The End Of Everything Part 25

Lifting her off her sister, that face violet-shot.

That's how I see it. The way Dusty tells me.

Mr. Shaw's man's arms. I can feel them.

Listening to Dusty, it all shudders into placea"Evie saying to me, He saved me, so I gave him this thing.

"He stopped you," I say, the recognition rustling against my neck. "Mr. Shaw."

"No, no, no. I'd already stopped," she says, the words breaking to shards. "I'd stopped."

"And then he took her away. Then he stole her away," I say, picturing Mr. Shaw hoisting Evie in his arms. A true rescue. At first, at the start.

Oh, Mr. Shaw, you might have been that knight if you had quit there. You might have been that knight, had you been able to stop your own sick heart froma"

"No, no," Dusty says, her voice soft. "He pulled me away. She was on the ground and the sound, thata rattling sound from her throat, and I couldn't look. I couldn't look. We were both breathing so hard, but her breath, like when you put your ear on a seash.e.l.l. Like your ear on aa"

"He took her," I say, pus.h.i.+ng myself in.

"No," she says. And she tells me how it was. Evie shaking the breath back into herself, her face stunned, lost. The searing red on her neck.

How he'd started backing away again, like he didn't know what to do now. Like he was afraid to get near either of them. Someone could swoop in at any minute and point the finger at him.

Her face covered in her arms, Dusty hid herself in herself. She covered her face, and buried herself fora she didn't know how long. It felt like forever.

Hearing Evie stumbling to her feet, calling out to him, calling his name. Running to him, her breath that gruesome wheeze.

The car door slamming. The car kicking to life. The car driving away.

"You have to understand. The things she said," Dusty goes on, her voice splintering and going high. "They were so awful. Things no one should ever say about anyone."

Her thumb on the clotting blood on her knee, dancing there, touching the sealing blood.

"Lizzie, she said those things and it was like shea carved them into me. Because now I look at myself," she says, her hand lifting, nearly covering her mouth, "and all I see are those words."

"What words?" I ask, but somewhere in my head I know.

"I can't say them," she says, darting her eyes at me, her face breaking softly. "Do you think I can say them?"

"A-a-about you," I stutter. "About you?"

"She said, How is it different from the two of you? From you and Dad. And I told her it was nothing like that, that I was nothing like her."

And Evie said to her, No, you're right. You're nothing like me, Dusty. It's not me you're like.

You're the one out there, just like Mr. Shaw. That's you under the pear tree night after night, wanting things you can never have, those last words like a claw over Dusty's face.

Dusty, she'd said, almost a taunt, but a thousand times sadder, you can want him your whole life and Dad's never going to give it to you.

I look at Dusty now and there's a howl in my head. I can't say anything.

"She made it seem sick," Dusty says, her voice choking her. "She made it seem like loving him was dirty. What could be dirty about loving your father?"

"But why didn't she tell on you?" I say. "Why didn't she tell what you'da" My voice trails off.

"She'll never tell," Dusty says, her eyes lidding softly.

"She's protecting you," I say, but even as I say it, it doesn't make sense. It doesn't make sense because they were never sisters that way, were they? Only keening rivals, circling each other, marking each other tightly.

A love was in it, I knew, but it was nettled and fearsome.

"It's not me," she says, shaking her head. "She's not protecting me."

I feel something stirring softly inside me. I think of Evie, secrets held close to her chest, and I see it's not about hiding, it's not about sealing herself up, sealing herself away from me.

She is raising the barricade so high, so he will never have to know. He will never have to see what his daughter did to his other daughter. What either of them has done. I think of Evie in the car on the way back from the pool, I'm sorry, Dad. I'm sorry.

"I never told him about her either," Dusty says, as if reading my mind. "I pictured myself, so many times, going to him. Saying, Don't you see, it's all her fault. Everything's her fault. She ran to him. She ran away with him. Even if I had nevera she was going to do it. Go with him. I know it.

"But I could never say it. I couldn't stand seeing the look on his face. I never want to see it."

She can break his heart, both sisters are saying, but I won't.

"I'll never tell either," I blurt. "I'll never tell."

She looks at me, and it's such a tortured look, full of anger and despair and a flushy kind of warmth I've never seen on her before.

"It's like kids," Dusty says, and she's almost smiling. "It's like when we were kids. Blood sisters, right? Remember, in the backyard, all three of us, thumbs to thumbs."

A memory hazes forth, Evie and me, maybe five or six, stretching our arms before golden Dusty, our thumbs jabbing, waiting for her silvery laceration.

"Blood sisters," I say.

She might even reach out to me, but she doesn't. She tilts her head, looking down at the tile, dragging her cleat against it.

"That day. The way I was. It wasn't me, you know?" she says, almost shaking her head in wonder.

I think of Dusty on the hockey field, ferocious and biblical, her stick slas.h.i.+ng, saberlike.

"It's a thing to know about yourself," she says, quieter still.

She watches me.

"Yes," I say.

Then there's a ripple across her face, and she looks away.

"Lizzie," she says, a whisper. "I know how it's been. With you at our house. All that time with him. I know how it's been."

"Dusty, Ia"

Her hands shaking in her lap, palms up.

"I know how it's been for you. With him. All those nights. I know."

"But Ia"

"But that's over now," she says, her voice tiny, forlorn. "That's over. Do you understand?"

I don't say anything.

She turns and faces me, her hands lightly on my arm, light like Evie-light, but I feel a steel beneath them. I do.

"The way it is, for Dad and me," she says, "it'll never be like that for you and him. It goes so deep with us. You could never have that. You just couldn't."

I could not.

Who was I to imagine I could?

That's what I think, and then the thinking of it makes me feel sick. I feel sick.

"He always says to me," she says, smiling lightly, " *You're going to leave a string of broken hearts, Dusty. Remember I told you that. I saw it before anyone else. I was the first.' "

She smiles at me. "I have to be true to that, don't I?"

Then she puts her fingers to her lips, as if she just thought of something.

"But I nevera he nevera it's not like that," she says. "Like Evie said it was. That's just Evie's sickness. To see something so beautiful as dirty, as wrong. She can't help it, I guess. She's a sick girl.

"What Dad and I have, Lizzie," she says, fingertips resting on that lovely mouth of hers, "it's pure. It's pure and I never looked at it. It was just a feeling, always, my whole life."

Twenty-five.

I don't pretend to know the hearts of women." Mr. Verver said that once, long ago. He'd said it, laughing, he'd said it with a knowing slant of his head, and I remember Dusty, her face, the glow of it, because Dusty only ever glowed and gloried under his gaze. I think of Dusty and boys, those furtive thoughts of why she can never yield herself to them, doesn't even care to try. Mr. Verver, he gives her everything and asks nothing in return, except everything. Everything. There's nothing left for anyone else, she gives it all to him, his gaze rendering her beauty with such care. And then the struggle after Evie went away, and after she came back, oh, for Dusty not to have that gaze on her. Oh, any minute at all in her life, not to have that gaze on hera It's nearly Labor Day. The sounds floating through the kitchen window, and it's like a thousand other nights, and Dusty's starry trill, Mr. Verver's throaty laugh, the swing of his voice, like his hand on your back, pus.h.i.+ng you on the swing set, your feet in the air.

Everything is back. It's back. But it's all different and the laughs are different, aren't they? I nuzzle the screen door and look and see their tanned faces, their gleaming teeth and avid eyes, and the frenzy in the air seems a thing apart.

Everything looks different now, Evie once said. But I don't think it's different. I just never saw it before.

Dusty, the eagerness on her face, the grasping, the grappling. How hard she's trying, how hard he's trying too. It's desperate, but you believe in it: We will make it so, we will make it as before, a fairy tale, handsome king and golden princess, surveying their kingdom from on higha I think of Evie up in her room, and wonder if she's hearing them too and knowing she is.

If things had been different, Mr. Shaw may never have touched her. He may have gone his whole life never stepping from the shadows. Never going beyond a few shared words on the back lawn of the school. But then it happened, and she ran to him, and then he couldn't stop.

But I saved her, didn't I? Stringing clues together, tracing the breadcrumbs back. Dropping breadcrumbs myself. All to rescue her from him.

Rescued her, returned her, restored hera back to that house where now she lies, one thin, filmy wall from her attacker, from the girl who held herself against her neck, nearly pressing the life from her.

Would you let it all go on? Would you let both sisters hide their dark tales, their black-heart secrets? Or would you tell all, turn that enchanting, light-struck household inside out, lay open its mysteries?

Caught up in it all, in the slipstream of it, I've seen things. I've seen the ma.s.sy heart of things.

They had made their choices, both sisters, hadn't they? Neither would tell what happened. Neither would ever tell.

They'd decided what mattered to them. And it was Mr. Verver, it was him. The him of him, and the idea of him, and maybe they were the same.

And now they've drawn up the bridge, raised high the walls, and who was I to say? Who were the police, anyone, to say they knew better? That they could look at the gold-gleaming family before them and see its troubled center and say they knew better, could undream that beautiful dream?

These two girls, not princesses so much as palace guards, sacrificing all to keep their n.o.ble king safe. Up high in his tower. Golden-walled, immaculate.

I walk outside, onto the patio, and watch them. There he is, holding court, Dusty enthroned at his side, her legs curled tanly beneath her.

I watch for a long time before he sees me, but he does.

He rises so fast, my heart catches.

There's a warmth on his face that brings everything back.

I take a few steps toward him.

Calling my name, he flings his arm out to me, hand outstretched, his face open and ready, inviting me in.

She smiles too, the gracious victor to her former rival, and the two of them, their smiles are the same and so much radiates from them it takes my breath away.

He flings his arm wide.

Take it, he says, hand outstretched. Oh, Lizzie, take it.

It's Sunday morning and Dr. Aiken has left to get almond Danish and I creep into my mother's room and she lifts her arms above her head and says, Come lie with me, little girl, like she used to when I was very small and dainty.

We are tucked under the mauve bedspread with the satin border I rub between fingers and it soothes.

I could lie there forever.

"High school this week," she says, smiling at me.

"Yeah," I say. High school, the idea seems so small, after everything.

"I heard Mrs. Shaw and her son moved away," she says carefully. "All the way down by Point Cleary."

I feel a twitch at my temple, push my fingers to it.