She was in her room. Meredith was in her room.
So how much rage was fair? How many tears were justified? There was a part of Claire—a big part, honestly, the majority of her—that felt like dancing, a pure joy that took her breath away every few minutes. This, as much as anything, was the part she could not put into words, this absolute contradiction of emotions. Shouldn’t they be celebrating? Shouldn’t they be on their knees, weeping not with grief but with gratitude? Thank god. Not only was her daughter alive and unharmed, but she was right down the hall, wrapped around her cat. She was safe. Two days before there had been two girls lying on that floor and one had been chosen and it had not been Meredith. Fifty-fifty, heads or tails, long straw, short straw—her daughter had won, had been left there on the floor shaken but safe, while the other girl—
Well, they hadn’t found her yet. Now it had been over forty-eight hours. On television they said the window of opportunity was closing. There were leads but nothing more. There were no suspects. There were no persons of interest. The girl’s cell phone had been found by the side of the road three blocks from the Deli Barn. But they hadn’t found anything else. Most notably, they hadn’t found a body. That was a good thing, right? That had to be a good thing. As long as there was no body then there was a chance she was alive.
But when she thought these things—even about a body, finding a person’s body, finding a girl’s body, for Christ sakes—Claire felt no quickening in her chest. The girl, Lisa Bellow, was nothing to her in this moment. Nothing! She had heard her name kicked around in carpools and at parties—she knew only that she was one of those popular girls Meredith and her friends hated—but that had no bearing whatsoever on Claire’s lack of anxiety for her. Lisa Bellow could have been the nicest girl on the planet. She could have been their next-door neighbor. She could have been Meredith’s closest friend. No, she didn’t care one bit who Lisa Bellow was; the only important thing about Lisa Bellow, to Claire, was that she, not Meredith, was the girl who was taken. Certainly it would be better if she were found alive, better for Meredith, but all that really mattered was that Meredith was alive. Meredith was safe. Meredith, her baby, her baby girl, was down the hall.
“They didn’t have those mini Tater Tots,” Mark said.
She was startled by the sound of a human voice. She flipped over to face him. “What?”
He propped himself up on his elbow. “Sorry. Were you asleep?”
“No,” she said. “I was—what Tater Tots?”
“You know she likes those little ones, the minis, instead of the fat ones. They didn’t have them in the freezer. I know I’ve gotten them there before. So I tracked down the manager and he said they didn’t carry them anymore. He said he wasn’t even sure they made them anymore. But I’m gonna call around tomorrow and see what I can find out.”
“Okay,” she said.
They had taken off the last two days, canceled all their appointments. The receptionists had called every patient—“family emergency, need to reschedule”—and theirs was the kind of practice where some of their patients might say, “Oh, I hope everything’s okay” but no one would lose any sleep over it. Tomorrow was Saturday. On Monday they would go back to work. They would go back to their lives.
“I went ahead and got the big ones,” he said. “I thought that’d be better than nothing.”
“Sure,” she said. “I’m sure they’ll be fine.”
He was quiet for a moment—had he finally settled this to his satisfaction?—then added: “I can always have them for backup if we find the little ones.”
“Honey, it’s fine.”
“I know,” he said. “I just wanted to tell you.”
She loved him. That was just a fact. You turned on the radio and there was music playing. You turned on the tap and water came out. That was all there was to it. They had been married twenty-three years and they had survived everything and here they were, lying in bed talking about Tater Tots. As absurd as it was, there was no one else in the world she would have rather had this conversation with. She turned her pillow over and rested her head on the cool side and closed her eyes.
“They have them at Stop and Shop,” she said. “That’s where I got them last time.”
“Okay,” he said. “I’ll go there tomorrow. First thing.”
?
It would have been easy to pretend that their bond, their mother-daughter closeness, had been shattered by what had happened at the Deli Barn—by the man and the gun and the missing Lisa Bellow. But the truth was that, for Claire, looking at her daughter for the last year or two had been something like looking at the flat face of a mountain range and being told to scale it, without ropes, without safety equipment, and without a canteen and PowerBars. To make the flat face worse, Claire could see some footholds near the bottom, but then, the higher the mountain rose, the flatter it became, until really it was only a solid sheet as unblemished as glass, a mountain only a superhero could scale, a task that would require not determination, skill, fortitude, attitude, or training, but magic.
With Evan she had never seen anything coming. Before Evan, she had always considered herself a person who prepared carefully, allowing her to adjust her external and internal responses in anticipation of any eventuality. But beginning with childbirth, everything with Evan was a shock, everything astonishing, both the highs and the lows. Pregnancy she could handle. Sometimes in those months she felt sick and uncertain, but the cause of the sickness and uncertainty was still inside, still a part of her, and as such completely dependent on her. She was still, in the ways that were most important to her, in control.
But beginning with the unimaginable act of childbirth—truly unimaginable, despite the billions of women who had done it before her—everything took her by surprise. She learned that any preparations or assumptions she might make were meaningless, a lesson driven home with the final, inevitable nail of the porker incident, her sweet, wise, ruined first-grader in the backseat, telling her in no uncertain terms: “There’s nothing you can do.”
So, with the second born, different. She was now armed with the necessary information . . . or at least with the necessary lack of information. Thank god—now at least she knew more or less what was coming. This time, she told herself, I will be prepared to not be prepared. This time I will expect the unexpected, anticipate the pointlessness of anticipation. This time I will give in sooner to my powerlessness. This time I will not try to fight a battle that is already over.
Thus, when that flat wall appeared, Claire accepted the impossibility of the task that lay before her, took one long look up at the face of that mountain and quietly, and not without some real sense of relief, and under the cover of a very busy schedule, returned to her base camp.
7