The End of Everything (8 page)

“
I
f you can think of anything else, anything at all,” Mr. Verver says. “Day or night. You can come over, you can call.”

This is what he says. We never had anything together like this. Now we do. We have this.

“Sometimes, Lizzie,” he says, “we think we don’t remember things, and then suddenly we do. Like you with the car. Wasn’t that
something, the way you were able to summon that up? And then sometimes we don’t connect things, but they
may be
connected. Like you did with the stubs. You’re smart as a whip, Lizzie, and you’ve been a lifesaver. Where would we be without
your help? So I’m just saying, anything comes to you, anything at all, just come over. Find me. Or call, even if it’s the
middle of the night. Okay?”

Yes, Mr. Verver, yes, yes.

J
oannie and Tara and I are perched on our bike seats three doors down from the Shaw house, thick with cops. Tara has been passing
tantalizers about the search warrant, so we skip fifth period and now hover madly from afar. It seems certain we’ll be caught,
grisly truants, rubberneckers, ghouls. But we have to see.

We don’t catch even a glimpse of Mrs. Shaw, or Pete, who still has not returned to school.

We’re there only ten minutes before a patrolman spots us, follows us back to school, but before he does we got to see the
detectives duck under the half-open garage door with flashlights, and Tara nodded so self-satisfiedly. We did not see them
come out.

I
t’s on TV that night. My mother, head craned over her tea, listens intently, shushing my brother. The newscaster says police
won’t confirm it, but that “inside sources” say that a search took place. On all three channels, they keep talking about Mr.
Shaw as a missing person who “may or may not be a suspect in the Verver girl disappearance.”

On Channel 7, they mention lab testing of the cigarette butts, though “it remains a question if anything can be retrieved,
given rain and exposure to the elements.” And, the lady newscaster adds, “According to his family and friends, Mr. Shaw was
not a smoker.”

“He gave it up years ago,” says a pinch-nosed woman identified as Mr. Shaw’s bookkeeper. “For his health.”

“Sources close to the investigation,” the lady newscaster says, in closing, “say that no cigarettes were found during the
alleged search of the Shaw house.”

I feel my mother’s eyes on me, watching my reaction. I don’t give her anything, even as it hits me, spins me.

I know they were his cigarettes in the Verver yard. I know it.

“Maybe the police just missed them,” I say. “You can hide cigarettes anywhere.”

“Maybe he stashes them on the patio,” Ted says, in that snide, prodding way he has with our mother. “Under a flowerpot.”

But we are in such a serious space that my mother doesn’t even look up when he says it, doesn’t lose her focus for a split
second.

“We have to consider the possibility that these may be two unrelated disappearances,” the jowly chief of police says. The
TV anchor nods with gravity, but in the chief’s eyes you can see it:
he knows it’s Mr. Shaw, we all know, don’t we?

“Well, I just don’t understand this,” my mother is saying. “Do they really think, after all this, that…”

But it is Mr. Shaw. I know it, soul deep. Somehow, it’s like I even knew before it happened. Must’ve felt it on some deeper
level when I saw Mr. Shaw’s car licking past us that day. And didn’t Evie share it with me during that momentous second in
her backyard, kneeling over cigarette stubs, a secret so perilous she could scarcely utter it?

It is Mr. Shaw, even if Mr. Shaw might not be as they conjure him, this appalling monster in our midst. Even if he might be
something else entirely.

It becomes hard to sunder the believing from the knowing.

And then there’s this:

It must be Mr. Shaw. It has to be.

Because if he didn’t take her, where is she?

“
T
hey didn’t find a-n-y-thing,” Tara explains the next day. There was no pornography, no murky snuff films, and nothing to link
him to Evie at all.

“He must’ve really cleaned house before he did the deed,” she says.

Part of me was bracing for unimaginable horrors. Something worse than dirty pictures of brace-faced girls lifting their jumper
over their head, worse even than muddy videos of dark deeds done to tousled children, eyes wide with terror. What could be
worse than that?

But mostly I realize that I never truly thought they’d find anything bad, anything ugly. There’s just that squinting part
of me that feels sure Mr. Shaw, whatever he’s done, was driven not by private sickness but by the purest, most painful love.
If I squint my eyes just so, if I push out all the dirty rumors, I can see him differently. I can see him as a yearning nighttime
wanderer dreaming his way into Evie’s yard, her lighted window. Her face there.

“He probably took all the dirty movies and magazines with him, up to Canada or wherever he’s got her,” Kelli, sucking on gum,
says. “Took them with him so he could make her look at them. So she could see how to get him off.”

We all faintly gasp at this. We all shift back, just slightly. There is someplace she has just taken us and all I can think
is how dare she?

Because then I do think of such things, of Mr. Shaw sitting next to Evie in his maroon car, the glossy peach of a centerfold
laid open, across their laps. I picture it like the one buried under my brother’s baseball card collection, where the girls
all seemed splayed like bent-back dolls, their mouths bright, enormous, their depthless eyes.

“Maybe it’s not him,” Joannie says, and we all look at her. “Maybe it really is just a coincidence.”

“So where the hell is he, then?” Tara says, clicking her retainer definitively. “My dad says there is no such thing as a coincidence.
Coincidences are for bored housewives and defense attorneys.”

There are things grinding in my head, chugging mercilessly…

The icky mysteries the Shaw house was expected to hold, the darkening rumors, none of this is in my real imagining. I don’t
believe any of it.

Didn’t I know they wouldn’t find a thing? It’s not about a rancid need for all girls, any girl. It’s about Evie and love.
Standing in her yard…

Blood-thick: I know it’s nothing’s like what they think. They’ve all got it wrong. I just don’t know how, yet.

T
he sobbing upstairs is loud, helpless, as if to rattle the windows and shake the pillars.

“Dusty wasn’t feeling up to school today,” Mr. Verver says, and I can tell from his T-shirt and jeans at three thirty in the
afternoon that he never made it to work either.

I’m there to deliver the trophy Dusty won at the end-of-year ceremony at the high school. MVP, which is a very big deal, especially
for a junior. Ted brought it home, was asked to deliver it to Dusty. (“I can’t go over there,” he whispered. But I could.)

Mr. Verver smiles at the golden figurine of the ponytailed field hockey player as he turns the walnut base over in his hand.
He brings the face close to his eyes, his brows knitted. “She doesn’t look nearly fierce enough,” he says, staring hard into
the gold-plated eyes.

I can’t fight the grin and he sees it and grins too.

“Shall we put it in a place of honor?” he asks, and for a second he feels like Mr. Verver from before, the way he made everything
an adventure, even having to get our shots before school started, or the time Mrs. Verver was sick and he took Evie and me
to the Roberto Salon for haircuts, the way he sat in one of the lilac chairs and tried to read
Woman’s Day,
and the way all the stylists preened and cooed over him, and one gave him a free cut and rubbed creamy coconut-smelling lotion
into his scalp and we could all smell it for hours, in the car, in the rec room when we played table tennis.

I thought of how the coconut scent must have sunk into his pillow that night.

Once, last summer, Mr. Verver, he pulled up the fallen strap of my bathing suit with one long finger. I still remember the
tickly-achy feeling, a feeling I never felt before.

We walk down the basement stairs to the rec room. This is where the Verver kid parties were held, and, for a while, weekly
poker night with Mr. Verver and some of the neighborhood dads. And the adults come down here a lot during the block parties
and the Verver Fourth of July party to get away from the kids and to smoke. There are family pictures and some German beer
posters. An old velvet poster that said, “Mott the Hoople,” which I always thought was a Dr. Seuss book.

The floor is hard and when we were little Evie and I practiced tap down here.

“Me and My Shadow,” step-shuffle-back-step, step-shuffle-back-step.

Behind the bar, there’s a long, thickly varnished shadow box where all the trophies are, except Evie’s, which are in her room,
because they are always too big for the case—puffy, padded soccer ball sculptures, and Dusty always says they look like cartoons
of trophies, not trophies themselves.

Mr. Verver shoves the new trophy into the center, and a fog of
dust puffs out at us. When I cough Mr. Verver slaps me hard on the back and makes a funny Three Stooges sound.

The room always smells like laundry, the soft gust of fabric softener. I see a few empty beer bottles on the barrel-slat coffee
table and think sadly of Mr. Verver down here, his mournful wife and daughter crying mercilessly in separate bedrooms upstairs,
and there’s nothing he can do.

It is so terrible.

In the corner of the shadow box, which stretches the full length of the leather-padded bar, there’s a small trophy I don’t
remember noticing before, a green-gold musical note propped on top of a tiny marble stand.

“What’s this?” I say, reaching out for it.

Mr. Verver smiles, yanking it from the shelf and handing it to me.

I see the gold lettering half dissolved, as if even setting my fingers on it could erase the rest:

STA E MUS C COMPE T ON—2 P CE

“It’s so old,” I say, and Mr. Verver laughs.

“Centuries past. Ice ages have come and gone.”

I feel an impish smirk on me. “This is yours,” I say.

“Yeah,” he says, taking it gently from my hand and turning it around to look at it.

“What did you play?” I ask, even though I know. I remember him telling Evie and me before. I remember how he got so excited
when he talked about it.

“Piano,” he says. “Keyboards. I played at the state finals. This big theater by the Capitol Building. One of those old-time
movie palaces with pipe organs that seem to hit the sky. I remember coming onstage and there was this heavy gold curtain,
the tallest I’d ever seen. And the lights. It was like stepping into the sun.”

He laughs softly. “It was a lot to take for a scrawny kid like me. But I played my heart out.”

I picture Mr. Verver, hunched over a gleaming baby grand, over a silver piano like in an old movie, over a shambling upright
piano in a dimly lit bar, his eyes soulful and brooding.

“I bet you were amazing,” I say, nearly cringing at myself.

“Not amazing, exactly,” he says, “but it got the girl. Annie. Mrs. Verver.”

I’ve never seen Mrs. Verver listening to music. Whenever I hear stories about Mrs. Verver, it’s always like this. They’re
always old stories, like she’s someone everyone used to know. Stories about how when we were little Mrs. Verver and Mrs. McCann
smoked pot behind the garage at the Fourth of July party, or how, back in high school, she played Ado Annie in
Oklahoma!
and flipped her skirt so high everyone saw her underwear, which was midnight blue lace.

These stories seem impossible and I don’t believe them. It’s like there was this Mrs. Verver once and now there’s someone
else, tired and bone-skinny, who works evenings at the VA and who reads while watering the garden, one hand on the hose and
the other clawed around a yellowing novel from the rummage sale. I wonder if that other Mrs. Verver is somewhere else, like
San Francisco or Mexico, doing wild things and never looking back.

“She heard me play at a club,” he says. “We were just out of college.”

“You were in a band?” I ask, feeling myself lift up onto my toes, leaning over the bar as his head lolls back in reminiscence.

“That’d be a generous way to put it,” he says, his eyes glimmering and doing wonderful things. “She was in the back hallway
with a guy she thought she was in love with, this cool guy with long sideburns and a ring on every finger. But then she heard
me playing and she couldn’t stop herself. She left the poor fella and made a beeline straight across the club to the front
of the stage.”

My head goes crazy with thoughts of Mr. Verver, age twenty-one, a mop of dark hair and a boy’s body lurched fast over the
keys. Did his collarbones jut, his Adam’s apple bob? Did he have that awkward slouch of boys who grew so fast they themselves
seemed bewildered by it, faintly dazed in their own skin?

And I could see it so clearly, Mrs. Verver, hair long and sunny, like in that old photo on the fireplace mantel, hips twisting,
eyes fixed, walking toward him, hypnotized.

And what if Mr. Verver was, and I bet he was, just as confident, just as cool and easy as he is now? How could she stop herself
from walking toward him?

“What were you playing?” I ask.

“I don’t remember,” he says, but the way he says it, I know it’s on the tip of his tongue. And sure enough, as he rotates
the trophy in his hand, looking at it like it’s a crystal ball, he breaks into another smile.

“ ‘Moonlight Drive,’ ” he says.

I nod eagerly, even though I’ve never heard of it, but it speaks of romance, of lost highways, red taillights flashing across
dreamy faces, dire love.

“If I can find it,” he says, “I’ll play it for you sometime.”

“On the piano?” I ask. I am bouncing on my feet and I can’t stop myself.

“Well, I don’t even have a keyboard anymore,” he says, his eyes creasing tenderly. Then he nods toward the wire album racks
teetering dangerously in the corner. “I’m sure the album’s in there somewhere.”