The Fall of Lisa Bellow: A Novel

PART ONE

1

Sometimes in the morning, while she waited for her brother to get out of the bathroom, Meredith Oliver would stand in front of her bureau mirror, lock eyes with her reflection, and say, This is me. This is really me. Right now. This is me. This is my real life. This is me.

She would say these things to herself because she liked the moment when she suddenly became uncertain that those things she was saying were in fact true, liked the way it made her feel unmoored, the hole of doubt that opened up inside her, and the wind that blew through that hole. It was a physical sensation, as real as cresting the first incline of a roller coaster, the momentum shift from ascending to descending. It was, Meredith had decided, precisely like sucking on a giant, whole-body Mentho-Lyptus cough drop, the way it cleared her out, head to toe. And she liked equally—not more and not less, because it was just the same sensation backward—the moment she became re-certain that those things were true—this is me, this is really me—when the hole closed, and the anchor caught, and she could smell the eggs her father was scrambling downstairs.

Meredith had been doing the mirror thing for as long as she could remember, on mornings both ordinary (today, for instance) and memorable (first days of school, birthdays, etc). Sometimes she went months without doing it, and then she’d resume for no reason she could name, and she did not think of it as a game or a habit or a meditation, but only her mirror thing. But even during those times when she called on it most, she didn’t do it every day. She didn’t want the trick to wear out. She suspected that if she overused it, it would lose its magic.

This morning the shower roared to life, the pipes humming with heat. This was encouraging, despite the fact that it would delay her from using the bathroom herself. Since Evan’s injury, Meredith could read his mood, predict how the day would go, by how much of his morning bathroom routine was completed. Because the bathroom was situated between their two bedrooms, the entire routine could easily be monitored by sound alone. Some days were pill-only days, the creak of the medicine cabinet opening, the rattle of the bottle, two seconds of running water—just long enough for him to gather a handful to wash down the pill, no cup required—the creak of the cabinet closing, followed by . . . silence. No brushing of teeth, no shower, no shave. On those days he might just go back to bed, and then there would be a half hour of sitcom-worthy upstairs/downstairs, first her mother up and down, then her father up and down, then her mother again, the anxiety rising with every trip, a variety of knocks (the breakfast-is-waiting, the tender-but-firm, the we-know-you-can-hear-us), an assortment of appeals (Evan, sweetie . . . Hey, pal . . . Getting late, kiddo . . . Evan, I’m serious . . .). Often this was still happening when Meredith left the house to walk to school, her brother already tardy (the high school started a half hour earlier than the middle school), her parents playing out precisely the same scene they’d played out on the last pill-only day. But thankfully, Meredith thought, the pill-only days were now fewer and further between. Now most days were at least pill-and-toothbrush days, and after one round of upstairs/downstairs Evan would appear at the kitchen table, unshaven but otherwise only marginally disheveled, his good eye flitting toward the clock every few minutes, sometimes a few lame jokes or minor complaints about the weather or the consistency of his eggs.

Meredith suspected that he got up now more often than not because he’d decided, maybe even subconsciously, that school was a better place for him to pass the day than home. Everywhere he spent any time at all—home, school, gym, hospital—was a delicate balance of distraction versus reminder, but at least at school the distractions were constant and diverse, a barrage coming at such a rapid-fire pace that sometimes he probably forgot for seconds or minutes about what had happened.

This day, Wednesday, there was brushing and showering and even the on-and-off water of a shave, which suggested not only a sulky resignation to, but perhaps actual interest in, the day, something he was looking forward to. Maybe it was the sunshine blazing through the bedroom windows. Maybe there was a party this weekend. Maybe there was a girl he wanted to talk to. Maybe his headache was just a dull pulse, an echo of pain more than the pain itself.

She didn’t blame him for going back to bed some mornings, or for his sulky resignation. She was not selfish enough to think him selfish. She liked to believe she was the only person in the world who truly understood him, so she was cautious not to judge, but just to observe. Carefully observe. The bathroom routine. The state of his bedroom. The hours spent on homework versus the hours spent on television versus the hours lying on his bed petting the tolerant cat. The tentative, jerky drives around the block. The rattle of pills tumbling out of the green bottle. The video games, some of which he could play, but most of which made his headaches worse. Smaller details: the part of his hair, reaching for his fork and missing it by half an inch, the angle of his iPhone, the thwack of the little rubber basketball as it bounced off the side of the mini backboard that hung over his closet door. And the thing he did with the tree by the front porch, touching the tip of a single branch with the tip of his finger. For the last couple of months he’d done this every time he left the house, and sometimes she saw him standing out there after school, doing it when he thought no one was watching.

He wore glasses now, mostly for protection of the now priceless right eye but also to obscure the view of the damage on the left. Ironically, neither lens of his black-framed glasses required any actual correction—the left lens was simply darkened, the right lens was simply glass.

In late March, just over six months ago now, Evan had been standing in the on-deck circle at baseball practice when a teammate hit a foul ball into his face. According to witnesses Evan had been maybe twenty-five feet from the plate, windmilling the bat around, stretching his shoulders, hooking the bat behind his back . . . the usual routine, the same old, same old. Meredith could picture this perfectly, had replayed the scene a million times, though she hadn’t been there. The windmill, the hook, the things he’d done thousands of times, tens of thousands, loving the weight of the bat in his hand, the sun in his eyes, the confidence of knowing this one central thing about himself: he was really, really good at baseball.

When he was a sophomore, the city paper had named him the starting catcher on the all-region team, which was very rare. Their region was made up of a dozen suburban high schools west of the city, each suburb nearly a city in and of itself. Players like that, he’d told Meredith, guys who made all-region as sophomores, wound up at D1 schools, sometimes with full scholarships. It had happened abruptly; for a long time he was good, and then something changed—something physical, something in his body, something he freely, cheerfully admitted he couldn’t take any credit for himself, a balance of strength and precision that elevated his skill both at and behind the plate—and suddenly he was really good. By that day in March he was nine games into his junior season and batting .470.

So there he was in the on-deck circle, thinking all these wonderful things about himself, or so Meredith imagined. (Sometimes, in her mind, she was watching from the stands; other times she stood no more than a foot or two away from him, so close she could hear the impact of ball on bone.) No one did anything wrong. No mistakes were made. Evan was wearing a helmet. He was standing in the appropriate spot. He wasn’t goofing off. There was nobody you could point to and blame, not the kid (Matt Bowman) at the plate, not the bench coach, not the coach throwing batting practice, not Evan. It was just something that happened, a fraction of a second that you couldn’t pin on anybody.

And then he was on the ground. I never saw it coming, he’d told her months later, abruptly, bitterly, sitting on the back patio one humid July evening between surgery three and surgery four. It was the only time he’d ever talked to her about that day. Blindsided, he’d said, scoffing. A mosquito had landed on his knee and he’d just sat there and watched it bite him, didn’t even try to swat it away. Never saw it. Not for one second.

The doctor said that Evan’s entire left eye socket was crushed beyond repair. A blow-out fracture, he called it. The doctor said, Imagine stepping on an ice cream cone. Meredith would never forget this, sitting in the hospital room, Evan sedated, she on a stiff vinyl chair looking out the window at the hospital parking lot, the doctor somberly relaying the news to her tight-lipped parents. Imagine stepping on an ice cream cone. Why hadn’t she been sent out of the room prior to this doctor-parent consultation? Why didn’t her parents think to say, Hold on, doctor, give us a minute—Mer, honey, why don’t you run down to the coffee shop and get a chocolate muffin while we talk to the doctor?

No, she was sitting on that hard, squeaky chair, wishing she could un-hear the sentence and un-see the image. The doctor said it was the worst baseball eye injury he’d ever encountered, that the best-case scenario was that Evan would regain some function (not sight—he plainly did not say sight, but function) in his left eye, but that he’d never play baseball competitively again.

As a catcher, Evan had been the recipient of numerous home-plate collisions, taken pitches off the shoulders and chest and knees and toes and facemask. He’d been banged up since she could remember; sometimes he seemed like one big purple bruise. Always, he recovered. But this was not like anything else.

•

More often than not they ate breakfast together, as a family, around the kitchen table in the sunny breakfast nook that looked out onto the backyard. Having breakfast together was a holdover from earlier years, when The Baseball Clock ruled the world, when Evan’s practices or games always ran right through the evening and most dinners (except in the dead of winter) were sandwiches or one-pot pasta or French bread pizza in front of the television whenever you got hungry, or a floppy hot dog from a concession stand.

Breakfast was the meal where they could actually sit together for fifteen or twenty minutes, during which her father inevitably asked everyone to set a goal for the day. They didn’t have to be serious goals—her father wasn’t that guy—but were intended, he always said, to let everyone know something about what the others were doing as they went about their day. Meredith’s stated goals were often lies having to do with academics—I want to do well on my English test, etc. Not that this wasn’t true, but her actual, pressing goals were almost always social in nature, and she didn’t feel like letting on to her entire family just how shallow she really was.

I’m going to go for a walk during lunch, her father said. Her father’s response to Evan’s injury had been to pursue an accelerated course of self-improvement in order that he might be better able to meet everyone’s needs, whatever they might be. Crushed eye socket? I got that! His goals were often exercise or nutrition related, but once during the summer Meredith looked out her bedroom window and there was her father lying on the hammock in the backyard, reading the Bible, the intolerant cat grabbing at the shoelaces that hung through the netting of the hammock, her father threatening the intolerant cat by pretending to smack it with the Bible. The Bible, which had apparently belonged to her great-grandmother but which no one in the family, as far as Meredith could tell, had so much as glanced at since her great-grandmother’s death.

What d’ya think? her father asked her mother now. Care to join me?

Her parents worked together, in the same office, the office of whirring drills and crying children, the office of the mingling smells of mint and artificial fruit flavors, the office she had adored as a child. Their practice was part of a sprawling, sparkling suburban medical park—her father referred to it as Sick City. All the buildings were identical on the outside, so patients routinely showed up at the dentist for a colonoscopy, or the orthopedist for a pap smear. But past the waiting room there was no mistaking where you were, and at the age of six or seven there was nowhere Meredith would have rather played, no amusement park more wonderful than those half-dozen chairs and the swiveling tables and the lights that dropped down from overhead like alien instruments. This was a game she and Evan especially enjoyed: Alien Examination. One of them would put on a surgical mask and the protective eyewear, the other would lie on the chair cloaked in the heavy x-ray blanket. The alien examiner would pull the light down and shine it on various parts of the specimen’s face, prodding with a gloved finger at mouth, nose, eye, ear: What does this do? How does this work? What do you use this for? How lucky she and Evan had been—she knew this even (especially?) when annoyed by them now—that their parents had let them play with everything in that office, let them have the run of the place on Sunday afternoons while they caught up on paperwork. She and Evan could have broken those chairs in a hundred different ways during Alien Examination, but they never did.

We could walk that trail in the park, her father said. Ah, the oft-mentioned wooded trail in the park adjacent to Sick City, a pretty jigsaw-puzzle image full of personal promise. It was not really for the sick; it was the place already healthy people went to get even healthier.

Maybe, her mother said vaguely.

Perhaps, Meredith thought, it was only for Evan that they kept doing it, this pointless exercise, so things would seem normal. Her mother was standing at the counter pouring Evan a tall glass of milk. This was something he could not do for himself anymore. He could not pour a simple glass of milk. Meredith had watched him try, early on, and miss the glass entirely, as if he were actually, entirely, blind. Some things are just a little different, he’d told her, soaking up the puddle of milk beside the glass, "but some things are impossible. Pouring—impossible. I can see the glass. I just don’t know where it is."

Today I will slay dragons, Evan said, taking the milk from his mother’s hand. I will dig to the center of the earth. I will reconcile warring nations. And I will learn to play the violin.

Modest goals, her father said. Is that it?

That plus a big piece of pie, he said. Then he winked at her. Meredith hated the wink now. Hated it. It bothered her that when her brother winked, he could not see at all. Why should that bother her? It was his wink, his darkness. Still, she couldn’t stand it. What d’ya think? he asked her. Care to join me?

Sure, she said. I’ll pencil it in.

•

At home there was Evan, and half-blind Evan was still Evan, still the safety net, whether he could actually catch her or not. At school there was no net.

The distance between home and Parkway North Middle School, a distance Meredith traveled by herself between 7:42 and 8:05 every single morning, seemed vast, a lonesome valley of suburban achievement, purring cars in driveways, crows the size of small cats milling about on rolling lawns, joggers attached to their NPR podcasts. She walked alone not because she had no friends, but because all her friends took the school bus. She lived—by some trick of fate, some ignorance of her parents when they’d purchased their dream home in their dream suburb prior to having school-aged children—in the unlucky zone just barely inside the 1.25-mile radius that required her to walk to school. Everyone who lived more than 1.25 miles from school got to take the school bus. And not that she would have loved the school bus—she knew this from friends and field trips, and, to be honest, from movies—but the school bus definitely seemed easier than walking, especially when it was rainy or cold. Her house was 1.19 miles from school, which she knew precisely because when Evan had started sixth grade, her father had driven the route twice to check to make sure the district transportation committee was right. Alas. And so she walked, alone, and at some point in the last quarter mile a giant bus barreled past her, sending her hair fluttering, and she would quicken her steps so that she could meet her friends when they disembarked, so they could enter at the glass doors as a unified front.

Numbers were essential. Solidarity was all.

•

It had been all downhill since fifth grade. Sometimes Meredith looked back on that golden year and felt a pang of nostalgia so keenly that she thought she might actually die. Fifth grade. Yes there were cliques, but the cliques didn’t really mean anything in fifth grade. They were pretend distinctions between groups that rarely, if ever, translated into any real action or consequence. In fifth grade you were still friends with everyone, whether you liked it or not, because it was easier for the adults that way. Your parents didn’t particularly care if you wanted to carpool with someone else to swimming lessons; it was convenient for you and Amanda Hammels to travel together, even if you never talked to each other in school, so, by god, that was the way it was going to be. Your teachers assigned you to groups with the expectation you could and should be able to work with anyone. Yes, in fifth grade there were some girls flirting with makeup and, yes, there were some girls flirting with boys, but it was all still as artificial as glittery lip gloss, all part of a world that no one yet really belonged to or understood. Plus, in fifth grade you could remember even further back, all the way back to first and second grade—you still walked down those same halls!—when some girl might have wet her pants or a boy might have cried for his mother or any number of humiliating things that held you all together, put you on an even playing field. As long as you were in that elementary school, in that physical space, everything that happened had happened equally to everyone.

But middle school? A different story. Turned out, what happened in elementary school stayed in elementary school. In sixth grade the playing field lurched to an impossible angle. How did it happen, the summer between fifth and sixth grade, how could it happen so abruptly that a level playing field could tilt so violently, tilt precisely like the Titanic, in a matter of mere hours the night before the first day of sixth grade? Meredith had seen the movie and this was the image she couldn’t get out of her mind: everyone tumbling from the top of the ship down to the bottom, sliding, skidding, careening, frantically grabbing hold of bolted down deckchairs and stair railings. The sliders were clearly the ones who had not anticipated the tilt. Anyone who was going to get off the boat safely had gotten off already. When? In June?

Too late! The last days of August, sixth grade begins, the great slide happens, the playing field tilts, and Meredith finds herself clinging to the ship, somewhere near the middle, around the shuffleboard courts, say. She is not down at the bottom near the icy water, but she can feel the chill of it below her dangling feet, and she has no idea what’s happened.

She had not gotten the memo about the iceberg.

And since then, since literally that first day of sixth grade, over two years ago, she had been trying to get her footing, trying to find her place.

Now she met her best friends Jules and Kristy at the corner of the parking lot where a herd of school buses belched and hissed. Kristy had been battling a head cold all week and had a tissue pressed to her nose, lest some shiny snot be detected by the snot police. They entered the school through the tall glass doors in the front—there was a security guard, but he was unarmed, and mostly for show. They went to their lockers. This was the most dangerous part of the day, the unstructured time at the lockers. Any social advantage that was to be gained would be gained during these precious few minutes. Of course, the opposite was also true. By the time first period started, you could feel so small, so pointless, that there’d be no chance for recovery. Meredith knew this all too well. Her locker was next to Lisa Bellow’s.

Since the beginning of the school year Lisa Bellow had had a picture of a boy in her locker, taped on the inside of the door. Meredith could see it out of the corner of her eye while she unloaded her books and supplies into her own locker. In the photograph, the boy was standing on a white sandy beach. He was wearing black board shorts and sunglasses and holding a blue Frisbee. He was tan and had muscular arms, and Meredith might have suspected the picture had been cut from a magazine were it not so clearly a photograph: glossy, catching the light so that, depending on the angle of the locker door, sometimes the glare made it impossible to see the right side of the boy’s body. Lisa had other things taped to her locker door—pictures of her friends, a bumper sticker from Virginia Beach, a birthday card—but the boy on the beach was at eye level, front and center, and some mornings as she turned from her own locker Meredith could not help but stare at it, her eyes drawn to it in a way she couldn’t even explain. It wasn’t like she’d never seen a hot guy before. It was just that everything about the photograph, every grain of sand, every crest of every wave, every finger and toe, was so beautiful.

Once Lisa caught Meredith staring at the picture. Meredith wasn’t sure, but it was entirely possible that her mouth was open as she stared, not gaping but definitely open, and Lisa rolled her eyes and gave a tiny little huff with her nose before she slammed the locker shut and twirled away, her golden hair a perfectly silky wave of dismissal. The message was clear: not only was Meredith unworthy of looking at the picture of the beautiful boyfriend, but she was also unworthy of any actual verbal response from Lisa. This was no surprise. Despite the proximity of their lockers, Lisa had not spoken a single word to Meredith for the entire year.

Lisa Bellow and her friends had gotten the memo about the iceberg. It was possible that they had written the memo. It was even conceivable, Meredith had long ago decided, that they had somehow been responsible for the iceberg in the first place. Lisa and her pack, a half dozen girls with all-season-tanned legs and perky little boobs, had outgrown middle school boys by about November of seventh grade. Now, in eighth grade, some of them were dating boys that Evan knew, and Evan was a senior. Lisa and her friends sashayed around Parkway North Middle School, licking their lips to keep them moist and primed for the next cutting comment about somebody’s stringy hair or somebody’s ugly shoes. Once, the year before, Meredith had been sitting at a lunch table talking to her friends and someone called her name and she turned around and from two tables away Lisa Bellow called, Can you please sit on the middle of your chair so your butt’s not hanging over the side? We’re trying to eat. Lisa’s table erupted into laughter; even a few girls at Meredith’s table laughed, which was the worst part. She felt herself withering inside, and instead of saying something clever just scooted toward the center of her chair and forever since made sure she was positioned correctly.

Meredith hated them. Jules and Kristy hated them. Most of the girls hated them. But then why were they the most popular girls in the school? It didn’t make any sense, and Meredith and her friends had spent countless hours analyzing the data. Eventually they realized: the bitches’ power came from their numbers; through some trick, two of them seemed like five, three like ten. This was partly because they clearly worked hard to be indistinguishable from one another, like Stormtroopers, Meredith often thought as she watched them cut a swath down the eighth-grade hall. Though their hair was different shades, they all wore it the same way, and they all wore too much eye makeup, and they all wore black leggings and cold-shoulder tops, and this year they all wore gold gladiator sandals, which Meredith thought were the stupidest shoes she’d ever seen. Lisa was always attached to Becca Nichols or Abby Luckett or Amanda Hammels or one of the aspirant bitches, and they stood apart and sneered at your inadequacies (those known and unknown to you) and rolled their eyes with such unabashed superiority that you really had no earthly choice but to despise them. These were girls, Meredith thought, who could only be loved by their grandparents and maybe—maybe—Jesus.

And yet, Meredith always thought. And yet. It wasn’t like she herself was any great prize. She was at least ten pounds overweight, and she was forever saying something she thought was funny until the instant it passed her lips, at which point she realized it was idiotic. Also she had been staring at that picture in Lisa’s locker, no denying that, because she stared at things—sometimes boys, but other things, too, for too long, weirdly long, until even her friends were like, um, hello? Also, she didn’t excel at a single thing. Sometimes she lay in bed at night listing her attributes in a calculated, disinterested manner, as if she were not herself but a project she was working on for the science fair. She could say, totally objectively, that she was very good, likely in the top 5 percent, of American thirteen-year-old girls at math. And she was good, likely top 25 percent, of American thirteen-year-old girls at field hockey, clarinet, and bumper pool. Yes, there were other talents: eavesdropping, for one, a cousin to staring but less obvious to outside observers. Catching popcorn or M&M’s in her mouth, especially when tossed by Evan. Picking things up off the bottom of a swimming pool with her toes. And pretending, perhaps her greatest but least useful skill—certainly less useful than retrieving a pair of sunken goggles. But she wasn’t truly exceptional at anything. No special gift set her apart from any of the other ten million thirteen-year-olds in the world. Last year Jules had won an award for an essay about diversity; Evan had been the best catcher in the whole region; even Lisa Bellow was awesome at being a bitch. Still, Meredith always reminded herself when at her lowest, at least there were actual freaking thoughts in her brain, unlike Lisa Bellow and company. At least she wasn’t just pushing out her boobs every second of the day.

Also, she regularly reminded herself, there were lots of girls who were way less popular than she was. The girls at the very bottom—like the bottom 10 percent—were staying at the very bottom, because they were there for a real and universally agreed upon reason, drugged out, silent, or just hopelessly weird. But then there were the girls who made up the huge middle—the lower-middle and the middle-middle and the higher-middle. This was 80 percent of the eighth grade class, which at their school meant about a hundred girls, and the movement within this middle group seemed to shift daily, sometimes hourly. And then of course there were the popular girls, the top 10 percent—Lisa and Abby and Becca