“If you want me to kill myself, I will,” he said quickly. “I just need . . . I would just ask that you not take it out on my parents. Please. They . . . I’ve already hurt them too bad.”
“Oh,” she said. A wave of exhaustion as palpable as a seizure passed through her. She sat down on the edge of the bed.
“I loved Taylor,” he went on. “I never told him that. He was my best friend. I was scared—because, you know, I’ve had friends before, where they didn’t end up being what I thought, where they weren’t really there for me when things got bad. But Taylor, he was the best. Everybody loved him, Mrs. Capparelli.” He swallowed again, as if he couldn’t get his throat to work right. “Everybody wanted to be like him. He was funny. He made everyone laugh. And it was like it always got fun when he was there. We could all be sitting around doing nothing, and Taylor would come in and then everyone was laughing and . . .”
He wiped at his eyes with his hands. “And I couldn’t believe he wanted to be friends with me,” he said, his voice cracking. “And Elizabeth—when I found out she was only seventeen, and I didn’t know what to do, and Taylor said, Do you love her? He kept telling me if I loved her, then everything would be all right, that love was the only thing that mattered. And that was before I even knew she was pregnant. And then . . . I was so worried about what my parents would say, and what we’d do, how we would make things work, with a baby, and he told me about you.”
“Me?” Shay said. “What do you mean?”
“He told me you got pregnant with his sister by accident and did your best anyway, and found someone to love and it wasn’t perfect but it was a good family, and even though he lost his dad and you didn’t have much money, he never felt like he was missing out on anything. He made me feel like it would be okay.”
Shay’s eyes welled with tears. She grabbed the box of tissues from the bedside table. “He was special,” she said, dabbing at her eyes. “He was such an old soul. I can’t believe it. I thought . . . I thought he’d come back to California once he got tired of working up here, that he’d save some money for a fresh start near me and his sister.”
The plan she had come here with, to make Paul tell her everything and then, somehow, to figure out how to hurt him and his family the worst way possible, had splintered into shards.
“I’m getting the nurse, you should be looked at,” she said. “I just need to know what happened. Why you went there that day and what you were fighting about.”
Paul blinked. “It wasn’t her fault,” he said. “She was scared.”
“Whose fault? Elizabeth’s?”
“Yes. She got beat up bad, she showed me pictures. She was worried about the baby. She told me T.L. did it. He thought . . . he thought the baby was his. But it wasn’t. Elizabeth didn’t know what to do, she said I should talk some sense into him, scare him enough to make him leave her alone.
“That’s all I wanted to do,” he said, his eyes pleading. “Just to make him understand, once and for all. That she was with me now. That we were having the baby and he had to leave us alone.”
“Wait wait wait,” Shay said. “Who beat her?”
“T.L. did.” Paul’s breathing had steadied again, but that spreading stain, that couldn’t be good. “They used to go out. He was in love with her but she didn’t love him anymore. She was with me. But the timing . . .” His face flushed, in embarrassment or anger, she couldn’t tell. “He thought the baby was his. But it isn’t. When Elizabeth tried to tell him she was with me, he wouldn’t leave her alone. He kept bothering her, telling her that he wanted her back. One day he came when she was walking home from school, and she went with him, just to talk. And things . . . they got out of control and he hurt her. He left bruises, up here and here.” He touched his upper arm, the top of his rib cage.
“He was careful, it was places no one would see. But she texted me the pictures. He could have hurt the baby. I had to do something.”
Shay’s mind raced, trying to factor all of this into the story. It had gotten away from her, shifting and changing, taking what she knew and making it into something different. She didn’t know how she was supposed to feel now. “Do you still have those pictures?”
“No. I got rid of the phone. I smashed it and got one of those prepaid ones. I wasn’t thinking real well, after . . . you know, when I left.”
“But Elizabeth might have them.”
“Why?” He fixed her with his pretty olive-colored eyes. “I figure he’s paid enough. He hasn’t bothered her again, not once since then. That’s all we wanted. Just for him to leave her alone. And now it’s just me that has to make up for all the rest. For Taylor.”
Shay gripped the side of the chair. The metal was cold and sharp. These chairs were shit—you’d think they could put something a little better in a hospital room, where people watched their loved ones suffer. Where they prayed and castigated themselves and wished for do-overs, for another chance.
“Court might not see it that way,” she whispered, the words a struggle to get out. “If he hurt her . . . that’s something they’d think about.”
She wasn’t actually sure. It was getting too complicated. It wasn’t black and white anymore. The blame had been what she held on to, a hard, furious kernel that was as real as her own flesh. But now it had splintered like the view in a kaleidoscope, all the pieces winking and mirroring one another, mocking her.
“If she was afraid for her life, or the baby’s life. And you were . . . trying to protect her.” The words were like chalk in her mouth. “And Taylor was just there to help you.”
“I wanted to take a gun,” Paul said. “Taylor had one. His dad’s.”
“Oh, Jesus,” Shay said. How could he have been so stupid? That thing had been locked up in the case Frank had made for it, a plywood box bolted to the garage wall. She hadn’t looked at it for years. Knew where the keys were, of course, because you don’t fuck around with that sort of thing with kids in the house.
Evidently Taylor had known where the keys were too.
“It was just for hunting,” Paul said hastily. “Our friend Luther—he was going to hunt duck, he invited us to come along. I . . . couldn’t, I mean, I’ve never shot anything.”
“Taylor didn’t tell me,” Shay said, shaking her head. “I should have gotten rid of that thing years ago. There just, there wasn’t that much that belonged to his father, and I don’t know, I thought someday he or Brittany might want it. Fuck.”
“He always had his dad’s army tags on,” Paul said, fingering an imaginary chain around his neck. “Anyway, I asked him to bring the gun and he said no way. If it wasn’t for that, I would have had it and I could have shot him. Only . . .”
His voice grew thick and hoarse. “Taylor’s dead so maybe it would have been better. I would have killed T.L. and gone to jail for murder, but Taylor would still be here. I mean, how do you even figure that out?”
Shay sighed, trying to do the mental calculus. One boy or another. One life or another. It was too much to think about, too big. She laid a hand on the mattress, the sheets thin and cool under her touch. After a moment she moved her hand to his arm. Paul’s skin was hot, hotter than she thought it should be. She had to get that nurse.
“You can’t,” she said softly. “That sort of thing, only God can sort it out. But losing you too, that doesn’t add up, it doesn’t help. Leave it now, let’s figure out how to move on.”
“But I’ll never be able to make it up,” Paul said. “I’ll never be able to do enough.”
“You don’t know that,” Shay said. “You got a whole life ahead of you still. See what you can do with it.”
SHAY WAS DIGGING in her purse for her keys when the elevator doors opened and Colleen was standing there. Their eyes met, and for a moment Shay forgot everything. Colleen looked terrible, her eyes sunken and her hair greasy and lank. Behind her was a tall man with short gray hair and round glasses. Andy—exactly what she would have expected.
“What are
you doing here?” Colleen demanded.
Then everything fell back into place, the terrible truth. The things that couldn’t be undone.
Colleen moved toward her, stumbling, zombielike. She grabbed for Shay and Shay jerked her arm away.
“Were you in there? With Paul?” Her voice rose into a shriek. Spittle collected in the corners of her colorless lips. Andy tried to pull her away, but she shook off his hand. “Who let you in there?”
“You don’t control him,” Shay shot back. “Or me. You don’t control anything.”
She shoved past Colleen and Andy as the elevator doors started to close. She stabbed the buttons and watched Colleen stumble down the hall, her purse dangling from her thin arm. Her Walmart boots had already torn and a piece of the faux fur was flapping loose. One pant leg had come free and sagged along the floor, soiled and ragged.
There was little evidence of the woman who’d arrived in Lawton just a few days ago. All the polish, all the refinement had been stripped away.
And what about me? Shay thought, as the elevator descended. Who am I now?
thirty-five
March
“I’M GOING WHETHER you come or not,” T.L. finally said, the only way he knew to end the argument.
Myron was convinced the meeting would lead to nothing but trouble. For a while he insisted he wasn’t coming unless Jack Cook came too. But when T.L. was getting ready for school that morning, filling his commuter mug from the old coffeemaker, Myron came into the kitchen dressed in his good sweater and khaki pants.
“I’ll meet you over at the place,” he said. He wouldn’t say Ricky’s. He thought the restaurant was a ridiculous place to meet, with its banks of big-screen TVs and baskets of sticky hot wings and beers as big as a carton of orange juice.
But T.L. had chosen it for a reason. When he pulled into the parking lot at three forty-five, fifteen minutes before Andy Mitchell had asked to meet, most of the parking spots were empty. At seven forty-five that evening, the lot would be packed and overflow would be taking up half the church parking lot next door. But for now, most of Ricky’s customers were either working or sleeping.
When T.L. was a kid, the restaurant had been a Chuck E. Cheese’s. He hadn’t been invited to many birthday parties that didn’t take place in someone’s living room on the reservation. But a kid from a soccer camp had invited him, the mom standing at the door of the place greeting the parents and kids as they arrived. Myron had carefully wiped his boots on the mat at the door, handing over the clumsily wrapped gift, a plastic dart set he bought at the drugstore, and then stood there looking like he didn’t know what happened next. The mom had given Myron a thin smile and told him that he was welcome to stay, there was plenty of punch and cake. T.L. had wanted nothing more than for Myron to leave.
Now he stood inside the restaurant and waited for his eyes to adjust from the brilliant sun. There, in a corner booth, was Myron, his hands resting on top of a folded newspaper. His reading glasses were pushed up on his forehead. If T.L. had to guess, Myron had been here for half an hour already, sweating in his acrylic sweater.
He looked terrified.
T.L. slid into the booth. “Myron . . . look. Nothing bad is going to happen.”
“Yeah?” Myron’s face was deeply lined. He had aged in the last six weeks. “Andy Mitchell had three lawyers out here before that kid of his was even out of the hospital. He threatened the police department with a lawsuit. And you want to tell me you’re some kind of bulletproof?”
Fear was the only thing that could make Myron angry, a fact that T.L. didn’t fully understand until he was in high school. He did his best to ignore it. “Thought you’d be happy to see someone get the upper hand on Chief Weyant.”
Myron looked up sharply. There was something on his face, some troubled depth that T.L. hadn’t seen before. “Why would you say that?”
“What aren’t you telling me?” T.L. demanded. After he’d been questioned and released back in January, he’d asked Myron why Weyant hated him. All Myron would say was that he and Weyant got into it after T.L.’s mother died.
Myron sighed. “Okay, look, your mom and Weyant used to have a thing.”
“I figured it had to be something like that. Did she break up with him?”
“You . . . look, you can’t understand what it was like back then. Nowadays a kid like you and some girl from Lawton High go out, it’s no big deal. Back then it meant something. When Weyant started coming around, people talked. Your grandpa was sure your mom was going to end up hurt. He told her this was Weyant’s big walk on the wild side, seeing a Fort Mercer girl.”
“How . . . serious did it get?” T.L. asked carefully.
“Well, more than any of us expected. Weyant didn’t just take her to the prom and cop a feel and drink some Boone’s Farm and put it all behind him when he went off to Bismarck. He and your mom . . .” He wiped a hand over his forehead. He was perspiring in the afternoon sun streaming through the windows. “They saw each other whenever they could. She was a year behind him. Her whole senior year, every time he was home from college, he came around. Even after he was engaged to some girl he met at school. Nobody could stop your mom. Your grandpa used to yell . . .”
Myron never spoke about his parents, dead before T.L. was born. He never talked about the past at all, about T.L.’s mother’s hard times, her descent down the meth pipe, her collision with a truck carrying gravel on an afternoon when she’d left him with a neighbor and gone to meet a girlfriend for happy hour in town. T.L.’s only memories of his mother were perfume and cigarette smoke and a brand of wafer cookies she had liked.
“When your mom got pregnant by some guy she’d gone out with a few times, Weyant went nuts. I was working at the plant and going to community college. Your mom was living at home again, between jobs, and Weyant was a rookie in town. He came over when your grandfather was at work, and she went out on the porch to talk to him and you could hear him yelling up and down the block. I got your grandfather’s gun and I went out there and told him I wasn’t afraid to use it, he couldn’t arrest me if he was dead, and he turned around and got in his car and left.”
“That was it?” T.L. said. He wasn’t sure what to do with this glimpse of the past. “That’s what you’ve been afraid to tell me all these years?”
“No, son,” Myron said, curling his fingers around the paper, wrinkling it. “That was nothing. Your mom had you a few months later, and within a month after that, Weyant had found a girl, different girl from the one he’d been engaged to, knocked her up, and that was Elizabeth. They had a shotgun wedding. I figured that would be the end of it, but then he kept coming around and your mom still kept sneaking out to meet him. Those two—it was like you couldn’t keep them apart.”
“Wait.” A rushing in his ears, a pain in his heart. For some reason, the mother T.L. had imagined for himself had never been capable of anything like a grand passion. Love. She’d been a junkie on the pipe and he figured Myron was the best thing to ever happen to him and nobody ever told him different. “She was in love with him?”
“Or something,” Myron said darkly, his eyebrows lowered. “The rest you know. She had the accident. You came here. But on the day of her funeral, I came back here after the wake at the church, had you in a little red snowsuit, I remember that. There’s Weyant in his car, his personal car, parked in my driveway. Right out there,” Myron gestured, as though he had forgotten they were sitting in Ricky’s. “Drunk as a skunk. He gets out of the car when he sees me, and I think, You bastard, you couldn’t even come to the church. He’s got a bottle in a bag and I can smell him a few feet away. He opens his mouth and I figure I don’t want to know what he’s going to say. Shut your fucking mouth, I tell him, you got nothing to say to me.”
Myron was shaking, he was so angry, his skin a mottled red, the paper shredded between his fingers.
“I went inside and turned on the TV and I didn’t even wait to see what was on, left you sitting on the couch in you
r snowsuit and mittens. I went back outside and I hit Weyant so hard he fell down. When he was lying on the ground, I saw he’d pissed himself. He kept saying he loved her. Over and over. And that just made me angrier. See, in my mind, if he had been braver, if he’d stood by her, married her the way it was supposed to be, she never would have become a junkie and she never would have died. He was lying on the ground and I kicked him, once in the ribs, and I was getting ready to kick him in the head, I think I would have killed him. But then I thought about you, sitting on my couch. And I picked him up and kind of dragged him to his car. He wasn’t fighting me by then. He got in and I closed the door on him. Went inside and turned the TV up loud and sat with you, and when I had waited long enough I went back to see and he was gone. Car was gone. I didn’t care if he died in a wreck on the way home, I guess that might have been some kind of justice. Anyway, so now you know.”
T.L. tried to absorb what Myron had told him. He’d always known Weyant hated him, but he and Elizabeth had never questioned why. They just figured that the fact that he was her first boyfriend had been enough.
“Why didn’t you tell me? When she and I started going out?”
Myron laughed, bitterly. “You got to be kidding. I won’t deny it was kind of satisfying, knowing he couldn’t do a damn thing about it. But mostly I figured you were entitled to your own life, without all that crap from the past hanging over you.”
T.L. wondered what he would have done if he’d known. Probably wouldn’t have made a difference. It still would have ended anyway; she still would have gotten bored with him and taken up with Paul. Got pregnant.
She’d be almost five months along now, if what he’d heard was true. He’d pieced together the story from the scraps that ended up in the paper. There hadn’t been a court case. No one had been arrested. T.L. had been asked to come in a second time, and they made it sound like his decision even though he knew it wasn’t, and he brought Jack Cook, who sat at the other end of the table from the Weyants’ attorneys. All the lawyers took notes and everyone was polite to him. Weyant was nowhere in sight. When he was finished, the police officer shook his hand and told him they’d be in touch if they had any further questions.
The Missing Place Page 28
