Darren could tell Randie was urging him to do something.
But he was not about to tell his mother any further details about his life. He did not want her in possession of the knowledge that he’d just turned in his badge. It was only because he had designs on a proposal to Randie that he said something vague about asking around to see if someone else had filed a missing person report, her parents maybe. He could try to find out a little more, he said. But he was sure there was nothing to worry about, the whole thing likely a misunderstanding.
“You find her parents, you make sure to tell them I got her things out the trash,” Bell said, jutting out her chin righteously. “I wasn’t about to let them just throw out that child’s stuff like she never even existed.”
“You moved evidence?” Darren said.
The question was pure instinct, going all the way back to his years in law school.
At the word evidence, Darren thought he saw his mother crack a smile.
“So you do think something funny is going on,” she said.
She had been enjoying herself too much for him to take any of it seriously. She had been having too much fun: announcing that she, a champion drunk, had quit booze; playing a mild-mannered amateur sleuth concerned about a black girl who’d gone missing — giving her a bona fide reason to command her son’s attention — a black girl who she’d claimed reminded her of herself, when Bell Callis had, at that girl’s age (younger, in fact), been a knocked-up teenager and nowhere near a college campus.
“And who knocked her up?” Randie asked now, finally sitting up in bed, the covers falling to her waist. The windows were original to the house and thin as a sheet of ice over a shallow pond, the glass as cloudy too, especially now, as the heat of their lovemaking still hung in the air, dampening to the touch everything in the room. He should get up and adjust the thermostat, but he felt leaden. The shock of seeing his mother had worn off, and in its place was a creeping sadness. It lived, as it always had, behind the anger. He kept a pint in the top drawer of his nightstand, alongside his Colt .45, a jar of antacids, and matches for the scented candles Randie liked. He sat up too, pulling out the bottle for a drink. Randie turned, watching him. She never said anything about his drinking. He caught looks sometimes, but as with everything else about Darren, she seemed to accept him completely, even as she gently pushed at his complacency, the aspects of his life he thought had been decided years ago. “It’s just interesting to me how much you frame your problems with your mother in such a way as to leave out the men who played a part in why your life turned out the way it did.”
“My dad died, Randie.” He played with the cap on the bottle, twisting it open and then closed. “Can’t blame him for not being around for Bell when I was born.”
“Not talking about blame,” she said. “At all.”
Then, kissing his shoulder, she added, “Just what happened.”
“Well, he was drafted, so there wasn’t much that could have been done.”
“I thought you said he was in school at the time.”
Had he said that? He knew bits and pieces of his father’s life, but they existed in a haze of the world before Darren was in it. His father wasn’t real to him. But Bell was, painfully so. “Well, how else would he have ended up in Vietnam?” he said, even as something felt off in his body. Randie said that surely his father would have gotten a deferment. Hadn’t all the Mathews men been educated? This talk made Darren’s head feel heavy, his thoughts fuzzy in the warmth of the room, confused by the tangle of questions. “He died in Vietnam,” he said, firmly repeating what he’d been told.
Randie turned her body away from him.
The room was small enough that she reached out a big toe and wiped condensation from the window on her side of the bed. It let in the moonlight once more, threw a gorgeous haze over everything. He was ready to nod off when Randie asked him again if he was going to check on the missing black girl, the Stephen F. Austin student. He reminded her he was no longer a Ranger, that he had no jurisdiction or cause to get involved. If the girl was missing, it wouldn’t go unnoticed. Her parents, professors, friends, someone would eventually file a report. “Your mother tried that.”
“My mother is not credible or an interested party.”
“A black girl is missing, and two law enforcement agencies and the girls at her sorority don’t seem the least bit concerned. I would think this would make you an interested party. I am, at least. I mean, Jesus, Darren, I lost my husband to this racist state. I can’t help but think someone out there cares about that girl and wants to know what the hell happened to her. You could at least alert the Rangers’ office in Houston.”
“What girl, Randie? We don’t know that any of this is real, that my mother didn’t make up this whole horseshit story —”
“To what end, Darren? What exactly would be her endgame here?”
She’d raised her voice at him.
“Why are you getting so upset?” he said.
“Because you’re being glib, cynical about this.”
“The woman tried to frame me for a fucking crime,” he said. “For all I know, she made this up as a cover for the fact that she was just in town testifying against me in front of a grand jury.” He uncapped the bottle again and nearly drained it. “My mother is a liar.”
Watching him drink, Randie came as close as she ever had to a sneer of irritation.
“I’m just saying, Darren, the reason I’m here right now… this whole thing that happened between us, how we found each other in this world… is because you were a man who did something when you saw something fucked up going on in this state. You took action in Lark, that shit-ass town. It’s part of what I love about you. Part of the reason I’m here, in your bed, is because —”
“So you want me to take on another murder case so you can get off?”
The sharp intake of breath coming from Randie’s side of the bed sucked all the warmth out of the room. If he’d thought he saw irritation in her eyes before, it had been replaced with contempt. He knew it was bad, that he’d been crude and cruel. Gross. He reached for her hand, but she swatted it away. She stood from the bed and dragged the entire quilt and comforter in a huge tangle as she walked toward the bedroom door. She turned back and looked at him for a long time. He watched her breath rise and fall in deep waves. He thought to say something, but he was a coward. And drunk. So, so drunk. Randie fixed her mouth to maybe say the same, but then she simply walked out, leaving him alone with the smell of the blood he’d drawn. For the first time since they’d been together, Randie slept in the guest room.
5.
SHE WAS gone by morning. And he was somehow more upset than he’d been the night before. He’d been an ass, yes. But she had been wrong for downplaying facts of his life that she didn’t understand, talking down to him about his relationship with a woman she hardly knew. He decided he was furious. That lasted until he drank his way through every bottle in the house. Then, after two days in a stumbling fog, with only his righteousness keeping him half upright, he awoke on the floor, laid low by a hammer-like pulse in his head that nearly blacked his vision, by a hollowed-out feeling in the center of his chest. He beat at it a few times to see if he was still in there, still alive.
Then he rolled over and threw up.
He lay there on his side for a while, trying to divine the events of the past few days in the pool of sick on his grandmother’s rug, to tell him what had happened. Bilious and thin, the greenish-yellow liquid was sinking quickly into the fibers. He saw in it evidence that he’d at least eaten in the past forty-eight hours, traces of heirloom tomatoes from his garden and the whippoorwill peas — when in the world had he cooked those? — he’d intended to prepare to welcome Randie to what he’d hoped would be her home. He remembered the ring suddenly, his plans to propose.
He felt the hole in his chest open so wide it swallowed him completely. He felt himself disappear into a darkness that was so thick and damp that he thought he’d actually gone through the floor, sinking into the earth below, that Randie walking out on him had buried him alive, and that it was a death he deserved for how ugly he’d behaved, for how callous he had been with her feelings about another person of color potentially in trouble in the state of Texas, another family out there somewhere without answers.
The buzzing of his cell phone told him he wasn’t dead. He must have passed out again. The climb to sitting upright enough to get the phone on the coffee table was as messy and arduous as clawing his way back to life. His shirt was creased with sweat and stains he didn’t recognize, and he had to wipe his mouth with the back of his hand to clear the filament of vomit on his chin. His long legs cracked at the joints as he unfolded them to reach for his cell phone. He noticed for the first time that the curtains on all the windows were pulled back, and the door to the back patio was open, revealing a view of rolling acres of green behind the house. The scent of pine tickled his nose hairs. Had he slept with the doors open? He thought he heard running water outside — or was it coming from the single bathroom that sat between the guest room and Darren’s bedroom? His heart lifted for a fanciful moment, thinking maybe Randie had returned, that he might throw himself at her feet and apologize profusely.
But it couldn’t be Randie in the house.
Not when it was her calling his phone now.
He snatched it up, answering quickly. “Randie.”
He heard her sigh, a rush of relief in her voice. “You’re alive, then,” she said.
“Listen —”
