They were walking down the hall, doctor’s orders. No reason to lie in bed all day, the handsome doctor had said. Go for a walk with your brother, take a spin around the floor, see the sights! He was one of those doctors, eager to prove he was cool by saying everything in a slightly mocking tone, lest you think he took himself too seriously. Walking beside Evan, Meredith peered into rooms along the hallway, watching people struggling with dinner trays. Until last year, when Evan got hurt, the most experience she’d had with hospitals was her favorite children’s book, Curious George Goes to the Hospital. Not that she really expected it to be the way it was in the book—monkey puppet shows, sick but gleeful children—but those were the colorful images she had in her head the evening she first came to see her battered-faced brother, and those were the colorful images she left behind forever when she and her mother drove home that night.
But strangely, over the week Evan was a patient, she found a new version of the hospital that was no less pleasing, that was perhaps even more pleasing, than a monkey in a wheelchair. Over that week Meredith came to appreciate the orderliness of hospitals, because it was exactly the opposite of middle school. In a hospital, even in times of urgency—maybe especially in times of urgency—there was a clear plan of action. Things happened in a certain way; there were procedures to be followed, and everyone knew their assigned role. Patients wore robes and pajamas and slippers. They were vulnerable, and the people dressed in white were charged with caring for those who were vulnerable. Things were clear: there were the caring and the cared for. And you always knew who you were. All you had to do was look down and see if you had on pajamas.
“Mom said you get to come home tomorrow.”
“Yeah,” she said.
“So that’s good.”
“Yeah,” she said. “I guess.”
“It’s weird that no one knows.”
“You mean—”
“Yeah. That it was you.”
No information about Meredith had been released. Not her name, not her age, not her condition. Her parents had told her this earlier. At the press conference the police had stated that Another Customer had been present in the Deli Barn at the time of the abduction. For all anyone knew—anyone besides her family and the police and the doctors and the sandwich farmer and Mr. Fulton the janitor—Another Customer had been an adult. For all anyone else knew—even her friends—she had walked straight home that day, passed by the Deli Barn without even glancing inside, continued down Chestnut Street, made the left on Duncan, then the cut across the edge of the park, then the right on Glenside, then into her house, a snack from the fridge, her phone, the television, the computer, same old, same old.
“I don’t think it’ll last,” she said. “Somebody’ll find out.”
“It is middle school, after all,” Evan said.
They reached the end of the hall and turned around. She realized she was shuffling a little, and wasn’t sure if there was anything actually wrong with her or if it just seemed like at least one of them should be shuffling. Inside the corner room a baby was crying and someone was trying to hush it.
“Do you know her boyfriend?” she asked.
“No,” he said. “He’s a freshman, I think. Somebody told me he’s a dick.”
“I’m sure,” she said. But then she didn’t really feel like saying anything bad about Lisa, not with Lisa sitting on the edge of the tub in that bathroom, waiting for Annie to pee by the concrete planter, thinking about what she wanted for dinner. It was possible that Lisa was a little scared, even though nothing all that scary had happened. It was possible that—
“He plays lacrosse,” Evan confirmed. For this was how people were defined at the high school, at least the people who mattered.
In her mind, Meredith left Lisa in the bathroom and made herself think instead about Evan, Evan who didn’t play anything anymore. Evan was undefined. Evan was floating. Actually, Meredith thought, Evan was hovering, bobbing in the air like a parade balloon, untethered but too heavy, too burdened with ropes, to drift away. He was supposed to be looking at colleges, she knew—it was October, and she knew some of his friends had already applied places for early decision—but she wasn’t sure he had done more than take the letters and catalogs from the mailbox and toss them into the recycling bin. A year ago he’d had a box—not a shoebox, either, but a box from the grocery store that said DOLE BANANAS on the side—full of recruiting letters from programs that wanted him to consider them. Just consider them. Now that he was no longer a baseball player, there were no more personal letters, only standard junk mail that every high school senior got. The banana box was gone, broken down, put out with ordinary pizza boxes. Evan wasn’t anyone special anymore, just another kid with a decent GPA.
Part of her wished she had seen it, really seen it and not just imagined it. She did not like to think that his life had changed so utterly while she was unaware, probably over at Kristy’s watching YouTube videos on her computer, probably laughing at some asinine thing while Evan stood there in the batter’s box, windmilling his bat around. He’d had three bats and they all had names, like boats. She didn’t even know where the bats were now. Probably her parents had whisked them away: out of sight, out of mind! She hoped they had not gotten rid of them. She hoped that, wherever they were, they did not yet belong to someone else.
The windmill. Then maybe he starts to turn his head. Maybe—she’d seen the moment ten thousand times—he’s going to yell something at the batter, nothing special, just some routine chatter. And then, just like that, he’s on the ground—maybe on his stomach, like she’d been, looking at those Coke stains under the Deli Barn counter. But Evan’s in the dirt. Evan’s unconscious. And the baseball that hit him is still rolling, and it rolls and rolls and understandably no one pays any attention to it, that ball, so that when they go back to find it afterward, they cannot distinguish it from the other batting practice balls.
When they took the bandages off he was not completely blind in the eye, as they’d feared. He could see some light, some shape. He had one surgery, then another, then another, to repair the fracture. It was delicate, tedious, endless, in and out of the hospital, his pain constant. Some more light came through, some shapes grew edges. There was cautious hope. Part of her believed—part of all of them, she suspected—that he was the one in a million, that his sight would be fully restored. But by July it had leveled off. Most likely, the doctor said, that was it: it was as good as it was ever going to get.
“They’ll find her,” Evan said, in answer to a question she had not asked. “She’ll just show up. Today, probably. She’ll wander up to a gas station and just start laying into some guy pumping his gas.”
“Maybe,” she said, though she doubted it, not with the army trunk wedged against the door.
“She’ll be like, give me your cell and make it snappy. Then she’ll call the lax bro and he’ll go get her in his dad’s Porsche. But first he’ll go through Starbucks and get her a skinny latte.”
They had reached her room. Her parents were talking in hushed tones to someone inside. Evan leaned against the doorway. “And before they go to the cops she’ll make him take her to the mall so she can get an outfit to wear for the press conference. And then she’ll be like, drive smoother so I can paint my nails.”
Her legs were heavy. She felt like she’d just walked ten miles in the sand. She looked up at her brother, her very best friend, the love of her life, her co-conspirator, with his uncombed hair and his hidden, milky, useless eye.
“Can you not?” she said.
6