by Susan Perabo
“Hello?”
“Is this Claire?”
“It is. Who’s this?”
“It’s Colleen,” the voice said. “Colleen Bellow.”
For a split second she thought Colleen had called to tell her that Lisa had been found. And then instantly she knew that the last thing Colleen Bellow would be doing, if Lisa had been found, was to be on the telephone calling anyone.
“Hello,” Claire said. “How—”
“I know you’re probably at work but I just wanted to tell you that the girls are here with me.”
“Okay . . . ” Claire said, carefully, because it sounded like something a crazy person might say, and the fact that Colleen had called an almost total stranger to say it made it seem even crazier. “So . . . what girls?” she ventured.
“Meredith and some of Lisa’s other friends. The whole gang. They came over after school. They’re hanging out, having a snack. They just got here but I thought you’d want to know. I’m sure you worry if . . . ”
Claire was trying to process this. She glanced at her watch. It was 3:45. Meredith was supposed to go straight home after school, where Evan would be waiting to meet her. She had been walking for the past week, had told them she did not want to be picked up anymore. “I like the walk,” she had said. “It’s peaceful.” And so she and Mark had relented (again), returned to their old routine—return to basic rules!—where they got home around 5:15 and the kids were doing homework or watching TV or staring into their phones.
“I thought you might want to come by and have a coffee,” Colleen said. “On your way home. You could pick her up.”
“Um, yes. Sure.”
Mark was walking down the corridor toward her. He slowed, raised his eyebrows in question. She nodded—all was well. Well, well-ish. No one was dead or maimed or abducted.
“Yes. Okay. Um, yes. I’ll come.”
She realized how she must have sounded, wanted to explain that she wasn’t resistant, only caught off guard.
“If this isn’t a good time . . . ”
“No, no,” Claire said. “I’ll be leaving the office in a bit. Give me your address. I can come. I—that would, yes, that would be lovely.”
Had she really said that? Lovely? Had she ever said to anyone, about anything, that would be lovely? Wasn’t that what you said at a funeral—it was a lovely service, that was a lovely tribute, they did a lovely job with your mother’s hair. (Her mother had so little left, such a modest amount to work with, that the funeral home had suggested a wig when her father said he wanted the casket open, and she had said, “Dad, no, come on, no wig, she wouldn’t want that,” and so they had styled her hair as best they could, and when she saw it she’d thought, okay, maybe a wig would have been the way to go; maybe these people know what they’re talking about; maybe her mother was dead and so who cared what she would have wanted, and/or maybe what she would have wanted was for her hair to not look so thin and sad that everyone approaching the casket did a little double-take because except for the hair her mother looked as spectacular as a dead body could look, if absolutely nothing like herself. But it was too late by that point, and of course everyone was lovely about it.)
“I’ll be there soon,” she said to Colleen.
•
She had always liked the neighborhood. They had looked at a house here, twenty years before, and she had loved the way the streets wound around themselves and how that made the houses near the center seem so far from the main road when they were really just nestled into the middle of three or four spiraling streets. There was a creek, too, which explained the wind of the street, because it followed the wind of the creek, and most of the driveways were partly little bridges over the shallow creek. The houses themselves were small, which is why she and Mark had looked elsewhere. They had lived in an apartment for a year while they’d set up their practice. Once the practice had taken off, they could already afford something bigger than what the cozy street offered, even though it was still just the two of them.
The Bellows’ house was a split-level—many of them in the neighborhood were—and looked its age in every other way as well. Colleen Bellow opened the front door and Claire was accosted by two twirly-tailed black Labradors.
“Let me put them out back,” Colleen said, and she was gone for a moment and Claire looked around. There was a two-sided fireplace that connected the living room and the kitchen, and a little tunnel under it where Claire knew Lisa must have played as a toddler, if they’d lived here then.
At least she had the dogs, Claire thought, listening to them bark in protest as they were shut outside. At least there was that. “Stop now,” Colleen was saying in the manner of people who regularly talked to dogs. “Stop it. You’re fine. You’re both fine.”
Did the dogs know Lisa was gone? Did they sleep in her room? Did they nap by the front door, waiting, their ears perking every time an acorn hit the front walk?
“I hope I didn’t bother you,” Colleen said, coming back into the living room. “Calling you at work. I just thought you might like to know she was here.”
“Of course,” Claire said. “Where . . . ?”
“They’re in Lisa’s room. They wanted to be up there, I could tell. They said they’d stay down here with me and I said, go on up. When they’re up there I can imagine she’s there, too. So that’s something.”
“Yes,” Claire said. “I would think. I think. Yes.”
There were two full cups of coffee already sitting on the coffee table. Claire sat down on the chair, despite it being farther away from the table than the couch, so that Colleen would not be able to sit directly next to her. (It was settled: she was a horrible person.) She picked up one of the cups and took a sip—lukewarm—and then rested it on her knee.
“I’m sure this hasn’t been easy on Meredith,” Colleen said. “It’s good that she’s at school and with friends. Is she well?”
“Mostly,” Claire said. “She had a little bug right when she went back. We don’t know—it may have been her nerves. She was out a couple days. But since then she’s been okay.”
“Lisa used to get sick like that,” Colleen said. “First day of school, every year, all through elementary school. She was wound up so tight.”
“That’s hard,” Claire said. “It’s hard to know . . . hard to know what to do for them.”
Laughter from upstairs. Footsteps, a creaking floor. Claire tried to imagine Lisa’s room. The room of a princess surely, a canopy bed—oh, how she’d wanted one herself, at ten—and lots of frilly pillows, posters of boys and kittens, a mirror lined with pictures of grinning friends with arms around one another. She doubted there were any battling animals, preparing for offensives along the base of the desk. How had Meredith wound up here? Claire was dying to hear the story, get the sequence of events that had led her to this house, and at the same moment she was sure that she would not, that Meredith would have nothing to offer but monosyllables.
“It’s nice to have people in the house,” Colleen said. “It’s been really quiet. I mean, some neighbors have stopped by.” She snorted a laugh. “The fridge is full, you know? But no one stays long. I might go back to work just so I can talk to people.”
“It’s good they’ve given you the time off,” Claire said.
“I’ve used up all my vacation time,” Colleen said. “Like for the next five years. Vacation, right?” She gestured around the room.
“Do you have family in town? Does Lisa . . . ?”
“Her dad’s not in the picture,” Colleen said. “Just her and me. Always has been.”
Claire tried to imagine what life would be like if it were just her and Meredith. No Mark. No Evan. She couldn’t even begin to get her head around it. But then she and Meredith were very different people than Colleen and Lisa Bellow. She and Meredith were . . . well, they were different people. That was all.
“My boyfriend has two kids,” Colleen said. “They come on weekends. We got out a bunch of Lisa’s old stuf
f, brought it up from the basement. I thought I was saving it for grandchildren. Now I have a boyfriend with two little kids. Lisa’s really good with them, especially Cara. She’s seven. Of course she thinks Lisa’s a queen.”
All the children, all the little girls, aspiring to be Lisa Bellow. More laughter from upstairs. Should they be laughing? They should. What were the options? Sit around Lisa’s room and cry, or mope, or worry? It was a good thing, good for this woman sitting across from her, who could probably almost hear her daughter’s laugh in the mix.
“Of course they don’t understand any of this,” Colleen said. “How do you explain to a seven-year-old that something like this could happen, that someone can just—”
“I don’t know,” Claire said. “It’s inexplicable. It is. Is there any? Have you—”
“You know they found her phone,” Colleen said. “Cracked on the side of the road. Thrown out the car window, they think. Last text a little before three, to Becca. She said she was going to the Deli Barn. And that was it. The police came and took our computer, took my phone, took her old iPod—she hasn’t touched it in years. They said they needed to check everything. So they’re checking everything. They talked to my boyfriend. They interviewed him at the police station. They asked him where he was at the time of the robbery. Can you imagine?”
“That’s terrible,” Claire said, thinking that, if she were the police, she would have interviewed the boyfriend, too. Those were the stories you heard, the creepy boyfriend, the teenage daughter. Maybe he looked at them sometimes—the mother and the daughter—and was not able to tell them apart, with their matching hair and clothes, their matching bodies. How old was Colleen Bellow? If she’d had Lisa at eighteen or nineteen . . .
“Peter almost cried, he couldn’t believe it. They interrogated him, like he was a suspect.”
“I guess they have to ask everyone.”
“They don’t know anything,” Colleen said. “Fifteen days and nobody knows anything.”
“Someone has to,” Claire said. “Someone has to know someone who—”
“I’d kill him with my own hands,” Colleen said. She set her coffee down on the table; her hands looked steady but Claire noticed that the coffee itself was trembling. The girls had turned on a song upstairs but she couldn’t hear the words, only the beat, a dull, music-less thunking. “I told Peter that, and you know what he said? He said that kind of thinking didn’t help. Like I could just turn it off because it’s not helping anyone. Like that’s the point. Like helping is the point of thinking.”
“It’s . . . ” Claire desperately search for a word. “ . . . hard. So hard. I’m sure it’s . . . ”
“I can’t turn it off. No matter what I do, I can’t turn it off. All I can think is, if I ever have the chance, I’ll kill that piece of shit with my bare hands. Sometimes that’s the only way I can go to sleep, you know?” Colleen looked at her hands lying in her lap. Her nails were painted but Claire could see there were little chips in the paint. “I imagine my hands around his neck. I imagine that until I fall asleep. It’s the last thing I see.”
Claire saw that her own coffee was trembling. “I understand.”
Colleen looked up at her abruptly. “I don’t think you do.”
There were winners and there were losers. There were people in big houses and people in small houses. There were people who drew X’s through entire sections of school forms and people who had a name for every box. There were people whom others spoke to with respect, and people who others looked past. There were people who had choices and people who did not. Why was this, again?
A rush of voices, then footsteps. She tried to compose herself. Two girls she’d never seen before appeared at the foot of the stairs, then Meredith, then another girl she recognized from a swimming lesson carpool years before—Amanda something. Meredith blushed when she saw her and dropped her gaze to the floor. She was obviously embarrassed Claire was here, as if she’d shown up uninvited, as if coming here was a choice.
“Hey, we were talking,” said one of the girls she didn’t know. “And we were thinking we could maybe make some sort of bracelet that people could wear, something that Lisa would have picked, instead of just those green ribbons.”
“Not that the ribbons aren’t nice,” the Amanda girl said. “But this could be like something people could keep.”
“A keepsake,” another of the girls said. “Silver. Like the one she always wore. Wears.”
Meredith was still looking at the floor.
“Sounds great,” Colleen said.
“We’re going to look online and see if we can find a place that will do them cheap. Like silver plated or whatever.”
“Perfect,” Colleen said. “You girls want more soda? Plenty in the fridge.”
The girls filed into the kitchen. Claire stood up and through the glass doors of the fireplace watched them sit around the kitchen table filling up their glasses. Meredith smiled and laughed at something one of the other girls said, then said something herself, and they all laughed.
“I wait every second for the phone to ring,” Colleen said quietly behind her. “It’s like holding in a scream. It’s horrible if it rings and it’s horrible if it doesn’t ring. It’s like the rest of everything is on the other side of the ring.”
Claire turned to her. There were winners and there were losers. There were people with sterling silver bracelets and people whose silver flaked away and left their wrists stained green. There were people whose children were taken. And there were people whose children were spared.
•
Once, many years before, a police detective had called them at the office, requesting the dental records of a man whom they suspected had died in a house fire in the city. The police were merely confirming the man’s identity—the house was rented in his name, and his car was parked on the street out front. But there were suspicious circumstances surrounding the fire, and they wanted to make sure that the corpse they had found, little more than bones and teeth in the rubble, according to the detective, was in fact the man they thought it was.
“Shall I look at them?” she’d asked the detective over the phone.
“We have people who do that,” he’d said. “If you could just track them down and leave them at the desk, we’ll send someone over.”
She’d found the file herself rather than asking the secretary to pull it. And then she had looked at the X-rays anyway, despite what the detective had said. They both had, she and Mark, over lunch that day, laid the panorex gently on the light box (often they just slapped them up there, but that seemed wrong), and flipped the switch.
“You remember him?” Mark had asked. The date listed on the panorex was six years earlier, and the patient’s records showed he hadn’t been seen at their office since. How had the police even tracked them down? A wife? A magnet melted to the fridge? One of their personalized toothbrushes, smoldering in the bathroom, their names still visible?
“No,” she said. “You?”
“No,” he said.
A crown on the upper-right first premolar. The lower left canine blocked out. A left condylar fracture, several years old. She and Mark stood there in the white light of the dead man’s teeth. Neither wanted to be the one to turn off the box. Finally, she stepped forward and flipped the switch.
Who knew when they would find Lisa, if they would ever find her. Teeth, the unsung heroes of the body, so vulnerable to Dr Pepper and Jolly Ranchers and complex carbohydrates, so often victims to human stupidity and shortsightedness. But once the human failings ceased, those same teeth proved immune to the manner of decay brought about by water and earth, the natural degeneration of the body that destroyed almost everything but was no match for the stalwart tooth. Who knew how many weeks would pass, how many months, before what was left of Lisa Bellow washed up along a riverbank, or was unearthed in some remote field. A dentist would be called to confirm the suspicion. Who but a dentist would recognize her?
13
> For almost her whole life, there was no place Meredith had loved more than the middle row of seats of the family minivan. Every June, and sometimes at Christmas, they took the two-day trek halfway across the country, deep into the endless Midwest, to see her grandparents, she and Evan in the middle row, the back row folded down and crammed with suitcases, pillows, stuffed animals, baseball gloves, swim stuff (summers), presents (Christmas), and the twelve-cup coffeemaker her mother insisted on bringing every time because her grandparents didn’t own one. Wedged between her seat and Evan’s was an enormous box of car stuff: trivia cards, playing cards, baseball cards, comic books, coloring books, Yes & Know invisible ink books, toy catalogs, Etch A Sketches, flashlights, dice, calculators, maps, stickers, license plate magnets, Power Rangers, My Little Ponies, car bingo, priceless “gems” in tiny suede bags. All four of them could have been stranded in the car for months and never run out of things to do.
Her friends always complained about family car trips. How could they be so stupid? There was nowhere in the world better than the middle row of a minivan, flying along a long flat stretch of highway, cornfields flashing by your window. And there was no better time than the two hours after dinner, pushing on an extra hundred miles to that hotel in eastern Indiana, darkness falling, the murmur of her parents’ voices in the front seat, the glow of Evan’s Nintendo DS, then iPod, then iPad, then iPhone.
But there were few places that Meredith loved less than the passenger seat of the family minivan. The middle row was her world, their world—hers and Evan’s—its connection to the front row sporadic and almost always voluntary, whereas the passenger seat was squarely adult territory, and as such there were certain expectations for those who sat in it. Like speaking. Like talking. Like answering questions.
As her mother pulled away from the Bellows’ house, Meredith steeled herself for the coming onslaught. Why was she hanging out with Lisa’s friends? Were they spending time together at school? Were they eating lunch together? How did they wind up at the Bellows’ house? Did they walk or did they take the bus? Had she ever been to the Bellows’ house before? Was it strange to be in Lisa’s room? Which one of the girls had invited her? Had she wanted to say no? Had part of her wanted to go and part of her not wanted to go? What did they talk about? Did they ask her about what happened? Did she even like those girls? Were they nice to her? Did she feel uncomfortable? Did she feel like herself? Did she feel like someone else?