Dismember

SEVEN

Mike parked the truck at the far end of the lot not because he couldn’t find a space closer to the food court entrance, but simply because he always parked at the far ends of lots. He wasn’t afraid the pickup might get dinged by a careless door opener or a runaway shopping cart—at this point, the truck couldn’t have looked much more battered if you’d taken a grenade to it—he liked the outskirts. That was all. After being folded into the cab of his truck for any uncomfortable length of time, he was usually ready to stretch his legs and get his blood pumping. It was one of the things Libby had loved to tease him about and one of the eccentricities he no longer had to try to defend.

He left the windows down, as was also his policy, so that the cab might be reasonably cool when he and Trevor returned. He had half a dozen ancient cassette tapes in the truck’s glove box, each worth nothing and thus more valuable than the vehicle itself. Even with the engine running and the doors unlocked, he figured the thing most likely to get nabbed would be his copy of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.

He passed through the farthest section of the lot, stepping over a curbed area of grass that acted as a traffic regulator in a way painted yellow lines never seemed to manage in the parking lots of the world. Pasted against the far side of the small island was a pile of windblown refuse comprised mostly of damp newspaper and flyers, an abstract mess of dirty papier-mâché.

Litterbugs. The mountains had their share too, of course, but somehow the grime always seemed thicker down here, less manageable. You got the impression that with a lot of dedicated clean-up you could eventually scrub those mountain roads clean but that the stains here in the lowlands were permanent.

Mike imagined a team of boy scouts with buckets and sponges going to work on the access road to his property and grinned sardonically as he stepped through the doors of the Mountain View. Upon seeing the grand carousel and the converging throng around it, however, his mind quieted, and his eyes bulged.

Jesus. A fake Santa Claus at Christmas was one thing, but the shopping mall had really gone all out with this one. Except for the music, which seemed to come from aftermarket loudspeakers inconsistent with the rest of the ornamentation, this thing was the real deal. A craftsman himself, he could appreciate the time and manual labor that had gone into the creation of such a masterpiece. In today’s pre-fabricated, cookie-cutter world, things like this carousel were remnants of an era gone forever by the wayside.

A trio of teenage girls in ripped jeans and too-tight t-shirts bumped him from behind, striding in through the doors with their heads held high and their shoulders pulled back, a royal entourage from some universe gone terribly wrong. Mike tried hard not to stare at the exposed slices of flesh through the tears in the seats of their pants.

He stepped deeper into the mall and out of the path of any future entrants. Libby had said she’d meet him in the food court, but she hadn’t specified where; Mike had counted on her finding him, maybe flagging him down or shouting his name from wherever she and Trevor might be. But he guessed she probably hadn’t known about the carousel when she’d suggested the meeting place. Keeping Trevor away from that ride would undoubtedly have been harder than keeping a hungry dog from a steaming t-bone. If Mike knew his son, there was only one place the two of them could be.

Mike walked casually past food-court diners, not in any rush. A quick look at his watch told him he’d actually arrived a few minutes early, despite the truck, and the line for the carousel was extensive. If Libby and Trevor were among that crowd, none of them would be going anywhere for quite some time anyway.

Walking closer to the waiting crowd, Mike let out a little whistle of disbelief. Two hundred people must have been standing in line, many of them children and young teenagers. Mike didn’t think he’d had that much patience as a kid. Hell, he wasn’t sure he had it now.

He moved around the perimeter of the crowd, always more comfortable away from the center of activity, scanning the field of hair, looking for Libby’s distinctively sleek do. Her hair. He’d always loved it, from the day they’d met, and he hadn’t grown so bitter that he couldn’t still see it for what it really was.

Her hair wasn’t there. He made a second lap around the crowd to double check, but he didn’t see her, and he was pretty sure he would have managed to pick her out. Trevor, being so small, might have disappeared beneath the surface of the crowd, but not Libby. Mike frowned and turned away from the carousel. Short of bulling his way through the line and screaming out their names like a rescue worker tearing through the wreckage of some collapsed building, he wasn’t sure what more he could do.

He supposed he ought to head back to the tables, see if somehow he’d passed them by. About to move in that direction, he happened to catch sight of a woman zigzagging her way down the corridor.

“Libby?” He said it quietly, could barely hear the word himself over the music coming from the loudspeakers behind him. Standing with his head cocked, he raised a hand to draw her attention, but she was looking at something behind her shoulder and didn’t seem to be aware of him at all.

He started to say her name again, but then decided he’d better move out of her way instead before she mowed him down.

He wasn’t fast enough.

He’d played football in high school, had been plowed over many times by linebackers and linesmen and once by a rival school’s mascot on a particularly embarrassing play, but that had been many years ago, and he hadn’t expected his ex-wife to come charging into him like a blitzing defenseman on an adrenaline high. He stumbled half a step back and grunted out, “Hey,” before reversing direction as quickly as he ever had in his gridiron days and moving to catch Libby before she could rebound onto her ass. He needn’t have bothered. She caught herself and seemed to consider hurrying past him without acknowledging his presence, but then she looked directly at him for the first time and stopped.

“What’s going on?” he asked her, peering into eyes maybe one blink away from a torrential tear storm. “Where’s Trevor?”

He leaned to the left and glanced around her waist, as if the boy might be hiding there. Of course, no Trevor. No Trevor anywhere, and Mike knew without Libby saying a word what had happened.

You lost him, he wanted to say, but he couldn’t phrase it that way, couldn’t make it an accusation even if he’d wanted to. She’d obviously been through enough.

“Missing,” he said simply, and Libby nodded, still not crying but looking close to it.

“I let him wait in line for the carousel,” Libby said, searching the area immediately around them with her eyes while she spoke. “He wanted to wait alone, didn’t want me—” She laughed a little in a way that made Mike cringe. “Didn’t want me cramping his style, I guess. And I got up to get a refill, and when I turned around, he was just gone.” She stopped talking long enough to crane her neck over a group of baggily dressed boys before continuing. “I talked to the girls he’d been standing in line with and a security guard and then looked in every shop I could think of but he—”

“Okay,” Mike interrupted. His natural instinct was to pull her to him and give her a big hug, maybe calm her down a little, but they were long beyond the days of such intimate contact. He settled for clutching her shoulder. “Don’t worry, okay. We’ll find him.”

“I don’t know where he could have gone.” Libby was understandably antsy, shuffling her feet, moving her fingernails toward her mouth.

“Let’s walk and talk,” Mike said, knowing she couldn’t stay still for long.

“He promised he’d stay where I could see him,” Libby said and hurried off down the corridor, leading Mike, though only barely. “I can’t believe…I thought maybe somebody grabbed him.”

Mike glanced at the carousel crowd. Children swayed slowly on their feet, bored. Little boys danced from foot to foot and…

“You were getting a refill?” Mike asked after a sudden inspiration.

“Yeah, so? I don’t—”

“You ate supper?”

“Oh,” she said, “yeah. I didn’t know if you had plans.”

“No, it’s not that. But I think I might know where he went.”

Mike took hold of her by the upper arm and led her only long enough to be sure they were heading in the same direction; then he let go of her bicep, and they rounded the uncrowded side of the merry-go-round together, back toward the eateries and the munching customers. He didn’t come to the mall any more often than anyone else, and certainly far less often than many people, but he knew his way around well enough.

“Where are we going?” Libby’s flats clacked against the floor. Dressed in well-worn sneakers, Mike had the grace of a cat burglar in comparison, though he chugged along just as swiftly.

Mike let her question go unanswered. Just a few more seconds and she’d see for herself.

Between the Orange Julius and the Chick-fil-A stood double doors slathered with a flat gray paint and sporting bulky push bars that would have made them look unappealing, almost off limits, if they hadn’t been propped most of the way open. Shoppers might still have confused them for fire exits if not for the belying placards screwed into the drywall overhead. Two icons; probably some of the most universally recognized in the world: little stick man, little stick woman.

The restrooms.

Mike and Libby stepped side by side through the two openings, moving together though momentarily separated by the thick steel jamb between them.

The acoustics here were very different, probably designed to spook you and get you back out into the mall where you could spend, spend, spend. The sound of their footsteps echoed off the walls. The music from the carousel ricocheted into the hallway after them.

The plain, white walls held no pictures or advertisements to draw the eye and should have been almost blindingly bright, but something about the quality of the light made them seem darker, more depressing. The way Mike imagined halls might look in a mental institution.

Still hurrying, almost jogging, they turned a corner to find the entrances to the facilities. Mike moved to the right-hand doorway, the men’s entrance, and sensed Libby surging along behind him; he stopped and held his hands out in a halting gesture.

“Whoa. Where are you going? Don’t you think maybe you ought to wait out here?”

“To hell with that,” she said, never slowing.

Grinning just a little, Mike followed her into the men’s room. “Just watch out for yellow puddles,” he said.

One look at the floor proved that to be a wise bit of advice. A second, equally important suggestion might have been: hold your breath. Mike didn’t think Libby would have any problems figuring that one out on her own.

At the second of the three urinals, a rotund man in a wrinkled shirt glanced from Libby to Mike and then quickly back to Libby. It was cinematic, the kind of double take a guy only did when he was an actor and he’d read it in his script. Mike expected him to shout out something like, Get outta here, lady, this is the men’s, but instead he zipped himself up prematurely and waddled away from the unflushed urinal with a quarter-sized wet spot to one side of his fly. He didn’t stop at the sinks, just rubbed his hands on the sides of his pants.

Mike shuddered and reminded himself never to touch anything in public again.

Libby moved to the first of the stalls. “Trevor, hon, you here?”

Mike wouldn’t have chosen the word hon to address someone as likely to be a horny biker with a bad case of constipation as their son, but he held his tongue.

A brief hesitation followed, and Mike had time to wonder if there was anybody in the room besides Libby and himself, and then a single-word response floated out to them from behind the closed door of the last stall: “Mommy?”

Libby’s body slumped. It was like every tensed muscle relaxed at once. She let out a little gasp of a cry. “Trevor. Thank God!”

They walked together to the locked door. “Hey, bud,” Mike said, standing close to the one-inch gap between the door and the frame but not looking in, wanting to give his son at least a hint of privacy. “You okay in there? Didn’t fall in, did you?”

“Daddy?” Trevor sniffed, and Mike realized the boy had been crying. “I…messed myself.”

Mike shared a sympathetic look with Libby, trying to think of some way to respond, but Libby beat him to the punch. “Hey, that’s no problem. Happens to the best of us. We’re gonna get you fixed up good as new. Okay?”

Another sniff. “Kay.”

Mike had to admire her. She was probably still upset with Trevor for wandering off, and maybe more so with herself for losing sight of him, but with just a mouthful of words she’d shown that her compassion outweighed her anger and that she could put Trevor’s feelings ahead of her own.

“But my shorts,” Trevor said. “They’re—”

“Never mind those,” Libby said. “You stay here and let your daddy help you get cleaned up, and I’ll go get you some all new ones.”

Mike looked at her approvingly, but she didn’t seem to notice.

“Push your dirty clothes out here, and we’ll take care of them,” she said.

A pair of elastic-waisted jean shorts slid under the door. Spiderman undies followed, and Trevor admitted in a trembling voice, “I got some on my socks and shoes, too.”

“Give em up,” Mike said. Libby scooped the soiled garments from the floor with no hesitation despite the streaking veins of fecal matter. Not so long ago, they’d changed his diapers for him; Mike supposed his poop was probably about the same now as it had been then, and they’d spent most of the first three years of Trevor’s life covered in it. What did a little more matter?

The first shoe rolled out to them and landed upright, the laces loosened but still knotted. The second ended up beside it on its side. Trevor had rolled the socks up inside.

While Mike examined the sneakers and the socks, Libby took the shorts and underwear to the trashcan, balled them up and tossed them in. At home, Mike knew, she’d have dropped them in the washing machine instead—neither of them had ever been rich enough that they could afford to throw out perfectly good, if temporarily soiled, clothes—but in these circumstances, Mike didn’t blame her a bit. He sure as hell didn’t want to haul the outfit through the busy food court.

He took the socks to the trash and dropped them in among the other clothes, but he thought he could probably salvage the shoes.

A crackling voice come down from speakers somewhere in the ceiling.

“TREVOR PULLMAN, IF YOU CAN HEAR THIS, PLEASE COME TO SECURITY. YOUR MOTHER IS LOOKING FOR YOU. TREVOR PULLMAN, TO SECURITY, PLEASE.”

The voice cut out with a click, and Mike said, “The security guard?”

“I guess so.”

He smiled a little. “Better late than never.”

Libby didn’t respond—or smile.

“Mommy?” Trevor sounded both scared and a little confused.

“Never mind that,” Libby said. “I’m gonna get you some new clothes now, okay? Just stay here with Dad and I’ll be right back.”

“Kay.”

Mike pulled his wallet from his back pocket and fished through the bills inside. “Here, let me give you some money. I’ll see if I can’t get these shoes fit to be seen while you’re gone.”

“No,” Libby said too quickly, “I can pay for—” She patted her right shoulder, then gave Mike a look he hadn’t seen often in all the years they’d been together. A look like she’d forgotten to turn off the stove or left the garage door open, a combination of forgetfulness and stupidity. He half expected her to slam her palm into her forehead. She didn’t.

“My purse.”

Mike didn’t have time to respond. She was halfway out of the bathroom, tossing the crumpled paper towels into the trashcan like an NBA player banking an easy lay-up. He followed her to the exit.

She spun around and saw him watching her. He thought from the look on her face that she might ask him a question, but instead she said, “Thanks. For helping me find him.”

“No problem.” He leaned his shoulder against the white block wall.

“But I would have found him on my own.”

Mike crossed his arms over his chest and said seriously, “I know you would have.” He meant it and could tell she knew.

“Back in a jiff.” And then she was around the corner and gone.

Mike uncrossed his arms, pushed himself away from the wall, and re-entered the bathroom to help his son.