Meredith could not explain it, but even if she could have, she would not have wanted to. Who would she tell? Evan? Becca? Her mother, this woman sitting silently beside her in the minivan, this woman who seemed to believe in nothing? What would she even say? Surely, anyone she told would think she was crazy. Maybe she was crazy. But more than that, Meredith knew that if she revealed this place to anyone, she would risk destroying it. And if it were destroyed, how was she supposed to save Lisa?
She looked out the van window. She sort of liked this street, Lisa’s street. Her own street, that she’d lived on her whole life, was geometrically pleasing and user friendly, rectangular lawns that were ideal for lawn tractors, impossibly smooth sidewalks for no-bounce scootering, wide and straight for as far as the eye could see, all of it utterly predictable. Lisa’s street wound around haphazardly, following the path of a little rocky creek. There were no sidewalks. Meredith liked that most of the driveways were bridges, if only for a few yards. She imagined Lisa and the other kids in the neighborhood had played under those bridges when they were younger, building dams in the creek, constructing forts with stones and branches, hiding as cars rumbled overhead, fathers coming home from work—not her father, not Lisa’s father, but some other neighborhood father who might come out with Popsicles for the whole gang, toss them into the gulch, to their waiting hands, and then go back to his beer.
?
“I never even saw a picture of my father,” Lisa said, “until I was like ten. Then I found my mom’s high school yearbook in my grandparents’ house. I was sitting on the couch flipping through it and my grandfather sits down next to me and points to this guy and goes, ‘You know who that is?’ And then he got a funny look, like he totally realized he was doing something he shouldn’t. And I go, ‘No,’ and he whispers, ‘That’s your dad.’ Then he looks around the room to see if anybody’s there, and then he goes, ‘shhhhhhhhh.’”
Lisa put her finger to her lips and arched her eyebrows comically.
“Shhhhhhh. Like, who’s he shushing, right? Like he just told the person that the shush was for. He’s actually mentally ill, my grandfather. You know, diagnosed or whatever. By a doctor.”
They were in the bathtub. It was really Lisa who had chosen the spot, proclaimed it their own. Even when the couch was free, even though the couch was warmer and obviously twenty times more comfortable, even though on the couch they could watch TV, even though on the couch there was a slice of sunlight in the afternoons and you could see the outside, or at least a sliver of it, through the gap in the curtains. Even with all that, Lisa wanted to sit in the bathtub, so that’s where they sat and talked. Of course Lisa always sat on the end without the hardware, the smooth end where she could lie back unimpeded, her legs stretched out in front of her. Meredith got the bad end, though she’d found a position that wasn’t awful, scooched in the corner and her arm draped over the rusty spigot. She was stretched out as well, her legs entangled with Lisa’s, so that sometimes, if she just looked at the four knees, Meredith forgot whose legs were whose, because they were both wearing black leggings.
“Did you ever tell your mom?” Meredith asked. “About seeing the picture?”
“Are you kidding? No way. But I took the yearbook. It’s on the bookshelf in my room and she’s never even noticed it.”
“You could look him up,” Meredith said. “You could google him. If you know his name?”
“Why would I want to look him up?” Lisa said. “It’s not like he ever looked me up.”
Meredith could not imagine having a father out there, knowing his name and even what he looked like but never having seen him in person. Wouldn’t you wonder about him? Wouldn’t you wonder if he laughed like you, or hated cantaloupe like you, or couldn’t hold a tune like you? Wouldn’t you wonder if he wondered about you?
“Do you ever miss him?” she asked Lisa.
“What’s to miss?” Lisa asked. She was inspecting her thumbnail. Some of her perfectly painted nails were chipped. From a struggle? Meredith pushed this thought away.
“He could be anywhere,” she said.
“Sure,” Lisa said. “But I probably wouldn’t even recognize him if he walked up to me. He probably doesn’t have that cheesy yearbook smile anymore.”
But wouldn’t you always, always be looking for him? Meredith thought. At the mall or the movies or walking down the street? Maybe Lisa’s father’s picture was in the police book, too, in addition to the yearbook. Maybe he was a suspect in something. Maybe, due to his prolonged absence, he was a suspect in everything.
?
Evan was in the kitchen eating a banana in that way he had of eating a banana. He peeled the whole thing, broke the banana in two, and then put one half entirely in his mouth, swallowed it seemingly without a single chew, and then as soon as his throat was clear did the same thing with the other half. It was like one of those YouTube videos of a snake swallowing a squirrel whole, where you could see the outline of the squirrel as it slid down the snake’s gullet. Did a snake even have a gullet? Wasn’t a snake all gullet? In any case, that was how Evan was eating his banana, leaning against the kitchen counter, his elbow resting on the microwave, and that was how she knew he was playing baseball again. He hadn’t eaten a banana like that in six months. Her mother went upstairs to change; she could hear her father watching television in the family room.
“So,” Evan said, swallowing his squirrel. “Hanging out with the cool kids, eh?”
“How do you even know that?”
“Dad told me. Mom told him. Is there a secret handshake? Or whatever girls do? A secret giggle?”
“We’re doing a project,” she said. “A service project. We’re trying to help her mom. Who cares anyway, who I hang out with?”
“You know what people are saying now? They’re saying the whole thing was a setup. She and some guy she met online faked the whole thing. Made it look like a kidnapping.”
“That’s not new,” she said. “Some people said that from the beginning.”
“Well, now lots of people are saying it. It makes some sense. Disappearing without a trace? And no ransom note . . . ”
“That’s stupid,” she said. “Ransom notes are in movies. This isn’t a movie.”
He shrugged. “I’m just sayin’. It’s a theory.”
“What about the sandwich guy?”
“How hurt was that guy, really? Bump on the head. Just enough to make it look like a real crime.”
“She was crying,” Meredith said. “She was scared.”
“Maybe,” he said. “Or maybe she was acting.”
He was in his sweats and black Under Armour shirt. The official uniform of breaking your mother’s heart. There was a paunch in the Under Armour, courtesy of months of Chester Cheetah and the family room couch. But he still looked about three-quarters like his old self.
“Are you playing baseball?” she asked. She was not interested in hearing any more of his theories.
“Maybe,” he said. “Maybe not.”
“Mom’ll kill you.”
“I’m seventeen years old.”