The End of Everything (14 page)

“But she knew there was nothing to find,” he says.

Then he says, “I think she might have called Mrs. Shaw. I don’t know, but I think she may have called her house.”

This seems gruesome, and I imagine the call, Mrs. Verver’s raspy voice scratching into the answering machine,
I know he took
her. I know he took her. Where did he take her, what did he do?
And Mrs. Shaw, huddled in some corner of her house, hands clasped over her ears, begging for it to end.

Everyone thinks it will never end.

Everyone is dying for it to end.

“She just feels like she has to do something,” he says. “We all do. I can’t seem to do anything else.”

I start to talk about other things.

I talk about how I have been listening to all the different songs he’s been telling me about.

And I tell him how my brother broke up with his girlfriend the day after the prom and how she kicked in his locker door and
wrote things about him in permanent marker on the mirror of the girls’ bathroom.

And I tell him how I remember when I was little and slid my bare foot hard on the slippery carpet in the hallway outside Evie’s
room and it dragged along the wood floor.

But you made it all better, I say. You propped me up on the bathroom vanity and spent fifteen minutes teasing the splinter
out with tweezers and a burnt-tip needle.

I still remember, or at least it feels like it as I tell him, the smooth pressure of the heel of his hand, while I sat rapt,
hearing about the time he learned to play piano at fifteen, listening to Ray Charles’s “What’d I Say” over and over again,
all to impress a girl named Eleanor Tipton, who told him, with a twitch of the nose, that she dated only guitarists, and preferred
Roy Orbison to Ray Charles, who was overrated anyway.

“I told you that?” he says, grinning. “I don’t remember that at all.”

“You did.”

“Eleanor Tipton,” he says, and it’s such a loose, careless smile.
“I thought my heart would break. I thought I’d never love again.”

“But you did,” I say.

“A hundred times,” he says, winking, “before I hit eighteen.”

W
hen I head home, just before the eleven o’clock news, my mother is so pleased with me. She says I’m growing up into a good
and thoughtful person. Her silky new kimono tied tight at her waist, she feeds me doughy cinnamon rolls from the oven like
when I was a kid, the kind that come with the plastic disk filled with frosting.

She sits with me at the kitchen table and I know she’d like me to tell her things, to tell her what’s going on with the investigation
and how Mr. Verver is doing. But I don’t feel like telling her. I wouldn’t know how to make her understand.

She leans toward me, her chin tucked in her hands, and I feel it like a breathless tug.

She wants me to confide, and then she will confide too.

Oh, how it must twist in her that I sit there and I lick that icing, and lick it off all my fingertips.

I just look at her and take another bite, my hand sinking over the softly wheezing roll.

I just look and look and look and my face gives her nothing.

I give her nothing.

I
t’s just past midnight, and I’m sitting on the front porch, which I know would make her crazy. But I can’t sleep and the air
conditioner was thundering at me and I felt all closed up. Out here, it’s still a heavy June heat, but the air moves a little,
it stirs.

And I have something to watch. It seems like I always do.

A car is in front of the Ververs’ house, a lonely blue car.

I recognize it right away. Bobby Thornhill. Bobby Thornhill is back. Everyone else—neighbors and the slinking mailman and
even the slow guy who delivers the church circulars—have all hunkered away since everything happened. All keeping a safe distance,
not wanting to push, to touch, to graze against, to get too close.

But not Bobby Thornhill, and there’s a funny warming in my chest. I’m somehow grateful for it. Despite everything, there’s
still
this
.
This
still lives and breathes and gasps and stutters. This doesn’t change. This doesn’t stop.

Bobby Thornhill still inches his car along the streetlit curb, lights off, shoulders slouched, neck craning, peering at the
Verver house.

Bobby Thornhill still gazes yearningly up at Dusty’s window, that window beaming with promise, a faintly curtained invitation.

“How long can you just look?” my brother once said. But what boy ever really put hands to Dusty, tongue to her teeth, her
pearly ear, searching for ways in, and found what he’d been promised by that curving smile of hers, that golden girl-face?
I know it must have happened, but I can’t remember it. I can’t even picture it.

“I see Dusty with college fellas,” Mr. Verver once teased, lying back on the pillow balanced on Dusty’s tanned lap.

Evie and I perked our heads up, so eager to know what he meant, what he knew about Dusty and what she should and would have.

“Graduate students. Wire-frame glasses and bottles of Scotch. They’ll recite odes to her, write songs about her on battered
acoustic guitars, and promise to take her away from all this suburban dread.”

Dusty rolled her eyes magnificently and pretended to snore and tugged at Mr. Verver’s dark hair, twisted it between her dainty
fingers.

Bobby Thornhill, though, I am glad for you. You remind me of before, just when “before” seemed gone forever.

I slink along the driveway and I think maybe I’ll get closer and maybe I’ll see something. Something I might want to see,
with his head jerking, his eyes glazed, and such magic behind them, visions of Dusty stretched out before him, reclined, finespun
curls twirled in her own twirling hands.

I think I might see Bobby seeing that and I don’t mind whatever I see, not even that.

I’m so close, and suddenly his car door pops open, and I jump back, feet on the curb. Startled, Bobby looks at me.

“What’re you doing?” he says, leaning out, eyes on me.

“Nothing,” I say.

There’s a half-empty six-pack of beer on the seat next to him, the cardboard sweating. I can smell gusts of it when he talks.

“You’re not calling the cops, are you?” he says. “Or her dad?”

“No,” I say.

“He seems like a cool guy,” Bobby says. “Everyone says he is. I feel bad for all of them.”

I nod, not knowing what else to do.

“She came out here two nights ago,” he says. “Maybe you don’t believe me. You’re just a kid. But she came out.”

I don’t know if I do believe it. But I can’t guess why he’d lie.

Then I think again how she’s never out there in the backyard with Mr. Verver anymore. Is his heartache so great she can’t
bear it, just like I almost can’t, seeing it on him, wanting to fix it?

I think about her up in her puffed pink room, restless and
bored. She doesn’t know what to do with herself, I think. She doesn’t know what to do if she’s not under his bright lights.

“She came out and she stood right here.” He points to where I’m standing. I look down at myself, my knobby legs and bare feet.

“She asked me what I wanted, but I didn’t know what to say,” he says. “And then she just got in the car with me. I couldn’t
believe it.

“And I couldn’t believe it when she let me kiss her.”

I pictured it, the kiss, his hands grasping at her, at Dusty’s clean, tight pureness. Would she let it unbend, unfurl for
him?

I imagine him trying so hard, his mouth on her, on her cheek, the side of her mouth, her neck. Trying to animate her, to share
all that want, show her what it means, and what it can do.

No, no. It was all so wrong. I didn’t know why, but I couldn’t see it. Dusty’s eyes glassy with want, with surrender. There
was no picturing it, not like this.

“It was like she was giving me my shot,” he tells me. “To see what I’d do.”

He looks at me and his eyes are sad, helpless.

“But it turned out I didn’t know what to do,” he says, and he’s not even embarrassed to tell me. Maybe I don’t count enough
to be embarrassed. “Because she’s not like other girls. That’s why she’s Dusty.”

What made him think he could do this? What made him think he could touch, even with the most delicate fingertips, much less
with those hapless, grabbing hands of his?

He looks up at the window, past my tugged-loose ponytail, his voice breaking softly.

“I never thought she’d come outside.”

M
y head filled with thoughts of the yearnings of Bobby Thornhill, I slink back in through the patio door. The kitchen is pitch-black,
and my bare feet skid hard on the linoleum. I stumble, and there is a feeling of softness, like I’ve slid into a basket of
laundry, but I haven’t, and I see the flash of eyeglasses, and it’s Dr. Aiken, shirttail hanging out, arms holding me up,
in our kitchen.

I feel the half scream from my mouth and I stop it fast with the heel of my hand.

“Lizzie,” he whispers, loudly, and tries to keep me upright, hands on my jerking arms.

“I don’t know you,” I say, and the light flashing on his glasses, I can’t see his eyes.

“I’m a friend of your mother’s. I was just leaving—”

That’s when the hall light streams across us and I see my mother whirl around the corner, tying her kimono fast around her.

“Lizzie,” she hisses, and her eyes fix on the open patio door and my grass-stained feet.

“Lizzie, what were you doing outside?” Her hand claws over my wrist. “Were you out there? By yourself outside, with everything
that’s happened?”

Her hand on me so tight, and she has so much nerve, and I
raise my chin and the words jump from me. “I can do what I want,” I bellow. “Don’t you?”

Like that, her hand leaps to my face, a slap that sings.

“Diane,” Dr. Aiken says, and he reaches out. “She wasn’t outside. I was the one who opened the door. She must’ve heard something
and come downstairs. We just surprised each other.”

I look at him, my cheek throbbing. I look at him, listen to him save my lily-white skin, but all I can see is the light on
his glasses and I don’t say anything.

A
t breakfast, my mother wants to reach out to my face, I can see it on her. Ted’s started his summer job at the country club
and it’s just the two of us. There’s been no talking about anything, and I slept dreamlessly, waking to the sound of her on
the phone, whispering plaintively, her voice rising once, saying, “I don’t know what to say. I don’t know what to say.”

I scrape the black off my toast mercilessly. She tries to start conversations. She says pained, half-embarrassed things, all
without saying anything.

There’s something wobbling in her and her hands shake and all the heat and tingliness she usually has after he has been over
are gone. She raps her knuckles on the newspaper and sighs and slathers a dishrag this way and that and swivels noisily around
the kitchen.

And finally she leaves for work too.

I wander the house, lingering in the doorway to my mother’s room. I don’t go in, I just can’t, but I see the bed’s unmade
and I can almost feel the pocketed warmth in the center.

Does she think, now that he’s seen what he’s seen, her doctor will be gone forever?

Fleeing, nights, late, the closeness of his house, the wifely claws snaring him. He runs from it and finds such ease, such
leg-stretching, laughing ease here, and it’s so wonderful, so warm and fun, and who wouldn’t want that?

But then it just gets scissored through, doesn’t it? The seams are torn and he sees all the misery he thought he left at home,
well, it’s here too.

All that misery’s burst through and you might choke from it.

A
n hour later, maybe more, of ambling around the house, and I see the way time can nearly stop.

I can’t imagine the stretch of summer days without Evie.

I can’t imagine summer without Evie. I’ve never had summer without Evie.

It’s pouring rain too, and I keep looking outside and it’s almost noon when I see Mr. Verver out there with Detective Thernstrom.
Mr. Verver’s face is so white. It’s the whitest face I’ve ever seen.

I inch toward the open window screen and try to hear, but I can’t.

Mr. Verver has one hand on his hip and he’s shaking his head, nodding, and looking down at the pavement. He’s soaking wet,
and Detective Thernstrom is trying to keep him under his umbrella, but Mr. Verver doesn’t seem to notice, keeps drifting away.

I feel a churning in my stomach and before I know it, I’ve pushed myself out the screen door and into their driveway.

Mr. Verver turns and looks at me, and his face, the rain glittering on it, I can’t read it. It’s like an assembly of the parts
of his face with nothing behind them.

But suddenly I know it, I just know.

It’s because of that look on his face, all that blood and life and feeling wiped clean.

The rain keeps pelting at him, pelting him so hard, like when ancient statues are worn away.

It happens just like that.

I suddenly feel Evie’s fingers slip through mine, feel her falling into the earth itself.

How could I have missed it, the way I knew her, the way I could put my hands on my own face, body, throat, heart, and know
it was hers, how could I have let it go by? She slipped from me while I, while I…

“Lizzie,” Mr. Verver says. And Detective Thernstrom continues to look at me, the rain slanting from the black umbrella.

“What happened?” I say, and I feel the wet hanging on me, and I can’t move, my sneakers filling with water.

Detective Thernstrom walks toward me.

“We thought we found her,” he says. “But it wasn’t her.”

“Found her,” I say.

“They found a body, Lizzie,” Mr. Verver says, and he puts his hands on my shoulders, and his hands are wet and heavy and I
feel myself sinking. “They called me a few hours ago to tell me they found the body of a girl down in Preston Hollow. We thought
it might be her.”

His hands loosen, his wrists turned up, resting on my shoulders. “But it wasn’t. It wasn’t her.”