Instead, she said, “Why don’t you go back outside and miss some more pop flies?”
He looked at her book. “Hey, guess what? George kills Lenny in Of Mice and Men. The Great Gatsby gets shot in his pool. Hamlet dies. Romeo and Juliet die. Christopher’s father killed the dog. The dude at the end of 1984 gets eaten by rats. There’s your reading for the next two years, spoiled.”
“That’s not spoiled,” she said. “Everybody dies. That’s not a spoiler.”
?
“My mother screwed up her life a thousand ways from Sunday,” Lisa said. “And she just keeps screwing it up a thousand ways more. She has this boyfriend, oh my god, he’s so lame. She really knows how to pick ’em.”
“My mother thinks she knows everything,” Meredith said.
“If she knows everything, why are we still sitting in this apartment? If she’s so smart?”
“She just thinks she’s smart,” Meredith said. “She actually knows literally nothing about anything.”
“Mothers think they know things because guess what—they were our age once, too! My mother’s always saying that to me. When she was my age my mother didn’t even have a cell phone. Her internet only worked when it was plugged into the phone. A landline. But because she was once fourteen years old she thinks she knows everything about being fourteen years old.”
“You know who else was fourteen years old once?” Meredith said. “Queen Elizabeth. And Jesus’ mother. And Laura Ingalls Wilder.”
Lisa laughed. “Who the hell is Laura Ingalls Wilder? Did you make that up?”
“No, I didn’t make it up. She wrote all those Little House on the Prairie books.”
“Oh, yeah—wait—that was a TV show, right?”
“Yeah,” Meredith said. “The TV show was based on the books.”
“I used to watch that when I was home sick from school. Oh my god, my mother loved that show.”
“Laura and Mary and Pa and everything,” Meredith said. “And something terrible always happened to somebody. There was always some fire or somebody was trampled by a horse or—”
“Who was the blind one? Mary? Oh my god, my mom loved Mary. She said if Mary could become a teacher then anything was possible. She talked about her like she was a real person.”
“She was a real person,” Meredith said.
“Right, okay, but whatever, you know what I mean. Like she was a real real person. She used to always say . . . ” Lisa trailed off and looked past Meredith, looked right through the shower wall into her own living room, Meredith thought, the way she’d been able not so long ago to sit at the kitchen table and look through the fireplace and see her mother sitting in the living room on the other side.
“They think they’re so smart,” Meredith said. “Mothers. They think they can just . . . what’s wrong?”
A thin line of blood was running from Lisa’s left nostril. It dribbled over her lip and down her chin and onto her blouse. Meredith grabbed the roll of toilet paper, tore off a wad and passed it to Lisa. Lisa tilted her head back against the tile and held the toilet paper to her face.
“What’s wrong?” Meredith asked.
“Don’t know,” Lisa said. She shifted to change her position and kicked Meredith hard in the ball of the ankle, at the point where her legs crossed. “Can you move over a little more?”
“There’s no place to move,” Meredith said. She started to get up. “You want—”
“No!” Lisa said. “Don’t get out. Just, can you move like a tiny bit over that way? There. Okay. Just right there. That’s good.”
Lisa pressed the bloody wad of toilet paper against her nose. The toilet paper was the super-cheap kind, so thin you could literally see through it. It was already falling apart in Lisa’s hand, pieces of it sticking to her upper lip.
“I think it’s slowing down,” she said.
It didn’t look like it was slowing down.
“I think it’s almost stopped.”
Meredith was now sitting on her own feet. After about five minutes she couldn’t even feel them anymore.
16
Claire’s father called to say that he and Nancy wanted to come for Thanksgiving. He promised they wouldn’t be in the way. They didn’t require anything. They didn’t even care if they were fed. They would fly in and stay at a nearby hotel (they always did), just for a couple days, but they’d been worried sick about everyone. They were trying not to intrude, but they wanted to see Meredith. They just wanted to put their eyes on her, her father said. Claire could understand that, couldn’t she?
Yes, she could understand that.
An impossible amount of time had passed. Lisa Bellow was still missing. Meredith Oliver, also among the missing, though her body still occupied the bed down the hall. Leads in both disappearances had gone cold with the weather. Meredith had replaced her gladiator sandals with some equally awful boots that all those girls, Lisa’s friends, wore, and every day Meredith walked out into the cold and Claire watched from the window until her daughter’s body was out of sight.
She saw Colleen Bellow on television, on a national talk show. She wore a thin blouse and the hollow of her throat was a cavern, her shoulders knobs.
“Somebody has to know something,” Colleen said. She must have said it ten times, facing the host, facing the camera, facing the studio audience. She said it like a plea, a prayer.
Yes, Claire thought. Colleen Bellow was right. Somebody knew something. Somebody had always known something. But clearly, six weeks in, that fact hadn’t made any difference. Among those who knew something, choices had been made. Perhaps even promises. Secrets were deepening, taking root. Lives moved forward, days became nights became days, for anyone who knew, for one man, at least, and maybe for a tight web of people around him—a friend, a wife, a mother, a brother. Life continued for all of them, and every day the secret became more stitched in, inextricable—not comfortable, perhaps, but an increasingly acceptable level of discomfort. They did their jobs. They shopped for groceries. They went to the movies. It was life, again, still. So why tell now? Why risk everything? Why, in fact, risk anything? Maybe someone who knew had even watched Colleen Bellow on television, listened to her pleas, thought these things. It was not like telling could help. It was not like telling could bring the girl back. It was not like telling could change what, however regrettably, had happened to her.