by Susan Perabo
Claire got her feet under her. She stood slowly, her knees shaking, her daughter draped across her arms. She took one step. She took another.
19
This is me. This is my real life.
The toilet flushed but she did not break eye contact with her reflection.
This is me. This is really me.
It was the Friday before Christmas break and Meredith did not want to go to school. It wasn’t even a real school day. They’d watch movies in half their classes, and there was some assembly where the sixth-graders were putting on a holiday play and of course it was going to be awful. She would have to decide who to sit with and that part would be awful, too. Mostly now at school she wanted to sit alone—in classes and in the library and especially at lunch. It was easier that way, and not nearly as lonely or lame as it sounded. She appreciated the quiet, the way the world spun while she stood off to the side. She watched without caring, or caring only in fragments, a moment here or there.
Like yesterday, she had wound up by accident walking into the locker room at the same time as Kristy, and so wound up changing beside her, and so wound up basically inadvertently being her changing shield. And that had been fine, if a little weird, because Kristy kept looking at her sideways like she didn’t quite trust her to hold up her end of the bargain. But then before Kristy went out into the gym, and Meredith was still tying her sneakers, Kristy said, “I hate volleyball,” and Meredith said, “Me, too.” And so there was that.
She slipped the cracked phone into her purse without looking at it, brushed her hair, put on her watch. Her father had given her the watch last week, claimed he’d seen it in a shop window, though she doubted this was true. It seemed like something he must’ve worked hard to find. Instead of whole numbers, the watch had equations around the dial, like instead of 3 it had 0.3*10. “That’s right, Meredith,” Evan had said earnestly, “this watch once belonged to Albert Einstein.” She had shot him a look to shut him up, because she understood why her father had given her the watch, understood it was the grown-up version of comic books and Tater Tots, that there was practical value in this gift, that it could endure.
Evan knocked on her door and stuck his head in.
“Y’okay?”
She turned from the mirror. “Why?”
“Dunno. You look a little sketchy.”
“It’s dumb to even have school today,” she said, sitting down on her bed. “It’s all bullshit.”
“Like most days,” he said.
Was he a little less paunchy? Perhaps. He’d been in a hole and then he’d crawled out. It happened. You couldn’t say why, but it happened. Last night she’d seen his catcher’s mitt in the pile on the dining-room table, things they’d be taking with them on their trip. She had picked up the glove and smelled it, deeply, the way you’d smell a towel out of the laundry. It was the smell of Evan, not just the leather but the sweat and maybe something else, too. In a year he would be away at college, somewhere; the thought of that loss, coming so soon after everything else, was almost too much for her to bear, and she pushed it away.
“Hey, Evan,” she said.
“What?”
“Nothing,” she said.
He leaned against her door frame, took off his glasses and wiped them with the bottom of his oxford shirt. His face, without his glasses, was bare and unfamiliar, his left eye a stranger to her.
“So what do you want for Christmas?” he asked, looking up.
“I don’t know,” she said. “Nothing.”
“Good. ’Cause I didn’t get you anything.”
“Get me a book,” she said. “Get me one you haven’t spoiled.”
“Ha,” he said. Then after a moment he said, “Thirteen sucks. For Christmas I’ll get you fourteen.”
“My birthday’s not till March.”
“I’m aware. You can have it early. You just can’t use it.”
“Thirteen didn’t suck for you,” she said. “Thirteen’s when you got good at baseball. Thirteen’s when you changed.”
“Thirteen’s when you changed, too,” he said. “You know when else I changed?”
“When?”
“Fourteen.” He put his glasses back on. “You know when else?”
“I get it,” she said.
He winked. He wasn’t blind when he winked his right eye, she reminded herself. His left eye had abilities. Movement. Shapes. Light.
•
A few minutes after Evan left for school her mother appeared at her bedroom doorway.
“You feel sick?”
“Sort of,” she said.
“It’s okay if you’re late. I can write a note for you.”
Meredith was sitting on the floor in the middle of her battling animals. Her mother came into the room and sat on the edge of her bed. The tolerant cat stood up and turned a half turn and lay down again.
“You missed goal of the day,” her mother said.
“Bummer.”
Her mother smiled. “Evan says you don’t want to go to school.”
“I don’t know if I ever want to go to school,” Meredith said.
“You’ll have a long break,” her mother said. “Almost two weeks. You might feel differently after. And if you don’t, we can figure something out.”
“Like what? Be an eighth-grade dropout?”
“Maybe you could go to a different school.”
“You’d let me do that?”
“Meredith,” her mother said. “We’ll do whatever we need to do.”
They had found her a new therapist, someone who was less useless than Dr. Moon. They took her and picked her up from school every day now, even when she said she wanted to walk. On an unseasonably warm day last week, her mother had come to pick her up but then left the Audi in the school parking lot and walked home with her—past the Deli Barn, down Chestnut Street, then left on Duncan, then the cut across the edge of the park, then the right on Glenside, up the lawn to their house. Was that crazy? It was a little crazy, yes. But her mother was insistent. Resolved.
Meredith picked up the battling tiger with the ax. His tail had been broken off for as long as she could remember—Evan had always claimed it was she who’d done it, chewed it off as a toddler, but she’d always suspected he was the guilty party. For one, there were no teeth marks.
“I used to talk to her,” she said to her mother. “I mean, I used to pretend to talk to her. Do you think that’s weird?”
She could tell her mother was surprised by this information, or at least by the sharing of this information, but she recovered quickly. “I don’t think so,” she said. “I think you do what you have to do.”
Meredith twisted the ax in the tiger’s paw. After a moment, her mother said, “Do you still do that? Talk to her?”
“Not really,” Meredith said. “We . . . I don’t know. We just . . . ” She shook her head and lay the tiger gently on the floor. “Not really.”
Sometimes she imagined herself back into the bathroom in the apartment. Sometimes she stood at the sink and looked into the mirror. Sometimes she could see Lisa in the reflection, stretched out in the tub, unobstructed. Sometimes Lisa was sleeping, her breaths deep and even. But sometimes Lisa was looking at her, and their eyes locked in the mirror, but Meredith did not get in the tub, and Lisa did not ask her to.
“It must be strange,” her mother said. “I don’t mean weird . . . just it must be strange, talking to someone you didn’t really know that well.”
“We were friends in fourth grade,” Meredith said.
“Were you? I didn’t realize that.”
“For a little while,” she said. She did not say, “for an afternoon.” “I don’t think she was really all that different than she was then. She was just, you know . . . she was just what she had to be. She was just what she was, what the world made her, like everybody.”
“She had a mother who loved her. And friends who loved her.”
“Yeah,” Meredith said.
Here
was something she knew. She knew that Lisa’s words—the things Lisa had told her at the apartment—weren’t really Lisa’s words. She knew those were words she had given to Lisa, guesses, maybe good guesses, but guesses. She knew that Lisa’s only words to her, maybe since that day in the cafeteria when Lisa had told her she had a big butt, were the ones Lisa had said on the floor in the Deli Barn. She had been holding onto those words, selfishly, desperately, for months. They were probably the words that had made all the other words happen.
“I need to go to the Bellows’,” she said, looking up at her mother. “I need to talk to Mrs. Bellow. I need to tell her something.”
“What is it?”
“It’s something,” Meredith said. She considered before going forward. “It’s something private.”
She was fairly certain this would not fly with her mother, not after everything that had happened. She had not been back to the Bellows’ house or seen Mrs. Bellow since her mother had come for her that morning, although she knew that Mrs. Bellow sometimes called, and that her mother sometimes talked with her.
“Are you sure?” her mother said.
“Sure that it’s private or sure that I need to tell her?”
“Both, I guess.”
“I’m sure.”
“Then it sounds like you should do it. I could take you there after school.”
“Do I have to go to school?”
“Yeah,” her mother said. “I think so.”
•
Meredith walked through the falling snow up to the Bellows’ front door. It was one of those light, powdery snows that melted almost as soon as it landed, the kind of snow that parents loved and kids hated. The stone path to the Bellows’ door was dusted white. Meredith rang the doorbell and a moment later a man answered. Meredith had never seen him before, but she assumed this was Mrs. Bellow’s boyfriend, the one Lisa had called lame. He was balding and wore a sweater with a Christmas tree on it. It was a lame sweater to be sure.
“Is Mrs. Bellow here?” she asked.
“She is,” he said. “Just a sec.”
He left her standing on the porch, which was fine with her. After a moment a little girl, maybe eight years old, ran past the storm door and stopped when she saw a person on the other side. The girl had a long ponytail and wore a black T-shirt that said “Oh No You Didn’t!” that Meredith was 99 percent sure had once belonged to Lisa. The girl looked left and right and then, apparently confident she would not be seen, did a little hula dance, pushing out boobs she did not have, and then laughed and ran off. A moment later Mrs. Bellow came to the door and opened it.
“Meredith, come in! I can’t believe he left you in the cold.”
“It’s fine,” she said. “I’m just here for a minute.”
She did not want to go into the house. She knew that for sure. She saw Mrs. Bellow realize this, but Mrs. Bellow didn’t have any shoes on so she slid on the man’s brown loafers that were beside the door and stepped out onto the porch. She was coatless and crossed her arms against the chill.
“How are you?” she asked.
“I’m fine,” Meredith said.
“Haven’t seen you in a while,” Mrs. Bellow said. “I’ve been—”
“I’ve been really busy,” Meredith said. “And we’re getting ready to go away for Christmas tomorrow, to my grandparents’.”
“Oh, that sounds nice. Where are they?”
“Kansas City,” Meredith said. She felt her nerves crumbling. It had been a mistake, coming here. It was not too late to back out, to say Merry Christmas, to keep her treasure to herself.
“That’s a long trip,” Mrs. Bellow said. “You guys don’t drive?”
“We do,” Meredith said. “Always. We always drive.”
“That must take—”
“I have to tell you something,” Meredith said. The words tumbled out before she could stop them. “I mean, I wanted to tell you something. I wanted to come today so I could tell you something.”
“I’m sorry about that night,” Mrs. Bellow said. “I tried to call afterward but—”
“It’s not about that,” Meredith said. “It’s about Lisa.”
Mrs. Bellow pressed her lips together. It was probably the wrong thing to say. “It’s about Lisa.” How could anything good ever follow those words again? The next time Mrs. Bellow heard those words would probably be from a policeman, and his face would be stone and his hand would be on her arm.
“It’s about that day,” she said. “The day it happened. I wanted to tell you something because I didn’t tell you before. I didn’t tell anybody. It’s just a little thing but I kept it to myself because . . . I don’t know why. I just—”
“What is it?” Mrs. Bellow asked.
The man appeared behind her at the door, then moved away.
“At first,” Meredith said. “When it first happened, Lisa was really scared. She was crying. I wasn’t scared at all. I mean, I guess I was, but I was in shock or whatever, so I didn’t actually feel scared. I was just kind of in a daze or something.”
She looked up. Mrs. Bellow was just staring at her, waiting for her to go on.
“But then I got scared. I got really scared because I thought he was going to shoot me. I was sure of it, actually. But then Lisa stopped being scared.”
“Why?” Mrs. Bellow asked.
“I don’t know,” Meredith said. “But I could tell she wasn’t scared anymore. I was looking right at her. She was like six inches from me. She stopped crying and she looked just like herself, just like always. We were just lying there and I was so scared and she wasn’t, not anymore. And then she said something. She told me it was going to be okay. She said, ‘It’s okay Meredith. It’s going to be okay.’ That was what she said to me. She almost smiled, even. And then right after that was when . . . was when she had to leave.”
“That was the last thing?” Mrs. Bellow said.
“Yeah,” Meredith said. “That was the last thing.”
A gust of wind sent snowflakes swirling against the storm door. The door was warm from the heat of the house, and the flakes vanished on contact.
“I wanted you to know she said that,” Meredith said. “I think about it a lot, but I didn’t ever tell anybody. I didn’t think it would make any difference. But I wanted to tell you now. Because I think she would want me to tell you.” She paused. The neighborhood was silent in the snow. “Actually, I know she would want me to tell you,” she added quickly.
“Yeah,” Mrs. Bellow said. Her voice was thin as a breath. “Why do you think . . . why do you think she said that?”
“I don’t know,” Meredith said. “I really don’t.” She could see Lisa clearly, standing at the counter, glancing up, meeting her eyes through the glass door of the Deli Barn. “I think maybe she was just being nice,” she said.
“Yeah,” Mrs. Bellow said. “Maybe . . . maybe so.”
“I hope you have a good Christmas,” Meredith said. “I mean . . . ”
“Thank you,” Mrs. Bellow said quickly. “And same to you.”
Meredith turned and walked across the Bellows’ front yard toward the minivan. Through the drifting snow she could see her mother, who looked for all the world to be sound asleep in the driver’s seat. Her eyes were closed, her head tilted back, her chin pointed forward. She looked, Meredith thought, almost absurdly relaxed, like she was on a beach instead of in a minivan. It was weird to be so comfortable—wasn’t it?—in a van, of all things, a van, a big blue metal box with wheels, a suburban cliché held together with screws and rods and whatever else held cars together. There was nothing at all special about their minivan. There were parking lots full of them, exactly identical to theirs. This wasn’t the kind of vehicle you remembered when you got old. It was just a thing that took you places with your family. It was just a way to get where you were going.
But maybe . . . maybe her mother loved the van as much as she did. Maybe there was no place else she would rather be. Maybe that was why she ha
d made the decision that they would drive west for Christmas. And right now, maybe she was imagining what it would be like when they headed out first thing tomorrow morning, the smell of coffee, the glare off the windshield, the click of the blinker, the hum of the tires, the entrance ramp, the van full, the day, the night, the road, the miles, the parents, the children, the journey.
Just as she reached for the door handle her mother opened her eyes and turned to her, startled. The look on her face was something like surprise. It was almost as if her mother was not expecting her. Meredith opened the door and slid into the passenger’s seat.
“Okay,” she said.
“Okay what?” her mother said.
“I’m ready,” Meredith said.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thanks to Brady Chilson for recognizing the poignancy of asymptotes and patiently explaining them to me. Thanks to Dr. Donald Oliver for dental expertise. Thanks to Officer Tim Lively for help on police procedure. Thanks to Ellie Park for fashion insights. And huge, profound thanks to Kirk Robinson for impeccably detailed, plot-altering information about the effects of catastrophic eye injuries. Thanks also to friends too numerous to name—but you know who you are—who saved me with a crucial detail here and there.
Thanks to my BFF&N Mary Beth Baken for great advice and confidence early in the game, and to Marion Winik for great advice and confidence late in the game.
Thanks to Dickinson College for continued support, especially for the unexpected riches of Norwich. Thanks to my Dickinson colleagues and students, especially the students who shared the adventure of Norwich with us. Thanks to my friends in Norwich and Carlisle who supported me—often in ways they didn’t even realize—while I wrote this novel.
Thanks to my editor, Marysue Rucci, who is equal parts brilliant and patient. It has been my great honor and pleasure to collaborate with her for the last twenty years. Thanks to Zack Knoll for answering my emails, especially the weird, frantic ones, and to all the people at Simon & Schuster who do their jobs so well and have always been such a joy to work with. Thanks to the remarkable Molly Friedrich for breaking her own rules and taking a chance on me, and to everyone at the Friedrich Agency for enthusiastically leaping on board when I needed them most.