The Fall of Lisa Bellow

by Susan Perabo

  “Do you still like that chicken casserole?” her mother asked.

  “What?”

  “The chicken casserole I used to make. With the mushrooms and the rice. I feel like we haven’t had that in a long time.”

  “Um, sure,” Meredith said. “That sounds good.”

  Then: nothing. Then, a moment later: the radio. Meredith didn’t trust it, her mother’s silence, the music, but that didn’t mean she wasn’t going to enjoy it, for as long as it lasted.

  She could not explain what had happened to her, or how she had come to be in the place, or places, that she was. She only knew that in all the universe there was only one spot where she was truly safe right now, today, and it wasn’t in a minivan or in her bedroom or in the Bellows’ kitchen or in a psychiatrist’s office or in algebra class. It was instead in an apartment off the highway, an apartment with a concrete planter out front where cigarettes were ashed, an apartment with a ratty couch and a big TV and a kitchen wastebasket with a foot pedal and a bedroom door that was only ever slightly ajar and a small bathroom with a cold bathtub where she could sit with Lisa. The apartment was in close proximity to everywhere, at the end of every off-ramp and every thought, around every corner and every conversation, tucked inside silences and empty spaces, and the more silences and empty spaces there were, the easier it was to get to the place where Lisa was.

  Meredith could not explain it, but even if she could have, she would not have wanted to. Who would she tell? Evan? Becca? Her mother, this woman sitting silently beside her in the minivan, this woman who seemed to believe in nothing? What would she even say? Surely, anyone she told would think she was crazy. Maybe she was crazy. But more than that, Meredith knew that if she revealed this place to anyone, she would risk destroying it. And if it were destroyed, how was she supposed to save Lisa?

  She looked out the van window. She sort of liked this street, Lisa’s street. Her own street, that she’d lived on her whole life, was geometrically pleasing and user friendly, rectangular lawns that were ideal for lawn tractors, impossibly smooth sidewalks for no-bounce scootering, wide and straight for as far as the eye could see, all of it utterly predictable. Lisa’s street wound around haphazardly, following the path of a little rocky creek. There were no sidewalks. Meredith liked that most of the driveways were bridges, if only for a few yards. She imagined Lisa and the other kids in the neighborhood had played under those bridges when they were younger, building dams in the creek, constructing forts with stones and branches, hiding as cars rumbled overhead, fathers coming home from work—not her father, not Lisa’s father, but some other neighborhood father who might come out with Popsicles for the whole gang, toss them into the gulch, to their waiting hands, and then go back to his beer.

  •

  “I never even saw a picture of my father,” Lisa said, “until I was like ten. Then I found my mom’s high school yearbook in my grandparents’ house. I was sitting on the couch flipping through it and my grandfather sits down next to me and points to this guy and goes, ‘You know who that is?’ And then he got a funny look, like he totally realized he was doing something he shouldn’t. And I go, ‘No,’ and he whispers, ‘That’s your dad.’ Then he looks around the room to see if anybody’s there, and then he goes, ‘shhhhhhhhh.’”

  Lisa put her finger to her lips and arched her eyebrows comically.

  “Shhhhhhh. Like, who’s he shushing, right? Like he just told the person that the shush was for. He’s actually mentally ill, my grandfather. You know, diagnosed or whatever. By a doctor.”

  They were in the bathtub. It was really Lisa who had chosen the spot, proclaimed it their own. Even when the couch was free, even though the couch was warmer and obviously twenty times more comfortable, even though on the couch they could watch TV, even though on the couch there was a slice of sunlight in the afternoons and you could see the outside, or at least a sliver of it, through the gap in the curtains. Even with all that, Lisa wanted to sit in the bathtub, so that’s where they sat and talked. Of course Lisa always sat on the end without the hardware, the smooth end where she could lie back unimpeded, her legs stretched out in front of her. Meredith got the bad end, though she’d found a position that wasn’t awful, scooched in the corner and her arm draped over the rusty spigot. She was stretched out as well, her legs entangled with Lisa’s, so that sometimes, if she just looked at the four knees, Meredith forgot whose legs were whose, because they were both wearing black leggings.

  “Did you ever tell your mom?” Meredith asked. “About seeing the picture?”

  “Are you kidding? No way. But I took the yearbook. It’s on the bookshelf in my room and she’s never even noticed it.”

  “You could look him up,” Meredith said. “You could google him. If you know his name?”

  “Why would I want to look him up?” Lisa said. “It’s not like he ever looked me up.”

  Meredith could not imagine having a father out there, knowing his name and even what he looked like but never having seen him in person. Wouldn’t you wonder about him? Wouldn’t you wonder if he laughed like you, or hated cantaloupe like you, or couldn’t hold a tune like you? Wouldn’t you wonder if he wondered about you?

  “Do you ever miss him?” she asked Lisa.

  “What’s to miss?” Lisa asked. She was inspecting her thumbnail. Some of her perfectly painted nails were chipped. From a struggle? Meredith pushed this thought away.

  “He could be anywhere,” she said.

  “Sure,” Lisa said. “But I probably wouldn’t even recognize him if he walked up to me. He probably doesn’t have that cheesy yearbook smile anymore.”

  But wouldn’t you always, always be looking for him? Meredith thought. At the mall or the movies or walking down the street? Maybe Lisa’s father’s picture was in the police book, too, in addition to the yearbook. Maybe he was a suspect in something. Maybe, due to his prolonged absence, he was a suspect in everything.

  •

  Evan was in the kitchen eating a banana in that way he had of eating a banana. He peeled the whole thing, broke the banana in two, and then put one half entirely in his mouth, swallowed it seemingly without a single chew, and then as soon as his throat was clear did the same thing with the other half. It was like one of those YouTube videos of a snake swallowing a squirrel whole, where you could see the outline of the squirrel as it slid down the snake’s gullet. Did a snake even have a gullet? Wasn’t a snake all gullet? In any case, that was how Evan was eating his banana, leaning against the kitchen counter, his elbow resting on the microwave, and that was how she knew he was playing baseball again. He hadn’t eaten a banana like that in six months. Her mother went upstairs to change; she could hear her father watching television in the family room.

  “So,” Evan said, swallowing his squirrel. “Hanging out with the cool kids, eh?”

  “How do you even know that?”

  “Dad told me. Mom told him. Is there a secret handshake? Or whatever girls do? A secret giggle?”

  “We’re doing a project,” she said. “A service project. We’re trying to help her mom. Who cares anyway, who I hang out with?”

  “You know what people are saying now? They’re saying the whole thing was a setup. She and some guy she met online faked the whole thing. Made it look like a kidnapping.”

  “That’s not new,” she said. “Some people said that from the beginning.”

  “Well, now lots of people are saying it. It makes some sense. Disappearing without a trace? And no ransom note . . . ”

  “That’s stupid,” she said. “Ransom notes are in movies. This isn’t a movie.”

  He shrugged. “I’m just sayin’. It’s a theory.”

  “What about the sandwich guy?”

  “How hurt was that guy, really? Bump on the head. Just enough to make it look like a real crime.”

  “She was crying,” Meredith said. “She was scared.”

  “Maybe,” he said. “Or maybe she was acting.”

  He was in
his sweats and black Under Armour shirt. The official uniform of breaking your mother’s heart. There was a paunch in the Under Armour, courtesy of months of Chester Cheetah and the family room couch. But he still looked about three-quarters like his old self.

  “Are you playing baseball?” she asked. She was not interested in hearing any more of his theories.

  “Maybe,” he said. “Maybe not.”

  “Mom’ll kill you.”

  “I’m seventeen years old.”

  “You can kill someone who’s seventeen.”

  He grinned. There was something in him, standing there in the kitchen with his elbow propped on the microwave, his head set at a slight angle, a little stinky from his run, that was very clearly not miserable. Something had changed over the last few weeks. He had ownership over himself; he was the master of his fate; he had resolve. The darkened left lens in his glasses was an afterthought.

  She’d hardly talked to him in at least a week. What was the point? Perhaps the miserable Evan would have understood what was happening to her. But this Evan, this banana-swallowing, Under-Armoured Evan, would be little help. He was not her safe space anymore. She’d woken and heard him hitting down in the garage and understood at once that that was his place now. He had his place, and she had hers, and they did not overlap. He was abruptly so gone that she didn’t even miss him.

  •

  She had stopped waiting for Jules and Kristy at the corner of the parking lot. Jules and Kristy, it needed to be said, had become more than a little bit irritating, Jules with her pathetic insistence that she did not want to be popular while simultaneously doing everything she possibly could to be popular, and Kristy with her whiny, sixth grade–holdover insecurity. Plus it was just easier to be with Lisa’s friends. They weren’t her friends, not exactly, but they were nice enough, and the distance between them and the bathroom where Lisa waited for her was infinitesimal, no more than a blink. With Jules and Kristy there was history, and baggage, and expectation. With Lisa’s friends, the only expectation was that she mourn the absence of their friend.

  She went straight into the building and to her locker as soon as she arrived at school. There were still little green ribbons covering Lisa’s locker, but every morning some would have fallen down overnight, scattered like tiny leaves, and she would pick them up and toss them into the bottom of her own locker. How long would they let that locker, 64C, sit there, unused? How long did missing-person ribbons stay up? Was there an expiration date, some point where they officially became irrelevant, a day when the fall of Lisa Bellow became the winter of someone else, as Evan had predicted from the start? She imagined Mr. Fulton brushing the ribbons away with a few heavy swipes of his large hand. Yes, maybe after Christmas they’d give the locker to a new kid, some guy from far away who transferred in and was none the wiser, who would fill the back of the locker door with his own life.

  Or maybe not. Maybe in a week Lisa would be standing at her locker again, found, freed, the criminal arrested, the mystery solved. Maybe everything would revert to the way it had been. And if Lisa were beside her here in this hall, would Lisa be ignoring her? In some ways this thought was as troubling as Lisa’s continued absence.

  “Return to basic rules,” like in Fluxx, the game they’d played endlessly that one summer. Her father’s favorite card. She and Evan, and even her mom, were always making things crazier—draw four, play your whole hand, switch hands with the player across from you, take six cards randomly from the discard pile—but her dad, god, the look of relief on his face when he drew it: “Return to basic rules.” They all laughed at him. Not in a mean way. Just in that way you were allowed to laugh at your father because you knew he would laugh along with you.

  Something was thrust in front of her face.

  “Look. At. This.” It was Amanda Hammels. The thing in front of her face was a catalog. The page in the catalog showed a silver chain bracelet, ten or twelve ovals looped together to make the whole.

  “It’s like the chain of life. Like the chain of friends. Like the chain of support.”

  “Cool,” Meredith said.

  “It’s perfect,” Amanda said. “Abby is freaking out, it’s so perfect. Her mom already emailed the company and they can get them special order, like super fast, so we can have them at the Halloween party.”

  “That’s great,” Meredith said.

  “It’s the chain of giving,” Amanda said. “It’s the chain of love. The love chain. Or is that weird? Maybe that’s too kinky. We don’t want it to be all sexed up or anything. Oh my god, that would be really bad.” She snorted out a laugh. “Lisa would think that was funny.”

  “It’s probably not a great idea, calling it that,” Meredith agreed.

  “Yeah. We’ll work on it. We’ll figure it out at lunch. I just wanted everybody to see it ASAP. Have you seen Becca?”

  “No. I just got here.”

  “Okay. I’ll find her.”

  She skipped off. Amanda had never been as mean as Lisa, always been a background giggler, not smart enough to come up with a comment or facial expression that could actually wound you. You got the feeling that you could turn Amanda in any direction and push the go button and she would go in a straight line until someone thought to turn her in another direction, or until she bumped into a wall and just kept butting into it for eternity, a wind-up toy with no off switch.

  •

  “It’s not like we don’t know what you think of us,” Lisa said.

  “Who?” she asked. “What?”

  “You and your smarty friends. It’s not like we don’t know what you’re saying about us behind our backs.”

  “That’s pretty hilarious, coming from you.”

  “I’m not actually any meaner than you,” Lisa said. “I’m just way more popular.”

  “That right there is meaner than anything I would say.”

  “It’s not mean,” Lisa said. “It’s just the truth.”

  Meredith thought about the awful thing Lisa had said in seventh grade, about her butt hanging off the chair in the cafeteria, but she was too embarrassed that she even remembered it to mention it now.

  “She is stupid,” Lisa said. “Amanda. I mean, you’re right. But she has a lot of good qualities. Have you ever seen her braid? She’s like some kind of braiding genius.”

  “Well it’s good she has that to fall back on,” Meredith said.

  “See?” Lisa said. “You’re a bitch. Just like me. See?”

  Lisa slipped a Sharpie out from under her leg and wrote BITCH on the tile wall of the shower in big, thick green letters. Meredith gasped.

  “Where’d you get that?”

  “What?”

  “That marker.”

  “It was in the bedroom,” Lisa said. “In a drawer. I stole it. I thought I might need it.”

  “For what?”

  “For this,” Lisa said, then underlined BITCH.

  Lisa did not talk about what happened in the bedroom. Meredith realized that this may in fact have been the first time she’d even mentioned the word “bedroom.” It wasn’t every night. It was sometimes. He would come home—from where? from work?—a couple hours after dark, and maybe they’d be watching TV but more than likely they’d be in the tub. He would come in with a greasy bag from somewhere—usually Burger King but sometimes Taco Bell and sometimes KFC and once it was the plain brown paper bag from Deli Barn, which was funny for about five seconds. He’d toss the bag into the bathroom, the way you’d fling slop to pigs, and then she and Lisa would spread out the bag like a picnic blanket between them, dump all the fries into a pile, and dig in. If he was going to take a shower, then they’d go sit on the couch and watch CSI and eat and then later, back to the tub, except sometimes he came for Lisa.

  It wasn’t even very scary, not anymore. (Had it ever been? Meredith could no longer recall those first days. Had it been a week yet? A month?) He’d just come into the bathroom and go, “You, get up”—just like he had that afternoon, at the Del
i Barn—and Lisa would stand up and Meredith would lie down on her side and the bedroom door would click shut and then Meredith would fall asleep. And then the next day it was the same thing all over again. They had their routine, all three of them.

  “What about Becca?” Meredith asked.

  “What about Becca?”

  “She’s not dumb.”

  “Becca is the only friend I have who can actually have a conversation,” Lisa said. “That’s why I wanted her in our group, when she moved here.”

  “To help with homework?”

  “No.” Lisa made a tally mark under BITCH. “But, okay, yes, sometimes. But no—she’s just, you know. She just sees things smart. Smartly. She has perspective.”

  “She’s in my algebra class,” Meredith said. She smiled. “She knows what an asymptote is. So you can ask her next year.”

  “Ha, yeah, she knows it’s made up. Asymptote. Buttymptote.”

  “It’s not made up,” Meredith said. “It’s a real thing. It’s just . . . ” She paused for dramatic effect, then waved her hands like an illusionist. “Invisible.”

  “Invisible algebra? Great.”

  “It’s an invisible line that you can’t cross. A curve gets right up next to it but it can’t cross it. It just almost touches it, to infinity.”

  “Yeah, well, if it’s so invisible, how does the curve even know where it is?” Lisa smiled triumphantly, the way she had in the car that first day when she’d told the kidnapper to shut his mouth. “I’d like to see them explain that.”

  “I guess you’ll just have to ask Becca,” Meredith said.