“And then she got up and they walked out,” Meredith finished.
Colleen frowned. She was not going to cry, Claire realized. Maybe she hadn’t cried yet. Maybe she was never going to cry. Maybe crying was as bad as sleeping. Maybe, until there was something definite to cry over, something physical, not an idea or a possibility of even a probability, but a body, there would be, could be, no tears. There was only do do do.
“I don’t understand how there can be such a good description, but still no one knows who this man is,” Colleen said to the detective. “Meredith’s done an awesome job.”
“She has,” Detective Waller agreed.
“Meredith,” Colleen said. “Do you think maybe you saw the car even a little bit? Because I was thinking, the door, the door at the Deli Barn, it’s all glass. All the way down to the bottom. So even while you were lying there you might have seen it. After Lisa got up, you might have seen it. You were looking that way.”
Colleen Bellow glanced over at Claire. “She was looking that way,” she said.
“Sort of,” Meredith said. “I mean I was looking sort of that way. But I—”
“She doesn’t remember,” Claire said. “She didn’t see the car and she doesn’t remember.”
“Those are two different things,” Detective Waller said. She didn’t say it critically, Claire noticed, only like a point of fact.
“They may be two different things,” Claire said. “But they’re both true.”
“I never saw the parking lot,” Meredith said. “I never saw the car. I know that. I heard the car but I never saw it.”
“Why didn’t you look when you heard it start up?” Colleen asked softly, kindly, even.
Meredith shook her head. “I don’t know,” she said.
Because she’s thirteen, Claire thought. Because a man had a gun pointed at her head. Because she thought she was going to die. Because her mind was frozen. Because the rules of common sense did not apply. Because how could she know that the simplest thing could be the most important?
She wished she could go back in time for one second—she wasn’t greedy, wasn’t asking for much, just one second to take Meredith’s head, tilt it in the right direction. “Look outside,” she’d say. “Meredith, Meredith, please, look.”
?
“That was horrible,” Mark said, later, in the kitchen, while they were doing the dinner dishes. “Horrible. I know it sounds selfish, but I don’t want to do that again. I don’t care what they say. There’s no reason to—”
“I hope that poor girl is already dead,” Claire said.
He turned off the water. “What?”
“I hope she’s already dead.”
“How can you say that?”
“It’s not going to end well,” Claire said. “It’s been four days. Imagine those four days if she’s still alive. Imagine. It’s not going to end well so the best everyone can hope for is that it ends soon. For everyone. The girl included.”
“Did Meredith even know her?”
“Meredith hated her. Don’t you ever listen to anything? She was horrible. She was awful.”
“And now you hope she’s dead.”
“Oh, come on,” she said. “For god’s sake, you know I didn’t mean—”
“I’m sorry,” he said, and he looked sorry, and he should be sorry, she thought. “I’m sorry. That was horrible, sitting there with that woman, talking about goddamn Deli Barn sandwiches.”
“Did someone mention Deli Barn sandwiches?” Evan said, appearing in the doorway. “Because I’m starving.”
“Stop it,” Mark said. “Just don’t, okay? People are in pain. You don’t even know the kind of pain that was in our living room this afternoon.”
It was not at all like him to talk this way, certainly not to Evan. He was rattled, and he was bad at being rattled, and Evan stood there silently in the doorway waiting for his father to apologize, which, Claire suspected, would take no more than five seconds.
“I’m sorry I blew up,” Mark said, on the count of four. “This is not about you.”
Evan continued his punishing silence.
“Okay?” Mark said. “Okay? Everything’s crazy. Everybody’s crazy.”
More silence. Her son’s face was a mask of granite disinterest. He knew how to hurt them. He had the weapons, and he wasn’t afraid to use them.
He had been drifting around the house like a ghost for months, his dreams in shambles. Not that they were very good dreams to begin with, and not that in some ways this wasn’t for the best. She’d told herself this a thousand times. The upside to Evan’s partial blindness was that there would be no horrible disappointment in the future with regards to baseball. He was very good, but he would have hit the wall eventually, likely as soon as he got to college when he was no longer the best, when every boy in the dugout had been the star of the high school team, a hometown hero. Evan was not going to play professional baseball, and she’d already been dreading that slow realization, the gradual resignation, the prolonged agony. Now that was all erased in one quick stroke. At least the stroke itself was quick, if not the aftermath. Losing the eye was terrible. The dream itself was no great loss.
“You want to do something?” Mark asked. “You want to play cards or something? You want to play rummy?”
Evan shook his head slowly.
Mark looked at her. “I’m going to take a shower,” he said. “For like two hours. Or until the hot water runs out.”
“Okay,” she said.
When it was just her and Evan, Claire said, “He’s very stressed out.”
“No shit,” Evan said. “Who isn’t?”
He sat down at the kitchen table and took off his glasses and pressed the heel of his hand over his blind eye. This was something he did. She knew he was in pain, though they no longer spoke of it. She knew he still took a pill every morning. Sometimes after he left for school she went into their bathroom and counted the pills, and some days—not most days, but some days—there were more gone than the prescription allowed.
“Are you all right?” she asked, sitting down across from him.
“It’s fine.”
“Are you sure?”
“It’s not awful,” he said.
“Has she said anything to you? About anything? Do you know the girl?”
“I know who she is,” he said. “One of those eighth-grade hoes.”
“Don’t say that.”
“Why not? I’m not making a judgment, I’m just saying. You asked who she is and I’m telling you: one of the eighth-grade hoes. Maybe the leader of the eight-grade hoes. I’m sure Meredith hated her guts.”
“It doesn’t matter if—”
“It does matter. Of course it matters. I’m not saying she’s not freaking out. Maybe you’d freak out more if it’s someone you hate, because maybe part of you doesn’t really care, or maybe even part of you is glad. And what does that say about you? Are you a monster? No, you’re just a normal thirteen-year-old human being. But you’re too stupid to know that. Why? Because you’re just a normal thirteen-year-old human being.”
She loved that he could be so blunt and still remain so utterly likable. Was he a little crueler now than he’d been a year ago? Probably. And yet he could not shake that sweetness, her whistling boy.
“Will you talk to her?”