Cold Shadow (Cold Country #2)(70)

"I don't have a grandmother. I never had a grandmother. And what does it matter? Who gives a shit what I do? Nathan has to work in this town, I don't want them talking about him like he's shit. I want him to be able to walk down the street and hold his head up. I don't want this town calling him faggot and … " She was laughing at him. He stopped talking because he'd obviously lost his goddamned mind.

"Nathan can handle people talking about him. He's handled it for years. Hell, he was handling it before y'all even graduated high school. I heard the kids call him fatboy when we walked by. He'd hold my hand and I'd trot after him because I was tiny and he'd forget. Hey, fatboy is that your afternoon snack? Fattening her up with an ice cream before you eat her? Shit like that. He never let it get to him."

"It got to him," Quinn said, remembering all too well what kids they thought were friends said to Nathan back then. He was a slow reader. They called him retard. He'd just hang his head and pretend he didn't hear them, and that made it all worse. "I think I was the only one who knew how much it bothered him. I'm the only one who ever saw him cry."

He had no idea where he was going. He just drove. They were nearing the school as if he'd somehow been drawn to the damned place. The football field was set off to the side. The stadium had been updated sometime in the past few years. New buildings stood between the main building and the field. A new parking lot. The whole town had changed since he'd left. He didn't know his own hometown anymore. He didn't have a connection to this place. His last connection was dead and buried. He could take his daughter and never come back and that would be it. Nathan and his family were all he had tying him to this place. And he'd fucked that up. 

"What are we doing here?" Natalie said a couple of minutes later. She hadn't been paying attention either, it seemed.

"I don't know. I was driving. I haven't really been back here since we graduated …  God, how long ago was that now? Nearly twenty years ago. When did we get old, Nat?" He pulled into the grass field that had always served as parking for the players. Today the fieldhouse was empty and locked up, but he knew that summer camp would be starting soon. Maybe even next week. Nathan used to have to start halfway through summer break, leaving him on his own for days. "That night … right after we walked off the field with the fake scroll of paper in our hands. That's the last time I saw him cry. He wasn't stupid. God, he hated school so much. He endured school."

"I don't remember," Natalie said so softly he almost didn't hear her. "I was too young to remember much. I guess maybe I thought he was the best big brother in the world, you know. Like that little girl in that Halloween movie who thinks her big brother will stand up to the bullies who stole his shoes, and he lets her down. Nathan never let me down."

"Until today," Quinn couldn't help saying.

"No, that was you," Natalie said succinctly. "You let me down."

He had no reply to that. He tried to stop the memory of Nathan sitting in his Jeep, still wearing that stupid cap with the tassel hanging in his face. It was all over. But it wasn't. Not for Nathan. College loomed in front of them, and he didn't know how to tell his father that he didn't want to go. Not even to play football. The girls who'd called him fat tried to get his attention now that he'd outgrown his pudgy days. Quinn had hated them all. He'd put the Jeep in reverse and had driven off as fast as he could. Nathan's graduation cap had gone flying in the spring night air. He'd laughed and Quinn had driven up to the lake cabin because he didn't know where else to go to be alone with him.

He wasn't on the road up to the cabin, not this time. He didn't know where he was going when he left the school. Natalie must have realized and started giving him directions. They were looking for her boyfriend … not his lost youth.

He turned when she told him to turn.

Every place they went had too many memories. Or ghosts. None of the old hangouts were left. Closed or torn down or a church had moved into the vacant buildings. One old burger place was now a dog grooming shop. Even the arcade was gone. And that was the last place he thought about. The old arcade out in that little strip shopping center near the plant. It had been there since before he was born. An old gas station-turned-convenience store on one end with a butcher shop in the middle. He and Nate had spent a lot of afternoons out at that arcade when they were working summers up at the plant part-time.

And then Nate was gone, and it was just him left to figure out what to do with his life. That's when he'd first fallen down the rabbit hole.

Night was starting to fall when Natalie tried Lonnie's number for the millionth time. "I don't know where else to look," she said, and he could hear tears in her voice. They'd been driving around for more than an hour. Nearly two hours. They were running out of town to search. "Nathan isn't answering either," she said after a minute and the hairs on the back of his neck stood on end.