The Missing Place Read Online Free PDF

dread. Next came the terrible realization that Paul was missing, the running calculus of his absence ticking up automatically to nine days, and she felt the loss of him like a gaping hole inside her.
    Only after the waking and remembering did her other senses kick in. Everything was wrong and unfamiliar. The surface she was lying on was cold and hard. The air she breathed held an unpleasant mélange of her own odor and faint notes of spoiled milk and industrial cleaner. And there was a rumbling that she not only heard but also felt, a mechanical, knocking-engine sound.
    Generator. Colleen remembered. She opened her eyes and recognized the inside of the motor home faintly lit with gloomy dawn. There, maybe eight feet away, was Shay, huddled into a lump under a pile of clothes and a single blanket. Guiltily, Colleen realized she had the lion’s share of the blankets, a fact she hadn’t registered last night, when the whiskey had gone down all too easily, followed by a fluster of preparations in which she hadn’t exactly participated. She hadn’t been drunk. But she hadn’t been sober, either. Nothing but the protein bar and the half sandwich, the milk Shay insisted that she drink, and the whiskey. Then peeing and brushing her teeth in that tiny closet of a bathroom. In fact the last lucid thought Colleen remembered having was towonder where the water went when she flushed, while she rinsed the toothpaste down the sink.
    No, wait. A hand-lettered sign taped to the mirror—Sharpie on a lined index card—read USE AS LEAST WATER AS POSSIBLY PLEASE, and Colleen’s last lucid thought was the one she always had when confronted with grammar mistakes on public display, which was to wish she had the ability to fix them without anyone ever knowing. A Johnny Appleseed for the postliterate generation, she would sow grammar skills everywhere she went.
    Colleen sat up slowly, trying to make no noise. If there was light in the sky, it had to be nearly eight o’clock, didn’t it? Which was what—nine her time?
    What time had they gone to bed last night, anyway? It had been after eleven on Dave’s dashboard clock when she climbed in the truck, she remembered that. She and Shay had stayed up talking for maybe an hour. Colleen couldn’t believe she had slept seven hours straight, something she hadn’t come close to managing the last few nights. Was she simply exhausted? Or could it be a sense of relief at having someone to share her burden with? Immediately Colleen felt guilty. It was only because another boy was missing—and another mother frantic—that she wasn’t alone.
    And then she felt even more guilty because she wasn’t alone, at least not as alone as Shay. She had Andy. Who she had forgotten to call last night. He would already have been up for nearly two hours this morning. She eased her legs over the side of the bed—not a bed, but the motor home’s tiny table, which Shay had somehow flipped over to create a sort of cot—and immediately felt the cold air slide into her sleeves and under the legs of her pants. The floor was freezing, even through her socks. Wedged in the narrow space between table and kitchenette was her suitcase. She remembered pawingthrough the contents last night to find her toiletry case; when she’d returned from the bathroom the table/bed was made, the lights were turned off save a dim overhead night-light, and Shay was sitting cross-legged on top of the tiny bed, as though the two of them were at sleepaway camp. Colleen had considered digging through her clothes for her nightgown, but that would mean changing in front of Shay, and she was too tired to contend with her own modesty, her embarrassment at her pouchy abdomen and jiggling upper arms and thighs.
    She’d left the suitcase open and crawled gratefully under the covers, mumbling a good night. She must have gone to sleep immediately, because she remembered nothing