by Gregory Ashe
“I’m not going to take it easy. She knew. I told her she wasn’t going to do it again, or I’d—”
“Ok. Take a breath. Lady. Shay. What time was all this?”
“I don’t know; ten-thirty. Maybe eleven. I left sandwiches in the fridge.” Her chin came up; she didn’t quite meet my eyes, but she was trying. “I was going to be back for dinner.”
“Fuck dinner,” I said. Austin’s fingers bit into my shoulder as he hauled me back, and it only made me yell louder. “They were gone by dinner!”
This time, Austin grabbed a handful of that fancy athletic t-shirt and shook me so hard that a seam popped. It sounded like a gunshot in the small room, louder even than my lopped-off breaths.
“You can either cool down and figure out what she has to tell you, or you can be a total asshole.” Austin shook me again, but more gently. “Which one?”
“I can do both,” I growled, rolling my shoulder away from his touch. “All right. You were out of the house by eleven. And?”
“And they knew they weren’t supposed to go any farther than the park. St. Raphael’s. It’s not even a park, really; it’s the playground for the Lutheran preschool. But we just called it the park. You can—” She cut off, pressing a hand to her chest. When she spoke again, her voice was reedy. “You can see it from our house.”
“From your mother’s house,” I said, just because I wanted to be a bitch.
Austin shook his head. “When did you get home?”
Shay ran a hand over her eyes.
“What time?” I said.
“It might have been seven. A little after.”
“You were gone for eight hours.”
“Vie,” Austin said.
“Eight hours. You left those kids alone for eight hours with a fucking plate of sandwiches. That’s it.”
“Vie.”
“They can—”
“If you fucking say they can fucking take care of themselves, I will kill you.”
“Vie!”
My breathing still had that staggering, lopped-off sound. Outside, the wind battered Sara’s small house. Anger prickled across my back, an invisible tattoo of heat and sweat that stung, and I couldn’t believe I’d ever been cold in my whole life.
“That’s more than a shift,” Austin said.
“All right. I’m a terrible mother. I’m the worst mother in the history of the world. Fine.” Shay threw up her hands as though waiting for the cuffs. “You don’t know. You don’t know how hard it is, being a mother. You don’t know what it’s like.”
The worst mother in the history of the world. The candles. The iron. The cigarettes. The vacuum cord.
“Where’d you go?”
“I worked my shift. I took my tips to the bank; we’re saving up for our own place. It was closed, but you can do the after-hours deposit. And I had to talk to a friend.”
“What was his name?”
“Vie, just drop it.”
“No, Austin. I want to know what his name was. And maybe you can tell me how much weed you scored. Or what kind of booze he stocks. Or if he had horse or coke or whatever you wanted. Or maybe you can just give me the measurements of his cock, and maybe that’ll explain why you left them. Again.”
“The measurements of his cock?” Austin rolled his eyes.
“Rich is a good guy, all right? He’s got a job. He sells insurance.” Shay squirmed to the edge of the seat; her nails picked at the gimp again, and Sara was going to rip my ass in half when she saw what had happened to the chair. “He treats me nice. You know what he said? He loves kids, and you know what he said? He said we should take a family trip to Disneyland this summer. That’s the kind of guy he is.”
“And when Rich had finished throwing it to you—”
“You’re being really crude,” Austin said.
“—you, what? Finally decided to go back home and check in?”
“I went home. They were gone.” Tears welled in her eyes, and her nails—at least two-inches long, peacock-blue with iridescent tips, the kind of nails that must have cost a fortune—ripped out another length of the gimp braid. “I looked everywhere. I called the school, but it was Saturday. I called their friends. I called up at St. Raphael’s, and all I got was the janitor, and he didn’t remember seeing any kids.”
“But you didn’t call the sheriff,” Austin said quietly.
Shay shook her head.
“Why?”
“Cribbs—that’s their dad—he’s complicated.”
“Hold on. His name is Cribbs?”
“His name is Todd Anthony Cribbs, but he went by Cribbs through high school. And yes, he’s from here. And yes, we both went to school here. And yes, he was my high school boyfriend. And yes, I dropped out when I had Tyler. So there you go. Is that all of it?”
“Don’t get pissy with me because you fucked up your life.”
“He’s complicated?” Austin said in that quiet voice. It was hard to reconcile him now—composed, compassionate, reserved—with the furious tears I had seen only minutes before. But he’d been going to therapy. He’d been getting all sorts of nifty self-help tricks. I, on the other hand, had my own kind of tricks. The self-fuck kind that I used every day.
“He’s bad enough. He hit me. He broke my nose one time. That’s before I was dancing, thank God, or Lawayne would have put me on the street. And he’s not clean. He drives long distance, and he put his willy in every puss-trap from here to the coast. Brought home all sorts of bugs and didn’t mind passing them along. But he loved those kids. He’s a shit dad, but he loves them.”
“He’s out of the picture, isn’t he?”
She shifted, her profile now toward us, but her body inclining toward the door. “He was.”
“So call the sheriff,” Austin said. “God, I feel like I’m talking in circles here. If you think he kidnapped the kids—”
The worst mother in the world, I thought, my fingers like chips of ice. The worst mother in the history of the world, and the candles, and the iron, and the cigarettes—
“You don’t have custody.” I didn’t recognize my own voice.
Austin glanced at me, a reflex, and turned back to Shay. Then he looked at me again. Harder. Like a goddamn sledgehammer. And his hand found the small of my back.
“You need to sit down.”
I shook him off. “You don’t, do you?”
Shay, still needled toward the door like a damn compass, shook her head once.
“Of course you don’t. Why would they give custody of two kids—two nice kids, two kids that deserve a good life, two kids that deserve somebody home, somebody watching out for them, somebody who cares about them—why would they give them to a stripper, to a drug addict, to a goddamn fucking prostitute?”
She flinched at the end like I’d hit her.
The candles, the iron, the cigarettes. The vacuum cleaner cord. Christ, I knew what that flinch was. That flinch was a lot of practice taking blows. I knew because I’d had a lot of practice myself, and all of the hate spilled out of me like a ruptured infection, and my knees sagged again.
I didn’t fall, not exactly—no fainting women, not in my life, just one big fainting queer-boy—but I staggered, and Austin steered me onto the sofa. He kept his hand at the small of my back. He rubbed small circles. I wanted to cry; my eyes burned with the need to cry. For myself, mostly, because that’s what kind of selfish shit I was.
I was so caught up in the struggle not to start bawling that I didn’t realize Shay was talking at first. “. . . heard he was back in town, the first time since they set custody, and he was shacked up with Maggie McKenna, who was probably the only girl from high school that out-slutted me. I saw her once in the C-Mart on 97. I didn’t go in. Thank God.” She whispered those two words. “If I’d gone in, I would have done something. I know I would have done something. She had Hannah and Tyler with her; I guess Cribbs was back on the road, or maybe sleeping one off
, or maybe he just told her to take the kids and get out of the house for a while. I hadn’t seen them in six months, I think. Hannah was four. She followed Tyler around the inside of the C-Mart clutching a Whatchamacallit; Tyler had a Laffy Taffy rope. Strawberry.”
A four-inch section of the gimp had come loose, and she worked her index finger under it, the nail flashing out like lapis lazuli. “Maggie wasn’t even paying attention to them. Not even when they went over to the beer cave and Tyler tried to open the door. They could have gotten stuck in there. They could have suffocated or frozen to death or something, but she was too busy talking to the clerk and trying to get him to look at her tits. I’d been clean for four months. And I knew I could do better for them than Maggie. I could do better than Cribbs. He loves them, but he doesn’t know what to do with them, and so he’d shack up with girls like Maggie and hope they could figure out how to handle kids. So I picked them up from school one day.” She smiled at me, and I forgot about crying, and I forgot about my own shit, and I figured out, for the first time since I’d known her, why a guy might pay money for Shay to smile at him.
“That’s it?” Austin said. “They just let you pick up the kids?”
“That’s it. Nobody even looked at me. I was just sitting at the end of the block, and when Tyler and Hannah walked past, I rolled down the window. I had that place out by Slippers by then, and I had a job, and we drove home.”
“Cribbs?” I said.
She shrugged.
“He didn’t come after you? He didn’t send the sheriff?”
“I think he knew it was better. That’s what’s so funny about it. The fight, the whole custody battle, that was about getting back at me. He loves those kids, sure, but that was really about teaching me a lesson. He didn’t want them around; he didn’t want to do the hard stuff with them. Once he realized how much work kids are, he must have wished he’d slashed my tires or something instead of fighting me for custody. I honestly think he picked up Maggie because he needed a nanny. He left her a week after I picked up the kids. I saw him a few times after that; he drove for Lawayne sometimes, and he’d stop by the club. Aside from being a general asshole, though, he didn’t really want anything to do with me. He liked to see the kids. Take them out for dinner or ice cream and a movie. But he saw them less and less.”
Lawayne’s name lit a fuse at the back of my head. He was dangerous, and he had a hand in every awful thing in the county, and he had gotten tangled up with Urho and the Lady before. “But?”
Shay spread a wrinkled paper across her knees and passed it to me. I scanned it. It was a page from the Kane Motor Court registry. On the left, three hole punches feathered out where they had ripped from the rings. Two-thirds of the way down the sheet, in a blocky all-caps print, someone had written Cribbs.
“He signs his name that way?”
“It’s the Kane Motor Court,” Shay said. “It’s not the Ritz.”
The date was for March 30th, the Friday before. I teased the torn hole punch as I studied the paper. “So he stayed in Kane the night before they disappeared.”
“It’s thirty miles away,” Austin said.
“It’s twenty-seven.”
“Why didn’t he stay at his house here?”
“He doesn’t have a house. He drives all the time. When he’s around for a few days, he stays with a buddy, or he stays at the Kane Motor Court or the Gypsy or the Hunt Public House. He used to sleep in the cab of his truck; maybe he still does when he’s driving. But when he’s in town, he likes to—” Her mouth twisted. “Get out.”
“He has legal custody.” Catching the ragged edge of one of the hole punches, I twisted until it tore free. “If he took the kids, he’s got every right to them. And when you talked to the sheriff, just a casual talk over lunch, that’s what he told you. He said you shouldn’t make it official. He said it wouldn’t go anywhere. He said he couldn’t do anything.”
Shay nodded.
“So get a lawyer,” Austin said. Jerking a thumb at me, he added, “This guy’s not a lawyer. He can’t help you.”
“Thanks.”
He was still rubbing circles at the small of my back, and he gave me a tight grin, but those eyes were hard as turquoise.
“It’s something else,” I said. Something was hollowing out Shay’s expression from the inside, collapsing her face into a horrified mask. “You don’t even really believe Cribbs took them. Or if you do, you don’t think he took them just because he decided he wants to play dad again.”
My final words made Shay jerk as though I’d pricked her, and her hand came up. With a long, stuttering rip, the gimp braid pulled all the way to the corner of the seat. I sighed. Sara was going to whip me through the streets.
“I keep hearing them. Well, her. Hannah. I can hear her at night. When I’m trying to go to sleep. Not that I’m sleeping much. But I can hear her.”
Austin’s hand, in the middle of one of those small, comforting circles, froze.
“You can hear Hannah?” I spoke quietly. Calmly. You don’t yell at a rabid dog.
“Not words. Not even all the time. But at night. When I’m in my room upstairs.” She giggled, the sound terrible and shrill, and clapped both hands over her mouth. “Because I’m upstairs. Like a radio tower. I can hear her screaming sometimes. Screaming and screaming and screaming.” She giggled again. Her nails bit into her cheeks; blood enameled little red pommels at the tips.
Austin’s fingers at the small of my back had enough tension to pull a trigger. “Jesus,” he breathed.
“Mother thinks I’m absolutely insane, coming to you. But the sheriff can’t do anything. Won’t. Can’t.” She shook her head. Some of the blood curved around her fingers and slid under her nails, staining the beds purple. “She thinks I should get a lawyer. She thinks she should put me in a home. But I can hear her. I can hear Hannah calling me.”
Next to me, Austin just breathed out low and slow. It was worse, somehow, than when he muttered Jesus.
With a suddenness that startled me, Shay shot out of her seat. She was coming for me. I brought up one arm. Austin launched off the sofa. But both of us were too slow. Shay clutched my leg, her nails slicing skin, embedding in flesh, her blood mixing with mine.
“Tell me. Tell me you’ll find them.”
“Get off him, you batshit fuck.” Austin slammed into her, and Shay was a tiny thing, maybe ninety pounds when she was sopping, but she didn’t budge. “Get the hell off him.”
“Promise me you’ll find them.”
Blood. Her blood and my blood. It laced my knee, branched, fanned along my calf.
“Promise me.”
“You’re hurting him. Get off him.”
“Promise me.”
“I’ll find them.”
“Get the fuck off him.”
Shay stumbled backward. Austin, his chest heaving, planted himself between us. She looked at me. She looked at her hand, the fingers crooked into a claw, gore staining the peacock blue of her nails. Then, with a shuddering sob, she plunged out into the wind and the rain and the night.
“What the fuck.”
I stood up, my injured leg pulsed, and I shut the door.
“What the fuck.”
When I faced him, those eyes were still hard and cold as turquoise.
“What the fuck was that?”
I shook my head.
“You’re not serious. You’re not serious about what you just said. Tell me that. You need to leave town, Vie. You heard those guys earlier. You need to get out of here, now, tonight.”
I rolled my shoulders. The look on his face transformed into that vicious, shutter-click rage I had seen before, the one that preceded tears. But there weren’t any tears this time. I could take him in a fight. The calculations ran just under the surface of conscious thought, but the conclusion was startlingly vivid. With him looking at me that way, with rage closing his face like the shutter on a lens, he might swing. And I co
uld take him. He was stronger now. Maybe stronger than I was. But I was bigger. And I was meaner. And I fought dirty. So I could take him because deep down, Austin was a good guy. And I wasn’t. And that meant I’d win.
“Just tell me what you said, tell me it was just to get her out of here. Tell me you wanted her gone, so you said what she needed to hear.”
If he swung—when he swung—it would probably be a wide right hook. That’s what he’d used last time.
“Tell me you’re not going to get dragged into some insane custody battle between a prostitute and her drug-dealing trucker boyfriend.”
“Austin.”
“Oh my God.”
“Austin.”
“You know what? You were right. I should have left.” He looked around, as though he needed to snatch up his jacket or a bag or something so that he could make his dramatic exit.
“Austin, come on. They’re kids.”
“They’re not your kids. They’ve got a mom and a dad. You’re a kid too, all right? This guy, Cribbs, I’ve heard of him. He’s not just a trucker, ok? Kids buy from him. Kaden’s bought from him. He’s a piece of shit. Even if she’s telling the truth and he really does love his kids, he’s a piece of shit. And he’s—he’s a fucking lunatic. And there’s no way I’m letting you get involved in this.”
“You’re not going to let me?”
The temperature in the room dropped. I could feel that rain again, icy and needling my chest.
“No.”
“You don’t get to say things like that. You don’t get to make decisions like that.”
“Yeah, I do. I’m your boyfriend—”
“You don’t own me.”
“I’m your boyfriend, damn it, and I’m telling you that I’m not letting you get involved with this.”
“Or what? You’ll break up with me?”
Rage shuttered his face again.
“You’ll hit me? You’ll break my legs so I can’t leave the house?”
His hands curled into fists.
That feeling of rain, of icy barbs driving into my chest, was heavier now.
With what looked like a lot of effort, Austin relaxed his hands. Staring at the carpet, he said, “Do you want help with your leg?”