“No.”
“Do you like anyone? Do you have a secret crush?”
She could tell that Mrs. Bellow really, really wanted her to have a secret crush. She thought of what Lisa had said about the boy in the high school yearbook, the boy who became her father. Had that boy been her mother’s secret crush once? Had she imagined their wedding, their honeymoon, their babies? Did the high school Mrs. Bellow imagine the way the boy would touch her? Meredith thought of Steven Overbeck, his watches, how his fingers had felt on the inside of her wrist, how Becca had laughed at him at the party. One day Steven Overbeck would be a boy in the high school yearbook. Would she point to his picture?
“Lisa has a boyfriend,” Mrs. Bellow said. “Do you know him?”
“I’ve met him,” Meredith said.
“I’ve had pretty bad luck with men,” Mrs. Bellow said. “That’s the truth. A couple years ago I dated this guy, a real creep. He called me last week and said he’d heard about Lisa. I didn’t like the way he said it. It wasn’t like he was calling to say he was sorry. It was like there was some other reason he wanted me to know that he knew. I called the police and they went to his house. They said they didn’t see anything unusual. They said he just had a house full of cats.” She paused. “Don’t you think that’s unusual? A house full of cats? It’s not like he’s an old lady.”
“Yeah, that’s kinda weird.”
“Anyway. I have a great guy now. Knock wood he doesn’t take off. I don’t think he will. Of course, I’ve thought that before.” She half-smiled at Meredith, and Meredith understood why Lisa hated her, and also why Lisa always brought her a sandwich from Deli Barn and left it in the fridge.
“I have a lot of homework to do,” Meredith said.
Mrs. Bellow started driving, but instead of going straight at the stop sign she turned left. Meredith didn’t say anything. She wasn’t sure if Mrs. Bellow was lost or if she was just taking a different way or . . . or what?
“Peter,” she said. “That’s the man I’m seeing.” She sneaked a look over at Meredith. “He thinks Lisa might have run away. He thinks maybe she went to one of those places we always talked about going. Spain. Brazil.”
“Why would she do that?”
“I don’t know. I mean, I do know. She wouldn’t. She wouldn’t do that.”
“Some other people are saying that, too,” Meredith said. “But I don’t think so either.”
“Of course not,” Mrs. Bellow said. “We know she wouldn’t do that. The police asked me about it. They said they had to ask me about it because she did it once before, ran off. Just for like twenty-four hours, but I called the police, so they have a record of it. She was twelve. It was when I was with that man, the one with the cats. I got up in the morning and her bed was empty.”
“Where was she?”
“A friend’s house. In the city. Some girl I didn’t even know. Some girl she’d met online. She told the girl’s parents that I knew where she was, but I didn’t. And she knew I didn’t. She stayed there the whole day, too. A whole night and a whole day. She was trying to scare me. She was twelve. She was only twelve then. She wasn’t very smart.”
“But you don’t think she ran away, right?” Meredith asked. “I mean this time.”
“I know she didn’t. Because when she came back that time, and she saw how I was—I was a hot mess—she promised she would never do it again. And she wouldn’t. She wouldn’t do that to me. She wouldn’t do that to me because she knows that I would die without her. So she wouldn’t do it.”
“I don’t think she would either,” Meredith said. She looked out the window. A group of four little kids, maybe kindergarteners, were walking in a line down the sidewalk, a mother and a beagle bringing up the rear.
“You know her,” Mrs. Bellow said. “That’s not who she is. I’m not saying I’m perfect. I’m not saying she’s perfect. I’m just saying that’s not who she is.”
?
The next day when she came home from school the house was quiet and Meredith thought she was alone. She went up to her room to change and from the window saw Evan in the backyard. He was throwing a ball underhanded up in the air and then trying to catch it. It was a game a four-year-old might play. He wasn’t even throwing it that high—maybe ten or fifteen feet—but she could tell he was trying to spin it so that it didn’t drop straight into his glove. She stood in the corner of the window and peered through the curtain so he wouldn’t see her. He missed three in a row before he caught one. After the catch, he threw the ball up only about five feet, a couple times, and one he caught and one glanced off the heel of his glove. Then he threw one really high, circled under it, looking confident.
The ball landed about six feet to his left.
She stepped away from the window. She changed her clothes and sat down on her bed and started reading. They were finishing All Quiet on the Western Front. They’d been reading it all fall, it seemed. The teacher kept reminding them how young the boy was—only nineteen—but that didn’t seem so young to Meredith.
Evan stuck his head into her room.
“He dies,” he said.
“You mentioned that already,” she said. She closed the book but kept her finger in it. “What’re you doing?”
“Nothing. Working out.”
“How’s it going?”
“Good,” he said. “It’s going good.”
“Good,” she said.
He walked to the window. He had to know she had seen him now. He turned.
“How’re the cool kids?”
“They’re fine.”
“You blowing off the not-cool kids?” He was pissed. He was pissed because she had seen him miss ball after ball.
“It’s not like that,” she said. “I—”
“What’s it like, then?”
“It’s like I have a life that’s none of your business. Just like you have a life that is none of my business. You don’t see me telling you what to do.”
“You want to tell me what to do?”
“No,” she said. “Not particularly.”
“Sure you do,” he said. “Go ahead. Go on and tell me. You think you know what I should do? You think I can’t catch pop flies? Think I should hang it up? Think I should apply to college and just forget about baseball? Or maybe I could be the trainer, or the equipment guy. Maybe I could put all the batting helmets into the dugout cubbies.”
“I never said any of that.”
“What is it with you? Suddenly Lisa Bellow is like your BFF just because you were almost kidnapped with her? Suddenly you’re tight with her friends and chilling at her house and drinking beer with her lax bro.”
“I didn’t drink beer with her lax bro.”
He shrugged, as if to say that was not how he had heard it.
“You don’t know anything about it,” she said. She wanted to say, “You know who was drunk that night? Mom.” She wanted to say, “The lax bro is a total asshole who didn’t deserve Lisa.” She wanted to say, “I am drowning, I am drowning, I am drowning in a bathtub.”