by Susan Perabo
But then something happened, something that surprised everyone. Or maybe not everyone. Mark, she had to admit, had anticipated it for years, claimed to see something in Evan, some great promise in his build, his hand/eye coordination, some secret baseball recipe—though she’d just always attributed the prediction to Mark’s usual optimism. But Mark was right. What happened was that Evan suddenly got good. Really, really good. Claire had seen his body change over the winter of his seventh-grade year, his shoulders and chest broaden, the belly that had once earned him the unmentionable nickname transform into muscle, the mustache darkening on his upper lip. (Really? So soon? She had not steeled herself properly for that darkness, had to stop her double-take the morning she first noticed it.) But she had never considered how puberty might translate on the field. Always one of the better players, at the age of thirteen Evan was abruptly and undeniably the best, hitting the ball with power that made parents lingering at practice look up from their phones and say whoa. He hit screaming line drives that other boys, instead of trying to catch, leaped away from. And she did not blame them. And suddenly, though she was ashamed to admit it, she turned from an apathetic baseball parent to the foam fingered #1 fan in the space of—well, really, there was no space. She was one, and then abruptly she was the other.
Claire loved going to his high school games, loved that Evan was the star, because she loved watching him excel, in the same way she’d loved, when we was two, watching him put the shaped blocks into the correctly shaped holes. It seemed to come to him just that easily. But it was more than that. It was something about her, too. She had always sat back and judged the other parents a little bit, how seriously they took everything, but now she was one of the crowd, automatically included: somehow Evan’s success was her ticket past the gates of her own judgment. She and Mark were popular. At the games they were Evan Oliver’s parents, a single unit of accomplishment. They held hands on the bleachers while they cheered the boy who had made them popular and modestly accepted the accolades from those around them, the mothers with their big sunhats and Dunkin’ Donuts iced teas, the fathers with their Phillies caps and hypertension. It was a mortifying cliché, but nonetheless true: Claire was actually warmed, inside, by the glow of her son’s towering home runs.
The mothers—a few of them she’d gotten to know well enough to look forward to their company—had called often after Evan was hurt, called over the spring and summer, and then eventually stopped trying when she did not return their calls.
Claire had long been friendly with many people but had no close friends. After what she and Mark always referred to half-jokingly (ha-ha-ha) as the Season of Divorce, when the three couples they had been best friends with split up, she had had a difficult time making connections with people that were based on anything other than convenience. She was too busy and too old to make new friends. Not that she could no longer be friends with the divorced couples. She was—she and Mark both were. They had made a somber vow that they would not be side choosers, but ironically it was that vow that wound up making the individual friendships difficult to sustain. You could say all you wanted that you would not choose sides, but the fact was that sometimes there were sides, and some days not choosing could wind up feeling more like outright betrayal than any kind of high-minded neutrality. And so instead of remaining good friends with half the divorced people, they became acquaintances with all of them. Sometimes the men came over for movies in the yard, but their lives were different now, and everyone could feel it. And sometimes the women came over for drinks, but Claire grew tired of the variation on the theme from years before: you wouldn’t understand; you have Mark.
Still, this was not something that had particularly bothered her, and it was only after Evan stopped playing baseball that she realized that those people, the women in the stands with the iced teas and sunhats, had become her closest friends without her even realizing it. And then they, too, were gone, in the course of one afternoon, in the path of one foul ball.
•
“Do you give out toothbrushes at your house?” a young patient asked Claire on Halloween.
“We’re just dentists,” she said. “We’re not monsters.”
In fact she had always loved Halloween, and they had the perfect Halloween neighborhood—no porch lights dared dim on their street, the long lawns dotted with gravestones and giant inflatable spiders. She would stay on the porch swing with her cauldron of candy while Mark walked the kids around one square block, and then they’d switch places and she’d take them on the second loop of the figure eight. They would not have given it up, either of them, the sight of their children bathed in the light of someone else’s front porch, the looks on their faces when they turned from the door and started back toward the sidewalk, their pumpkin buckets swinging, Evan holding Meredith’s hand so she would not trip on a darkened stair or stone. Claire mourned the loss of those moments even as they were happening. And now here she was, those moments ghosts.
The days of trick-or-treating had long passed for Evan and Meredith. Now it was parties—music, costumes (either bloody or ironic, extra points for both), possibly pranks, probably alcohol. This year, with Halloween on a Friday—there should be some sort of law preventing this, Claire thought—both kids would be god knows where and she and Mark would sit on their porch swing with their cauldron of Kit Kats for two hours and feel ancient. And it wasn’t as if they could even feel ancient together. Tonight, she was fairly certain, they would feel ancient alone.
It was true that sometimes Claire went months without thinking of that man all those years ago, her escape hatch, and then other times she thought of him almost every day. She knew the danger zones—god knows they were clearly marked—and recognized all the signs of her mounting vulnerability. She knew she was in a dangerous place now. What fool would not want the escape hatch at this moment?
She was mature enough to acknowledge that the man himself did not even exist anymore. It had been twenty years and she could hardly conjure his face. He wasn’t on any social media—this meant he hadn’t changed. Unless it meant he was dead. But more than likely he just turned his nose up at that kind of thing. More than likely he was tending to Syrian refugees. But no, there she went again, creating a hero from the sketchy outline in her head. Maybe he was just being a selfish bastard somewhere. He’d had that capacity, that was for sure. Maybe that had been part of his appeal. Mark had never been a selfish bastard. He wouldn’t have known how to be a selfish bastard if his life depended on it. She hated that about him.
•
“We’re coming for you at ten o’clock,” she said to Meredith during dinner.
Meredith set down her fork. “Ten o’clock? Seriously? That’s when most people will be getting there.”
“Probably true,” Evan said.
Evan was now her number-one enemy, if one had to think in those terms, looking around the kitchen table at the three people she loved most in the world.
“I don’t even know this girl,” Claire said. “Who is it again?”
“Abby Luckett. And just because you don’t know her doesn’t mean she’s bad,” Meredith said. “All it means is you don’t know her.”
You were held at gunpoint twenty-three days ago, Claire thought. You were lying on the floor of a restaurant and a man had a gun pointed at your head. Do not talk to me as if that didn’t happen. Do not talk to me like a typical snotty teenager.
“How about ten thirty?” Mark said.
“Whatever,” Meredith said. She lifted her fork as if it weighed seventy-five pounds, then began morosely stirring her vegetables. “Maybe I won’t even go. I’ll just . . . whatever.”
Claire watched Mark fall headlong into this obvious trap and did nothing to prevent it, which was, in a way, falling headlong into the trap herself.
“We didn’t say we don’t want you to go,” Mark said. “We want you to go, honey. We think it’s great that you’re going. We just don’t want you to stay super late. What time
does the party end?”
“It’s not a birthday party, Dad. There is not an end time. It’s just over when everybody leaves, which will probably be at like midnight.”
“Eleven,” he said. “We’ll come at eleven.”
“It’s a good offer,” Evan said. “At thirteen. It’s a fair offer. I’d take that offer.”
“Where are you going?” Claire asked him.
“Nowhere,” he said. “Just to Zack’s or whatever.”
Zack was the shortstop.
“Are you driving?”
Night driving was trickier than day driving. She knew this. Headlights complicated matters. And on Halloween, kids darting out from between cars, kids in dark costumes, Darth Vaders, Hogwarts robes. It was like a shooting gallery with cars as bullets, kids as ducks, difficult enough for someone with perfect eyesight.
“I’m taking the stilts,” Evan said. “And there’s nothing you can do to stop me.”
“I’m serious,” Claire said.
“Sam’s picking me up,” Evan said. “We may just crash at Zack’s.”
Sam was the first baseman. The shortstop and the first baseman and the catcher. She hadn’t seen those boys in—how long? Weeks? Or was it months? She should be happy for her son. She was happy for him. She was.
“What’re you guys going to do?” she asked.
“We’re gonna play baseball in the dark,” he said. “We’re gonna get drunk and throw baseballs at each other’s heads. Stuff like that.”
“Just as long as you have a plan,” Mark said.
•
Claire sat on the front porch swing with her giant cauldron of candy. It was a mild night, clear and moonlit, ideal Halloween weather. So where was everyone? Had she inflated the numbers from the past, swept up in her nostalgia, or were there actually fewer trick-or-treaters this year? Had the suburbs been spooked? Maybe it was in bad taste to trick-or-treat when girls were being taken from Deli Barns. Maybe it was wrong to pretend to be scary, or scared.
Lisa Bellow had fallen off the edge of the news. For the first week she had been the top story, of course, every night, when a break seemed imminent. Then for the ten days following, they recapped, because there were no updates. Each story began, “Police continue to follow leads in the abduction of—” but there was never any new information. “Officials encourage anyone with knowledge,” etc., etc., etc. The same picture of Lisa, a new plea from Colleen, a shot of the Deli Barn, the sign on the middle school lawn studded with green ribbons. It was the same story now, every night on the 11:00 local news, every morning when she lay in bed and read the news on her iPhone, every sentence of non-news punctuated by a ping from the garage.
Of course there were glimmers of hope, because there was always an exception to the rule, always someone who beat the odds, always some incredible story shouted as far and wide as the internet could reach. (And wasn’t this why Evan believed he could play baseball? Because there was always someone who did something extraordinary, and that was always the someone you heard about? Because who wanted to make a TV movie about all the people who tried to do something extraordinary and failed?) There was the girl who had been kidnapped out of her bedroom and been missing for how long? A year? And then one day on the street someone spots her and she’s reunited with her family and yes, god knows it was awful, terrifying, life altering, but now she’s home safe. And those women in Ohio, kept in a house for a decade or more, long enough to have children fathered by their rapist, somehow kept there by one single maniac until the day they finally believed they could kick the door out and make a run for it? These were the stories you had in the back of your mind. No one mentioned them. To mention them would risk a jinx. But everyone knew them, and surely these were the stories Colleen Bellow reminded herself of every day so that she could get out of bed.
MISSING. She looked at those yellow flyers on Meredith’s closet door almost every morning, and once in the middle of the night while Meredith slept behind her and the tolerant cat rolled its back against her shins. She kept hoping she would open the closet to find them gone. 5'5", 110 LBS. BLOND HAIR. HAZEL EYES. Claire desperately wanted to take them down, get them out of Meredith’s room. She could hardly bear the thought of Meredith looking at them every morning, every night, like a lover or a stalker or . . . or a what? She didn’t even know. She just knew that she wanted to hide them away, the way they’d hidden Evan’s bats after his first surgery. She wanted to zip them up in that bat bag in the corner of the garage, tuck them away in the place that held all the things you couldn’t bear to look at, all the things you couldn’t bear to love anymore. But that had failed. Evan had found the bats, found his way back to them, even with only one eye.
The van pulled into the driveway and Mark got out. He swung the keys around his finger and came and sat with her on the swing.
“Busy?”
“Only four or five,” she said. “Two groups. Three Princess Elsas. How was the party?”
“I only stayed for the Jell-O shots,” he said.
“Did you see any of her friends? Was Kristy there?”
“No idea. They all looked exactly alike. Same makeup. Bunch of zombies standing around in the yard.”
“High school kids, too?”
“Seriously, no idea. Maybe you should have gone.”
“I’ll pick her up,” she said.
He rested his hand on hers, between them on the swing, and she looked at him. He was wearing his dumb puffy white sweater that was about nine sizes too big. He smiled.
“Nice to see you,” he said.
She might have cried right then had the voices not reached them from a couple houses down, kids whooping. A moment later a battalion of Stormtroopers appeared on the sidewalk, marching in their direction, led by an Irish setter.
“You want a beer?” he asked.
“I want ten beers,” she said.
“Let’s start with one.”
•
Two hours later it was 10:15 and they were on their backs in the front yard, looking up at the stars. The last of the trick-or-treaters had been gone for hours. She’d had five beers and at least as many Kit Kats. Her only solace was that she now knew she could still enjoy getting drunk with her husband and that she genuinely no longer wanted to kill him.
“Go inside,” she said. “Go to bed. You don’t want to fall asleep out here.”
He was notorious for this, going from pleasantly drunk to sound asleep in a matter of seconds. In dental school he’d fallen asleep on the couch of every single person they knew, often while the party continued around him, and on two embarrassing occasions he had fallen asleep with his head on the table at a restaurant.
“Two-minute warning,” she said, because she knew all the signs. “Trust me. You don’t want to sleep in the yard. For so many reasons.”
“I really don’t,” he said. “I really, really don’t. But you—”
“I’m fine,” she said. “I still have a little time. I’ll have some coffee. I’ll be fine.”
“Are you sure? I could call a cab or something.”
“Terrific. We’ll show up to pick her up in a taxi. She’d love that.”
They had a deal, an unwritten agreement, more binding than their marriage vows. They were not reckless people. They did not do reckless things. The list was short but absolute. Among the terms: they did not drink and drive.
“Okay,” he said. He stood unsteadily in the grass, took a few deep breaths. “Okay. I can do this. I’m going to bed. I’m going to walk into the house and go to bed.”
“In the bed,” she said. “You’re going to bed in the bed. Our bed.”
“In our bed,” he confirmed. “But wake me up if you don’t think you can drive. Seriously. Wake me up and we’ll figure something out.”
“It’s fine,” she said. “I’m fine.”
Which was almost the case, a cup of coffee later. She sat behind the wheel of the minivan and took a long deep breath. She was fine. She backed out of
the driveway. The thing was, she was tired. There was no law against driving tired, although probably there should be. She had read once that more accidents were caused by tired sober adults than drunk teenagers. What about drunk mothers? Not that she was a drunk mother. She was, at the very most, a mother who had been tipsy a half hour before but was now fine but tired. Better than Evan, surely, and they let him drive.
She put a hand over her left eye. He might be out driving right now. He might be driving Sam’s car. She might crash into him at the next intersection. He’d get out of the car and say, “What the hell, Mom?” And she, still with her hand over her eye, would say, “I was just trying to understand how you see the world. Is that so wrong?”
It was possible that she smelled a little bit like beer. Or maybe it was just the car that smelled like beer, which might have been worse. On a Friday Halloween there would be roadblocks everywhere. It was nearly as bad as New Year’s or the Fourth of July. An officer would walk slowly up to the van and she’d roll down the window and the stench of beer would erupt from the interior. And the cop would say—she’d seen this many times on TV, so she knew—“Ma’am, would you please step out of the car?” and she would say, would have to say, “My daughter was almost kidnapped earlier this month.”
She had driven herself to the Deli Barn by the middle school. She was sitting in the parking lot of the Deli Barn. She had come here for coffee, without thinking about it, or at least without being aware of thinking about it. She had stopped here before for coffee once or twice, and for sandwiches many times, but of course all that was before everything, and of course she had not forgotten, but rather used “forgetting” as an excuse to finally come here, a place she had avoided even driving by in the last weeks.