The Fall of Lisa Bellow

by Susan Perabo

  “She wouldn’t stop bitching about the chair,” he said. “She said we should get new chairs because the ones we have are uncomfortable. I swear, I thought about leaving her there with the bite wing in her cheek and going for coffee.”

  “You should have,” she said. “Sometimes, well, we need to, you know—”

  “Teach zem a lesson?” he said, pretending to crack his knuckles.

  Well, there was her opening. “Seriously, honey, listen,” she said. “Okay, there’s this kid. He’s been picking on Evan for years. And so one time I gave him a little extra poke with the scaler.” She smiled coyly. “Just, you know, a leetle poke.”

  They were in the file room, finishing up some patient notes. It was the end of the day. Everyone had gone home. He had just knelt down to tie his shoe and now he looked up at her.

  “What?” he said.

  “I just tapped him a little bit. You know.” She held her thumb and index finger a half inch apart. “A leetle.”

  He stood up, his shoe still untied. There was no expression whatsoever on his face, which was probably the most frightening expression she had ever seen. “You’re kidding.”

  Rewind, she thought. Rewind. She actually almost prayed this word: rewind. She’d been fooled into thinking she could tell him anything, lured by a connection that in that moment—despite the fact she’d kept this secret for three years—seemed not only could withstand a little honesty but maybe even flourish because of it. Okay, well, obviously an error had been made. Rewind. Obviously she had misjudged the situation. Rewind. The non-expression on his face made this very clear.

  “I’m kidding,” she said, so utterly unconvincingly that if they’d been onstage an audience would have roared with laughter. “Of course I’m kidding.”

  “You’re not!” he’d shouted, loudly enough that she took a step back. “You’re not kidding! Jesus Christ! You’re telling me you stuck a kid in the gum because he was mean to your son? Are you really telling me that?”

  “It was one time,” she said. She was still trying to smile. “Mark, really, it was like literally for one second.”

  “But you did it! You did it. You thought about doing it and then you actually did it.”

  “I—I know. I thought—I don’t even know what I thought. I wasn’t thinking.” Appeal to fatherly instincts. Must appeal to fatherly instincts. “I was, maybe, I don’t know, maybe I felt like I was protecting Evan or something.”

  “Protecting him?” He yelled this. He never yelled. Actually, once he’d yelled at three-year-old Meredith when she’d rushed into the street in front of Independence Hall, and the entire city had screeched to a halt. “Protecting him? What the hell? How does that protect him?”

  “I know it sounds crazy,” she said. “It was just—”

  “That’s not protection, Claire,” he said. “That’s revenge. Those are two very different things.”

  “It wasn’t revenge,” she said. “It wasn’t even . . . ”

  “What?”

  “I already told you, I didn’t really even think about it,” she said. “It just happened. You know how things just sometimes happen. Don’t things ever just sometimes happen to you?”

  He didn’t answer. He just stared at her. The contempt, the utter disgust, that she had felt for Logan Boone was being reflected back at her. She wasn’t sure anyone had ever been disgusted by her before, but here it was, here was how it looked and here was how it felt. And yet, even as she stood there among the patient files, withering under her husband’s appalled gaze, she did not regret what she had done. She only regretted telling.

  •

  She was walking down the carpeted corridor, past the tooth posters, full of friendly reminders to practice responsible dental care. Sometimes she wanted to make a poster that said, FOR CHRIST SAKES, JUST BRUSH YOUR TEETH.

  Maybe it wasn’t Evan that the phone call was about. Maybe it was her father. Maybe he’d had a heart attack. She had pictured this many times, her father keeling over, because, though nearly eighty, he insisted upon pushing a hundred-pound wheelbarrow around his yard and putting Christmas lights on his roof. So this was how it would be: swift. The good-bye with her mother had been endless; with her father there would be no such torture. DOA. Nancy on the phone (technically her stepmother, though it felt odd to say this about a woman she’d never had as a mother, so only Nancy), tears, etc. She’d have to cancel everything, clear the appointment calendar, get the kids out of school. Two days before the funeral, then the funeral, then a day after—four days away for certain, maybe more for her. Why this lack of emotion? It wasn’t as if she did not love her father, only that the details were—

  “It’s a police detective,” the receptionist said.

  “What?”

  They were sitting behind the desk, three of them, in a row, silently. The one holding the phone held it out to her.

  “It’s the police,” she said.

  •

  After she’d spilled the beans about Logan Boone, Mark didn’t speak to her for two days. It was the week before Christmas. They were supposed to drive halfway across the country to see her father and Nancy. They had always loved car trips, taken them whenever they had the chance, first when it was just the two of them, then with just the three of them, then with the four of them. They’d never understood people who flew around the country, friends who complained about a ten- or twelve- or sixteen-hour car trip, who said their kids couldn’t stand being cooped up for more than a couple hours, or that they couldn’t stand being cooped up for more than a couple hours with their kids. It was pathetic, really. Together Claire and Mark believed: if you raised your kids on car trips, your kids loved car trips. And if you really didn’t want to spend several hours in close proximity with your family, maybe your issue didn’t have anything to do with cars, or trips.

  Oh, life had been so much simpler when they were better than everyone else! Now, with Mark not even speaking to her, it was difficult to imagine they would be going anywhere together ever again, in any mode of transportation. But he packed his bags and the kids’ bags and paid the cat sitter and stopped the paper and watered the plants, all without speaking a single word directly to her. And then as they were loading the luggage into the back of the minivan, he turned to her. He was wearing a T-shirt and basketball shorts, even though it was twenty-five degrees outside, because this was what he liked to drive in, regardless of season. She loved that about him, as stupid as it was, as ridiculous as he always looked in his long black shorts, standing in the cold, pumping gas at the turnpike service plaza as the snow fell around him. God, she loved him.

  “Whoever you are,” he said, “I forgive you.”

  They drove through the afternoon and into the evening and then into the nighttime. Meredith was just five; by 8:30 she was asleep. For a while after dinner Mark drove and Claire and Evan tried to name all the state capitals. Then she and Mark switched off and she drove and Mark slept and Evan turned on his Nintendo DS. It was nearly 10:00 and they still had a hundred miles to get to their hotel, though Claire felt she could easily drive all night, watch the hotel disappear behind her, cross one state line, then another. She watched her son in the rearview mirror, his gentle face lit by the faint, flickering light of Mario Kart. Beside her, her husband slept; behind her, her daughter slept. They were in the dark, in their minivan, with their things inside. They were safe, protected by a half-dozen air bags, stability control, traction control, safety locks, side impact beams, and antilock brakes. These were the features they had paid for, the equipment they could rely on. This was what they had worked for. In the van, on the highway, on the edge of Ohio, there was nothing that could hurt them. If only she could keep driving, keep them all here together in the dark van, nothing could hurt them ever again.

  She drove on.

  5

  For just a moment, when Meredith woke up in the hospital, she thought her parents were dead. She had never seen a dead body in real life, but her mother and f
ather looked like TV murder victims, both slumped on a stiff green couch in the corner of the room, half-sitting and half-lying, their heads titled awkwardly back against the cushions, their eyes closed, their lips slightly parted. She lay quietly, her thoughts coming sluggishly, and regarded them with a strange, dreamy curiosity until she understood that they were merely sleeping. The heavy blinds in the room were open and it was dark outside, though the lights from the parking lot were bright and cast dull shadows around the room she lay in.

  She knew she was in a hospital, though she had no memory of arriving. The last thing she remembered clearly was the cool air on her forehead as the Deli Barn door whooshed closed and the sound of the car rumbling out of the parking lot. Drowsily she wondered if perhaps Lisa Bellow had opened the door of the car as it sped away, tumbled out onto the unforgiving pavement of Chestnut Street, ripping skin from her knees, maybe breaking her arm, certainly screaming bloody murder, and was now lying in the bed beside her on the other side of the hospital room, applying eyeliner or texting her friends or flipping through some piece-of-crap magazine. Meredith slowly turned her head to look. There was no bed beside her. It was a single room.

  The spring before, when Evan had suffered his horrible injury, he’d been in the hospital for almost a week and shared a room with an eighty-year-old man who every so often would bellow, “Goddammit, are you kidding me?” to no one but his own pain. They had had enough of hospitals, all four of them. And now here they were again. No wonder her parents looked dead.

  She rubbed her hand hard over her eyes. Her face throbbed and her head seemed to be full of wet sand. She was so sleepy she could feel individual sections of her brain shutting down, like a night watchman was walking through her head turning off lights, one by one. She was closing her eyes to sleep again just as Evan came into the room, carrying a fountain drink and a bag of Cheetos. The straw was in his mouth, and when he saw her half-open eyes he froze for a moment, then pulled the straw from his lips.

  “Hey,” he whispered.

  “Hey,” she whispered back. The word was thick and strange in her throat, her brother little more than shadow in the muted light.

  “How’s it going?”

  She tried to shrug, but wasn’t sure if she’d succeeded. “’kay.”

  He nodded toward their parents. “Check them out. Where’s the camera when you need it?”

  She smiled groggily. She wanted to tell him not to wake them, but she couldn’t get the words to form. But it didn’t matter—he knew what she wanted (he almost always did), and made no move to rouse them from their sleep. He sat down beside her on the bed and set the bag of Cheetos at her feet. He smelled like a cafeteria, like french fries.

  “Sleepy,” she said.

  It seemed like almost everything was better, easier, when it was just the two of them. Their parents were forever complicating matters by inserting some practical, know-it-all point of view into a situation. Objectively she recognized that this was their job, to be parental, but that didn’t make it any less annoying.

  For years she had imagined this alternate reality—a family of two—especially before Evan had gotten hurt. She loved books and movies where the parents were MIA (detained, missing, conveniently deceased) and the kids had to take care of themselves—the older sibling doing all the boring parental necessities (laundry, bills, etc.) while still effortlessly retaining his carefree pre-tragedy personality, the younger sibling making grilled cheese for dinner every night, the two working together to cleverly dodge authorities and stay out of foster care. Or better yet, the stories where the siblings were alone and in some sort of dire situation—shipwrecked, captured by terrorists, surrounded by lions—and had to rely on each other to survive. Her talents would complement his; their sense of humor would ease the tension; their cunning would get them out of endless impossible circumstances. Yes, if only it weren’t for her parents, keeping the lions at bay to begin with. She always knew she and Evan would excel at peril, given the chance.

  “Cops . . . ” he was saying.

  “What?”

  “Okay?” he said. “Do you . . . ?”

  “What?”

  “You’re asleep,” he said, smiling. “Don’t—”

  She tried to shake her head, but nothing moved.

  The spring before, she’d sat on the edge of his hospital bed, trying, failing, to get the sour look off his face, cracking jokes and telling stories, all the while trying to not make eye contact with him. His left eye had been bandaged, and she did not like him looking at her with only one eye. She didn’t say this, of course—she wasn’t that insensitive—but it creeped her out, that single right eye. It was wrong, imbalanced, and when it darted around the room it seemed frantic in its searching. When the bandage came off and they all got a look at what remained of his left eye—not much of use, as it turned out—she still preferred its milky drifting to the lone, darting eye from the hospital.

  “All right?”

  She felt her eyelids droop. “Evan,” she said.

  “The cops,” he said. “They want . . . ”

  She couldn’t catch the end of this. She tried to keep her eyes open, to look at him squarely, but he was fuzzy and each time she let her eyes close it became harder to open them again. Had she figured out the vertical asymptote? Had she graphed it?

  “Lisa?” she asked.

  “They don’t know,” he said. “They thought—”

  Wait . . . there she was. Meredith, her eyes closed, breathed a sigh of relief. She could see it all clearly, as if she were standing right outside a glass door, just like the one she’d looked through before going into the Deli Barn. There was Lisa Bellow, sitting on a tattered brown couch in the living room of a small apartment, holding a little white dog on her lap. It was a very little dog, like a Chihuahua but not quite, and its name was Annie. It had a stubby tail and pointy ears and a thin red collar, no bigger than a bracelet. Lisa was scratching Annie behind the ears, and Annie was twisting her head back happily the way dogs do when you scratch them in just the right place. Lisa’s face was still stained from all the makeup she’d cried off, and Meredith thought she looked a little bit like a child who had tried to make herself up like a circus clown.

  The man with the too-long gray hoodie came into the room where Lisa and Annie sat, but he wasn’t wearing his hoodie anymore. Of course, he wasn’t wearing his black ski mask either, because this was his apartment, but Meredith knew it was the same man because of his dark eyes and his blond eyebrows. Behind him Meredith could see a little kitchen. There was a silver trash can with a foot pedal. There was a blender on the counter. There were photos magneted onto the refrigerator, and there were people in the photos, but because she was outside the door, Meredith couldn’t make out any of the faces. The man wore jeans and a navy-blue T-shirt. He had a mustache she had not seen before, and a face with a lot of little dents and grooves. He looked at the girl on the couch.

  “That’s my dog,” he said. Meredith could hear him clearly, and she looked and realized the glass door was open a few inches, though she’d heard no bells to announce her arrival. “That’s Annie.”

  “She’s sweet,” Lisa said quietly.

  Something had already transpired between them, Meredith realized, some information exchanged or understanding reached, because Lisa wasn’t trying to run for the door or scream for help or even ask the man what was happening. Lisa didn’t even seem all that upset. She seemed content to be petting the dog, and the dog was content being petted, and Meredith was content because, of all the terrible things that might have happened to Lisa Bellow, here she was sitting on a couch petting a cute little dog, and maybe it wasn’t so bad after all, what had happened to Lisa.

  Someone touched her arm and Meredith turned from the glass door and there was a man she didn’t recognize, a handsome young man with black hair. He wore a blue button-down shirt and a white jacket.

  “How’re you feeling?” the man asked.

  Meredith turned ar
ound to see Lisa again, but there was nowhere to turn. She was on her back. She was in a bed. The sheets were itchy on her bare shins. She was in the hospital and the man with the black hair and the white coat was, well . . . duh.

  “Okay,” she said. “Fine.”

  “The police need to talk with you,” the handsome doctor said. “I’ll be back in a few minutes, but the police need to speak with you now.”

  The doctor looked exactly like a doctor on a soap opera her grandmother watched. Was he real? Again she tried to turn to catch a glimpse of Lisa. Which part of this was real? Now there were other people she had never seen before, a black woman with round glasses and a tall bald man, the woman seated beside her on her right side and the man standing at the end of the bed.

  “Where’s Evan?” she asked.

  “He’ll be back soon.” This from yet another voice, another woman seated beside her, on the left, with her hand resting on Meredith’s shoulder. She turned to look at this woman. This woman was her mother.

  •

  It was important, the black woman said, it was imperative to get her story as soon as possible, so that they would have the best chance of finding Lisa safe and sound. That’s what the woman—the police detective—said: “safe and sound.” The detective spoke slowly. She chose her words carefully, it seemed to Meredith. Her name was Detective Waller. She was a small compact woman, young, maybe thirty, with efficient hair and mannerisms. She spent a lot of time adjusting her glasses. The other detective, a tall bald man with a black mustache, stood at the end of the bed and wrote things down in a notepad. Her mother sat on the opposite side of the bed from Detective Waller and remained completely still as Meredith relayed the story of what had happened in the Deli Barn.

  She told them about the Christmas bells. She told them about the gunman calling the sandwich artist a fat ass. She described the man (the kidnapper, she thought, but she could not quite form this word) as best she could—his too-long hoodie and his ski mask and his hiking boots and his pale eyebrows and about how tall he was and about how much he might have weighed. She guessed he was about the same weight as her father and the detectives’ heads swiveled in unison toward where her father sat on the stiff couch, as if he might be the black-masked bandit. She told them how the kidnapper’s boots thunked and that his voice was not deep and that he had said that Lisa had to go with him and so Lisa did.