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.