The Fall of Lisa Bellow

by Susan Perabo

  “He plays lacrosse,” Evan confirmed. For this was how people were defined at the high school, at least the people who mattered.

  In her mind, Meredith left Lisa in the bathroom and made herself think instead about Evan, Evan who didn’t play anything anymore. Evan was undefined. Evan was floating. Actually, Meredith thought, Evan was hovering, bobbing in the air like a parade balloon, untethered but too heavy, too burdened with ropes, to drift away. He was supposed to be looking at colleges, she knew—it was October, and she knew some of his friends had already applied places for early decision—but she wasn’t sure he had done more than take the letters and catalogs from the mailbox and toss them into the recycling bin. A year ago he’d had a box—not a shoebox, either, but a box from the grocery store that said DOLE BANANAS on the side—full of recruiting letters from programs that wanted him to consider them. Just consider them. Now that he was no longer a baseball player, there were no more personal letters, only standard junk mail that every high school senior got. The banana box was gone, broken down, put out with ordinary pizza boxes. Evan wasn’t anyone special anymore, just another kid with a decent GPA.

  Part of her wished she had seen it, really seen it and not just imagined it. She did not like to think that his life had changed so utterly while she was unaware, probably over at Kristy’s watching YouTube videos on her computer, probably laughing at some asinine thing while Evan stood there in the batter’s box, windmilling his bat around. He’d had three bats and they all had names, like boats. She didn’t even know where the bats were now. Probably her parents had whisked them away: out of sight, out of mind! She hoped they had not gotten rid of them. She hoped that, wherever they were, they did not yet belong to someone else.

  The windmill. Then maybe he starts to turn his head. Maybe—she’d seen the moment ten thousand times—he’s going to yell something at the batter, nothing special, just some routine chatter. And then, just like that, he’s on the ground—maybe on his stomach, like she’d been, looking at those Coke stains under the Deli Barn counter. But Evan’s in the dirt. Evan’s unconscious. And the baseball that hit him is still rolling, and it rolls and rolls and understandably no one pays any attention to it, that ball, so that when they go back to find it afterward, they cannot distinguish it from the other batting practice balls.

  When they took the bandages off he was not completely blind in the eye, as they’d feared. He could see some light, some shape. He had one surgery, then another, then another, to repair the fracture. It was delicate, tedious, endless, in and out of the hospital, his pain constant. Some more light came through, some shapes grew edges. There was cautious hope. Part of her believed—part of all of them, she suspected—that he was the one in a million, that his sight would be fully restored. But by July it had leveled off. Most likely, the doctor said, that was it: it was as good as it was ever going to get.

  “They’ll find her,” Evan said, in answer to a question she had not asked. “She’ll just show up. Today, probably. She’ll wander up to a gas station and just start laying into some guy pumping his gas.”

  “Maybe,” she said, though she doubted it, not with the army trunk wedged against the door.

  “She’ll be like, give me your cell and make it snappy. Then she’ll call the lax bro and he’ll go get her in his dad’s Porsche. But first he’ll go through Starbucks and get her a skinny latte.”

  They had reached her room. Her parents were talking in hushed tones to someone inside. Evan leaned against the doorway. “And before they go to the cops she’ll make him take her to the mall so she can get an outfit to wear for the press conference. And then she’ll be like, drive smoother so I can paint my nails.”

  Her legs were heavy. She felt like she’d just walked ten miles in the sand. She looked up at her brother, her very best friend, the love of her life, her co-conspirator, with his uncombed hair and his hidden, milky, useless eye.

  “Can you not?” she said.

  6

  ”Words cannot express,” was the phrase Claire couldn’t get out of her mind. People had said it to her about her own losses (her mother all those years ago, her son’s perfect vision the previous spring), and she had used it herself in comforting others, but now she felt ashamed at having called on it so cavalierly. She lay in bed with her back to Mark, whom she was almost certain was also not asleep, and they were silent.

  They had lain like this, back to back, for over an hour—it was past 1:00 a.m.—and she literally could not think of how to frame a single thing she was feeling into words. Surely there would be some solace, at the very least some relief, in talking, in rolling over and beginning a sentence, fumbling through some explanation of her state of mind, however inadequate. But there were simply no words. It wasn’t that she couldn’t bring herself to say them; it was that she didn’t have them.

  They had brought Meredith home in the afternoon, set her up in the family room on the foldout couch with her favorite magazines and an assortment of snacks. Meredith had sat cross-legged on the bed for about an hour, staring vaguely at the television, the cat across her lap, and then after dinner had said she’d really rather sleep in her room than on the foldout. And she’d taken the cat (the tolerant cat, who allowed himself to be cradled like a baby) and gone up to her room, and Claire had thought to herself that she would give her a few minutes, give her a little space, and then go up and sit on the edge of her bed and talk about it. Really talk about it.

  A psychiatrist had spoken to them in the hospital room while Meredith and Evan were out walking the halls. This psychiatrist specialized in trauma, they’d been told by the medical doctor. Trauma was his thing. The psychiatrist had said of course it was impossible to predict precisely how someone would react to a situation like this, to an event so unimaginable, so distressing, that each person would handle it differently, with different types of coping mechanisms.

  “Like what?” Claire had asked.

  “She might be terrified?” the psychiatrist said. His name was Dr. Moon. He was very thin and had silver hair, so perfectly silver that Claire was certain that friends had sung “By the Light of the Silvery Moon” to him at his fiftieth birthday party. Claire already didn’t like him—though, to be fair, she did not like psychiatrists in general. She had seen a psychiatrist in college, to combat test anxiety, and plunged into a deep depression after a half-dozen sessions. “She might have nightmares? She might be afraid to leave the house?”

  “Understandably,” Mark said.

  “Understandably,” Dr. Moon agreed. “Or she might be angry? She might be angry at you, that you let this happen to her? She might feel like she can’t trust you? She might look to her brother for support, or she might shut him out? She’s bringing her own personality into this, so you might have some idea of how she’ll react. You know her. But she’s also grappling with something entirely new, so she may also act completely out of character? She may be needy or she may be reserved? She may feel frightened or she may feel emboldened? She may feel relieved or she may feel guilty? Or she may feel all of those things?”

  “Thank you, doctor,” Mark said, and Claire had nearly laughed out loud. Thank you, doctor? Really? For a hundred questions and no answers?

  “So you really can’t tell us anything,” Claire said.

  Dr. Moon raised his hands in the universal symbol for being useless. “Keep the lines of communication open,” he said. “That’s really all you can do at this point. I’ll be available if you need me.”

  “We can do that,” Mark said. He nodded at her resolutely. “We can definitely do that.”

  He turned back expectantly to Dr. Moon, and Claire realized with equal parts despair and affection that her husband was apparently so pleased to have been given something concrete to focus on that he failed to realize that the lines of communication were not literal lines of communication and that Dr. Moon would not, in fact, be handing them a telephone or a walkie-talkie or even pair of tin cans connected by a string. She could read the
disappointment on Mark’s face as Dr. Moon excused himself and pushed open the door, revealing Meredith and Evan standing just on the other side, in the gleaming white hall, an odd space between them large enough for the psychiatrist to walk through with ease.

  Oh yes, it had sounded very simple in the hospital room, and the truth was that even she had nodded understandingly at Dr. Moon. Of course The Lines Of Communication would be open! Of course! But now here they were, ten hours out of the hospital, and Meredith seemed to be underwater, in some kind of tank that separated her from the rest of them, like Harry Houdini on a stage inside one of those giant tanks wound with heavy chains and those huge, ancient padlocks. How the hell could The Lines of Communication be open when someone was on a stage inside a giant tank?

  Ascending the stairs, Claire steeled herself against the wall she was about to face, determined to break through. This was her child. Her baby girl. She would do anything for her. But when she cracked open Meredith’s door she found the room dark and Meredith and the tolerant cat sound asleep. Not pretend asleep, either, and not fitful sleep—Claire stood there long enough to make sure—but just normal, another-ho-hum-night-of-my-life sleep. And she had been enormously relieved—thank god! off the hook! conversation postponed!—and then embarrassed and disgusted by her relief.

  Then she went to find Evan, but he had retreated to his room as well—she could hear him watching something on his computer, something with gunshots—and she told herself lies she knew were lies to justify not knocking on his door, and so then by 9:00 p.m. it was just her and Mark, and then Mark went to the grocery store, because that was what he did, and so she stood in the kitchen by herself and drank two beers and ate an entire bag of sour-cream-and-onion potato chips, listening to the house settle. And now here they were lying in bed, she with a beer-and-sour-cream lump in her stomach and a taste in her mouth no toothpaste could combat. Here they were, lying in bed, and no one in her family was talking about anything, no one was even making a sound, despite the fact that her daughter had been through an unimaginable trauma and should be screaming and pulling out her hair while her family held her and wept with her and raged.

  But.

  But.

  Yes, but.

  She was in her room.

  Her daughter was in her room, in her pajamas, under her blankets, under her roof, in the light of her nightlight, in the sight of her cat, nine steps from her brother, fifteen steps from her mother, her clothes in her closet, her shoes on her floor.

  She was in her room. Meredith was in her room.

  So how much rage was fair? How many tears were justified? There was a part of Claire—a big part, honestly, the majority of her—that felt like dancing, a pure joy that took her breath away every few minutes. This, as much as anything, was the part she could not put into words, this absolute contradiction of emotions. Shouldn’t they be celebrating? Shouldn’t they be on their knees, weeping not with grief but with gratitude? Thank god. Not only was her daughter alive and unharmed, but she was right down the hall, wrapped around her cat. She was safe. Two days before there had been two girls lying on that floor and one had been chosen and it had not been Meredith. Fifty-fifty, heads or tails, long straw, short straw—her daughter had won, had been left there on the floor shaken but safe, while the other girl—

  Well, they hadn’t found her yet. Now it had been over forty-eight hours. On television they said the window of opportunity was closing. There were leads but nothing more. There were no suspects. There were no persons of interest. The girl’s cell phone had been found by the side of the road three blocks from the Deli Barn. But they hadn’t found anything else. Most notably, they hadn’t found a body. That was a good thing, right? That had to be a good thing. As long as there was no body then there was a chance she was alive.

  But when she thought these things—even about a body, finding a person’s body, finding a girl’s body, for Christ sakes—Claire felt no quickening in her chest. The girl, Lisa Bellow, was nothing to her in this moment. Nothing! She had heard her name kicked around in carpools and at parties—she knew only that she was one of those popular girls Meredith and her friends hated—but that had no bearing whatsoever on Claire’s lack of anxiety for her. Lisa Bellow could have been the nicest girl on the planet. She could have been their next-door neighbor. She could have been Meredith’s closest friend. No, she didn’t care one bit who Lisa Bellow was; the only important thing about Lisa Bellow, to Claire, was that she, not Meredith, was the girl who was taken. Certainly it would be better if she were found alive, better for Meredith, but all that really mattered was that Meredith was alive. Meredith was safe. Meredith, her baby, her baby girl, was down the hall.

  “They didn’t have those mini Tater Tots,” Mark said.

  She was startled by the sound of a human voice. She flipped over to face him. “What?”

  He propped himself up on his elbow. “Sorry. Were you asleep?”

  “No,” she said. “I was—what Tater Tots?”

  “You know she likes those little ones, the minis, instead of the fat ones. They didn’t have them in the freezer. I know I’ve gotten them there before. So I tracked down the manager and he said they didn’t carry them anymore. He said he wasn’t even sure they made them anymore. But I’m gonna call around tomorrow and see what I can find out.”

  “Okay,” she said.

  They had taken off the last two days, canceled all their appointments. The receptionists had called every patient—“family emergency, need to reschedule”—and theirs was the kind of practice where some of their patients might say, “Oh, I hope everything’s okay” but no one would lose any sleep over it. Tomorrow was Saturday. On Monday they would go back to work. They would go back to their lives.

  “I went ahead and got the big ones,” he said. “I thought that’d be better than nothing.”

  “Sure,” she said. “I’m sure they’ll be fine.”

  He was quiet for a moment—had he finally settled this to his satisfaction?—then added: “I can always have them for backup if we find the little ones.”

  “Honey, it’s fine.”

  “I know,” he said. “I just wanted to tell you.”

  She loved him. That was just a fact. You turned on the radio and there was music playing. You turned on the tap and water came out. That was all there was to it. They had been married twenty-three years and they had survived everything and here they were, lying in bed talking about Tater Tots. As absurd as it was, there was no one else in the world she would have rather had this conversation with. She turned her pillow over and rested her head on the cool side and closed her eyes.

  “They have them at Stop and Shop,” she said. “That’s where I got them last time.”

  “Okay,” he said. “I’ll go there tomorrow. First thing.”

  •

  It would have been easy to pretend that their bond, their mother-daughter closeness, had been shattered by what had happened at the Deli Barn—by the man and the gun and the missing Lisa Bellow. But the truth was that, for Claire, looking at her daughter for the last year or two had been something like looking at the flat face of a mountain range and being told to scale it, without ropes, without safety equipment, and without a canteen and PowerBars. To make the flat face worse, Claire could see some footholds near the bottom, but then, the higher the mountain rose, the flatter it became, until really it was only a solid sheet as unblemished as glass, a mountain only a superhero could scale, a task that would require not determination, skill, fortitude, attitude, or training, but magic.

  With Evan she had never seen anything coming. Before Evan, she had always considered herself a person who prepared carefully, allowing her to adjust her external and internal responses in anticipation of any eventuality. But beginning with childbirth, everything with Evan was a shock, everything astonishing, both the highs and the lows. Pregnancy she could handle. Sometimes in those months she felt sick and uncertain, but the cause of the sickness and uncertainty was still i
nside, still a part of her, and as such completely dependent on her. She was still, in the ways that were most important to her, in control.

  But beginning with the unimaginable act of childbirth—truly unimaginable, despite the billions of women who had done it before her—everything took her by surprise. She learned that any preparations or assumptions she might make were meaningless, a lesson driven home with the final, inevitable nail of the porker incident, her sweet, wise, ruined first-grader in the backseat, telling her in no uncertain terms: “There’s nothing you can do.”

  So, with the second born, different. She was now armed with the necessary information . . . or at least with the necessary lack of information. Thank god—now at least she knew more or less what was coming. This time, she told herself, I will be prepared to not be prepared. This time I will expect the unexpected, anticipate the pointlessness of anticipation. This time I will give in sooner to my powerlessness. This time I will not try to fight a battle that is already over.

  Thus, when that flat wall appeared, Claire accepted the impossibility of the task that lay before her, took one long look up at the face of that mountain and quietly, and not without some real sense of relief, and under the cover of a very busy schedule, returned to her base camp.

  7

  Everyone knew that men thought about sex all the time. Young men and old men and married men and single men and rich men and poor men and black men and white men and gay men and straight men and rock stars and bank tellers and crossing guards and presidents and lacrosse players and math teachers and brothers and fathers and kidnappers. So Meredith wasn’t going to be a baby about it and try to pretend that Lisa Bellow wasn’t getting raped.