The Fall of Lisa Bellow

by Susan Perabo

  “Yeah,” Meredith said.

  “Really?” Lisa said. “Do you really remember it? Are you just saying that?”

  “No,” Meredith said. “I really remember it. I never forgot it. I was thinking about it just . . . just yesterday.”

  Lisa closed her eyes for a moment. All her makeup had worn away and her hair was a tangled mess. The girl from the yearbook was gone. This was another girl.

  Lisa opened her eyes. “That was such a great day,” she said. “That was the best snow cone I ever had in my life.”

  “It was lime,” Meredith said.

  “It was,” Lisa said. “It was lime. Your face was green.”

  “Your face was green.”

  Meredith looked out the window. It was raining and the branches of the trees were swaying in the wind. Yesterday it had been sunny and you could believe in an Indian summer. Today it was rainy and the leaves were falling from the trees and summer was over.

  “Meredith,” Lisa said.

  “What?”

  Lisa lay back until her head rested on the arm of the couch.

  “What?” Meredith said again.

  Lisa took a little bite of her bottom lip. “I don’t think we’re ever getting out of here.”

  PART TWO

  12

  The sound coming from below her, in the garage, did not surprise Claire. Not at first. It had been the soundtrack to their lives for so long, the background noise of so many early mornings, that when she woke to it she did not think of all the months that had passed without it. It was so familiar that she couldn’t have said, in that first moment of being awake, if it had been six hours or six months since she’d last heard it, the ping of aluminum on leather.

  She rolled over to face Mark’s side of the bed. He was awake, looking up at the ceiling. “You hear it?” he asked.

  As if there were any not hearing it. When Evan had first started his routine, the summer before his freshman year, they had looked into putting extra insulation in the garage, which sat directly under the western hemisphere of their bedroom. Or maybe, they suggested, he could take his swings just a little later in the morning. Or after school? But he was thirteen and he cared about something, cared about it intensely. He had a routine. He stuck to it. He was disciplined. It felt wrong to discourage him, even if it was a little annoying. Wasn’t this precisely what you wanted from a boy approaching fourteen? Passion? Commitment? Practice?

  So they got used to it, like the sound of traffic, or crickets, or lapping waves. There was a rhythm to it. Ping. Beat (ball from bucket). Beat (ball on tee). Beat (stance). Ping. Beat (ball from bucket). Beat (ball on tee). Beat (stance). Ping.

  She looked at the clock. 5:55. Even the traditional time. Half hour of swings before a shower, alone in the garage with his tee and a net and his big, beat-up white bucket of weathered balls, no sound but the contact, no distraction, no chance of distraction, everyone else still in bed. How many hundreds of hours had he spent there, how many swings, how many balls launched into the soft net? After that first summer the garage had become Evan’s personal training facility, in and out of season. Sometimes his teammates came over on winter evenings and there would be a group of three or four down there, their voices echoing against the metal door, laughter, ping-beat-beat-beat-ping, music playing from someone’s phone, jeering, the voices of boys now, suddenly, the voices of men. But mostly it was Evan’s alone, his sanctuary. Often she’d be in the kitchen making the coffee when he finished at 6:20, and they’d exchange smiles as he passed. He never seemed more comfortable in his own skin, more sure of himself, than that moment he crossed from the garage into the kitchen. Not even when he was actually playing in a game.

  After the injury she and Mark, together, had zipped the bats into the black bat bag and hung it up beside the rakes and snow shovels. They’d pushed the net back into a corner, laid the tee on its side, put the cover on the ball bucket, little by little erasing what had been, or if not erasing, at least obscuring. But they’d never put the cars back in the garage. The cars had remained in the driveway, throughout the spring and summer and into fall. Maybe they would have put them in come winter, at the first frost. But now, October, there was this.

  “God, I missed that sound,” Mark said. “I didn’t know it until now.”

  His eyes were closed and he was smiling, the way you closed your eyes and smiled while you listened to your favorite song. But even as she watched him smile Claire felt the dread begin to seep under her skin. The sound could only mean one thing.

  “He can’t do it,” she said to Mark. The whole sentence came out as a sustained groan.

  “What?”

  “He can’t play baseball.”

  He turned and propped himself up on his elbow, head in palm. “He’s just hitting the ball off the tee. Imagine how good that must feel. God, after all these months. Just imagine.”

  This was Mark, always wanting to return to the way things had been before. Everything fixable. Nothing ever truly out of reach. Everything open to regain, renew, restore. There was a card game they’d played all the time when the kids were younger—she couldn’t recall the name—in which the rules changed frequently, but every so often you drew a card that said, “Throw out all new rules. Return to basic rules.” Mark was always so relieved to get that card. The kids loved the new rules, but he’d play that card the second he got it. Return to basic rules. And here he was, back at his basic rules: 5:55, ping-beat-beat-beat-ping.

  “This is bad,” she said. “It’s—”

  “Don’t do that,” he said. “Please. Don’t do what you’re—”

  “How can you not see that this is bad?”

  He sat up. “For Christ sakes, he’s been lying on the couch for six months and finally he—”

  “It’s because he wants to play. He thinks he can just rejoin the team. He thinks he—”

  “First,” he said, pointing his finger a little too close to her face—she was still lying down—“you don’t know that. And second, what if he does? Who’s to say he can’t?”

  She pushed his hand out of her way and sat up. “The doctor,” she said. “Remember? The eye doctor? The expert?”

  “He didn’t say he couldn’t play. He never said that he could not play. He said he wouldn’t be able to hit a ball. But listen! Listen! He’s hitting a ball.”

  “Off a tee,” she said. “Let’s not get carried away.”

  “Oh no,” Mark said. He flipped the covers off and got out of bed. “That’s the last thing we’d want to do, isn’t it? We definitely wouldn’t want to get carried away. We definitely wouldn’t want him to get off the goddamn couch and start thinking maybe he could have his life back. Wouldn’t want that. Oh no.”

  “That’s not—”

  “He hits twenty balls off the tee and you’ve already lived through the disappointment of the next year, mapped it all—”

  “I’m not. I’m—”

  “I can see it in your face. You’ve planned it out already, for all of us, stop by stop, every dashed hope along the road. Whoosh, seen it all. No need to live it. Just shut it down right now, close up shop. Why not? You already know what’s coming.”

  “You’re screaming at me,” she said. “You are screaming at me. Meredith can hear—”

  “Meredith can’t hear anything,” he spat from across the bed. “She’s hardly even looked at me for two weeks. She’s so far away from us I don’t even know how we can still see her. But he”—he nodded in the direction of the ping—“he’s coming back. Don’t you dare screw that up.”

  She wanted to hit him. She imagined getting out of bed and walking over to him and punching him in the face, and when that was not enough she imagined picking up the alarm clock and smashing him over the head with it. “Don’t you dare screw that up.” There was no way to read that other than the way it was so obviously intended, the accusation that screwing things up was always what she did, that only due to the emergency intervention of others was she able
to not screw up every single thing she touched.

  “You’re being horrible to me,” she said, her voice shaking in a way she absolutely despised, a pathetic, wronged-housewife whine.

  “Well, I’m sick of it,” he said. “I get to be horrible. Maybe for like a month, okay? I get to be horrible for one fricking month. I’m sick of being the nice one. I want my children back. I want my children.”

  “Your children are gone,” she said. She swung her legs out of bed and spoke with her back to him. “They’re gone. They grew up. Accept it. Things happened to them. Terrible things. And now they’re gone. And they’re not coming back.”

  “They’re still here, Claire,” he said. She couldn’t see him but she knew the expression on his face. He had faith in what he loved. His face always said so, in a boyish, earnest way. It was part of what everyone who barely knew him adored about him. “Believe it or not,” he said. “Like it or not. They are still in this house.”

  “Barely,” she said, scoffing. It was an ugly sound, uglier than she thought she was capable of, made even uglier by its juxtaposition with his conviction.

  “They are still. In. This house,” he said again. Then he went into the bathroom and closed the door.

  •

  One thing he’d said was true, the thing about Meredith. Something had happened to her that night, the night she’d said the mysterious thing to Evan: “There’s no dog.” Meredith had vanished in a way that Claire could not specify. She was going to school. She was doing her homework. She talked on the phone. She ate and slept and showered. But there was something essential missing, some profoundly blank space.

  Several years ago, before the tolerant cat and the intolerant cat, they’d owned a cat that had absolutely no interest in them, in a way that far surpassed the normal, expected indifference of cats. The cat actually did not seem to understand that there were other sentient beings living in the house. It became a great family joke, just how aloof this cat could be. The children became desperate to befriend it, not because they especially loved it, but because they wanted to defeat its indifference. The cat walked across their feet while they stood in the hallway, walked across their bodies on the couch as if they were merely part of the furniture, material objects to be crossed or scaled. One day after they’d had him a year or so, the cat walked down the long backyard—Claire saw it go from the kitchen window—and never returned, and the children never missed the cat because he’d never really been their cat to begin with.

  Meredith walked around the house like that cat. It was like she couldn’t even see them. Or when she did see them, what she saw was something else.

  But maybe that was just what happened to you when something happened to you. Meredith had been to two appointments with the psychiatrist in the last ten days, and each time, after fifty minutes with Meredith, Dr. Moon had sent her back to the waiting room and called Claire and Mark into the office and without inviting them to sit down told them the same thing he’d told Claire over the phone:

  “She’s processing. Still processing. Be patient. It’s a process.”

  So maybe all there was to do was to wait and see if Meredith wanted to say something. Say anything. Processing was a process, yes. You couldn’t expect things to get better overnight. You had to be patient, like Dr. Moon said. Maybe all there was to do was stand back and wait for the processing to be complete, the way you waited for X-rays to develop, for the images to rise out of the black pool. It had always been so satisfying for Claire, that moment, her instincts confirmed: Yes—yes! There was the problem, the damaged root. And now that the problem has been revealed, the solution must surely be at hand. But there was no rushing the image. To rush, in fact, was to ruin.

  “Goal of the day,” Mark said.

  Her goal of the day was to not smash him over the head with the alarm clock. She poured Evan’s milk and set it down in front of him.

  “I’m going to go for a run this afternoon,” Evan said.

  Sometimes Claire held her hand over her left eye and tried to do things, simple things: walk down the stairs, plug in her phone, put a stamp on a letter. She knew from the specialist that this wasn’t truly seeing the world as Evan saw it—that covering an eye couldn’t really replicate monocular vision, that it was not just Evan’s eye that had changed but also his brain—but it made her feel better anyway. A run was fine, right? Unless something came at him from his blind side, something fast, a Frisbee, a speeding car.

  “On the track?” she asked.

  “Probably just around here,” he said.

  “The track would—”

  “—be smooth, yes,” he finished. “Even. No surprises.”

  “I just thought for a first time,” she said.

  “It’s not the first time, Mom,” he said.

  It was nearly the end of October. What was he thinking? That he would be in shape by February, for the preseason? That he’d be crouching behind the plate by the first of March, his senior season excavated from the earth like some pristine fossil, perfectly intact, only in need of a dusting? And when exactly had he decided this, and in consultation with whom? His coaches? His teammates? His father? Maybe he needed a psychiatrist as well (maybe Dr. Moon offered some sort of two-for-one, multichild, multitrauma offer?), someone to speak sensibly, someone who did not just seem like a wet freaking blanket, someone who could nudge him into reality with simple common sense. He could not see out of his left eye. He could not see out of his left eye.

  Competitive baseball was over. He was not going to play in college. He just needed to apply to college. Just apply. Just somewhere. Application deadlines were rapidly approaching. In another couple months, community college was going to be his only option. He was better than that, smarter than that. But that wasn’t even the point (she reminded herself . . . again). The point was he was not going to be a baseball player. Not anymore.

  “I’m going to take a half hour and read,” Mark said. “Over lunch. I’m just going to find a quiet spot and read a book.”

  “What book?” Evan asked.

  “I don’t know. Maybe it won’t be a book. Maybe it will be the newspaper.”

  “You could just read People in the waiting room,” Evan said.

  “It is absolutely true that I could do that,” Mark said. “Meredith?”

  She looked up from her cereal. “Can I go to a Halloween party this weekend?”

  “Is that a goal or a question?” Evan asked.

  “A question,” she said.

  And there it was, Claire thought. There was the difference. Normally an answer to Evan would have had more bite to it, a joke attached, at the very least a facial expression.

  “Whose party?” Claire asked, as lightly and cheerfully as she could. “Jules’s?”

  “I don’t think she’s doing one this year,” Meredith the detached cat said. “It’s somebody else. I don’t think you know her.”

  “I know her,” Evan said. “I went to her house once. She’s awesome.”

  Meredith manufactured a smile for her brother. It was deliberate and evasive, a professional job.

  “What’s your goal?” Mark asked her. He, too, wore a manufactured smile. They could open a factory. The new family business.

  •

  After Evan left for school Claire went to Meredith’s room. Meredith was sitting on her bed, putting on her golden shoes. How long until it was too cold to wear those sandals? Would that day ever come? Would she wear them in the snow?

  “Can we talk?” she asked. “I could drive you.” She stood in the doorway.

  “I don’t mind walking,” Meredith said.

  “I know,” Claire said. “It’s just . . . your father said something that made me think.”

  “There’s a first,” Meredith said.

  Claire didn’t know whether to smile or be offended, so she did neither, instead leaned against the doorframe with what she hoped seemed a casual, friendly lean.

  “What’s going on at school?” she ask
ed.

  “Same as always.”

  “I don’t see how that can be.”

  “You wouldn’t,” Meredith said, looking at her phone before slipping it into her purse. “So you just have to trust me.”

  “It’s not that I don’t trust you. It’s just . . . ”

  Just what? Even she didn’t know. What did people do with their children after they were not kidnapped? How were you supposed to help the girl not taken? There was no group for this. No best practices. Did she even need your help? Or did she just need you to leave her alone?

  “I have to go,” Meredith said. “I’m going to walk. I meet people on the way. I walk with them.”

  “What people?”

  “Just people.”

  She left then. Feet on the stairs. Door closed, then across the yard like the cat. Never to return?

  There was a clothes hanger, overlooked, jutting out from under the bed. Claire picked it up and went to Meredith’s closet, opened it. The inside of the closet door was covered with yellow flyers. MISSING. There must have been forty of them, four across and ten down, like wallpaper, Scotch taped to the door, neatly, so that instead of forty individual posters it seemed like one big poster with forty Lisas. TAKEN FROM CHESTNUT STREET DELI BARN ON WEDNESDAY OCTOBER 8. Claire walked out of Meredith’s room and into the upstairs hallway. She wanted to show this to someone. She could hear the water running in the master bath—Mark in the shower. Evan was long gone, already sitting in a classroom. Who else was there? She went back into Meredith’s room. She realized she was tiptoeing. Gently, as gently as she could, she closed the closet door.

  •

  Her cell was buzzing in her coat pocket. Until recently she had not carried it with her while she was with patients. But now she felt better having it on her, just the buzz against her hip, not the sound itself, in case something happened. (What could happen that had not happened? Imagine if she had three children! Or four!) She stepped behind the patient’s head and looked at the phone. The number was one she did not recognize, which was more alarming than not. The police. The school. Anyone, anything. She backed out of the room and into the corridor.