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“Want to try Leon’s phone?”
Theo placed the call, and a recorded message told them the number was no longer in service.
“Is this—” Auggie stopped. “Should we call John-Henry again?”
“It’s a little late for that, don’t you think?”
“I know you’re upset about—well, about everything, but Theo, let’s be realistic: even if someone had called, even if someone had seen something they could report, something they could substantiate—”
“More than his pathetic bedroom, you mean?”
Auggie took a breath. “What would have happened? Best-case scenario, he would have ended up in the system, probably in a group home. You know there aren’t enough foster care parents—”
He had already passed the flash point when he caught himself; for a single moment, before Theo took control of his emotions, fury blazed in his face.
“That’s not what I meant,” Auggie said. “That’s not where I was going with this.”
Outside, the world was a heat shimmer of empty asphalt and concrete.
“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean—”
“There’s nothing to tell John-Henry,” Theo said. “Unless you saw something in there I didn’t?”
It was a question. And a challenge. And it was a kind of verbal shove, like Theo wanted to get things going.
Auggie shook his head.
“Fine,” Theo said. “Let’s—”
But his phone buzzed, and he picked it up and frowned at Emery’s name on the screen. He answered on speakerphone.
“Get your asses over to the ice plex,” Emery said. “Now.”
“We’re in the middle of something—” Theo said.
“I don’t care. Because of you two, I’m currently an accomplice to a felony. I believe the charge, when the dust settles, will be kidnapping.”
“What—” Auggie began.
“Just get over here. Fast.”
8
The ice plex hadn’t existed in Wahredua when Theo had been growing up—not that his dad would have driven them into town to go ice skating. Hockey wasn’t the Stratford sport of choice, and the Stratford boys certainly wouldn’t have been allowed to skate purely for fun—or for performance, God forbid, like a fairy. The Stratford boys played football, basketball, and baseball. Wrestling was an alternative to basketball if you were Jacob, but Jacob had always gotten special dispensations like that because Jacob was the eldest and because he was, in the ways that counted, so much like their father. Not that it had mattered in the end, Theo thought as they pulled into the parking lot for the massive structure. In the end, no amount of sports had changed what Theo had been. Hell, maybe he should have done wrestling. Maybe he should have sprung a boner and humped somebody’s leg in the middle of gym. It might have saved him some time.
“I know you’re mad at me,” Auggie said in that joking-not-joking voice he had started to use more and more often lately. “But could you not take it out on the car?”
Too late, Theo realized he was gripping the door handle hard enough to make the plastic squeak. He forced himself to release it, and he dropped his hands in his lap. When the anger got this bad, he felt like he was standing at the bottom of a well. Down, down, down. Up above him, was light and clean air and that sense of spaciousness, but here, at the bottom, everything contracted to a circle. Like a tunnel. Like the barrel of a gun. Everything had to make its way across that great distance: Auggie’s voice, the whisper of cold air across his face, the feel of the tremor in his hands, the one he was trying to hide.
What is going on with me, he thought across that vast distance. What’s wrong? It was a question he had been asking a lot in the last year.
He forced himself to say, “Sorry.”
Auggie nodded and eased the Audi into a parking stall. The lot was three-quarters full. Late afternoon balanced on the cusp of evening, but the sun still broke hot shards of light across the glass and chrome in the lot. This time of year, the light and heat had their own weight and density, pressing in, trying to fill every available space. A mom—Theo thought she was a mom—in a mauve jumpsuit was shouting at a kid as she picked up her sunglasses. The kid, five years old, maybe six, hung his head, a miniature hockey stick hanging from one hand. Theo knew how it had gone. The kid had been trying to have fun. It had gotten out of hand. A bad day tipped into something worse. The yelling started. And later—when it was too late—perspective, guilt, maybe even disbelief. Why did I react so strongly? How did I let it get so far out of hand?
“I’m sorry, Auggie.”
“It’s ok. I shouldn’t have said what I did.”
