It was true that sometimes Claire went months without thinking of that man all those years ago, her escape hatch, and then other times she thought of him almost every day. She knew the danger zones—god knows they were clearly marked—and recognized all the signs of her mounting vulnerability. She knew she was in a dangerous place now. What fool would not want the escape hatch at this moment?
She was mature enough to acknowledge that the man himself did not even exist anymore. It had been twenty years and she could hardly conjure his face. He wasn’t on any social media—this meant he hadn’t changed. Unless it meant he was dead. But more than likely he just turned his nose up at that kind of thing. More than likely he was tending to Syrian refugees. But no, there she went again, creating a hero from the sketchy outline in her head. Maybe he was just being a selfish bastard somewhere. He’d had that capacity, that was for sure. Maybe that had been part of his appeal. Mark had never been a selfish bastard. He wouldn’t have known how to be a selfish bastard if his life depended on it. She hated that about him.
?
“We’re coming for you at ten o’clock,” she said to Meredith during dinner.
Meredith set down her fork. “Ten o’clock? Seriously? That’s when most people will be getting there.”
“Probably true,” Evan said.
Evan was now her number-one enemy, if one had to think in those terms, looking around the kitchen table at the three people she loved most in the world.
“I don’t even know this girl,” Claire said. “Who is it again?”
“Abby Luckett. And just because you don’t know her doesn’t mean she’s bad,” Meredith said. “All it means is you don’t know her.”
You were held at gunpoint twenty-three days ago, Claire thought. You were lying on the floor of a restaurant and a man had a gun pointed at your head. Do not talk to me as if that didn’t happen. Do not talk to me like a typical snotty teenager.
“How about ten thirty?” Mark said.
“Whatever,” Meredith said. She lifted her fork as if it weighed seventy-five pounds, then began morosely stirring her vegetables. “Maybe I won’t even go. I’ll just . . . whatever.”
Claire watched Mark fall headlong into this obvious trap and did nothing to prevent it, which was, in a way, falling headlong into the trap herself.
“We didn’t say we don’t want you to go,” Mark said. “We want you to go, honey. We think it’s great that you’re going. We just don’t want you to stay super late. What time does the party end?”
“It’s not a birthday party, Dad. There is not an end time. It’s just over when everybody leaves, which will probably be at like midnight.”
“Eleven,” he said. “We’ll come at eleven.”
“It’s a good offer,” Evan said. “At thirteen. It’s a fair offer. I’d take that offer.”
“Where are you going?” Claire asked him.
“Nowhere,” he said. “Just to Zack’s or whatever.”
Zack was the shortstop.
“Are you driving?”
Night driving was trickier than day driving. She knew this. Headlights complicated matters. And on Halloween, kids darting out from between cars, kids in dark costumes, Darth Vaders, Hogwarts robes. It was like a shooting gallery with cars as bullets, kids as ducks, difficult enough for someone with perfect eyesight.
“I’m taking the stilts,” Evan said. “And there’s nothing you can do to stop me.”
“I’m serious,” Claire said.
“Sam’s picking me up,” Evan said. “We may just crash at Zack’s.”
Sam was the first baseman. The shortstop and the first baseman and the catcher. She hadn’t seen those boys in—how long? Weeks? Or was it months? She should be happy for her son. She was happy for him. She was.
“What’re you guys going to do?” she asked.
“We’re gonna play baseball in the dark,” he said. “We’re gonna get drunk and throw baseballs at each other’s heads. Stuff like that.”
“Just as long as you have a plan,” Mark said.
?
Claire sat on the front porch swing with her giant cauldron of candy. It was a mild night, clear and moonlit, ideal Halloween weather. So where was everyone? Had she inflated the numbers from the past, swept up in her nostalgia, or were there actually fewer trick-or-treaters this year? Had the suburbs been spooked? Maybe it was in bad taste to trick-or-treat when girls were being taken from Deli Barns. Maybe it was wrong to pretend to be scary, or scared.
Lisa Bellow had fallen off the edge of the news. For the first week she had been the top story, of course, every night, when a break seemed imminent. Then for the ten days following, they recapped, because there were no updates. Each story began, “Police continue to follow leads in the abduction of—” but there was never any new information. “Officials encourage anyone with knowledge,” etc., etc., etc. The same picture of Lisa, a new plea from Colleen, a shot of the Deli Barn, the sign on the middle school lawn studded with green ribbons. It was the same story now, every night on the 11:00 local news, every morning when she lay in bed and read the news on her iPhone, every sentence of non-news punctuated by a ping from the garage.
Of course there were glimmers of hope, because there was always an exception to the rule, always someone who beat the odds, always some incredible story shouted as far and wide as the internet could reach. (And wasn’t this why Evan believed he could play baseball? Because there was always someone who did something extraordinary, and that was always the someone you heard about? Because who wanted to make a TV movie about all the people who tried to do something extraordinary and failed?) There was the girl who had been kidnapped out of her bedroom and been missing for how long? A year? And then one day on the street someone spots her and she’s reunited with her family and yes, god knows it was awful, terrifying, life altering, but now she’s home safe. And those women in Ohio, kept in a house for a decade or more, long enough to have children fathered by their rapist, somehow kept there by one single maniac until the day they finally believed they could kick the door out and make a run for it? These were the stories you had in the back of your mind. No one mentioned them. To mention them would risk a jinx. But everyone knew them, and surely these were the stories Colleen Bellow reminded herself of every day so that she could get out of bed.