by Susan Perabo
“Sure,” Meredith said.
Detective Thorn reached into his bag and took out the Parkway Senior High School yearbook. “I’d like you to take a look through this. Just in case.”
“That’s a yearbook,” Meredith said.
“It is,” Detective Thorn said. “You remember at the hospital, what we told you? Most people are abducted by someone they know. We don’t know if that’s the case here, but we have to look at every possibility.”
“This isn’t even our yearbook,” Meredith said. “This is the high school yearbook. The middle school yearbook is—”
“We know Lisa spent time with high school kids,” Detective Thorn said.
“And he had a car,” Claire said. “The . . . the . . . ” she fumbled, forgetting what to call him. “The . . . abductor.” She was relieved, absurdly, to realize that the abductor could not be an eighth-grader because he had to be at least old enough to drive.
“Her boyfriend’s in high school,” Meredith said.
“That’s right,” Detective Thorn said. “Do you know him?”
“No. I know he plays lacrosse.”
“It sounds like she interacted with several people at the high school. So we thought a look at the yearbook couldn’t hurt.” He cast a glance at Claire. “Kids, you know . . . ” he said sadly. He shook his head.
Know what? she wondered. Know that kids sometimes abducted each other? What message was the detective trying to send her? Did they suspect something and weren’t letting on? Did they think this could be a joke of some kind, a senior prank gone wrong? It didn’t make any sense. What about the unconscious employee? The safe? The gun?
The detective had bookmarked the yearbook so that Meredith was able to skip all the candids and go straight to the headshots. As she flipped through Claire recognized boys from the baseball team, boys that had been Evan’s classmates for years. Meredith stopped on the O’s in Evan’s class.
“That’s my brother,” she said to Detective Thorn.
Claire looked at the photo, taken a few months before the injury. Her son looking confidently with both eyes toward the future. Meredith flipped the page and Claire looked away. All these boys, not yet the men in the official books of suspects, but fixed forever now in their own book of suspects, the preface to the ongoing series of men who might take you.
Meredith closed the book. “Sorry,” she said again.
“We’ll keep trying,” he said.
“Can I go now?”
“Sure. We might do it again tomorrow.”
“Okay.” She left the room and went slowly up the stairs, dragging her hand along the banister. Claire wondered if she had paused partway up to listen, sat down soundlessly on what they called the Christmas Step, the spot where the stairs turned and there was a mini landing large enough for two kids to wait until they were summoned downstairs to see what Santa had brought them.
“Are there any leads at all?” Claire asked.
Detective Thorn frowned. “Lots of tips. People call the line, say they saw a man driving with a teenager. Most of the time it ends up being a girl and her dad. But that’s how we do it, how we find people. We follow every tip.”
“Do you really think it might be a student?”
“We have a lot of ideas.”
“But nothing solid.”
“Not yet,” he said. “But someone will see something eventually. We’re fortunate. Lot of people are invested in this. Lot of community support. Social media. Posters. People putting together search groups and the like. Ribbons. Fund-raisers.”
“Fund-raisers for what?”
“Help out her mom,” the detective said. “Single mom, not a lot of resources. Just people want to lend a hand.” He cleared his throat. “Speaking of her, I think she’d like to speak to you.”
“Who-what?” Claire asked.
“Lisa’s mom,” he said. “Colleen’s her name. I think she’d like to speak with you.”
“Why?” Claire asked quickly, then considered, too late, how it might look to ask why, to question anything. She was the mother who had won; Lisa Bellow’s mother was the mother who’d lost.
“She’s distraught,” he said flatly.
“Of course,” she said. “Of course she is.”
“I think she thought she might find some comfort in speaking with you. And in speaking with Meredith. I’ve told her that you all and Meredith are working with us, helping us in whatever way you all can. But I think this is more of an emotional question than a practical one. If you see what I’m saying.”
“Of course,” Claire said. Claire did not want Colleen Bellow in her living room or on her couch or at her dining-room table, did not want her reclining against her throw pillows or drinking out of her glasses, did not want her washing her hands in her bathroom sink, did not want her home and family polluted by that degree of agony. If she was being honest with herself—and there was no reason not to be—she would appreciate it if Colleen Bellow would keep her own tragedy off their doorstep. They—Meredith, the whole family—had dodged the bullet. It was a gruesome, awful bullet, but they had dodged it, goddammit. Could they not simply dust themselves off, breathe a sigh of relief, and move on? Did they have to become involved? She could not say any of this to the detective, of course. If she was going to be a terrible person, she was going to have to be a terrible person in private. This was something she had learned long ago.
“So it would be all right if someone brought her by later? You’ll talk to Meredith and make sure that’s okay? I think it would be a nice thing for Mrs.—Ms.—Bellow. I’m not sure she’s had one minute of sleep since Wednesday.”
“Anything we can do,” Claire said, because what other option did she have?
•
“Her mother?” Meredith said. Claire thought she looked more appalled than distressed. “Here?”
“We can tell them no,” Mark said. “If you’re not up to it.”
“We can’t really tell them no,” Claire said.
Mark gave her a pointed look. The look plainly said: You want to rethink that one? Because I’m pretty sure you want to rethink that one.
“Well, I’m sorry, but I don’t feel we can say no,” Claire said. “The woman has lost her daughter. She would like to speak with Meredith. Meredith was the last person to speak with her. Her daughter—”
“You say that like—” Mark started.
“—before she was taken. The last person to speak with her before she was taken.”
“I’m not saying she doesn’t ever have to talk with her,” Mark said in his super-enunciated voice, normally reserved for elderly patients. “I’m saying that she doesn’t have to do it today.”
“Her daughter,” Claire said, “is missing.”
“It’s okay,” Meredith said, her game face on. “It’s okay. I can do it.”
Strangely, Claire had not fully understood the origin of Meredith’s game face until the day she’d caught the exact same expression in her own reflection in a car window. It was the determination and deliberate detachment made necessary by a difficult situation. Sometimes Claire imagined that one day, when Meredith was her age and she was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, or Alzheimer’s, or whatever was going to kill her, she and Meredith might just stare at each other with their game faces on until Claire died. This frightened and heartened her simultaneously.
•
She arrived a little after 4:00 on Sunday afternoon. It was Detective Waller who brought her, the detective they’d seen at the hospital the morning Meredith woke up. Claire was certain she would recognize Colleen Bellow from school, that she’d remember her face from a band concert or open house, but the woman she saw bore no resemblance to anyone she knew. She seemed much too young to be the mother of a middle-schooler, looked closer in age to an eighth-grader than to a mother of one. She was shorter than Claire and had long straight blond hair, the kind (Claire always thought) that women who were not quite willing to grow up clung to as long as possible, especially if
they had daughters. She was cute and dressed like the dental hygienists at the office, in clothes that came from stores Claire hadn’t set foot in for at least ten years.
Claire had also expected Colleen Bellow to look more like a wreck than she did. She’d imagined a crazy-woman with bloodshot eyes and tangled hair and splotchy skin—all the earmarks of a stricken woman—but Colleen Bellow did not look all that bad. She looked, in fact, better than Claire felt.
“Thanks for letting me come over,” she said to Mark, shaking his hand, identifying him quickly, as everyone always did, as the welcoming one, despite the fact that he’d been the one to try to rescind the invitation. “I can’t tell you how nice it is to be in a house.”
Claire thought it was an odd thing to say (surely Colleen Bellow lived in a house?), but she tried to smile warmly as she shook the woman’s hand. The hand was surprisingly strong, the grasp firm. Her daughter was missing but her grip was full of resolve.
“What can we do for you?” Claire asked. “Can we get you anything? Coffee?”
“I can’t stand another cup of coffee,” Colleen said. Her eyes moved to the staircase. “Is Meredith here? Is she in her room? Can I talk to her?”
The plan had been that she and Mark would talk to Colleen for a few minutes, evaluate her mental state, see if they thought talking to her was something Meredith was up for, before they brought her into it. They wanted to control the situation. They did not want to give Meredith more than she could handle.
“She’s . . . ” Mark started. He looked to Claire for support.
Of course you wouldn’t sleep, Claire thought. You wouldn’t dare. What your mind would do to you in the moments before sleep, the images held at bay while you talked to people, while you kept moving, kept drinking coffee, kept answering the phone, kept making lists—they’d have nothing to keep them back if you stopped and lay down in a dark and quiet room and closed your eyes. Of course you would look like this, not stricken but driven; of course your handshake would be firm, firmer than it ever had been before, knuckle bruising if necessary. In the first days, when that window of possibility was still open, her leftovers still in the refrigerator, the smell of her still on her sheets, when you could sense the window sliding shut but still feel her breath blowing through the opening, you would do nothing but do do do. There was only action, forward motion.
For a moment Claire was standing in Colleen Bellow’s home, their roles reversed, Meredith missing, Lisa left behind, and Claire was looking hopefully up the Bellows’ stairs in the direction of Lisa’s room and asking to speak with her, while just on the other side of the window in her mind was the horror of what might be happening to her daughter in this moment, this exact moment, and thus the need to go back to the last moment, the last moment that could possibly be accounted for. . . .
“I’ll go get her,” Claire said. “She’s just upstairs. I’ll be right back.”
Her children were sitting on the floor of Meredith’s bedroom quietly playing with what they called the battling animals. They weren’t even really playing with them; they were setting them up, which always seemed to them to be more fun than the actual playing, the placing of each one in its strategic position in order that it might have the greatest advantage in the battle, when and if that battle was finally waged. The bull with the ball and chain was on the desk chair; the alligator with the sword on the overturned trashcan. Claire stood in the doorway and watched them for a moment. They weren’t speaking to each other, but they were making little mumbly animal growls as they arranged their toys, and anyone who did not know them would think that they both suffered from some sort of terrible disability.
“Meredith,” she said.
“Grrrr,” Evan said. “Who dares interrupt our preparations?”
“Honey,” she said. “Mrs. Bellow is downstairs.”
“I know,” Meredith said. “I heard her.”
“So you need to come now, okay?”
Meredith looked at Evan. He raised his eyebrows. Was he asking her if she wanted him to come, too? Claire did not know. She was not, nor had ever been, privy to the meaning of their gestures. She imagined they could have an entire conversation, with the help of the battling animals, and she would not know a single thing that had been said.
“Okay,” Meredith said. She lay her animals down on the battlefield. Claire walked down the stairs behind her and on the bottom stair gave her what was intended to be a comforting touch on the back but which wound up, somehow, maybe because Meredith slowed, to seem like a shove. They both felt it, the shover and the shoved, and Meredith tensed up in that moment and walked stiffly into the living room where Mark and Colleen Bellow were sitting on the edges of their chairs, not talking, and Claire wondered if they’d said a word in her absence aside from Mark’s increasingly desperate offers to get her something from the kitchen.
Colleen stood up when Meredith came into the room.
“Meredith,” she said. She said it warmly and with great relief, as if they were old friends who had been separated for years. Claire could see that Colleen Bellow wanted to hug her daughter, and could also see that Meredith was going to do everything possible with her body—arms crossed, legs pressed against the end table—to prevent it.
“Hi,” Meredith said.
“It’s so good to see you again. You probably don’t recognize me, but I know you and Lisa have known each other for years. Isn’t your locker next to hers?”
Claire saw her daughter struck by this comment.
“Uh, yeah,” Meredith said.
“She’s mentioned you a bunch of times,” Colleen said. She looked at Claire. “She’s mentioned her,” she said.
“Yes,” Claire said. “I think they’ve been in several classes together.”
“I remember a birthday party,” Colleen said. “A roller-skating birthday party. I think it was for Mary Berger. It was at the community center. I remember that you and Lisa were both really good at limbo. I was so impressed that anyone could think about limbo and roller-skating at the same time.”
“Hmmmm,” Meredith said.
“Do you remember that party?”
“Sort of,” Meredith said. “I think it was a while ago.”
“I’ll never forget that,” Colleen said. She turned to Claire. “They were both so good, and they were the last two, and the bar just kept getting lower and lower and they kept doing it. Do you remember that?”
“It rings a bell,” Claire said, though it rung not the slightest, faintest of bells, and she was sure that even if such a birthday party had ever happened that, one, she had not been there and, two, that Colleen Bellow was confusing Meredith with someone else, some other girl Lisa vaguely disdained, because Meredith had inherited her poor flexibility, and was terrible on roller skates, and would never in one million years have been a finalist in a limbo roller-skating competition.
“I bet Mark remembers it,” Colleen said.
“I do,” Mark said, always the hero. “I remember it well.”
Meredith sat down on the hearth. Colleen looked at her and smiled.
“Lisa just had a birthday,” she said. “Two weeks ago. When’s your birthday?”
“Not till March,” Meredith said.
“What do you want for your birthday?” Colleen said.
“I don’t know,” Meredith said. “I mean . . . it’s still a long way off.”
“Your parents are really lucky to have you,” Colleen said.
“We feel very lucky,” Claire said, then wished it back, lest it seem like they were flaunting their luck, speaking not just of the general good fortune of having nice children (which is obviously how she’d intended it), but of this very specific moment of good luck that their child was the one sitting on the hearth in this living room and Lisa Bellow was—Claire thought with a sudden, vivid shock—lifeless, bruised, and tangled in some brush by the side of the interstate.
“You know we will help in whatever way we can,” Mark said. “Anything we ca
n do.”
Colleen turned to Meredith. “I know you’ve talked to the police,” she said. “But if there’s anything you forgot to tell them about what happened, any more you can remember . . . ”
Detective Waller had been standing silently in the archway between the foyer and the living room, but now she straightened up.
“Sometimes just the smallest detail can help,” she added.
“She was ordering a sandwich,” Meredith said. “Two sandwiches.”
“Two?” Colleen said.
“One foot-long and one six-inch,” Meredith said.
“What was on the foot-long?” Colleen asked.
“Like, a lot of onions, I think. That’s the only thing I really remember.”
“That’s my sandwich!” Colleen said, turning to the detective. “That’s the one she was getting for me.”
Now she turned to Claire. “I usually don’t get off work until seven, and so sometimes she gets me a sandwich and puts it in the fridge so I have something to eat when I get home, so I don’t have to cook.”
“It sounds like she was—” Claire started, then swallowed what was to follow, “a wonderful girl,” and was able to quickly replace it with, “getting you your sandwich.”
“Yes,” Colleen said. “She was. That was my sandwich. It was for me.”
“What kind of sandwich was it again?” the detective asked, uncapping her pen.
Claire was sweating. In some way she couldn’t explain, the discussion of the sandwich was actually worse than the image of the bruised body tangled in the brush. She never wanted to talk about sandwiches again. She hated sandwiches, period. Sandwiches were dead to her. (And here, now, the wildly inappropriate impulse to giggle.)
Meredith told the rest of her story. She told the same story she’d told before, now ten, a dozen times, no new details, all she remembered. Claire did not like to imagine Meredith lying on that floor so she stopped listening near the end.
“And then she got up and they walked out,” Meredith finished.
Colleen frowned. She was not going to cry, Claire realized. Maybe she hadn’t cried yet. Maybe she was never going to cry. Maybe crying was as bad as sleeping. Maybe, until there was something definite to cry over, something physical, not an idea or a possibility of even a probability, but a body, there would be, could be, no tears. There was only do do do.