MISSING. She looked at those yellow flyers on Meredith’s closet door almost every morning, and once in the middle of the night while Meredith slept behind her and the tolerant cat rolled its back against her shins. She kept hoping she would open the closet to find them gone. 5'5", 110 LBS. BLOND HAIR. HAZEL EYES. Claire desperately wanted to take them down, get them out of Meredith’s room. She could hardly bear the thought of Meredith looking at them every morning, every night, like a lover or a stalker or . . . or a what? She didn’t even know. She just knew that she wanted to hide them away, the way they’d hidden Evan’s bats after his first surgery. She wanted to zip them up in that bat bag in the corner of the garage, tuck them away in the place that held all the things you couldn’t bear to look at, all the things you couldn’t bear to love anymore. But that had failed. Evan had found the bats, found his way back to them, even with only one eye.
The van pulled into the driveway and Mark got out. He swung the keys around his finger and came and sat with her on the swing.
“Busy?”
“Only four or five,” she said. “Two groups. Three Princess Elsas. How was the party?”
“I only stayed for the Jell-O shots,” he said.
“Did you see any of her friends? Was Kristy there?”
“No idea. They all looked exactly alike. Same makeup. Bunch of zombies standing around in the yard.”
“High school kids, too?”
“Seriously, no idea. Maybe you should have gone.”
“I’ll pick her up,” she said.
He rested his hand on hers, between them on the swing, and she looked at him. He was wearing his dumb puffy white sweater that was about nine sizes too big. He smiled.
“Nice to see you,” he said.
She might have cried right then had the voices not reached them from a couple houses down, kids whooping. A moment later a battalion of Stormtroopers appeared on the sidewalk, marching in their direction, led by an Irish setter.
“You want a beer?” he asked.
“I want ten beers,” she said.
“Let’s start with one.”
?
Two hours later it was 10:15 and they were on their backs in the front yard, looking up at the stars. The last of the trick-or-treaters had been gone for hours. She’d had five beers and at least as many Kit Kats. Her only solace was that she now knew she could still enjoy getting drunk with her husband and that she genuinely no longer wanted to kill him.
“Go inside,” she said. “Go to bed. You don’t want to fall asleep out here.”
He was notorious for this, going from pleasantly drunk to sound asleep in a matter of seconds. In dental school he’d fallen asleep on the couch of every single person they knew, often while the party continued around him, and on two embarrassing occasions he had fallen asleep with his head on the table at a restaurant.
“Two-minute warning,” she said, because she knew all the signs. “Trust me. You don’t want to sleep in the yard. For so many reasons.”
“I really don’t,” he said. “I really, really don’t. But you—”
“I’m fine,” she said. “I still have a little time. I’ll have some coffee. I’ll be fine.”
“Are you sure? I could call a cab or something.”
“Terrific. We’ll show up to pick her up in a taxi. She’d love that.”
They had a deal, an unwritten agreement, more binding than their marriage vows. They were not reckless people. They did not do reckless things. The list was short but absolute. Among the terms: they did not drink and drive.
“Okay,” he said. He stood unsteadily in the grass, took a few deep breaths. “Okay. I can do this. I’m going to bed. I’m going to walk into the house and go to bed.”
“In the bed,” she said. “You’re going to bed in the bed. Our bed.”
“In our bed,” he confirmed. “But wake me up if you don’t think you can drive. Seriously. Wake me up and we’ll figure something out.”
“It’s fine,” she said. “I’m fine.”
Which was almost the case, a cup of coffee later. She sat behind the wheel of the minivan and took a long deep breath. She was fine. She backed out of the driveway. The thing was, she was tired. There was no law against driving tired, although probably there should be. She had read once that more accidents were caused by tired sober adults than drunk teenagers. What about drunk mothers? Not that she was a drunk mother. She was, at the very most, a mother who had been tipsy a half hour before but was now fine but tired. Better than Evan, surely, and they let him drive.
She put a hand over her left eye. He might be out driving right now. He might be driving Sam’s car. She might crash into him at the next intersection. He’d get out of the car and say, “What the hell, Mom?” And she, still with her hand over her eye, would say, “I was just trying to understand how you see the world. Is that so wrong?”
It was possible that she smelled a little bit like beer. Or maybe it was just the car that smelled like beer, which might have been worse. On a Friday Halloween there would be roadblocks everywhere. It was nearly as bad as New Year’s or the Fourth of July. An officer would walk slowly up to the van and she’d roll down the window and the stench of beer would erupt from the interior. And the cop would say—she’d seen this many times on TV, so she knew—“Ma’am, would you please step out of the car?” and she would say, would have to say, “My daughter was almost kidnapped earlier this month.”
She had driven herself to the Deli Barn by the middle school. She was sitting in the parking lot of the Deli Barn. She had come here for coffee, without thinking about it, or at least without being aware of thinking about it. She had stopped here before for coffee once or twice, and for sandwiches many times, but of course all that was before everything, and of course she had not forgotten, but rather used “forgetting” as an excuse to finally come here, a place she had avoided even driving by in the last weeks.
There were three teenagers sitting at one of the tables, and a man and a little boy who was dressed as Buzz Lightyear (Evan had worshipped Buzz Lightyear) and when she walked through the door some bells jingled and the little boy laughed, although probably not at the bells.
There was a huge bearded guy behind the counter with bulging, tattooed muscles. He was not the injured sandwich farmer, whose picture she knew from the newspaper. This guy was in his thirties and looked like he could snap a masked kidnapper in two. Perhaps he had been hired expressly for this purpose.
“Do you have coffee?” she asked.
This was it. This was the spot. Claire was seized with the urge to take off her shoes. Socks, too. She wanted to be barefoot on this floor, on this cold and sticky slab. This was where her daughter had lain down, her cheek flattened against the chill, where Lisa had lain down, where the two girls had stared at each other before one was taken. This was where her daughter had believed she was going to die, had thought . . . what? Claire had never asked. How could you ask? Wouldn’t it be cruel to ask, to force her to relive that moment, rethink those thoughts?
“Black, yes,” she said.
Had the girls said anything at all, in those minutes (how many? three? four?) leading up to Lisa’s abduction? She had heard Meredith’s story of that afternoon repeated to the police at least a half dozen times, and there had never been mention of any talking, though surely even if they had not spoken, something, some message, some understanding, must have passed in that narrow gap between them, those few inches that separated their faces, that space—this space she inhabited now—that a thousand ankles had breached since. A look. A gesture.
She was standing where the man had stood. She looked down at her own feet, saw the floor from his perspective, imagined this thought: I will pick something up from this floor. I will pick something.