The Missing Place (6 page)

In the convenience store, amid aisles of snack foods and coolers full of soft drinks, Colleen found rubber flip-flops and a package of hair elastics, and joined Shay in line.

“Don't buy those, I've got plenty,” Shay said, eyeing the elastics.

“Oh. Well. I kind of need one now, to put my hair up.”

“You're not going to wash it?”

“Um . . . maybe not.” Colleen washed her hair only every few days; it was part of a regimen recommended by her colorist to preserve her color, rinsing only with cool water and using sulfate-free products.

“Well, here, then, you can have mine.” Shay twisted her own ponytail out of its band and handed it over. A few long curly strands were knotted to it.

“Thank you,” Colleen said, looping it over a finger, trying not to show her distaste.

“It's probably going to be half an hour before our names come up. We might as well get some coffee.”

“You mean for the shower?”

“Yeah, lot of these guys are living in their cars. They come in here to clean up after work.”

“
After
work?”

“Yeah, night shift gets off at seven. So they get back to town and come here for a shower and a meal, then go crash.”

“But they can't sleep in their cars—not in weather like this!”

Shay laughed. “I'm not saying I'd want to do it,” she said, as they neared the head of the line. “But I would have if I had to, if Brenda hadn't come through. I talked to this one guy, he wasn't hardly older than Taylor. He's been in his car all week, got a job his first day up here but there was a delay on his room in the camp. Says he turns the car on three times a night and runs the heater to warm up and goes back to sleep. 'Course if it was me, I'd be having to pee every time I woke up. I'd probably pee in a Big Gulp cup rather than open the car door and let all that cold air in. Yeah, two showers,” she added, to the harried-looking clerk.

“I'll get those,” Colleen said primly, laying the flip-flops on the counter along with her credit card.

“You don't have to,” Shay said, a slight edge to her voice. “I have money.”

“Oh, I didn't—I mean, I'm happy to,” Colleen stuttered, as the clerk waited. She gave the credit card a little push, willing the clerk
to pick it up. After a painful moment, she did. “We can settle up later,” Colleen said quietly.

Shay muttered something unintelligible, turning away. Colleen signed the slip quickly and followed her to the restaurant, where a waitress thrust laminated menus at them.

“Anywhere you can find, dolls,” she said as she moved down the counter, refilling coffee cups. “I'll send Petey out to bus soon's I get a minute.”

Every table in the place was occupied, but two men were in the process of leaving. Colleen inhaled deeply: coffee, bacon, a not-unpleasant note of burned potatoes. And aftershave—a masculine smell she associated with her father. Paul took after Andy, the pair of them insisting she buy only unscented soap and deodorant and shaving cream, and the shock of the forgotten scent kept her rooted to the spot for a moment, her father's memory startlingly present.

Martin Hockemeyer would have been at home here, a thought that made Colleen wistful. She had never been particularly close to her father, and he had died when Paul was in grade school after their visits had diminished to once-yearly trips to Florida. Even in old age, Martin had been a man's man, puttering around their trailer park wearing a tool belt and fixing things for the widows while her mother gardened in her sunhat, beaming with thin and flinty pride.

“Move,” Shay said, digging into the small of Colleen's back with a knuckle. “Else we'll lose that table.”

But the waiting customers stepped respectfully aside. “Ma'am,” one said as they passed, touching his cap in such a perfect imitation of Martin that Colleen briefly wondered if she'd conjured him from her imagination.

The men who were leaving wore bulky earth-colored coats over jeans and enormous boots. One of them pulled on the kind of hat
that some of the kids used to wear at Paul's high school, what Colleen thought of as a Berenstain Bear hat, corduroy with a plush lining and ear flaps. At home they were a style statement, if a clumsy one. Here, she suspected they were strictly utilitarian.

“We left a mess for you girls,” the man in the hat said in a rueful drawl. He pulled a wad of napkins from the dispenser and wiped at the toast crumbs and syrup smears on the table.

“Don't worry about it,” Shay said, tossing her hair over her shoulders before plopping down in the chair and unzipping her coat. Colleen had noticed that Shay became unconsciously flirtatious around men, her voice throatier and a sashay in her walk. “Drive safe.”

Colleen slipped off her own coat and draped it over her chair. She hung her purse over the coat and, after a brief hesitation, set her laundry bag on the floor, since there was nowhere else to put it. She avoided looking at the plates stacked at the edge of the table; a brief glance at the bright yellow smear of yolk, the rinds of a pancake stack, had made her faintly nauseous.

A busboy came by with a tub and cleared everything away in a clanking flurry, followed by a sweet-faced waitress with a red ponytail and at least half a dozen earrings in each ear. She wiped the table with a rag that smelled of bleach and Windex, lifting the salt and pepper shakers to clean underneath. She pocketed the tips—one of the men had left a ten, the other a fan of ones—and dug her pad from her pocket.

“What are you having?”

“We just got on the shower list,” Shay said. “Think we have time to eat before we come up?”

The waitress looked over at the kitchen and squinted at the row of orders clipped to the warming lights. “Yeah, should be fine. They got it under control back there.”

“Okay. I'll have a western omelet, biscuit, potatoes fried well. Can you do that?”

“Sure thing. You, hon?” She looked at Colleen expectantly.

“Um—toast?”

“White, wheat, rye?”

“Wheat, please.”

“Give her a couple of scrambled eggs too,” Shay said. “You sure you don't want a biscuit? No? And potatoes, cook them like mine. You got any decent melon today?”

“Sure, got the honeydew.”

“We'll have some of that too.”

The waitress left with their order. Shay dug in her purse—really, it was more like a tote bag, a large rectangular brown canvas affair with an appliqué of pink birds—and took out a plain gray notebook. More digging produced a cheap mechanical pencil. Shay opened the notebook to a clean page and pressed it flat on the table.

A different waitress came by and turned their cups right side up, pouring steaming black coffee without asking. “I'll get your creamer in a second, or you can just fetch it,” she said, already moving on to another table.

Shay got up and grabbed a little metal jug of cream off the counter. Colleen saw how men watched her move, their eyes both hungry and glazed. Shay was wearing the same jeans she'd had on yesterday, dark denim with a loop of sparkling topstitching on each back pocket, curving over her narrow rear. Colleen felt even more self-conscious, dressed in her wool pants and silk and mohair sweater. She took a sip of the coffee, hot enough to scald. She blew on the cup and took another, longer sip. It tasted so good she thought she might cry.

“Just black?” Shay asked, pouring a long stream of cream into her coffee until it was pale as caramel. “Okay, let's talk about money. I don't mind keeping track. We can split it all down the middle, the shared stuff. You got the showers, they're twelve dollars—I know, they jack you—and I can get breakfast, but I got to be honest, I'm getting to the bottom of my cash so if you could chip in for your half of the trailer that would be . . . let's see, it was Tuesday to Tuesday, you got here . . .”

Colleen watched uncomfortably as Shay wrote a neat column of numbers, her pencil flying over the numerals. “Four days out of seven, at three hundred, that's eighty-five dollars and change if we split it. I don't mind covering the deposit.”

“Shay . . .” Colleen said. “I don't—this is—let me just get it all. I brought a lot of cash.”

Shay was already shaking her head before Colleen finished speaking. When she frowned, the brackets around her mouth and the fine lines along her top lip made her look older. “Let's just keep it square, okay?”

“I just want to find my son. Our sons. I don't—”

Shay slammed her hand down flat on the table, making the coffee cups jump. Some spilled over the edge of Colleen's, sloshing onto the table.

“Don't you think that's what I want?” Shay demanded. Her eyes shone with tears, but she brushed them angrily away with the cuff of her sweater. “Don't you think that's what I'm thinking every second of the day? There's so much of him in my head, I just have to—I have to—”

She looked down at her numbers, carefully closed the loop of an 8, drew two lines below the total. “I have to keep my brain moving. Okay? If I don't—oh, God, I don't know. I just do things, keep busy.
That way everything, Taylor and all those little moments when I'm so terrified I want to scream, they just kind of stay aboveground a little. I do this”—she tapped the paper with the point of her pencil—“and it helps for a minute. So humor me here. Let me do my math.”

She picked up her own mug with two hands and drank deeply, the heat of the coffee evidently not bothering her.

“I understand,” Colleen said, though she didn't, not really. But if the numbers on the pad helped Shay, she wasn't about to argue.

The first waitress was back with their food. “Careful, it's hot,” she said. “Ketchup? Hot sauce?”

“Hot sauce for sure. You got any strawberry jam?” Shay asked. “Col, you want anything?”

Colleen shook her head. No one but Andy had called her Col since college, but she found that she didn't mind.

“Eat,” Shay said, salting her potatoes. Colleen's stomach rumbled. Hunger felt like a betrayal. She picked up her fork and poked at her scrambled eggs, pushing a thin string of egg white out of view under the toast. She took an experimental bite of potato. It was good, salty and hot and crispy, the sort of thing Colleen never ordered. Breakfast, when she had anything at all, was usually a protein bar or oatmeal, but she preferred to wait as long as she could before eating. She had lost thirty pounds on Weight Watchers three—or was it four?—years ago, but all but five were back, and she had been vaguely planning to try again to lose it this spring.

She took another bite.

“You wanted to go to the police station this morning, right?” Shay asked. “They open at nine. We can go straight from here.”

“I just thought an in-person visit might, uh, underscore . . .”

“Yes. Definitely. We want to be a burr on their ass. Then I want to go back to Black Creek. When I was there the other day I couldn't
get anywhere with the desk girls. Dumb as stumps. The manager's supposed to be there today, and we can get the boys' things. You got your ID, right?”

“Shower for Capp . . . Capp . . .” a female voice came on the intercom.

“Capparelli,” Shay said. “It's not that hard! Listen, you go ahead and take the first shower if you want. Finish eating, though, let them wait a few minutes, they won't give it away.”

Colleen crammed down the eggs and a single triangle of toast. She took her things and headed back to the counter, where the clerk pointed down the hall. “Number four.”

Inside was much better than she had expected. It was like a hotel bathroom, except that every surface but the ceiling was tiled. On the floor, one corner dampened and stuck to the tile, was a rectangle of paper labeled
BATH MAT
in blue lettering. A blue plastic trash can with a fresh liner was the only other industrial touch. A long counter held a folded towel with a paper-wrapped bar of soap on top.

Colleen took a deep breath and looked at herself in the mirror. The past few days had taken a toll on her. The bulb in the motor home bathroom had been blessedly dim, so she'd been able to pretend the dark circles and sunken flesh were the result of bad lighting. Here, under the bright fluorescents, every wrinkle and pore was on display. The whites of her eyes were bloodshot, the lids puffy, the lines at the corners like her mother's before she died. Her skin looked like it had been carved from wax, yellowish and sagging. Her lips had no color, disappearing into her face like an old woman's.

Was this what grief looked like? Colleen reached out and touched her image with her fingers, leaving a smudge. She took the washcloth Shay had given her and wiped the glass. She was a wiper
of smudges. A cleaner of countertops. A vacuumer of crumbs. Only . . . it was Paul's fingerprints, his jam smears, the remains of his pizza crusts to which she had devoted herself for so long. Since the day he left for Syracuse a year and a half ago, his absence had withered her, scouring out what was left inside and draining any traces of youth that remained on the outside. She'd been fifty when he graduated from high school, Zumba-fit and pampered, the envy of her friends, the recipient—still!—of the occasional drunken pass at neighborhood dinner parties. Now she was . . . this.

And if he was really gone? Forever? What then?

Colleen gasped, doubling over, elbows on the cold countertop, unable to breathe. She closed her eyes and murmured
no, no, no.
Because she didn't mean gone. She meant dead.

Dead.

She hadn't allowed herself to think the shape of the word until now. It had hovered, slinking around the edge of her consciousness, ever since the missed Sunday call. A mere shadowy wraith first, as the hours and days passed, it had become more insistent, waiting for her to slip, to forget for one second, to fall into incautious sleep. But she'd been so careful. So careful! Under her clothes her thighs and inner arms were bruised from where she pinched herself. Because that's what she did. Every time that cursed thought threatened—
dead
—she punished herself until the pain forced it to recede.