“I’ll go get her,” Claire said. “She’s just upstairs. I’ll be right back.”
Her children were sitting on the floor of Meredith’s bedroom quietly playing with what they called the battling animals. They weren’t even really playing with them; they were setting them up, which always seemed to them to be more fun than the actual playing, the placing of each one in its strategic position in order that it might have the greatest advantage in the battle, when and if that battle was finally waged. The bull with the ball and chain was on the desk chair; the alligator with the sword on the overturned trashcan. Claire stood in the doorway and watched them for a moment. They weren’t speaking to each other, but they were making little mumbly animal growls as they arranged their toys, and anyone who did not know them would think that they both suffered from some sort of terrible disability.
“Meredith,” she said.
“Grrrr,” Evan said. “Who dares interrupt our preparations?”
“Honey,” she said. “Mrs. Bellow is downstairs.”
“I know,” Meredith said. “I heard her.”
“So you need to come now, okay?”
Meredith looked at Evan. He raised his eyebrows. Was he asking her if she wanted him to come, too? Claire did not know. She was not, nor had ever been, privy to the meaning of their gestures. She imagined they could have an entire conversation, with the help of the battling animals, and she would not know a single thing that had been said.
“Okay,” Meredith said. She lay her animals down on the battlefield. Claire walked down the stairs behind her and on the bottom stair gave her what was intended to be a comforting touch on the back but which wound up, somehow, maybe because Meredith slowed, to seem like a shove. They both felt it, the shover and the shoved, and Meredith tensed up in that moment and walked stiffly into the living room where Mark and Colleen Bellow were sitting on the edges of their chairs, not talking, and Claire wondered if they’d said a word in her absence aside from Mark’s increasingly desperate offers to get her something from the kitchen.
Colleen stood up when Meredith came into the room.
“Meredith,” she said. She said it warmly and with great relief, as if they were old friends who had been separated for years. Claire could see that Colleen Bellow wanted to hug her daughter, and could also see that Meredith was going to do everything possible with her body—arms crossed, legs pressed against the end table—to prevent it.
“Hi,” Meredith said.
“It’s so good to see you again. You probably don’t recognize me, but I know you and Lisa have known each other for years. Isn’t your locker next to hers?”
Claire saw her daughter struck by this comment.
“Uh, yeah,” Meredith said.
“She’s mentioned you a bunch of times,” Colleen said. She looked at Claire. “She’s mentioned her,” she said.
“Yes,” Claire said. “I think they’ve been in several classes together.”
“I remember a birthday party,” Colleen said. “A roller-skating birthday party. I think it was for Mary Berger. It was at the community center. I remember that you and Lisa were both really good at limbo. I was so impressed that anyone could think about limbo and roller-skating at the same time.”
“Hmmmm,” Meredith said.
“Do you remember that party?”
“Sort of,” Meredith said. “I think it was a while ago.”
“I’ll never forget that,” Colleen said. She turned to Claire. “They were both so good, and they were the last two, and the bar just kept getting lower and lower and they kept doing it. Do you remember that?”
“It rings a bell,” Claire said, though it rung not the slightest, faintest of bells, and she was sure that even if such a birthday party had ever happened that, one, she had not been there and, two, that Colleen Bellow was confusing Meredith with someone else, some other girl Lisa vaguely disdained, because Meredith had inherited her poor flexibility, and was terrible on roller skates, and would never in one million years have been a finalist in a limbo roller-skating competition.
“I bet Mark remembers it,” Colleen said.
“I do,” Mark said, always the hero. “I remember it well.”
Meredith sat down on the hearth. Colleen looked at her and smiled.
“Lisa just had a birthday,” she said. “Two weeks ago. When’s your birthday?”
“Not till March,” Meredith said.
“What do you want for your birthday?” Colleen said.
“I don’t know,” Meredith said. “I mean . . . it’s still a long way off.”
“Your parents are really lucky to have you,” Colleen said.
“We feel very lucky,” Claire said, then wished it back, lest it seem like they were flaunting their luck, speaking not just of the general good fortune of having nice children (which is obviously how she’d intended it), but of this very specific moment of good luck that their child was the one sitting on the hearth in this living room and Lisa Bellow was—Claire thought with a sudden, vivid shock—lifeless, bruised, and tangled in some brush by the side of the interstate.
“You know we will help in whatever way we can,” Mark said. “Anything we can do.”
Colleen turned to Meredith. “I know you’ve talked to the police,” she said. “But if there’s anything you forgot to tell them about what happened, any more you can remember . . . ”
Detective Waller had been standing silently in the archway between the foyer and the living room, but now she straightened up.
“Sometimes just the smallest detail can help,” she added.
“She was ordering a sandwich,” Meredith said. “Two sandwiches.”
“Two?” Colleen said.
“One foot-long and one six-inch,” Meredith said.
“What was on the foot-long?” Colleen asked.
“Like, a lot of onions, I think. That’s the only thing I really remember.”
“That’s my sandwich!” Colleen said, turning to the detective. “That’s the one she was getting for me.”
Now she turned to Claire. “I usually don’t get off work until seven, and so sometimes she gets me a sandwich and puts it in the fridge so I have something to eat when I get home, so I don’t have to cook.”
“It sounds like she was—” Claire started, then swallowed what was to follow, “a wonderful girl,” and was able to quickly replace it with, “getting you your sandwich.”
“Yes,” Colleen said. “She was. That was my sandwich. It was for me.”
“What kind of sandwich was it again?” the detective asked, uncapping her pen.
Claire was sweating. In some way she couldn’t explain, the discussion of the sandwich was actually worse than the image of the bruised body tangled in the brush. She never wanted to talk about sandwiches again. She hated sandwiches, period. Sandwiches were dead to her. (And here, now, the wildly inappropriate impulse to giggle.) Meredith told the rest of her story. She told the same story she’d told before, now ten, a dozen times, no new details, all she remembered. Claire did not like to imagine Meredith lying on that floor so she stopped listening near the end.