A glance at his cell phone jars him anew. It’s ten past noon. Those in attendance at Ben’s funeral are in the sandwich-eating, coffee-drinking, funny-Ben storytelling segment of the event. He imagines Romy sitting in a hospital wheelchair off to one side, a widow in dire need of a friend to lean on, as mourners offer useless condolences.
Harvey turns his cell phone with its damning time face-down on the table. Despite the contrary evidence of her barren hospital room, he’s convinced Romy has friends and loved ones. She has people in her life who, unlike him, never wished Ben gone. Romy must have people who aren’t afraid to look her in the face. People who are worthy of public mourning.
The waitress arrives and Harvey stops her recitation of the beer specials by telling her he’s three days away from his eight year cake. The smell of hops and fermentation is bad enough; he doesn’t need words to increase the temptation.
When the waitress returns with his chili-cheeseburger, however, she also delivers a pitcher of beer and a frosted glass. “It was Coke for me,” Harvey says. “Eight year cake. Remember?”
“Tell that to your secret admirer.” The waitress moves on, leaving the beer behind.
Harvey’s scan of the room stops at the rotund Elvis who tips an imaginary hat his way. He considers his options: he could deliver the pitcher back to the bar or to the man’s table with an explanation, or he could lower his head to avoid the golden brew, eat quickly and get out of there before it’s too late.
Twenty minutes later, Harvey’s plate is clean, and the pitcher drained. After years of sobriety he’s a lightweight and the alcohol goes straight to his head and bladder. He wobbles to his feet in urgent need of the john. As he passes the Elvis impersonator’s table, he sees Celine Wheeler too late to avoid the drunken image she captures on her phone.
“You’re welcome, Detective,” she sneers. “My treat.”
¤
Harvey brakes the Tahoe to carefully manage the last turn toward home; into the driveway and decides on a radical plan of action. Before he sobers up he’ll call a realtor and tell them to come plant a For Sale at the end of his driveway. Leaving town is the only way to escape the torment of Celine Wheeler. It’s a twisted game with her: the almost daily calls to the station, her inflammatory interviews with the Fenny Times, the rumors she circulates around town about police mismanagement of the case. Playing to his weakness today.
Someone stronger and smarter should oversee Gabriel’s case. Someone who won’t fail the boy at every turn. The Fenny police are doing everything humanly possible to find Gabriel: Harvey and his team have searched abandoned train tunnels and cave systems, dredged stretches of river and numerous lakes, hiked for hours to search a historical brickworks, haunted cemeteries looking for fresh disturbances and tracked down every abandoned barn, house and trailer within a hundred-mile radius. And they won’t stop there.
Harvey makes a silent appeal to whatever or whoever keeps track of eternal credit. It should count for something that, despite the recent epic failure, he did his best and contributed to society. For years his worst vice was eating too much Chinese take-out while watching Jimmy Stewart movies. It meant something that Harvey was Effie’s favorite film made by the Ordinary Hero.
“Aw shucks,” Harvey says in Jimmy’s voice, “don’t let that woman do this to you.” Every single time he encounters the whore it turns out this way, with the mother-from-hell secure in a self-righteous gloat and Harvey wanting to flush his decent life down the toilet.
Too bad the john in your house isn’t big enough. The teasing voice is his father’s.
Harvey slows the car to check out the water barrel at the side of his house. A heavy rainfall has caused the water level to reach the top. When the wind picks up, waves slop over the edge. The sight stirs a craving for the open ocean.
Except he can’t run away. Harvey can’t leave things so wrong with Romy, and he can’t stop searching until he knows what happened to Gabriel Wheeler, even if all he ever finds of the boy is a scrap.
«59»
Willard salts his french fries as he scans a McDonald’s courtesy copy of the newspaper. His fingers burn when he picks up a hot fry, but even a blistered mouth can’t dissuade him from gorging. His need for belly comfort trumps pain.
Older national and local papers litter the front seat of the old woman’s Ford Tempo that he’s left parked outside. Willard has searched them all for items about Gabriel and found none. It’s the same with television and radio. The faker should be all over the news by now, unless the social workers and police have him hidden.
As Willard chews another fry, he realizes the obvious—the night he cleaned up the mess in the basement, the neighbor woman left and never came back. A bit more thinking and he has the whole scene worked out. The boy was stolen right from under his nose.
An elderly man approaches the table. He places his hand on the newspaper. “Done with that?” he asks.
Willard snatches it away. “Mine,” he growls.
¤
At a public park on the outskirts of town, Willard follows a teenage boy accompanying his little brother into the washroom. When the teen sees Willard observe them in the mirror, a spasm of concern crosses his pimpled face. They retreat to the privacy of a stall to do their business. Later, while they wash their hands, Willard imagines the same scene only with himself and Terrance as the brothers.
He returns to his seat facing the kiddie playground where he’s already spent a pleasant half-hour. The teen’s suspicious nature ruins Willard’s hope the brothers will stay to play. As the pair walks away hand-in-hand the sweet sight triggers a wave of regret in Willard. If he’d found the real Terrance instead of a faker, they would have done brotherly things together like going to the playground and the zoo. He believes his brother is alive and waiting to be found. When that happens, life will be so good. In the past, Willard let fear of how the traitor would behave in public hold him back from living a normal life. Not anymore.
The car is sweltering when he opens the door. The bare skin below his shorts sticks to the seat as soon as he gets in and the steering wheel is almost too hot to handle. He turns on KJOS. As he pulls out of the parking lot he listens to the host’s chatter. The news comes and goes, once again, without mention of Gabriel.
Willard enjoyed the traveling life in the week after his grandfather died. Now the seedy hotel rooms wear him out. He preferred the quiet months at home with the boy he believed was Terrance. Willard hadn’t minded his job at the recycling plant. He had a favorite grocery store, and someone to come home to every night. He had grown to like the familiar.
Familiar. Willard parks the car haphazardly on the shoulder of the road and flicks on his hazard light. He thinks a moment before consulting a map. A few hours’ drive will get him to Fenny. Willard knows one thing with absolute certainty: if the faker has gone anywhere, he’s gone home.
«60»
The Motel Six suite in Fenny has a small bedroom, a sitting room with a TV bolted to a wall, a kitchenette complete with a hotplate, toaster oven, microwave, and a circa 1950s table that reminds Chase of the one in her grandmother’s apartment. Gabriel has deposited Chase’s grocery purchases in the mini fridge and cupboards and is watching earnestly as Chase reads the instructions on the back of a fish and chip box. “Bake at 350 degrees for forty minutes.”
Chase flips up the lid of the toaster oven, spreads the goods out on the tray, closes the lid, then turns the dial. She slumps onto one of the lime-green chairs. A bank statement from her last ATM withdrawal lies on the table, fluttering in the wind of an overhead fan. The statement shows a whopping $827.49 left. She’s dropped almost a thousand dollars on gas, necessities for Gabriel, the motel, and the extra costs associated with road-trips. She’s almost run through the emergency fund that took her three years to accumulate.
Chase should be on her way to another life already, except she’s too exhausted to drive another mile. She rifles through pamphlets Gabe insisted they get from
a teen working the Fenny Information Booth. The lucky town has eight restaurants, mini golf, and a public pool. Originally a two-industry town, farming and welfare, a push seems to be on to capture some of the lucrative tourism market. Good luck with that, she thinks.
Despite everything he’s been through, Gabriel doesn’t seem to have developed the street smarts Chase had at his age. It’s a problem that soon won’t be Chase’s to worry about. She got the kid home, deed done.
Lighting up a cigarette flouts the motel’s no smoking rule, but Chase does anyway. At Central California Women’s Facility they put eight women in dorms meant to house four. Chase did six months with a hardened lifer, a schizophrenic murderer, some young mothers and an ill grandmother. The lifer decided Chase should be her best friend with benefits. When Chase disagreed, she stuck a fork into the hand of the grandmother to persuade her, a ploy that worked.
Chase won’t fold for another person’s sake ever again. She also won’t go back to jail for anyone, not even the sweet little kid who’s busy gushing over a pineapple as though it’s as precious as a newborn baby. The small blue tattoo of an arrow in the flesh between the thumb and finger is a reminder every time she looks at her hand: Aim for something better.
She looks around the room. She’s been careful about fingerprints, but still has to wipe things down. Once she’s gone, events will ramp up quickly for Gabriel here in Fenny. Some of it will be shit the poor tyke won’t see coming.
“When you smell smoke, your dinner’s ready.” Chase picks up her cigarettes and ashtray. She heads to the foldout couch to stretch out for an afternoon nap. I don’t care. I don’t care. I don’t care. The lie drags her down into sleep, where it finally becomes as true as it will ever be.
«61»
Gabriel’s bedroom has pink flowers around the wall near the ceiling. He doesn’t understand why Chase said boys aren’t supposed to like flowers when they grow everywhere on earth. The room also has a bed and a dresser with a few of his new clothes in the drawers. There was a blurry painting of a beach, but he took it down and put up Chase’s velvet painting of the gambling dogs, although Chase said he shouldn’t settle in because the motel suite is only rented for one night.
Gabriel gets up, leaving Radar sleeping on top of the blankets. After getting dressed he puts on his Superman sunglasses, then goes into the kitchen.
All six of the beer cans Chase bought the day before are empty on the counter. When Celine drinks beer there’s never any breakfast the next day, but Chase put out pineapple, toasted crumpets with jam and scrambled eggs. Gabriel eats everything on the plate, even though it makes his stomach so full it hurts.
After he helps Radar get off the bed, the dog makes his way to the door where he waits for someone to take him on his morning walk. Gabriel listens for noise in the bathroom. He doesn’t hear anything, which means Chase is soaking in the tub. The night before her soak took a whole hour and Radar looks like he can’t wait that long to pee. Gabriel opens the door and follows Radar outside.
Gabriel didn’t tell Chase that his apartment is the next street over from the motel because he wasn’t ready to leave her and Radar. His body prickles all over as he walks toward home. Bikes, barbecues and plastic pots with plants are on most of the balconies, but his is empty because Celine spends her money on work clothes instead of bicycles or barbecues.
He stops on the street in front of the building. Even though nothing has changed, being home makes him dizzy. It feels like a dream as he walks up to the apartment door. He isn’t going to knock—Chase warned him not to tell anybody he’s back until she’s gone—he only wants to try the door handle and see if it’s locked.
Gabriel’s hand is still on the knob when a tiny Chinese lady with a long white braid opens the door. She peeks out through a crack to say, “No English. You come back later.” Then she slams the door. Gabriel sits down hard on the stoop. The pineapple comes up to his throat. If Celine moved, he doesn’t know how to find her. The old lady opens the door again, holding a broom. “Come back, later,” she says as she pokes him with the sharp straw bristles.
Gabriel’s feet should take him back to the motel. Instead they don’t stop walking until he sees McFarland Elementary School. The wall mural of rainbows and trees that Gabriel’s class helped paint is gone. Now there are red, white and blue people playing sports.
He knows it’s not a school day because there is only one car in the parking lot, so he walks around the side of the school to the back of the building. In the field behind the school, where the older kids sneak to play at recess, one brown cow looks up from chewing grass. Gabriel feels dizzy again as he climbs the back stairs up to the covered porch. His favorite stuffed bear is tied to a post with yellow plastic flowers and Gabriel’s angel costume picture.
Instead of a handle, a flat metal plate is screwed into the door. Gabriel presses his cheek against the metal that’s hot from the sun. He pretends the door opens when he pushes. With his eyes closed, he goes back inside and stands beside the Virgin Mary. It’s almost time for the grade fours to go on stage and say their lines and, this time, everything is going to be okay.
«62»
Romy watches a silent cooking show on the hospital’s waiting room monitor. As the TV host whips egg whites by hand, Romy worries she’ll never have the energy to cook again. If the hospital ever discharges her, Helena and Mark will probably starve.
She’s waiting for the state-appointed foster parent, a nice enough woman who’s currently minding Mark, to come claim Helena as well. Romy should focus on her daughter—for the next few weeks their only contact will be via phone—but the foster mother is forty minutes late, and Romy is growing desperate for her next dose of pain medication.
Helena has somehow come into possession of a Barbie, likely a gift from a guilt-ridden nurse. Romy is too realistic to think any of the staff warmed to her angry, dramatic child who’s obsessed with creating images of death and frightening the other sick children with weird poems. Already the doll has undergone a deathly transformation: Helena has cut off the long, blond locks and colored the ragged tips black with indelible felt pen. The plastic skin is covered with red lines on its face and torso, similar in placement to Romy’s scars. The blue and purple princess dress is reduced to tatters. Now Helena kneels on the hospital waiting room’s germ-laden floor, her brow furrowed in concentration as she saws off the doll’s tiny hand with a pair of scissors.
“I think she might need that hand for doing her princess wave,” Romy suggests.
“Do you need your booby?” Helena asks, as she rips off the doll’s magical butterfly that makes sounds and triggers a flashing thunderbolt on the glittery bodice. Then she starts in on removing a foot. Like Romy, the doll is denuded of her princess powers.
Romy won’t tell her daughter she desperately needs two f-cup breasts. Or that no one on her medical team has discussed the possibility of reconstructive surgery, likely because the area of scar tissue is too vast.
As she has daily since Helena emerged from her coma, Romy searches for the words that will bring healing to her daughter. The hospital’s counselor stressed the importance of validating Helena’s feelings, but it seems counterintuitive to encourage a morbid preoccupation with death.
For the hundredth time, the automatic doors whoosh open, letting in the heat of a muggy day into the air-conditioned space. Romy sees Mark with the state-appointed foster mother, Glenda Spritz. This handover isn’t supposed to happen to a family with a backup plan: the children are meant to stay with Pam and Harvey, but Pam has moved on and self-centered Harvey has gone AWOL just when Romy needs him most.
Romy wheels toward her son, needing to touch him. He’s soft and yielding as she breathes in his baby-fine hair with its real world smells of grass, strawberry and chocolate. When she forces herself to break away, he offers up his chubby hand for kisses. Mark’s gesture, the first normal thing Romy has experienced in weeks, breaks down her defenses.
“You’ll be glad to
know the little darling has transitioned into a new routine without a fuss,” the foster mother, Glenda, says. “Not that he doesn’t miss you. Of course he misses his mom and big sister. Bet you missed Mark too, right Helena?”
Helena doesn’t answer. Instead, she gets up from the floor and holds out the mutilated Barbie to Mark.
“Gee,” the foster mother says. “That’s kind of you to share, but the arm and leg are a bit too sharp for a baby to play with. What do you think, Helena?”
Helena’s eyes flash impatience. “You’re ugly.”
“Well, I think you’re pretty. Let’s head to toy store and see if they have a doctor Barbie to take care of your poor hurt doll.”
It’s a natural and therapeutic response that subdues the storm on Helena’s face. Romy rolls away from her children, unable to rattle off the list of instructions she had prepared, and struck with an unforgivable longing to relinquish the job of parenting forever.
Just like Ben.
¤
The hospital pay phone smells like other people’s illness. Romy holds the sticky receiver with one hand and a phone card in the other. Someone needs to check on the house and gather the bills stacking up in the mailbox. By now there are probably rotting carcasses of mice in the attic traps, and the newly planted perennial garden won’t survive the heat wave.
A few of Ben’s friends, able-bodied men with whom he fished, drank, and bowled, attended the funeral. Some offered practical help that Romy, irrational with grief, declined.
Her own friends, women from high school and university, weren’t informed of the accident or invited to the funeral. They are near strangers after years of little more contact beyond annual Christmas cards and birth announcements. She can’t ask them to drop everything in their busy, child-centered lives to ease the raw, visceral pain of her loneliness.
All That Remains (A Missing and Exploited Suspense Novel Book 1) Page 15