The Fall of Lisa Bellow

by Susan Perabo

  “My mom said we have to come back,” Becca said, although Meredith knew Becca’s mother had said nothing of the sort. They hadn’t even seen her mother, in fact. “She’s expecting us. My sister, you know. The baby is—”

  “I’ll stay,” Meredith said suddenly. She wasn’t even sure why she’d said it. But she didn’t want to leave Mrs. Bellow alone.

  Becca looked at her.

  “It’s fine,” Meredith said. “I’ll stay and you go. I’ll just . . . I’ll come back in the morning.”

  “She’ll come back in the morning, Bec,” Mrs. Bellow said. “That sounds okay, I think. Don’t you think?”

  “Okay,” Becca said. “If you’re sure. But all your stuff’s—”

  “It’s fine,” Mrs. Bellow said. “She can borrow something to wear. And I always have extra toothbrushes. I buy them at CVS when they go on sale.”

  “That’s smart,” Meredith said, smiling at Mrs. Bellow.

  “Well, you never know, right?” Mrs. Bellow said. “You never know what’s going to happen.”

  Becca looked at Meredith.

  “It’s fine,” Meredith said. “It’s all good.”

  What she thought was: Go away, go away, go away.

  •

  She changed into Lisa’s pajamas—a sleeveless purple top and black bottoms that tied at the waist—and sat down on the edge of Lisa’s bed. Mrs. Bellow came in with a glass of water.

  “Do you like water in the middle of the night?” she asked. “Sometimes Lisa likes water in the middle of the night and then she’s always so annoyed that she has to go down to the kitchen and find a cup. So I try to remember to bring her one.”

  “Sure,” Meredith said, setting the cup on the nightstand, next to a little bobble-head dog.

  “It’s nice having you here,” Mrs. Bellow said, sitting down beside her on the bed. “I know how it seems.” She looked away, embarrassed. “How I seem. It’s just nice to have company . . . like, your age company, I mean.”

  “Sure,” Meredith said. “I understand.”

  “Sometimes I talk to her,” Mrs. Bellow said. “I tell her things. I know I’m talking to myself but I do it anyway. Like I’ll be watching TV and I’ll say, ‘Can you believe that?’ Or I’ll be looking in the fridge and I’ll say, ‘Do I want orange juice or cranberry juice?’ Little things. Dumb things. Those are the things you miss. The dumb things. The things you thought didn’t mean anything.”

  For a moment Meredith thought Mrs. Bellow was going to cry, and she prayed this would not happen. Mrs. Bellow seemed to recognize the precipice as well. She took a deep breath and steadied herself, then patted Meredith on the hand and stood up.

  “Anyway,” she said. “It’s nice to have someone to talk to who’s really here.”

  “I know,” Meredith said. “I mean—” I mean I know, she thought. She slipped her feet under the covers. She thought that the last time someone had lain under these covers was the night before the Deli Barn, when Lisa had lain down and her mother had come with a glass of water and Lisa had gone to sleep, thinking . . . thinking what? Not thinking that tomorrow everything would change, forever. Maybe thinking she was going to break up with her lax bro. Maybe thinking that she was going to take his picture from the door inside her locker. Maybe thinking that she would do it when that loser Meredith Oliver wasn’t standing there gawking.

  “Call me if you need anything,” Mrs. Bellow said. “Okay? I’m right next door.”

  “Okay,” Meredith said. Mrs. Bellow shut off the light, but there was a streetlight outside so Meredith could still see the room. She could see the photo collage on Lisa’s dresser, which was only a few feet from the bed. Lisa and Becca at Six Flags. Lisa and her mother sitting on a stone wall with a waterfall behind them. Lisa and Becca and Abby and Amanda somewhere—maybe a concert? Lisa at five or six, wearing a Villanova cheerleading outfit and waving blue and white pom-poms over her head. Then the outlier, the sore thumb—and yet among them, connected by a common frame: the picture of her from last year’s yearbook. God, she hated that picture. She looked terrible, her mouth somewhere in between a—

  The yearbook. The yearbook.

  She sat up in the bed and squinted across the room at Lisa’s bookshelf. Some of the books she could recognize from their spines, even if she couldn’t make out the words: a few books they’d read in English in seventh grade, two Harry Potters, Twilight, a popular horse series they’d all devoured in elementary school, with the telltale fancy cursive titles with swishy horse tails. None of these was what she was looking for. But there, on the end of the bottom shelf, was a tall red book that from afar looked for all the world like—

  I took the yearbook. It’s on my bookshelf and she’s never even noticed it.

  Meredith got out of bed and walked across the room to the bookshelf, then sat cross-legged on the floor in front of it and carefully slid the tall book from its place. She set it face up on her lap before she looked down.

  GREAT VALLEY ECHO

  2000

  ROCKIN’ THE MILLENNIUM!

  Meredith gently opened the book, turned its pages as if they were thin sheets of glass. She found the section for the senior class. “Jazz Band!” “Girls Volleyball!” “The Music Man!” Then finally the class photos. Abrams through Ashley, Atwood through Bart, Bashor through—and there she was. Colleen Bellow, eighteen years old, smiling brightly into her daughter’s dark bedroom, no earthly idea of what her life would be beyond the moment when she blinked away the photographer’s flash, no notion that fifteen years later a girl named Meredith Oliver would be dressed in her missing daughter’s pajamas and looking back at her.

  There were about a dozen men pictured on the page. They were boys, really, exactly Evan’s age, as stupid and lost as he was. Beck. Birch. Bolton. Was one of them the man that Lisa’s grandfather had pointed to, had said, “That’s your father? Ssssshhhhhhhh.” Which one was it? Did Gregory Bond have Lisa’s eyes? Did Brian Bosley have her smile?

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

  The yearbook was here on the bookshelf, precisely where Lisa had said it would be, exactly where Lisa told her it was. Lisa had told her this. There was no other way she could have known it. And if that were true, it meant the apartment and the bathtub and the BITCH tally and the bloody toilet paper and the soft blue blanket, all of it, it was real. And it meant something else, too. It meant Lisa was still alive.

  But something was nagging at her, tugging on the leg of Lisa’s black pajama bottoms. Maybe she had seen the yearbook before. Maybe that’s why it looked so familiar. Maybe she had seen it here some other day, noticed it when she was in Lisa’s room that first afternoon with Becca and Abby and Amanda, talking about the charity bracelets. Maybe even one of the girls had slid it from its place, said, “What’s this?” and she had spotted the cover from where she was sitting at Lisa’s desk. Maybe one of them had said, “It’s her mom’s old yearbook.” Maybe one of them, one of Lisa’s real friends, had said, “Remember Lisa showed us that last year?”

  Maybe. Or maybe not. Or maybe. Or maybe not.

  She was shaking. She slid the yearbook back into its spot on the shelf. She climbed into Lisa’s bed. Something was wrong with her legs. They were shaking from the inside, like when she was in the car with the man, with the man and Lisa, the Deli Barn a tiny spot behind them. “You suck,” Lisa was saying. She leaned forward until she was practically right behind the driver’s right ear. “Do you hear me?” She was screeching. “You suck. You asshole!” Meredith grabbed for her and knocked the glass of water off the nightstand. Something was wrong with her. Something was crushing her chest; something had fallen on top of her. She was having a heart attack. She was thirteen years old and she was having a heart attack. It happened. Things happened. Things you couldn’t believe. Things that couldn’t be explained. Inconceivable things. They happened.

  “Lisa,” she said. She was pounding on the bathroom door now. The feet
, unmoving. “Lisa, it’s me. Open the door.”

  The overhead light came on and Mrs. Bellow was in the doorway.

  “Meredith?” she said. “Hon, what is it?”

  She couldn’t say anything. Her tongue was a dry lump in her mouth. A dog was whimpering. Annie the dog was outside the front door whimpering in the snow. She had been put outside and then forgotten, and she was cold and standing by the flowerpot with the cigarette butts and she was not dead but had just run off, run off in the night and gotten lost and couldn’t find her way back because all the apartments looked exactly alike and she was just a stupid dog. A stupid freezing dog.

  “Let her in,” she whispered.

  “What?”

  Her face was wet. Was she crying? Had she thrown up? Was she bleeding? Was her nose bleeding? She was putting her hands all over her face trying to find the source of the moisture.

  “Hey, girl. Hey there, girl.” Mrs. Bellow was beside the bed. “Stop,” she said, putting her hand on her shoulder. “I’m here. It’s okay. I’m here.”

  “Would your parents know?”

  “Know what?”

  “If you didn’t come home after school. Would they know it was something bad?”

  “They would know,” she said to Mrs. Bellow. “I think they would know. I think they would know.”

  “Shhhh,” Mrs. Bellow said. She left the room and came back a minute later with something in her hand.

  “Take this,” she said. “Okay? It helps me. It’ll help. It’ll help you sleep.”

  Meredith was sitting up. A small purple pill was in her right hand and a glass of water was in her left hand. She closed her fist around the pill. Her knuckles ached from knocking. She opened her hand and swallowed the pill. Mrs. Bellow fluffed her pillow and tucked her in. Then she lay down beside her, on top of the covers, and took hold of her hand. She rubbed Meredith’s wrist. She was rubbing the watch away. She was smudging the watch drawn by Steven Overbeck and it would not be 2:15 anymore, ever. Soon there would only be a green stain where the bracelet had been.

  “Okay,” Mrs. Bellow said. “You’re all right now. I’ve got you.”

  Sleep or something like it came over her, and for a little while she was happily suspended and it was not 2:15 but it was not any other time either—what time isn’t it?—and her face dried and her parents knew everything and Evan was catching the ball every try and she had leaped up right away, just as the car was driving out of the Deli Barn parking lot, and she had taken a picture of the license plate with her phone and then she had called the police, the car still in her sights.

  “Can you please sit on the middle of your chair so your butt’s not hanging over the side?”

  The car, still in her sights. The license plate. The numbers. She spoke them clearly to the dispatcher.

  “This is the best day of my whole summer.”

  •

  She woke with a jolt and time started and it was 2:15 and she was late for algebra.

  Vertical Asymptote: x=2

  Horizontal Asymptote: y=1

  Meredith sat up in Lisa’s bed. “I have to go,” she said.

  “You can’t go, hon,” Mrs. Bellow said. She was still lying in the bed, over the covers, and she talked as if she were sleeping. “Not now. It’s the middle of the night.”

  “I have to,” Meredith said. She stood up. “I just . . . I just have to go to the bathroom. And I need a pen.”

  She was looking all over Lisa’s desk, pushing aside the frames and opening all the little drawers. Something fell on the floor, then something else. Finally she found a Magic Marker, one of those smelly ones that everyone got in fifth grade. It might work.

  She stumbled out of Lisa’s room and into the hall. She was looking for the bathroom. She had to finish her graph. Where was the bathroom? She just had to get to the bathroom.

  18

  Well, she had made the deal, hadn’t she? Traded the airport trip for geriatric dentistry. It sounded like a joke, but she knew she’d gotten the better end of the bargain, driving the little car twenty minutes out to Hillsboro, the two cases in the trunk with all she would need for her work today. It felt like a clean getaway, like winning the avoidance lottery, not like killing two birds with one stone but more like killing eight birds—dishes, shopping, Evan, Meredith, Mark, her father, and Nancy. She counted them as she sped down the highway. Okay, seven. Seven birds dead for the day, and no great loss among them.

  How far could one woman get, exactly, with a freshly serviced Audi and two satchels full of dental tools? Across the state line? Into another time zone? Into another time? She turned up the radio. She didn’t know the song that was playing and she didn’t care. Mark and Meredith had still been asleep when she’d left, Evan in the garage, pinging. She had left earlier than necessary, slipped out when she realized he was coming to the end of his swings. She could sit in the car with her coffee. She could sit there for hours, happily, in the Hillsboro parking lot, irresponsibly plowing through her tank of gas to keep the car warm, until her father was airborne, Mark at the office, her children . . . where? It was Black Friday. Maybe they would shop, or go to the movies, or eat out with their friends. Maybe they would lie in their beds and think thoughts she could not imagine, devise plans she was not privy to, make decisions they would soon regret.

  They were gone, her children, to wherever children went when they left. Had she gone so far away, when she was thirteen, or fifteen, or seventeen? She supposed she must have, but she could not recall now with any clarity or certainty what it had felt like to be that age. It was as if those years—not what had occurred externally, but what had occurred internally—had just been wiped away; the only person who’d played a part in those years that she still had any regular contact with was her father, and “regular contact” was just a nice way of saying that they were not estranged. Maybe who you were didn’t really start, didn’t really count, until you found the majority of people you were going to spend your life with. Maybe the rest was too easily lost, because there was no one there to keep reminding you of who you used to be.

  But these were only Black Friday, early morning, coffee-in-the-parking-lot-of-Hillsboro-Home thoughts. Ever since the argument in the dining room, she felt as if she’d been cut loose and was floating. It was neither a good nor bad feeling, though if pressed she’d have to say the primary emotion that accompanied it seemed to be relief.

  There were far worse places in the world than Hillsboro Home, a fact Claire often had to remind herself of when she felt especially crushed by the weight of its collective despair. There was the clinic in Honduras where her in-laws extracted children’s teeth that had been rotted black by malnutrition. There were hospitals in war-torn countries where the elderly—yes, someone’s grandmother, yes, someone’s grandfather—slept on a hard floor for days waiting to see a doctor. The patients at the Hillsboro Home (they were supposed to be called residents, but by this point, honestly, they were patients) were well cared for. It was not an inexpensive facility, so either the patient himself or someone in the family had the necessary resources to provide. It was clean and well staffed and there were people in the kitchen with chef hats. There were daily events posted on a board in the front lobby: Humphrey Bogart Movie Night, Poker Tournament, Wii Bowling, Life Collage Workshop. And yet despite all this it was awful. Maybe it was made more awful because apparently this was the very best you could hope for after you got too ill or too feeble for non-assisted living. Clean. Well staffed. Cable TV. Dental care.

  The mobile dentistry practice consisted primarily of routine cleanings. Almost all the residents of Hillsboro Home were wheelchair bound, and many entirely bedridden, and so only for a true emergency would a patient be put through the stress of an ambulance trip to a dentist’s office. Better, in the final months and years, to stave off infection, reduce as much pain as possible, focus on preventive dentistry so that there could be one less thing to worry about as multiple other systems began to break down. Patients
were seen every six months, which meant that often Claire and Mark saw each person just once—by the time the next appointment rolled around, chances were fifty/fifty that the patient was dead. There was heavy turnover at Hillsboro Home. It was, Mark had once commented, like the trenches in Belgium, except that there was no floss in the trenches.

  Ninety-four-year-old Mr. Mitchum had clearly not paid attention to the attrition statistics; Claire recalled seeing him at least twice before, although Mr. Mitchum certainly did not recall her and lay still in his bed staring up at the ceiling, his jaw dangling open like a broken marionette. Often it was utterly silent, this particular dentistry, more like the operating room Claire had once imagined than her regular office ever would be. She knew Mark talked to these people, some of whom did not, could not even, talk back, and some days she made an effort to do so as well. But today she could not bring herself to say these kinds of things: “It’s getting chilly out there!” “What wonderful holiday decorations!” “That’s a very handsome sweater!”

  There was a new woman, Mrs. Ogles, who was chatty and smiley and referred several times to “when I move back in with my daughter.” There were three others, standard cleanings, then a filling at the end of the day. The fillings had to be done in a special exam room at the end of the hallway, a cold place that doubled as medical storage and had shelves lined with gauze and rubber gloves, patient gowns, sheets, towels. Mark hated “the closet,” as he called it, but today Claire preferred it to the patients’ rooms because at least inside the closet there were no reminders that the mouth she was inside belonged to an actual person, no mementos, no photos of happier days, no needlepoint pillows, no proof of life.

  She inserted the novocaine needle into the gum.

  “Where’s Thomas?” the mouth said.

  “I’m the dentist,” Claire said. “I’m going to fill your tooth.”

  “But where’s Thomas?” the mouth said.

  “It will only take a couple minutes. I’ll have you right out.”