by Susan Perabo
Outside it was dark. It must have been after 7:00. Her parents would be frantic by now, would have called the police. It made her stomach hurt to think of her parents. She was sorry she had caused them this trouble. They did not deserve this, first Evan, and now this.
Yes, Evan. What she needed was Evan, precisely, always her imagined partner in this kind of scenario. Lisa was a shit partner because she had no experience with peril. She thought she could boss this guy around like he was one of her Parkway North bitches, and it had worked, incredibly, for a couple minutes, until the guy remembered that she was the hostage, and now it wasn’t going to work again. Ever. But Evan would know what to do. He would not have made the mouthy mistake, not have started things off on that note. She needed him to intervene, to rescue her (well, them), and not in any showoff-y Superman way, not bursting in here and wrestling the gun away and beating the guy to a bloody pulp, but something clever, something no one else would think of. He would come dressed as a pizza delivery guy. He would appear to be no threat, due to his dark lens. It would be the dark lens that would gain him access into the apartment, just a foot in, six inches, one step, just enough to catch sight of them out of the corner of his good eye. And then—what? He’d send her some sort of message, somehow. Maybe with the pizza?
“I’m hungry,” Meredith said softly.
“Shut up,” the man said.
•
And then it was like that for a long time, him at the table, thinking, and she and Lisa on the couch. The ice had all melted but she did not dare ask for more. Her sleeve was wet and the couch cushion between them was wet, too, and some of the wetness was blood. The moisture had soaked through her leggings but she did not try to move away from it. On the other side of the stain, Lisa sat motionless, so motionless that every so often Meredith cut her eyes toward her to make sure she was not unconscious.
The clock on the cable box was flashing 12:08, so she had no idea what time it really was. She was pretty sure that in a nearby apartment someone was watching TV, because although she couldn’t make out any voices, every once in a while there would be the canned murmur of a laugh track. But after a while even that seemed to stop and then it was only silent, as if no one else lived in these apartments, or no one else lived anywhere.
“I have to pee,” Lisa said.
“Do you?” he said.
“Yes,” she said flatly, no nasty comeback even on her radar judging from the tone of her voice.
“You sure?”
He was trying to pick a fight, Meredith saw. Maybe he missed the girl who had talked back to him.
“Yes.”
“Fine. Actually, yeah, fine. You want to go to the bathroom, why don’t you both go to the bathroom?” He stood and picked up the gun. “Both of you, in the bathroom. You go in there and you stay in there until I come for you. You got that? And I don’t want to hear a single word.”
They must have been sitting a long time because Meredith’s legs ached when she stood, maybe from tensing them for so long. She limped on her way to the bathroom.
“What’s wrong with you?” he asked. “Something wrong with you?”
“No,” she said softly.
“You sure?”
She had the feeling he would kill her if there were something wrong with her. “I’m sure,” she said.
He pushed them both into the tiny bathroom.
“Quiet,” he said. He put his finger to his lips. Then he closed the door. She could hear something being dragged in front of it. Something heavier than a chair. A trunk, maybe. An army trunk.
The bathroom had a tub and a toilet and a small basin but had not been designed to hold any actual people, much less two. There was about one square yard of floor space between the three appliances. Lisa peed while Meredith washed the blood from her hands. Then Lisa wetted a wad of toilet paper and wiped the blood from her face and her neck. They stood for a minute, awkwardly suspended in each other’s space, and then Meredith realized they could sit in the bathtub. She gestured to it with her head and then got in and sat down. Lisa climbed in quietly and sat down on the other side of the tub. It was a small tub and even sitting cross-legged their feet and knees touched. It was like they were on a small boat—no, not a boat, but a raft. They were bobbing in the water.
Then they heard his voice. At first Meredith thought there was actually someone else in the apartment, but after a few seconds she realized he was on the phone. She couldn’t hear what he was saying but she didn’t think he was ordering a pizza: there was a desperate whine to his voice that was clear even when the words were not. He was telling someone what he had done. He was calling to ask for help.
“Are you okay?” she whispered to Lisa, as quietly as she could, not a slumber party whisper or even a library whisper but more like a funeral whisper. Some of the words weren’t even words, just the movement of lips and eyes.
“I think so,” Lisa whispered back. “Just hurts.”
“Cold water?”
Lisa shook her head.
Out in the apartment the voice continued to rise and fall. Every so often a recognizable word or words: “she,” “tomorrow,” “Jason,” “I know!”
“Who do you think?” Lisa whispered.
Meredith shrugged. “Friend?”
“Girlfriend?”
Girlfriend. It was an encouraging thought, a wonderful-sounding word, in fact, a thousand times better than simply “friend.” He’d called someone for advice. And a girlfriend would definitely tell him to let the girls go, as soon as possible. A girlfriend would be, finally, a girl. One of them. “Jesus Christ,” she would say. “And now they’re in your bathroom? Seriously? What were you thinking?” She might worry about what would happen to him, but this too could work in their favor: “Let them go right now,” the girlfriend would say. “And then we’ll leave town. We’ll just clear out of here. We’ll go far away.”
A friend, a male friend, might have other ideas, ones that would not work in their favor. A male friend might make different kinds of suggestions. Maybe a male friend would even offer to help implement those suggestions. Suddenly it was very easy to divide the world in this way, even though Meredith knew it wasn’t fair to do this, not fair to her brother or her father or Steven Overbeck. Fair didn’t matter. The fact of the moment was this: everything depended on whether the person on the other end of the phone was male or female.
Lisa leaned forward. “Do you think he killed him?” she asked. Again, it was as much mouthing as speaking, the words just hints of words.
“Who?”
“Deli Barn. Do you think he killed him?”
Meredith leaned in so that their foreheads were almost touching. “He didn’t shoot him,” Meredith said. “No gunshot. So probably not.”
“He doesn’t look like he’d kill someone,” Lisa said. “He doesn’t look that bad.”
“He’s scared,” Meredith agreed. “He just wants it to be over. It’s easier if he lets us go.”
They quieted as they realized the talking out in the apartment had ceased. Had he hung up? Had he heard them whispering? Was he standing in the hall with his ear pressed to the door? It was impossible to tell. They both sat listening. What if he had left? How long before they should stand up?
“Hey.”
He was on the other side of the door. “You hear me? Say yes if you hear me.”
“Yes,” they both said.
“You’re gonna hear the door close. I’m just going out to my car. I’m not going to be more than fifty steps from you. If you scream, I’ll hear you. If you try to go through the window, I’ll see you. You got that?”
“Yes.”
His car. Why would he go to his car?
The apartment door closed, then locked.
“He’s gonna wipe it,” Lisa said, still whispering but with a little more sound behind it.
“What?”
“He’s gonna wipe it clean. Our fingerpints are all over it. That’s what the person on the phone
was doing, telling him how to get rid of the evidence.”
“Maybe he’s going for cigarettes or something.”
Lisa frowned and leaned back. “Shit. My backpack’s in the car.”
“Mine, too.”
“I bet he’s throwing them in the Dumpster.”
Meredith thought of all her school books, of all the threats the teachers made at the beginning of the year about what would happen to you if you lost a book, how much money your parents would have to pay. Surely there were exceptions.
“What time do you think it is?” Lisa asked.
“I don’t know. Late.”
Lisa looked up at the ceiling.
“My mother probably doesn’t even know yet,” she said.
Meredith didn’t say anything. She didn’t know anything about Lisa Bellow’s mother or family or where she lived.
“She works till seven, and then she probably thought I was at somebody’s house. She might still think that. Would your parents know?”
“Know what?”
“If you didn’t come home after school. Would they know it was something bad?”
“Yeah,” Meredith said. “I mean, not right away. They work. They get home at like five thirty, though. They’d know by now.”
“My mother’s all alone,” Lisa said. “When she finds out, she won’t have anybody.”
“I’m sure she has some friends or something,” Meredith said. “They’ll help her out. They’ll bring food.”
“I left her sandwich at the Deli Barn,” Lisa said. “It’s still sitting there on the board.”
“It’s probably not very good anymore,” Meredith said.
Lisa smiled. “It’s probably fine. It’s the Deli Barn, right? It’s probably exactly the same as it was six hours ago. What were you getting?”
“Just a root beer. I promised myself a root beer at the end of my algebra test.”
“I hate algebra,” Lisa said. “Oh my god, I hate algebra and I hate Mr. Kane. Are you in my class?”
“I’m in Algebra two.”
“What do you do in there? Is it really hard?”
Meredith closed her eyes. She could see the problem in her head, still, all these hours later. Stupid broken pencil. She had not had time to complete the graph.
“You know what an asymptote is?”
“Um . . . some bullshit word you made up?”
“No,” Meredith said. “It’s a real thing. You’ll find out next year.”
“Oh my god, I can’t wait to go to high school,” Lisa said. “I literally can’t wait. In high school you get choices. About everything. You actually get to choose what you want.”
“My brother’s at the high school. He hates it.”
“Isn’t your brother blind or something?”
“He’s not blind,” Meredith said. “He’s mostly blind in one eye. He got hit with a baseball.”
“That sucks,” Lisa said. “He must be so pissed. I bet that’s why he hates high school.”
“Yeah. Probably.”
“I’d love high school even if I was blind,” Lisa said. “You don’t even have to eat in the cafeteria. Did you know that? You can take your lunch anywhere. You can eat outside at the picnic tables. Even in the winter.”
“Why would you want to eat outside in the winter?”
“It’s just an example,” Lisa said. “Of what you can do. Without someone tearing—”
The door closed. They heard his footsteps. Then the bathroom door opened.
“You,” he said to Lisa. “Get out here.”
•
Maybe the quiet was the worst part. Meredith could have anchored herself to sound, followed the act moment by moment, and some moments would have been less horrible than others, and at least she would have known when it was over. But there was only silence—stark, utter, silence—and so there was no sequence of events, only the worst moments happening again and again and again in a never-ending loop, no release, no relief at the conclusion. Her back was killing her—how long had she been sitting in the tub?—and finally she slid down flat and rolled onto her side and hugged her knees and waited.
•
In the morning she awoke to the click of the bathroom door. He came in and peed and she didn’t move, just lay very still in the tub in the hopes that he would forget she was even there. He must have been sorry she was. He must have been thinking how foolish it was to have taken them both, the disadvantages of two girls far outweighing any advantages—the work, the complications, the mess of it all.
“There’s food in the kitchen,” he said, and then he was gone. Still, she waited a minute or two before rolling over. The bathroom door was ajar. She slowly stood and stepped carefully out of the tub. Every part of her ached, but nothing more than her right side, on which she’d slept for who knew how long on the hard porcelain. She took two steps into the hallway. There was no sign of him, and no sign of Lisa either. She looked toward the bedroom. The door was halfway closed and she could not see the bed. There was no sound coming from in there and for a moment she was certain that Lisa was dead, sprawled across the bed, the air choked out of her, her eyes still open, her body twisted from the struggle. She could see it vividly and knew it was there, just as she imagined it, just on the other side of the door.
She tiptoed into the kitchen. There was a box of Rice Krispies on the counter and part of a loaf of white bread. On the rickety little table there were several brown bananas. Magneted to the refrigerator with a Liberty Bell magnet was a photograph of a little dog on a beach. The dog had a tiny blue Frisbee in its mouth. The dog was Annie.
“What’re you looking at?” the man asked.
She turned, startled. He was standing in the doorway wearing black boxers and a gray T-shirt.
“Nothing,” she said. “Just . . . the fridge.”
He stepped forward so that he was standing right next to her. She could smell him, a sour smell, overpowering, causing her stomach to lurch. He slid the photo from underneath the magnet and held it in his hand and smiled at it. Most of his smile was lost inside his mustache. She wondered if he knew that.
“She was great,” he said. “She liked to swim. You shoulda seen her. Out there paddling. Dog paddling.”
She had no idea how to respond. She should just say something nice. She should say only nice things, from here on out until the end. She shouldn’t be weird or angry or morose or quiet. She should just be nice. Didn’t the abduction instruction booklet say that? Or was it exactly the opposite?
“She’s cute,” she said softly.
“Yeah,” he said. “She was the best.”
He slid the picture back under the Liberty Bell magnet. There was something about the magnet that made it seem ancient, its loopy font like something you’d find at an old lady’s garage sale.
“You don’t have to be afraid,” he said. “I don’t want to hurt you. I think you’re great. I think you’re doing a real great job.”
“Thanks,” she said. Had she really said this? Jesus Christ, here at the end, her last act, thanking this man because she was too chicken-shit to do anything else. She was pathetic.
He put his hand on the middle of her back. It was a teacherly gesture, a fatherly gesture, at the very least a big-brotherly gesture. There was no sex in it but it was gruesome, like some heavy dead wet thing had been laid on her.
“You believe me?” he asked.
She had to will herself not to squirm away from his touch. “Yeah,” she said.
“You don’t sound real sure.”
She took a deep breath. At the end of the breath she found something, something totally unexpected, something she hadn’t even been looking for, but there it was for the taking, like turning a blind corner and bumping smack into the one thing that could save you.
Resolve.
Yes. Yes. She could feel it in her bones. Something had changed. She was in charge now. She was in control. What happened to Lisa from here on out—it was all on her. There was noth
ing outside this apartment, or nothing that mattered anyway. There was only this. And this was everything.
“Where’s Lisa?” she asked, turning to face him. His hand fell from her back, one dead thing sliding off another dead thing. But no. No. Not dead. Not yet. She knew now that there was only one way she was going to have any chance of surviving this, and it was by knowing that Lisa was here in the apartment with her, still, always, not dead yet either. And she knew, too, that this was the only way Lisa would survive. It was imperative that they remain together. Their very existence depended upon it. There was no other way. And if he wanted to kill her for asking . . .
“She’s asleep,” he said. “I didn’t want to wake her up.”
“I’m going to make her some breakfast,” she said. “And then I’m going to take it to her.”
“There’s not much,” he said, nodding to the counter.
“It’ll do,” she said.
“That’s real nice,” he said. Then, after a pause, “It’s funny.”
“What?” she said.
“I didn’t take you all for friends.”
•
When she turned from the counter with the bowl of cereal Lisa was sitting on the couch in the living room. She had dragged a blanket with her from the bed and had it on a pile on her lap. Meredith went and sat down on the couch.
“You should eat something,” Meredith said. She held out the bowl. “Eat some cereal.”
Lisa stared at her dumbly. Her chin was black from the blow from yesterday, and around her mouth was purple. She also had a mark on her neck.
“Seriously,” Meredith said.
“You were in my tennis group,” Lisa said softly. “Do you remember that? That summer tennis camp. There was that mean coach who called everybody names.”
“I remember. At Eaton Park.”
“One day Brianne Kirk hit me in the face with her racquet. And you had to walk me to that concession stand to get ice. Do you remember that?”