The Good Boy (44 page)

“She didn’t call you?”

“What?”

“Some guy saw Joel and Butch two nights ago, and some lady at the Jewel after that. Detective Colton has a lead—”

“Are you—?” Pete pulls McKenna up out of her chair and into a hug. “Why didn’t you—?” He holds her there and closes his eyes and he can’t finish the questions; he doesn’t want her answers to ruin this glimpse of relief. He can breathe again, finally; he breathes in and smells her too-sweet perfume, her lovely terrible hair. “McKenna,” he says, holding her in his arms, though she tries to push him away.

“Oh god, Dad, you’re disgusting, seriously, you stink, like—”

“I love you,” he tells her, because he meant to the other night when he picked her up. And he should have, so many other times.

“You’re not mad at me?”

“Hell yes I’m mad at you.” But he won’t let go. Not just now.

*   *   *

Upstairs, Pete stops at the bedroom door when he sees Sarah at her bathroom vanity, steam left over from her shower clouding the top of the mirror. She doesn’t notice him, and he isn’t sure what kind of reaction to expect when she does, so he waits there and watches for a moment.

She’s daytime-dressed, shoes and all; even they look too big, as thin as she is. The shoulder seams of her V-neck fall halfway to her elbows, as though they’re draped on a wire hanger. Her legs are bones. Her wedding ring hangs on by the knuckle.

She’s applying makeup—an orange hue that doesn’t suit her since she’s become so pale. She must know this, the way she tries again to blend the color at her jawline. Her hair is wet, except where coarse strands of gray have dried and lifted, untamable.

Pete remembers the day this past spring when she told him she’d lost a few pounds. First day for shorts, and she was outside planting sunflower seeds in a pair of planters the old lady had left behind. Pete went out to ask her something—who knows what—because when he saw her bare legs, he couldn’t help but think about the rest of her. He told her she looked good; she said her shorts didn’t fit anymore. He didn’t realize she wasn’t talking diet and exercise.

He was so fucking obtuse.

She tucks the makeup into the vanity drawer and gets up and he doesn’t want to scare her so he steps back and forward again and makes like he’s just now walking into the room.

“Hey,” he says. “You going somewhere?”

“I hope so.” She doesn’t seem surprised to see him but she doesn’t seem angry, either. She opens the bureau—only two-thirds of the way, because of the bed—and picks out a sweater. Then she says, “I doubt it.”

“I talked to McKenna. There’s news?”

“Not exactly news. Bo has a few leads.”

Pete doesn’t like that she’s so comfortable calling the detective by his first name. “Why isn’t that news? Good news?”

“I don’t know, Pete,” she says, holding on to the cuffs of her V-neck as she pulls on the sweater. “It’s been forty-eight hours.”

“So what? For forty-eight hours, I’ve been thinking our son is dead.” The statement feels like a confession. But: “This is
great
news. Why didn’t you call me?”

She goes to the antique settee at the foot of the bed—the only place they could find for the damn thing, her grandmother’s—and takes a towel from a pile of clean laundry. She says, “I was waiting to hear from Bo again.”

“Tell me what he said. Tell me everything he said.” He had been terrified that Joel was dead and now this rush of hindsight—his whole body trembles.

“There’s nothing solid.”

“That’s better than nothing at all.” He thinks of the word,
solid
. Thinks of coincidence. Thinks,
how could I ever explain all this?

Sarah shakes out the towel and lays it across the bed to fold it and says, “A gentleman who lives in a halfway house down by Welles Park claims he saw Joel and Butch late Friday night. Apparently, the man encouraged them to go home. Joel told him they were on their way.”

“Welles Park, that’s what, a mile from here?”

“Bo says the guy is a whackjob. He kept trying to explain the importance of the house’s steps.”

“That’s it? The whackjob?”

“Might as well be, but no. Another woman responded to the bulletin. She says she saw Joel yesterday morning at the Jewel on Lincoln Avenue. That’s the same neighborhood. She said he bought bread. She wanted to know if there was a reward.”

“I didn’t even think about that,” he says. “A reward.” He didn’t know there was a bulletin, either.

“Yeah. Well.” Sarah puts the folded towel back on the settee and picks up another. She is determined to be busy. She will create order.

Probably because Pete’s made such a mess. And she doesn’t know the half of it.

“Listen,” he says, “there are a lot of things I didn’t think about. Anything you said, for starters. All I knew was that I had to do something. Joel was gone; I couldn’t sit here and wait for a case to come together. I couldn’t put his fate in someone else’s hands. I had to look for him myself.”

“I know.” She spreads the towel on the bed. She won’t look at him.

“When I couldn’t find him, I looked for a motive. I couldn’t believe Joel would leave on his own, you know? Our boy? There had to be a reason. There’s always a reason—and I kept finding reasons—but I couldn’t find Joel.”

She stacks the towels on the settee and nods almost automatically, which means she agrees or else she anticipated what he’d say. She picks up a pair of pants. Joel’s school pants. She does not shake them out, she just holds them there.

“Sarah, I stayed away because I was afraid to come home without him. I couldn’t fail you again.” He takes the pants from her, puts them back on the settee, and holds her hand, his own still trembling. “But I realize, now, I failed you the minute I left you here.”

Sarah takes her hand away, looks down at her rings. “The, ah. The real reason I didn’t call is because Mrs. Moeller? Two doors down? When Bo interviewed her yesterday, she told him she saw a car driving on our block the night Joel went missing. A car that stood out because it had lettering along the side—”

“No—”

“She couldn’t see the letters, exactly; she insisted they were Roman numerals, except that Bo knew there is no numeral
Z
—”

“Fuck. Sarah. You knew?”

“Elgin Poole,” she says, barely.

“I should have told—”

She holds up her hands. “You didn’t, and anyway, I wouldn’t have listened to you. I needed you to be wrong. But after you left last night, I asked Bo to talk to McKenna. She was acting so—just,
guilty.
And Bo,” she says, tears in her eyes now, too, “he’s been looking at Zack Fowler. That’s the lead he’s following—he thinks Zack knew about your history with the Hustlers and thought he’d use it to his advantage. He thinks Zack lured McKenna to his place as some show of solidarity to the gang. But Zack didn’t invite Joel, and he certainly didn’t anticipate Butch. They were there, Pete. They ran from there.” When she looks up at him, a tear falls. “You
were
right. I just couldn’t let you think so.”

“I didn’t want to be right.”

She clears space on the settee, socks falling to the floor. “I saw a shrink,” she says, and sits down. “After Ricky died. He said I was depressed. Of course I was depressed: my brother died. The doctor gave me a prescription, but I didn’t take it. I thought if I was grieving I would get better. But now that I’ve been over it a million times, just like everything else I obsess about, you know what I realize?
I’m
the one who’s crazy. I worry about you, and the kids, because I can’t understand how you’re normal and I’m not. I fight with you so I’ll have a reason to feel bad. I say there’s something wrong with Joel because I know there’s something wrong with me. And I just need you to be wrong. All the time. About everything.”

“You’ve been grieving.”

“But it’s not about Ricky, Pete. It’s us.”

Pete looks across the room, the night-blacked window. And the yellow rocking chair sitting beneath it—the one Sarah used with both kids—another impractical, sentimental piece. Another of her attempts to make this place feel like home. What the hell has he ever done to make it feel that way?

“It’s me,” he says.

She puts her head in her hands, same as McKenna, and says, “You ran away a long time ago. I still don’t know why.”

Pete pushes the rest of the laundry off the settee and sits next to her. He wants to put his arms around her, but he doesn’t want to risk being pushed away.

“It was Kitty,” he says. “That night, when Quick photographed us? I never told you. I mean, I told you—nothing happened—that’s true. But something did happen. While I was on her detail. All that time I spent with her, watching her get raked over for one bad clack of the gavel? In this world, you can be just or you can be passionate, but not both. That was her problem. She wanted both. And that’s what made me realize I didn’t have any passion left. I’d been trying to do police work, but all the bosses really wanted me to do was be the police. And that’s not the same thing. Not at all. I tried—I mean, I wanted to, for us—for rank, a raise. A desk.
Our
life. But that meant my life. That meant
not
doing the job. It meant officially no longer giving a shit.

“So when Oliver Quick took that photo and everybody else made up their own thousand words’ worth of context, I blamed him. I said my whole fucking career was ruined by that one moment. The punch. But the truth is, my whole life had been leading right up to that moment. And what
I
wanted was a different ending.”

“What ending did you want?”

“I don’t know. It doesn’t seem like there will ever be a fucking ending.”

Sarah says, “It would have been easier if you’d just had an affair with her.”

He slides off the settee, finds the floor. “The city is settling with White. I have to settle.”

“You shouldn’t.”

“I have to,” he says, and thinks of Elgin. “I have to take responsibility.”

“You always take responsibility, Pete. It’s what makes you so easy to blame.”

He feels her hand on his shoulder and he is surprised and he doesn’t ever want her to take it away so he stays there, still, and closes his eyes, and feels her warmth. Her steady hold. He has missed her so much. He will miss her so much more.

He needs to tell her. He can’t let her soften; she needs to know what he’s done. She needs to know, and to prepare; when he goes this time, it will not be temporary.

But then she gets down on the floor in front of him, between his legs, and she says, “I gave Oliver Quick Joel’s photo.”

He can’t look at her—not because he is mad, but because he is ashamed.

“Pete?” She tries to find his eyes and when she does, they both see: this is not about what they’ve done. It is about what they have done for Joel.

“I know you will bring him back,” she says.

When she kisses him he remembers the blood on his clothes and takes her hands to stop her and says, “Sarah, I’m filthy.”

She says, “I don’t care. You’re
here.
” And then she kisses him again and she doesn’t stop and he doesn’t stop her.

*   *   *

In the dark, after Sarah’s fallen asleep, Pete lies there underneath the crisp, light sheet and listens to her breathe. He wants to take it all in, and to take it with him: the shape of the room, blue moonlight from the window, the stillness, his wife. And this feeling—this glimpse of life as it is, apart from consequence—it isn’t perfect. But it is now.

He wishes he could remember every detail. Like Joel would.

30

The line to get into the courthouse is long and Joel waits with his hood on, head down, hoping the people waiting with him are too busy with their own pending cases to have read the newspaper this morning, his face right there on the front page.

The security guard makes him feel like he’s up to something as he rattles off a list of dos and don’ts—mostly don’ts:

“
No
food,
no
drink,
no
cameras …
phones
off,
bags
open … Parents, watch your kids; kids,
listen
to your parents…”

Joel decides the woman in front of him—a blonde with a file folder under her arm—will be a better pinch-hit parent than the Hispanic man behind him who kicks his bag along the floor while talking on his phone, testing the
no
s. Joel steps closer to the woman than she’d probably appreciate if she noticed, positioning himself out of eye reach from the guard.

When the woman gets to the front of the line, Joel takes off his hood, puts his book and wallet in a plastic bin on the conveyor belt and follows her through the metal detector. He finds Butchie’s plastic tags around his neck and presses them between his fingers for good luck as he passes through.

On the other side, the woman swipes her folder and takes off before Joel’s bin comes out from the X-ray machine.

And then the belt stops.

Joel waits, the bin visible right there on the other side of the flaps, his “mom” disappearing into the sea of people headed for the courthouse lobby. He looks after her as the female guard stationed at the monitor calls for backup; he’s certain his cover is blown.

He thinks about following her. Just pretending that’s not his stuff in the bin and keeping up with his fake mom and hoping nobody saw his face. In his wallet, the guards would find his name on his library card, and his Game Planet card, but only his name—not his face. He’s so close. If he took off, would they catch him?

Another guard, a tall black man, joins his partner and nods at the monitor, eyes knowing. He looks at Joel and Joel swallows, dry, a gulp. It’s too late. He’s been made.

“Sir,” he says, which is confusing because Joel is not a sir.

“I’m a friend of the judge’s—” Joel starts to explain, but then the guard starts the belt again, watches Joel’s bin roll by, and lifts the Hispanic man’s bag.

“Excuse us, kid,” he says, so Joel gets his things and gets swept up in the lobby rush.

On the way to the elevators, he stops at the drinking fountain outside the men’s bathroom. The water tastes metallic, and at first it hurts his dried-out throat. After a long drink and nobody in or out of the bathroom, Joel pushes through the door. He doesn’t have to go—he already did, in an alley on the way over—but he wants to fix his hair before he sees the judge.