“Her dad’s not in the picture,” Colleen said. “Just her and me. Always has been.”
Claire tried to imagine what life would be like if it were just her and Meredith. No Mark. No Evan. She couldn’t even begin to get her head around it. But then she and Meredith were very different people than Colleen and Lisa Bellow. She and Meredith were . . . well, they were different people. That was all.
“My boyfriend has two kids,” Colleen said. “They come on weekends. We got out a bunch of Lisa’s old stuff, brought it up from the basement. I thought I was saving it for grandchildren. Now I have a boyfriend with two little kids. Lisa’s really good with them, especially Cara. She’s seven. Of course she thinks Lisa’s a queen.”
All the children, all the little girls, aspiring to be Lisa Bellow. More laughter from upstairs. Should they be laughing? They should. What were the options? Sit around Lisa’s room and cry, or mope, or worry? It was a good thing, good for this woman sitting across from her, who could probably almost hear her daughter’s laugh in the mix.
“Of course they don’t understand any of this,” Colleen said. “How do you explain to a seven-year-old that something like this could happen, that someone can just—”
“I don’t know,” Claire said. “It’s inexplicable. It is. Is there any? Have you—”
“You know they found her phone,” Colleen said. “Cracked on the side of the road. Thrown out the car window, they think. Last text a little before three, to Becca. She said she was going to the Deli Barn. And that was it. The police came and took our computer, took my phone, took her old iPod—she hasn’t touched it in years. They said they needed to check everything. So they’re checking everything. They talked to my boyfriend. They interviewed him at the police station. They asked him where he was at the time of the robbery. Can you imagine?”
“That’s terrible,” Claire said, thinking that, if she were the police, she would have interviewed the boyfriend, too. Those were the stories you heard, the creepy boyfriend, the teenage daughter. Maybe he looked at them sometimes—the mother and the daughter—and was not able to tell them apart, with their matching hair and clothes, their matching bodies. How old was Colleen Bellow? If she’d had Lisa at eighteen or nineteen . . .
“Peter almost cried, he couldn’t believe it. They interrogated him, like he was a suspect.”
“I guess they have to ask everyone.”
“They don’t know anything,” Colleen said. “Fifteen days and nobody knows anything.”
“Someone has to,” Claire said. “Someone has to know someone who—”
“I’d kill him with my own hands,” Colleen said. She set her coffee down on the table; her hands looked steady but Claire noticed that the coffee itself was trembling. The girls had turned on a song upstairs but she couldn’t hear the words, only the beat, a dull, music-less thunking. “I told Peter that, and you know what he said? He said that kind of thinking didn’t help. Like I could just turn it off because it’s not helping anyone. Like that’s the point. Like helping is the point of thinking.”
“It’s . . . ” Claire desperately search for a word. “ . . . hard. So hard. I’m sure it’s . . . ”
“I can’t turn it off. No matter what I do, I can’t turn it off. All I can think is, if I ever have the chance, I’ll kill that piece of shit with my bare hands. Sometimes that’s the only way I can go to sleep, you know?” Colleen looked at her hands lying in her lap. Her nails were painted but Claire could see there were little chips in the paint. “I imagine my hands around his neck. I imagine that until I fall asleep. It’s the last thing I see.”
Claire saw that her own coffee was trembling. “I understand.”
Colleen looked up at her abruptly. “I don’t think you do.”
There were winners and there were losers. There were people in big houses and people in small houses. There were people who drew X’s through entire sections of school forms and people who had a name for every box. There were people whom others spoke to with respect, and people who others looked past. There were people who had choices and people who did not. Why was this, again?
A rush of voices, then footsteps. She tried to compose herself. Two girls she’d never seen before appeared at the foot of the stairs, then Meredith, then another girl she recognized from a swimming lesson carpool years before—Amanda something. Meredith blushed when she saw her and dropped her gaze to the floor. She was obviously embarrassed Claire was here, as if she’d shown up uninvited, as if coming here was a choice.
“Hey, we were talking,” said one of the girls she didn’t know. “And we were thinking we could maybe make some sort of bracelet that people could wear, something that Lisa would have picked, instead of just those green ribbons.”
“Not that the ribbons aren’t nice,” the Amanda girl said. “But this could be like something people could keep.”
“A keepsake,” another of the girls said. “Silver. Like the one she always wore. Wears.”
Meredith was still looking at the floor.
“Sounds great,” Colleen said.
“We’re going to look online and see if we can find a place that will do them cheap. Like silver plated or whatever.”
“Perfect,” Colleen said. “You girls want more soda? Plenty in the fridge.”
The girls filed into the kitchen. Claire stood up and through the glass doors of the fireplace watched them sit around the kitchen table filling up their glasses. Meredith smiled and laughed at something one of the other girls said, then said something herself, and they all laughed.
“I wait every second for the phone to ring,” Colleen said quietly behind her. “It’s like holding in a scream. It’s horrible if it rings and it’s horrible if it doesn’t ring. It’s like the rest of everything is on the other side of the ring.”
Claire turned to her. There were winners and there were losers. There were people with sterling silver bracelets and people whose silver flaked away and left their wrists stained green. There were people whose children were taken. And there were people whose children were spared.
?
Once, many years before, a police detective had called them at the office, requesting the dental records of a man whom they suspected had died in a house fire in the city. The police were merely confirming the man’s identity—the house was rented in his name, and his car was parked on the street out front. But there were suspicious circumstances surrounding the fire, and they wanted to make sure that the corpse they had found, little more than bones and teeth in the rubble, according to the detective, was in fact the man they thought it was.
“Shall I look at them?” she’d asked the detective over the phone.