“Goal of the day,” Mark said.
Her goal of the day was to not smash him over the head with the alarm clock. She poured Evan’s milk and set it down in front of him.
“I’m going to go for a run this afternoon,” Evan said.
Sometimes Claire held her hand over her left eye and tried to do things, simple things: walk down the stairs, plug in her phone, put a stamp on a letter. She knew from the specialist that this wasn’t truly seeing the world as Evan saw it—that covering an eye couldn’t really replicate monocular vision, that it was not just Evan’s eye that had changed but also his brain—but it made her feel better anyway. A run was fine, right? Unless something came at him from his blind side, something fast, a Frisbee, a speeding car.
“On the track?” she asked.
“Probably just around here,” he said.
“The track would—”
“—be smooth, yes,” he finished. “Even. No surprises.”
“I just thought for a first time,” she said.
“It’s not the first time, Mom,” he said.
It was nearly the end of October. What was he thinking? That he would be in shape by February, for the preseason? That he’d be crouching behind the plate by the first of March, his senior season excavated from the earth like some pristine fossil, perfectly intact, only in need of a dusting? And when exactly had he decided this, and in consultation with whom? His coaches? His teammates? His father? Maybe he needed a psychiatrist as well (maybe Dr. Moon offered some sort of two-for-one, multichild, multitrauma offer?), someone to speak sensibly, someone who did not just seem like a wet freaking blanket, someone who could nudge him into reality with simple common sense. He could not see out of his left eye. He could not see out of his left eye.
Competitive baseball was over. He was not going to play in college. He just needed to apply to college. Just apply. Just somewhere. Application deadlines were rapidly approaching. In another couple months, community college was going to be his only option. He was better than that, smarter than that. But that wasn’t even the point (she reminded herself . . . again). The point was he was not going to be a baseball player. Not anymore.
“I’m going to take a half hour and read,” Mark said. “Over lunch. I’m just going to find a quiet spot and read a book.”
“What book?” Evan asked.
“I don’t know. Maybe it won’t be a book. Maybe it will be the newspaper.”
“You could just read People in the waiting room,” Evan said.
“It is absolutely true that I could do that,” Mark said. “Meredith?”
She looked up from her cereal. “Can I go to a Halloween party this weekend?”
“Is that a goal or a question?” Evan asked.
“A question,” she said.
And there it was, Claire thought. There was the difference. Normally an answer to Evan would have had more bite to it, a joke attached, at the very least a facial expression.
“Whose party?” Claire asked, as lightly and cheerfully as she could. “Jules’s?”
“I don’t think she’s doing one this year,” Meredith the detached cat said. “It’s somebody else. I don’t think you know her.”
“I know her,” Evan said. “I went to her house once. She’s awesome.”
Meredith manufactured a smile for her brother. It was deliberate and evasive, a professional job.
“What’s your goal?” Mark asked her. He, too, wore a manufactured smile. They could open a factory. The new family business.
?
After Evan left for school Claire went to Meredith’s room. Meredith was sitting on her bed, putting on her golden shoes. How long until it was too cold to wear those sandals? Would that day ever come? Would she wear them in the snow?
“Can we talk?” she asked. “I could drive you.” She stood in the doorway.
“I don’t mind walking,” Meredith said.
“I know,” Claire said. “It’s just . . . your father said something that made me think.”
“There’s a first,” Meredith said.
Claire didn’t know whether to smile or be offended, so she did neither, instead leaned against the doorframe with what she hoped seemed a casual, friendly lean.
“What’s going on at school?” she asked.
“Same as always.”
“I don’t see how that can be.”
“You wouldn’t,” Meredith said, looking at her phone before slipping it into her purse. “So you just have to trust me.”
“It’s not that I don’t trust you. It’s just . . . ”
Just what? Even she didn’t know. What did people do with their children after they were not kidnapped? How were you supposed to help the girl not taken? There was no group for this. No best practices. Did she even need your help? Or did she just need you to leave her alone?
“I have to go,” Meredith said. “I’m going to walk. I meet people on the way. I walk with them.”
“What people?”
“Just people.”
She left then. Feet on the stairs. Door closed, then across the yard like the cat. Never to return?
There was a clothes hanger, overlooked, jutting out from under the bed. Claire picked it up and went to Meredith’s closet, opened it. The inside of the closet door was covered with yellow flyers. MISSING. There must have been forty of them, four across and ten down, like wallpaper, Scotch taped to the door, neatly, so that instead of forty individual posters it seemed like one big poster with forty Lisas. TAKEN FROM CHESTNUT STREET DELI BARN ON WEDNESDAY OCTOBER 8. Claire walked out of Meredith’s room and into the upstairs hallway. She wanted to show this to someone. She could hear the water running in the master bath—Mark in the shower. Evan was long gone, already sitting in a classroom. Who else was there? She went back into Meredith’s room. She realized she was tiptoeing. Gently, as gently as she could, she closed the closet door.
?
Her cell was buzzing in her coat pocket. Until recently she had not carried it with her while she was with patients. But now she felt better having it on her, just the buzz against her hip, not the sound itself, in case something happened. (What could happen that had not happened? Imagine if she had three children! Or four!) She stepped behind the patient’s head and looked at the phone. The number was one she did not recognize, which was more alarming than not. The police. The school. Anyone, anything. She backed out of the room and into the corridor.
“Hello?”
“Is this Claire?”
“It is. Who’s this?”
“It’s Colleen,” the voice said. “Colleen Bellow.”
For a split second she thought Colleen had called to tell her that Lisa had been found. And then instantly she knew that the last thing Colleen Bellow would be doing, if Lisa had been found, was to be on the telephone calling anyone.
“Hello,” Claire said. “How—”
“I know you’re probably at work but I just wanted to tell you that the girls are here with me.”