Those That Wake (3 page)

She got his leash and put on sneakers and let him lead her, racing, out of the house and onto the road.

She called her parents again while she was being tugged along, and though the phone was clearly on, because it rang several times before the message this time, she still got no answer. Amid the shadowed trees, the familiar houses snug behind their neat lawns were a hallmark of the quiet affluence and security of her life. She passed them by unnoticed as she checked her own messages and found not only that her parents hadn't replied to her text, but that there were no messages from Rachel or Cheryl, either, who both knew she'd had the interview this morning, though they at least had the excuse of being in school today. Laura had taken the day off as one of her allotted college days, with the assumption that it would be noticed by her interviewer as a sign of her commitment. So Rachel and Cheryl would be at the end of pre-calc now. She could voice-text them, or wait the ten minutes until lunch and call them. But she felt hollow at the idea of talking to them before talking to her parents about this. For all their double-checking, their last-second notes, their wholesale and often frustrating investment in practically every step she took, wasn't this exactly what parents were for? She didn't need them to tell her how to do everything right; she just wanted them there when things went particularly wrong. Which, as she recalled, was where they had always been until now.

Back at home, she took a real shower, dressed in a tight light-blue T-shirt and her jeans skirt, and put her black hair in a ponytail, tugging her father's old Mets cap around it. She sat at her dad's desk and unfolded the cell screen to its largest size. She enlarged the touchpad and spent the next hour web-numbing her brain.

By the time she was bleary-eyed and bored, her parents hadn't called back in three hours, and it was surely enough to worry a person. Given that her mother still told her to put her seat belt on every time she got into the car, was it any wonder that dreadful thoughts would spring to Laura's mind? Not that the other explanations were so wonderful, either: that they had forgotten her interview was today (not possible, given how long she had been blathering on about it) or that they didn't care (not possible, given how long
they
had been blathering on about it).

What the hell was it about New York, anyway? After all the crap that had been heaped on that place, why would two people want to spend a vacation there?

"Screw this," she said out loud.

She turned music up louder than ever would have been permitted in a parentally supervised house, cleared her mind of this useless nonsense, and got down to work.

Just because the internship she'd been planning on—had, in fact, assumed she'd be getting, given her much-vaunted credentials—had fallen through didn't mean there weren't a thousand others waiting for her elsewhere. She started looking and found that, in not having bothered to look around, she had missed others that interested her just as much. Two of them were even through the Medical Center, where she already knew people who would, she assumed again, be happy to help her out.

Her eyes wandered to the message indicator.

Still no call.

She put the music back on louder still, too loud for Mookie, anyway, who darted out of the house through his dog door and started rooting in the yard. She retreated to the laundry room and ironed what was waiting in the dryer while the next load was going, then ironed the new stuff. She folded it and brought it to its proper places and had the knob of one of her dresser drawers crack off in her hand as she slid it open. Like the mug, it was done, but unlike the mug, it could be replaced.

Still no call.

With a high-pitched shriek of frustration, she gave in, snatched up her cell, and keyed her parents. Expecting to be frustrated once again, and not sure whether to present herself as happy or furious if she did get a response, she was immediately surprised to have the screen brighten with her mother's face after one ring.

"Hello?" Claire Westlake said, looking quizzically at the screen.

"Mom!"

"I'm sorry?" her mother said. She was focused right on the screen, and Laura could see the generic décor of a hotel room behind her, so the cell was clearly working properly.

"Mom, it's me." She took off the Mets cap; though, if anything, the hat should have made her
more
recognizable.

"I'm sorry," her mother said. "Who's 'me'?"

This whole day of not calling and refusing to answer in service of some half-assed joke? That was not like her mother, and it was definitely not like her father.

"Mom, what are you doing?"

"I'm sorry, young lady, but I don't know you. Have you"—her mother stumbled, obviously troubled by this exchange herself—"have you checked the number you're dialing?"

"What's wrong, Claire?" her father's voice came from off the screen, and her mother shook her head without looking away.

"Mom," Laura said again, because, really, what else was there to say? "It's
me.
Laura."

"I'm sorry, Laura," her mother said. "You seem to have the wrong number."

"I..."Laura's voice trailed away, her mind suddenly stupid and her fingers numb.

"Try again," said her mother, not unkindly. "I'm sure you'll get who you're looking for." She looked at the screen quizzically for one more moment, then keyed off, leaving behind a scrolling ad for reduced train fares to New York.

Laura stood immobile in the middle of the living room, her body stiff and her eyes dizzy. Dazed, she looked down at the empty screen.

"Mom?"

MAL'S EYE WAS PURPLE
and yellow. It didn't hurt as much as his knuckles, which always stung fiercely the day after a fight; nor as much as the back of his torso, where he'd taken a kidney punch; nor his wrist, which had hyperextended in a clumsy block. Nevertheless, it was the eye that Sharon noticed.

"What do your new parents say about that?" she asked, and maybe her voice was smug, or maybe that was how she always sounded. Mal couldn't remember. "I'm sure they love it, knowing you're coming into their home with other people's blood on your knuckles."

"They get me an ice pack," he said, "and ask me if I'm okay." A lie. He had gotten out of the house before the Fosters had even seen him.

Sharon was a tired woman, washed out and wasting away, scrubbed at by a rough and bristled life. It was the same thing Mal thought he saw in the mirror; something strong in his face worn away, the defining and striking sharp edges dulled until strength had become sorrow and a gleam in his eyes had become a dull flatness.

"And do they care that you aren't in school?"

"If they do, that's their business now. Not yours. I'm here to talk about Tommy. Or are you finished with him, too?"

Her jaw hardened. She bit something back, then nearly spat out her next words.

"I told you already, I haven't actually
seen
him in months." As she sat on the edge of her couch, her face wasn't softening, but her fingers wouldn't stay still, searching for a smoke, or something more powerful. "Tommy always talked a good game and dropped the ball as soon as things got hard. He barely graduated, then he couldn't find work." She snorted. "I hounded him about it, but what the hell good did that ever do? He'd make a halfhearted try, then never follow up. George arranged an interview for him; more than one. Tommy didn't even bother showing up for the last one. George yelled at him, said it made him look bad; said Tommy had to pull his weight if he wanted to stay. Tommy said he'd pull his weight." She laughed, her eyes looking inward. "Pull his weight right out of George's house. And he did. Only solid decision he ever managed to stick to."

Mal nodded. He had never been to this apartment, tiny and crowded with the objects of a life he had nothing to do with anymore. No light found its way in here, through the grimy windows. A bulky shadow loomed outside, cutting off the sun. He had not been in the same room with his mother more than three times since his father had marched out, pulling Mal behind him. But his mother still had the same harshness in her look, a look of perpetual accusation.

"So he got a job, found a place," Mal supposed out loud.

"I guess so," Sharon said. She didn't sound convinced.

"You don't know what he was doing, nothing like that?"

"Christ, Mal, at least I had his address. When's the last time you saw him?"

"I didn't mean it like that." He
had
meant it like that. "What about his friends? Do you know any of them?"

"Well, sure, there's Danny and Miles and Tony. Oh, you mean their
last
names, don't you? So we could, like, look them up and ask them about all this?" Her unpleasant sarcasm was also something he remembered well about her. "You're not the only one with a brain in your head, Mal. I never spent much time with his friends. I doubt I'd have been welcome to if I'd wanted to."

Mal nodded. She was steamed, and he was only making it worse, which was their classic dynamic playing out beautifully to form. He saw it among guys at the gym again and again. Some climbed into the ring just because it meant a couple of bucks or some recognition or a chance to punch an anonymous face. Other fighters had it in for each other specifically, and it had nothing to do with a shared history. It was purely chemical. Mal and his mother had a history
and
they had that chemistry. They suffered through it, at each other's throats for the first eleven years of his life, when Sharon was sober enough to pitch a fight and wasn't bothering to have one with Mal's father.

"How about a girlfriend?" It was all he had left. "A blond girl, real pretty." Sharon was shaking her head.

Mal's eyes wandered around, and finally he nodded and stood up.

"Okay," he said, instead of offering anything reassuring or hopeful. What did he owe her, exactly?

"So, what, are you going to go back to his place?"

"I guess I am. Maybe he'll show up."

She led him to the door but stopped in front of it and held her place.

"I think we should call the police," she said.

What he thought about the police, generally, was that you shouldn't call them. But Tommy was actually
gone.
Not missing like he went for an unexpected walk, but missing like he had called for help and there were people after him. At least that would explain why Tommy was blocking locator apps when he made his call to Mal.

"Okay."

She looked up at him, letting her guard down just long enough to show him she was frightened, then shut it away again. What did she do about her fear these days? Did she still go on week-long benders, or had George cured her of that? And why should Mal care, really?

He blew off school for the rest of the day. Would anyone realize he wasn't there? He wasn't good enough or bad enough for teachers to care one way or the other. There were people who knew him, of course, but no one who particularly sought him out, unless it was for a fight, because he had a certain reputation in some circles. He didn't make a habit of ditching, but he did it when he needed to. Sometimes they called his foster parents, sometimes they didn't. What would the Fosters say if they did? He had no idea. They were nothing but a pair of faces to him at this point.

He sat in Tommy's apartment again. The place was nothing new in the daylight, though the hall outside was noisier. Music played too loud through one of the doors, and two different sets of people yelled at each other in two different languages from behind two other doors. Smells of spicy food filled the hall and seeped into Tommy's place.

He poked around, embarrassed when he found some condoms and surprised when he came upon a sketchpad filled with rough pencil drawings of things and people. The sketches made something funny happen in Mal's chest. At first they made him feel as if he were seeing something about who Tommy was, but as he flipped through them he started to feel as though he was searching through a stranger's life. He left the rest of the apartment alone and just waited. Pacing, he kept finding himself in front of the picture of Tommy and the girl at the beach. Important enough for Tommy to take a hard image off his cell and put on display. Was Tommy the sentimental sort, or had the girl in the picture made this choice? Was she the reason Tommy had stayed out of George's house without crawling back, had managed to keep an apartment of his own for months? Mal looked at the photo intermittently for minutes until he finally convinced himself he might need it to show their faces around. He removed it from its frame and slipped it into his back pocket.

He played the last half hour of a movie about an alligator terrorizing a city, beaming it from his cell onto a cracking wall, and was into the last rounds of the week's
Blood Match X-Treme
finals when he started to wonder if he was going to be here forever. When he'd decided to wait, he figured it could be for as much as two or three days, but now, just two or three hours started to seem interminable. He abandoned the ball game and went to the window. Outside, the world looked gray. He felt as if he remembered a time, as a child, when there was a sun and people looked up at it instead of down, embroiled in a conversation on cell, or into the palms of their hands, surfing as they walked, their minds on anything but the gray world around them.

And there was a knock at the door.

He limped hard to the door, adjusting to the stiffness that had set into his injured body as he'd been sitting there. He hesitated, remembered looking through the peephole last night and seeing those four faces staring weirdly back, right at him. Cautiously, he checked the peephole again and saw a young face framed by blond hair. It had five thin silver rings in the left ear and a tiny silver stud in the left nostril. It looked worried, and sweeter because of it.

The door had no functioning lock left. Mal wouldn't have been able to get in if it had. It was pure luck—or something harder to explain—that the place hadn't been cleaned out last night after he'd gone. He pulled the door open, and the girl looked happy, then surprised when she ended up looking into a chest instead of the face she was expecting to see. She followed the chest up and seemed to relax once she got to the head.