Yes. Yes. She could feel it in her bones. Something had changed. She was in charge now. She was in control. What happened to Lisa from here on out—it was all on her. There was nothing outside this apartment, or nothing that mattered anyway. There was only this. And this was everything.
“Where’s Lisa?” she asked, turning to face him. His hand fell from her back, one dead thing sliding off another dead thing. But no. No. Not dead. Not yet. She knew now that there was only one way she was going to have any chance of surviving this, and it was by knowing that Lisa was here in the apartment with her, still, always, not dead yet either. And she knew, too, that this was the only way Lisa would survive. It was imperative that they remain together. Their very existence depended upon it. There was no other way. And if he wanted to kill her for asking . . .
“She’s asleep,” he said. “I didn’t want to wake her up.”
“I’m going to make her some breakfast,” she said. “And then I’m going to take it to her.”
“There’s not much,” he said, nodding to the counter.
“It’ll do,” she said.
“That’s real nice,” he said. Then, after a pause, “It’s funny.”
“What?” she said.
“I didn’t take you all for friends.”
?
When she turned from the counter with the bowl of cereal Lisa was sitting on the couch in the living room. She had dragged a blanket with her from the bed and had it on a pile on her lap. Meredith went and sat down on the couch.
“You should eat something,” Meredith said. She held out the bowl. “Eat some cereal.”
Lisa stared at her dumbly. Her chin was black from the blow from yesterday, and around her mouth was purple. She also had a mark on her neck.
“Seriously,” Meredith said.
“You were in my tennis group,” Lisa said softly. “Do you remember that? That summer tennis camp. There was that mean coach who called everybody names.”
“I remember. At Eaton Park.”
“One day Brianne Kirk hit me in the face with her racquet. And you had to walk me to that concession stand to get ice. Do you remember that?”
“Yeah,” Meredith said.
“Really?” Lisa said. “Do you really remember it? Are you just saying that?”
“No,” Meredith said. “I really remember it. I never forgot it. I was thinking about it just . . . just yesterday.”
Lisa closed her eyes for a moment. All her makeup had worn away and her hair was a tangled mess. The girl from the yearbook was gone. This was another girl.
Lisa opened her eyes. “That was such a great day,” she said. “That was the best snow cone I ever had in my life.”
“It was lime,” Meredith said.
“It was,” Lisa said. “It was lime. Your face was green.”
“Your face was green.”
Meredith looked out the window. It was raining and the branches of the trees were swaying in the wind. Yesterday it had been sunny and you could believe in an Indian summer. Today it was rainy and the leaves were falling from the trees and summer was over.
“Meredith,” Lisa said.
“What?”
Lisa lay back until her head rested on the arm of the couch.
“What?” Meredith said again.
Lisa took a little bite of her bottom lip. “I don’t think we’re ever getting out of here.”
PART TWO
12
The sound coming from below her, in the garage, did not surprise Claire. Not at first. It had been the soundtrack to their lives for so long, the background noise of so many early mornings, that when she woke to it she did not think of all the months that had passed without it. It was so familiar that she couldn’t have said, in that first moment of being awake, if it had been six hours or six months since she’d last heard it, the ping of aluminum on leather.
She rolled over to face Mark’s side of the bed. He was awake, looking up at the ceiling. “You hear it?” he asked.
As if there were any not hearing it. When Evan had first started his routine, the summer before his freshman year, they had looked into putting extra insulation in the garage, which sat directly under the western hemisphere of their bedroom. Or maybe, they suggested, he could take his swings just a little later in the morning. Or after school? But he was thirteen and he cared about something, cared about it intensely. He had a routine. He stuck to it. He was disciplined. It felt wrong to discourage him, even if it was a little annoying. Wasn’t this precisely what you wanted from a boy approaching fourteen? Passion? Commitment? Practice?
So they got used to it, like the sound of traffic, or crickets, or lapping waves. There was a rhythm to it. Ping. Beat (ball from bucket). Beat (ball on tee). Beat (stance). Ping. Beat (ball from bucket). Beat (ball on tee). Beat (stance). Ping.
She looked at the clock. 5:55. Even the traditional time. Half hour of swings before a shower, alone in the garage with his tee and a net and his big, beat-up white bucket of weathered balls, no sound but the contact, no distraction, no chance of distraction, everyone else still in bed. How many hundreds of hours had he spent there, how many swings, how many balls launched into the soft net? After that first summer the garage had become Evan’s personal training facility, in and out of season. Sometimes his teammates came over on winter evenings and there would be a group of three or four down there, their voices echoing against the metal door, laughter, ping-beat-beat-beat-ping, music playing from someone’s phone, jeering, the voices of boys now, suddenly, the voices of men. But mostly it was Evan’s alone, his sanctuary. Often she’d be in the kitchen making the coffee when he finished at 6:20, and they’d exchange smiles as he passed. He never seemed more comfortable in his own skin, more sure of himself, than that moment he crossed from the garage into the kitchen. Not even when he was actually playing in a game.
After the injury she and Mark, together, had zipped the bats into the black bat bag and hung it up beside the rakes and snow shovels. They’d pushed the net back into a corner, laid the tee on its side, put the cover on the ball bucket, little by little erasing what had been, or if not erasing, at least obscuring. But they’d never put the cars back in the garage. The cars had remained in the driveway, throughout the spring and summer and into fall. Maybe they would have put them in come winter, at the first frost. But now, October, there was this.
“God, I missed that sound,” Mark said. “I didn’t know it until now.”
His eyes were closed and he was smiling, the way you closed your eyes and smiled while you listened to your favorite song. But even as she watched him smile Claire felt the dread begin to seep under her skin. The sound could only mean one thing.
“He can’t do it,” she said to Mark. The whole sentence came out as a sustained groan.
“What?”
“He can’t play baseball.”