by Susan Perabo
“I don’t understand how there can be such a good description, but still no one knows who this man is,” Colleen said to the detective. “Meredith’s done an awesome job.”
“She has,” Detective Waller agreed.
“Meredith,” Colleen said. “Do you think maybe you saw the car even a little bit? Because I was thinking, the door, the door at the Deli Barn, it’s all glass. All the way down to the bottom. So even while you were lying there you might have seen it. After Lisa got up, you might have seen it. You were looking that way.”
Colleen Bellow glanced over at Claire. “She was looking that way,” she said.
“Sort of,” Meredith said. “I mean I was looking sort of that way. But I—”
“She doesn’t remember,” Claire said. “She didn’t see the car and she doesn’t remember.”
“Those are two different things,” Detective Waller said. She didn’t say it critically, Claire noticed, only like a point of fact.
“They may be two different things,” Claire said. “But they’re both true.”
“I never saw the parking lot,” Meredith said. “I never saw the car. I know that. I heard the car but I never saw it.”
“Why didn’t you look when you heard it start up?” Colleen asked softly, kindly, even.
Meredith shook her head. “I don’t know,” she said.
Because she’s thirteen, Claire thought. Because a man had a gun pointed at her head. Because she thought she was going to die. Because her mind was frozen. Because the rules of common sense did not apply. Because how could she know that the simplest thing could be the most important?
She wished she could go back in time for one second—she wasn’t greedy, wasn’t asking for much, just one second to take Meredith’s head, tilt it in the right direction. “Look outside,” she’d say. “Meredith, Meredith, please, look.”
•
“That was horrible,” Mark said, later, in the kitchen, while they were doing the dinner dishes. “Horrible. I know it sounds selfish, but I don’t want to do that again. I don’t care what they say. There’s no reason to—”
“I hope that poor girl is already dead,” Claire said.
He turned off the water. “What?”
“I hope she’s already dead.”
“How can you say that?”
“It’s not going to end well,” Claire said. “It’s been four days. Imagine those four days if she’s still alive. Imagine. It’s not going to end well so the best everyone can hope for is that it ends soon. For everyone. The girl included.”
“Did Meredith even know her?”
“Meredith hated her. Don’t you ever listen to anything? She was horrible. She was awful.”
“And now you hope she’s dead.”
“Oh, come on,” she said. “For god’s sake, you know I didn’t mean—”
“I’m sorry,” he said, and he looked sorry, and he should be sorry, she thought. “I’m sorry. That was horrible, sitting there with that woman, talking about goddamn Deli Barn sandwiches.”
“Did someone mention Deli Barn sandwiches?” Evan said, appearing in the doorway. “Because I’m starving.”
“Stop it,” Mark said. “Just don’t, okay? People are in pain. You don’t even know the kind of pain that was in our living room this afternoon.”
It was not at all like him to talk this way, certainly not to Evan. He was rattled, and he was bad at being rattled, and Evan stood there silently in the doorway waiting for his father to apologize, which, Claire suspected, would take no more than five seconds.
“I’m sorry I blew up,” Mark said, on the count of four. “This is not about you.”
Evan continued his punishing silence.
“Okay?” Mark said. “Okay? Everything’s crazy. Everybody’s crazy.”
More silence. Her son’s face was a mask of granite disinterest. He knew how to hurt them. He had the weapons, and he wasn’t afraid to use them.
He had been drifting around the house like a ghost for months, his dreams in shambles. Not that they were very good dreams to begin with, and not that in some ways this wasn’t for the best. She’d told herself this a thousand times. The upside to Evan’s partial blindness was that there would be no horrible disappointment in the future with regards to baseball. He was very good, but he would have hit the wall eventually, likely as soon as he got to college when he was no longer the best, when every boy in the dugout had been the star of the high school team, a hometown hero. Evan was not going to play professional baseball, and she’d already been dreading that slow realization, the gradual resignation, the prolonged agony. Now that was all erased in one quick stroke. At least the stroke itself was quick, if not the aftermath. Losing the eye was terrible. The dream itself was no great loss.
“You want to do something?” Mark asked. “You want to play cards or something? You want to play rummy?”
Evan shook his head slowly.
Mark looked at her. “I’m going to take a shower,” he said. “For like two hours. Or until the hot water runs out.”
“Okay,” she said.
When it was just her and Evan, Claire said, “He’s very stressed out.”
“No shit,” Evan said. “Who isn’t?”
He sat down at the kitchen table and took off his glasses and pressed the heel of his hand over his blind eye. This was something he did. She knew he was in pain, though they no longer spoke of it. She knew he still took a pill every morning. Sometimes after he left for school she went into their bathroom and counted the pills, and some days—not most days, but some days—there were more gone than the prescription allowed.
“Are you all right?” she asked, sitting down across from him.
“It’s fine.”
“Are you sure?”
“It’s not awful,” he said.
“Has she said anything to you? About anything? Do you know the girl?”
“I know who she is,” he said. “One of those eighth-grade hoes.”
“Don’t say that.”
“Why not? I’m not making a judgment, I’m just saying. You asked who she is and I’m telling you: one of the eighth-grade hoes. Maybe the leader of the eight-grade hoes. I’m sure Meredith hated her guts.”
“It doesn’t matter if—”
“It does matter. Of course it matters. I’m not saying she’s not freaking out. Maybe you’d freak out more if it’s someone you hate, because maybe part of you doesn’t really care, or maybe even part of you is glad. And what does that say about you? Are you a monster? No, you’re just a normal thirteen-year-old human being. But you’re too stupid to know that. Why? Because you’re just a normal thirteen-year-old human being.”
She loved that he could be so blunt and still remain so utterly likable. Was he a little crueler now than he’d been a year ago? Probably. And yet he could not shake that sweetness, her whistling boy.
“Will you talk to her?”
“About what?”
“About anything. About everything. Will you try to talk to her? It’s going to be hard, going back to school . . . ”
It wasn’t as if she was asking him to do her job, only that he would do it better, have a better chance of doing it right, of making some difference.
“I’m not going to make her talk. That’s not what she needs.”
“What do you think she needs?”
“How should I know? I’ve never almost been kidnapped before.”
“But you know her. And you know what it’s like to . . . ”
“To what? Get hit in the face? She didn’t get hit in the face, Mom. She got out of the way.”
“Evan,” she said. He was on the other side of the kitchen table and she could have reached out and touched him, almost, but the table was too big. She would have had to practically lay herself across the table to do it because he was leaning back in his chair, in his defensive position now, and what was she supposed to do, flatten herself across the tabletop just to reach him with the tips of her fing
ers?
“She trusts you,” she said. “Anything you can say to her, anything will help. Even just being funny. That will help. She just needs to know you’re there for her.”
“Well, obviously,” he said. “Where else would I be?”
9
Meredith hadn’t looked very long at the books, but now, in her bed, it seemed like she could vividly recall every page, every face. How could there be so many suspects? How could it be that so many men might have taken Lisa? Surely if that were true then people were being taken all the time, every day, all over the country, girls brought to their feet inside a hundred Deli Barns, walked briskly to unidentified cars, bells ringing in their wakes.
But probably most of those men were not real criminals. Right? Probably they were potheads or deadbeat dads or petty thieves—the ones who broke into minivans left unlocked in driveways, who fished change out of unused ashtrays. Probably there were not so many men (were all of those men from around here? was that a local book?) who were capable of real crimes, serious crimes, crimes where detectives came to your house and laid books across your dining-room table, the table where a long time ago, before baseball, you ate dinner, and sometimes still did. Probably good, too, that she did not recognize any of those faces as the half face glimpsed in that moment when she’d first looked up from the counter and realized what was happening. She had seen enough movies to know what happened next, what happened when you could positively identify the criminal.
What happened was that the criminal came back for you.
She rolled over and looked at the clock. It was 5:15. No one else was awake. Except maybe the intolerant cat, who sometimes moved about in the night, when there was no one to bother him, and sometimes made noises that sounded like a window sliding open, or footsteps on the stairs, or the creak of a door.
Lisa could sleep late, which was nice for her. There would be no one hassling her to get out of bed so she could catch the bus, no one asking her if she’d finished her homework or if the field trip form had been turned in, or reminding her to pick up a sandwich on the way home. That was weird, right? Getting your mother a sandwich at Deli Barn? Of course Meredith understood it was nice, it was thoughtful, but it was also kind of weird, like your mother couldn’t stop on her own way home to pick up a sandwich? Because by the time she got home after work that sandwich would have been in the fridge for like four hours and the bread would be cold and hard, and there was almost nothing worse in the world than cold, hard bread.
So not for the boyfriend, the lacrosse player, the boy on the beach, not for him those onions, but for her mother. Her mother who remembered some party from like three years ago, some party where not only had she not even talked to Lisa but also definitely had not participated in any stupid limbo contest. And her mother knew, somehow, that their lockers were beside each other this year? What had Lisa said: “Hey, Mom, can you see if you can get me a new locker, because I’m next to Meredith Oliver who is a total loser”? Her mother looked like a grown-up version of Lisa, like the kind of mother who was dying to be confused for an older sister. Not that she, Meredith, should be a jerk about it because, after all, Mrs. Bellow’s house was completely empty now, and there was no one to bring her a sandwich.
He’d gotten Lisa some clothes, almost definitely. Right? She was not still wearing the same clothes from Wednesday, the cold-shoulder peasant top and the black leggings. Certainly, he’d picked up something for her—most likely some sweats she wouldn’t be caught dead in in public, but what else would she need, she’d have her sweats and her couch and her daytime television. And probably a bag of chips or something. It was sort of blissful, when you thought about it, that part at least, although probably there was a little part of Lisa this morning that was wishing she were going to school, despite all the hassle and pain in the ass of it, wished she were sliding her folders into her Vera Bradley backpack and strapping on the gladiator sandals, wished she could glide through the halls on those sandals like she always had instead of sitting on the couch, all alone.
But she wasn’t all alone, Meredith reminded herself. Of course not. Where was little Annie? She listened hard for the jingle of Annie’s collar. And then there she was, right on cue, jingling into Lisa’s lap.
Lisa smiled. Meredith smiled. The house was quiet. She went back to sleep.
•
“We’ll give you a ride,” her father said as they were finishing their breakfast. “It’s on our way.”
“That’s okay,” Meredith said.
“It’s on our way,” her mother repeated, both of them determined not to acknowledge the fact that in three years of middle school—six, actually, if you counted Evan’s years—it had never once been on their way to drop a child off. “And we’ll pick you up after.”
“Okay,” she said. “Whatever.”
“And it’s still okay to not go,” her father said. “You can come to the office with us. You can hang out there for the day.”
“No,” she said. “I’m good. It’s not like anyone knows about me, anyway.”
•
“Just drop me off at the corner,” she said, when she saw Kristy and Jules standing there, waiting for her.
“You sure?”
“Yes, I’m sure.”
Her father pulled up to the girls and waved at them and they waved back. Meredith could instantly tell that Jules had told Kristy everything.
“Call us if you want,” her mother said. “It’s fine. We can come get you.”
“I’ll be okay,” she said. “See ya.”
She slammed the door and turned to Jules before Kristy could say anything, Kristy who was just standing there with an open mouth anyway.
“I can’t believe you told her,” she said.
“I didn’t tell her, and everybody knows,” Jules said.
Meredith turned to Kristy for confirmation on both these points. “Everybody,” Kristy said. “Every single person on the bus was talking about it. About you.”
It was a slo-mo moment, turning toward the school, a moment from one of those movies she sometimes watched on Saturday mornings with Evan, the old zombie movies, where you turn to sneak a quick look and all the zombies are staring at you. The crowd in front of the school was facing her as one unified wall, or at least it felt that way.
“How’d they find out?” she asked.
“Who knows?” Jules said. “But they know.”
Of course no one said anything, not in that initial zombie-moment. They looked at her sideways and there was a little bit of whispering, but mostly as she walked toward them, they just cleared a neat path leading to the main doors. Perhaps this was how Lisa felt sometimes, the path cleared before her, the sea of students parting to let her through, a path that led all the way up to her locker, next to which Lisa was not. In Lisa’s place were hundreds of tiny green ribbons, taped or glue-sticked to her locker, plus some messages on colorful Post-it notes—LOVE U, MISS U, COME HOME—as if Lisa might see these and be buoyed up, as if Post-its could somehow help. Meredith focused intently on her own locker, on its dull contents, and was surprised when she turned and there was Mr. Fulton, the custodian, standing at Lisa’s locker.
“Morning,” he said. He was a big man, bulky. All those times he had squirted hand sanitizer onto her hands, he hadn’t seemed so large. But standing by her now, in Lisa’s place, she felt tiny beside him.
“Hi,” she said.
“Looks like you and me are famous.” He smiled warmly. “How you doing anyway? You feelin’ all right?” He had a wide, expressive mouth that had before seemed friendly when it smiled. Probably this was the same smile he had always smiled. Probably it was the same wide smile he smiled at his own kids. But Meredith had a sudden thought, standing here at her locker, that Mr. Fulton could eat her.
“Okay,” she said. “I mean . . . I just got here.”
She had never spoken to him before. She didn’t know anything about him. He was in his fifties, maybe early sixties, older than
her parents but not ancient, his mustache and beard sprinkled with gray.
He gave Lisa’s locker a little tap with his knuckles. “Went through it last week,” he said. “I opened it up for the police. Thought there might be a clue in there, in case she knew him, the man who snatched her.”
“Was there?” she asked quietly.
“A clue? No. Just what you’d expect. Same as yours or anybody else’s.”
How did he know what was in her locker? Or anybody else’s? Did he have keys to everything? The bell rang and people started streaming past her on their way to class. Someone bumped her from behind and she stumbled toward Mr. Fulton. He held up his hands to catch her but she caught herself, only grazed his open hands.
“I gotta go,” she said, closing her locker.
“Strange,” he said. “You being right next to each other here, and then being in the same spot when it happened. You all don’t run in the same crowds though, do you?”
“Not really,” she said. She thought it was weird that Mr. Fulton had some understanding of what crowds people ran in, the social structure of the school. But maybe that was all he did, while he swept with his giant flat broom and squirted out hand sanitizer. Maybe he knew everything. Maybe he had a big book that explained it all, a book with lines that connected people. Maybe he was keeping score.
“I knew when I saw you lying there on the floor,” he said. “I knew it was bad. I didn’t know how bad, but—”
“Yeah,” she said. “Thanks.” Humiliating, that he had seen her on the floor. She couldn’t remember any of it, and now again the unpleasant thought: Why had she lain there for so long? What had she been doing, flat on her stomach, not moving, long after the danger had passed? God knows what he’d seen when he’d walked into the Deli Barn. God knows what she was doing or saying.
“You take care today,” he said.
“Thanks,” she said again. He had found her there on the floor. Maybe he had comforted her before the ambulance arrived. She managed to look him in the face for an instant, to make eye contact, to be polite. Was his face in the book? How many men had been in that book that looked just like Mr. Fulton, old men with wide mouths and little to lose?