The Missing Place

by Sophie Littlefield

  Colleen found it near the door, where Shay must have dropped it. Shay got out her cigarettes and lighter, her hands shaking. “Can you open that?” she asked, inclining her head toward the sliding door. “Wouldn’t want good old Scott Cohen to get stuck with the bill if they figure out I was smoking in here.”

  Colleen slid the door open a few inches. The balcony held a plastic table and chairs that were crusted with ice. Cold air rushed into the room. Shay lit up and took a deep inhale, closing her eyes and holding the smoke in for what seemed like forever. Then she leaned over and exhaled toward the gap in the sliding door.

  Colleen sat down cross-legged next to Shay and watched her smoke. She did it so prettily. Her thin wrists and fingers curled languidly as she held the cigarette so lightly between her fingertips. Shay made smoking look like the most natural thing in the world, like the French girls Colleen had envied when she spent her junior year abroad. She had never even tried to imitate them, knowing it was beyond her.

  When the cigarette was spent, Shay stuck her hand through the door and ground out the butt on the balcony floor. Then she closed the door and leaned back against it.

  “Shay,” Colleen said hesitantly. What could she say? What the hell could she say?

  Shay looked at her. She scratched at her chin. “How’s Paul?” she asked tonelessly, as if she was asking about a bus schedule. “He have to stay in the hospital?”

  “He’s . . .” Going to live. Going to see his twenty-first birthday. Going to have the chance to get married, get a job, grow old. “Shay, Andy is working on flights for Brittany and Robert, to get them out here as soon as possible. Tonight if he can. Leila too.”

  “I know. Brittany called.” Shay lit another cigarette. “I had to tell her, you know. I had to be the one to tell her that her brother is dead.”

  Colleen moaned quietly. She didn’t mean to, but the sound leaked from her, the frayed grip she had on her composure starting to sever. “Shay. Shay.”

  Another woman would know what to do. Another woman would reach for Shay and hug her, let her cry on her sweater. Colleen didn’t care about her sweater, her coat, anything. She would give anything at all to help Shay. Everything. But what did she have?

  When the thing had happened with Darren Terry, the word had spread quickly through the school. A few days later, after Paul had been suspended for two weeks, Colleen went to the school to pick up his homework. She had waited until half an hour after school let out, hoping not to see anyone. She’d walked, head down, taking the back stairs, and still she had run into a knot of mothers. Who knew what they had been doing—an academic booster meeting, teacher appreciation planning, sister school fund-raiser, it could have been a thousand different things, meetings and activities that Colleen herself had once been a part of.

  The knot of women split apart for her to pass through. She knew nearly every one of those mothers. One or two murmured greetings, the rest looked at the floor, the walls, pretended to check their phones. Anything but look at her.

  And then Sandy Prescott had stepped in front of her. Colleen had never liked Sandy. No one did. She didn’t fit in and, worse, she didn’t seem to know it. She had the faint traces of a New Jersey accent and she chewed gum with her mouth open and people tended to roll their eyes when she spoke up in meetings.

  “Colleen,” she said, reaching for one of her hands. “I’ve been thinking about you ever since I heard. I’m just so very sorry your family is going through this hard time, I can’t even imagine.” And then she’d hugged her, hard, patting her back and giving her a peck on the cheek before she let go. “If you need anything, to talk, or, I don’t know, just to get away from everything for an hour—oh, I don’t even know what would help. For something like this. But if you think of it, let me know, okay?”

  The mob had moved on, and Colleen had stood in the hall, feeling the ghost impression of Sandy’s arms around her.

  She reached a hand, tentatively, to touch Shay’s leg. Shay had taken her boots off and was wearing gray leggings and pink socks with yellow stars. They knew each other’s wardrobes, after spending the last few days together. Colleen settled her hand on Shay’s thin calf. Shay didn’t move, and after a moment Colleen lifted her hand.

  “Thanks,” Shay said, in that same dead voice. “I should thank you and Andy. For buying the plane tickets. You know I can’t pay you back.”

  “That’s—of course.” Colleen recoiled, stung. “It’s, it’s what we want to do. The least we can do.”

  Shay narrowed her eyes and her lips thinned. So she wasn’t going to give Colleen any help. Maybe she even wanted to hurt her a little. Or a lot.

  Colleen would endure it. She had no choice. She took a breath. “And Andy’s assistant is trying to get another hotel room, for Robert and Brittany, and he had this one billed to us. As long as you want it. We have that room Andy reserved at the Homewood Suites. So, uh, that worked out. And then—”

  “Since you have that room,” Shay interrupted, taking another cigarette from the pack, “could you just go? Just take your stuff and go?”

  As Colleen gathered her toiletries and stuffed them into her suitcase along with the laundered and folded clothes, Shay stayed on the floor, smoking steadily. Colleen could feel her watching as she moved around the room. When everything was packed, she stood in the middle of the room with her coat over her arm, her hand on the handle of the rolling suitcase, and tried one last time.

  “If you want me to come back—I’m just down the street. I can get back here in no time. I’m going to try to get a little sleep before Andy gets here but I’ll keep the phone by my bed.”

  Shay raised one eyebrow. “Right,” she said through a cloud of smoke. “Thanks.”

  It felt like a curse.

  COLLEEN HAD LEFT Shay’s car keys on the nightstand. She decided to walk to the Homewood Suites, but it was farther than she remembered. The sidewalk petered out into a gravel shoulder. She trudged by the Dollar Store, a gas station, an Arby’s. Passing cars sprayed dirty slush on her pants and coat.

  By the time she arrived at the hotel, she was past the pretense of dignity. “I think I have a room reserved,” she said meekly. “Under Mitchell?”

  The tapping, the fresh-faced girl, the sweet smile—all of it all over again. “Oh, I’m so sorry, Mrs. Mitchell, but that room won’t be ready until three.” She looked genuinely regretful. “That’s when check-in is.”

  “Oh.” Colleen’s mouth collapsed on itself. She looked at her watch: barely noon. “I just . . . can I just wait here, in the lobby? I don’t have anywhere else to go.”

  “Of course, Mrs. Mitchell. Or if you want to go somewhere, I can call you when the room is ready. You never know . . . maybe they’ll get to it a bit early.” She didn’t sound very hopeful. “Maybe you want to get some lunch?”

  Lunch. Yes. She should eat. “Where?” she said, and then she was swaying again. She gripped the edge of the counter and tried very hard to hold on, but her very best effort wasn’t enough. She let go and went down.

  thirty-four

  AFTER COLLEEN LEFT, Shay set her phone alarm for four o’clock and crawled into the bed, but she was awake again long before then, her mind going a thousand directions at once. She pulled the covers off the bed and sat on the floor wrapped up in them, staring out the window. The view wasn’t much, just the parking lot and the dumpy strip mall next door, and a few houses and then the open fields started, the rolling hills all the way out to the horizon. She didn’t see a lake, but somewhere the lake was out there too, and Taylor was there, trapped in the black water below the ice.

  That was all she knew right now. She should have asked Paul more. He was lying on the ground and Colleen was talking to the girl, almost shaking her, asking her what her precious little darling had done, ready to clean up the latest mess he’d made.

  “How?” she’d finally asked him, after the first wave had knocked her senseless, after the snow had soaked through the knees of her pants, and her t
hroat was raw from screaming. She’d crawled over to him and demanded to know, just as the ambulances were cresting the hill, their lights strobing across the snowy lake.

  He’d used the last of his strength to tell her, quickly, before his mother came back. He wanted to tell her. He wanted her to know. You could see in his eyes he was sorry, Shay would give him that. So he wasn’t a monster. But he was still alive, and Taylor wasn’t, and there was no balance in that.

  “He drowned,” he had said. “It was an accident.”

  Then the paramedics were running toward them and Colleen was shouting something and his eyes rolled up and there was nothing else to learn at that moment.

  But now, Paul was lying in a bed at the hospital and Britt and Robert wouldn’t be here until later, and Colleen was safely out of the way and this was her chance.

  She pulled off all her clothes, leaving them puddled on the floor. She turned on the shower and twisted her hair into a knot while she waited for it to get hot.

  She let the water splash on her upturned face. It was hot enough to hurt, running into her eyes and pooling in her mouth, coursing down her body, across her belly and down her shoulder blades and the backs of her legs. Taylor. Taylor.

  She might have stood there forever, waiting for the heat to reach into her bones, to burn away the thought of him frozen in that terrible brackish lake. Long ago, Taylor had swum in Lake Tahoe’s crystal blue depths. She had stayed on the beach with her friend Marian drinking G&Ts from a thermos while the boys, eight or nine at the time, swam like seals until their lips were blue, and then lay on the beach shivering in the sun. Taylor had the makings of an athlete even then, with his long sun-browned legs and arms. “He’s going to take over the world, that one,” Marian had said, while her youngest buried her feet in the sand.

  Shay still saw Marian sometimes, though she was on her third husband, and the little one had grown up reckless and got into a motorcycle accident and was in a wheelchair now.

  What would it have been like, if it had been Marian here this last week instead of Colleen? For a moment Shay hesitated, holding the damp towel she’d dried herself with. Marian made a sound like a donkey when she laughed. She poured a whole bottle of Red Bull on her living room carpet and told the insurance adjuster her nephew did it, as a way to get new carpet. She met her third husband at a debt-counseling seminar. It was safe to say that Marian would have been a disaster to lean on when the chips were down.

  On the other hand, Colleen had come back. She had tried hard to talk to her today. Shay hadn’t let her. She’d looked down at Colleen’s hand on her leg, and she’d seen only the diamond as big as a walnut, the remains of a French manicure still clinging to the nails, and she’d wished that it had been not just Paul who had died instead of Taylor, but Colleen too, and Andy and all their rich, boring friends back in Boston. All of them.

  She wished they’d never been born, that they were obliterated from history. Anything to reverse the course of fate. But she had been here once before.

  When Frank had died, she knew the minute the cop came up her walk. She’d only been surprised it hadn’t happened sooner, when he enlisted and went off to Iraq. Frank was reckless, fearless to a fault. At some level she’d been preparing their kids to lose their dad long before he left them for real, and still it hit her like a wrecking ball. As they lowered his casket into the ground, Brittany in her little pink dress tossing rose petals on top, Shay had wished that she’d never met Frank, just so she’d never had to lose him. That the driver of the car who hit him had a heart attack that morning instead, that she had collapsed in her Shredded Wheat.

  But Shay had known deep in her heart that life doesn’t work that way. You don’t get to choose from a menu of tragedies and losses, don’t get to consider which you can survive and which will crush you. God simply serves them up and there you are; you either play the hand He deals, or you give up.

  Shay hung the towel carefully over the shower curtain rod. Someone was going to have to clean this bathroom and she might as well not make the job any harder. She dressed in clean clothes and combed her hair, yanking hard and taking a handful of hair out with the knots.

  When Brittany and Robert got here, she would be ready. She would hold her daughter and let her cry her heart out and she would tell her it would be all right. She would survive this.

  But there was something she needed to do first.

  IT WAS DARK by the time she left. The Explorer complained and sputtered before it started. “Come on,” Shay encouraged as she fed it gas, “come on, you motherfucker, come on.”

  Finally it coughed to life. Shay idled for a few minutes, letting the engine warm up. She’d timed her departure to the shift change—it was a quarter to six, and the boys with the farthest to drive were getting in their trucks, ready to head out for the night shift. They carried lunch pails and coolers, and half of them were bareheaded. Some of them didn’t even bother zipping up their coats.

  It was the sort of bravado she could identify with. These men risked their lives on the rigs, all so casually. Shay had a lifetime’s experience with men and their dumbass risk taking. The way they’d take a turn too tight with you on the back of their motorcycle, just to show off; or toss another man a wrench that could take his eye out; or stand on top of a roof beating their chests, pretending to be Tarzan to get a laugh from a three-year-old. They gambled their lives as though they were worth no more than a quarter flipped for luck.

  She drove to the hospital, asked for Paul at the desk, and went up to his room. So easy. Too easy. Didn’t they understand?

  They’d decided he was innocent. There would be no arrest made, no charges brought. Shay wasn’t really surprised. He was a golden boy. Soon his father would arrive with their lawyers, and he and Colleen would form a wall around Paul just like they always had before. By this time tomorrow, the story—whatever it was—would have been molded and smoothed, the parts they couldn’t explain away would be recast, and history would be altered. There would be no justice. And Shay could learn to live with all of that. After all, nothing was going to bring Taylor back.

  But now, in this narrow period of time before the wagons were circled, she was here and Paul was alone and unprotected.

  Shay slipped into his room.

  The lights were low. Paul lay sleeping, propped up on two pillows, a blue blanket pulled up to his chin. His lips were slightly parted but there was no sign that he was breathing. She could see faint blue veins tracing his eyelids, charcoal-colored smudges underneath. But his eyelashes were still pretty, as black as coal.

  She knocked against a chair and he jerked, then woke in twitching stages. “No, I can’t,” he said, or something like it, as his eyes fluttered open. His fist clenched the thin blanket and then relaxed. He looked around the room and licked his lips. His head came up off the pillow and then he lay back down, seemingly exhausted by the effort.

  He noticed her standing there, but it took a moment for recognition to dawn in his eyes. Last night her face had been streaked with makeup and constricted with grief. Now she was calm. She was surprised that he recognized her at all.

  “Mrs. Capparelli,” he said. “You came to see me?”

  What had she been expecting? That he’d cower, or cry, or start making excuses? He had a young man’s voice, not quite a man’s, liable to crack at any moment. Taylor had been that way too. He used to come into the kitchen and pick her up and she was helpless to do anything but laugh and slap at his arms as he spun her, singing along with the radio in a big loud baritone.

  “I want to know everything,” she said. “You owe me that.”

  He nodded. “I can’t believe he’s gone,” he said. “Every morning I wake up and for a minute or two, I don’t remember. Those are the best minutes of the day. They’re the only time I feel—the rest of the day I . . .”

  He couldn’t seem to find the words. Shay stiffened her resolve and crossed her arms across her chest. “If he had never met you, he would be ali
ve, wouldn’t he? Whatever happened, you dragged him into it.”

  Paul swallowed. He looked like it hurt. “After it happened, I thought about killing myself. I think about it every day, every single day.”

  “Then why don’t you?” The words shot out of her. Shay clapped her hand over her mouth, horrified. How could she really have just said that?

  She backed away from the bed, tripping against the same chair, nearly falling. She stumbled out of the room, gasping for breath. There was no one in the hallway and she bent at the waist, leaning against the wall, feeling like she might throw up. God. Was that what she really wanted? For Paul to be dead? If they both died, would it somehow make it even?

  She wanted so much to hate him. She did hate him. He had stolen the most precious thing in the world from her and she could kill him with her own hands, she could take a dull knife and stab it into him, over and over, until he was dead . . .

  Except that this wasn’t him, this wasn’t Paul. Not the Paul she expected him to be. The boy in the hospital bed looked like the pictures Colleen had showed her, with those long eyelashes and that tentative mouth and that thick dark hair. But he wasn’t ruthless and he wasn’t crazy. His eyes weren’t empty. There was no guile there, only desperate sadness.

  “Mrs. Capparelli . . .” There was a clattering in the room. Shay went in without thinking. Paul had managed to sit up and was trying to get out of the bed. He’d lowered the side bar and pushed off the covers, and she could see a spreading rusty stain on the bandage around his waist.

  “What are you doing?” she demanded, putting her hands on his shoulders and pushing him back against the bed. “I’m calling a nurse.”

  “No—wait. Please.”

  She froze, standing over him the way she had stood over both her children on days when they stayed home sick from school, when they had fevers and the flu and chicken pox, wanting to tuck the covers back around him.