This Is What I Want (14 page)

DOREEN

She stood over the crumpled form of her boy, her eyes narrowed and focused as they took in the length of him. Doreen Smothers held the neckline of her T-shirt over her nose and mouth to fend off the sour-sweet stench of the urine that stained Omar’s pants and the wafting scent from the congealed river of vomit that ran away from his outstretched right arm and pooled around the base of the toilet.

“Wake up. You disgust me.”

Omar rolled to his right, the momentum getting the better of him, and Doreen reached for him, shouting, “No, no, no.”

He now lay flat on his back in his own vomit. His mother, looking him in the eye, spoke muffled words through her shirt.

“You’re going to clean all of this up,” she said. “Right now. I’m so disappointed in you.”

Omar pushed himself off the linoleum, tottering to his feet as clumps of his sick clung to his skin. Doreen, repulsed, made sure she kept eyes on him until he looked away, and then she turned and left.

She’d scolded herself earlier that morning when everything came to light, when she realized that had she obeyed her instincts and waited up for Omar to come home, she could have headed off at least some of this. But he was an adult now, or nearly so, and Doreen had started making peace with giving him some space. A Jamboree Friday night without a hint of supervision had seemed safe enough, and here was where that had gotten them.

Sam’s call—to tell her the store was her duty the next couple of days, as if she didn’t know that already—had set her to thinking. “I guess some kids snared a case of beer from the Sloane,” he’d said in that tossed-off way, like he was relaying the going rate for beet tonnage. “Happens every year, I suppose.”

“I suppose,” she’d agreed, and once the phone was back on the hook, she listened to her gut and went looking for Omar. A bed check yielded nothing, so she’d checked the bathroom. Bingo, as it were.

Now, she strode back down the hall to the closed door of the bathroom, and she pounded it with an open hand.

“I better not find even a speck in there when you’re done,” she said.

“Yeah, OK.”

She hit the door again. “Yes, ma’am.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

Doreen returned the way she’d come, to the kitchen table to wait for her boy to show his face, to contemplate again just how nullified she felt by this whole mess. In the space of just a few seconds, she’d considered, and discarded, a handful of options. She could call Eldrick Sloane and offer her apologies and Omar’s sweat equity to make things good, but Eldrick would eventually talk, and Omar would get a label he’d never shake, and for that matter, so would she, the single mother who couldn’t contain her child. Same deal with calling the coach. He’d run it out of Omar, but anything that brushed up against her son’s basketball future wasn’t to be trifled with. At last, she alighted on the same answer that was always there: she could take it to Sam. Eventually, that is, but not today, not with everything else on his plate. She sat in her chair and she agitated, and then she gave herself over to the reality of the situation: for the next couple of days, she’d have to carry this alone. She wrapped her hands around her coffee cup and drew it to her lips.

Down the hall, the sound of the shower kicked in.

OMAR

The job done, Omar slipped into the shower and set about shedding the awfulness from his skin. He’d never seen so much puke and piss in all his life, and the idea that he’d come home and upchucked and peed on the floor, in some order or maybe simultaneously, and then lain down in it—confirmed by the contours of his leavings—left him nothing less than astounded at his own stupidity. Why had this held such a mystery for him, his first drunk? It had been about as far removed from exotic as something could be. He drank a beer, hated it, got laughed at by Gabe and the two sophomore girls they’d hooked up with, then drank six more. After that, oblivion. He wasn’t sure how he’d made it home.

He dropped his head back under the water flow and let it spray down his neck and back. He hoped the girls wouldn’t be there tonight. They were fine, as far as girls went. The shorter one, the one more obviously interested in him, had even let him feel up her shirt, and that had been nice enough, but he hadn’t had much time to talk to Gabe. He needed to build some insulation around his coming lie, and he’d decided that regardless of Clarissa’s pleas that he keep things to himself, he needed to tell somebody. Gabe could keep a secret, he was pretty sure.

“Are you almost done?” His mother’s sharp words cut through the door and found him again. Jesus, but she was pissed off about this. This was her third pass, and each time he assured her, yes, he was just getting clean and he’d be out soon.

As far as tonight goes,
Omar thought to himself,
she may have some things to say
. She usually did, and while he tried hard not to disappoint her, he knew the collisions were coming faster. If she had prohibition in mind, he supposed he’d have to give lip service to that. But eventually, she’d be asleep and he’d be out the door, and there wasn’t anything his mother could do about that.

A dozen minutes later, he sat at the kitchen table across from her, steadying himself for the brewing storm.

“What did you drink?” she asked him.

“Beer.”

“Where did you get it?”

“Some kids had it.”

“Word on the street is that it was stolen from the Sloane Hotel.”

Omar knew he should just leave it be, just issue a denial and accept whatever punishment was coming, but he couldn’t. “You already know the word on the street?”

“Don’t get tart with me, young man. The rest of the world has been up much longer than you, I assure you.”

“I don’t know anything about stolen beer.”

She had a bit further to ride on this burst of agitation. “But you just couldn’t wait to drink some, could you?”

“I didn’t like it.”

“Which one? The first can or the twelfth?”

Omar rubbed his eyes. “Don’t be dramatic.”

Next came the hard slap of her hand against the wood, jolting him out of his disaffection. He wrenched up his face. “Don’t you ever, ever presume to lecture me,” she said. “I know you’re a big man and you don’t think you can be bothered with the likes of me anymore, but you will respect me every remaining moment you live in this house. Do you understand?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

At once, the hard lines of her face softened, her voice right along with them. “It’s so unlike you. And you have so much in front of you. I just don’t want to see you make a mistake.”

“I know. I’ll make better choices.” He’d been leaning hard on that phrase of late. It seemed to please her.

Now tears spilled. He tried to smile at her without watching this. It made him uncomfortable, and he couldn’t help but think that on some level she was manipulating him. She could always move him where she wanted with her emotions.
We always end up here. Her crying. Every time.

“That’s all I want,” she said. And then she stood and moved toward him, toward the hug that she needed and he needed to endure, and with it the less-than-subtle nod to his paternal heritage that she always found a way to bring up, forcing him into deeper conflict about what it meant and whether he was prepared to accept the underlying logic.

“There are people in this town who are waiting for you to fail,” she said. “Not because of who you are, but because of what you are. You can’t give them that satisfaction, son. You just can’t.”

THE CHIEF

Adair had come to consider cell phones the root cause of many of her troubles. If she wasn’t chasing down some entitled girl—they were almost always entitled, and almost always girls, she contended—who’d run a stop sign while texting, she was confiscating the phone of some oversexed teenage boy who was harvesting titty shots of the sophomore class. (Here, similarly, it was almost always boys and almost always titties.) But this morning, her particular trouble lay in an inability to scare up a phone number she needed, in all likelihood because the person she sought had joined everybody else and ditched the landline for a cell phone.
Easier living, harder investigating,
Adair thought.

She had a buddy from the academy, Jerry Dickson, who was working in Grand Forks County now, and maybe he could zero in on her target, but Adair hated like hell to call in help from the law on a Hail Mary like this one. Dickson would respect her enough not to push, but he’d want some answers before he did too much digging for her. And answers, Adair had decided, were in short supply.

Adair, sitting on her bed, crossed her bare legs and bore down on the computer. A simple Google search had unearthed the name she was seeking: Martha Swarthbeck. She could see from the background-search website that the age was about right. She clicked on the link for Martha’s name, and right there, it said “Possible relatives: John Henry Swarthbeck.” She half considered ponying up what it would take for the full package—a mishmash of public records—but she hesitated. The whole point of this was to leave as little a trail as possible while she was working out what could be nothing more than paranoia. Every time she even considered what she might say—“Hey, I don’t trust your ex-husband”—she felt a flush of foolishness over the endeavor.

She flipped over to the Facebook tab. She’d gotten a couple of likes for her status update that morning:
No rest for the weary at Jamboree.
Jim Fuquay was among them. That swelled her up a bit. Good old Jim. Her post on the Grandview Police Department page—
Have a safe Day 2, everybody!
—lay unmolested after fifty-three minutes.

In the search field, she typed “Martha Swarthbeck” and here it came, Martha Standish Swarthbeck, a profile with one mutual friend. She clicked on it, and the friend in common was Tut Everly. Bingo.

She punched out a message, taking extended pauses between words as she considered how best to shape the message.

Hi . . . You don’t know me, I don’t think, but I’m Adair Underwood, the police chief in Grandview. I was wondering if I could give you a quick call.

Adair waited. Facebook quickly showed her message as seen, but she saw no immediate evidence that a reply was forthcoming. As the seconds morphed into minutes, Adair again felt the surges of silliness welling up inside. It had been remarkable that she’d remembered the name at all, a snippet of recall involving Joe LaMer and some beers they’d shared during her first week on the job. Curious about the town and its power structure, she’d made innocent inquiries about her boss, and LaMer had told her about Martha and her mysterious escape to being perhaps the oldest coed at the University of North Dakota.

“Here one day, gone the next,” LaMer had said then. “He doesn’t talk about her. Nobody else does, either—at least not to him. She might as well have been smoke.”

Adair sat up. Facebook indicated that someone was typing on the other end.

Am I under arrest?

Clever.
No, nothing like that. Just want to talk.

What about?

I’d rather talk on the phone.

John, I’m guessing.

Adair blinked at the screen and lifted her hands from the keyboard.

That’s it,
Martha wrote.
You were typing eagerly until I said his name.

Adair went back to it.
Can we talk, please? Just for a couple of minutes.

She again waited. And then, a single word came back.
No.

She started to key in a fresh plea, but Martha was typing again. Adair wiped out her few letters and waited for Martha’s message to come through.

I earned my right to leave and to be done with that town. It wasn’t easy, but I’m here, and I’m happy, and I’m not going to mess with that by getting involved in whatever you’ve landed in there. I’ll just say this—whatever you’re wondering, whatever reason you had for bringing this to me, whatever you’re worried about or scared of, I have one answer: yes.

Adair looked at the screen, transfixed. A chill ran the length of her, radiating outward.

You got it?
Martha prompted.

Adair watched the cursor for a few moments as confusion flushed into her head and then exited. Finally, she typed,
Yes.

Don’t ever contact me again.

Adair drove around town, north to south and back again, repeated loops along the outskirts. When Officer Sakota contacted her by radio and asked what was up, she covered by saying she was just doing a perimeter check.

“Perimeter check?” he’d repeated.

“Yes. I’ll be back soon. Those guys get fed?”

“Joe’s with them.”

“Roger that.”

She dumped the contents of her head again, trying to piece things together.
So this is what isolation feels like,
she thought. Martha Swarthbeck, in what she did and didn’t say, had given blanket endorsement to any suspicion or fear Adair might have, and she was beginning to think she should start harboring plenty of both.
She didn’t see any clear way to go. That was the problem. She could call Captain Fuquay again, but what would that do besides give her another opportunity to hear his rolling laugh and wish she hadn’t been so quick to move on? Here, in her cruiser, she could fast-forward to his bottom line:
I agree, Adair, it sounds weird, but stuff that sounds weird isn’t evidence. Get yourself something to work with, and then let’s talk.
So where did that leave her? She had no confidantes, no sources, no omniscient guide who could speak plainly to her in some fallow field like an agricultural deep throat. She had LaMer, whom she was now inclined to view skeptically after his cryptic warning the day before, and she had Phil Sakota, whose ears she had to towel off daily.

That’s some damn thin gruel
, she thought.

She made one last loop while she talked out loud to herself. “Eyes open, antenna up, do your fucking job, Adair.”

She gripped the steering wheel with both hands and pushed herself ramrod straight in the seat.

“Do your fucking job.”