Boy Still Missing (32 page)

Who gave your son the gun?

Has he ever shown signs of violence before?

Is your son a drug user?

When was the last time the two of you had contact?

I imagined those words dumped on him like snow from a plow, leaving him buried in a cold, white silence with his lack of answers. He didn’t have any explanation for them as to how this had happened. How could he? And I found myself wondering for the first time what he had been doing since the night I left home. Drinking? Bawling on a barstool night after night to Mac Maloney? Telling anyone who would listen that he had lost his beloved wife?

I turned my eyes away from him and spotted Marnie standing behind the yellow tape. Gazing up at the motel, hands clasped tight, praying as if this were Mecca. Joshua Fuller was out there, too, and when I saw him, I decided that the TV reporter didn’t look so much like him
after all. Joshua seemed taller, skinnier to me. I thought back to him asking Roget for a lift to Marnie’s place. And I wondered if he and Marnie had seen the news together and raced over here. Or if maybe they had simply driven by on their way to the bus station after their interview had been completed.

Look at all those police
, I imagined Joshua saying.
Stop the car
.

I pictured Marnie’s face full of alarm as she stepped on the brakes.
Oh, my goodness,
she might have said.
Oh, my God.

I wondered, too, about Joshua’s visit with Roget earlier. As cool as Roget had played it when they paced the room next door, that must have been when he realized I was hiding out in the motel. The unlocked door. Leon’s car. The messy bed. The blankets over the windows. Those clues had told him all he needed to know. And as soon as he ditched Joshua, he must have begun to gather his men, maybe he contacted Edie and waited until she arrived before surrounding the place.

All that—or something pretty close to it—had been going on while Jeanny and I were having sex. Knowing that, I probably should have regretted that I’d agreed to sleep here one more night. But I didn’t feel that way. Instead I felt grateful for the chance to be with Jeanny. No matter the cost. I pulled my eyes away from the commotion outside the window and slipped my arms around her waist. Kissed her cheek.

“How could you be kissing me when all this is going on?” she said. “I mean, shouldn’t we be doing something more?”

I sighed and let go of her, searched for a way to explain everything I felt. My life seemed to have taken on an unstoppable energy all its own. And something told me there wasn’t much else we could do right then. We had to just wait and hope that someone out there listened to me about Roget. In the meantime I wanted to be as close to Jeanny as I could. Because I knew this was it for us. But instead of telling her any of that, I simply tried to kiss her again. Just to have her a little longer. But she pushed me away so she could look out the window. “Not now, Dominick.”

I gave up after that and watched outside with her some more. We
were quiet until Jeanny pressed her finger to the glass. “There’s my mother,” she said, her voice sounding shocked and happy at the same time.

I scanned the parking lot but didn’t see her. “Where?”

“Right there,” Jeanny said. “Getting out of the Volkswagen. She’s all by herself. I wonder who’s watching my brothers.”

Jeanny’s mother was a frenzied-looking woman with a spray of stringy hair, dressed in a ratty nightgown with a winter coat slung over it. My mind filled with an image of her in bed when the phone rang, jolting her from a long, drugged sleep like a scream in the night. The police, or a TV station, waking her with bad news. Her daughter, her only daughter, who hadn’t come home in three days, was in danger. I imagined her throwing on that coat and hurrying over here. The tires of her little car slipping and sliding along the slick roads the whole way. I watched her as she left the door to her Volkswagen open and rushed toward the swarm of policemen. One of the officers lifted the yellow tape so she could duck beneath. He led her to his car and fumbled around inside for a bit before holding the radio receiver to her mouth.

When Mrs. Garvey spoke, the sound of her trembling voice seeped into the winter air and halted the buzz of activity down in the lot. “Jeanny, baby,” she said over the speaker. “Are you all right in there? Did he hurt you? Please tell me you’re okay.”

“What do you know,” Jeanny said, holding her hand to her chin, that barely noticeable scar. She bit her lip like she might cry. “She’s actually worried about me.”

Jeanny took a deep breath and put her mouth to the cracked-open window, called out, “I’m okay! Just tell the police to give him what he wants and this will all be over!”

When Jeanny leaned back, we watched her mother collapse into an officer’s burly arms crying. He helped her take a seat in the squad car, gave her something to drink. Meanwhile Roget kept busy. Talking into his radio. Ordering his men around. Acting as if his name hadn’t been called out in connection with my mother’s death once again. He walked
toward my father, and I saw the two of them talking. Figuring out what to do next, I supposed. In that moment I knew my father believed Roget over me despite all the shitty things he always said about cops. And it made the anger I felt toward both of them rattle my insides. They stepped away from each other, and my father moved toward the police car where Mrs. Garvey was sitting. He gave her a sort of nod, then took the radio from the officer.

“Dominick,” he said over the speaker, “it’s your father.” He stopped. Maybe struggling to find what he could say to me. The right words to talk me down. Make up for all he had or hadn’t done to lead me here. This was all he could come up with: “I shouldn’t have gotten so angry at you that night you left. And I’m sorry. I know you miss your mom. So do I. But come on now, son. What are you doing in there? Let’s cut this out. Come out so we can all go home.”

He made it sound like I was hiding too long in a game of hide-and-seek. Come out, come out, wherever you are. Did he honestly think we’d all have a laugh and head home? He had to be stupid to believe that. I leaned toward the window and screamed, “Do what I want! And then I will give up!”

My father looked back toward Roget as if for sympathy or advice. Then he turned toward the motel again and said, “We called your uncle the way you wanted.”

“Did you tell him to bring me my brother?” I shouted.

“It’s not that easy—” my father started to say, but I cut him off.

“Well, find a fucking way! And I’m telling you one last time: Roget was the one who got Mom pregnant! He was with her the night she died!”

With that I closed the window. No more talking. I wanted them to start doing something. Getting me what I wanted.

On the television a somber voice was saying, “We interrupt this program to bring you another special news update.” Jeanny and I walked to the set again to find Marnie on the screen. A reporter introduced her as a close friend of the Pindle family. She didn’t look weepy and worried the
way she had when I first saw her in the lot. Instead she had an eager expression, sort of the way she looked on the hospital TV when she announced bingo. For a second I almost expected her to start calling letters and numbers.
B seven. N thirty-five. O seventy-three. Who’s got the hot card today?
Then she said into the microphone, “I know that sheriff was with Terry Pindle the night she died. Dominick is an innocent, good-natured boy who has been driven to this horrible circumstance because of the lies that crooked police officer told. And someone needs to do what he’s asking and investigate him. It’s a shame Dominick had to go to these lengths for his mother’s sake. But what else was he to do when the entire police force in this town is conspiring against him?”

I wanted to kiss her face on the screen. Stupid, old annoying Marnie, who I hadn’t been nice enough to the last few years, was speaking up for me. She was the only one out there on my side. I remembered her voice the day of my mother’s service.
I want to find a way to get Roget.
Now she had found her way. And she must have realized, too, that this was our only chance.

After Marnie’s interview the newscast didn’t return to regular programming. Instead the reporter kept speaking. Only with a different tone than he had used in his first report. I went from being a kidnapper to a victim. And Roget went from being the Holedo sheriff to a suspect. Jeanny and I listened as a newswoman talked about my “tragic plight” and my attempt to avenge my mother’s death by bringing justice to a “crooked small-town police officer…” On another channel there was a discussion of a case in Texas. A woman who needed an abortion was suing because she had been refused one. The people on the news were making connections between that story and my mother’s.

Jeanny and I were caught up in all that talking, feeling like we might win at this thing, the way Steve McGarrett must feel on
Hawaii Five-O
right before he says, “Book ’em, Danno.” Justice served. Case closed. A giant wave curling toward the beach as the credits roll.

But then the TV went dead.

The lights, too.

The room was completely dark.

Neither of us said anything at first. And without all those voices on TV, a ghostly silence took hold. All we could hear was the sound of Sophie softly breathing in her case. Something about that quiet made me whisper when I spoke next. “They cut the power,” I said to Jeanny, who was a shadow next to me.

She walked to the telephone, picked up the receiver. “The phone line is dead, too.”

We stood there in the dark, letting our eyes and our minds adjust to the lack of light. Those balloons hung like apparitions around us, as if they were waiting for something more to happen now that we were surrounded by blackness. I walked to the window and peeked outside. The officers had clicked off all their red car lights. The glow was gone. Even the parking-lot light was off, too. All I could see was their silhouettes out there in the falling snow. Like those demon spots that had danced in front of my eyes when my head hit the dresser.

“They’re trying to drive us out,” Jeanny said, joining me at the window. Her breath made a misty white spot on the glass, which then disappeared. “And I’m scared now.”

“It won’t work,” I told her, trying to sound brave despite the fear creeping through me as well. “We’ll just keep waiting. That’s all.”

“But for all the talk on TV, no one’s doing anything about Roget,” she said. “He’s still out there. Why don’t they take him in for questioning?”

“I don’t know,” I told her. “But something’s got to give sooner or later.”

I could hear the storm above us now like an army of fists pounding the roof of the motel. Wind gusted and spat rain against the window. Even though the heat register was still working, the air seemed colder by the second.

“What if it’s us that gives?” Jeanny asked finally.

I didn’t answer her, because I was asking the same question myself. That
Hawaii Five-O
wave had been blown back into the ocean before it even hit the sand. Cutting the power seemed to have put them in control again, and I wasn’t sure how to handle it. Jeanny and I stood side by side watching the
nothingness out the window, until she said, “As much as I hate that gun, you could fire another shot. Tell them you want the power back on.”

Something told me to hold off on that. We could get by without electricity for the time being. And I didn’t want to keep bluffing with the pistol. Because the truth was, I didn’t have the guts to hurt anyone—even Roget. So without any other options, we just sat on those thin pillows in front of the window. Watched their shadows out there for hours.

More cars came and went.

Two of the reporters packed up and left.

A new reporter arrived a while later.

Eventually Jeanny nodded off with her head in my lap. I stroked her hair as she slept and kept my eyes wide open, peering down at her face, then outside. In a perfect world, or at least in a fairy tale, something would have happened to save the day right about then. A fairy godmother would have swooped down and waved her wand, making Roget melt into a puddle in the parking lot. My brother would have descended from a cloud, smiling at me. And this whole sordid ordeal would have come to a neat little end. But that wasn’t my life.

Instead I waited all night by that window, as the snow turned to rain again. Then finally stopped. Oddly enough, Sophie didn’t wake up, crying to be fed or changed. She lay so still in the comfort of her case that I practically forgot she was there. I rested my head on the windowsill, and in spite of all that was happening or not happening, the darkness and quiet lulled me to sleep, too.

When I opened my eyes, a thin strip of sunlight streamed in through the opening in the curtains. Heat, bone-dry and dusty, gusted up through the register, making a relentless scratching sound like a determined animal beneath us clawing its way into the room. Those balloons had lost even more helium during the night, and they floated a few feet away from the ceiling, their ribbons coiling on the floor. Flags slowly being lowered to half-mast. My body felt stiff and crumpled, like one of those blue tissues in Marnie’s pockets. All used up but still being used.

I rubbed my eyes and looked down into the lot.

And I couldn’t believe what I saw.

Twice, no, three times as many people out there as the night before. Only not just police and reporters. There was a group of women. Maybe twenty of them to one side, all carrying picket signs:
WOMEN DIE WHEN THEY CAN’T CHOOSE. LEGALIZE ABORTION ON DEMAND. WHO WILL BE THE NEXT THERESA PINDLE
? They stood behind that yellow tape, their faces determined and angry. I saw a girl even younger than Jeanny. A woman too old and gray to be out in the cold. The bulk of them had to be about my mother’s and Marnie’s age. They marched in a circle like witches casting a spell, trampling the white snow beneath their feet. Round and round. Round and round.