by Susan Perabo
She lay in bed and listened to morning things downstairs: the gurgling of the coffeemaker, the ringing of cereal hitting bowl, the bump of the front door being opened (intolerant cat out) and closed (newspaper in). Meredith thought about sex a fair amount as well, not every nine seconds like guys did—according to the internet—but maybe every nine minutes. She and Kristy and Jules often lay awake during sleepovers talking about things that were going to happen to them, sex they were going to have, and with whom, but in all these fantasies Meredith was always nineteen or twenty, a sexy and confident college student who bore almost no resemblance to her current self. Her sexual partner, often the adorable and funny drawer of watches Steven Overbeck, was also a sexy and confident college student in her fantasy, with muscles and sometimes a mustache. So although she could very vividly imagine herself having sex with Steven Overbeck, and was aroused by the thought, the self she imagined in the throes of passion was an entirely different version than the self that lay in this bed now listening to morning happening downstairs.
It was possible that Lisa had already had sex with the freshman lacrosse player, the boy on the beach, the orderer of the oniony sandwich. It wasn’t common (which is to say usual, which is to say ordinary, which is to say normal) in eighth grade, but it happened; Meredith had heard stories. But it was also very possible that Lisa had thus far limited herself to hand jobs and blow jobs, possible that Lisa was holding out, hanging on to the one valuable property she still held, already understanding her own sexual power, already knowing about things like being “used goods,” saving herself not as a moral choice but out of a desire to have something—anything—left for high school.
Regardless. Today, Saturday, October 11, sixtysomething hours post–Deli Barn, the queen of the eighth grade was definitely no longer a virgin.
It was a good thing for Lisa that there was the dog, Meredith thought. Right? At least there was little Annie, who might stand idly by while the sex was happening, chewing her Nylabone and minding her own business, but who afterward would definitely leap up onto the blankets covering Lisa and curl up in a ball beside her while the man stood by the bed pulling up his pants.
And maybe the sex itself wouldn’t have been that bad, not too bad, not really awful but rather just sort of awful, just something to get through, like a long school assembly or your grandparents’ anniversary dinner. This thought was enough to buoy Meredith into an upright position. Having sex with the kidnapper—really she wasn’t even going to think of it as rape, because maybe it wasn’t quite exactly rape, not like someone jumping out of the bushes and tearing your clothes off—was unpleasant, to be sure, but it probably wasn’t horrible. Maybe Lisa even thought the kidnapper was sort of cute. Maybe he was sort of cute. Maybe, in a certain light, he looked a little bit like the mustached, grown-up version of Steven Overbeck.
She stood up and clenched her toes into the thick carpet of her bedroom. She knew she had to go downstairs eventually. A check of the clock told her it would not be long before they came up and did a gentle tap-tap-tap on her three-quarters-closed door, the door opening a little farther with each tap, then a face in the space between door and frame. They did not come into her room often. She and Evan, children of two working parents, were expected to take care of their own spaces. They made their beds and straightened their desks and every night put their clothes in the laundry hamper in the bathroom. Meredith did not understand people who left clothes lying all over their bedroom floors, though some of her friends did this, just kicked aside piles to make more piles, until at some point a mother intervened and picked everything up and put it in the washing machine and then folded it and replaced it in drawers and closets and then the whole thing started over again. She liked that her mother did not have to do this for her, liked that her room felt more like an apartment, a place that was truly her own. One time at Jules’s house, Jules’s mother had come into Jules’s bedroom and flopped down across the bed, and Meredith had to conceal the distaste she felt spreading over her face.
It was possible they would send Evan to fetch her, and Evan was always welcome in her room, and sometimes he would just come in and sit down on the floor and start playing with the battling animals. They had a vast collection of these figures, wild animals who walked upright and carried swords and clubs and axes—and they would set them up around her room and have battles, and there was no sense that any time had passed. He could have been seven and she three; he could have been twelve and she eight. She didn’t play with the animals with anyone else, because it wouldn’t have been any fun. They had belonged first to Evan, and then they had each had several, and divided them into defined teams, bitterly opposed (Croc/Rhino/Lion/etc. vs. Tiger/Ram/Octopus/etc.). Now they all lived in her room, the whole collection, but it was understood that they all belonged to both of them.
She got dressed and went downstairs. As anticipated, her parents were instantly intolerable. Before a single word was spoken, she could see that they were doing their best to appear friendly but parental, caring yet not overbearing. They were failing on nearly every count. Her father was a flashing yellow light in the middle of the kitchen; her mother’s smile looked like she’d drawn it on her face after consulting an illustrated encyclopedia of expressions.
“I made pancakes,” her mother said.
“Thanks,” she said. “Where’s Evan?”
“Still sleeping, I think. Should we wake him?”
“I’ll go get him,” her father said, lurching into motion.
“No,” Meredith said. “It’s fine.”
She sat down at the kitchen table. Her parents, who had apparently already eaten, sat down across from her.
“Well, that’s a little formal, isn’t it?” her father said, and he scooched his chair to the corner of the table so that it looked a little less like an interrogation, but now felt weirder for the anti-interrogation effort having been made.
“Did you sleep okay?” her mother asked.
“Yeah.”
“You seemed to sleep well,” her mother said, which was her mother’s way of telling her that she’d come to look in on her in the night. How many times? Meredith wondered. Three? Thirty?
“I did,” she said. “Really well.” She took a bite of the pancake, which was undercooked, even on the edges, promising a goopy middle. Her mother had no patience when it came to pancakes, yet continued to make them, and they never got any better, and she always wound up throwing half of them away before they even made it to the table. These were worse than usual.
“Meredith,” her mother said.
She studied her pancake. “Yeah?”
Of course Meredith knew exactly what was coming. She and Evan had overheard the end of their parents’ conversation with the psychiatrist, Dr. Moon. She knew all about the Lines of Communication and how important they were. She’d gotten away with silence yesterday, but she knew it wouldn’t last.
“What happened to you,” her mother said. “I can’t even. I don’t even. I can’t even.”
A for effort, Meredith thought, then immediately felt guilty for being so mean. Her mother was trying. Everyone was trying.
“It’s okay,” she said. “I’m all right.”
“What your mother’s saying,” her father said, “is that we are here. For you. We are here.”
Like this was always a good thing. Like all anybody ever wanted was their parents here, two feet away and ready to pounce.
“I know,” she said. “Thanks.”
“If you want to talk,” her mother said. “If you want to tell us. Something. Anything. Feelings. Things. Emotions. Tricky emotions. Anytime. If you want to say something. You can say anything.”
Meredith made herself look up from her pancake. Her mother was smiling, but her eyes were drowning eyes, pleading eyes. Meredith could have swum in her mother’s failure. She could have launched a boat into it, a battleship, an aircraft carrier. When Evan got hurt she’d felt sorry for her mother. The night after Evan’s se
cond surgery, which had been endless and especially frightening, Meredith had gotten up to go to the bathroom and heard the kettle on downstairs and come down to the kitchen and her mother was sitting at the kitchen table and there were tears just rolling down her face onto the table. It was the weirdest crying Meredith had ever seen, soundless and motionless but for the tears themselves, spilling onto the table.
“It’s all right,” Meredith said. “Okay? Really.”
She knew she had to throw them a bone, so she looked back and forth between them, made actual eye contact, and added, “I mean it’s really weird and probably it hasn’t quite hit me yet, you know? And so maybe a little later I’ll want to talk about it—but for right now I just kind of want things to go back to normal as much as possible.”
“Normal?” her mother said, like she didn’t quite believe in the word, but she wanted to grab onto it like a life preserver—Meredith congratulated herself for rescuing both her mother and herself simultaneously.
Her father put both hands palms down on the table, to indicate the conversation had reached a satisfactory conclusion. “Who would like some Tater Tots?” he asked.
“It’s breakfast,” Meredith said, looking down at her inedible pancake.
“Who says Tater Tots are not for breakfast? I went out first thing this morning and got those teeny-tiny ones. They’re like breakfast potatoes. They don’t call them breakfast potatoes but that’s exactly what they are. They are exactly, precisely, a hundred percent breakfast potatoes.”
“Okay,” she said.
Her mother had layers; she had always known this, known it well before the silent crying over Evan’s eye, known it well before she, Meredith, had reached the age to be embarrassed or even annoyed by her mother. Her mother had layers and secrets and dark spaces where she kept god knows what. Her father had no such dark spaces. Her father was transparent, which is not to say he was shallow or stupid or even uninteresting. He just was what he was. Sad things made him sad and happy things made him happy. His emotions were fine-tuned. And he was almost never angry at people. He got angry at things, particularly things that didn’t work—she had once seen him punch a closet door that he was trying to repair, strike it with such fury, such personal hostility, that she’d backed out of the room and later, when she’d seen a bandage on his hand, hadn’t asked about it.
Evan shuffled into the kitchen.
“Nobody ever made me Tater Tots for breakfast,” he said. He sat down at the table and looked at Meredith’s plate. “How’re the pancakes?” he asked.
Or Lisa could be dead, Meredith thought.
But no, it wasn’t even a thought. It was more like a near miss. She heard the sound of the thought missing her, heard it whistle by like a foul ball, like the ball that struck Evan would have sounded to him if he’d been standing six inches closer to the dugout. Yet somehow she knew what the thought was—strangers talking, a snippet of conversation, a voice overheard, an adjoining room—without it having actually made an appearance in her brain. Then, over the blank space in her brain where the thought did not appear,
“I need some new shoes,” she said.
She didn’t know where it came from, but she knew once she’d said it that it was 100 percent true, that she needed new shoes, that new shoes were precisely what she was lacking. It was the first thing she’d asked for in three days, and the pleasure it brought to her parents was obvious and immense. Maybe that was partly why she had said it, to give a gift to her struggling parents.
“My shoes are too small,” she clarified. “I need some new ones.”
“There’s a plan,” her father said. “The shoe plan. The plan of shoes. Why don’t we hit the mall after breakfast?”
“What kind of shoes, sister?” Evan asked mock suspiciously.
“Clown shoes,” she said. “Red ones.”
“With tufts?”
“Yes. Yellow tufts,” she said.
“I see,” he said. He pretended to write on his paper napkin. “Yellow tufts. Yes. Yes, interesting, I see where this is going.”
“Evan can take me,” she said. “He knows what I’m looking for.”
“We’ll all go,” her mother said cheerfully. “There’s something I need from there, too.”
“Yeah,” Evan said. “She needs, um, what was it, let me see, oh yeah, a baby monkey. With a, uh, golden rattle. A baby monkey with a golden rattle. It’s the baby monkey with a golden rattle plan.”
“The plan of the baby monkey with the golden rattle,” Meredith said.
“They just keep on dishin’ it out and I just keep on takin’ it,” her father said, popping a Tater Tot into his mouth. He couldn’t have been happier, she knew, his children smiling, his family brought together, safe in their home with their jokes, with a plan.
•
If Lisa Bellow was the queen of eighth grade and the middle school was her castle, then the Parkway Mall was the country village where she deigned to mingle with the town folk. This was in large part why Meredith wanted to go there to buy new shoes. (What shoes? She would just have to figure that out when she got there.) Meredith had spent many Saturday afternoons at the mall with her friends, but there were the girls who went to the mall and the girls who ruled the mall, and it was easy to tell them apart. There was apparently no occasion too mundane, and no place too commonplace, for Lisa and her besties to take a selfie. They were forever squeezing into the frame—Lisa and Becca and Amanda and Abby—with their skinny vanilla lattes at Starbucks or beside the nearly pornographic mannequins at Victoria’s Secret or cuddled together in the leather chairs in front of Hollister. For what purpose? Meredith and Jules and Kristy often wondered. Just to show that they had been there . . . again? Another corner of the mall conquered . . . again? Meredith sometimes wondered if they ever even looked back on those selfies. Or was it just about the taking, and not the remembering? Meredith recalled seeing the iPhone in Lisa’s hand the moment before the door opened at Deli Barn. If only there had been occasion for a selfie moment then, perhaps the man, or even his car, would have been captured in the background.
She could not explain why she wanted to see the country village without Lisa in it, only that she wanted to experience a world without Lisa before she went back to school on Monday, a trial run, a test. Normally she wouldn’t be caught dead in the mall with her parents, especially not on a Saturday. After the age of eleven, the weekend duties of parents primarily involved transportation. But she knew they would not let her out of their sight. Too many things could happen to girls without their parents.
But those girls, the selfie girls, Lisa’s friends, were not at the mall. There was no eighth-grade pack. In fact there seemed to be no middle school pack at all, and very few teenagers but for the stray one with a parent attached, and Meredith wondered if it was they or their parents who were keeping them at home on a Saturday afternoon, whether it was grief or fear at work.
Was there a danger to the public? The police had not said so specifically. They had not said be careful, watch yourself, pay attention. In the three days that had passed it had not occurred to Meredith that what happened at the Deli Barn might be anything other than an isolated incident, but the thin crowds at the Parkway Mall suggested that this thought had occurred to others. Many others.
She went with Evan and her parents into a shoe store. It was ridiculous, the four of them shopping together. She could not remember the last time this had happened—surely it had been four or five years. Evan stood beside her and her parents hung back, scoping out the place for kidnappers.
“Those,” she said to the saleslady, pointing at the shoes she had last seen seventy-two hours before, the golden gladiator sandals on the feet in front of her face, right before the feet had disappeared. She liked those shoes after all. Jules had been trying to convince her to buy a pair but she had never wanted them before, because she thought they were stupid and phony—“Are we gladiators? I don’t think so!”—but now that she had seen them close up she
realized they actually were kind of cute.
“Cute,” her father agreed, not that he wouldn’t have said that about anything she’d decided to put on her feet, including six-inch slut heels. She walked around to get the feel of them. They felt different from her old shoes. They were not so tight. Her feet felt more like feet. She looked in the mirror. It was just the same old her but the shoes looked good.
“They’re you,” the saleslady said. “And they’re very trendy. This is our last pair. End of the season.”
“I’ll take them,” Meredith said.
•
Lisa was missing the mall. Meredith closed her eyes on the car ride home and could see Lisa sitting on the couch in the apartment, watching TV, the dog on her lap, pretty much okay except for missing the mall. Missing being a bitch at the mall, Meredith thought. God, what would it feel like to walk through a space like that knowing that you owned it, to have that confidence that anything you wore was the right thing to wear and anything you said was the right thing to say and anything you did . . .
But Lisa was probably missing her friends a bit, too. Mostly she was thinking about bossing them around, but also maybe she was thinking about how Becca always got the cinnamon pretzel with extra sugar and Abby always got the pretzel bites because they weren’t as greasy as the classic pretzel and her mom was totally going to kill her if she ruined another skirt with pretzel grease.
And speaking of Abby’s mom, and moms in general, Lisa might also be remembering the way her own mom always waited until the last possible minute to use the hair dryer in the morning, and how she was always busting into the bathroom shouting at her mom, “It’s time to go!” and her mom was always like, “What? What?” over the high-pitched whine of the hair dryer, and how Lisa would mouth, Time to go, and her mother would be like, “What?” and Lisa would stab her finger on the time on her iPhone and her mother would be like “What? What?” And how it took her, Lisa, forever to realize that her mother knew perfectly well what she was saying but said “What?” anyway because she thought it was funny to prolong the moment, because it was their thing, the thing they’d always done and no one else knew anything about it, and so she, Lisa, kept doing it, too. Parents, right? You never knew what dumb thing they’d think was hilarious.