The Moon Pool (9 page)

She turned and headed for the door. Shay stood too, as did Weyant. “As for me, I may be nobody,” Shay said, “and I don't have money and I don't know anyone important. But I won't go down quiet. This is my
son
who's missing. I'm his
mom
, and I don't have anything to lose.”

She closed the door behind her, harder than she intended, the sound getting the attention of everyone in adjoining offices. Shay could feel her face burning as she strode after Colleen, refusing to meet the eyes of the people they passed.

They didn't speak as they exited the building or on the way to the car. Shay slid into the driver's seat and put the key in the ignition, but she didn't turn it. Colleen put her seat belt on and sat with her arms folded, staring straight ahead.

Then she started to shake. Shay watched Colleen's careful composure disintegrate, torn between sympathy and the knowledge that it was going to get a lot harder before it got any easier.

“You did good,” she said quietly, as silent tears streamed down Colleen's face.

Colleen nodded, not bothering to wipe the tears away. “He was just so... I don't know. Smug? Supercilious?”

“I don't have any idea what that second one means, but I don't like that fucker. Only it doesn't matter how we feel about him. We need to
use
him, Col, you hear? Him and everyone else who can help us. Nothing else matters. Now, we going to the lodge? You ready for that?”

“Yes,” Colleen whispered fiercely, digging for a tissue. “Yes, I am.”

SHAY WAS A
good driver, Colleen had to give her that. She'd adapted to the road conditions and didn't make any of the beginner mistakes that caused so much trouble back east. She hovered under the speed limit, left ample room for the cars in front of her, and dropped back whenever the ubiquitous long-bed trucks passed them.

They drove back through town, block after block of strip malls and lumberyards and churches now familiar. A few more times back and forth and she'd have the whole town memorized. What was it Paul had said, during his first trip home? That it was easy to feel like you fit in. Something like that. He'd been irritated when Andy called Lawton a one-horse town. Andy hadn't meant anything by the description, but something had already changed between them: it was as though for the first time in his life Paul had found something that was his alone, and he guarded it jealously.

By then they'd accepted that nothing they did or said was going to change Paul's mind. Any hopes that the first few weeks of hard work would convince Paul of the absurdity of his choice were dashed when he returned home even more enthusiastic than before he'd left. He paced the house restlessly during that first visit, and if he didn't complain out loud that he couldn't wait for his days off to be over, it was only because they'd all retreated into a state of forced politeness, the aftermath of the violent arguments before he left.

How Colleen had longed to touch her son during that visit. To put her arms around him, to inhale his scent, to reassure herself that he was still hers. But something was broken in their relationship. Oh, for heaven's sake, she knew exactly what was broken, because she'd been the careless one who broke it. She was the one who delivered ultimatums and demands, years and years of them, thinking she was building him into something stronger and better, believing that someday—eventually—he'd come around.

If she had other sons, she would know what to do next time. Colleen understood now that a boy of eighteen or nineteen might not be a man in every way, but he wasn't going to let anyone tell him what to do. Her belief in her own authority struck her as ridiculous and even pitiable now, proof of a careless ignorance, which felt, in the worst moments, like the sin that had driven him away.

She'd been the one to find his note that morning, the morning Andy was supposed to drive him back to Syracuse to start his sophomore year, which was actually his second attempt at his freshman year, though they didn't discuss that. It should have been Andy who found the note, because he was always up first. He made the coffee and got the paper while she was in the shower, then came up and took his turn in the shower while she dried her hair and dressed. But Colleen hadn't slept well that night. She woke at three o'clock and tried to get back to sleep until five, turning one way and another trying to get comfortable, alternately too hot and, after she cast off the covers, too cold. Andy slept through it all, as she replayed the week's arguments in her head, Paul's anger and their objections and pleading, the plans she thought they'd all agreed to at the therapist's office, his grudging agreement to stay on the Concerta and Pristiq.

At five, she gave up. She padded down the hall in her bare feet and briefly considered looking in on Paul, one last chance to watch her son sleep before he left, abandoning the idea mostly because she didn't think she could open the door without waking him. She went downstairs and got the coffee out of the freezer and a filter from the cabinet and had been about to fill the pot with water when she saw the piece of paper centered next to a bowl of apples on the island. Paul's handwriting, blocky and childish and slanted down the page. She hadn't even begun to read when she knew he was gone. Her fault, her fault, all her fault.

The road out of town seemed carved by a router that dug wide ditches on either side, for reasons Colleen couldn't fathom. One wrong turn and any of these trucks could catch a wheel and tumble in, like soldiers into a moat. The land was not as flat as it looked from the air; a long, gradual ascent led them past empty fields, stalks of some dead crop poking through snow, and warehouse-size buildings that seemed cobbled together from sheets of metal. Once they crested the top of the hill, more of the same was laid out in front of them as far as she could see: squared-off fields, graveled drives that led to roundabouts before heading back to the road, small squat clusters of industrial vehicles.

Shay signaled and eased over to the shoulder, taking a slow right turn. There was a bridge, pavement edged with rocky earth, over the ditch or culvert or whatever it was.

“This is it?” Colleen asked as they pulled even with a guard shack. Downhill from the shack, on the other side of a parking lot the size of the one in front of Walmart, was a grid of long, low buildings that reminded Colleen of the chicken farm in Vermont she had visited once as a child, the stench of the cramped open-air buildings worse than anything she had ever smelled.

When Shay rolled down her window, the only scent on the air was of the cold. A man bundled head to toe came out of the shack with a clipboard in his hand. He was wearing cloth gloves with the fingertips cut off, clutching a pen.

“Me again,” Shay said. “Shay Capparelli. I'm here to see Martin.”

“He know you're coming?” The man spoke from underneath a fleece hood with a mask covering the lower half of his face. The shack must have no insulation at all.

“Yup.” The two stared at each other for a moment, the wind blowing snow up from the ground and into his eyes, then the man waved them on and retreated into the shack.

“I said I'd be back,” Shay said defensively. “So yeah, he
ought
to know.”

The parking lot was only about a third full, but many of the spaces had recently been occupied, judging from the snow pattern. Shay parked next to one of the few scraggly trees in the lot, the Explorer dwarfed by the massive pickup trucks on either side. Colleen followed Shay to a cedar-sided lodge at the intersection of the long, plain buildings. The doors and railing were festooned with dry brown pine garland, and a wooden deck and steps out front had been shoveled and salted.

“They put some money into the main building,” Shay said grudgingly. “It's pretty nice. You know what the dorms are made of, though? Shipping containers. Just like they send over from China. They freight them in, weld them together and cut holes for windows, and put up the lodge practically overnight. Martin, he's the manager we're going to see, he says when they dismantle this place you won't be able to tell it was ever here.”

“Paul told us this boom will last for twenty years. At least. That seems like a long time for a temporary structure.”

“Yeah, Taylor said some people are saying that. But the boom in the seventies? That ended pretty much overnight, left a lot of people out of work,” Shay said in disgust. “I had an uncle, down near Galveston, showed up one day and the company was gone. Not just the rig, not just the portable office, the
whole company.
He was out a month's pay, didn't find work for the rest of the year. That's why these camps are all temporary now, nobody wants to get stuck with a building down the road.”

Their boots clanged against the metal tread embedded in the steps. They entered a tiled vestibule with another set of doors leading inside, a sort of air lock that kept the wintry air from blowing into the building. In a box on the floor were dozens of pale blue fabric booties and a hand-lettered sign reading
WATCH YOUR FEET! WEAR BOOTIES PLEASE! THIS IS YOUR HOME—ACT LIKE IT!

“Wow,” Colleen said, reaching in the box. “Just like at an open house.”

“That doesn't mean you,” Shay scoffed. “That's for when the guys come in with mud all over their boots. Believe me, you don't qualify.”

Colleen tried to ignore a flash of irritation as she stomped off as much caked snow as she could. She was growing tired of Shay pointing out the chasm between them every chance she got. Inside, two girls who couldn't have been more than twenty-five sat on high stools behind a rustic wooden counter. They had been laughing together, but they went silent when they saw Shay. The one whose plastic name tag read
BRIT
got off her stool and busied herself with something under the counter. The other one blushed and looked at her nails. She was wearing a lot of eye makeup, dramatic wings of silver shading to black, and had tried to cover up the ravages of acne with heavy foundation that didn't quite match her skin. Her name tag read
JENNIE
.

“Martin said to tell you he's sorry but he can't talk to you anymore,” Jennie said without preamble.

“That right?” Shay said, slamming her purse down on the counter.

“He said. Um. I'm just telling you what he told me to tell you. He said he'd call the cops if he had to this time.”

“Well, you can tell him to—”

Colleen grabbed Shay's arm. Shay twisted away from her and shot Colleen a look full of raw fury and aggression, but Colleen held on. Shay blinked a few times, breathing noisily through her nostrils, and then the intensity was gone. Colleen was learning the rhythm of Shay's temper, and now she tugged her away from the counter, grabbing Shay's purse and slinging it over her arm.

“They can't tell me I can't—” Shay muttered.

“Stop it,” Colleen hissed. “Now come on.”

She pulled Shay back to the vestibule, waiting until the first set of doors closed behind her before speaking. The air felt barely above freezing after the warmth of the lodge.

“What happened when you came here before?”

“The manager—Martin—I don't know. I mean, I maybe pushed him kind of hard, I mean, just
talking
, but nothing to make him react like that. I swear.”

“It's just, I don't think he would have threatened to bring the police into it unless something
happened.
Would he? I'm not judging,” Colleen lied—in truth she wished she could slap some tape over Shay's mouth. “I'm just trying to understand what the situation is.”

“Yeah?” Shay's eyes blazed, but in seconds she dropped the stormy glare. “Okay, look. I got kind of mad when they wouldn't let me see Taylor's room. They said they'd already rented it out.”

“They probably had. With the occupancy rates what they are...”

“All I wanted was a
look.
I wasn't going to touch anything. I told him he could come with me and watch to make sure I didn't disturb anything, but he kept talking about liability. Like whoever had the room would even notice. And if he did, he wouldn't care. I mean, these guys are working twelve-hour days and coming back to a shared shower and cable TV. Quality of life isn't like their main concern, you know?”

Colleen bit her lip, trying to figure out how to handle this. She'd known Shay less than twenty-four hours and she already could trace the arc of her volatility. And it was easy to imagine that in whatever low-paying job Shay worked, conflicts were probably settled with direct confrontation.

But throwing a temper tantrum would quickly burn through strangers' sympathy. Since arriving, Colleen had learned nothing that could lead her to Paul, and due to Shay's behavior this could end up being another dead end. And she didn't have a whole lot of other ideas. They had to make this work.

“Let me try. I'll talk to the girls. And fast, before they decide to go tell their manager we're here.”