by Susan Perabo
“You’re supposed to wait. And you’re supposed to be there for her when she’s ready. Obviously it’s a fluid situation.”
“How will I know when she’s ready?”
“You’ve been protecting her your whole life,” he said. “You’ll know.”
But he was wrong. Protecting her? Psychiatrists were stupid. Psychiatrists, in fact, were complete morons. She could not protect her daughter. She could not protect her from the stomach flu. She could not protect her from cancer or AIDS or the common cold. She could not protect her from the mean girls. She could not protect her from her friends. She could not protect her from her own thoughts. She could not protect her from men who took girls from the line at the Deli Barn and killed them.
She could not protect her son. She could not protect him from bullies. She could not protect him from pill bottles. She could not protect him from girls who would break his heart. She could not protect him from drunk drivers. She could not protect him from crazy people with guns. She could not protect him from baseballs.
She could vaccinate them and make them wear seat belts and batting helmets. She could give them cell phones with emergency numbers on speed dial. She could give them straight-talk books and scared straight DVDs and a solid, honest, pitch-perfect piece of advice every single morning on their way out the door. But in the end there was no intervention.
There was only awareness.
11
“Just one stripe of mayo,” Lisa was telling the sandwich farmer. Meredith noticed that she had her iPhone in her hand. It was the newest iPhone, naturally, and the biggest, large enough to contain Lisa’s large life. Meredith’s phone was Evan’s hand-me-down and the screen had been cracked for over a month, ever since she’d dropped it out the car window while trying to take a picture of a rainbow. Lisa was wearing the usual uniform: black leggings and a white, cold-shoulder peasant top, its straps just barely wide enough to pass the school district’s two-finger rule.
“Not a big glob,” Lisa said. “Just one little stripe.”
Meredith had had this exact exchange with various sandwich farmers before, but she was sure she hadn’t sounded so nasty when she said it, like it was this guy’s entire purpose in life to measure out mayonnaise, like this was what he’d gone to school for, to differentiate between a stripe and a glob to make this eighth-grade bitch the perfect sandwich.
The front door jingled open and Meredith turned and saw a man stride purposefully into the Deli Barn. The man had on a black ski mask—not the kind with the eyeholes cut out, but the kind that only covered the bottom half of his face, so she could see his dark eyes and pale blond eyebrows. He wore a gray hoodie that was too long—it went nearly to his thighs—and jeans and big brown hiking boots. The door closed behind him and the Christmas bells rang for a moment in Meredith’s mind even after they were still. The man was holding a gun.
Meredith had never seen a gun in real life before, except for maybe in a policeman’s holster, but this thing in the man’s hand looked exactly like every single gun she had ever seen on television, so she didn’t doubt that it was real. The man pointed the real gun at the sandwich farmer and said, “Open the register, fat ass,” which didn’t make sense because the sandwich farmer wasn’t even fat. Lisa Bellow let out a little squawk, and the man’s head swung toward the girls.
“Get on the floor,” the man said. His voice was muffled by the mask, so it sounded more like “Gone the four.” It also wasn’t clear who he was talking to, so Meredith only crouched down slightly until she saw Lisa Bellow getting on her hands and knees and then she did it, too, and felt—astonishingly—a stab of embarrassment that she had not been able or willing to do it herself initially and instead was following the lead of Lisa Bellow. What was wrong with her? This was a robbery. The Deli Barn was being robbed. The Deli Barn was being robbed and that was all and she didn’t have to worry and there was nothing wrong with her.
As she lay down she caught a fleeting glimpse of her left wrist, Steven Overbeck’s drawn-on watch buckle, blue ink already fading, joined at her pounding pulse. Her backpack was still on her back and it was incredibly heavy—her Algebra II book alone must have weighed five pounds—and it shifted and settled awkwardly across her upper back once she was flat on her stomach, its weight suddenly immense, like the weight of a whole person with his foot pressed into her shoulder blade.
Because she had been at the bread station, and Lisa a few feet ahead at the condiment station, when Meredith lay down she and Lisa were face-to-face, though their feet were pointing in opposite directions, Lisa’s toward the front door, and Meredith’s toward the potato-chip rack. The floor was cold and smelled like dishwasher detergent. Meredith could hear the sandwich farmer breathing and the jiggling of the cash register drawer.
“You know the safe combination?” the man with the gun asked.
“There’s no safe,” the sandwich farmer said.
“You wanna die in this shit hole?” the man said. “Is that what you want?”
The sandwich farmer started crying, or at least it sounded like crying, or maybe hyperventilating. Meredith wasn’t sure because she couldn’t see anything except for Lisa. Lisa was crying, too. Her lips were trembling and slimy with spit, and thick teardrops slid down her cheeks and puddled on the floor about six inches from Meredith’s nose. Meredith could feel Lisa’s breath as it came out in hot little puffs. Meredith wasn’t crying. Her eyes felt dry and sore, like she’d been staring at a movie screen for a long time without blinking. In her mind she saw a picture of her and her brother sitting on Santa Claus’s lap at the Parkway Mall. She was two or three years old, and her hair was clipped back in green barrettes that were shaped like Christmas trees.
“Swear to god,” the sandwich farmer said. “I swear to god there’s no safe.”
“Show me,” the man said. “You show me.”
Meredith heard them walking into the back room. Somebody’s shoes were squeaking (sneakers), and somebody’s thunking (hiking boots). Now it would be okay. There was a door back there, to the outside—Meredith had seen sandwich farmers smoking by that door before—and the man with the too-long hoodie would see there was no safe to open and then he would run out that back door with the money he’d taken from the cash register and he would go far away, first to another state and then probably to another country, and no one would ever hear anything from him again. It would be a clean getaway. That’s how it would be described in the newspaper tomorrow: a clean getaway. Vividly, as vividly as anything in the Deli Barn, Meredith could see her family sitting around the breakfast table, her mother reading aloud from the newspaper article: “It was a clean getaway.”
Meredith licked her dry lips. “It’s okay,” she whispered to Lisa Bellow. She couldn’t remember a time she’d been so close to someone else’s face for so long. And it was especially weird because their eyes were almost perfectly in line but the rest of Lisa was upside down. “It’s okay now. It’s okay.”
Lisa’s mouth opened like a word was going to come out, but only a little wet pop came from between her lips. Thick black mascara lines connected her eyes to the floor. Meredith thought of the scorching tennis court that summer morning, all those years ago, Lisa’s lip gashed, the blood spattered on her white Nike tennis shirt. Had Lisa cried then, there on the court, or after, walking across the dry brown grass to the Snak Shed? Meredith didn’t think so. But back then there was no makeup to ruin, no face to distort so colorfully, so maybe she had, a little. Maybe, their backs propped against the Shed, Lisa had held the baggie of ice to her face and in doing so shielded Meredith from the brimming tears in her eyes.
The thunking feet, the hiking boots, returned. The steps were heavy and unhurried. No squeaking accompanied the boots. The boots were alone. Meredith couldn’t see him, but when the thunking stopped she was pretty sure the man, the robber, was standing right behind her head, between her and the counter. He had come back without the sandwich farmer. Meredith had heard no gunshot, but
something had happened in the back room and now it was just the man with the too-long hoodie and her and Lisa. And now Meredith was absolutely certain of something, as certain as she’d ever been of anything in her whole life, and that thing was as far from what she had just said to Lisa as a thing could be:
It was definitely not okay.
It was definitely definitely definitely definitely not okay. It was not okay now, not anymore, not ever again, because the man was going to kill her. He was going to shoot her in the head as she lay on this floor. This spot, this very spot, was where she was going to die. She would never see her mother or her father or her brother or her cats or her room or her toothbrush again. In a moment she was going to be dead. Now she was completely alive but in an instant she would be completely dead and she wouldn’t even know it, it would just be over, and she wouldn’t even know it was over because she herself would be over, and all the stuff in her brain—all the thoughts in her brain right now, right this second—would just be a big sticky mess on the floor of the Deli Barn. And it was now—now—now. It was this instant—no, this instant—this instant—this—
—this is me. This is really me. This is my real life.
She realized her eyes were closed, bracing for the impact of the bullet, and she wanted to see the world one more time—even if it was just a crappy old Deli Barn—so she opened her eyes and there was Lisa Bellow staring right at her.
“Don’t worry, Meredith,” Lisa said. “It’ll be okay.” She didn’t even whisper it. She said it in a normal voice, as if nothing were wrong, or even out of the ordinary. She had stopped crying. Her cheeks were dry. Something in her face made Meredith think she was about to smile.
“You two,” the man said. “Get up.”
•
There were candy wrappers all over the inside of the car. It looked like a family car the morning after Halloween, the way they were littered everywhere, the floor, the seats, and all different kinds: Snickers, Kit Kats, Butterfingers, M&M’s. She and Lisa sat still in the backseat while he walked around to the driver’s side of the car, not holding the gun out in the open but his hand tense under his jacket, watching them through the windows every step he took, making sure they knew he was not taking his eyes off them. He got in the car and pulled the ski mask off his head and turned around. His face was flushed pink from the mask but besides that he was ugly. His eyes were squinchy. He had a knobby chin and a mustache that drooped around the sides of his small mouth. It was the kind of face that had always looked older than it really was. Probably he was in his late twenties but he could have been forty. He was a little man who had been made fun of in eighth grade by girls just like Lisa.
“I’ll shoot you if you try to get out of the car. Got it?”
Meredith was shaking from the inside, which she didn’t even know was possible. The shaking started in her heart and lungs and spread out to her sides and legs and arms, and her fingers were trembling and she wanted to put them in her mouth and bite down on them to stop the trembling. It was the only thing she could think to do, the only thing she felt like might make things better, sticking her fingers in her mouth and biting down, hard. She raised her hand to her mouth.
“Got it?” the man said again, and she froze where she was and then lay her hand back on her lap.
A minivan drove haltingly by the Deli Barn parking lot, and inside the van Meredith could see a mother turned halfway around trying to hand something to the kid in the backseat. The van couldn’t have been more than twenty feet away from them. If both she and Lisa screamed bloody murder, the mother in the minivan might hear them. If they opened the back doors and leaped out, the van would surely screech to a halt. If they did it together, maybe only one of them would be shot. And maybe he was full of crap anyway. Maybe he wouldn’t really shoot but would just tear off, his tires squealing. Maybe. But Meredith didn’t even have time to pass this idea on to Lisa, not even with a look. The minivan turned the corner, and the man started the car.
“You suck,” Lisa said. She leaned forward until she was practically right behind the driver’s right ear. “Do you hear me?” She was screeching. “You suck. You asshole!”
Meredith turned to her, horrified. Lisa looked furious, possessed. There was spittle on her lips from screaming.
“Shut up,” the driver said, throwing the car in gear. “Shut your mouth. Shut it. Shut it.”
“You shut your mouth,” Lisa said savagely. “You stupid fuck.”
The driver shut his mouth. Lisa turned and gave Meredith a triumphant little smile. Meredith had seen that smile on Lisa many times before—in the cafeteria, the locker room, the library, every chaotic hall of Parkway North Middle School. It was the smile of the person in control of the situation. It was the smile of the person in charge.
Meredith couldn’t feel her face. She had the sense that her mouth was hanging open but she didn’t feel like she had the ability to close it. Her whole body was numb. The man pulled out of the lot and turned right onto Chestnut, then made a left onto Willow. Lisa was smirking and rubbing her fingers together.
“I got this,” Lisa whispered. “I got this.”
•
The apartment complex was sprawling. It seemed to go for blocks and blocks, and from the outside all the apartments were identical. Meredith had never seen the complex before, or if she had she didn’t remember it, for there was nothing memorable about it. It had taken them only fifteen minutes to get there from the school, but part of that was on the highway, at least two or three exits, so she wasn’t exactly sure where they were. His was a ground-floor apartment with an outdoor entrance; they passed two other drab brown doors on the way to his drab brown door. His hand was tucked in his jacket. He pushed them inside.
It had dawned on Meredith way too late that she and Lisa had broken one of the cardinal rules of abduction by allowing themselves to be taken to a second location. She knew this was a rule because one afternoon the spring before she’d spent a harrowing two hours reading every single pamphlet in the hospital lobby. The pamphlets, hundreds of them on a wide array of subjects, were all distributed by the same company, so essentially the same cartoon people faced hardship after hardship, with a very limited number of facial expressions. By the end of that afternoon Meredith knew about every terrible thing that might possibly ever happen to her and suggestions on how to go about avoiding the terrible thing (or, if unavoidable, like acne or menopause, at least how to gracefully manage it). She got the cartoon lowdown on cervical cancer, meth addiction, miscarriage, colonoscopies, cystic fibrosis, tinnitus, STDs, domestic abuse, and athlete’s foot. And abduction. She actually remembered the drawing that accompanied the second-location rule, a stick man and stick woman standing beside a car, and a big X drawn through the car. Once you got to a second location, the pamphlet informed her, your chances of survival dropped by over 50 percent. But who could stop and think of that in the moment, when the flow of events (not to mention a gun) was propelling you across a parking lot? And what were the other rules? There had been at least five more, perhaps as many as ten. But Meredith could not recall what they were. Would she only remember each one as it lay broken behind her?
They shuffled into the apartment and the man closed and locked the door behind them.
“Sit on the couch,” the man said, pointing at the couch with his gun. “Just sit there and let me think.”
Meredith sat. Lisa did not.
“Let us go,” Lisa said, riding high on her triumph from the car. “Let us go right now. Just open the door and we’ll walk out and you’ll never hear anything from either of us again.”
“Shut up,” he said. He seemed to have remembered that he was the one in charge. Maybe because he was in his own home. “You shut up now.”
“Make me,” Lisa said.
The man punched Lisa in the face. The sound reminded Meredith of leaping from the monkey bars onto the playground sand—some smack, some give. Lisa fell backward over the arm of the couch and landed on t
op of Meredith.
“Now you just sit there and shut up,” he yelled. “Do you understand me?”
“Yes,” Meredith said. She winced as Lisa’s elbow dug into her stomach. “We understand you.”
Lisa rolled off Meredith and into a kneeling position on the floor beside the couch, holding her face. There was blood seeping through her fingers. There was blood on her white blouse and on the couch and on Meredith’s leggings. The man sat down at a chair at a little table and set the gun down in front of him. He closed his eyes and took some deep breaths and rubbed his mustache with his left index finger, rubbed it hard, like he was trying to make sure it was firmly attached. Meredith could tell he was thinking. He was trying to decide what to do. Things had not gone as planned. He had told them to get up—a split-second decision, the disappointment of so little money—and now here they all were in his apartment, the snotty one already covered in blood. In thirty seconds he’d gone from armed robbery to two counts of kidnapping, and now here they all were and he was going to have to figure out what to do with them. And he was going to have to figure it out fast. And the first thing he was going to have to figure out was just how far he was willing to go.
•
Crushed ice would have been better, but at least it was something—big cubes with sharp edges that Meredith wrapped in the cuff of her sweater sleeve to hold on Lisa’s swollen face. Lisa hadn’t said anything for a half hour, only tensing up when Meredith moved the ice. The whole bottom half of her face was purple and swollen. Looking at it, Meredith was now more afraid of getting punched than getting shot. She wondered if something in Lisa’s face could be broken.
The man was sitting at the table again. He’d given them the ice and then he’d gone into the bathroom. He hadn’t closed the door and she heard him peeing and then the water in the sink ran for a long time. Then he’d come out and gone into another room and changed his clothes. Now he was back at the table with the gun still in front of him. He fingered it absently and appeared lost in thought. If he had wanted to kill them, really wanted to, maybe he would have done it already, Meredith thought. Maybe he would have killed them in the car instead of going to the trouble of bringing them back here. Maybe thinking about things was a good sign.