Meredith

MEREDITH

11 YEARS BEFORE

May

My hearing returns to me first, to a limited degree. What I hear is spotty, sporadic. Slurred words. Wind rushing through a tunnel. Drumsticks tapping a snare drum. I can’t make sense of it. I press my eyes closed, avoiding sensory input. It’s too much. Vomit rises in the back of my throat and I swallow it down. My head throbs. It pulsates in my ears, my temples, the backs of my eyes. Someone hums.

I don’t know where I am or why I’m here. I must have been dreaming.

I force my eyes open to see the world hurtling past. It’s dizzying, disorienting. My vision is blurred. It comes and goes, clouding over with fog before clearing. Rain falls, everything a monochrome shade of gray. I’m cold. I shake.

Things beside me start to take shape, my world coming slowly into focus. I see a child’s board book, a dog leash. A booster seat thrust to the floor, my feet on it. Gray and red with a pink water bottle angled in the cup holder. It’s Delilah’s water bottle. It’s Delilah’s booster seat. Plastic covers hang from the headrests of the front row seats, to protect the fabric from little feet.

I’m in the back seat of my own car.

I sit slowly up, my body sore. I find that I’m bent over a car seat, the knobby parts of it pressing into my skin, leaving marks. There’s the imprint of the chest clip on my arm.

It’s Leo’s car seat.

I sit fully upright, looking desperately around. Where is Leo? Where is Delilah? Why am I here? The car is in motion. It’s going fast.

Disequilibrium overwhelms me. I grip the first thing I see to steady myself.

Bea is in the driver’s seat. Bea is driving my car. Her window is open an inch. It moves her hair. Somehow or other the rain doesn’t get in. The radio is on. Bea speaks to herself, something agitated, incomprehensible.

It all comes rushing back to me then.

Bea and me arguing. Bea with the hammer. Delilah standing scared in the open garage door. After that: nothing. Blackness.

The first words out of my mouth are, “Where is she?”

My words are garbled when they come. My lips are sluggish, unable to form words. The pounding in my head intensifies when I speak. I press my hands to my head, drill my palms into my eye sockets. It helps nothing. I pull my hands away.

I try again. “What did you do with her?” This time, words form.

“You’re awake,” she says, glancing over her shoulder at me. As she does, she tugs on the steering wheel by accident. The car swerves. A car horn blares. Bea looks back ahead. She rights the car before we get hit.

“What did you do with Delilah?” I demand.

Bea doesn’t say. Her lack of a response makes me frantic, desperate. I need to know where my daughter is. I need to know what she’s done to my child.

I grab for the door handle, try and force open the door. My first thought is to jump from the moving vehicle and make a run for it. But I can’t because the door doesn’t budge. The child locks have been activated. I don’t know how long I was unconscious. Long enough for Bea to do something to Delilah, to get me in the car and drive. I look out the window. I try and orient myself as to where we are. We haven’t gone far. We’re only a few blocks from home. If I can just get out of the car, I can get back to Delilah. I can see if she’s okay.

“Did you hurt her?” I ask. I’m terrified that Bea has done something to her. Delilah watched as she hit me over the head with the hammer.

Delilah saw too much. Bea couldn’t just let her go.

I slide to the other side of the back seat. I try and open that door. It, too, is unopenable. I go to put the power window down, but it’s locked. Bea has thought of everything.

Desperate, I smack my hands against the window to try and draw attention to us, to myself, trapped here in the back seat of my own car.

Bea snaps, “Stop it, Meredith. What the fuck do you think you’re doing?”

“Let me out of here,” I say, feeling like a caged animal. “You can’t do this, Bea. You can’t do this to me.”

The only thing I can think to do is lunge into the front seat of the car. To forcibly gain control of it. A rush of adrenaline counters the pain in my body and head as I, impetuously, press myself into the narrow space between the two front seats and start to go.

But then I see it, sitting there on the passenger’s seat: a knife.

Bea grabs for it at the same time as me. She gets there first. I go rigid.

“What are you doing with that?” I ask, terrified that she already used the knife to do something to Delilah.

“Just do what I say and no one gets hurt.” Her voice is controlled.

I sit back in my seat. I have no other choice. My mind is in flux, trying to figure out how to get out of this. I come up empty, despairing because of it. What is Bea planning to do to me? What has she done to Delilah?

Bea drives through town. We turn right, then left, then right again. It isn’t aimless; she’s hatched a plan. We leave our town and enter another, and then another, where it’s less populated, more industrial than residential.

“Take me home,” I beg as she drives. “Please just take me home. We can forget this ever happened. I promise you, Bea, I won’t go to the police. What happened to Shelby stays between you and me.”

She ignores me at first. But I keep pressing until she snaps. “Shut up, Meredith. Please just shut the fuck up.” Her tone is cold, direct.

She pulls into the parking lot of a run-down motel just off the highway. The building is ochre in color. It’s single story. There is a Dumpster in the parking lot, picnic tables, a vending machine. She parks my car in the nearly empty lot.

Bea grabs my purse from the floor of the car. She tells me what’s going to happen. “You’re going to go in there and get a room. For a month. Pay cash,” she says. She goes through my wallet and then hers, gathering dollar bills. She leans into the back seat and presses them into my hand. “Check into your room. Get the key,” she says.

“And what if I don’t?” I ask, though I watched with my own eyes what Bea did to Shelby. I’ve witnessed the cover-up, the lies. Hard-pressed, Bea is capable of anything.

“You don’t want anything to happen to Delilah, do you?” she asks, and there’s a glimmer of hope: Delilah is alive.

Unless Bea is lying to me.

Bea gets out of the car. She tucks the knife into the back pocket of her jeans, and hides it beneath the hem of her shirt. She comes around the side of the car and opens the door for me. It takes me a minute to get to my feet. I’m unbalanced, my head still throbbing.

“Don’t do anything stupid, Meredith. I will be just outside watching. Remember, I’m the only one who knows where Delilah is. Don’t test me.” I swallow hard. I don’t know what Bea has done with Delilah. But if she’s alive, I have to get back to her. I have to do what Bea says. I have to behave, for Delilah’s sake.

Bea follows me to the motel office. She stands far enough back that security cameras, if the motel has them, wouldn’t reach. The clerk takes my cash and hands me a key. She doesn’t look up long enough to see that I’m not right.

Bea and I walk to the room. She tells me to unlock the door. With shaking hands, I do. She tells me to turn on the light, to close the blinds. She touches nothing. I’m sensitive to this.

“What are you going to do to me, Bea?”

She doesn’t say.

The motel room is squalid. The carpeting is stained. The plaster flakes off the walls.

“Delilah is sick,” I tell her, pleading now. “She’s overdue for medicine. Her fever will be back by now. She’ll be burning up. She’ll need Tylenol.”

Bea says nothing apropos of this. Instead, “I need you to find paper and a pen.” I do what she says. I don’t ask. I go rummaging through drawers to find what Bea needs. But this isn’t the kind of place to have free paper and pens. Instead, I come across an outdated phone book in a drawer. I tear a page from it. Bea has a pen. She wipes it on a sleeve before passing it to me.

“Write this down,” she says. “Write Delilah is safe. She is fine.”

I look at Bea, not understanding. “Just do it,” she says when I hesitate. “Write down Delilah is safe. She is fine.” I’m not quick to do it. Why would she want me to write that down? She reaches for the knife in the back pocket of her jeans, holding it to me. “I’m not messing around, Meredith. I need you to write it down. If you do what I say, I’ll go and get Delilah for you. I’ll bring her here. But you have to do this for me first.”

“Okay,” I say, acquiescing. I write the words down, because of her promise to bring Delilah to me and because of the knife at my throat. I don’t know that I have another option. All I can think is that Bea plans to leave us in this dingy motel for the month that we’ve paid for. She’s going to make Josh think we’ve run away, which will buy her time to figure out what to do. It’s not a bad plan. I could survive a month here.

What I don’t understand is why Bea didn’t bring Delilah and me at the same time. She must have a reason. But maybe the two of us together was too much to manage.

When I’m through, I hold the paper out to her to take. “Set it on the dresser,” she says. I do. “You understand, this needs to look like a suicide,” Bea says.

I hear her words. They reach my ears, but they don’t get interpreted by my brain. They don’t make it that far. I don’t have time to comprehend what she’s said. I don’t have time to react.

A second later I feel the excruciating sting of the knife blade slicing across my wrists. I scream, backing away from her.

“I’m sorry to be so direct,” she says, following. “But you did this to yourself, Meredith. If only you could have kept your mouth shut, this wouldn’t be happening. I warned you. I told you to just let it go, to forget about what happened that night. You couldn’t. I never wanted to hurt you or Delilah,” she says. “You left me no choice. I told you so many times—I can’t go to jail. What did you expect me to do?”

She lashes out. Again the blade scores my wrist. It bleeds. I press my palm to it to try and control the bleeding. I try backing away from her in the room, but the room is small, boxy. Bea, with the knife, stands between me and the door. There’s no way out. The motel is vacant or nearly vacant right now, the parking lot empty. If I were to scream, no one would hear. No one would come.

This is how she plans to do it, then. Bea plans to make the world believe I slashed my own wrists. That I was a desperate woman. Suicidal.

I hide my arms behind myself, thinking that will buy me time. I don’t expect her to have an alternative plan. But then, in an instant, I feel the knife plunge into my gut. I watch in horror as Bea yanks the knife back out of me. It’s so spontaneous. It knocks the wind out of me, makes it almost impossible to breathe. As I watch, the redness spreads from my center. My hands go to the blood, holding it back. Bea takes an inappreciable step backward. She watches me flounder, knife at the ready in case once wasn’t enough.

She says, “I never wanted it to come to this. You were my friend.” She cries. Standing there, watching me struggle, tears drip from her eyes. “Why couldn’t you just leave it be?” she screams.

The shock sets in, replacing pain. My legs lose the strength to hold me up. I stagger, reaching out to her for help. “I’m sorry,” she cries. “I’m so fucking sorry, Meredith.” She steps away from me. She turns her back to me. She can’t watch me die. She presses her fingers into her ears so she can’t hear.

I collapse onto the motel floor. The floor catches my body, and I think what a relief it is to lie down. I’m so tired. For the first time in days, I think that I could sleep.