“If you didn’t come home after school. Would they know it was something bad?”
“Yeah,” Meredith said. “I mean, not right away. They work. They get home at like five thirty, though. They’d know by now.”
“My mother’s all alone,” Lisa said. “When she finds out, she won’t have anybody.”
“I’m sure she has some friends or something,” Meredith said. “They’ll help her out. They’ll bring food.”
“I left her sandwich at the Deli Barn,” Lisa said. “It’s still sitting there on the board.”
“It’s probably not very good anymore,” Meredith said.
Lisa smiled. “It’s probably fine. It’s the Deli Barn, right? It’s probably exactly the same as it was six hours ago. What were you getting?”
“Just a root beer. I promised myself a root beer at the end of my algebra test.”
“I hate algebra,” Lisa said. “Oh my god, I hate algebra and I hate Mr. Kane. Are you in my class?”
“I’m in Algebra two.”
“What do you do in there? Is it really hard?”
Meredith closed her eyes. She could see the problem in her head, still, all these hours later. Stupid broken pencil. She had not had time to complete the graph.
“You know what an asymptote is?”
“Um . . . some bullshit word you made up?”
“No,” Meredith said. “It’s a real thing. You’ll find out next year.”
“Oh my god, I can’t wait to go to high school,” Lisa said. “I literally can’t wait. In high school you get choices. About everything. You actually get to choose what you want.”
“My brother’s at the high school. He hates it.”
“Isn’t your brother blind or something?”
“He’s not blind,” Meredith said. “He’s mostly blind in one eye. He got hit with a baseball.”
“That sucks,” Lisa said. “He must be so pissed. I bet that’s why he hates high school.”
“Yeah. Probably.”
“I’d love high school even if I was blind,” Lisa said. “You don’t even have to eat in the cafeteria. Did you know that? You can take your lunch anywhere. You can eat outside at the picnic tables. Even in the winter.”
“Why would you want to eat outside in the winter?”
“It’s just an example,” Lisa said. “Of what you can do. Without someone tearing—”
The door closed. They heard his footsteps. Then the bathroom door opened.
“You,” he said to Lisa. “Get out here.”
?
Maybe the quiet was the worst part. Meredith could have anchored herself to sound, followed the act moment by moment, and some moments would have been less horrible than others, and at least she would have known when it was over. But there was only silence—stark, utter, silence—and so there was no sequence of events, only the worst moments happening again and again and again in a never-ending loop, no release, no relief at the conclusion. Her back was killing her—how long had she been sitting in the tub?—and finally she slid down flat and rolled onto her side and hugged her knees and waited.
?
In the morning she awoke to the click of the bathroom door. He came in and peed and she didn’t move, just lay very still in the tub in the hopes that he would forget she was even there. He must have been sorry she was. He must have been thinking how foolish it was to have taken them both, the disadvantages of two girls far outweighing any advantages—the work, the complications, the mess of it all.
“There’s food in the kitchen,” he said, and then he was gone. Still, she waited a minute or two before rolling over. The bathroom door was ajar. She slowly stood and stepped carefully out of the tub. Every part of her ached, but nothing more than her right side, on which she’d slept for who knew how long on the hard porcelain. She took two steps into the hallway. There was no sign of him, and no sign of Lisa either. She looked toward the bedroom. The door was halfway closed and she could not see the bed. There was no sound coming from in there and for a moment she was certain that Lisa was dead, sprawled across the bed, the air choked out of her, her eyes still open, her body twisted from the struggle. She could see it vividly and knew it was there, just as she imagined it, just on the other side of the door.
She tiptoed into the kitchen. There was a box of Rice Krispies on the counter and part of a loaf of white bread. On the rickety little table there were several brown bananas. Magneted to the refrigerator with a Liberty Bell magnet was a photograph of a little dog on a beach. The dog had a tiny blue Frisbee in its mouth. The dog was Annie.
“What’re you looking at?” the man asked.
She turned, startled. He was standing in the doorway wearing black boxers and a gray T-shirt.
“Nothing,” she said. “Just . . . the fridge.”
He stepped forward so that he was standing right next to her. She could smell him, a sour smell, overpowering, causing her stomach to lurch. He slid the photo from underneath the magnet and held it in his hand and smiled at it. Most of his smile was lost inside his mustache. She wondered if he knew that.
“She was great,” he said. “She liked to swim. You shoulda seen her. Out there paddling. Dog paddling.”
She had no idea how to respond. She should just say something nice. She should say only nice things, from here on out until the end. She shouldn’t be weird or angry or morose or quiet. She should just be nice. Didn’t the abduction instruction booklet say that? Or was it exactly the opposite?
“She’s cute,” she said softly.
“Yeah,” he said. “She was the best.”
He slid the picture back under the Liberty Bell magnet. There was something about the magnet that made it seem ancient, its loopy font like something you’d find at an old lady’s garage sale.
“You don’t have to be afraid,” he said. “I don’t want to hurt you. I think you’re great. I think you’re doing a real great job.”
“Thanks,” she said. Had she really said this? Jesus Christ, here at the end, her last act, thanking this man because she was too chicken-shit to do anything else. She was pathetic.
He put his hand on the middle of her back. It was a teacherly gesture, a fatherly gesture, at the very least a big-brotherly gesture. There was no sex in it but it was gruesome, like some heavy dead wet thing had been laid on her.
“You believe me?” he asked.
She had to will herself not to squirm away from his touch. “Yeah,” she said.
“You don’t sound real sure.”
She took a deep breath. At the end of the breath she found something, something totally unexpected, something she hadn’t even been looking for, but there it was for the taking, like turning a blind corner and bumping smack into the one thing that could save you.
Resolve.