“Sometimes I talk to her,” Mrs. Bellow said. “I tell her things. I know I’m talking to myself but I do it anyway. Like I’ll be watching TV and I’ll say, ‘Can you believe that?’ Or I’ll be looking in the fridge and I’ll say, ‘Do I want orange juice or cranberry juice?’ Little things. Dumb things. Those are the things you miss. The dumb things. The things you thought didn’t mean anything.”
For a moment Meredith thought Mrs. Bellow was going to cry, and she prayed this would not happen. Mrs. Bellow seemed to recognize the precipice as well. She took a deep breath and steadied herself, then patted Meredith on the hand and stood up.
“Anyway,” she said. “It’s nice to have someone to talk to who’s really here.”
“I know,” Meredith said. “I mean—” I mean I know, she thought. She slipped her feet under the covers. She thought that the last time someone had lain under these covers was the night before the Deli Barn, when Lisa had lain down and her mother had come with a glass of water and Lisa had gone to sleep, thinking . . . thinking what? Not thinking that tomorrow everything would change, forever. Maybe thinking she was going to break up with her lax bro. Maybe thinking that she was going to take his picture from the door inside her locker. Maybe thinking that she would do it when that loser Meredith Oliver wasn’t standing there gawking.
“Call me if you need anything,” Mrs. Bellow said. “Okay? I’m right next door.”
“Okay,” Meredith said. Mrs. Bellow shut off the light, but there was a streetlight outside so Meredith could still see the room. She could see the photo collage on Lisa’s dresser, which was only a few feet from the bed. Lisa and Becca at Six Flags. Lisa and her mother sitting on a stone wall with a waterfall behind them. Lisa and Becca and Abby and Amanda somewhere—maybe a concert? Lisa at five or six, wearing a Villanova cheerleading outfit and waving blue and white pom-poms over her head. Then the outlier, the sore thumb—and yet among them, connected by a common frame: the picture of her from last year’s yearbook. God, she hated that picture. She looked terrible, her mouth somewhere in between a—
The yearbook. The yearbook.
She sat up in the bed and squinted across the room at Lisa’s bookshelf. Some of the books she could recognize from their spines, even if she couldn’t make out the words: a few books they’d read in English in seventh grade, two Harry Potters, Twilight, a popular horse series they’d all devoured in elementary school, with the telltale fancy cursive titles with swishy horse tails. None of these was what she was looking for. But there, on the end of the bottom shelf, was a tall red book that from afar looked for all the world like—
I took the yearbook. It’s on my bookshelf and she’s never even noticed it.
Meredith got out of bed and walked across the room to the bookshelf, then sat cross-legged on the floor in front of it and carefully slid the tall book from its place. She set it face up on her lap before she looked down.
GREAT VALLEY ECHO
2000
ROCKIN’ THE MILLENNIUM!
Meredith gently opened the book, turned its pages as if they were thin sheets of glass. She found the section for the senior class. “Jazz Band!” “Girls Volleyball!” “The Music Man!” Then finally the class photos. Abrams through Ashley, Atwood through Bart, Bashor through—and there she was. Colleen Bellow, eighteen years old, smiling brightly into her daughter’s dark bedroom, no earthly idea of what her life would be beyond the moment when she blinked away the photographer’s flash, no notion that fifteen years later a girl named Meredith Oliver would be dressed in her missing daughter’s pajamas and looking back at her.
There were about a dozen men pictured on the page. They were boys, really, exactly Evan’s age, as stupid and lost as he was. Beck. Birch. Bolton. Was one of them the man that Lisa’s grandfather had pointed to, had said, “That’s your father? Ssssshhhhhhhh.” Which one was it? Did Gregory Bond have Lisa’s eyes? Did Brian Bosley have her smile?
“Why would I want to look him up? It’s not like he ever looked me up.”
The yearbook was here on the bookshelf, precisely where Lisa had said it would be, exactly where Lisa told her it was. Lisa had told her this. There was no other way she could have known it. And if that were true, it meant the apartment and the bathtub and the BITCH tally and the bloody toilet paper and the soft blue blanket, all of it, it was real. And it meant something else, too. It meant Lisa was still alive.
But something was nagging at her, tugging on the leg of Lisa’s black pajama bottoms. Maybe she had seen the yearbook before. Maybe that’s why it looked so familiar. Maybe she had seen it here some other day, noticed it when she was in Lisa’s room that first afternoon with Becca and Abby and Amanda, talking about the charity bracelets. Maybe even one of the girls had slid it from its place, said, “What’s this?” and she had spotted the cover from where she was sitting at Lisa’s desk. Maybe one of them had said, “It’s her mom’s old yearbook.” Maybe one of them, one of Lisa’s real friends, had said, “Remember Lisa showed us that last year?”
Maybe. Or maybe not. Or maybe. Or maybe not.
She was shaking. She slid the yearbook back into its spot on the shelf. She climbed into Lisa’s bed. Something was wrong with her legs. They were shaking from the inside, like when she was in the car with the man, with the man and Lisa, the Deli Barn a tiny spot behind them. “You suck,” Lisa was saying. She leaned forward until she was practically right behind the driver’s right ear. “Do you hear me?” She was screeching. “You suck. You asshole!” Meredith grabbed for her and knocked the glass of water off the nightstand. Something was wrong with her. Something was crushing her chest; something had fallen on top of her. She was having a heart attack. She was thirteen years old and she was having a heart attack. It happened. Things happened. Things you couldn’t believe. Things that couldn’t be explained. Inconceivable things. They happened.
“Lisa,” she said. She was pounding on the bathroom door now. The feet, unmoving. “Lisa, it’s me. Open the door.”
The overhead light came on and Mrs. Bellow was in the doorway.
“Meredith?” she said. “Hon, what is it?”
She couldn’t say anything. Her tongue was a dry lump in her mouth. A dog was whimpering. Annie the dog was outside the front door whimpering in the snow. She had been put outside and then forgotten, and she was cold and standing by the flowerpot with the cigarette butts and she was not dead but had just run off, run off in the night and gotten lost and couldn’t find her way back because all the apartments looked exactly alike and she was just a stupid dog. A stupid freezing dog.
“Let her in,” she whispered.
“What?”
Her face was wet. Was she crying? Had she thrown up? Was she bleeding? Was her nose bleeding? She was putting her hands all over her face trying to find the source of the moisture.
“Hey, girl. Hey there, girl.” Mrs. Bellow was beside the bed. “Stop,” she said, putting her hand on her shoulder. “I’m here. It’s okay. I’m here.”
“Would your parents know?”
“Know what?”
“If you didn’t come home after school. Would they know it was something bad?”