?
She was sitting on the floor of her bedroom. She was not going to do her homework. No one would care if she did her homework. She set up the battling animals and Evan came into the room and sat on the floor but he didn’t pick up the animals.
“The first day will be the worst,” he said.
“It was okay.”
“It’ll get better,” he said, because the lie was so obvious. “In a couple weeks it will feel normal at school. People will start forgetting. There’ll be something else.”
“Not something else like this,” she said. For years she had been comforted by Evan’s confidence, his bold predictions, his cavalier superiority; now she suddenly found it irritating. “There’s nothing else like this.”
“Doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter what it is. Something else is something else. There always has to be something else because the collective attention span of any group of teenagers is only a few weeks. Trust me: something new will take its place. In June they’ll give her the last page of the yearbook with an inspirational quote from Maya Angelou and that’ll be that.”
“Jesus,” she said. “Stop. Jesus, what’s wrong with you?”
“I didn’t say it wasn’t awful, Mer. I just said that’s the way it would happen.” He picked up the lion, who was doubly armed: a long ax in one hand, a sword in the other.
“The queen is dead; long live the queen!” Evan said in the lion’s voice.
She snatched the lion from him. “Stop it,” she said. “Get out. Stop messing with my stuff.”
He raised his eyebrows. “Your stuff?”
She could not stand him sitting here on her floor. All she wanted was to be left alone.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “Listen, really, I am sorry. All I’m trying to say is, life at Parkway North marches on. The world keeps spinning.”
Spinning, yes. That was an accurate description of her current state. For thirteen years she’d never felt the motion of the earth, and now suddenly she couldn’t stop feeling it. And this earth, this new earth, was rotating her through two worlds simultaneously, spinning her so fast that she was no longer certain where one world ended and the other began.
“Let’s watch a movie,” Evan said. “Let’s watch something funny. Something stupid.”
“I’m tired,” she said. “I’m gonna go to bed.”
He stood up, stretched. Sometimes he seemed massive, ten feet tall. “C’mon, Mer. Something mindless. Good for the soul.”
“I don’t—” she started.
“I’m gonna carry you,” he said.
“No.”
He grinned. “You know I’ll do it.”
Would he? He used to all the time, before the injury, trap her in the polar bear hug and then in one swift motion swing her off the ground and into the cradle of his arms, like a bride or a baby. Long after her parents had stopped picking her up, Evan was still doing it. Sometimes when he put her down he’d flex his muscles and kiss his biceps. She had imagined those days were over.
“My only concern is the stairs,” he said. He paused a moment, put a finger to his chin in mock consideration. “Probably we won’t fall. Probably.”
“Okay,” she said. “Stop. Okay. I’m coming.”
?
Meredith closed her eyes. Lisa was still on the couch and the man was in the bathroom. What was he doing in the bathroom? He’d been in there a really long time. Something was amiss. Lisa was sitting cross-legged on the couch. Something was missing. Something was—Annie. She was not on the couch. The television was turned off and the remote was on the table and Lisa was just sitting there by herself looking at the black television.
Meredith listened for the jingle.
Lisa stood up and went into the kitchen and opened the refrigerator. It was nearly empty. There were some Baggies of shredded cheese and an almost empty jar of black olives; the few olives inside bobbed around in the juice like little shrunken heads. Annie was not in the kitchen. More alarming to Meredith was the fact that Annie’s bowls were not on the kitchen floor. Where the bowls had been there was a little rickety table with a bunch of brown bananas on it. On top of the refrigerator, where Annie’s box of Milk Bones had been yesterday, there was an old radio.
Maybe he was giving Annie a bath in the bathtub and he had taken her Milk Bones in there to give her as treats and her bowls were in the dishwasher. But there were no sounds coming from the bathroom. Lisa went past the bathroom door and into the bedroom. The door was only partially open, but Meredith could see there were clothes lying on the bed and the sheets were askew. Annie was not curled on the pillow, not stretched out at the end. There was no sign that Annie was there, or had ever been there.
The door clicked open and the man came out of the bathroom. He was wearing black boxer shorts and nothing else. Lisa was sitting on the edge of the bed. She looked up wearily.
“There’s my girl,” the man said. He went into the bedroom and closed the door.
Where the hell was Annie? Meredith was in the apartment now. Actually in the apartment, for the first time. She could see everything. She could walk from room to room regardless of where Lisa was. She had stopped spinning. She was not going to walk into the bedroom because she already knew what was happening the bedroom, but she was going to find Annie because she wanted Annie to be there when it was over and she was going to pick up Annie and set her in front of the bedroom door. But maybe Annie had run away. Maybe that was it. Maybe he’d opened the door and she’d dashed out. Meredith looked at the hook by the door. There was no leash there. There was a baseball hat hanging on it. She went and sat down on the couch. She licked her index finger and dragged it along the brown suede cushions. Crumbs. Ashes. No fur.
He hadn’t given her away. She hadn’t run off. Annie wasn’t just gone. It was way worse than that. It was this: there was no Annie.
There never had been any Annie.
Meredith opened her eyes. She was in her own family room. Outside the window it was dark. The dishwasher was running in the kitchen. On television a bride and groom were sprinting away from a church. Her brother was next to her on the couch. He was smiling at the movie.
“There’s no dog,” she said. At first she wasn’t sure if she’d said it aloud, but he looked over at her.
“What?” he said, still smiling. Then he saw her face and he stopped smiling. “What?”
It felt like someone had taken hold of her lungs, one in each huge hand, and was squeezing.
“There’s no dog,” she said.
10
“There’s no dog?” Mark asked. “What does that even mean?”
“It means we need to call the psychiatrist,” Claire said.