“Whoever you are,” he said, “I forgive you.”
They drove through the afternoon and into the evening and then into the nighttime. Meredith was just five; by 8:30 she was asleep. For a while after dinner Mark drove and Claire and Evan tried to name all the state capitals. Then she and Mark switched off and she drove and Mark slept and Evan turned on his Nintendo DS. It was nearly 10:00 and they still had a hundred miles to get to their hotel, though Claire felt she could easily drive all night, watch the hotel disappear behind her, cross one state line, then another. She watched her son in the rearview mirror, his gentle face lit by the faint, flickering light of Mario Kart. Beside her, her husband slept; behind her, her daughter slept. They were in the dark, in their minivan, with their things inside. They were safe, protected by a half-dozen air bags, stability control, traction control, safety locks, side impact beams, and antilock brakes. These were the features they had paid for, the equipment they could rely on. This was what they had worked for. In the van, on the highway, on the edge of Ohio, there was nothing that could hurt them. If only she could keep driving, keep them all here together in the dark van, nothing could hurt them ever again.
She drove on.
5
For just a moment, when Meredith woke up in the hospital, she thought her parents were dead. She had never seen a dead body in real life, but her mother and father looked like TV murder victims, both slumped on a stiff green couch in the corner of the room, half-sitting and half-lying, their heads titled awkwardly back against the cushions, their eyes closed, their lips slightly parted. She lay quietly, her thoughts coming sluggishly, and regarded them with a strange, dreamy curiosity until she understood that they were merely sleeping. The heavy blinds in the room were open and it was dark outside, though the lights from the parking lot were bright and cast dull shadows around the room she lay in.
She knew she was in a hospital, though she had no memory of arriving. The last thing she remembered clearly was the cool air on her forehead as the Deli Barn door whooshed closed and the sound of the car rumbling out of the parking lot. Drowsily she wondered if perhaps Lisa Bellow had opened the door of the car as it sped away, tumbled out onto the unforgiving pavement of Chestnut Street, ripping skin from her knees, maybe breaking her arm, certainly screaming bloody murder, and was now lying in the bed beside her on the other side of the hospital room, applying eyeliner or texting her friends or flipping through some piece-of-crap magazine. Meredith slowly turned her head to look. There was no bed beside her. It was a single room.
The spring before, when Evan had suffered his horrible injury, he’d been in the hospital for almost a week and shared a room with an eighty-year-old man who every so often would bellow, “Goddammit, are you kidding me?” to no one but his own pain. They had had enough of hospitals, all four of them. And now here they were again. No wonder her parents looked dead.
She rubbed her hand hard over her eyes. Her face throbbed and her head seemed to be full of wet sand. She was so sleepy she could feel individual sections of her brain shutting down, like a night watchman was walking through her head turning off lights, one by one. She was closing her eyes to sleep again just as Evan came into the room, carrying a fountain drink and a bag of Cheetos. The straw was in his mouth, and when he saw her half-open eyes he froze for a moment, then pulled the straw from his lips.
“Hey,” he whispered.
“Hey,” she whispered back. The word was thick and strange in her throat, her brother little more than shadow in the muted light.
“How’s it going?”
She tried to shrug, but wasn’t sure if she’d succeeded. “’kay.”
He nodded toward their parents. “Check them out. Where’s the camera when you need it?”
She smiled groggily. She wanted to tell him not to wake them, but she couldn’t get the words to form. But it didn’t matter—he knew what she wanted (he almost always did), and made no move to rouse them from their sleep. He sat down beside her on the bed and set the bag of Cheetos at her feet. He smelled like a cafeteria, like french fries.
“Sleepy,” she said.
It seemed like almost everything was better, easier, when it was just the two of them. Their parents were forever complicating matters by inserting some practical, know-it-all point of view into a situation. Objectively she recognized that this was their job, to be parental, but that didn’t make it any less annoying.
For years she had imagined this alternate reality—a family of two—especially before Evan had gotten hurt. She loved books and movies where the parents were MIA (detained, missing, conveniently deceased) and the kids had to take care of themselves—the older sibling doing all the boring parental necessities (laundry, bills, etc.) while still effortlessly retaining his carefree pre-tragedy personality, the younger sibling making grilled cheese for dinner every night, the two working together to cleverly dodge authorities and stay out of foster care. Or better yet, the stories where the siblings were alone and in some sort of dire situation—shipwrecked, captured by terrorists, surrounded by lions—and had to rely on each other to survive. Her talents would complement his; their sense of humor would ease the tension; their cunning would get them out of endless impossible circumstances. Yes, if only it weren’t for her parents, keeping the lions at bay to begin with. She always knew she and Evan would excel at peril, given the chance.
“Cops . . . ” he was saying.
“What?”
“Okay?” he said. “Do you . . . ?”
“What?”
“You’re asleep,” he said, smiling. “Don’t—”
She tried to shake her head, but nothing moved.
The spring before, she’d sat on the edge of his hospital bed, trying, failing, to get the sour look off his face, cracking jokes and telling stories, all the while trying to not make eye contact with him. His left eye had been bandaged, and she did not like him looking at her with only one eye. She didn’t say this, of course—she wasn’t that insensitive—but it creeped her out, that single right eye. It was wrong, imbalanced, and when it darted around the room it seemed frantic in its searching. When the bandage came off and they all got a look at what remained of his left eye—not much of use, as it turned out—she still preferred its milky drifting to the lone, darting eye from the hospital.
“All right?”
She felt her eyelids droop. “Evan,” she said.
“The cops,” he said. “They want . . . ”
She couldn’t catch the end of this. She tried to keep her eyes open, to look at him squarely, but he was fuzzy and each time she let her eyes close it became harder to open them again. Had she figured out the vertical asymptote? Had she graphed it?
“Lisa?” she asked.