“I don’t think anything yet,” Detective Waller said, standing. “But we have to consider everything. Many people who are abducted have some connection to their abductor. That may not be the case here. But we just don’t know yet.”
Meredith was relieved when they were gone, but only momentarily, because then her father stood up. He didn’t come over to the bed. He just stood in his spot and looked at them expectantly, an actor waiting for his cue. Her mother’s hand was ice cold. Meredith couldn’t even remember the last time she’d held her mother’s hand, but this hand was not something you’d go out of your way to grasp for comfort. In addition to being oddly freezing—it wasn’t cold in the room at all—her mother’s fingers were narrow and hard. It felt like they were made of metal, like they themselves were dental instruments.
“The doctor said you can come home tomorrow,” her mother said.
“Okay,” Meredith said.
“We’ll fold out the couch in the family room and you can watch movies.”
“Like a sick day,” Meredith said. “Dad can bring me comic books.”
“Great!” her father exclaimed. “I’m on it.”
She was kidding, but the joke was completely lost on her father, who of course lived to provide material satisfaction—even the briefest, shallowest happiness—for anyone at any level of discomfort. From the time they were little kids, whenever she or Evan were sick, her father would come home from work with a bag full of comics, handheld pinball games, baseball cards, invisible ink trivia books, a dozen varieties of Jell-O, six-packs of 7Up.
“It is a sick day,” her mother said, squeezing Meredith’s fingers with her dental instruments. “You can have a sick week if you want. Whatever you want, Meredith—”
Her voice wavered and she did not finish her sentence. God, where was Evan? Meredith wondered. He’d abandoned her here, with emotional parents and no buffer. She had sat in the room last spring and listened to the ice cream cone diagnosis while he was unconscious. He owed her this. He owed her his presence.
“You want something from the café?” her father asked. “A soda? Maybe a juice box?”
It had been at least five years since she’d stabbed a straw into a juice box. “No thanks,” she said.
“You hungry? You want some chips or a candy bar or something?”
“I’m really okay.”
He was looking slightly desperate, like a robot who’d been given contradictory instructions. She played the only card she had. She yawned. It was a fake yawn at first, but after the initial intake of air it turned into an authentic one, so she didn’t feel too guilty about it.
“We should let you sleep,” her mother said. She turned to her father, relieved. “We should let her sleep.”
“Sleep is the best thing,” her father said.
On this they could all agree.
?
In Meredith’s half sleep, one thing was for sure: Lisa Bellow would definitely not be allowed to accompany the man to walk Annie the dog, not out in broad daylight, in the apartment courtyard, where any well-meaning citizen could instantly recognize her instantly recognizable face and call the police. Her story, no doubt, was all over the television. Not that Meredith had seen any news . . . . the TV in her room had been conspicuously dark all day, the remote control nowhere to be seen. Lisa’s photograph, Meredith assumed, would be her seventh-grade yearbook picture, the one in the Parkway North Middle School Pioneer, which Meredith was ashamed to admit she could conjure in her mind on cue. Meredith and Jules and Kristy had spent an embarrassing (even by their own lax standards) amount of time looking at the seventh-grade section of the yearbook, flipped through it nearly every day over the summer until its pages were limp, categorizing, defining, ranking. Plus, due to some annoying trick of fate and a refusal to alphabetize, Lisa Bellow’s picture was directly above Meredith’s, so there was no not comparing them, Lisa with her perfectly timed smile, Meredith caught off guard (was that really the best shot they had?) in a lopsided grin, looking like the idiot cousin.
But of course the dog—Annie—would have to be walked. It was inevitable. Annie was not one of those genius dogs featured on Animal Planet that could use the toilet. At least a few times a day the man would have to take her outside, even if only for a minute or two, even if only a couple steps outside the front door of the apartment building to pee beside the concrete planter with the cigarette butts stuck in the soil. (In her half sleep, the image could not have been clearer; the concrete planter’s base was chipped; one of the cigarette butts was ringed with lipstick.)
For this minute or two of dog peeing, Lisa would be alone in the apartment, unguarded. How would the man keep her from making a phone call, or walking out the door and sprinting to the parking lot, where surely there were people who could help her? He would have to put her in the bathroom. This would avoid the time and energy of tying her up, which—time and energy aside—Meredith was certain he didn’t even really want to do anyway. Probably he couldn’t lock the bathroom door from the outside, but he could push something against it, something heavy, like a dresser or a trunk. Maybe his old trunk from the army, which he’d held on to and dragged around with him from apartment to apartment for the last dozen years. All that was inside were blankets and towels and a winter coat, but if he turned it longways it wedged perfectly between the bathroom door and the hall wall, so there was no chance of it budging, nowhere she could go. Of course she could pound on the door, scream her head off, try to alert the neighbors. Yes, he would have to tell her something to keep her from doing this. He would have to offer her something meaningful in return for her good behavior.
Maybe, Meredith decided, he would say she could have whatever she wanted for dinner, as long as she didn’t make any noise.
?
“What’re you thinking about?” Evan asked her.
“Nothing,” she said quickly. She had been turning over this question: What would Lisa choose for dinner? “My algebra test.”
“Your algebra test?” He raised a doubting eyebrow at her. “Really? You just became the single most dedicated student in the history of algebra.”