“Is your sister staying in school?”
Becca shrugged. “She says she is. I guess there’s a whole group of them. They have like a little club. They do their homework while they breastfeed or whatever.”
“I guess that’s nice,” Meredith said. “Who keeps texting you?”
“Oh, it’s Lisa’s mom,” Becca said. “She keeps asking me to come over for hot chocolate. She texts me like five times every night. Sometimes I go. It’s only like two blocks from here. But sometimes I pretend I didn’t get the text. I know—I’m shit.”
“She texts you every night?”
“Well, lots of nights. I go over there and just talk for like a half hour and then I say I have homework or whatever. Which is true.”
“What do you talk about?”
“She asks me about school and friends and stuff,” Becca said. “Sometimes we talk about Lisa, but mostly about other people, like who’s going out with who or whatever.”
“Maybe we should go,” Meredith said. She pictured Mrs. Bellow’s hopeful smile from the car window, imagined her at the kitchen table with her phone, texting Becca, then texting her again, then again. “It’s okay with me.”
“Are you sure?”
“Sure,” Meredith said. “I don’t mind.”
?
Mrs. Bellow met them at the door with the mugs of hot chocolate. They sat at the kitchen table and talked about Thanksgiving. There was a fire crackling in the fireplace, and the dogs were splayed on their sides in the open space under the fireplace, the tunnel that connected the living room to the kitchen. It was the perfect little cave, and Meredith knew Lisa must have spent countless hours under there when she was little. If she’d been Lisa’s friend they would have had a fort there and draped blankets over the side so the adults couldn’t see in.
“The kids were here,” Mrs. Bellow said. “With Peter. All they ate was mashed potatoes. We have so much turkey left. Do you guys want turkey?”
“No thanks,” Meredith said. “I actually just had some earlier.”
“We ordered way too much,” Mrs. Bellow said. “I’m just going to freeze it and save it for Christmas.”
“That makes sense,” Becca said.
There was snow falling outside. It was bitter cold. Winter had arrived abruptly—but didn’t it always seem that way, like one day it was just suddenly winter? Because it was, Meredith thought. Because there wasn’t supposed to be any space between one thing and the thing that was next to it.
“You want to go up to Lisa’s room?” Mrs. Bellow asked. “I don’t mind if you do.”
“That’s okay,” Becca said. “I told my mom we’d be back soon.”
“You should just go up for a minute,” she said. “I did a little work on it. A little redecorating. Got some cool frames. Put some pictures up. That kind of thing.”
“Okay,” Becca said. “Sure.”
They went upstairs, leaving Mrs. Bellow in the kitchen. Lisa’s room looked almost the same as the last time Meredith had seen it except that most of the pictures that had previously been Scotch taped to her mirror were now in sleek silver frames on the desk and the dresser. There was a framed photo that Mrs. Bellow had taken on her phone the afternoon Meredith had first come here, with all the other girls, the day her mother showed up. In the photo the four girls were sitting at the kitchen table and Amanda was absurdly making a peace sign. Then there was a framed photo collage with seven or eight pictures of friends and family, and included among the images was Meredith’s seventh-grade school photo which she could only imagine Mrs. Bellow had photocopied from the yearbook, because there was no reason why Lisa would ever have had a picture of her.
“Maybe we should call somebody,” Becca whispered. “Like one of her friends.”
“Is your mom her friend?”
“Not really. I mean, she knows her. But I wouldn’t say she’s really her friend. But this is weird.” She nodded to the xeroxed photo of Meredith in the photo collage. “No offense, but you know, that’s just weird. Like if Lisa ever came back to this room, she’d be like, Who the fuck is that?”
Mrs. Bellow appeared in the doorway. “What d’ya girls think?”
“It’s great,” Meredith said.
“Yeah,” Becca said. “I love it.”
Mrs. Bellow looked at her phone. “It’s pretty late,” she said. “And it’s snowing. Why don’t you guys stay here? I could call your mom, Becca, and just tell her you’re staying over.”
“Oh, that’s okay,” Becca said. “It’s not snowing that hard.”
Mrs. Bellow came in and sat down on Lisa’s bed. “Plenty of room,” she said. “It’s really no problem.”
“My mom said we have to come back,” Becca said, although Meredith knew Becca’s mother had said nothing of the sort. They hadn’t even seen her mother, in fact. “She’s expecting us. My sister, you know. The baby is—”
“I’ll stay,” Meredith said suddenly. She wasn’t even sure why she’d said it. But she didn’t want to leave Mrs. Bellow alone.
Becca looked at her.
“It’s fine,” Meredith said. “I’ll stay and you go. I’ll just . . . I’ll come back in the morning.”
“She’ll come back in the morning, Bec,” Mrs. Bellow said. “That sounds okay, I think. Don’t you think?”
“Okay,” Becca said. “If you’re sure. But all your stuff’s—”
“It’s fine,” Mrs. Bellow said. “She can borrow something to wear. And I always have extra toothbrushes. I buy them at CVS when they go on sale.”
“That’s smart,” Meredith said, smiling at Mrs. Bellow.
“Well, you never know, right?” Mrs. Bellow said. “You never know what’s going to happen.”
Becca looked at Meredith.
“It’s fine,” Meredith said. “It’s all good.”
What she thought was: Go away, go away, go away.
?
She changed into Lisa’s pajamas—a sleeveless purple top and black bottoms that tied at the waist—and sat down on the edge of Lisa’s bed. Mrs. Bellow came in with a glass of water.
“Do you like water in the middle of the night?” she asked. “Sometimes Lisa likes water in the middle of the night and then she’s always so annoyed that she has to go down to the kitchen and find a cup. So I try to remember to bring her one.”
“Sure,” Meredith said, setting the cup on the nightstand, next to a little bobble-head dog.
“It’s nice having you here,” Mrs. Bellow said, sitting down beside her on the bed. “I know how it seems.” She looked away, embarrassed. “How I seem. It’s just nice to have company . . . like, your age company, I mean.”
“Sure,” Meredith said. “I understand.”