Читать книгу Secrets She Left Behind - Diane Chamberlain - Страница 11

Keith

MY MOTHER COULD ANNOY THE CRAP OUT OF ME SOMETIMES. She hovered over me, like I was going to die if she didn’t keep her eye on me every second. I almost did kick the bucket after the fire, so I guess that gave her the right to freak out, but it could really get to me. So when I came home from the beach and she wasn’t there, I was glad. And after a couple hours, when I could heat up my own mac and cheese for dinner and eat it in front of a Simpsons rerun without her giving me grief about it, I was still liking it.

The Simpsons was still on when I heard someone on our deck and then a knock on the door. I opened it and saw a couple of guys out there. One was on the other side of our screen door, the other back a ways, holding a camera. The sun was starting to go down behind his head.

“Keith?” the guy closest to me said. “Today Maggie Lockwood was released from prison. As one of the fire victims, can you tell us how you feel about that?”

It took me a couple of seconds to realize what was going on. Reporters!

“No fuckin’ way!” I slammed the door shut in his face, then walked around the trailer yanking down the shades. Like I needed this! Where was my mother? She would’ve answered the door and told those bastards to take a hike off the end of a pier.

When The Simpsons was over, the news came on. I never watched the news, but I wanted to make sure they didn’t say anything about me. They didn’t. Not by name, anyway. But the first thing they showed was this mob outside the prison and Maggie coming out the door, looking pale and scared. The crowd was vicious, shouting and holding these protest signs and everything. I loved it.

“You deserve it, bitch!” I shouted at the TV.

I watched the news awhile longer, then looked at the clock on the stove, which I could see from the couch. Almost seven-thirty. Where was my mother? She probably told me she was going out with Dawn or something and I forgot. I didn’t listen all that much when she talked. But by eight o’clock, which was when she always helped me with my physical-therapy exercises, and she still wasn’t home, I got…worried is the wrong word. Mad. I was mad she hadn’t left a note or anything. She knew I forgot things she told me, and if she was going to miss eight o’clock, then she should have left a note or a message on my cell or something.

I sat in the living room and dialed her cell number. It rang and rang and finally cut to her voice mail.

“It’s eight o’clock,” I said. “Where are you?”

So I called Laurel to see if my mother had said anything to Andy. A sign of total desperation—me calling Laurel. After I talked to her, I called Dawn. Frankie answered the phone and tried to make chitchat with me.

“Just put Dawn on,” I said. I didn’t know what Dawn saw in that dude.

She sounded worried when I said Mom wasn’t home. Dawn’d had no plans with her, and my mother didn’t have much in the way of friends, really. She’d been best friends with Laurel all those years and then this last year she’d been glued to my hip, so she didn’t get out much. Dawn said she hadn’t talked to my mother since the day before at Jabeen’s Java, where they worked together.

I tried to do my exercises by myself. I got out the exercise bands. My mother would pull against them while I pulled back, working all the muscles in my arms and trying to keep the scar tissue from tightening up. It was brutal shit. Without my mother there, I wrapped the bands around the leg of the heaviest chair in the living room, but every time I pulled on the band, the chair moved. My mother would always kind of cheer me on. You can do it. I know it hurts. Keep going. I hated her rah-rah stuff, but without it I wasn’t doing all that good.

I sat like I was supposed to, with my legs stretched out wide on the floor, and got the red band into position on my left arm. I pulled, leaning way back, and the damn chair flipped over on my ankle.

“Goddamn it!” I managed to push the chair off my foot. I threw the band to the floor and stood up, grabbing my cell phone again, punching the number for my mother’s phone.

“Where the hell are you?” I shouted, then rammed the phone into my pocket. Screw the exercises. Screw them. Now my ankle was killing me on top of the whole arm agony. I took a Percocet even though it was a couple of hours before I was supposed to.

I went outside and ran down the deck stairs to my car, moving fast in case the reporters were still hanging around. She went to the store, Andy’d said. Not that I trusted Andy to remember things right, but what else did I have to go on? I couldn’t believe Andy and I were now in the same year when he was dumb as a toad. What did I care, really? School was a waste of time. My mother kept pressuring me, like, what do you want to do when you graduate? I didn’t know the answer to that question before the fire. Now it was as if my choices had been reduced by thousands. Everyone at school was talking about college and how they were going to visit different ones this year, and since so many kids were poor—like us—how they’d get loans or try to get scholarships and all that crap. My counselor said if I could get my grades up, I might be able to get a scholarship myself, but the whole time he was talking to me, he was looking at my right eye so he could avoid the left side of my face. Didn’t want to be caught staring at the freak. Pretending it was a normal dude he was talking to. I was thinking, oh sure, buddy. Once I was out of Douglas High, the last thing I wanted was more school with more kids staring at me. I didn’t bother telling him that if I wanted to go to college, I didn’t need a scholarship. I had a college fund. Guilt money given to me by Marcus Lockwood after Jamie Lockwood—my real father—died. I could only use the money for college, but if I didn’t do college, I could have it when I was twenty-five. Twenty-five! What was I supposed to do till then?

So I headed toward the Food Lion in Hampstead where my mother usually shopped, checking the ditches along the side of the road for her car. It was dark and I had to use a flashlight and I thought, this is so lame. So fucking dramatic. Like what did I think, I was in some movie or something? But then I kept coming back to the fact that it didn’t make sense she was gone. I called her, like, fifteen times. Maybe her cell battery was shot, but still, couldn’t she find a phone somewhere?

Her car wasn’t in the Food Lion parking lot. Then I drove back to the island and checked out the parking lots at Jabeen’s and the restaurants and anyplace else I could think of, mostly because I didn’t know what else to do. I wondered if I should call the police, but that seemed like even more drama. I went home after a while and sat in front of my computer and got online. We didn’t have high-speed Internet, but I could piggyback on someone else’s connection nearly every time I tried. I did what I usually did online. I Googled stuff like suicide and burns and ostracism and grief and all that shit. Sometimes I went to porn sites, but that was so pathetic. I didn’t like thinking about how those sites would probably be the only place I’d get any for the rest of my life. Instead, I liked reading about how burn victims like me felt. Most of them were older. Some of their wives and husbands left them. Couldn’t take the stress, they said, but I bet it was more like the embarrassment of having a partner who looked like a monster.

Most of the burn victims I read about took antidepressants. So did I. If I didn’t, I probably would have offed myself months ago. I still thought about suicide, but not like I used to. Back then, I thought about how I could do it. Get a gun. Hang myself. OD on meds. Every time I thought about my mother finding me dead, though, I’d start crying. Pathetic. I’d turned into a sissy this year. Then I got on the Zoloft and stopped feeling like I wanted to die, but I still wasn’t sure why I should want to live. My mother was worried because they said some kids on antidepressants were more likely to kill themselves. I thought that was interesting and paid attention to how I felt. The truth was, I wanted the Zoloft to push me over the edge. To give me the guts to do it. I started thinking that I could hang myself from this tree over by the police station. I could do it at night so no one would see me until it was too late, and then the cops would be first to find me and they’d cut me down before my mother could see me like that. But on the Zoloft, I started losing the urge. I got more pissed than sad. I felt more like hanging other people than hanging myself. It was Maggie Lockwood I wanted to see dead. Not myself.

I was still surfing the Net around midnight when the phone rang. The caller ID said it was the Lockwoods’ house and I stared at the number for a few seconds, worried it might be Maggie calling to say she was sorry or something. But around the fourth ring, I thought maybe it was Laurel and she knew where my mother was, so I picked it up.

“Did your mom get home okay?” Laurel asked.

“No,” I said. “I don’t know where she is. Dawn doesn’t know either.”

Laurel was quiet. “Did you try her other friends?”

I wasn’t going to let her know there were no other friends. “Nobody knows where she is,” I said.

“Keith, you should call the police. Or if you want, I’ll call them for you.”

“No.” I didn’t want Laurel Lockwood to do anything for me.

“Will you call them, then? Please? I’m worried.”

“Yeah, I’ll call,” I said. It was like she was giving me permission to dive into the drama. Like it wasn’t just me overreacting.

“Let me know what happens, Keith,” she said. “Do you want me to come over there and stay with you?”

Right, I thought. That’s just what I want.

“No. I’m good. I’m getting off so I can call the police.”

A cop showed up half an hour after I called. Must’ve been a slow night in Surf City.

“Hey, Keith,” he said when I opened the door. “I’m Officer Pryor.” His name didn’t register. He was an old guy, and he seemed to know me. But then, everyone knew who I was: the most damaged living victim of the fire. My claim to fame. “Okay if I come in?” he asked.

We sat in the kitchen. He took off his hat, leaving ridges in his gray hair. He knew my mother from Jabeen’s, he told me. Nice lady. Where did I think she was?

“If I knew, I wouldn’t’ve called you,” I said.

He asked me the expected stuff about her description, even though he knew her. A couple of inches shorter than me, I told him. Blue eyes. Short blond hair. Tan. She had that kind of skin that went dark just from walking between the trailer and her car. She’d looked exactly the same my whole life. Never changed that hair or the way she dressed or her routine or anything. She never changed anything. That thought freaked me out. Made me realize how serious this was.

“She’s always home at night to do my exercises with me,” I said. “My physical therapy. And she always makes dinner, unless she’s working and she didn’t work today. Makes no sense.”

He wrote things down on a notepad as I talked. He had fat hands and a gold band on his ring finger.

“Does she have any medical conditions?” he asked.

“No. I mean, except for some arthritis in her knees.” She groaned like an old lady when she got down on the floor with me to do the exercises.

“No seizures or anything like that? Diabetes? Heart problems?”

“No.”

“Did she take any medication?”

I couldn’t ever remember seeing my mother take anything, except maybe cough syrup or vitamins.

“Nothing.”

“How about mental-health problems? Been a hard year for her and you both, with the fire and all. Do you know if she was depressed?”

“Nah,” I said, but I wondered. How would I know? I didn’t think much about what this year had been like for her. “She’s not the depressed type.”

“What does that mean?”

“You know. She’s tough. If she went on one of those Survivor shows, she’d win.”

“Some of those tough survivor types are cream puffs inside.”

“Not my mother.”

“Did you call any of her friends?”

“Dawn Reynolds and Laurel Lockwood.”

He raised his eyebrows when I mentioned the name Lockwood. Probably because of Maggie getting out of prison.

I explained about Andy being sick and staying in our trailer while Laurel went to get Maggie. How Mom told him she was going to the store and just didn’t come back.

“What store would she go to?”

“I guess the Food Lion in Hampstead. I mean, I guess she meant food shopping. I don’t know where else she’d go.”

He had his eyes on his notepad even though he wasn’t writing, and I figured he’d had enough of looking at my face.

“Can you tell me the names of her other friends?”

“She didn’t have a lot,” I said. I didn’t want her to seem totally pathetic, so I named some ladies she used to be in a book club with.

“What church does she go to?”

“She doesn’t.”

“How about men? Was she dating anyone?”

“No.” My mother didn’t date. I couldn’t even imagine it. I couldn’t even imagine her getting close enough to Jamie Lockwood to get pregnant with me.

“Are you sure? Did you ever suspect she was—”

“Trust me,” I said. “Especially this year. I’ve been her date. She made me her full-time job.”

“You angry about that?” he asked. “You sound angry about it.”

“Not angry,” I said. “Just…I don’t want to be babysat.” I noticed him looking into the living room, where the chair that had fallen on me was still on its side. I realized he might suspect me of something. Foul play. Whatever. Like if I was angry at her, maybe I’d hurt her. That pissed me off even more.

“Have you looked around to see if anything’s missing?” he asked.

“You mean, like someone broke in and stole something and she caught them and—”

“It’s just a general question.” He stopped me. “Did she have a suitcase?”

I didn’t know the answer. “She never went anywhere,” I said.

“Well, everyone has a suitcase.”

Actually, I didn’t have one. But, I supposed with all that time my mother spent in Chapel Hill when I was in the hospital, she must have owned a suitcase.

“Can we take a look in her room?” he asked, getting to his feet.

“Sure.” I tried to sound more cooperative, now that I thought he might be suspicious of me.

We had to walk through the living room to get to her bedroom, and he whipped out a camera and took a picture of the chair on its side.

“I was trying to do my exercises,” I said, reaching for the red exercise band I’d tossed on the sofa.

“Leave that there,” he said. I dropped my hand and he snapped a picture of the band.

“Like I said, she always helped me with the exercises, so I put the band around the leg of the chair and when I pulled on it, the chair fell over.”

“Uh-huh.”

We reached my mother’s room. It was small and neat. The bed was made—she was one of those people who made their bed the second they got up in the morning. She tried to get me to do the same, but gave up a long time ago.

The cop stood in the doorway and looked around. My mother would’ve known if I’d moved my comb from one side of my bathroom counter to the other. But in her room, I was totally lost. I never went in there. I had no reason to.

Officer Pryor opened her closet door. “Does this look like more or fewer clothes than she usually has in here?” he asked me.

I leaned around him to look in the closet. “No clue,” I said. “I never…I don’t pay attention to her clothes.”

He walked into her bathroom. “Toothbrush is here,” he said. “Did she have more than one?”

“I don’t know.” Why would she have more than one toothbrush?

“I don’t see any makeup bag,” he said.

Makeup bag? “She didn’t wear much.”

“How about a hair dryer?” he asked. “Did she have one?”

“Nah. Her hair was really short.”

He took a few pictures while I stood in the doorway, then he walked back in her bedroom and started opening the drawers of her dresser, one after the other.

“Really not a lot in here,” he said. “Most women, especially if they live in a small space like your double-wide, have their dresser drawers so full you can’t get them open.”

It bothered me that I was letting this guy paw through her stuff. Through her underwear drawer, for Christ’s sake. I was making way too much out of this. I expected her to come home any minute and say, “What are you doing? I told you I’d be out late tonight.”

“I don’t see a suitcase anywhere.” He was still going through her dresser, like he might find a suitcase in there.

“Maybe she told me she was going away for the night and I forgot or something,” I said. Though, where would she go?

He headed back toward the living room and I followed him. He was looking all around the room while he walked. Taking everything in. “You’re what?” he said. “Eighteen?”

“Yeah,” I said, though I wouldn’t be eighteen for a few months.

“So, she didn’t abandon a minor.” He stood between the kitchen and the living room, his arms folded over his chest. He was staring at the couch. At the red exercise band. Did he think I tried to choke her with it or what? “It looks to me like she left of her own volition,” he said, “since there’s no suitcase—”

“I told you. I’m not even sure she had one.” And she wouldn’t leave me! Did I have to club him over the head with it?

“Look.” He reached into his pocket. Handed me a card. “I’m going to get someone out here to do a more thorough search. Don’t touch anything, all right? Don’t move that chair back upright.”

“The chair doesn’t have anything to do with—”

“Just don’t touch anything,” he said. “Do yourself a favor. Meanwhile, we’ll put a BOLO on her car.”

“What’s a BOLO?”

“A ‘Be on the Lookout’ bulletin. That’ll get authorities to keep an eye out for her. We’ll get Pender County to check the Food Lion parking lot and contact the hospitals.”

“I already checked the Food Lion parking lot.”

“You did? When?”

“A while ago.”

“We’ll be checking it, too,” he said. “We’ll subpoena her phone records and put a tracer on her car, but most likely, she’s out with a friend and lost track of time and forgot to turn her cell on. By the time I get an officer back out here, she’ll be home safe and sound.”

“Right,” I said, trying to calm myself down. I was making a mountain out of a molehill.

I watched him get into his cruiser and drive out to the main road. Then I looked next to my car, to where her car should have been. Where her car always was. And I knew something was very, very wrong.