The End Of Everything Part 7

Evie just keeps going, cartwheel after cartwheel.

Mr. Shaw, eyes set so deep, like holes in his head, has a hand resting on his open car door, and he is watching us, with Mr. Verver.

And I am still laughing and Evie's hair fans out black feathers with each cartwheel.

And Mr. Shaw's keys fall to the pavement of the driveway and Mr. Verver picks them up for him and Mr. Shaw opens the car door wider and smiles funnily at Mr. Verver, his tie loose around his collar from his after-work beer break. The smile is wrong, it lifts in the corners but it's not really a smile, it's a thing he does with his mouth.

And he looks over at us one more time before getting in the car, then he starts his engine and leaves.

And Mr. Verver waves, but I don't think Mr. Shaw sees. He is driving slowly past my house, my lawn.

Evie springing, legs flying, hair whipping around her face, hard body never stopping, and Mr. Shaw still looking, even after he's gone.

Did it happen like this? I don't know. But it's how I remember it and I know Evie's cartwheels, the way she floated through them, like moving through mola.s.ses, smooth and dawdling and tongue-sweet, why, that's how it was. I tried, always, to slow them down like she did, to make them linger, lovingly, but mine were always short bursts, tight and fast.

Her dark hair sheeted out, matching her limbs, summer-honeyed.

He saw that and he fell in love. How could anyone see Evie's cartwheels and not fall in love?

Oh, how his heart must have ached with it.

And then the picture comes again.

The picture comes twice. Everything comes at least twice.

Mr. Shaw watching, eyes set so deep, like holes in his head, has a hand resting on his open car door, something square and silver gleaming in his dangling hand.

A cigarette lighter, square and silver, gleaming in his dangling hand.

Mrs. Shaw may not know it, Mr. Verver may not remember. But I do, I do.

He smokes.

And now I can guess how it is. He smokes Parliaments, in his car, around town, on sales calls, on long walks at night, twining through the starry streets. Standing at courtly remove in the Verver backyard, yearning.

Anywhere but home.

Evie is not at the bottom of the lake.

Those are his cigarette stubs, his left-behind longings and woe.

He watched Evie and smoked and made her his dream, over and over, then and later, and then every night, every single night until he couldn't stand it any longer.

Sat.u.r.day morning, I'm crouching in the alley behind the Tri-County All-Risk office, and that's where I see them, behind the drainpipe.

The two cigarette b.u.t.ts, the gold-edged piece of plastic from a hard pack. I even spot the Green Hollow Pharmacy bag, crumpled in the wire trash can, a receipt still inside. It might be his. It might've been his.

It hits me fast that my hand is shoved in a trash can, and that I have left home without permission and during a strict curfew.

There's a giddiness in it too.

And I peer in the gla.s.s door, into the darkened office, thinking of Mr. Shaw in there, gloomy and yearning.

Everyone else running down blind alleys, everyone doubting me, but I know. I know everything.

At home that night, I imagine placing an anonymous call to the police. "Look in the alleyway!" I'd whisper witchily.

My mother is droning on and on about the old woman and the lake sighting and what it means.

"I haven't seen Annie at all," she says, talking about Mrs. Verver. "I tried calling. What do you say? Do you say you're sure it wasn't Evie. I mean, really. What do you say?

"And him. Oh, it's so sad, the way he stands in the driveway, like he's forgotten something. Or like now. Did you see? He's sitting in the yard with the bottles of beer, and the way he looks into the trees. It's like he thinks just maybe little Evie will suddenly slip from between two trees and walk back into the yard.

"And he doesn't even have Dusty around to lean on. Where is she? The way she usually clings to hima"the vine, that's what we used to call her when she was little. Where's she?"

My mom is feeling wistful and semitragic. She has had no late-night visitors in days. She and Dr. Aiken can't lie languorously in our patio loungers late into the night when Mr. Verver's twenty feet away, doing such conspicuous grieving.

"Why don't you go sit with him?" Ted, eating ice cream over the kitchen sink, says. He glances through the screen. "He looks lonely."

I feel a surge of warmth toward Ted, who never seems to notice anything. But part of me knows he's just prodding, poking at her, like he does.

My mother twists her lips a little and for a second I think she might do it, might go over there with her tending ways like she tends to Dr. Aiken, ministering to his lonely-husband heart. But she and Mr. Verver never really talk much, and my mother, if she was feeling neighborly at all, always chose Mrs. Verver, the two sighing together about how long the soccer games were, when either of them went, which was hardly ever.

"Lizzie," she says, curling one hand over my shoulder, "he likes you. You go."

She says it as if he's the kid at school with the stutter or the harelip. Go make friends. Doesn't she see that all I want is to go, to have him s.h.i.+ne himself on me like he could always do? But he can't. He's captive to this horror. I know things, I know them in a sneaking way, but I don't know how I can make him know them too.

"Hi," I say, standing before him, itching the back of one leg with the toe of the other.

"Hi," he says, nearly smiling. Forcing a smile, just for me.

"I remembered something," I say. "I remember Mr. Shaw here last summer. Do you remember? He was talking to you. Evie and I, we were doing cartwheels."

He winces when I say it. It's a wretched thing to see, but I go on.

"I remember something in his hand," I say. "I remember he had a cigarette lighter. Do you remember?"

He squints hard. "Ia I don't think so," he says, and the defeat on him overwhelms me. "Lizzie, our heads, they can do funny things. Believe me, all I do is replay everything in my head, all the time. Everything reminds me of everything."

The words echo in me, they hurt.

I drop down into the lawn chair beside him.

I want to tell him about what I saw in the alley, but I know it won't matter. It won't matter because no one believes me now.

Sitting there, so helpless, I feel such desperation. All I can do is try to show him the knowing feeling I have, try to make him feel it too, at least a sliver of it.

"It's not true," I say, and I can't believe I've said it, and Mr. Verver looks at me like he can't believe either. "What that old lady said she saw. It's not true."

He pauses and he's considering his words carefully, or else the hurt is too great for the words to come out clean, steady. Either way, the look on his face makes me want to sink into the wormy earth and lose myself forever.

"Lizzie," he says, and there is only the slightest tremble in his voice, which mostly sounds very deep and very grave, "I wish I knew anything anymore."

"Mr. Verver," I say, pitching up in my chair, "that old lady is wrong."

He looks at me as though maybe, just maybe I have some kind of secret wisdom, and don't I?

"Mr. Verver," I say, and I find myself placing my stubby girl hands on his arm, and it sparks on me. "I know, I do."

I fill my face with weighty meaning, I make him lock eyes with me. He must believe, he must believe.

He looks back at me.

What a tortured wisp of hope to cling toa"instead of drowning, his daughter has been secreted away by a lurching man three times her age, but it's there. It's the strand we've got and we clutch at it madly.

It is after midnight, one, two o'clock, I don't know, but the storm must have come, the winds pitching high, and there's this sound from outside, the metallic squeak of the chaise, sc.r.a.ping along the patio.

Heavy with a nightmared sleep, I stumble from my bed and I guess I mean to go out back and drag the chair inside. I can't shake my thoughts straight enough to be scared, careening through the dark house, wind thudding on the roof. My body nearly flings itself down the carpeted stairs to the kitchen.

I'm almost to the patio door, fingers reaching out for the clicking vertical blinds, when the voice barks out.

"Don't do it."

I nearly jump.

It's Ted, that flat, rough tone, his boy's sullen grunt. "Don't," he says, like when he tells me not to throw my cleats on the creamy vinyl of his car's backseat.

I turn to see him, or at least the crest of his blond hair, the two pale streaks of his long ballplayer s.h.i.+ns. He's leaning against the kitchen counter, and looks, as always, a hundred feet tall.

I'm about to ask him why, but the words just hover in the back of my mouth. I wonder what he's seen. I think about burglars in black knit caps or packs of wild dogs, teeth clattering against the gla.s.s patio doors. What has he seen?

And then, of course, I think of Evie.

Is something coming for me, too? Something come to pull me down into the sumpy core, the hidden center where Evie hides, big-eyed and lost?

He ducks his head forward and I can see him now in the light banding across the kitchen from the Ververs' porch lamp. Ted's face, colorless, his lips pulled back. It's not his face at all. For a second, it is my dad's.

Watching him, I forget about the noise, the squeaking and dragging, but it's stopped and I turn and place my hand on a thatch of blinds, looking at my brother, as if asking permission.

I don't wait for it, though. Instead, I peek out into the dreamy green-black of the backyard. The patio itself is tucked deep in the shadow of the house, but I angle my head against the gla.s.s door, and there it is, shot through with the captured brightness of a streetlamp, a stray bedroom window.

I see all of it. I see the hard flash of a bare leg, my mother lifting herself upright from the chaise, her hair tumbling, a hand tucking a bare breast back into her open blouse.

And him, too. His back to me, I see him rise, his hand digging through his hair. I want him to turn around, to face her. I want him to look at her.

Instead, Dr. Aiken seems struck motionless by the sight of the strutting sports car in the Darltons' driveway next door.

He tilts his head, as if very tired. For a second, I can see my mother's face as she looks over at him. Her face, there's something sparking and sad in it at the same time. It seems like it couldn't be both at the same time, but it is.

I don't go back to bed. There's a sense of wicked license to everything. What did any of it matter when it's like this?

Head filled to the brim, mind racing, I grapple for my tennis shoes and sneak out, traipsing darkly through backyards, one after the next, houses trapped in quiet, all the way, all seven blocks to the Shaw house.

I don't know what I mean to do but feel it could be anything.

Before I know it, I am standing in front of the Shaw house, fingers tapping on the streetlamp post.

It seems there could be no darker house, its eaves drooping like batted lashes. The quiet in there, why, it's sealed tight, there's no breaking it. Watching it earlier that week, doors flung open, police officers in and out with cardboard boxes, notepads swinging like tails from back pockets, it seemed laid bare. Now it seems sealed over, plastered shut.

I picture Mrs. Shaw and their son, Petea"that dark-haired junior who got in the paper for winning the state robotics prizea"huddled high in the house, the sloping storybook house with the steeply pitched gables that overhang so thickly as to hide within them things monstrous and beautiful. I picture bats folded in on themselves, bleating possums under the porch.

But maybe too something magical, something from a bedtime story, a glittery raven tucked under the eaves, a p.r.i.c.kling briar rose.

I think if I look hard enough, I'll understand something. It will become clear to me.

What is there to see, to know?

The wind lifts and I stand, goose pimples rising on my skin, my eyes doing crazy things, like when I was a kid and thought I could see through walls if I tried just so.

But the house offers up no reward.

The minutes slink by and I've nearly surrendered, when I think what I might do.

I creep around to the backyard. Did the police even look here? If he smokes in the Verver yard, isn't it possible he smokes in his own?

It's too dark to see anything, and so I'm bending over, then kneeling, feeling for things, rolling my palms over clumps of gra.s.s, flagstones, the thick gnarl of an old tree stump. The more I clutch my hands over everything, the more I think there's a kind of madness in it, scrounging, burrowing, on all fours on the Shaws' nighttime gra.s.s, like I might throw my head back next, howl at the moon, scream b.l.o.o.d.y murder.

I crawl on the Shaws' lawn for a very long time, corner to corner, but I find nothing, not one stub, not even a stray, curling match.

But I'm not done. Dirt under my nails, I feel bold and daring and walk freely along the driveway, up against the house itself, even laying my hands on it. The outer walls are cold to the touch, my fingers scuffing along the brick and stucco, the timber slats that, higher up, spoke through every gable.

The garage looks horror-housey to me. The place people said he hid the p.o.r.n and the snuff film and all manner of things that it turned out weren't there at all. I press my face to one cloudy window, though all I see is my own face, a smeary negative, eyes wide and blinking.

I think of it maybe as Mr. Shaw's own private s.p.a.ce, a s.p.a.ce where he could sit or maybe even lie on cold concrete and smoke and imagine things.

Just past the garage, I rest my hands on the house again. This time, my fingers touching something colder still, like metal, and I see it's one of those two-way milk chutes from olden times, just like we have at our house, only ours has a broken hinge my dad never fixed. When we were younger Evie and I pa.s.sed each other notes there and sometimes she'd still leave thingsa"a painted barrette, a soccer ball key chaina"there for me, and it'd take me months to find them, to think to look.

The chute at our house is painted bright green, but this one is brown, and half covered with creeper ivy. You could miss it entirely. I wonder if the police missed it.

Slipping my fingers under the spiny tendrils, I grab for the hinge, which is not broken and I don't even have to pull hard and it opens.

Not even stopping to think, I dart my hand inside. Whirling my fingers around, I don't feel a thing but tickly ivy stems on my wrist.

But then, as I start to pull my hand back out, I hear the faintest crackle of something just under my retreating knuckles.

It's something wedged in the lip of the chute.

Grasping eagerly, I feel something plasticky and soft, and something else, too, something cool and nubby. Tugging now, I claw my hand over everything and topple it into both hands, running to the streetlamp to see if I have found what I think I have found.