“This whole thing about putting DVD players in vans, is that, like, evidence of the fucking collapse of civilization or what? Are they thinking, like, little kids aren’t getting enough of a chance to watch TV, that they’ve got to put them in their cars, too?”
You see what I mean? She had her moments.
“I get what you’re saying,” I said. “When Syd was little, and we were driving around together, she’d always be asking what everything was. She liked to ask what all the different kinds of cars were. By the time she was six, she could tell a Honda from a Toyota from a Ford. That wouldn’t have happened if she was watching The Little Mermaid instead of looking out the window.”
I felt a lump in my throat and tried to swallow it away.
“My point exactly,” Patty said. A few more seconds went by where she didn’t say anything. Maybe she was thinking about the fact that she never spent a lot of time riding around in a car with her father.
Jeff got his awkward, lumbering frame out of the Accord and got behind the wheel of a Civic. You could almost hear him making “vroom” noises under his breath as he gripped the wheel.
Patty said, “Syd and I actually watched The Little Mermaid together a few months ago and we cried like we were in fucking second grade.” It was difficult to picture the girl sitting before me now being entranced by anything remotely Disney.
“You know that cartoon about the monsters?” I said. “How they all work for a big company and their job is to scare little kids?”
“Monsters, Inc.?”
“That’s the one,” I said. “I took Sydney to that when she was, what? Ten? The ending, I started tearing up myself. You know the part I’m talking about?”
Patty Swain nodded. “Oh yeah. My mom took me to that. She snuck in a can of Coke that actually had rye in it. She’s taught me everything I know.” She grinned, hoping she could shock me.
I leaned forward. “Patty, did Sydney have any friends up in Derby?”
She looked taken aback. “I don’t think so. Derby? Fuck, no. Nobody in Derby. Why?”
I weighed whether to tell her about Syd’s car, decided against it.
“So I’m still putting the word out,” she said. “Facebook, shit like that.” The leg she’d propped over the chair arm was swinging back and forth, plus she was doing some flicking thing with the fingers of her left hand.
“I appreciate that. You’re probably reaching more people that way than I am.” I watched the leg swing. “You okay, Patty? You seem a bit on edge.”
She stopped all the seemingly involuntary body movements. “I’m cool.”
“You’re not, you know, high or something, are you?”
She laughed. “Shit, Mr. B., you’re something.”
Laura Cantrell was doing a slow walkabout through the showroom, graceful as a gazelle despite the five-inch heels. She swept by my desk, not saying a word to either of us, wandered between the cars. It felt as though the thermostat had been turned down.
Laura Cantrell slipped back into her office. Patty had been aware of her the whole time.
She said, “Seriously, that chick needs to get banged.”
“I know I’ve asked you this a thousand times, Patty, but where could she have gone?” I asked. “If she wasn’t working at the hotel, where was she?”
“I don’t know. It’s totally fucked up.”
“I’ve been all up and down Route 1, going into every shop and business. No one knows anything about her.”
That made me think, just for a second, about Ian, from Shaw Flowers, how he could have looked at Syd’s picture a little longer before saying he hadn’t seen her.
“You were her best friend,” I said. “And yet she didn’t tell you what she was really doing.”
She nodded. “I swear, I thought she was working at that place. She never told me any different. The thing is, she’s not like me. She wouldn’t be looking for trouble. I was born for it.”
I flashed her a weary smile. “Thanks for dropping by. If you think of anything…”
She nodded, blinked furiously several times, like maybe she was warding off tears. “Sure,” she said, getting out of the chair. “The thing is, I was wondering…”
“What is it, Patty?”
“You know this new job I got at the mall?”
“At the jewelry place?”
She nodded, like this was no big deal. “Yeah. So you have to work for a month before you get your first paycheck, and my mom, well, you know, she’s kind of tapped out herself at the moment, and it’s not like my dad’s sending me a check every month.”
“You can’t be asking me for money, Patty,” I said.
“Sure,” she said, her face flushing. “I get that.”
I looked at her a moment, then took a twenty out of my wallet and handed it to her. She took the bill and stuffed it down the front pocket of her jeans. They were on so tight she had trouble getting her fingers in there.
“Thanks,” she said. “You want to grab something tonight or anything?”
Trying to fill the gap left by Sydney, Patty had dropped by half a dozen times in the last few weeks with surprise deliveries of McDonald’s or Burger King or Subway, which I always paid her back for.
“I don’t think so, not tonight,” I said.
I could see the disappointment in her eyes. “That’s okay,” she said. “Catch you later.”
As she walked past Andy Hertz’s desk, hips swaying, she said, “Hey there, Andy Panda,” and kept on walking.
Andy, who was working his way through the page from the phone book, making cold calls, mumbled a “Hey.”
Patty had been in here enough to know Andy, but that seemed a little familiar.
Jeff got out of the Civic and ran to catch up to Patty, dropping a set of keys on my desk as he went by. “Someone left these in the car,” he said.
SEVEN
I USED TO WONDER HOW PEOPLE DID IT.
You’d watch the news, and there’d be some couple who’d lost a child in a fire. The mother of that girl who went missing in Bermuda and was never found. A father whose son was killed in a bar fight. Once, there was a story about a girl whose class went on a skiing trip, and there was an avalanche and she was buried under several feet of snow and the rescue workers couldn’t find her. And there were her parents, weeping, holding out hope their daughter was still alive, and you knew there was simply no way.
How the hell do they do it? I’d say to the TV.
I figured, something like that happens to a loved one, everything just stops. How can it not?
But I was realizing that everyone does go on. You get up. You have breakfast. You go to work. You do your job. You come home, have some dinner, go to bed.
Just like everybody else.
But it’s always there. You go on, but you don’t go on. Because there’s this weight, and you can feel it all the time, like you’ve got a cinder block sitting on each shoulder, pushing you down, wearing you out, making you wonder whether you’ll be able to get up the next day.
And son of a bitch, you do get up. That day, and the day after, and the day after that. With those blocks on your shoulders.
