The Moon Pool (25 page)

Colleen shoved her way through the crowd, not caring who she ran into. She grabbed Shay's arm and pulled her away from the man.

“Hey!” he said, looking more startled than angry.

“Oh, hi,” Shay said, her smile crumpling. “Scott ever show? Is he here now?”

“
No
, he never came.” Colleen realized she had yelled it. Too late, it occurred to her that she didn't know why she was angry, exactly. “I want to go.”

Shay raised her eyebrows and put a hand on her friend's shoulder. “This is McCall. That's his first name. That's kind of cool, isn't it? What did you say your last name is?”

“Whittaker.” He was looking at Colleen like a boy who's dropped his ice cream cone down the storm drain. He and Shay both had that look, in fact, of having something taken away from them.

“Yeah, that's right. McCall Whittaker. He's from South Bend, Indiana.”

“I don't—I don't
care
where he's from.” The wine had rushed to Colleen's head all of a sudden, and she felt overheated and dizzy. “I'm sorry. I didn't mean it like that. But Shay... we have that, ah, meeting tomorrow, that I asked you to prepare for...”

“She's my boss,” Shay said. “She's right. I have a shit ton to do before tomorrow. But it was nice to meet you.”

Colleen turned and started wading back toward the entrance, which was all the way at the other end. There were no men in suits here. She wondered if Scott had ever intended to meet her at all, if he was just toying with her. If, somehow, he had divined her true purpose, read the madness on her face that was the sole domain of the desperate mother.

She kept going until she was standing outside. Her breath made clouds in the air. The parking lot was nearly full. What day of the week was it? Colleen had to think for a moment before determining it was still Sunday. But it almost didn't matter. These men, here on twenty-day hitches, she bet they lost track of the days too, since they had no days off, no weekends. Instead of counting Monday through Thursday, they probably had a week that began day one and ended when they got on the plane. A twenty-day week, so that maybe day seventeen was like Thursday night, when freedom is so close you can almost taste it.

Shay was taking her time. Colleen stamped her feet on the ground and waited, trying to control her impatience. She was doing everything she could think of, and it wasn't enough.

COLLEEN DIDN
'
T STOP
to think about about how much Shay had had to drink until she destroyed Brenda's front yard.

When they got back to the motor home, there was a new padlock on the door, and half a dozen white plastic garbage bags were stacked on top of their suitcases in a pile on the driveway. Snow had drifted onto the bags, giving them an eerie, sculptural effect. A piece of paper had been taped to the door above the padlock. The lettering had run a little. It read
FOUND YOUR
POT
I WILL NOT HAVE
DRUGGIES
IN MY HOME YOU ARE
EVICTED.

They'd both gotten out of the car, and when they were done reading the note, neither of them said anything for a moment.

“That
cunt
!” Shay said, and kicked the door, making a small dent in the metal. She turned to Colleen. “She can't go through our stuff! I can't believe she went in there. She had to have been waiting, watching through her little windows, spying on us to see when we left. Goddamn it. She can't kick us out like this.”

Colleen remembered the smell from the first night, the faint skunky odor. She bit down her impatience; it wouldn't help anyone. “Let me talk to her.”

“And say what? She doesn't want us here. It's clear. She knows she can get more money is the only reason she's doing this.”

“And I can
pay
her more! Come on, Shay,
think
for a minute. We lose this place, we have nothing.” Colleen took a deep breath. Now she had to tell her about the room Andy had found, and it felt like she was giving up the only card she held. Because she couldn't let Andy come now, not if it meant Shay would be without a place to live. “Look, I should have told you earlier. Andy found us a room starting Wednesday. That means we just have to make this work for three more days and we can move into a hotel.”

Shay stared at her. “You weren't going to
tell
me that? What were you planning to do, just move out? Were you even going to leave a note?”

“Shay, listen, I hadn't decided what to do. Andy said he might want to come, I told him I might still want to room with you, if—if we were getting somewhere with the search—”

If we were still speaking to each other
, she didn't say. If she learned to live with the faint accusation in Shay's eyes every time she looked at her. If she could convince Shay—because that's what she had hoped to do, though the understanding didn't come to her until just that moment—that her son was
good
, that he was worthy of Taylor's friendship, of membership in this club that he had chosen for himself, defying her and Andy. That his bid for a life of his own hadn't been a failure.

She'd needed time to make Shay see that. But how? What difference would a few more days make?

“I don't need you,” Shay muttered, backing away. She stalked to the front door of the house, cutting across the frozen lawn. She didn't bother with the bell, just started pounding with her fist.

“She's not home!” Colleen ran to catch up. “There're no lights on and her car is gone. Shay, she's at work.”

“Then I'm going there.”

“Shay, stop! We can't make trouble with her. We can't get the cops involved in this or they'll be even less likely to help us. If you don't want me to try to talk to her, we need to put our energy into finding somewhere else to stay.”

Shay didn't respond. She walked over to the Explorer, opened the tailgate, and started tossing the garbage bags in, not bothering to brush off the snow first. Colleen helped; she could hear things rattling in the bags. The suitcases were empty; Shay threw them in last. Then she slammed the hatch and went around to the driver's side. “You coming?”

Colleen had barely gotten in the car when Shay revved the engine twice and drove onto the lawn. While Colleen scrambled to get the door shut and her seat belt on, Shay drove to the other side of the lawn and then backed up. The tires spun on the icy grass and the engine whined. Lights went on over the neighbor's porch, but no one came outside.

“Shay, stop it! Come on, you're just making it worse!”

“How could it be worse?” Shay drove over the garden bed, the car lurching as it went over the little decorative fence. She plowed through the bushes, backed up and drove over them again. The branches brushed and scratched against the side of the Explorer, but she kept going until she'd managed to flatten them all.

Colleen said nothing, sitting rigid, braced with her hands on the dashboard. Finally Shay finished with the lawn. Deep gouges had kicked up frozen clumps of grass and dirt. She turned the wheel and Colleen saw it coming, closed her eyes before Shay drove into the mailbox. When she backed up, the thing was leaning nearly to the ground, the pole bent and the concrete pad clinging to the base.

Shay drove around it and out into the street. She stayed to the speed limit as they headed for town.

“I can't believe you did that.”

“I can't believe you wanted to just pay her off! Is that how you solve every problem in your life? Never mind. I guess I already know the answer to that.”

Colleen waited just a beat and then she couldn't help herself. “What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

“That means that instead of being a
mom
to your son, you were so worried about what people would think that you bought his way into everything so you wouldn't have to deal with it! Even in Fairhaven we got a few mothers like you. The other kids don't like their kids, they go out and buy Happy Meals for the whole class. Have parties at the jumping gym and spend more on the goodie bags than I ever spent on Taylor's whole birthday! How much did you have to pay to get him into college? Huh? How much to keep the admissions people from knowing he nearly killed another kid?”

“
Stop it!
” Colleen screamed. “Stop it, oh, God, let me out! Let me out!” She reached for the door, unsnapping her seat belt. She saw the asphalt moving underneath the car as Shay slammed on the brakes, and when her feet hit the ground, the momentum made her stumble. She tottered and fell, the shock of the impact shooting pain through her hip. Her purse had fallen upside down and emptied itself on the street.

“Are you fucking
crazy
?” Shay yelled. “Do you have a death wish?”

“Leave me alone!” Colleen pawed at her wallet, makeup case, keys, stuffing everything back into her purse. “You don't know anything about my relationship with my son!”

“I know that my son told me he was hanging out with Paul as a favor because no one else wanted to!”

“That's a
lie
!” Colleen was on her knees, trying to grab a lipstick that had rolled a few feet away. She tried to stand, slipped and fell again, this time on her knee. The pain was breathtaking. “Paul had a ton of friends!”

“Maybe back east. You probably bought those too. That's not how it works here. I mean, look
around
you, Colleen. You think anyone's paying these guys to just show up? Everything here you have to earn. Maybe if you'd left him alone, Paul would have finally figured out how to be a man. Maybe that's why he disappeared, he couldn't get away from you even up here!”

Colleen abandoned the lipstick. She finally got to her feet and stumbled toward the sidewalk. They were in front of a storage facility, its parking lot surrounded by tall fencing. She grabbed at the chain link for balance as she tried to get away.

“Are you out of your mind? Get back in the car!” Shay shouted.

Colleen kept walking, tears streaming down her face. She was sobbing, unable to catch her breath. After she'd gone another twenty feet she heard the screech of tires and Shay peeled off down the street.

She thought Shay would turn around, make a U-turn and come back to harangue her some more. To rip at the open wound. Thinking of what she'd said about Paul... Colleen couldn't stand it. She covered her ears with her gloved hands and made sounds to cover up her thoughts, horrible wailing sounds of pain, but she couldn't obliterate them.

Ahead, in the next block, was the truck stop where they showered and had breakfast. The sign still blinked SUPER STAR PLAZA
FUEL—SHOWERS—DINER—HOT COFFEE—24 HOURS
. Half a dozen trucks and a few cars were parked on the side; all but one of the pumps were occupied. Even the car wash was going, steam rising into the night as the hot water blasted away the snow and grime and salt.

Colleen shied away from the light. She followed the edge of the parking lot, along the fencing. The snow covered shapes of dead plants. In the summer, they probably grew geraniums here. Marigolds, begonias. Hardy plants you could buy cheap at the hardware store.

There was a bench, awkwardly placed by a planter that contained nothing but cigarette butts, some of them recent. Colleen brushed the snow off the bench and sat down, hoping no one would glance her way.

After a while, the sobbing slowed. The tissues had fallen out of her purse along with the lipstick, so Colleen had been forced to wipe her nose on her sleeve and the back of her glove. Her hair was matted to her cheeks. She was terribly cold, but she welcomed it, wished for the pain that was setting into her fingertips and toes to spread. She wanted to feel the pain everywhere. Maybe she would freeze to death here. They would find her body frozen to the bench. With her long coat and her hood pulled up, she would look like the Virgin Mary in prayer. And this would be her pietà, her final sign of devotion to Paul. Because in the end, she defended him alone, no matter how much Andy loved him, no matter how he wrestled with his own demons. A boy grows into a man and leaves his father, to return as an equal. But a mother is always his mother.

She remembered holding Paul in her arms when he was a baby, cradling him with that head full of downy dark hair nestled in her elbow, marveling at the beauty of him, the perfection of him. Even as an infant he'd been angry and restless; even then, if Colleen was truly honest with herself, she knew there was something different about him. But look at him! God, he was so beautiful.

Yes. Dying here, now, with this image in her mind, this would not be so bad. God would forgive her this. She had done her best; He would judge her kindly. Andy would move on, eventually. Everyone would forgive him. They always forgive the men. He would find another woman, who would adore him, who would remind him that it was never his fault, none of it was ever his fault. She might spare Colleen some compassion; she might allow Colleen's photo to stay on the mantel. But deep down she would know what everyone knew: somehow, it was always the mother's fault.