He shook his head.
“I brought three,” I told him. I unzipped my bag, intending to toss them out for his perusal, when my cell phone rang.
“Hello?”
“Mr. Weaver?”
“Hello, Gloria.”
“Is Jeremy there?”
“Of course.” I looked at him and mouthed, “It’s your mom.”
His head went down like a bag of sand. Blindly, he held out his hand and let me drop the phone into it.
“Hi, Mom... Yeah, we had some sandwiches... I don’t know.” He looked at me. “Are you going to get me a hot meal?”
“That’ll be breakfast,” I said.
“He says I’ll get a hot meal at breakfast.” He gave me a look that suggested his mother did not think that was a good enough answer. “It’s okay, I’m fine. No, we drove straight here. No stops along the way. We’re in Kingston now. I think we’re going to New York City.”
I shook my head.
“I guess I wasn’t supposed to tell you that... Yes, I know you’re my mom and you deserve to know where I am... Are you going to call Ms. Harding in the morning and tell her what’s going on?”
I gave him a puzzled look. He whispered to me, “My probation officer.”
Then, back to his mother, “Okay... Yes, I’ll check in. Okay... Yes, I love you too. Goodbye.”
He handed back the phone. I put it to my ear, wondering if Gloria was still on there, wanting to give me a piece of her mind, but she’d hung up.
“She really does treat me like I’m five sometimes,” he said.
“And she probably always will. Kids are kids to their parents no matter how old they are.”
“She had kind of a rough time when she was little,” he said.
I nodded. “I read about that.”
I went back into my case and brought out three books. “I’m reading this one,” I told him, holding up an old copy of John Irving’s A Prayer for Owen Meany that I had bought at Naman’s. “But you can have one of these if you want.”
Onto his bed I tossed two paperbacks. Early Autumn, by Robert B. Parker, and The Stand, by Stephen King. The latter was about five times the thickness of the former. Jeremy gave them a cursory look, then picked up the remote.
“I wish I had my phone,” he said.
He watched a couple of episodes of The Big Bang Theory while I tried to read, but I found it hard to concentrate with the background noise. Finally, I said it was time to turn in. I went into the bathroom to brush my teeth, then made way for Jeremy. He closed the door. I heard the shower running, but he was in there a long time after the water stopped.
I called out to him, “You okay in there?”
“Yeah,” he said quickly. “Tummy’s kind of off. I think it was one of those sandwiches. We should have gotten a pizza or Mickey D’s.”
The sandwiches hadn’t upset my stomach.
At long last, he came out and slid under the covers of his bed. Light from the parking lot filtered through the drapes, so we weren’t in total darkness once I’d turned off the bedside lamp.
“Do you snore?” Jeremy asked.
“I’ve been told I do.”
“Great. I heard Madeline say you aren’t married or anything.”
“Not any more.”
“You got divorced?”
“No.”
Jeremy went quiet. There was no sound from his side of the room for a long time, and I thought maybe he’d fallen asleep.
I was wrong.
“What will happen to me?” His voice came through the darkness like someone in the distance calling for help.
“What do you mean?”
“What kind of life am I going to have?” he asked. “I mean, the whole world knows who I am and hates me. What happens when I have to go back to school? What about when I want to go to college or something? If I even decide to do that. Or after that, when I want to get a job? Who’s going to hire me? They’ll google my name and find out who I am and what I did and they won’t want to have anything to do with me. I’m like the world’s biggest asshole.”
“No you aren’t,” I said. “I think that might be Galen Broadhurst.”
I heard an actual chuckle from him.
“Sorry,” I said. “That was unprofessional.” I shifted onto my side so that, even if Jeremy couldn’t see me, my voice would project more clearly to him. “Look, I don’t have all the answers. I sure can’t claim to have been the greatest father that ever lived.”
“You’ve got kids?”
“I had a son.”
“Oh.” A pause. Then, “But not any more?”
“No.”
“Oh.”
“The thing is,” I said, “you did what you did, and there’s nothing you can do to change that. You own it. You can’t hide from it. If you don’t tell people up front, and they find out later, they’ll think you’re trying to put something over on them, even if all you’re doing is what anyone else would do. Wanting people to respect their privacy.”
“Yeah, sure. So I put on the top of my résumé, I’m the kid who ran over that girl?”
“No. You did something stupid. All kids, by the time they’ve reached your age, have done something stupid. The others are just luckier than you. Maybe they drove drunk, too, but nothing bad happened. So that’s tough. But you have to accept responsibility for what you did. You can’t go blaming others. You have to say, ‘I did it, I own it,’ and every day moving forward you have to learn from that.”
Silence from the other bed.
“Does that help any?” I asked.
“Not really.”
I heard him turn over and pull up the covers.
We were done.
Twenty-seven
Even with his eyes still closed, Barry Duckworth became aware that someone was in the bedroom.
He opened them, blinked a couple of times to get used to the light coming through the window, and saw his son, Trevor, standing just inside the door.
“Trev?” he said.
That prompted Maureen, under the covers next to Duckworth, to turn over, remove the eye mask that blocked out all light, and say, “What’s going on, what’s happening? What time is it?”
She glanced at the clock radio on her bedside table. “It’s six forty. What are you doing up so early?”
Trevor was fully dressed. His hair was slightly tousled, and he didn’t appear to have shaved yet this morning.
“I haven’t been to bed,” he said, his voice shaky. “Dad, I need help.”
His father raised himself up, swung his bare feet down to the hardwood floor. “What happened, son?”
“It’s Carol,” he said. “Something’s happened to Carol.”
Duckworth dressed quickly. By the time he was down in the kitchen, Maureen had made coffee. Trevor was pacing.
“Okay, let’s start from the beginning,” Duckworth said, taking a mug from Maureen and standing by the counter to drink it.
“So we were going to meet up last night. After you and Mom went out for dinner.”
“Where?”
“At the mall.”
“Promise Falls Mall?”
“Yeah. We were going to grab a bite in the food court. They’ve got that movieplex there now and we were thinking we’d check out what was playing, maybe see something.”
“What time were you going to meet?”
“Eight. That’d give us time to eat and see what the shows were.”
“Okay.”
“I got there about quarter to eight. I went to the food court first, in case she was early, but I didn’t see her there, so I decided to look in a couple of stores first, and go by and see what the movies were. But I got right back to the food court for eight, and she still wasn’t there.”
Trevor was trembling as he spoke. Maureen put her hand on his arm as he continued talking.
“So I sat down and started thinking about what I would get to eat, but then it was five after eight, and then ten after eight, so that was when I texted her. You know, like, I’m here, where are you?”