by Susan Perabo
If she hoped to survive this—this motherhood (the word now felt just a tiny bit sinister when she heard it in her head)—she would have to change her tactics.
•
Two months after the “porker” incident, after everyone but her had forgotten it (or at the very least moved on from it), she walked into exam room 3 on a dreary Tuesday afternoon to find Logan Boone supine in the chair, the blue paper bib chained around his neck. She actually did a bit of a double-take. She had seen him so often swaggering down the sidewalk that this was the image of him that had burned itself into her mind, so much so that even in her little indulgent fantasies of confrontation it was always that school street sidewalk where she faced him down. He looked small in the chair—everyone did, flattened out like that, bug on its back—but even horizontal there were angles in his body that seemed consciously intended to illustrate his superiority.
“Everything looks okay,” the tech said, handing Claire the chart.
“I’ll just take a peek, then,” Claire said. This was the way it worked. For the standard checkup, the tech did 95 percent of the work, then Claire or Mark came in at the tail end to confirm that all was well. People expected to see the dentist, if only for a couple minutes at the end of the appointment. They’d paid a hundred bucks—or their insurance company had—and they needed face time with someone with a “Dr.” in front of his or her name.
Claire sat down on the stool beside Logan Boone, looked at her tray of instruments, and picked up the scaler.
“Open,” she said, and he did, without looking at her. She was certain Logan Boone had no idea who she was. His gums were bright pink from cleaning, his teeth smooth and well spaced. He’d already lost six of his baby teeth; Evan had only lost one.
She located the spot where the most recent baby tooth had vacated—it looked like only several days before—and poked the point of the scaler into his tender pink gum.
“Ayyyy,” Logan said, his face twisting.
“Be still,” she said. She readjusted herself on the stool. “There’s just a little something here.”
“Wha’?” Logan asked.
She twisted the point into the gum where the new adult tooth was forming and Logan gasped in pain. His eyes, for a moment, lost their hardness and there was fear in them. No, Claire thought, it went deeper than that—it was the pleading look: astonishment, confusion, betrayal. Claire often thought that it was precisely this expression that made so many dentists so miserable, a look regularly given to dentists but almost never to doctors, a frantic look born of pure pain and irrationality: Why are you doing this to me?
She saw it all the time, midprocedure, not only from children but from adults, people who understood full well the necessity of the work being done on them, being done to them. This, of course, what she was doing to Logan right now, was a different kind of necessity.
“Got it,” she said, looking Logan straight in the eye, just to see if she could. His eyes were thick with tears and his lips were quivering. You big baby, she thought. You pathetic, horrible crybaby. “Rinse out,” she said.
She slept better that night. The pit in her stomach subsided. There were things that could be done. Perhaps her children were defenseless, her boy just seven, her girl nearly three. But she was ready to enter a new phase of parenting. The joy was ending, and the battle beginning. At least she, the dentist, had some decent tools with which to fight for them.
3
When she reached the door of the Chestnut Street Deli Barn and saw that bitch Lisa Bellow posing at the counter inside, Meredith nearly turned on her heel and headed home. Forget the soda. She didn’t need it. Yes, its promise had propelled her through that final problem on the algebra test. Yes, its promise had helped dispel the nagging disappointment that she had not had enough time to graph the asymptotes on that final problem and thus would at best only get half credit for it (and only if Mrs. Adolphson was feeling in an extremely generous mood). But it wasn’t like she was desperate for a soda, like going without one would kill her.
There was no one in the Deli Barn besides Lisa and the curly-haired guy who made the subs—“Sandwich Farmer,” his shirt proclaimed—so Meredith would have to say something upon entering in order to not look like a total whack job, and she didn’t particularly want to have to think up something to say to Lisa that was at once fiercely clever and totally nonchalant. She had done enough thinking today, thank you very much. Often after school she felt as if she’d just spent seven hours and fifteen minutes on stage, with two brief intermissions during which she sat on a stone-cold toilet in a tiny stall cursing herself for all the missed cues and blown lines. Now, after curtain, all she wanted from the remainder of the afternoon was a large root beer and a peaceful 1.19-mile walk home in the dwindling warmth of early October. But of course there was Lisa Bellow to screw things up, Lisa Bellow who had taken so much from Meredith already, Lisa Bellow, taking again, this time a root beer.
Lisa glanced up in the direction of the door and the girls’ eyes touched for a moment through the glass. There was nothing extraordinary in the eye contact, really only the merest shade of recognition, but now Meredith was trapped; a hasty retreat, witnessed by the enemy, would be just another heap of coal in the furnace that powered their operation, further proof that Lisa and her friends controlled not only the middle school itself, but also the quiet streets, small businesses, and suburban neighborhoods that lay just beyond it.
Meredith took an instant to gather herself then casually pushed open the jingling door—there were bells attached that looked like Christmas bells, though they were there year-round—and setting her head at a disinterested angle, muttered “hey” in the general direction of Lisa and the sandwich farmer. Then she went to the potato-chip rack and began studying the nutrition information on the back of a bag of Doritos while Lisa ordered her sandwiches.
Meredith thought back to the summer between third and fourth grade, approximately a hundred and seventy-five thousand years before, when she and Lisa Bellow had both taken tennis lessons with about thirty other grade school kids at the community park. This was long before anyone was a bitch—before anyone was anything, come to think of it—and one sweltering morning Lisa Bellow had been smacked in the face with a recklessly swung Venus Williams junior racquet and her bottom lip had burst open and the instructor told Meredith (who was close enough to the incident to receive a shower of Lisa’s blood on her white shorts) to take the injured girl to the Snak Shed for some ice. Meredith and Lisa wound up spending the remainder of the morning eating snow cones in the blissful rectangle of shade thrown by the Shed, watching all the other kids getting yelled at for sloppy footwork and poor follow-through. Meredith was 98 percent certain that Lisa had no recollection of this event, that she had blocked it out, or perhaps even rewritten it with Meredith in the role of the clingy flunky sent for ice. But Meredith was sure there had been no flunky on that day, because she recalled vividly the surprise she’d felt when Lisa Bellow, her fingers green with lime snow-cone syrup, had brushed a wayward strand of hair from her face and said, “This is the best day of my whole summer.”
Not that it mattered what she’d said, what either of them had said or done, what either of them remembered. They’d been babies then, nine years old, and nothing that happened when you were nine counted for anything anymore. You certainly couldn’t collect on it now. Not that she would have wanted to anyway.
Lisa was ordering two sandwiches. One was turkey and provolone with light mayonnaise and the other a foot-long club with pickles and green peppers and extra onions. Meredith guessed that the sandwich with all the onions was for the boy in the picture in Lisa’s locker, the tan boy on the beach with the Frisbee. Lisa was probably headed to his place right now. He’d probably texted her—pick me up a sandwich—on his way home from the high school. A girlfriend and a sandwich delivery service in one! His parents at work, his man cave thick with the funk of Phoenix-scented Axe body spray (she knew this smell well, from he
r own bathroom), the boy with the Frisbee would devour his sandwich right before he climbed on top of Lisa and stuck his thick oniony tongue halfway down her throat.
“Just one stripe of mayo,” Lisa was telling the sandwich farmer. Meredith noticed that she had her iPhone in her hand. It was the newest iPhone, naturally, and the biggest, large enough to contain Lisa’s large life. Meredith’s phone was Evan’s hand-me-down and the screen had been cracked for over a month, ever since she’d dropped it out the car window while trying to take a picture of a rainbow. Lisa was wearing the usual uniform: black leggings and a white, cold-shoulder peasant top, its straps just barely wide enough to pass the school district’s two-finger rule.
“Not a big glob,” Lisa said. “Just one little stripe.”
Meredith had had this exact exchange with various sandwich farmers before, but she was sure she hadn’t sounded so nasty when she said it, like it was this guy’s entire purpose in life to measure out mayonnaise, like this was what he’d gone to school for, to differentiate between a stripe and a glob to make this eighth-grade bitch the perfect sandwich.
The front door jingled open and Meredith turned and saw a man stride purposefully into the Deli Barn. The man had on a black ski mask—not the kind with the eyeholes cut out, but the kind that only covered the bottom half of his face, so she could see his dark eyes and pale blond eyebrows. He wore a gray hoodie that was too long—it went nearly to his thighs—and jeans and big brown hiking boots. The door closed behind him and the Christmas bells rang for a moment in Meredith’s mind even after they were still. The man was holding a gun.
Meredith had never seen a gun in real life before, except for maybe in a policeman’s holster, but this thing in the man’s hand looked exactly like every single gun she had ever seen on television, so she didn’t doubt that it was real. The man pointed the real gun at the sandwich farmer and said, “Open the register, fat ass,” which didn’t make sense because the sandwich farmer wasn’t even fat. Lisa Bellow let out a little squawk, and the man’s head swung toward the girls.
“Get on the floor,” the man said. His voice was muffled by the mask, so it sounded more like “Gone the four.” It also wasn’t clear who he was talking to, so Meredith only crouched down slightly until she saw Lisa Bellow getting on her hands and knees and then she did it, too, and felt—astonishingly—a stab of embarrassment that she had not been able or willing to do it herself initially and instead was following the lead of Lisa Bellow. What was wrong with her? This was a robbery. The Deli Barn was being robbed. The Deli Barn was being robbed and that was all and she didn’t have to worry and there was nothing wrong with her.
As she lay down she caught a fleeting glimpse of her left wrist, Steven Overbeck’s drawn-on watch buckle, blue ink already fading, joined at her pounding pulse. Her backpack was still on her back and it was incredibly heavy—her Algebra II book alone must have weighed five pounds—and it shifted and settled awkwardly across her upper back once she was flat on her stomach, its weight suddenly immense, like the weight of a whole person with his foot pressed into her shoulder blade.
Because she had been at the bread station, and Lisa a few feet ahead at the condiment station, when Meredith lay down she and Lisa were face-to-face, though their feet were pointing in opposite directions, Lisa’s toward the front door, and Meredith’s toward the potato-chip rack. The floor was cold and smelled like dishwasher detergent. Meredith could hear the sandwich farmer breathing and the jiggling of the cash register drawer.
“You know the safe combination?” the man with the gun asked.
“There’s no safe,” the sandwich farmer said.
“You wanna die in this shithole?” the man said. “Is that what you want?”
The sandwich farmer started crying, or at least it sounded like crying, or maybe hyperventilating. Meredith wasn’t sure because she couldn’t see anything except for Lisa. Lisa was crying, too. Her lips were trembling and slimy with spit, and thick teardrops slid down her cheeks and puddled on the floor about six inches from Meredith’s nose. Meredith could feel Lisa’s breath as it came out in hot little puffs. Meredith wasn’t crying. Her eyes felt dry and sore, like she’d been staring at a movie screen for a long time without blinking. In her mind she saw a picture of her and her brother sitting on Santa Claus’s lap at the Parkway Mall. She was two or three years old, and her hair was clipped back in green barrettes that were shaped like Christmas trees.
“Swear to god,” the sandwich farmer said. “I swear to god there’s no safe.”
“Show me,” the man said. “You show me.”
Meredith heard them walking into the back room. Somebody’s shoes were squeaking (sneakers), and somebody’s thunking (hiking boots). Now it would be okay. There was a door back there, to the outside—Meredith had seen sandwich farmers smoking by that door before—and the man with the too-long hoodie would see there was no safe to open and then he would run out that back door with the money he’d taken from the cash register and he would go far away, first to another state and then probably to another country, and no one would ever hear anything from him again. It would be a clean getaway. That’s how it would be described in the newspaper tomorrow: a clean getaway. Vividly, as vividly as anything in the Deli Barn, Meredith could see her family sitting around the breakfast table, her mother reading aloud from the newspaper article: “It was a clean getaway.”
Meredith licked her dry lips. “It’s okay,” she whispered to Lisa Bellow. She couldn’t remember a time she’d been so close to someone else’s face for so long. And it was especially weird because their eyes were almost perfectly in line but the rest of Lisa was upside down. “It’s okay now. It’s okay.”
Lisa’s mouth opened like a word was going to come out, but only a little wet pop came from between her lips. Thick black mascara lines connected her eyes to the floor. Meredith thought of the scorching tennis court that summer morning, all those years ago, Lisa’s lip gashed, the blood spattered on her white Nike tennis shirt. Had Lisa cried then, there on the court, or after, walking across the dry brown grass to the Snak Shed? Meredith didn’t think so. But back then there was no makeup to ruin, no face to distort so colorfully, so maybe she had, a little. Maybe, their backs propped against the Shed, Lisa had held the Baggie of ice to her face and in doing so shielded Meredith from the brimming tears in her eyes.
The thunking feet, the hiking boots, returned. The steps were heavy and unhurried. No squeaking accompanied the boots. The boots were alone. Meredith couldn’t see him, but when the thunking stopped she was pretty sure the man, the robber, was standing right behind her head, between her and the counter. He had come back without the sandwich farmer. Meredith had heard no gunshot, but something had happened in the back room and now it was just the man with the too-long hoodie and her and Lisa. And now Meredith was absolutely certain of something, as certain as she’d ever been of anything in her whole life, and that thing was as far from what she had just said to Lisa as a thing could be:
It was definitely not okay.
It was definitely definitely definitely definitely not okay. It was not okay now, not anymore, not ever again, because the man was going to kill her. He was going to shoot her in the head as she lay on this floor. This spot, this very spot, was where she was going to die. She would never see her mother or her father or her brother or her cats or her room or her toothbrush again. In a moment she was going to be dead. Now she was completely alive but in an instant she would be completely dead and she wouldn’t even know it, it would just be over, and she wouldn’t even know it was over because she herself would be over, and all the stuff in her brain—all the thoughts in her brain right now, right this second—would just be a big sticky mess on the floor of the Deli Barn. And it was now—now—now. It was this instant—no, this instant—this instant—this—
—this is me. This is really me. This is my real life.
She realized her eyes were closed, bracing for the impact of the bullet, and she wanted to see
the world one more time—even if it was just a crappy old Deli Barn—so she opened her eyes and there was Lisa Bellow staring right at her.
“Don’t worry, Meredith,” Lisa said. “It’ll be okay.” She didn’t even whisper it. She said it in a normal voice, as if nothing were wrong, or even out of the ordinary. She had stopped crying. Her cheeks were dry. Something in her face made Meredith think she was about to smile.
“You,” the man said. “Get up.”
Meredith knew from the startled look on Lisa’s face that the man was talking to Lisa. He must have touched her leg with his boot, maybe given her a nudge. Or maybe not. Maybe Lisa Bellow just knew the man was talking to her because, given the choice between the two girls lying facedown on the floor, of course the man was talking to her. And Meredith knew this, too, and did not move.
Lisa got to her feet. She stood still for a moment and Meredith (though she could see only Lisa’s sparkly gladiator sandals) had the sense she was composing herself, maybe brushing a wayward strand of hair from her face, adjusting the straps of her peasant top, slipping her Vera Bradley backpack over one shoulder. Meredith did not dare move. She didn’t even want to move her eyes. She had an idea that if she lay completely still with her eyes fixed straight ahead that she would be invisible. This was called something but she couldn’t remember what. Scared possum? What even was a possum? Was it like a porcupine without the points? The left cuff of Lisa’s black leggings had a small white mark on them, something from the floor probably, and would require washing. And her gladiator sandals were—but then they were nothing, or rather they were gone, still something but gone, out of Meredith’s sight, no longer her concern, only a recollection hovering among the settling molecules in the space they’d just occupied. Then the door opened and the Christmas bells jingled and there was a little burst of air in the restaurant, like a quick breath of October inhaling, and then a car door slammed, and then an engine rumbled, and then acceleration, and then silence.