The Missing Place (39 page)

Now he stood inside the restaurant and waited for his eyes to adjust from the brilliant sun. There, in a corner booth, was Myron, his hands resting on top of a folded newspaper. His reading glasses were pushed up on his forehead. If T.L. had to guess, Myron had been here for half an hour already, sweating in his acrylic sweater.

He looked terrified.

T.L. slid into the booth. “Myron . . . look. Nothing bad is going to happen.”

“Yeah?” Myron's face was deeply lined. He had aged in the last six weeks. “Andy Mitchell had three lawyers out here before that kid of his was even out of the hospital. He threatened the police department with a
lawsuit
. And you want to tell me you're some kind of bulletproof?”

Fear was the only thing that could make Myron angry, a fact that T.L. didn't fully understand until he was in high school. He did his best to ignore it. “Thought you'd be happy to see someone get the upper hand on Chief Weyant.”

Myron looked up sharply. There was something on his face, some troubled depth that T.L. hadn't seen before. “Why would you say that?”

“What aren't you telling me?” T.L. demanded. After he'd been
questioned and released back in January, he'd asked Myron why Weyant hated him. All Myron would say was that he and Weyant got into it after T.L.'s mother died.

Myron sighed. “Okay, look, your mom and Weyant used to have a thing.”

“I figured it had to be something like that. Did she break up with him?”

“You . . . look, you can't understand what it was like back then. Nowadays a kid like you and some girl from Lawton High go out, it's no big deal. Back then it meant something. When Weyant started coming around, people talked. Your grandpa was sure your mom was going to end up hurt. He told her this was Weyant's big walk on the wild side, seeing a Fort Mercer girl.”

“How . . . serious did it get?” T.L. asked carefully.

“Well, more than any of us expected. Weyant didn't just take her to the prom and cop a feel and drink some Boone's Farm and put it all behind him when he went off to Bismarck. He and your mom . . .” He wiped a hand over his forehead. He was perspiring in the afternoon sun streaming through the windows. “They saw each other whenever they could. She was a year behind him. Her whole senior year, every time he was home from college, he came around. Even after he was engaged to some girl he met at school. Nobody could stop your mom. Your grandpa used to yell . . .”

Myron never spoke about his parents, dead before T.L. was born. He never talked about the past at all, about T.L.'s mother's hard times, her descent down the meth pipe, her collision with a truck carrying gravel on an afternoon when she'd left him with a neighbor and gone to meet a girlfriend for happy hour in town. T.L.'s only memories of his mother were perfume and cigarette smoke and a brand of wafer cookies she had liked.

“When your mom got pregnant by some guy she'd gone out with a few times, Weyant went nuts. I was working at the plant and going to community college. Your mom was living at home again, between jobs, and Weyant was a rookie in town. He came over when your grandfather was at work, and she went out on the porch to talk to him and you could hear him yelling up and down the block. I got your grandfather's gun and I went out there and told him I wasn't afraid to use it, he couldn't arrest me if he was dead, and he turned around and got in his car and left.”

“That was it?” T.L. said. He wasn't sure what to do with this glimpse of the past. “That's what you've been afraid to tell me all these years?”

“No, son,” Myron said, curling his fingers around the paper, wrinkling it. “That was nothing. Your mom had you a few months later, and within a month after
that
, Weyant had found a girl, different girl from the one he'd been engaged to, knocked her up, and that was Elizabeth. They had a shotgun wedding. I figured that would be the end of it, but then he kept coming around and your mom still kept sneaking out to meet him. Those two—it was like you couldn't keep them apart.”

“Wait.” A rushing in his ears, a pain in his heart. For some reason, the mother T.L. had imagined for himself had never been capable of anything like a grand passion.
Love.
She'd been a junkie on the pipe and he figured Myron was the best thing to ever happen to him and nobody ever told him different. “She was in
love
with him?”

“Or
something
,” Myron said darkly, his eyebrows lowered. “The rest you know. She had the accident. You came here. But on the day of her funeral, I came back here after the wake at the church, had you in a little red snowsuit, I remember that. There's Weyant in his car, his personal car, parked in my driveway. Right out there,”
Myron gestured, as though he had forgotten they were sitting in Ricky's. “Drunk as a skunk. He gets out of the car when he sees me, and I think, You bastard, you couldn't even come to the church. He's got a bottle in a bag and I can smell him a few feet away. He opens his mouth and I figure I don't want to know what he's going to say.
Shut your fucking mouth
, I tell him,
you got nothing to say to me.
”

Myron was shaking, he was so angry, his skin a mottled red, the paper shredded between his fingers.

“I went inside and turned on the TV and I didn't even wait to see what was on, left you sitting on the couch in your snowsuit and mittens. I went back outside and I hit Weyant so hard he fell down. When he was lying on the ground, I saw he'd pissed himself. He kept saying he loved her. Over and over. And that just made me angrier. See, in my mind, if he had been braver, if he'd stood by her, married her the way it was supposed to be, she never would have become a junkie and she never would have died. He was lying on the ground and I kicked him, once in the ribs, and I was getting ready to kick him in the head, I think I would have killed him. But then I thought about you, sitting on my couch. And I picked him up and kind of dragged him to his car. He wasn't fighting me by then. He got in and I closed the door on him. Went inside and turned the TV up loud and sat with you, and when I had waited long enough I went back to see and he was gone. Car was gone. I didn't care if he died in a wreck on the way home, I guess that might have been some kind of justice. Anyway, so now you know.”

T.L. tried to absorb what Myron had told him. He'd always known Weyant hated him, but he and Elizabeth had never questioned why. They just figured that the fact that he was her first boyfriend had been enough.

“Why didn't you tell me? When she and I started going out?”

Myron laughed, bitterly. “You got to be kidding. I won't deny it was kind of satisfying, knowing he couldn't do a damn thing about it. But mostly I figured you were entitled to your own life, without all that crap from the past hanging over you.”

T.L. wondered what he would have done if he'd known. Probably wouldn't have made a difference. It still would have ended anyway; she still would have gotten bored with him and taken up with Paul. Got pregnant.

She'd be almost five months along now, if what he'd heard was true. He'd pieced together the story from the scraps that ended up in the paper. There hadn't been a court case. No one had been arrested. T.L. had been asked to come in a second time, and they made it sound like his decision even though he knew it wasn't, and he brought Jack Cook, who sat at the other end of the table from the Weyants' attorneys. All the lawyers took notes and everyone was polite to him. Weyant was nowhere in sight. When he was finished, the police officer shook his hand and told him they'd be in touch if they had any further questions.

And that was the last time anyone contacted him, until Andy Mitchell emailed, asking to meet with him. “Off the record,” he'd assured T.L. “Bring anyone you want.”

In the weeks since everything quieted down, T.L. had kept his head down, tried to ignore the news, and recommitted himself to school. He quit baseball and started painting again. Myron asked him to reconsider UCLA, and after thinking about it for a few days, T.L. had made a call and explained what had happened, leaving out some of the details. The scholarship was still his. He had until the end of the month to decide if he wanted it. He was leaning toward yes.

The door jingled. They both looked up. Andy Mitchell was
dressed casually, but even so he looked nothing like Myron. He was wearing a wool coat with a leather collar. His belt buckle gleamed. He had his hand out before he ever got to the table. Myron, seated against the wall, couldn't stand all the way up, so he had to lean across the table to shake hands.

The waitress arrived as they were stumbling through the pleasantries. T.L. ordered a root beer. Andy glanced at Myron's glass of iced tea and ordered the same.

“I want to start by saying how grateful I am that you agreed to talk to me,” Andy said.

“One thing,” Myron said. “T.L. can't talk about that day anymore. It's too much. It's just too much to ask from him.”

“Of course, of course.” Andy nodded.

T.L. was surprised—that was a conversation he had never had with Myron.

Andy pulled out a folder full of papers from his leather portfolio. He laid the papers on the table, squaring up the edges. Then he started talking—about Hunter-Cole Energy.

“The safety lapses that have been going on, the handling of accidents, have gone beyond unconscionable to outright illegal,” he began. He had reports and graphs and incident reports. He had figures and statistics. He told them that he was speaking confidentially and that he couldn't reveal his sources—but then he listed several names from the tribal business council.

“Why are you telling us this?” Myron asked. “What do you want from us?”

“It's . . .” Andy looked like he was choosing his words carefully. “I guess it's a courtesy. I wanted you to know before it gets into the news. I mean, it could be a very good thing for Fort Mercer. The reservation
can only benefit from the exposure. Lease renegotiation could happen as early as this summer, and any pressure we can put on Hunter-Cole . . . Well, you get the picture.”

“So you're going after Hunter-Cole,” Myron said. “You're not the first.”

“No,” Andy said calmly. “But I do bring a lot of experience—and a lot of resources—to the table.”

Myron nodded. “Okay. Say you shut down their operations in Lawton, get the leases to revert. That's good for us, you're right. But how does it help you? How does it help your boy?”

T.L. had been wondering the same thing. When Andy had asked to meet, T.L. guessed it had something to do with the lawsuit. That maybe he wanted ammunition to use against Weyant. Or possibly to defend against a civil suit.

Myron had asked the question he'd been thinking: what about Paul? T.L. had never seen him again after that day on the ice. Paul had disappeared once he was released from the hospital, somehow eluding the news media. The way T.L. figured it, his parents could have driven him to Bismarck and paid cash for a flight on one of the big carriers. Anyway, it didn't matter now.

Andy looked pained. “It doesn't help Paul, not directly,” he admitted. “But I just . . . I took a leave from my firm, to sort through this mess. When it was over, when we got Paul home, I wasn't ready to go back yet. I wanted . . . I guess the word that comes to mind, and I hate to use it, is
closure.
I wanted something good to come out of this, if at all possible. Regardless of what happened, there were significant failures of the system on the rigs. Men were hurt. People need to be held accountable.”

It wasn't a very convincing explanation, and neither Myron nor
T.L. made much of an effort to pretend otherwise. Andy gathered his papers and pushed his untouched iced tea away. “There's one more thing I wanted to tell you in person.”

Here it is
, T.L. thought. This is where he tells him that Paul is sorry, that he'd do anything to go back to that day and do it differently. That he knows now that T.L. was innocent all along and he blames himself. And so on.

Andy took a deep breath and looked into his eyes. T.L. felt his body tense. He could get through this. He'd prepared for just this moment. He wouldn't know if it was true until he spoke the words, but he planned to say that all was forgiven.

Andy cleared his throat. “Elizabeth has come to live with us. She and Paul are getting married this fall.”

T.L. THOUGHT ABOUT
that moment often in the weeks that followed. He put in extra shifts at the store when the day worker broke his collarbone falling off a ladder. He called the admissions department at UCLA and accepted. On Facebook, he friended the boy he'd be rooming with. Myron gave him the watch his father had owned as a graduation gift—he'd taken it all the way to Minot to be replated.

It wasn't that hard to put it all together. The bruises on Elizabeth's body, the ones that had provoked Paul to come after T.L.—it was pretty obvious now that she had made them herself. Maybe T.L. was even partly responsible. If he hadn't pushed Elizabeth so hard about the baby, if he had believed her the first time she said it wasn't his, if he hadn't been in such a rush for a family, a life whose outlines he'd imagined since he was a kid—if he had just let her go when she asked, none of this would have happened.