by Susan Perabo
“You want to tell me what to do?”
“No,” she said. “Not particularly.”
“Sure you do,” he said. “Go ahead. Go on and tell me. You think you know what I should do? You think I can’t catch pop flies? Think I should hang it up? Think I should apply to college and just forget about baseball? Or maybe I could be the trainer, or the equipment guy. Maybe I could put all the batting helmets into the dugout cubbies.”
“I never said any of that.”
“What is it with you? Suddenly Lisa Bellow is like your BFF just because you were almost kidnapped with her? Suddenly you’re tight with her friends and chilling at her house and drinking beer with her lax bro.”
“I didn’t drink beer with her lax bro.”
He shrugged, as if to say that was not how he had heard it.
“You don’t know anything about it,” she said. She wanted to say, “You know who was drunk that night? Mom.” She wanted to say, “The lax bro is a total asshole who didn’t deserve Lisa.” She wanted to say, “I am drowning, I am drowning, I am drowning in a bathtub.”
Instead, she said, “Why don’t you go back outside and miss some more pop flies?”
He looked at her book. “Hey, guess what? George kills Lenny in Of Mice and Men. The Great Gatsby gets shot in his pool. Hamlet dies. Romeo and Juliet die. Christopher’s father killed the dog. The dude at the end of 1984 gets eaten by rats. There’s your reading for the next two years, spoiled.”
“That’s not spoiled,” she said. “Everybody dies. That’s not a spoiler.”
•
“My mother screwed up her life a thousand ways from Sunday,” Lisa said. “And she just keeps screwing it up a thousand ways more. She has this boyfriend, oh my god, he’s so lame. She really knows how to pick ’em.”
“My mother thinks she knows everything,” Meredith said.
“If she knows everything, why are we still sitting in this apartment? If she’s so smart?”
“She just thinks she’s smart,” Meredith said. “She actually knows literally nothing about anything.”
“Mothers think they know things because guess what—they were our age once, too! My mother’s always saying that to me. When she was my age my mother didn’t even have a cell phone. Her internet only worked when it was plugged into the phone. A landline. But because she was once fourteen years old she thinks she knows everything about being fourteen years old.”
“You know who else was fourteen years old once?” Meredith said. “Queen Elizabeth. And Jesus’ mother. And Laura Ingalls Wilder.”
Lisa laughed. “Who the hell is Laura Ingalls Wilder? Did you make that up?”
“No, I didn’t make it up. She wrote all those Little House on the Prairie books.”
“Oh, yeah—wait—that was a TV show, right?”
“Yeah,” Meredith said. “The TV show was based on the books.”
“I used to watch that when I was home sick from school. Oh my god, my mother loved that show.”
“Laura and Mary and Pa and everything,” Meredith said. “And something terrible always happened to somebody. There was always some fire or somebody was trampled by a horse or—”
“Who was the blind one? Mary? Oh my god, my mom loved Mary. She said if Mary could become a teacher then anything was possible. She talked about her like she was a real person.”
“She was a real person,” Meredith said.
“Right, okay, but whatever, you know what I mean. Like she was a real real person. She used to always say . . . ” Lisa trailed off and looked past Meredith, looked right through the shower wall into her own living room, Meredith thought, the way she’d been able not so long ago to sit at the kitchen table and look through the fireplace and see her mother sitting in the living room on the other side.
“They think they’re so smart,” Meredith said. “Mothers. They think they can just . . . what’s wrong?”
A thin line of blood was running from Lisa’s left nostril. It dribbled over her lip and down her chin and onto her blouse. Meredith grabbed the roll of toilet paper, tore off a wad and passed it to Lisa. Lisa tilted her head back against the tile and held the toilet paper to her face.
“What’s wrong?” Meredith asked.
“Don’t know,” Lisa said. She shifted to change her position and kicked Meredith hard in the ball of the ankle, at the point where her legs crossed. “Can you move over a little more?”
“There’s no place to move,” Meredith said. She started to get up. “You want—”
“No!” Lisa said. “Don’t get out. Just, can you move like a tiny bit over that way? There. Okay. Just right there. That’s good.”
Lisa pressed the bloody wad of toilet paper against her nose. The toilet paper was the super-cheap kind, so thin you could literally see through it. It was already falling apart in Lisa’s hand, pieces of it sticking to her upper lip.
“I think it’s slowing down,” she said.
It didn’t look like it was slowing down.
“I think it’s almost stopped.”
Meredith was now sitting on her own feet. After about five minutes she couldn’t even feel them anymore.
16
Claire’s father called to say that he and Nancy wanted to come for Thanksgiving. He promised they wouldn’t be in the way. They didn’t require anything. They didn’t even care if they were fed. They would fly in and stay at a nearby hotel (they always did), just for a couple days, but they’d been worried sick about everyone. They were trying not to intrude, but they wanted to see Meredith. They just wanted to put their eyes on her, her father said. Claire could understand that, couldn’t she?
Yes, she could understand that.
An impossible amount of time had passed. Lisa Bellow was still missing. Meredith Oliver, also among the missing, though her body still occupied the bed down the hall. Leads in both disappearances had gone cold with the weather. Meredith had replaced her gladiator sandals with some equally awful boots that all those girls, Lisa’s friends, wore, and every day Meredith walked out into the cold and Claire watched from the window until her daughter’s body was out of sight.
She saw Colleen Bellow on television, on a national talk show. She wore a thin blouse and the hollow of her throat was a cavern, her shoulders knobs.
“Somebody has to know something,” Colleen said. She must have said it ten times, facing the host, facing the camera, facing the studio audience. She said it like a plea, a prayer.
Yes, Claire thought. Colleen Bellow was right. Somebody knew something. Somebody had always known something. But clearly, six weeks in, that fact hadn’t made any difference. Among those who knew something, choices had been made. Perhaps even promises. Secrets were deepening, taking root. Lives moved forward, days became nights became days, for anyone who knew, for one man, at least, and maybe for a tight web of people around him—a friend, a wife, a mother, a brother. Life continued for all of them, and every day the secret became more stitched in, inextricable—not comfortable, perhaps, but an increasingly acceptable level of discomfort. They did their jobs. They shopped for groceries. They went to the movies. It was life, again, still. So why tell now? Why risk everything? Why, in fact, risk anything? Maybe someone who knew had even watched Colleen Bellow on television, listened to her pleas, thought these things. It was not like telling could help. It was not like telling could bring the girl back. It was not like telling could change what, however regrettably, had happened to her.
Claire had not seen Colleen Bellow in person since that afternoon at her house. Meredith had been over there after school several times since, but Claire always asked Evan to fetch her. Evan excelled at awkward situations—he’d inherited this from his father, clearly, the ability to effortlessly put people at ease, set a comfortable tone. Good old whistling Evan, with his winning smile; one day he would make some woman the envy of her friends, make her miserable by being so perfect. Plus, the added bonus, the talent that set him a cut above even his father: Evan was good
at rescuing Meredith.
Except. Except. Things had been oddly cool between her children for the last couple weeks. The deeper Evan folded himself back into baseball, the deeper Meredith folded herself . . . where? Somewhere Claire could not see. It was the new friends, yes, and it was Colleen Bellow, but there was somewhere else, too, somewhere else she was going in all that silence. Twice a week Meredith went to see Dr. Moon and came out looking tired and annoyed—though, to be fair, these days Meredith looked tired and annoyed no matter where she was. When Claire requested an update, Dr. Moon said, “She doesn’t say a lot. But sometimes what she doesn’t say is as important as what she does say,” which sounded to Claire like a load of bullshit. She tried to imagine getting away with that degree of bullshit in her own treatment. How easy to be a therapist, the evidence of your failures always obscured! No rotting teeth, no abscess, no—
“Let’s find a new doctor, then,” Mark said. “There have to be good therapists in the world. They can’t all be terrible.”
“Fine,” she said. “Ask around. Be my guest.”
She knew he’d do nothing. Mark considered himself inept at such things, and so he was inept at such things. Give the man a shopping list and he’d make all your dreams come true. Ask him to find a new psychiatrist for your daughter and he’d dance around the edges of the job for a week before declaring himself unable to complete the task. It would fall to her. So why even waste the effort of pretending?
But the thought of finding a new therapist, all by herself, was exhausting. She needed to be patient, she reminded herself. It had only been six weeks. There was no magic wand, no miracle cure. Not to mention, she wouldn’t expect Dr. Moon to know how to fill a tooth, so wasn’t it gross arrogance to presume that she, only the mother, knew better than he how to counsel a trauma victim? She’d turned it over in her head a thousand times, and always wound up back at the same place: be patient. Let people do their jobs.
“I’m buying extra wine,” Mark said. Yes, there he was at his kitchen table with his beloved list and his special list-making pen, his weapons of choice. “I’m buying wine for twelve.”
She could not imagine drinking any wine. She hadn’t had a drink since Halloween. Every day she did not drink made her a little less drunk in the minivan, a little less pathetic at the Deli Barn, a little less inappropriate standing at the foot of that stranger’s porch with her broken phone and Logan Boone crawling through the grass looking for the lost battery. When Mark had asked her about it the next morning she had said, “It was fine. I was fine. Just tired.” He had nodded sympathetically, her faithful co-conspirator.
“It won’t be for long,” Mark said.
“What won’t?”
“They’re just coming for the day, right?”
“A flyby,” she said. “On their way to Nancy’s kids for the weekend. They don’t want to intrude. I’m sure it was my father who insisted upon that. ‘One day only. We shouldn’t intrude. We don’t want to add to their burden.’ You know what he’s like.”
“Your mom was worse,” Mark said.
“They were born that way,” she said. “Both of them. Maybe that was what they had in common. A desire to not intrude. Maybe if you find someone who shares that desire then you never have to worry about intrusion again.”
“Maybe. Though I guess it kind of depends on what your definition of intrusion is. If intrusion is just showing up . . . ”
“Get like six bags of stuffing mix,” she said, peering over his shoulder at the list. “Evan can eat four by himself.”
“Got it,” he said. He wrote “x6” after “stuffing.”
She heard a thud on the roof, like a very heavy bird falling from a tree.
“What was that?” she asked.
“He’s out there playing,” Mark said. “Our stuffing man.”
“What? On the roof?”
Another thud. She was already at the back door, her hand on the knob.
“Stop. Jesus, of course he’s not on the roof. Jesus, Claire. He’s throwing a ball onto the roof and letting it roll off. That’s all.”
Thud.
“He’s throwing a ball onto the roof?”
“He’s practicing. He throws it up there with some spin on it so he doesn’t—”
“I don’t care,” she said. “I really don’t care about the details. I could not care less about—”
Thud. A new addition to the baseball symphony.
“You were right about the pop-ups,” Mark said. “They’re killing him. They’re impossible. And I don’t think it’s getting any better. He’s trying all sorts of drills, making them up as he goes. I don’t know . . . maybe it’s a little better. But only a little.”
“Think about the number of things he could do,” she said. “Sports, I mean. I’m not trying to be a bitch about this, okay? I know everybody thinks I’m the world’s biggest killjoy, but good god. He could swim or run or play soccer, even. Don’t you think he could play soccer?”
Thud.
“Do you remember him playing soccer? Do you remember how terrible he was?”
“He was nine years old,” she said. “He was—”
“Exactly,” he said. “And now he’s seventeen. Seventeen. He’s a baseball player, Claire. He’s been a baseball player for ten years. He can’t just learn to be a soccer player now. That’s not how it works. It’s not what he does. It’s not who he is.”
“Baseball is not who he is,” she said. “He’s lots of things. He’s smart. He’s funny. He could do a thousand different things really well if he put his mind to it. It’s not like all his windows of opportunity have closed. He might be great at something else and not even know it yet.”
Thud.
“But this is who he is right now,” Mark said. “I mean, you can take it or leave it. But I don’t think there’s anything you can do about it.”
Evan came into the kitchen and laid his mitt on the counter. His cheeks and hands were pink. The lenses of his glasses were thick with steam and he took them off and wiped them with his shirt.
“How’s it going?” Mark said.
“Good,” he said. “Better. Better every day.” He smiled at his mother, his face naked, open, vulnerable. Oh, she had been astonished, completely staggered, holding him in her arms for the first time. She had not been herself at all, not the Claire she’d known her whole life, pressing him against her chest, holding him for dear life, that newborn boy. She did not even recognize herself as a mother. In a two-year period her own mother had died and she had nearly left her husband and now here was this impossible thing, this life, all packed into this teeny-tiny body no bigger than a throw pillow. And so she had held him and held him and held him, through babyhood and toddlerhood and beyond, long after it was necessary, carried him to bed, carried him through supermarkets and malls and airports, carried him from the car to the house lest his toddler feet falter, and then one day—maybe he was six? maybe seven?—she had put her little boy down and never picked him up again. If only she had known that day, that time, that it was the last time. But by then she had another little life she carried around (though not in the same way, if she was being honest, never with exactly the same fervor), and one day when that life, her little girl, was six or seven she put her down and never picked her up again either. Would it be better to know that moment was that moment? Or was it better not knowing? Better to know, as she lowered her boy onto his SpongeBob SquarePants sheets, that she would never lift him again? Better to know, when she and her mother talked idly about the coffee they always stopped for at that diner on I-35, that it was the last conversation they would ever have?
•
Her father and Nancy flew in late the night before Thanksgiving and came over early in the day on Thursday. Meredith was still in bed and Evan was out for a run when Claire answered the door. They had skipped their normal June trip west—the summer had been consumed by Evan’s surgeries—so she had not seen her father since the Christmas before, and watching h
im and Nancy slip off their winter coats in the front hall she felt it had been years, that she had lived a whole life since seeing them last, and she felt some emotion in her break ranks for a moment, as if this father might be a father to whom she could say, “Daddy, oh my god, you can’t believe what I’ve been through . . . ” But, instead, there were the typical exchanges and predictable expressions of support, her father with his one-armed hug for all and then Nancy, the stupendously loving Nancy, who surely would have hugged everyone with eight arms if only she had been born an octopus.
There was endless fussing over Evan when he returned from his run. How wonderful he looked! How handsome! The glasses were so becoming! Had he grown another six inches since they’d last seen him? Did the girls ever stop calling? He fielded the questions with ease. He seemed happy to discuss anything and everything with his grandfather and Nancy. His grandparents. They were indeed the children’s grandparents and to pretend otherwise, Claire knew, was unfair to everyone involved. Nancy and her father were already married by the time Evan was born. The children called them Grandma and Grandpa, and she did not move to correct them, because there was no correction that made sense.
The hardest part was that her children, when they were young, did not understand that Nancy was not her mother, that there had been another woman, a mother, who had raised her into adulthood but died before she could meet them. The number of times she had this conversation with both children, looking at the photo album: “Who’s that?” “That’s my mother.” “I thought Grandma was your mother.” And then she would have to tell them, yet again, break the awful news of her mother’s death to her children for the fiftieth time. They still forgot occasionally, even as teenagers, and sometimes asked Nancy questions about their mother as a child, and Nancy would cheerfully say, “You’ll have to ask your grandfather,” and Claire would mentally add, “because your mother was raised by another woman who died before you were born, and who was not afforded the immense pleasure of knowing you, her beautiful grandchildren, whom she would have utterly cherished.”