“They would know,” she said to Mrs. Bellow. “I think they would know. I think they would know.”
“Shhhh,” Mrs. Bellow said. She left the room and came back a minute later with something in her hand.
“Take this,” she said. “Okay? It helps me. It’ll help. It’ll help you sleep.”
Meredith was sitting up. A small purple pill was in her right hand and a glass of water was in her left hand. She closed her fist around the pill. Her knuckles ached from knocking. She opened her hand and swallowed the pill. Mrs. Bellow fluffed her pillow and tucked her in. Then she lay down beside her, on top of the covers, and took hold of her hand. She rubbed Meredith’s wrist. She was rubbing the watch away. She was smudging the watch drawn by Steven Overbeck and it would not be 2:15 anymore, ever. Soon there would only be a green stain where the bracelet had been.
“Okay,” Mrs. Bellow said. “You’re all right now. I’ve got you.”
Sleep or something like it came over her, and for a little while she was happily suspended and it was not 2:15 but it was not any other time either—what time isn’t it?—and her face dried and her parents knew everything and Evan was catching the ball every try and she had leaped up right away, just as the car was driving out of the Deli Barn parking lot, and she had taken a picture of the license plate with her phone and then she had called the police, the car still in her sights.
“Can you please sit on the middle of your chair so your butt’s not hanging over the side?”
The car, still in her sights. The license plate. The numbers. She spoke them clearly to the dispatcher.
“This is the best day of my whole summer.”
?
She woke with a jolt and time started and it was 2:15 and she was late for algebra.
Vertical Asymptote: x=2
Horizontal Asymptote: y=1
Meredith sat up in Lisa’s bed. “I have to go,” she said.
“You can’t go, hon,” Mrs. Bellow said. She was still lying in the bed, over the covers, and she talked as if she were sleeping. “Not now. It’s the middle of the night.”
“I have to,” Meredith said. She stood up. “I just . . . I just have to go to the bathroom. And I need a pen.”
She was looking all over Lisa’s desk, pushing aside the frames and opening all the little drawers. Something fell on the floor, then something else. Finally she found a Magic Marker, one of those smelly ones that everyone got in fifth grade. It might work.
She stumbled out of Lisa’s room and into the hall. She was looking for the bathroom. She had to finish her graph. Where was the bathroom? She just had to get to the bathroom.
18
Well, she had made the deal, hadn’t she? Traded the airport trip for geriatric dentistry. It sounded like a joke, but she knew she’d gotten the better end of the bargain, driving the little car twenty minutes out to Hillsboro, the two cases in the trunk with all she would need for her work today. It felt like a clean getaway, like winning the avoidance lottery, not like killing two birds with one stone but more like killing eight birds—dishes, shopping, Evan, Meredith, Mark, her father, and Nancy. She counted them as she sped down the highway. Okay, seven. Seven birds dead for the day, and no great loss among them.
How far could one woman get, exactly, with a freshly serviced Audi and two satchels full of dental tools? Across the state line? Into another time zone? Into another time? She turned up the radio. She didn’t know the song that was playing and she didn’t care. Mark and Meredith had still been asleep when she’d left, Evan in the garage, pinging. She had left earlier than necessary, slipped out when she realized he was coming to the end of his swings. She could sit in the car with her coffee. She could sit there for hours, happily, in the Hillsboro parking lot, irresponsibly plowing through her tank of gas to keep the car warm, until her father was airborne, Mark at the office, her children . . . where? It was Black Friday. Maybe they would shop, or go to the movies, or eat out with their friends. Maybe they would lie in their beds and think thoughts she could not imagine, devise plans she was not privy to, make decisions they would soon regret.
They were gone, her children, to wherever children went when they left. Had she gone so far away, when she was thirteen, or fifteen, or seventeen? She supposed she must have, but she could not recall now with any clarity or certainty what it had felt like to be that age. It was as if those years—not what had occurred externally, but what had occurred internally—had just been wiped away; the only person who’d played a part in those years that she still had any regular contact with was her father, and “regular contact” was just a nice way of saying that they were not estranged. Maybe who you were didn’t really start, didn’t really count, until you found the majority of people you were going to spend your life with. Maybe the rest was too easily lost, because there was no one there to keep reminding you of who you used to be.
But these were only Black Friday, early morning, coffee-in-the-parking-lot-of-Hillsboro-Home thoughts. Ever since the argument in the dining room, she felt as if she’d been cut loose and was floating. It was neither a good nor bad feeling, though if pressed she’d have to say the primary emotion that accompanied it seemed to be relief.