The End of Everything (25 page)

The heat, and the kids laughing, and the speakers dragged into the street, the rolling beer bottles, the slick tug of fallen
marshmallows under your feet, it’s all happening, but none of it is.

The Ververs, they packed up a car and headed north two weeks ago, just a few days after Mr. Shaw, after everything.

And that time before, those nineteen days when life felt unhinged, wild and headlong, well, now it feels like a forlorn thing.
A whistle in my head, a distant rumble.

When they left, I watched from an upstairs window. Watched Mrs. Verver huddle Evie into the car. Watched Mr. Verver lugging
jammed suitcases, a duffel bag with a shirttail caught in its zipper. Watched Evie lean her head wearily against the car window,
and I wondered, Will she now be weary for the rest of her life? I wondered about faces she used to wear—curious, wonderstruck—and
if she will ever wear them again.

I thought of all the questions she’d never answered and wondered if I’d ever get to ask them. Somehow, somehow knowing that
a key had turned, a lock had clicked, and that was it. That was all I’d ever get.

It felt like the end of everything.

And the last thing, I watched Mr. Verver, red and white cooler tensed between his arms, look up for a second, like he knew
somehow. Like he knew I was there. He glanced up at me, and I can’t tell you the expression on his face. I can’t describe
it. It was both broken and serene.

Dusty was the last one to come outside. I didn’t even know she was back from her grandparents’. She stood at the car door,
hand on the window. Evie, already inside, stared straight in front of her, like they were already driving. She didn’t turn
her head.

Dusty stood there for so long, and she wouldn’t open the door till the very last minute. She kept looking all around, head
darting everywhere. It was like she couldn’t imagine how she would get in that car. There was something lonely about it, and
something else too.

I never did see her get in. My mother said something, I turned my head, and when I looked back, she was gone. They all were.

After, my mother told me they went high into the woods, hours away. A cottage Detective Thernstrom had told them about, one
he’d rented himself once. An A-frame on a lake.

I picture them all on paddleboats, with fishing tackle, around campfires, in horseshoe pits, doing family things.

I picture it all the time.

I picture it especially tonight, the Fourth, hiding on the back patio, hiding from everyone, I picture it all.

I think no one sees me, but then I hear a chair scrape and I nearly jump from my skin. It’s Dr. Aiken.

He’d come to the house earlier that day, wearing madras shorts and the new glasses. The first time he’s ever showed up in
the daytime, not even four o’clock, and he came to the front door, holding a white box with red string, which he handed to
me with a half smile, one of those smiles from someone who doesn’t smile much and isn’t sure what it’s supposed to look like.
But somehow it comes out all right.

When my mother walked in and saw him, her face steamed pink, she ran upstairs and changed from her T-shirt and shorts to a
sundress I’d never seen, with little blue pindots. She moved in it with great care.

In the bakery box were hot cross buns, so strange for Fourth of July. He must have seen the look on my face because he said
he wanted to bring Rice Krispies treats, but the bakery didn’t make them.

“You’re missing everything,” Dr. Aiken says now, standing on
the patio, extending a wilting paper plate toward me. “You mean to tell me you’d miss the limbo contest?”

I look down at the plate he’s handed me and see it’s one of his hot cross buns, the glaze melting onto the corners of the
plate.

“I saved you one,” he says.

I almost smile, even as I feel so far away, so far away from all this. Like I’m watching everything through glass.

“Actually,” he says, “looks like I saved you all of them.”

“I remember the song,” I say suddenly, my voice surprising me.

“Of course.” He nods. “ ‘Hot cross buns, one a penny, two a penny.’ ”

“ ‘If you haven’t any daughters,’ ” I say, “ ‘give them to your sons.’ ”

“Not much of a song,” he says, shaking his head.

“Are you a dad?” I say, my hands on the plate, my fingers growing stickier.

“No,” he says.

I look up at him and his glasses slip and I can see his eyes behind them.

“My wife—my ex-wife now—we wanted to, but we never did.”

I don’t say anything. I can feel him watching, delicately. Watching to see that I understand this. That I understand what
he is saying.
Ex
-wife. And my mother twirling in her blue dress.

“Lizzie,” he says, his voice shifting, “have you heard from the Ververs?”

“No,” I say. “They’ll be home soon.”

“You know,” he says, sitting down beside me on the back step, “I’ve seen those girls for years. Through broken arms, jammed
fingers. Tough girls.”

“Yes,” I say.

“I saw Dusty just… must’ve been the end of May.”

I look at him, and, just like that, I start to feel a pressure in the air, but I’m not sure why. Maybe because he is speaking
with such care.

“Her parents brought her in for a stomachache. All the stress from her sister, I’m sure. This was just a few days after she’d
been reported missing.”

There’s a flicker in my head. A flickering thing flickering from a hundred thoughts I’ve had over the past weeks. A hundred
thoughts I’ve pushed aside, didn’t want to pause long enough to ponder.

Dusty’s flaring anger, as if saying, a thousand times in the last month,
How dare Evie do this to us, to all of us.

“Did you help her?” I say. “Was she okay?”

“Yes,” he says, and he takes off his glasses and looks at them, even though it’s dark and what could he see?

“You’re not supposed to talk about this stuff, are you? Doctors aren’t, right?”

“No,” he says. “I’m not.”

I nod.

“The funny thing, though…,” he starts, putting his glasses back on and turning to me.

“What?” I say, my voice sounding so small.

“Well, when she took off her sweatshirt she was covered with scratches.”

“Field hockey,” I say. “Field hockey.”

“That’s what she kept saying. Long scratches on her arms, on her neck.” He’s looking at me so intently and I feel the pressure
in my chest now.

Something’s happening, but I don’t know what, and it’s like a booming in my chest.

“From practice. From sticks, the cleats. From…,” my voice scraping. What can he mean? I wonder. What does this mean?

“Well, I’ve seen a hundred field hockey injuries,” he says. “I know what they look like. They don’t look like that.”

He looks at me, and I feel his eyes on me.

The pause is so long, and the pressure is in my head now, pounding.

“Things can get pretty rough out there,” he says. “Can’t they? For you girls? You’re all a bunch of warriors, aren’t you?
Lionhearted.”

“Yes,” I say. “Yes.”

I
n bed that night it comes to me: everything that was so raw and fleshy and gaping, everything that felt chaotic and blood-torn—it
all might mean something after all. Something more than what it was, a man fighting a private affliction, until he couldn’t
fight it anymore.
Of course it was more than that…

But to look at it, it’s hard.

I think of Dusty, and everything seesaws and all the things that made her so remote, so far away… the things that made it
seem like you couldn’t touch her no matter what she said, or did. No matter if she took her stick to you, if she laid her
own rough justice on you. She had a fire in her. She did. And… and…

All Dusty’s misery, her preening rage, and Evie insisting, “We never saw him together. We never did at all.”

They never shared anything. They were never sisters like that.

Long scratches, battle scars.

I have this picture in my head, Dusty, a sentry. Might she have tried to stand guard? Tried to stop it?
Don’t you go with him, Evie, don’t you dare go,
that’s the imagined voice whirring in my head. Dusty.

I can’t quite get at it. I’m circling, I’m circling, but I can’t yet see the darkening center.

These last weeks, I replay, and replay it all the time. Everything Dusty and Evie shared with me, revelations on tongue tips.
The center of things—or is it the bottom?—I haven’t reached it yet.

“
T
hey’re back,” my mother says, waking me, her fingers tickling my face, and she leans down over me, her long hair pooling on
my cheek, whispering in my ear.

It’s the last week in July and the Verver car is in their driveway and my mother is making waffles, which has not happened
since never.

Her face is warm, as though brushed soft with something gold and smooth. She is touching everything with light, dancing fingers,
the backs of our chairs, the serving spoon, Ted’s husk of yellow hair.

I can’t take my eyes from the kitchen window, the Verver house, you can feel it jolting to life again.

“So, Mom,” Ted says, shrugging from her tickling hand. “What’s up? You bust out that old Harvey Wallbanger mix again?”

He’s laughing, and I think he means for her to too, but it makes her look at herself and all the butter-softness leaves her
face. He didn’t mean to do it, but he did. He took it all away.

“No,” she says, “nothing like that.” She smiles a little and, bit by bit as she pours syrup onto our waffles, sliding the
dewy tub of butter toward us, the gold comes back.

Dr. Aiken, could he really have such magic in him, could he cast spells and glimmers and make my mother shine like a piece
of fine brass? A man like that, why, he has no glimmers. He has no magic. But there she is, shining.

I
t’s all so fast. The car in the driveway, and by noon Evie and I are riding our bikes to the pool.

She tells me the trip was nice. She tells me everything is better. She says the school mailed her diploma and she’ll start
high school with me in September.

She tells me many things and it’s like she’s talking us into it, talking us into everything being back to the way it was.
Like we’re both secretly saying,
It’s like before and we can talk forever, and we can spend every minute together.

It’s like all these things. It’s the picture of these things. And Evie and I, it’s as if we’re standing there looking at the
picture of how we once were and we’re moving our arms the same way, turning our head this way and that. If it looks like the
thing, maybe somehow it will become the thing.

Me and my shadow.

In everything she says, though, I hear the hollow knock behind it. I am knocking hollowly at Evie’s hollowed heart.

It’s over.

But here’s the thing: in its overness there is a crazy freedom, and I watch Dusty, I watch her, and I am waiting for my moment,
the clearing field. The things she might know. The things she might have tried to stop. The scratches on her arms, and suddenly
I remember Evie’s neck, the faded yellow marks still whispering on Evie’s neck after she first came home. The faded yellow
smudges there, like she’d run a highlighter across her throat.

And the way the two separated, never in the same room, seldom in the same house, since Evie’s return. Like two boxers gone
to their separate corners, spitting blood.

Don’t you go with him, Evie. Don’t you dare go.
Was that it?

There’s still knowledge to be had. If Evie won’t give it to me, Dusty will dare me to take it.

I
wake up that morning with the words on my tongue already. The things I will say to Dusty.

The tryouts are at eight o’clock, before the heavy August heat sinks into the skin.

Evie won’t be trying out with me.

She tells me she never liked field hockey that much anyway. She’ll stick to soccer. She tells me this with her head turned,
and I can’t see her face.

Evie goes with her mother to special therapy sessions twice a week now. They go shopping after, to Reynold’s for ice cream,
to the movies. Some days I barely see Evie at all.

Sometimes it’s like her head is always turned away, so I can never see her face.

T
he field is clogged with freshman girls, all with a bristle of fear on them as Dusty and her cocaptains stalk the sidelines.
They look a hundred feet tall, even though Dusty probably doesn’t break five feet four. They are tremendous. And she most
of all, her purling gold hair, her nut-brown limbs, her kilt snapping as she strides back and forth, eyes hidden behind mirrored
sunglasses, her face blank and inscrutable.

We all go through it, the ball control and push-pass drills, then the attack drills. Drive, push, slap, drive push slap. It
goes on and on and she’s thirty yards away, she’s barely even watching me, but her voice thrums in all our ears, and then,
at the very end, she takes the field with me, and I knew it was coming, but could anyone really be ready for her?

The ball on the end of my stick, I feel my blood roaring, and then there she is, the tackle so hard, our sticks like locked
swords, and I bend double, all the air sucked from me.

It’s a fair tackle, it’s fair, but still, there’s a thudding, charging feel in me and before I know it, my shoulder is vaulting
against her chest, my elbow corkscrewing, knocking her chin sideways with a sickening clack.

The whistles are blowing at me and there is shouting, but we’re in it now. I feel her turf shoes gnash against my face, my
forehead going wet, my mouth guard nearly down my throat. But my arm clips her, swinging around, my foot wedging between hers,
she losing her balance, crashing hard to the sparking grass.

Standing above her, I push my hair from my eyes and give her my whole face. I won’t blink, I won’t, we, squared off western
outlaws.

Barely glancing at me, she raises her hand up to me, a bangle bracelet dangling there, the one that must’ve caught my eyebrow,
tore a gash across it.