“Okay . . . ” Claire said, carefully, because it sounded like something a crazy person might say, and the fact that Colleen had called an almost total stranger to say it made it seem even crazier. “So . . . what girls?” she ventured.
“Meredith and some of Lisa’s other friends. The whole gang. They came over after school. They’re hanging out, having a snack. They just got here but I thought you’d want to know. I’m sure you worry if . . . ”
Claire was trying to process this. She glanced at her watch. It was 3:45. Meredith was supposed to go straight home after school, where Evan would be waiting to meet her. She had been walking for the past week, had told them she did not want to be picked up anymore. “I like the walk,” she had said. “It’s peaceful.” And so she and Mark had relented (again), returned to their old routine—return to basic rules!—where they got home around 5:15 and the kids were doing homework or watching TV or staring into their phones.
“I thought you might want to come by and have a coffee,” Colleen said. “On your way home. You could pick her up.”
“Um, yes. Sure.”
Mark was walking down the corridor toward her. He slowed, raised his eyebrows in question. She nodded—all was well. Well, well-ish. No one was dead or maimed or abducted.
“Yes. Okay. Um, yes. I’ll come.”
She realized how she must have sounded, wanted to explain that she wasn’t resistant, only caught off guard.
“If this isn’t a good time . . . ”
“No, no,” Claire said. “I’ll be leaving the office in a bit. Give me your address. I can come. I—that would, yes, that would be lovely.”
Had she really said that? Lovely? Had she ever said to anyone, about anything, that would be lovely? Wasn’t that what you said at a funeral—it was a lovely service, that was a lovely tribute, they did a lovely job with your mother’s hair. (Her mother had so little left, such a modest amount to work with, that the funeral home had suggested a wig when her father said he wanted the casket open, and she had said, “Dad, no, come on, no wig, she wouldn’t want that,” and so they had styled her hair as best they could, and when she saw it she’d thought, okay, maybe a wig would have been the way to go; maybe these people know what they’re talking about; maybe her mother was dead and so who cared what she would have wanted, and/or maybe what she would have wanted was for her hair to not look so thin and sad that everyone approaching the casket did a little double-take because except for the hair her mother looked as spectacular as a dead body could look, if absolutely nothing like herself. But it was too late by that point, and of course everyone was lovely about it.)
“I’ll be there soon,” she said to Colleen.
?
She had always liked the neighborhood. They had looked at a house here, twenty years before, and she had loved the way the streets wound around themselves and how that made the houses near the center seem so far from the main road when they were really just nestled into the middle of three or four spiraling streets. There was a creek, too, which explained the wind of the street, because it followed the wind of the creek, and most of the driveways were partly little bridges over the shallow creek. The houses themselves were small, which is why she and Mark had looked elsewhere. They had lived in an apartment for a year while they’d set up their practice. Once the practice had taken off, they could already afford something bigger than what the cozy street offered, even though it was still just the two of them.
The Bellows’ house was a split-level—many of them in the neighborhood were—and looked its age in every other way as well. Colleen Bellow opened the front door and Claire was accosted by two twirly-tailed black Labradors.
“Let me put them out back,” Colleen said, and she was gone for a moment and Claire looked around. There was a two-sided fireplace that connected the living room and the kitchen, and a little tunnel under it where Claire knew Lisa must have played as a toddler, if they’d lived here then.
At least she had the dogs, Claire thought, listening to them bark in protest as they were shut outside. At least there was that. “Stop now,” Colleen was saying in the manner of people who regularly talked to dogs. “Stop it. You’re fine. You’re both fine.”
Did the dogs know Lisa was gone? Did they sleep in her room? Did they nap by the front door, waiting, their ears perking every time an acorn hit the front walk?
“I hope I didn’t bother you,” Colleen said, coming back into the living room. “Calling you at work. I just thought you might like to know she was here.”
“Of course,” Claire said. “Where . . . ?”
“They’re in Lisa’s room. They wanted to be up there, I could tell. They said they’d stay down here with me and I said, go on up. When they’re up there I can imagine she’s there, too. So that’s something.”
“Yes,” Claire said. “I would think. I think. Yes.”
There were two full cups of coffee already sitting on the coffee table. Claire sat down on the chair, despite it being farther away from the table than the couch, so that Colleen would not be able to sit directly next to her. (It was settled: she was a horrible person.) She picked up one of the cups and took a sip—lukewarm—and then rested it on her knee.
“I’m sure this hasn’t been easy on Meredith,” Colleen said. “It’s good that she’s at school and with friends. Is she well?”
“Mostly,” Claire said. “She had a little bug right when she went back. We don’t know—it may have been her nerves. She was out a couple days. But since then she’s been okay.”
“Lisa used to get sick like that,” Colleen said. “First day of school, every year, all through elementary school. She was wound up so tight.”
“That’s hard,” Claire said. “It’s hard to know . . . hard to know what to do for them.”
Laughter from upstairs. Footsteps, a creaking floor. Claire tried to imagine Lisa’s room. The room of a princess surely, a canopy bed—oh, how she’d wanted one herself, at ten—and lots of frilly pillows, posters of boys and kittens, a mirror lined with pictures of grinning friends with arms around one another. She doubted there were any battling animals, preparing for offensives along the base of the desk. How had Meredith wound up here? Claire was dying to hear the story, get the sequence of events that had led her to this house, and at the same moment she was sure that she would not, that Meredith would have nothing to offer but monosyllables.
“It’s nice to have people in the house,” Colleen said. “It’s been really quiet. I mean, some neighbors have stopped by.” She snorted a laugh. “The fridge is full, you know? But no one stays long. I might go back to work just so I can talk to people.”
“It’s good they’ve given you the time off,” Claire said.
“I’ve used up all my vacation time,” Colleen said. “Like for the next five years. Vacation, right?” She gestured around the room.
“Do you have family in town? Does Lisa . . . ?”