The End of Everything (3 page)

Do I see it in her expression, as she looks at me, as she pulls her face into blankness? Do I hear her say, in some low register,
a creeping knowingness always between us? Do I hear her say,
This is the last time, this is the last time
?

This face, my face, gone forever.

T
he phone rings. It’s ten thirty at night. I’m brushing my teeth when it happens, and I hope it’s not my dad calling from California,
calling from his apartment balcony, a sway in his voice, talking about the time we rented canoes at Old Pine Lake, or the
time he built the swing set in the backyard, or other things I don’t really remember but that he does, always, when he’s had
a second glass of wine.

But it’s not him, and my mother sounds rattled and confused.

“I’ll be sure to speak to her right away,” she says, and I try to think of things I might have done. Late for Algebra twice
last week. Would they call your parents at ten thirty at night for that?

After she hangs up, she drops her arms to her sides, and I can see her take a long breath.

Pushing wisps of hair behind her ears, which is what she does when her nerves run high, she sits me down at the kitchen table.

“I’m going to ask you something,” she says, “and I need you to tell me the truth.”

I say of course I will.

“Okay,” she says, and her hands tremble, and I feel bad about whatever I did even though I can’t imagine what it might be.
“Do you know anything about Evie not coming home from school today?”

I shake my head and say I don’t know anything. I don’t know anything at all. Even though I’m telling the truth, it somehow
feels like I’m lying.

My mother, her face gone soft and pink, takes my hand in hers and asks me again. And then once more.

But I don’t know. I don’t know, I don’t.

Somewhere, though, somewhere in my head, in the back pitch of it, there’s something. There’s something. I just can’t reach
it.

I
t’s happening,
that’s what I think, but even as the words come to me, I don’t know what they mean. In some tucked-off way, it seems like
whatever is happening had already been happening, for so long, a falling feeling inside, something nameless, a perilous feeling,
and I don’t know what to do with it.

I saw her, that hank of dark hair, sports socks tugged high over knees. I saw her.

Evie was there, and then Evie was gone.

Fingers pushed between the blinds in our den, I peek through to the Verver house, lights blaring in every room.

Just five nights before, I slept over, trading pj’s and listening to music and even reading aloud a chapter from the thick
paperback Mrs. Verver kept by her lounge chair, the one with the woman’s mouth on the cover, open, and a man’s finger touching
it. Evie said the finger looked hairy, and she didn’t like how they were always having sex standing up. But we read some of
the scenes two, three times, taking turns. I kept thinking what it might be like, all those bodies and rushing blood and thrusting
tongues. Everything seemed rough, bruising, wet. It made my stomach go tight and we put it away and I was glad.

I kept thinking about the book after we went to bed, Evie’s room dark, my eyes on the soccer ball mobile making lively
shadows on the wall. Dusty and Mr. Verver were in lawn chairs on the back patio, their voices floating up. I could hear them
laughing and his laugh always so serene, so serene, like he is.

You always feel Mr. Verver through the whole house, that laugh of his, deep and caramely. He makes the house feel so full,
crowded with bright things and mischief and fun. When we were younger, he’d play board games with us and he always cheated,
but you couldn’t care. He’d announce it, like it was his own special strategy, and then he’d wink at you, and it was like
you were in it with him. You found yourself wanting to help him. Dusty always scolded him and sometimes took his turn away.
The games would go on for hours, and you never wanted it to stop.

“Dusty’s back from her date,” Evie whispered, and it was only then that I realized she was listening to them too. I sat up
in my sleeping bag and nudged toward her bed.

“With Tom Mullan?” I asked, and Evie said shush.

“Listen,” she mouthed. “Just listen.”

Dusty and Mr. Verver’s voices hovered, so delicately, through the window. We could hear Dusty, wry and giggly at the same
time, which is how she always is with her dad and no one else.

“So then he stops the car and—”

“Just tell me he didn’t say he was out of gas.”

A peal of Dusty laughter. I remembered the week last summer when my brother took Dusty out a few times and wondered if she
sat back here with Mr. Verver and they laughed together about him.

“No, he just stops the car and turns to me and says, ‘Babe—’ ”

“Babe? He called you ‘babe,’ did he? Poor kid. He’s in way over his head.”

“He says, ‘In that white dress, you look like an angel.’ And then—”

“But you
are,
babe, but you
are
…,” Mr. Verver said, and I could practically see his grin.

“Dad, stop!” Dusty was wheezing with laughter, trying to get words out. “So he leans over, and next thing I know he’s practically
swallowing my ear.”

“Well, did you return the favor? I raised you with manners, didn’t I? I mean, he promised you dinner, didn’t he?”

Dusty’s laughter was just breathless squeaks.

“C’mon. What did you do?” Mr. Verver chuckled. “The poor little squirt.”

“What could I do? He swallowed my pearl drop earring and nearly choked. I couldn’t stop laughing. I hit him on the back, and
it popped out.”

“I bet it popped out,” Mr. Verver said, and there was the briefest of gasping pauses before both of them let loose a new stream
of uproarious howling.

Evie kept staring at me, waiting for me to smile or say something, but I didn’t because I didn’t know what she wanted.

All I could think was how wondrous it was—oh, the two of them. Everyone wanted to fall under their enchantment, her gaze hard
and appraising, his so soft, so welcoming.

That was how it was in that house, and there was so much fun to be had. Wouldn’t it be wonderful, I remember thinking—was
it just five days ago?—to talk about boys with Mr. Verver? To play Uno with Evie for hours and watch Dusty try on her pastel
dresses and listen to music with Mr. Verver until dawn?

I
t is a long night and my mother walks the halls, checks the window latches three times, the front door. She seems to walk
all night, bumping into chairs, turning the television off and on.
And I try to sleep, I try to sleep away the thoughts spreading dark stains through my head.

But I have thoughts, and the thoughts feel like they will be very bad dreams.

M
y mother walks me over to the Ververs the next morning. On TV you have to wait twenty-four hours. Twenty-four hours before
it means something. It’s been only a half day. This is what I tell my mother as she holds my hand so tightly for the seven
steps between our houses.

She stops and looks at me, her face pinched. “Not with children,” she says. “They don’t make you wait with children.”

“Oh,” I say, and she looks like she wants to say more but is stopping herself, making herself stop. But then she can’t.

“With children,” she says, “every minute matters. Everything can be ruined in a half hour. You have no idea.”

I feel a hard rake across my chest. It’s the most awful thing I’ve ever heard. What could she mean? What does that mean?

Wired so tight, she doesn’t notice my flinch, and before I know it, she’s yanked me through the Ververs’ side door.

There are two detectives in the living room, and they ask my mother to wait while they lead me upstairs. I’m still thinking
about Mr. Verver’s face when he’d answered the door for us, brimmed high with feeling, his whole body jumping, his hands scratching
at his upper arms, bouncing on his feet.

He’s trying so hard, that’s how I see it. He’s trying so hard, and Dusty was making coffee, her whole body cocooned in a big
sweatshirt that made me perspire to look at, and she was trying to concentrate, and the grounds kept scattering, and when
she knelt down, I saw the long swoop of a tear hang off her eye, but
she covered it quick with her ballooning sleeve, and by the time she rose and turned to me, she was dry-eyed, focused.

Upstairs in Evie’s room, with the two men in blazers and ties, my head feels hot, and everything’s twitching in me, like nerve
endings snipping and snapping. It’s all too much and here I am, and I have to know things, tell things.

I take breaths, many of them, deep ones. First, they ask me if anything in the room looks different, but it doesn’t. They
make me look around, but there’s nothing to see. Nothing I can see. All I can think of is how strange it is to see the room
that’s all Evie—a soccer ball lamp, tidily arranged schoolbooks, neat rows of pencils with bright eraser toppers, and that
Magic-8 Ball she keeps on her desk (
Ask again later,
it always said)—filled up with two men in striped ties who have to bend their heads to avoid the eaves.

Then, for half an hour or more, they ask me many questions, over and over again. They sit me down on the twin bed, that nubby
yellow bedspread of hers. I don’t know where to look, so I focus on the luscious strawberry crusted over my knee from practice,
running my fingernails under its hard edges, tugging ever so gently.

“Lizzie,” one of them says, “did Eveline—Evie—did she say she was waiting for someone?”

“No. She was just going to walk home.”

“Do you usually walk home together?”

“Yeah, but I was going to the mall.”

They repeat the earlier questions. I repeat my answers, running my fingers over my knee, the crinkles of the scab. The questions
shift.

“Did Evie have a boyfriend?”

I feel my face rash up with red, and then I feel silly for it.

“No,” I say.

“Did she ever talk about boys to you? Boys she liked, or who maybe liked her?” One of the detectives sits down beside me,
crunching the tiny bed lopsided.

“No,” I repeat. “Never.”

M
ISSING
: Eveline Marie Verver, age thirteen years old. Five feet, one inch tall. Eighty-nine pounds. Hair: Dark brown. Eyes: Gray.

Last seen en route from JFK Middle School, 5/28. Wearing yellow T-shirt with butterfly on front, blue shorts, tennis shoes.

Identifying marks: Bruise above left eye. Small white scar on inside of upper left thigh.

It’s posted on all the electrical poles, in store windows. Everything about it seems wrong, beginning with the name.

When you’re girls growing up like we did, you’re so body-close. Sometimes, I’d look at my own left thigh and wonder where
the white curl went, the scar like a half-moon, a nail dug deep, from falling off Dusty’s Schwinn in second grade, Dusty pushing
so hard, hands on Evie’s back. Then I’d remember it wasn’t my scar, my leg, but Evie’s, even as I could sometimes feel it
under my fingertips, like the soldiers with the phantom limbs we read about in History class.

The body-closeness, it comes from all those nights knotted together in the tent in the backyard, or showering the chlorine
off in the bathhouse at the pool, lying in the plush grass by the soccer field, comparing injuries, pushing our fingers in
each other’s violet bruises. Tugging at our bathing suits, seeing who’d get that bra first, even as Evie knew it would be
me, but she was the one with the hot cramps that made her bend over, that made her turn white. Sometimes I felt them too,
with her. Sometimes I felt my insides turning as hers did. I wanted to.

We shared everything, our tennis socks and stub erasers, our hair elastics and winter tights. We were that close. Sometimes
we blinked in time.

Back in second, third grade, all the parents always saying,
Do the dance, do the dance.
The first time was at the tap recital. “Me and My Shadow,” in our matching silver leotards and shiny top hats, our hair the
same muddy color, the baby curls sprayed to shellac by Madame Connie, our teacher. Then everyone made us do it again and again,
at birthday parties, on Easter. A hundred times in the Verver basement, my living room, at school,
step-shuffle-back-step, step-shuffle-back-step.
Over and over, cheeks painted red. Until I grew two inches and Evie’s hair went dark and finally we never did that dance
again.

But I bet I still could do it. I bet I could do it right now.

These things, though, they end.

And with Evie gone, I can see things had been changing for who knew how long. It was like the scar on her thigh, the one I
could feel beneath my own fingers, had slithered from my own leg back to hers. “Maybe I won’t try out for field hockey,” Evie’d
said one day, even as we’d talked of little else all year long, aiming for a shot at JV. And there Evie is on Friday nights,
and she doesn’t want to do the backyard table tennis tournaments with Dusty and Mr. Verver, the ones that last till long past
dark, fireflies flicking in the deep night majesty. She just doesn’t anymore, and these are things I can’t account for.

We’re no longer two summer-brown kids with tangles of hair and jutting kid teeth. I don’t know when it happened, but it did.
Lately, things had been hovering in her face, and I couldn’t fathom it. I had things too, new things twisting under my skin,
but I didn’t know what they were. It felt like she knew her own zigzagging heart, and I was just killing time.

“
H
e’s b-a-a-c-k…” That’s what Kelli Hough says at school, a group of us ribboned around her locker. I’d missed the first three
periods, talking to the police, and I feel unsteady, somehow lost. And there is Kelli, shrill-mouthed, French braids tight
enough to pop veins.

“Corrine Willows,” someone whispers. It’s the name sizzling through the halls, behind locker doors, in the steaming cafeteria
line. We were all in second grade and Corrine was two years ahead of us. Someone had climbed into her bedroom window during
a slumber party, grabbed her, and disappeared into the night. The details, you remembered them. The Strawberry Shortcake sleeping
bag, the shiny purple nightgown, the finger splint on her left hand, from when she jammed her finger in gym class. There were
search parties. They dragged the lake and the Milky River.