by Susan Perabo
There were three teenagers sitting at one of the tables, and a man and a little boy who was dressed as Buzz Lightyear (Evan had worshipped Buzz Lightyear) and when she walked through the door some bells jingled and the little boy laughed, although probably not at the bells.
There was a huge bearded guy behind the counter with bulging, tattooed muscles. He was not the injured sandwich farmer, whose picture she knew from the newspaper. This guy was in his thirties and looked like he could snap a masked kidnapper in two. Perhaps he had been hired expressly for this purpose.
“Do you have coffee?” she asked.
This was it. This was the spot. Claire was seized with the urge to take off her shoes. Socks, too. She wanted to be barefoot on this floor, on this cold and sticky slab. This was where her daughter had lain down, her cheek flattened against the chill, where Lisa had lain down, where the two girls had stared at each other before one was taken. This was where her daughter had believed she was going to die, had thought . . . what? Claire had never asked. How could you ask? Wouldn’t it be cruel to ask, to force her to relive that moment, rethink those thoughts?
“Black, yes,” she said.
Had the girls said anything at all, in those minutes (how many? three? four?) leading up to Lisa’s abduction? She had heard Meredith’s story of that afternoon repeated to the police at least a half dozen times, and there had never been mention of any talking, though surely even if they had not spoken, something, some message, some understanding, must have passed in that narrow gap between them, those few inches that separated their faces, that space—this space she inhabited now—that a thousand ankles had breached since. A look. A gesture.
She was standing where the man had stood. She looked down at her own feet, saw the floor from his perspective, imagined this thought: I will pick something up from this floor. I will pick something.
“Thank you,” she said, taking the cup that was handed to her.
She got back into van and tried to sip the coffee but it was too hot. It was a few minutes past 11:00. She would let Meredith have a little extra time, sit here for a couple minutes and allow the car to fill up with the smell of coffee. Maybe she should have gotten something else, something that smelled stronger, a sandwich with extra onions—wasn’t that was Lisa had ordered for her mother that day? Some kind of club sandwich with extra onions? Maybe she should start picking up that club sandwich for Colleen Bellow on her way home from work. Maybe she would leave it at her front door so she wouldn’t have to have the conversation, the one where she was told again and again that no, she did not understand. Or perhaps Colleen Bellow had only said this once but the echo of it had continued unabated.
After a few minutes Claire pulled from the lot. The coffee was still undrinkably hot but it definitely smelled good, potent, and she almost felt like she was drinking it even though she was only smelling it.
She pulled up in front of the assigned house and was aware of bumping over the sloped curve onto the grass of the front yard, but only a tiny bit, a few inches at most, and it was the kind of thing that might have been intentional, a courtesy to passing traffic. There was no one standing around the yard anymore, and she walked to the front porch where two high school boys sat on white wicker chairs, looking at their phones. One of the boys was short and blond and had a cigarette. The other boy was Logan Boone. She had not seem him in at least five years but there was no mistaking him, his shock of ginger hair. She stood at the bottom of the porch stairs—there were only seven or eight steps, but there might as well have been a thousand. She was one-hundred-percent certain her legs would not support her bid for the top.
“Is this the eighth-grade party?” she asked, her head titled up at the boys. She was startled by the sound of her own voice, which sounded louder and more judgmental than she had intended.
“Yeah,” the blond boy said, not looking up from his phone. “They’re all inside. We’re protecting them from zombies.”
Logan Boone laughed and set his phone on the table between them. “We’re the hired help,” he said. His voice was very deep. He didn’t look like a teenager, not like Evan and his friends. He looked like a man. He looked sturdy. He looked like a man who would fix her car or check her electric meter. What did that even mean? She had no idea. Was she drunk? Or was she just surprised? Her heart was hammering.
She did not think he recognized her.
“Who’s your daughter?” the blond boy asked. “I can go get her.”
“Meredith,” she said. “Oliver.”
“Meredith Oliver, princess of darkness.”
“That’s the one,” she said.
“They’re all that one,” Logan said.
The blond boy stood and stepped on his cigarette and went inside the house. Was she not allowed inside the house? What was happening inside the house? She stayed at the bottom of the stairs, silent.
“They’re watching scary movies in the dark,” Logan said. Had she asked her question aloud? “There’re about fifty of ’em all over the floor. Believe me, you don’t want to go in there. Can’t see a thing.”
“Okay,” she said. “Thanks for the tip.”
She thought she might sit down on the porch steps to wait, but then she would have to turn her back to him and that seemed rude. Then he stood up. He was tall, well over six feet. He walked slowly down the stairs. “I think you were my dentist,” he said, reaching the bottom step. “A long time ago.”
“Is that right?” she asked. “Well, it’s certainly possible.” He smelled like cigarettes and she recalled vividly the smell of cigarettes in an embrace, her nose pressed against the white cotton shirt of a smoker. What smoker? When? College? High school? She took her phone out of her purse. “I think I’ll just text her and tell her I’m out here.”
She started through her contact list and the phone slipped from her fingers and landed on the stone walk. It broke apart and the battery went flying into the dark lawn.
“Oh no,” she said. “Oh, wow. Oh, no.”
“I’ll find it,” Logan said. He crouched down and started brushing through the tall grass. “Happens to me all the time. Every time I drop it the battery goes flying somewhere. Once in a pool.”
“Was it ruined?”
“Oh yeah. Big time.”
He was on his knees in the grass, sweeping his arm across the dark blades in wide arcs, and then he crawled away from her into the blackness and vanished. Somehow he was just gone, abruptly, into a place where the porch light could not reach. She felt weak. She felt like something terrible was about to happen to her, like he might not return from the darkness, and then she might never get home. She was Meredith with her cheek pressed to the cold floor and the man standing over her. And then she was Lisa Bellow, kneeling, standing, walking, stepping from the restaurant into the afternoon, and then into the car, and then, and then, and then.
“Here you go,” Logan said, on his feet now, materializing ghost-like from the dark yard and back into the glow from the porch. Only a step from total darkness into light, she thought. Only one step. Only half a step. Only an inch. Only a millimeter. He held out his hand and she took the battery from him.
“Thank you,” she said.
“Are you okay?” he asked.
“I’m fine,” she said. “I’m just really tired. I’ve had a long day.”
He smiled. “Halloween must be a tough day for dentists.”
“Oh, you know it,” she said, forcing a smile in return.
“Well let me know if you need a ride home,” he said. “We’re here to help out.”
“Are you a babysitter or something?”
“Abby’s my cousin,” he said. “I’m just helping look after everyone, keep everybody out of trouble.”
“The adults, too,” she said. “Apparently.”
“Sure,” he said. “I mean, whoever.”
The door opened and the blond boy emerged with a girl who might have been Meredith. The girl had a white face and bright red lips and a
bloody tear on her cheek. “I found her,” the blond boy said. “One princess of darkness, only slightly traumatized.”
“Thanks,” Claire said.
The girl who might have been Meredith was walking down the stairs toward her. How would she know if she’d gotten the right girl, the one she’d come for? Would Logan know?
“See ya, Meredith,” Logan said.
“See ya, Logan,” Meredith said.
“Thank you,” Claire said to him. “Thank you for fixing my phone. Or for finding it. Or, you know.”
She and Meredith walked to the car in silence. She tried to walk carefully but not too carefully, evenly but not too evenly. The last thing she wanted was to stumble, but she also didn’t want to look like she was trying not to stumble. By the time she got in on the driver’s side Meredith was already seat-belted in and had her head leaning against the window, looking back at the house. Claire turned the car on, then promptly turned it off again. She rolled down her window and took a deep breath. She would sit for a few minutes in the fresh air. She would sit and enjoy her cup of coffee from the Deli Barn. She would—
“What are you doing?” Meredith asked.
“It’s nice out. I thought we might just sit for a minute.” She picked up the coffee and took a sip. “How was the party?”
Meredith stared at her. The bloody tear on her cheek was smudged, and some of the white face paint beside it partially rubbed away. Had someone touched her face?
“Your face is smudged,” Claire said.
Meredith reached up to flip open the mirror on the sun visor. Something jangled on her wrist. It was a silver chain bracelet. Claire reached out for it and Meredith snatched her hand away.
“It’s pretty,” Claire said. “I just wanted to see.”
“You can buy one,” Meredith said. “They’re five dollars. You can buy your own. It all goes to charity.”
“What charity?”
“Mrs. Bellow.”
Claire took another sip of the coffee. She was fine. Everything was fine.
“Mrs. Bellow isn’t a charity,” she said.
“She is now,” Meredith said.
15
It was supposed to be an eighth-grade party, exclusively, but it wasn’t like Abby Luckett’s parents were paying attention to every single person who showed up in their front yard, so there were a handful of high school kids there, some invited, some not. Abby’s brother and cousin, the one her mother had looked ready to plant a wet kiss on for fixing her phone, were in high school, obviously, but they were the ones who were supposedly in charge while Abby’s parents sat in their bedroom watching porn and fooling around. Or at least that was what Abby said they were doing. But there were other high school kids, too, mostly freshman boys who’d come for the rumor of smuggled-in beer and eager girls, and including the lax bro who Meredith found in a corner of the stuffy, noisy basement with Becca, passing a tall skinny can of beer between them.
“Want some?” the lax bro said, holding it out to her.
“I’m okay,” she said. This was a Life Lesson from Evan, something he’d taught her last year but which she had not had occasion to use until tonight. When someone asked her to do something she didn’t want to do, for whatever reason, she should say “I’m okay.” Not “No thanks” or “I’m not really into that” or, god forbid, “My parents won’t let me,” or anything else suggesting fear or naiveté. Just plain and simple, “I’m okay.” Evan claimed this would get her through 75 percent of awkward teenage situations.
“More for us,” the lax bro said, passing the can to Becca.
“This is Jeremy,” Becca said. “Jeremy, Meredith.”
“The famous Meredith,” Jeremy said. “How does it feel to be famous? Have you sold your movie rights yet?”
“Jeremy is Lisa’s boyfriend,” Becca explained, which Meredith already knew because she’d seen his picture in Lisa’s locker and also in Lisa’s room. He looked smaller in person than in his pictures, and considerably less gorgeous than his beach Frisbee photo. He wore no costume or makeup. Most of the kids had a bloody scar or two on their faces and a couple of the boys had masks or fangs. Meredith had gone for the all-white face paint, bright red lipstick, and a single bloody teardrop, because that’s what Becca and Amanda and Abby were doing. Zombie chic, they called it.
“Was Lisa’s boyfriend,” Jeremy said, his words sliding together, connected like cursive. He looked squarely at Meredith. “We know she’s dead. Me and Becca know. Everybody else is pretending. Coming up with these crazy shit stories. Making themselves feel better, I guess. What do you do to make yourself feel better?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “Nothing.”
He leaned into her. “You must do something,” he said. She felt his breath hot on her face and she thought of Lisa, her quivering lips, her panting. “You tell yourself any crazy stories, Meredith?”
He was drunk, or something like it. The embarrassing truth was she didn’t really know what a drunk person looked and sounded like. Once, at a family wedding, her parents were on the dance floor flinging their bodies around like total maniacs to the song “Footloose,” and her mother had kicked off her high heels so wildly that one had flown into someone’s table and shattered a wineglass and her father had actually fallen onto the dance floor laughing. She still wasn’t sure, looking back on that night, if they’d been drunk or just really, really happy. But she knew she had never, except on TV, heard someone slur their words like Jeremy was doing right now. There was a part of it that seemed fake, like he, too, had only seen drunk people on TV.
“Nobody ever comes back after this long,” Jeremy said, slouching into his chosen corner. “Cops are desperate. They show you that picture? The mystery dude nobody recognized? Turns out that guy was some guy from Starbucks. Just some guy she talked to one day. She’d talk to anybody.”
“Anybody’d talk to her, more like it,” Becca said.
“Cops are pathetic,” Jeremy said. “Searched my room. Searched my fucking locker. Why don’t they just start digging?”
“Where, genius?” Becca asked. “You can’t dig up the whole world. She could be anywhere.”
They were very matter-of-fact about it, Meredith thought, especially considering they were the people who were supposedly closest to Lisa. What would Lisa say to them, these two? What would Lisa say, sitting in her bathtub, to know that they had given up on her?
“Meredith was the last person to see her alive,” Becca said. “Except for the guy who did it.”
“That’s so weird,” Jeremy said. He stared at her. “Meredith, isn’t that weird? You were the last person to ever see her. The last person. Ever.”
“Except the guy,” Becca said again. “He was the very last.”
“You were the last friendly face she saw,” Jeremy said wistfully. He studied the beer can in his hand for a moment, then looked again at her. “Are you sure you don’t want some of this?”
“I’m okay,” she said.
He shrugged, apparently shrugging off his melancholy as well. “You know what she’d want? Do you girls know what she’d want? She’d want us all to have a good time. She wouldn’t want us sitting around feeling sorry for ourselves. She’d say, ‘Go on and live a little.’ ”
He detached himself from the corner and wobbled off into the party.
“That’s totally not what she’d want,” Becca said, rolling her eyes. “He didn’t know her very well.”
“How long did they go out?” Meredith asked.
“Since last spring. He’s such a dick. She was about to break up with him. They were about half broken up already. It’s not like he needs an excuse to get drunk. He just likes to add some drama to it. He’s very tortured.”
“I can see that,” Meredith said. Across the room Jeremy was talking to Missy Carmody, a seventh-grader, a well-known desperate wannabe. Missy took the beer can from Jeremy and smelled the opening before taking a swallow. The outlook was bleak for Missy Carmody.
Meredith turned to Becca. “What would she want?”
“What?”
“You said it wasn’t what Lisa would want. What do you think she’d want?”
“Oh, she’d want some moping,” Becca said. She was quiet for a minute. Then she said, “I don’t mean that in a bad way. I think most people would want some moping. Wouldn’t you?”
“Sure,” Meredith said. She imagined herself gone. Really gone. Body and spirit. Her desk vacant, her bed empty. How long would the moping last? Who would mourn her most?
“There was this thing we used to do,” Becca said. “Lisa and me. We’d take her dogs out really late, like after midnight. We’d walk around her neighborhood and everywhere there were lights on we’d try to guess what the people were doing inside. Sometimes it was obvious because you could see the TV, and once we saw shadows of people making out. But usually you couldn’t see anything, just the light behind the curtains, and so we’d make up stories. Lisa was really good at it. Her stories were crazy.”
“That sounds fun,” Meredith said.
“It was,” Becca said, and for the first time Meredith thought, She was her friend, her best friend. She was . . .
“It was fun,” Becca said. “But it was also kind of sad sometimes. You know? ’Cause it . . . ” She trailed off, her eyes moving to the basement stairs. “Loser alert,” she said, smirking. “Who invited them?”
It was a group of five or six nerdy eighth-grade boys, including Steven Overbeck, who despite what Meredith thought were good looks were not good enough looks to overcome his nerdy status. At the end of the day even the handsomest nerd ranked lower than a boy who was ugly but cool. At the end of the day, for the guys, physical appearance had almost nothing to do with popularity.
“I’m surprised they stay up this late,” Becca said.