The Missing Place (45 page)

“All right. I'll come,” Colleen finally said. She pressed a hand to her forehead. She was suddenly very tired. When she hung up, maybe she'd lie down and pull the drapes over her like a blanket and take a midday nap. “All right.”

“I'll send someone out to pick you up, text me the flights. I need to go, Colleen. Just promise me you'll be there. Okay?”

“Okay,” Colleen whispered. She set the phone on the bedside table and slowly sank onto the bed. The sun slanted through the bare windows, warming her body. A breeze came through the screens. June was nice. A good season for cleaning, for clearing out the dust.

She closed her eyes.

THEY DIDN'T OFTEN
all have dinner together. Andy usually stayed late at work and picked something up downtown. Paul had a late class three days a week. And Elizabeth, until recently, had said the sight and smell of food at that time of day made her ill.

But tonight was the last night before Paul left for the memorial. Colleen texted Andy and asked him to be sure to come home. She stopped by Stazzo's and picked up mushroom béchamel lasagna, which both Paul and Andy loved and might be bland enough for Elizabeth too. She made a special trip to the bread stall for a loaf of their olive multigrain, and chose a half dozen fancy cupcakes from the bakery, with elaborate poufs of frosting with glazed fruit embedded like jewels. The salad she made herself, from a recipe that her mother-in-law had given her years before she died.

She took her time setting the table. She had opened the china cabinet, thinking she might use the Lenox that came out only at holidays and Paul's and Andy's birthday dinners, when she had an idea. She picked up one of the dinner plates and went upstairs.

“Elizabeth,” she called from halfway up the stairs. “Okay if I come up for a minute?” She could hear the television on quietly, the sound of studio laughter. It was silenced abruptly.

Elizabeth was sitting on the couch, knitting. She hastily set the yarn and needles down and pushed a couch cushion on top of it. She was struggling to get up, but her bulk—her stomach was perfectly
round, the rest of her thin frame barely puffy—made the task difficult.

“Don't get up,” Colleen said, surprised by the knitting. What had she imagined the girl was doing up here, between her twice-daily walks and endless texting?

She sat down gingerly on the sofa. Between them the knitting peeked out from under the couch cushion: a beautiful shade of periwinkle blue. Because it's a boy, Colleen thought automatically, but then pushed away her resentment with a heroic effort. “I didn't know you knew how to knit.”

“Oh. I . . . my mom taught me and my sisters. I mean, I'm not very good.”

“Will you let me see?”

“It's just . . .” Elizabeth reached out to touch the edge, a two-by-two ribbing. Maybe the band at the bottom of a baby cardigan. “It was supposed to be a surprise.”

To Colleen's mortification, she sniffled in a way that didn't disguise the fact that she was about to cry. Colleen jumped off the sofa and got the tissue box from the table and set it in front of Elizabeth.

“About that,” she said. “I'll admit I was kind of, um, taken aback that Shay knew that the baby is a boy before I did. But really, it's up to you kids to share that when you want to and with whomever you want to.” Had the girl told her mother? Did everyone know but her?

“No, that's not what I meant. But just so you know, I didn't want Paul to tell her, I was kind of mad at him for that. I thought . . . we were going to have a dinner. Paul and me. It was my idea. I wanted to cook for you. Like a thank-you? For letting us stay here and everything? And we were going to tell you then. And I was going to . . .” She reached out and shoved the knitting all the way under the cushion. “I was making this for you, for a present.”

It took Colleen a second to understand. The knitting. It wasn't for a baby. And that beautiful blue, the color of a scarf Elizabeth had once complimented her on . . . hadn't she told the girl it was her favorite color?

“Oh,” she breathed. “Honey.”

“It's just when Shay texted Paul, you know, after they found him, Taylor—well, I think he wanted to give her something to hold on to. I mean we'd already talked about naming the baby after him. But that—once Shay told him, it was like, yes, that's what we're going to do. Both of us, we thought it was right. And so he told her.”

They'll be out of your house in a year one way or another
, Shay had said, trying to hurt her, and succeeding more than she could know.

She had tried so hard to keep them close. But what she had lost. Oh, what she had lost.

Colleen felt a tiny loosening inside, a relaxing of a pain she had been holding on to so hard it was practically pulling her apart from within.

“Paul,” she started, and then had to stop and collect herself. Elizabeth was dabbing at her eyes with a tissue, and she reached for one herself and cleared her throat. “Paul is
good.
On the inside. He always has been. He's made mistakes . . .”

Darren Terry, in the locker room. So many ruined playdates, the incidents at school. The middle school suspension, the screaming matches between Paul and Andy after every semester's report card. The hurled words and curses.

The broken dishes on the floor. Paul on his knees, looking up at her like it would never, ever be all right again between them, and then returning to the task, his fingers cut and bleeding as he swept up the shards.

“We all make mistakes,” Elizabeth said. “I did something so
bad . . .” She squeezed her eyes together as if trying to shut out the thought itself.

Tentatively, Colleen reached for her hand. It was small and cool, the fingernails cut short and bare. She folded it in both of hers. “I know this is hard to believe now,” she said, “but after a while, that's not going to hurt quite so bad. You'll get more experience and you'll learn that everyone does stupid things when they've run out of ideas. You'll start to forgive yourself. I promise.”

Was it a lie? Colleen wasn't sure she would ever be able to forgive herself for all her wrong turns with Paul, for every time she looked at her little boy and found him wanting, every day that she spent trying to bend and shape him into something he wasn't.

But this wasn't about her right now. Couldn't be.

She squeezed Elizabeth's hand a little harder. “You love my son. Don't you?”

Elizabeth blinked, her watery blue eyes finding Colleen's, her lips parted in surprise. “Of
course
I do, Mrs. Mitchell.”

“Well, then.” How could she make Elizabeth see that that was enough, that for that gift Colleen would never, ever betray her? So far, she hadn't found the right way to show the girl. Hadn't even begun to understand her, much less befriend her. All those hours, up here, she must have been so lonely.

An idea came to her.

“Honey, would you like to invite your mom out for a visit? Or a few of your friends? Get some time with them before the baby comes?”

“Oh, I . . . I'm not even sure my mom would come.”

“Whyever not?”

“She's not exactly . . . she's kind of mad at me.” Elizabeth's voice had gotten very small. “I made her one of . . . the thing I'm making
you. Hers is pink. I had Paul mail it last week but I haven't heard anything.”

“But you've been talking to her, haven't you? On the phone?”

“No, not really. She'll get on the phone for a few minutes after I talk to Daddy, sometimes. And sometimes I'm pretty sure she's there but she makes Daddy tell me she isn't. She's—I don't know. Because I did the same thing she did, you know, getting pregnant by accident, when I was too young. And she feels like Grace and Brookie will see me and, I don't know, like somehow that will corrupt them or something. It's . . .”

She couldn't seem to find the word she wanted. “Well.” Colleen sighed. “That will change too, I'm pretty sure. Once she sees her grandson.”

Elizabeth hung her head. “I hope so.”

Colleen picked up the plate. She had chosen the pattern with her own mother, ivory bone china with a delicate tracing of white and gold around the edge.
Timeless
, her mother had said.
You'll never get tired of it.

It was so funny, the things women pretend are important, generation after generation, standing among the glittering displays of tableware, outside jewelry stores looking at the diamond rings, stroking the lace of a dress suspended from a silk hanger. If Colleen had had a daughter, would she have done the same? Probably. She would have stood by, feverishly spinning a web of sterling iced tea spoons and eternity bands and satin pumps and organza veils, praying it would be enough. And having so little to offer when it wasn't.

“This is my wedding china,” she said, showing the plate to Elizabeth. “It's yours, if you and Paul want it. But more important, I was wondering if you might be willing to come downstairs and keep me company while I set the table? I'm frankly bored out of my mind
down there. And I'm sick of all this sad stuff. Let's just pretend for one afternoon that none of it happened, okay? I'll fix you a virgin daiquiri.” She smiled. “With an umbrella. I think I still have a few of those left over from last summer. How does that sound?”

The girl gave her a tentative smile, wiping her eyes. “I'd love to.”

THIS WEEK WAS
for the poor kids, the ones recruited to boost the university's diversity statistics. They didn't call them “poor” or “disadvantaged”—in fact they didn't call them anything at all, something T.L. had noticed during orientation. Everything was left vague. Even the program's name didn't really mean anything—Special Transitional Enrichment Track, so when a term was needed they were just the “STET kids.”

The faculty in charge of the program kept emphasizing that the friendships T.L. and the others made this week, before returning to their shitty lives for the rest of the summer until they came back for real in August, would last them throughout their years at college, and beyond.
Beyond
, into the futures the adults kept describing as limitless, spectacular, larger than not only the lives they'd led so far but also larger than their own imaginations.

But look at them
, T.L. thought, from his seat at the back of the classroom. Balding and paunchy men, women with loose flesh in their upper arms and ugly shoes. Had this been their dream, to usher the underperforming and unremarkable into the hallowed halls of UCLA? Was this the limitless future they'd imagined for themselves, a degree from a respectable school and a cinder-block office with a mini-fridge and a view of the quad? Half the STET kids wouldn't graduate, and the university didn't care, as long as they stuck around long enough to make their numbers.

T.L. had arrived at LAX on his first plane trip and a wave of uncertainty, unsure how deep his debt to Myron went. He supposed he owed his uncle the whole four years, the degree, a job with a 401k. In the suitcase borrowed from Wally Stommar, he'd packed one pair of shorts from Abercrombie & Fitch, bought in Minot last week, and a half dozen T-shirts culled with care from the stack in his dresser. Boxer shorts from the Gap and a new bottle of Axe. New flip-flops, the very same ones he'd seen the kids in Lawton wear, that summer he'd spent with Elizabeth.

Elizabeth
. Andy Mitchell had promised that if T.L. ever needed anything, all he had to do was ask. But what T.L. needed from the Mitchells was only for them to keep her, to enfold her into their remote and unknowable world, with his failed first love sloughing from her like a snakeskin. The baby would take her the rest of the way, and then finally his home would be
his
again, all of western North Dakota and its brilliant stars and rustling grasses and birds and sky and mice and foxes. The reservation and the lake, the highways and summer storms and snowdrifts, the mud in his boot soles and the grit in his eyes on windy days.

In L.A. everything was shining and temperate. There was no humidity, no mosquitos. T.L. was offered weed, a place to stay if he was ever in East St. Louis, a harmonica, dried mangoes, a hand-knotted bracelet made of colorful threads, a blow job, an invitation to prayer. He went to one study skills refresher class and skipped the rest. He went to a subtitled Turkish film and, before he could figure out the plot, a girl from the Sierra foothills—T.L. had not known California had inland mountains—put her hand in his pocket.

The night before he was to fly home, he and that same girl went up on the roof of the dorm. She brought a huge plastic tumbler of homemade sangria. Bits of orange rind floated among the ice cubes.
The girl's lips were spicy and cold, but they quickly warmed. She had a tiny silver stud in her cheek, and T.L.'s fingertips brushed against it as they kissed.

The sky in L.A. was chalky and diluted at night. But not far away, past the buildings and the hills and the highway, was the ocean, which T.L. had seen for the first time three days ago. He licked the salt from his fingers and watched the Ferris wheel spin above the Santa Monica pier. The sand under his feet didn't belong to anyone. The kelp and broken shells, the shrieking of children and the smell of fried food, these were all his if he wanted them. He could stay here. He could stay.

SHAY WAS ALONE
in the bride's room of the church.

A thousand years ago, she had waited in here with her mother and three of her friends all fussing over her dress. It had had puff sleeves you could hide a loaf of bread in and sequins embroidered over every inch of the bodice. Her aunt was outside in the church trying to console Brittany, who was supposed to be a flower girl but had thrown such a huge fit over the basket of petals that they decided to skip her part.