Shelter (Book One): A Mickey Bolitar Novel

SLEEP DIDN’T COME easily that night.

I thought about Bat Lady. I thought about Ashley. But mostly I thought about my mother coming home in the morning. At seven A.M., Myron drove me to the Coddington Rehabilitation Institute. The drive was only about ten minutes, but it felt ten times longer. When we arrived, I jumped out of the car before it even came to a stop. Myron called out to me that he’d wait out here. I waved thanks in mid-sprint.

The security guard nodded and called me by name as I flew by him. Everyone here knows me. I visit my mother every day, except when their protocol doesn’t allow it.

Christine Shippee owned the place, but she also liked to work the front desk. Her facial expression was permanently set on grumpy, peering intensely at everyone through a Plexiglas window. I nodded at her and rushed through a lobby that reminded me of a fancy hotel. I stopped at the entrance so she could buzz me right in. She didn’t. I walked over to where she sat.

She studied me for a moment. “Good morning, Mickey.”

“Good morning, Mrs. Shippee.”

“Big day,” Christine said.

“Yep.”

“I’ve warned you all about the pitfalls.”

“You have.”

“And I’ve told you how the chances of relapse are somewhat high.”

“Several times.”

“Super.” Christine Shippee looked at me over her reading glasses. “Then there’s no need to repeat myself.”

“None.”

She gestured with her head toward the door. “Go. Your mother is waiting.”

I tried not to break into a sprint again, instead doing a little gallop down the corridor. When I entered her room and saw my mother, I broke into a smile. She looked great. For the past six weeks, she had been locked up in this place, detoxing, doing both group and individual therapy, taking pensive walks, exercising, eating right.

The day before Myron brought her here, my mother had gone out late to a seedy bar to get a fix. I used my fake ID—yes, I have a very good one—to get into the bar. I found her with a skuzzy guy, both half passed out, looking like something a cat had spit up.

Now the poison was out of her system. She looked like, well, my mom again.

Kitty—she wanted me to call her that for some reason, but I never did—hugged me and then she took my face in her hands. “I love you so much,” she said.

“I love you too.”

She winked and gestured to the door. “Let’s get out of here before they change their minds.”

“Good idea.”

My mom was Kitty Hammer, and as I implied before, if that name rings a bell, you’re probably a big-time tennis fan. When she was sixteen, Kitty Hammer was the number-one-ranked junior tennis player in the country. Mom was on track to be the next Venus or Billie Jean or Steffi, except something derailed her career for good:

She got pregnant with yours truly.

The world wasn’t ready for my parents’ relationship, I guess, so they ran off to parts unknown. Everyone predicted that the marriage would not last. Everyone was wrong. My mom and dad lived the corniest of love stories, and as I got older, it embarrassed me to no end. It was the kind of love that makes people jealous—and makes them cringe.

I used to want that kind of love for myself one day. Who doesn’t, right? But I don’t anymore. The problem with an all-consuming love like theirs is what happens when you lose it. Love like theirs turns two into one—so when my dad died, it was like ripping one entity in half, destroying my mom too. When we buried my father, I watched her crumble, like a puppet with its strings cut, and there was nothing I could do.

I learned a lesson from all this: that kind of obsessive storybook love was not for me. The end price was simply too high. While I liked Ashley a lot—while I cared about her and enjoyed my time with her—I would never let her or any girl get too close. Maybe she sensed that. Maybe that was why she ran away and never told me. Maybe that was why I should stop looking for her.

Uncle Myron was waiting for us next to his car. I tensed up as we approached. To say that the relationship between my mother and Myron was strained would be a gross understatement. They pretty much hated each other. It was Myron, six weeks ago, who had threatened to take me away from her if she didn’t agree to intensive rehabilitation.

I was surprised then when she walked up to him and gently kissed him on the cheek. “Thank you.”

He nodded, said nothing.

My mother has always been frighteningly honest with me. She was barely seventeen when she got pregnant with me, my dad nineteen. Myron thought that she had trapped my father. Myron called her names, even telling my dad that the baby—me—probably wasn’t even his. It culminated in a fight between the two brothers that ripped them apart in a way that meant they would never be brought back together.

I know all this because my mother told me. She never forgave Myron for what he said about her. But here Mom was, fresh out of rehab, letting go of the past, surprising him, surprising me, and maybe that was the best sign of all.

As promised, Uncle Myron just dropped us off and left. “I’ll be at the office if you need anything,” he said. “The spare car is in the garage if you need one.”

“Thank you,” Mom said. “Thank you for everything.”

Myron had converted the ground-level office into a bedroom for my mother. I would be in the basement below while Myron had the master bedroom upstairs. Most nights, before I came into his life, Myron stayed in a famous apartment building in Manhattan. My hope was, now that my mother was home, he’d go back to that routine and give us some privacy until we could get on our feet and find a place of our own.

Mom practically skipped into her room. When she saw the clothes laid out on the bed, she turned to me with a smile and said, “What’s this?”

“I just bought you a few things.”

It was nothing much. Some jeans and tops from a discount department store. Just enough to get her started. She came over and hugged me. “You know something?” she said to me.

“What?”

“We’re going to be okay.”

I flashed back to when I was twelve. Mom, Dad, and I were spending three months in Ghana. They did charity work for the Abeona Shelter, a group that specialized in feeding and caring for poor and at-risk children. My father often left us for two or three days at a time, doing missions in even more remote areas. One night when he was gone, I woke up with chills and a spiked fever. I felt so awful that I thought I was going to die. My mother rushed me to the hospital. It turned out I had malaria. I was woozy and dazed and sure that I wasn’t going to make it. For three days, Mom never left my side. She held my hand and kept telling me that I was going to be okay, and it was her tone that made me believe it.

I heard that tone again now.

“I’m so sorry,” Mom said.

“It’s fine,” I said.

“What I did. What I became . . .”

“It’s behind us.”

Here was what she didn’t get: Mom had taken care of me my whole life. It was okay for it to be my turn for a while.

She started unpacking, humming while she did. She asked me about school and basketball. I gave her only the basics. I didn’t want to worry her, so I didn’t tell her about Ashley or especially about Bat Lady and what she’d said about Dad being alive. Don’t get me wrong, I wanted to share all that with her. Like I said before, my mother was ridiculously open. But it wasn’t the kind of thing you told someone the day she leaves rehab. It could wait.

My phone buzzed. I looked down at the incoming call. It was Spoon, his third call this morning. Mom said, “Why don’t you get that?”

“It’s just someone from school.”

That pleased her. “A new friend?”

“I guess.”

“Don’t be rude, Mickey. Answer it.”

So I did, stepping into the hallway. “Hello?”

“Only male turkeys gobble,” Spoon said. “Female turkeys make more of a clicking sound.”

For this he called three times? Oh boy. “Great, Spoon, but I’m kind of busy.”

“We forgot about Ashley’s locker,” Spoon said.

I switched hands. “What about it?”

“She had a locker here, right?”

“Right.”

“Maybe there’s a clue in it.”

Genius, I thought. But I didn’t want to leave Mom alone. “Let me call you back,” I said, and pressed End.

When I came back in the room, Mom said, “What was that about?”

“Just something going on at school.”

“What?”

“It’s not important.”

She looked at her watch. It was eight thirty. “You’re going to be late.”

“I thought I’d stay with you today,” I said.

Mom arched an eyebrow. “And miss school? Oh, I don’t think so. Don’t worry. I’ve got a lot to do. I need to buy some more clothes. I need to go food shopping so I can make us dinner. I need to go back to Coddington for outpatient therapy in the afternoon. Come on, I’ll drive you.”

There was no room for protest, so I grabbed my backpack. Mom played the pop station and sang along softly. Normally her singing, off-key and enthusiastic as it was, made me roll my eyes. Not today. I sat next to her, closed my eyes, and just listened.

For the first time in so long, I let myself feel hope. This woman driving me to school was my mom. The junkie we had dropped off six weeks ago wasn’t. That’s what they don’t tell you. The drugs didn’t just change her. They stole her away, made her into something she wasn’t.

We stopped in front of the school. I didn’t want to leave her. She told me again not to worry.

“I’m going to the supermarket right now,” she said. “Then I’m going to prepare us the absolute best dinner in the history of the world.”

Mom was a great cook. She had learned how to prepare all kinds of exotic dishes during our years in exotic lands. “What are you making?”

She leaned in conspiratorially. “Spaghetti and meatballs.”

Man, that sounded great. Talk about a perfect choice. Mom’s spaghetti and meatballs, as she well knew, were my favorite. Pure comfort food. She took my face in both of her hands. She always did that, held my face. “I love you so much, Mickey.”

I almost cried right then and there. “I love you too, Mom.”

I started to get out of the car but she put a hand on my forearm.

“Wait.” She fumbled for something in her purse. “You’ll need a note, right? For being late?” She jotted one down. When I got out of the car, she drove off, smiling and waving. Anybody watching would think that she was just another mom dropping her kid at school.