The End of Everything (7 page)

It’s five terrorizing minutes before I breathe again, the force of her coming at me, the speed with which she is on me, stick,
arm, jab, the gust of her hair, the sucking sound of her stick sweeping,
slicing, my legs spiraling beneath and dragging me down with a thud three, four, five times.

Five times, ten times, she takes it from me. Three, four times, I feel the hard kick of the ground knock my chin backward,
my teeth rattling like loose pennies.

Then, I think I finally have it, I have a shot, one shot, but just looking at her in front of me, legs apart, puts a fear
in me I can’t shake.

She could always do that to me, since we were little kids, me standing, wide-eyed, stunned by that gold-sparked perfection.
She could tear you down with a glance, a flicked wrist, a slow-blinking eyelash.

Then the ball is there, and the toe of her stick down like a guillotine and the block comes so fast, my head jerks like it
might pop off.

I am sitting on the ground, my breath like scraping metal, and Dusty is far afield, her face flush, her breath coming fast
too, but in excited fits and starts. She smiles at me, wry, and is saying something about how I’ve done good, or something
like it, amid all the ringing in my head.

She’s above me and her hand is outstretched and I wobble to my feet and that’s when, with her swinging me up, so strong, I
see the change in her face. The gleaming triumph breaks into something soft and desolate, and the breath in sounds almost,
almost like a sob, our hands interlocked.

“Dusty, I—” I start, but she whips around, stick to her side, nearly slicing me, and she’s running off the field, curls swinging.

Later, I wonder if she went back into the locker room and let herself cry, head between her knees. But I think that’s my dream
of Dusty. The way she is, which is lionhearted, magnificent, those few tears she nearly shook fast on the field—that’s the
most I’d get.

T
hat night, the reporter on the Channel 2 news with the blond ledge of hair is holding up a Parliament and saying, “Cigarettes
much like these were found in the Ververs’ backyard,” but adds, gravely, “but whether these cigarettes are linked to the alleged
abduction is uncertain.”

Watching, my mom is amped up at the kitchen table. She’d brought a casserole over to the Ververs and she says the police were
there again.

“They keep getting these endless reports of Harold Shaw sightings,” she says. “One of them’s got to come through. They sent
two detectives up to the border. They think he might be in Canada. The wife—Kitty… she said he had an old college friend up
in Ontario somewhere.”

She goes on like this, and I’m listening, but mostly it’s about how Mrs. Verver can’t sleep, can’t eat, lost seven pounds
in five days, and then about how frightening a place the world is for mothers.

I wait until her show comes on, and then I sneak outside and drop into a lawn chair, twist myself into the rubbery slats,
wedge feet and toes beneath.

Oh, these long curfewed evenings and no gallivanting, hopping yard to yard with Evie, pedaling bikes up to Rabbit Park to
swing on the rusty merry-go-round or pump legs on the squeaky swings. No ice cream, no riffling through magazines at the drugstore
and giggling through the feminine products aisle, nose to the tip of the lavender bottles dappled with flowers promising such
cleanness, such powdery, perfumed womanly cleanness.

Instead, I sit and contemplate my foot, the cool dent from Dusty’s fiberglassed saber, its terrorizing J hook.

There is something holy and badgelike about the injury, about the flaring bruise on my ankle, the hardening scabbed streak
up my shin from the cut rendered by my own desperate stickwork.

Savoring my war wounds, I sit, and feel I deserve rich rewards. Spotting my mother’s secret Benson & Hedges pack crammed into
the wet dirt of a gangly potted geranium, I think about pulling one out and lighting up. Evie and I did it once. It hurt our
throats, but the good kind of hurt. That’s what we said.

Are there cigarettes in every backyard, every garage, every toolshed or bird feeder?

I spot a lemon wedge sucked dry in the corner of the patio. Sliding my foot out from beneath me, I take my toe to it, kick
it loose, watch it wheel across the pebbled expanse, hollow and paper light.

This is where she sits with him, with Dr. Aiken, who wears squared glasses and, in my head, always seems to be carrying a
clipboard, wearing a stethoscope, even though I’ve never seen him with either. He’s not my doctor and wasn’t my mother’s.
She met him, Ted confided—but how did he know?—at the snack bar at the pool last summer, but that seems too long ago, so I’m
not sure. I think I’ve felt him in the house only since March, since that night he brought her that book, the one called
The Heart of the Matter,
which he said he’d promised to loan her and which she read even while washing the dishes. I never saw her read like that
before, but it was soon after that all the huddled conversations in the backyard started, all the mixing of drinks and long
telephone calls and a steamy pink look on my mother’s face.

She doesn’t talk about him, but he’s everywhere, all over the house. Once I saw him through my window at four in the morning,
saw him rustling through the patio shrubs, looking for his glasses, which he cleaned with the tail of his untucked shirt.

He leaves himself everywhere, I think. He leaves bits and pieces and scraps and shavings.

It’s strange, a little, sitting where he sits, even though it’s our patio, my patio.

I can hear the Darltons’ television drifting from their living room, the theme music with the big strings and whirling piano.
And, from upstairs, Ted’s baseball game,
And there’s a strike on the outside edge
…

Then, just like that, Mr. Verver emerges from the green of his backyard, a finger shoved into a brown beer bottle.

He swings it back and forth as he walks toward me.

The startled
oh!
that springs from my mouth, I didn’t even know it was there, and he looks at me and I feel my face scrub up hot.

“Hi, Mr. Verver,” I say. I wonder how long he’s been in his driveway. Has he seen me eyeing those cigarettes? Has he seen
the awkward way I’ve been sitting, hands between my thighs?

“Hey, Lizzie.” He smiles slightly, forelock dangling like a football player. His shirt looks dirty, like he wore it to sleep.

I feel my hand go to tuck my hair behind my ear.

It’s the first time I’ve talked to him in two days. The first time since I recognized the car, since I told him about the
cigarette butts. Since everything seemed like it was hurtling fast toward something, whatever something might be. That’s how
it seemed two days ago, but here we are, Mr. Shaw everywhere and nowhere at once, and no closer to Evie at all.

I think of how disappointed he must be in me because in some way he thought I had given him a golden key. I wish I had given
him a golden key.

He stands over me and pauses, eyes crinkling.

Then, and I can scarcely believe it as I see it, he settles into the chair beside me, legs astride.

“So how are you. How’s school,” he says, looking off into the hazy stretches of the yard.

“Okay,” I say, but it sounds ridiculous. “You know, strange.” My hand reaches to scratch a phantom mosquito bite on the back
of my knee.

Talking to him, talking like this to
Mr. Verver,
feels so big and important. I don’t want it to stop, but I don’t know how to make it go forever. I never had this before,
never had him like this, just talking to me.

“Everything’s been canceled,” I say. “Practices and stuff.”

I feel my face flushing. I can’t really look over at him, but I can feel his eyes on me.

“You miss her very much,” he says, with such gentleness, as though I am the one to be comforted, soothed. “Don’t you?”

I feel my mouth open slightly, but nothing comes out.

He pats me lightly on the arm with the tips of warm, callused fingers.

Looking at him, I see such heaviness on his face, like I’ve never seen. I think of dire things. This isn’t how it’s supposed
to be. Not for him.

“Yeah,” I finally say, the small hairs on my arms tingling. “But she’s coming back.”

I say it and I can’t believe I’m saying it and I know it’s true. I know it.

Mr. Verver encloses my wrist in his hand and smiles sadly, his eyes unfocusing and drifting to someplace over my left shoulder.

“Yeah. Yes, that’s right.”

He doesn’t believe me, and the knowing of it pierces me. I want him to know, really know, in the blood, in the bones, as I
do.

Oh, Evie, what you have carved out, unloosed, scooped out clean, such fullness, such wholeness, and what’s he to do?

How can I make him believe? I wonder.

I look at him with all the Evieness I can flood my face with. I promise him over and over, without saying one word.

Know it, know it. Know me.

I
don’t remember it all, it’s in the dungeonmost part of my head, but I was four, five years old, and he saved me. It was at
Green Hollow Lake, and so many families, it was Fourth of July or it was Labor Day or it was some big summer picnic and I
remember the ashy hot dog buns from the grill and the tang of ketchup warming on paper plates and I was there on my brassy
yellow Hawaiian Punch raft, floating next to Evie, so alike then no one could tell us apart, our hair cut in the same bobs,
our squirmy little bodies in matching checked swimsuits.

We were all there and it was before they roped off the beach because of that rough current and there was so much noise and
frenzy and I remember the feeling of the raft against my cheek, the way I tried to block everything out, to push myself into
the center of the raft and hear nothing but the low pounding of the water, my heart.

Somehow, the shoving and nonsense of older boys, or the slickness of the seaweed snared around my kicking ankles, or something,
I tumbled into the lake, and no one saw. There were minutes, centuries, in those murky depths. That is how I think of it now,
epochs floating, vanished, forgotten. No one saw. Until Mr. Verver scooped me up, shook me like a wet puppy, lifted me as
if by my neck scruff, and saved me then and there.

I remember—do I?—spouting green sludge, lake bottom sorrow, a tadpole wiggling in his arms. The rough towel on me, Mr. Verver
there now, his bright white grin. “You slid away like a scaly fish,” he said. “You don’t get away so easy.” Huddled fast against
his chest, the warmth then came, like a promise.

I remember that.

T
hat night, the dream comes, and it’s Evie at the foot of my bed, mouth stuffed with cotton, just like before. And I sit up
and reach down and pull it in long tufts from her mouth, long tufts that wind through my fingers like swirls of snow.

More comes, more, and I let my hands rise up high, to her chin and to her open mouth, which is now black and bottomless.

Like Nurse Stang, my fingers slip in, touch the wetness there.

Your stitches are gone,
I say, as my fingers push against her tongue, rasping cotton free in filmy tendrils.

I don’t need them,
she says, and sticks her tongue out, propelling my fingers back.

The tongue, it dangles like a red ribbon. But I look closer and see it is split in two, like a snake’s. Like the king cobra
they showed us at the zoo.

I reach out to it, and her jaw clicks, like it might snap loose, like her mouth might swallow her face. It’s then I realize
it’s not Evie at all but the thing that took Evie deep inside and is hiding her there.

T
ara Leary always has things to tell in the locker room after gym. Her pipeline of secret knowledge surges constantly, we are
ankle-deep in it. She hears everything, her gaping-mouth mother phoning in dispatches. Before, her dad’s job at the prosecutor’s
office meant only that we all had to go to the morgue for Biology class. Now it means she is the keeper of all life-death
knowledge and revelation.

I am her most favored steward. She knows the police have talked to me, and therefore we two are part of a special category,
an elite.

We’re in the shower stalls, and she’s whispering to me through the curtain.

“I heard my dad tell my mom,” she says. “They got the search warrant for Mr. Shaw’s house.”

She tells me the police also got an anonymous tip that he had boxes of pornographic magazines and videos hidden in the garage.

“Whoever called must’ve seen them,” she says. I can see the shadow of her mouth through the curtain as she talks. “He hid
them under stacks of old newspapers or something. His wife probably never knew. He probably went out there at night.”

I try not to picture it, not to see Mr. Shaw in a garage like our garage, with my dad’s old workbench and the transistor radio
and the dozens of boxes labeled
SHIMS
,
DOWELS
,
SCREWS
,
HINGES / PULLS
. Mr. Shaw in his bathrobe, standing under an overhanging lightbulb, looking, looking, looking—

“It’s called kiddie porn,” Tara is saying, and I touch my side of the rubber curtain, feeling the vibration of her voice against
my fingers, telling myself she is lying.

“I heard there was this one video,” she continues, “where they show this little girl and she’s a pure virgin because she’s,
like, nine, and this long line of men, some of them, like, fat or old, they come along and rape her one by one and then they
kill her
and they really kill her because it’s called a snuff film. They snuff her out. My dad said that it’s just as well by that
point because what’s gonna happen to a nine-year-old girl who’s been raped by, like, twenty guys in an hour?”

Tara’s voice is clear and sharp, sliding through my brain like a hot needle. I want her to stop, but I can’t catch my breath
or get my voice back.

H
ere’s the thing: Evie is gone, has been gone for six days, and no one can find her and it is not long, another day, before
it starts to feel like no one really expects her to be found. It starts to feel like everyone is waiting to hear where the
body was dumped and what was done to it.