by Susan Perabo
She did not tell them quite everything. She did not tell them what Lisa had said in that moment when she, Meredith, had lost all hope. She did not tell them that Lisa had told her it was going to be okay. It didn’t make any difference to the investigation, she was sure, and somehow this thing that Lisa had said to her was like a coin already deep, deep in her pocket and she did not want to dig it out and hand it over. She wanted it in her pocket—she didn’t even want it to see the light of day—because once it was out it would not really belong to her anymore.
She asked the detectives about the sandwich farmer. He’d been hit in the head, they said, but he would be fine. They had already talked to him and gotten his statement, and now that they had hers they had a better chance of finding the perpetrator.
“But you were there the whole time,” Detective Waller said. “So your story is very important. Most important. Because you were there when they left.”
“Yeah,” Meredith said. “But I didn’t see his car or anything.”
“Do you have any idea how long you were there after they left, before Mr. Fulton found you?”
“Mr. Fulton? The custodian?”
“That’s right,” Detective Waller said. “He’s the man who came in and found you and called the police.”
“That’s so weird,” Meredith said. Mr. Fulton was forever giving them hand sanitizer. That seemed to be his entire job, to stand in the main hall squirting out hand sanitizer to germy children. She didn’t know anything about him except that he was black, and someone, probably one of Lisa Bellow’s group, had started a rumor that he had spent twenty years in prison for murder. Of course this rumor made the rounds about every single black male who worked at the school, including the principal.
“How long would you say you were there, after the man left with Lisa, and before Mr. Fulton came in?” the tall Detective asked.
“I don’t know,” Meredith said. “I don’t even remember it. I don’t remember Mr. Fulton coming in.”
“She clearly didn’t remember Mr. Fulton coming in,” her mother said. “You just told her and she was obviously surprised.”
“Ma’am,” Detective Waller said.
Meredith looked at her mother. She’d seen the look on her face before. Years ago Evan had dubbed this look “the constipated rhino.” Oh, that had been hilarious. How many years had they laughed over this?
“Did he tell you to stay still for a certain amount of time?” Detective Waller asked. “Did he tell you not to get up?”
“No,” Meredith said. “Why?”
“Did he threaten you?” the tall detective asked.
She shook her head.
“The man had a gun,” her father said from the other side of the room. “I think that—”
“Of course,” Detective Waller said in her clipped way, though she didn’t stop looking at Meredith. “That in itself is a threat. It must have been very scary.”
It wasn’t until this moment that Meredith realized what this conversation was about, and why it was important how long she had lain on the floor, and why it mattered that she’d been so out of it or crazy or whatever it was that was making her not remember Mr. Fulton and not even remember the ambulance or getting to the hospital or any of it. Now she understood. If she had leaped up the moment the car pulled away, if she had called 911 right then from her cell phone, then the man with Lisa wouldn’t have had such a big head start. If she had even sat up and looked out the door she would have seen the car, would know at least its size and color, and maybe if she’d been on the ball, maybe even what kind of car it was and maybe even some numbers from its license plate.
And worse, just dawning on her now—how long had it taken before someone had realized that a kidnapping had even occurred? It would have just looked like a simple robbery; there was no trace of Lisa, just an unconscious sandwich farmer and one flipped-out teenager, no one to say Lisa had ever been there, no reason for anyone to suspect a third person had been involved. For all Mr. Fulton or the cops or anyone knew, there were only two victims, and they were both lying on the floor of the Deli Barn.
What time was it now? She could see light behind the curtains. How long had the sandwich farmer been unconscious? How many hours until, maybe in the middle of the night, being interviewed as she was now, had he said, “Then the girls laid on the floor” and Detective Waller jerked her head up and said, “Girls?” and then the pieces had started falling together—yes, in fact, a girl’s mother had called the switchboard in the evening, somebody Bellow, her daughter had never come home from school, she thought she was at a friend’s house, but now it was late, and . . .
So while she and the sandwich farmer slept, the man in the car was getting farther and farther away, and Lisa was getting farther and farther away, and no one knew the clock was ticking, no one knew to shake them awake in their hospital beds, wake them up for Christ sakes, there were three people in that store, three people, three victims, not two.
Why had she lain on the floor so long? What had she even been thinking about? Maybe the man had said something. Maybe he had said, “Lie there for an hour and don’t move. Lie there for an hour or I’ll come back and kill you. Lie there for an hour or I’ll kill her”—yes, maybe that was it. Maybe she’d forgotten that because she’d forgotten everything else. All she knew was what people told her about what happened, and there was no one here who could tell her this. Maybe she was just following instructions.
“The last thing I remember is them leaving,” she said. “I don’t remember anything after that until I woke up here.”
“Do you think he could have hit her?” her mother asked. “She might have been unconscious.”
“Doctor said no bodily trauma,” the tall detective said.
Meredith felt her mother take hold of her hand, not squeezing it, but wrapping her fingers carefully, like you’d hold something fragile that might be blown from your grasp.
“More likely you were in shock,” Detective Waller said. She smiled gently. She wasn’t unfriendly. She wasn’t accusing anyone of anything. She was just doing her job. “It’s understandable,” she said. “It happens. You did what you could.”
Which was nothing, Meredith thought. What I could do was exactly nothing.
“We have a good description and a clear time frame. We know you and Lisa went to the restaurant after school, and we know that Mr. Fulton arrived at the restaurant about three twenty-five. We just don’t know precisely when they left. But we’re working on it. We just wanted to talk with you as soon as we possibly could, so we have the best chance of finding Lisa.”
Meredith wanted to tell them that Lisa was safe, at least for the time being, that Lisa was in the man’s apartment, on the man’s couch, petting the man’s little white dog. But she knew how this would sound, and she wasn’t sure she believed it herself, though she knew the dog’s name, and she knew about the blender and the silver wastebasket with the foot pedal, and that had to mean something, didn’t it?
“One more thing,” Detective Waller said. “The man. Did he seem familiar to you? At all?”
“No,” Meredith said. “But his face was—”
“His voice sound at all familiar?”
“No,” she said. “I don’t think so.”
“Why would he be familiar?” her mother asked.
“We’re just exploring all the possibilities,” Detective Waller said. “Meredith, do you think he could have been younger than you thought? Do you think he could have been a teenager?”
“I don’t think so,” Meredith said. “He didn’t really sound like a teenager.”
“And you don’t think you’d ever encountered him anywhere before?”
“No.”
“Do you think Lisa recognized him?”
“No,” Meredith said. “I mean, she didn’t act like she did.”
“How did she act?” Detective Waller asked.
“She already told you,” her mother said. “She—”
“
She cried,” Meredith said. “And then she stopped. And then . . . then she left.”
“Do you think Lisa might have known him?” her mother asked Detective Waller.
“I don’t think anything yet,” Detective Waller said, standing. “But we have to consider everything. Many people who are abducted have some connection to their abductor. That may not be the case here. But we just don’t know yet.”
Meredith was relieved when they were gone, but only momentarily, because then her father stood up. He didn’t come over to the bed. He just stood in his spot and looked at them expectantly, an actor waiting for his cue. Her mother’s hand was ice cold. Meredith couldn’t even remember the last time she’d held her mother’s hand, but this hand was not something you’d go out of your way to grasp for comfort. In addition to being oddly freezing—it wasn’t cold in the room at all—her mother’s fingers were narrow and hard. It felt like they were made of metal, like they themselves were dental instruments.
“The doctor said you can come home tomorrow,” her mother said.
“Okay,” Meredith said.
“We’ll fold out the couch in the family room and you can watch movies.”
“Like a sick day,” Meredith said. “Dad can bring me comic books.”
“Great!” her father exclaimed. “I’m on it.”
She was kidding, but the joke was completely lost on her father, who of course lived to provide material satisfaction—even the briefest, shallowest happiness—for anyone at any level of discomfort. From the time they were little kids, whenever she or Evan were sick, her father would come home from work with a bag full of comics, handheld pinball games, baseball cards, invisible ink trivia books, a dozen varieties of Jell-O, six-packs of 7Up.
“It is a sick day,” her mother said, squeezing Meredith’s fingers with her dental instruments. “You can have a sick week if you want. Whatever you want, Meredith—”
Her voice wavered and she did not finish her sentence. God, where was Evan? Meredith wondered. He’d abandoned her here, with emotional parents and no buffer. She had sat in the room last spring and listened to the ice cream cone diagnosis while he was unconscious. He owed her this. He owed her his presence.
“You want something from the café?” her father asked. “A soda? Maybe a juice box?”
It had been at least five years since she’d stabbed a straw into a juice box. “No thanks,” she said.
“You hungry? You want some chips or a candy bar or something?”
“I’m really okay.”
He was looking slightly desperate, like a robot who’d been given contradictory instructions. She played the only card she had. She yawned. It was a fake yawn at first, but after the initial intake of air it turned into an authentic one, so she didn’t feel too guilty about it.
“We should let you sleep,” her mother said. She turned to her father, relieved. “We should let her sleep.”
“Sleep is the best thing,” her father said.
On this they could all agree.
•
In Meredith’s half sleep, one thing was for sure: Lisa Bellow would definitely not be allowed to accompany the man to walk Annie the dog, not out in broad daylight, in the apartment courtyard, where any well-meaning citizen could instantly recognize her instantly recognizable face and call the police. Her story, no doubt, was all over the television. Not that Meredith had seen any news . . . . the TV in her room had been conspicuously dark all day, the remote control nowhere to be seen. Lisa’s photograph, Meredith assumed, would be her seventh-grade yearbook picture, the one in the Parkway North Middle School Pioneer, which Meredith was ashamed to admit she could conjure in her mind on cue. Meredith and Jules and Kristy had spent an embarrassing (even by their own lax standards) amount of time looking at the seventh-grade section of the yearbook, flipped through it nearly every day over the summer until its pages were limp, categorizing, defining, ranking. Plus, due to some annoying trick of fate and a refusal to alphabetize, Lisa Bellow’s picture was directly above Meredith’s, so there was no not comparing them, Lisa with her perfectly timed smile, Meredith caught off guard (was that really the best shot they had?) in a lopsided grin, looking like the idiot cousin.
But of course the dog—Annie—would have to be walked. It was inevitable. Annie was not one of those genius dogs featured on Animal Planet that could use the toilet. At least a few times a day the man would have to take her outside, even if only for a minute or two, even if only a couple steps outside the front door of the apartment building to pee beside the concrete planter with the cigarette butts stuck in the soil. (In her half sleep, the image could not have been clearer; the concrete planter’s base was chipped; one of the cigarette butts was ringed with lipstick.)
For this minute or two of dog peeing, Lisa would be alone in the apartment, unguarded. How would the man keep her from making a phone call, or walking out the door and sprinting to the parking lot, where surely there were people who could help her? He would have to put her in the bathroom. This would avoid the time and energy of tying her up, which—time and energy aside—Meredith was certain he didn’t even really want to do anyway. Probably he couldn’t lock the bathroom door from the outside, but he could push something against it, something heavy, like a dresser or a trunk. Maybe his old trunk from the army, which he’d held on to and dragged around with him from apartment to apartment for the last dozen years. All that was inside were blankets and towels and a winter coat, but if he turned it longways it wedged perfectly between the bathroom door and the hall wall, so there was no chance of it budging, nowhere she could go. Of course she could pound on the door, scream her head off, try to alert the neighbors. Yes, he would have to tell her something to keep her from doing this. He would have to offer her something meaningful in return for her good behavior.
Maybe, Meredith decided, he would say she could have whatever she wanted for dinner, as long as she didn’t make any noise.
•
“What’re you thinking about?” Evan asked her.
“Nothing,” she said quickly. She had been turning over this question: What would Lisa choose for dinner? “My algebra test.”
“Your algebra test?” He raised a doubting eyebrow at her. “Really? You just became the single most dedicated student in the history of algebra.”
They were walking down the hall, doctor’s orders. No reason to lie in bed all day, the handsome doctor had said. Go for a walk with your brother, take a spin around the floor, see the sights! He was one of those doctors, eager to prove he was cool by saying everything in a slightly mocking tone, lest you think he took himself too seriously. Walking beside Evan, Meredith peered into rooms along the hallway, watching people struggling with dinner trays. Until last year, when Evan got hurt, the most experience she’d had with hospitals was her favorite children’s book, Curious George Goes to the Hospital. Not that she really expected it to be the way it was in the book—monkey puppet shows, sick but gleeful children—but those were the colorful images she had in her head the evening she first came to see her battered-faced brother, and those were the colorful images she left behind forever when she and her mother drove home that night.
But strangely, over the week Evan was a patient, she found a new version of the hospital that was no less pleasing, that was perhaps even more pleasing, than a monkey in a wheelchair. Over that week Meredith came to appreciate the orderliness of hospitals, because it was exactly the opposite of middle school. In a hospital, even in times of urgency—maybe especially in times of urgency—there was a clear plan of action. Things happened in a certain way; there were procedures to be followed, and everyone knew their assigned role. Patients wore robes and pajamas and slippers. They were vulnerable, and the people dressed in white were charged with caring for those who were vulnerable. Things were clear: there were the caring and the cared for. And you always knew who you were. All you had to do was look down and see if you had on pajamas.
“Mom said you get to come home tomorrow
.”
“Yeah,” she said.
“So that’s good.”
“Yeah,” she said. “I guess.”
“It’s weird that no one knows.”
“You mean—”
“Yeah. That it was you.”
No information about Meredith had been released. Not her name, not her age, not her condition. Her parents had told her this earlier. At the press conference the police had stated that Another Customer had been present in the Deli Barn at the time of the abduction. For all anyone knew—anyone besides her family and the police and the doctors and the sandwich farmer and Mr. Fulton the janitor—Another Customer had been an adult. For all anyone else knew—even her friends—she had walked straight home that day, passed by the Deli Barn without even glancing inside, continued down Chestnut Street, made the left on Duncan, then the cut across the edge of the park, then the right on Glenside, then into her house, a snack from the fridge, her phone, the television, the computer, same old, same old.
“I don’t think it’ll last,” she said. “Somebody’ll find out.”
“It is middle school, after all,” Evan said.
They reached the end of the hall and turned around. She realized she was shuffling a little, and wasn’t sure if there was anything actually wrong with her or if it just seemed like at least one of them should be shuffling. Inside the corner room a baby was crying and someone was trying to hush it.
“Do you know her boyfriend?” she asked.
“No,” he said. “He’s a freshman, I think. Somebody told me he’s a dick.”
“I’m sure,” she said. But then she didn’t really feel like saying anything bad about Lisa, not with Lisa sitting on the edge of the tub in that bathroom, waiting for Annie to pee by the concrete planter, thinking about what she wanted for dinner. It was possible that Lisa was a little scared, even though nothing all that scary had happened. It was possible that—