST WATER AS POSSIBLY PLEASE, and Colleen’s last lucid thought was the one she always had when confronted with grammar mistakes on public display, which was to wish she had the ability to fix them without anyone ever knowing. A Johnny Appleseed for the postliterate generation, she would sow grammar skills everywhere she went.

  Colleen sat up slowly, trying to make no noise. If there was light in the sky, it had to be nearly eight o’clock, didn’t it? Which was what—nine her time?

  What time had they gone to bed last night, anyway? It had been after eleven on Dave’s dashboard clock when she climbed in the truck, she remembered that. She and Shay had stayed up talking for maybe an hour. Colleen couldn’t believe she had slept seven hours straight, something she hadn’t come close to managing the last few nights. Was she simply exhausted? Or could it be a sense of relief at having someone to share her burden with? Immediately Colleen felt guilty. It was only because another boy was missin
g—and another mother frantic—that she wasn’t alone.

  And then she felt even more guilty because she wasn’t alone, at least not as alone as Shay. She had Andy. Who she had forgotten to call last night. He would already have been up for nearly two hours this morning. She eased her legs over the side of the bed—not a bed, but the motor home’s tiny table, which Shay had somehow flipped over to create a sort of cot—and immediately felt the cold air slide into her sleeves and under the legs of her pants. The floor was freezing, even through her socks. Wedged in the narrow space between table and kitchenette was her suitcase. She remembered pawing through the contents last night to find her toiletry case; when she’d returned from the bathroom the table/bed was made, the lights were turned off save a dim overhead night-light, and Shay was sitting cross-legged on top of the tiny bed, as though the two of them were at sleepaway camp. Colleen had considered digging through her clothes for her nightgown, but that would mean changing in front of Shay, and she was too tired to contend with her own modesty, her embarrassment at her pouchy abdomen and jiggling upper arms and thighs.

  She’d left the suitcase open and crawled gratefully under the covers, mumbling a good night. She must have gone to sleep immediately, because she remembered nothing after that.

  Now she considered Shay’s sleeping form while she slipped her boots on, pulling up the zippers slowly so as to make no noise. She wondered if Shay had looked through her suitcase or her purse. Had it been her, she wouldn’t have attempted the suitcase, mostly because it would be hard not to muss the contents yet leave no evidence that she’d been snooping. But she might have looked in the purse to see if there were any obvious clues. Shameful, but true.

  Shay’s purse, if she had one, was nowhere to be seen. Besides the bottle of whiskey, the cigarettes, and the small CorningWare ramekin she was using as an ashtray, there was a mound of folded clothing, a laptop plugged into the only outlet in sight, two Mountain Dew cans, and a stack of magazines.

  Colleen tiptoed to the narrow counter and dug her phone from her purse. There were three calls from Andy, but just one voice mail. Colleen hesitated for only a moment before taking her coat from the foot of the bed and slipping it on, winding her scarf around her neck.

  Despite her caution, the door squeaked and rattled. Colleen didn’t look at Shay; if she’d woken the woman, she hoped she’d have the courtesy to feign sleep until Colleen got outside. Just these few moments of privacy, just long enough to talk to Andy.

  As she eased the door open, she spotted something she’d missed the night before: tucked into the window, curling from the moisture condensing on the glass, was a photograph of a young man. Colleen’s breath caught in her throat: Shay’s son, Taylor, was beautiful, broad-shouldered and strong-jawed, with the same startling blue eyes as his mother. His dark blond hair was so thick it refused to stay flat. He had a tan and a smattering of freckles across his nose, which, combined with the dimple at one corner of his confident grin, gave him an air of wholesome mischief. He was the sort of boy you wanted to believe in, the boy who was a shoo-in for class president and dated the prettiest girls.

  As Colleen slipped out the door, pulling it gently shut behind her, her heart withered as it had a thousand times before. You’re every bit as good as him, she whispered to the wind, to her lost boy, and deep in her weary heart she waged her forever battle to believe it hard enough to make it true.

  THE COLD WIND hit her like a sheet of metal, slamming into her lungs, crackling her nostrils, and assaulting her bare hands. Despite Shay’s prediction, only another inch or two of snow had fallen since her arrival; she could still make out her footsteps and Dave’s larger ones. Light peeped between blinds in the house’s front windows. A gust lifted snow from the ground and swirled it around her face, stinging her cheeks, and Colleen hurried around the corner of the trailer, out of the wind. From this vantage point, she faced the side of the house as she made her call.

  “Col, what happened?” Andy said before the phone finished the first ring. “I called you half a dozen times.”

  “Yes, sorry, I’m fine,” Colleen said, thinking, Three, it was only three. “I didn’t—it got so late and . . .”

  “Where are you? Did you find a room?”

  “Well, not exactly. I mean, yes, I had a place to sleep last night.” It occurred to Colleen that Andy didn’t know about the other boy, the other mother.

  “You didn’t call, and I got up this morning and there wasn’t a message. I was about to call the airline.”

  “Oh, Andy.” Something crumpled inside Colleen, and she felt like she might cry. But her first day in North Dakota had barely begun, and she couldn’t afford tears. So she rubbed her eyes and focused on the cold leaching through her boots and freezing her ears and nose. “There’s another boy. They went missing together. He’s also twenty, and his name is Taylor, and he and Paul worked on the same rig and they both stayed at Black Creek Lodge.” She told him the rest: arriving to find the airport closing for the night, Dave taking pity on her, driving her to the trailer. Shay sharing her blankets and food.

  She left out the whiskey, the photograph of Taylor wedged in the window.

  “But Hunter-Cole never mentioned the other boy,” Andy said, skipping right over Colleen’s ordeal, her introduction to Shay in the middle of the night. “Surely they must have been aware there were two of them.”

  “I know, Andy, there’s something wrong here. Shay says that the oil companies routinely cover up workplace injuries. When we talked to the corporate office, they were giving us the runaround.”

  “Wait, hang on. Is Shay an attorney or something? Does she have a connection in the industry?”

  “No, she’s a . . .” Colleen thought, trying to remember if Shay had said what she did. I told my boss something came up and hit the road, she’d said, and Colleen—dazed and exhausted—hadn’t bothered to ask her what job she’d left. “She did some research online.”

  “Well, I spent quite a bit of time online myself the other night.”

  Colleen hadn’t stopped to wonder how Shay had been able to find things out that Andy hadn’t. Her fingers flew so fast over her laptop keyboard; she seemed to type as fast as she thought. She was full of contradictions, something Colleen didn’t have the energy to explain to Andy.

  She looked down the street. Wisps of smoke wafted from chimneys; lights shone weakly from kitchen windows. Gusting drifts provided a snow globe whimsy at odds with the dispirited houses and shabby cars, the leafless black trees.

  “I don’t know where Shay got her information,” she said, too tired to make the effort to protect his feelings. “But she said she’d read about all these accidents and workplace injuries. Things that weren’t reported. Or weren’t compensated, anyway.”

  “All right,” Andy said, and in his tone Colleen detected the skepticism that had been present from the moment she first suggested coming out here. “Tell you what. Are you writing all of this down? If you email it to me, I’ll keep it organized for Steve. He’s supposed to call me today, he was going to make some calls to towns within a hundred-mile radius just double-checking on the hotel situation. Not that there are many to call—there’s only a dozen towns in the whole state with more than a few thousand people.”

  The door of the house opened, and a figure stepped out, pulling a knit cap down over his ears. Her ears, Colleen corrected herself, as the flat-faced woman strode toward her more quickly than Colleen would have thought possible in unlaced Bean boots and a flapping parka. Her face was set in a determined scowl. In her bare hand was a wooden spoon.

  “Listen, I need to go,” Colleen said. “I’ll call you later today.”

  She hung up and slipped her freezing hand into her pocket as the woman came to an indignant halt a few feet away, huffing white breath. She had a smear of something at one corner of her mouth, and graying blond hair pulled back in a plastic clip. She was around sixty and badly in need of a good moisturizer.

  “Who the hell are yo
u?”

  “I’m Colleen Mitchell. I’m the—the other mom.” She extended her hand, but the woman made no move to shake it. “I’m sorry I arrived too late to introduce myself last night.”

  “Jesus. I looked out and saw you out here, you could be anybody.” She looked only slightly mollified.

  “I thought— Shay said you’d called over . . . Brenda, right?”

  “Yeah, I called to say you were in town, after Lee called me. I didn’t tell her you could stay.”

  Colleen struggled to keep up, blushing. Lee: Dave’s wife’s sister, if she was remembering right. “There’re no rooms. I tried, I was going to stay in a hotel room and I . . . I am very sorry to inconvenience you.”

  Her voice sounded hollow even to herself, because really, how much inconvenience could she possibly be?

  “Look. I’m real sorry for your loss, but—”

  “My loss?” The word felt like a slap, and Colleen staggered back as she echoed it. “My son is missing, he’s not—he’s not—”

  Brenda waved her hand. “Right, sorry. I meant I’m sorry for what you’re going through, but it’s a code issue. Having two people in there? With the generator and the tanks running like that?”

  “I hardly imagine it’s legal to have even one person living in your driveway, but I notice you took Shay’s money,” Colleen snapped, too stunned by Brenda’s remark to censor the haughtiness that was her first defense when she felt attacked. “So perhaps codes aren’t the issue.”

  Brenda crossed her arms over her chest, her scowl deepening. There was something stuck to the spoon, maybe oatmeal. “Look, you want to talk issues, let’s talk about her smoking in there when I clearly told her not to, let’s talk about the cigarette butts I found out here yesterday, let’s talk about her running her computer and her hair dryer and I don’t know what in there.”

  “Look, I’m sorry. I’ll talk to her. If my presence is an issue, I’ll be glad to add a per diem.”