The End Of Everything Part 9

"It's kind of weird, though, don't you think?" she says.

"What?"

"That broken hinge. I mean, it's been broken forever. I remember when your brother busted it, swung at it with his baseball bat."

"Yeah," I say, remembering it too.

"Well, I was thinking about it," she says, uns.c.r.e.w.i.n.g the cap. "It must've been a real ha.s.sle for Mr. Shaw, hiding those cigarettes there. When you open it, you have to hold the door with the other hand, just to stop it from falling off."

"Right," I say, keeping my voice as even as I can.

"a when there's plenty of other perfectly good places to hide things, like his cara""

"He probably didn't want his wife to know he smoked," I jump in. "She might have found them if he hid them in his car."

"How about a flowerpot?" she says, taking a sip from the juice, slanting her head, as if pondering. "One of those big old empty planters your mom has all over the place."

"I guess it could get wet there. Ita""

"It just doesn't make much sense." She pauses, then taps the jug against her chest. "To me, at least."

"No," I say, my head hot and tingling. "I guess it doesn't."

I sit up straighter in my seat. I can shake her off, I can. But the jolt on me, it's like a coldness on the teeth. It's no surprise that she knows I'm lying. She reads me here, like on the field, like everywhere. She sees it all.

"I guess none of what he's done makes sense," I try.

She nods, but the stare she gives me, I know I'll feel it all day long.

Later, Mr. Verver pulls me aside to update me on everything. He stops and pulls me aside just to tell me.

"The police showed the lighter to Mrs. Shaw and her son," he says, "and the son recognized it. He said his dad kept it as a memento, that it'd been his own father's lighter, and Shaw used it to light the Christmas candles or birthday cakes."

"What about Mrs. Shaw?"

Mr. Verver shakes his head. "She said she couldn't be sure. She couldn't remember anything," he says. "But, here's the thing, Lizzie, Mr. Shaw's office a.s.sistant also identified it, said she'd see him spinning it around on his desk sometimes, called it his lucky piece."

Oh, to see him so animated, so enlivened. And I did that. Savoring it, I try to put Dusty out of my head. If she doesn't believe me, what does it matter? I keep telling myself that. Over and over.

Then it's on the news that night.

A college student comes forward, identifying herself as the girl the old lady saw jumping into Green Hollow Lake, the one she thought was Evie.

"I was just collecting samples for Geology cla.s.s," the girl tells the reporter. Her hair's long and dark like Evie's, but she's nothing like Evie. I wonder how anyone could think this college girl with her big dorm-fed shoulders and cork sandals could be Evie.

All my mother can talk about, though, is the milk chute, as if it linked us to everything.

"I can't believe it," she says, standing in front of the refrigerator, trying to imagine dinner. Ted is nowhere to be seen. "The idea of that man skulking in our driveway. Hiding his things here, creeping around our house at night."

This is what she says.

In my head, Dr. Aiken stumbles through our back hedges.

I nearly laugh, I nearly do.

Sometimes, though, it's like I believe it myself. Sometimes I forget my own lie and I think of Mr. Shaw jerking open our milk chute door, fumbling his hands inside, hiding his secrets. He gave his secrets to me anyway, didn't he? Or I took them from him. It was me who took them from him, my hands reaching, grasping.

Eleven.

Tuesday, the school froths with revelations. Tara Leary stalks the halls with her growing pack, girls eager for her gruesome knowledge.

"It's a big manhunt now," she says. "My dad always said it was a s.e.x crime. They're looking everywhere, across the state, and they have the best leads in Ontario. They're working with police up there. The wife says he was always talking about how he wanted to go live up there, get some cabin by himself. What a freak."

A cabin on a lake, like some romantic getaway, like some lovers' retreata "But my dad says it's probably a suicide at this point," Tara goes on. "Because now there's nowhere he can hide."

"But I heard they're going to do another search in the woods behind the school," Joannie says.

"They think they might be hiding in the woods?" I ask, picturing a pup tent and propane stove.

Joannie, now as worldwise as Tara, looks at me and shakes her head. "They're looking for the body," she says. "They're wondering where he might have buried the body."

We're in Health cla.s.s and we're learning about menstrual flow again and Kelli Hough is playing Mrs. Miller like a carnival gawker, asking her why the blood "down there" comes so thick, and is it wrong that she feels "tingly" down there when it happens?

I am spinning my pencil in fast circles and clock-watching and it happens like this first: a buzzing, hot in my ear. Poking with my finger, I try to stop it. No one else seems to hear it, rapt as they are by Kelli and the "tuggy" way it feels when her period comes, "like a thread, you know, pulling down inside me."

But the buzzing sound has a heat to it and my head feels hot too and the room is so white, so glaring white, it hurts my eyes and I dig my hands between my legs and try to shut it out, try to think of other things. But I'm thinking of Mr. Shaw and Evie and how I know it seems to me he'd never hurt her, he just loves her so and why can't anyone understand?

And then I start to think of all these days that have pa.s.seda"eleven days and countinga"and what might have gone on by now, and if Evie finds his love beautiful and if it's turned to things done under covers and Evie's eyes rolling back.

I am sick with it, and sick with myself. And my mind jumps and it's that time last summer, waiting for my brother. I'm with his friend Matt Nettle, who just fixed my bike, and we're behind his house, by the garage.

I'm tired, he says, let's sit down a minute, and I do because he's sixteen and I just turned thirteen, and there is a trembly leg thing happening to me and sitting down seems right.

We're leaning against the heat-curled s.h.i.+ngles of the garage and I can feel paint dust hot on my neck.

We're not saying anything. Then Matt starts talking about the things that guys need and he bets I understand because I have a brother.

I tuck my knees to my chest and pull at one of the tongues on my gra.s.s-stained Keds. He's talking and talking and I don't know that he will ever stop. He reminds me of my dad when he wants to explain his reasons for things, when he wants to say he's sorry.

I squeeze my fingers on that shoe tongue, my cheeks going hot and hotter. I don't look at him, or even hear him anymore, but then I feel his big callusy hand on my wrist and my stomach somersaults and my breath rushes back into my mouth.

Next I feel his fingers around my arm and he's moving my hand and then I feel my hand settle on soft fabric and I know it's Matt Nettle's shorts. My hand pulls away fast and goes back to the tongue on my Keds.

And he's saying, Please, please, Lizzie, don't be a baby, and yanking at me with his big basketball player hands. And then he says, What if you just help me out? You don't have to touch. You just have to pull your s.h.i.+rt up and let me look. Just let me look.

This is what he says, as if it'd be granting a favor, giving him a gift.

It somehow happens that I'm unwrapping my knees from my chest and his hands are there so fast, underneath my blue T-s.h.i.+rt, hot and dusty, they move like this, right to my small white bra, and I don't look at his face and he moves his hands and I hear him unzip and I don't look.

His voice all weird and breathless, he says, Just let me see, and I don't know what to say and he says, C'mon, c'mon, and I know what he's doing, I just know.

How is it that I pull my arms out of my sleeves and slide my bra down and let him see? But I do. My skin quills up, and he stops talking, he finally stops talking.

When he's done, he makes a little sound, and I feel his hand sticky on my chest and he pinches them and my eyelids flutter anda"

I pull my s.h.i.+rt down and get up and grab my bike and run with it, the pedals cutting into my legs. I run through the Middleton yard, twisting my ankle on an old watering can and running still and finally jumping on the bike seat and it's not until I'm riding fast down the street that I realize, under my s.h.i.+rt, my bra is still down around my lower rib cage, straps so tight across my arms I can't ride and have to stop and hope no one's looking while I pull it up, back into place.

When I told Evie about it, in the quiet of our sleeping bags, she didn't say anything for the longest time, but I could hear her breathing. Then she said sometimes the ways boys need things so badly, like they could never stop needing, it almost scared her.

But, she said, sometimes I feel like that too.

She said, Lizzie, do you ever find yourself wanting so much you feel like you might disappear? Like all that you are is the wanting, and the rest of you just burns away?

This is what I'm thinking of and I'm so deep in the thinking of it that it's like I'm not in Health cla.s.s at all, listening to Kelli and hearing her rapping her pencil against her barrette and her voice going up and down about the blood, the blood and the way it feels between her legs.

No, I'm with Evie, and we're clasped close together and she's about to tell me something, she's about to tell me everything, all the things she knows, all the things she's learned, the secret knowledge gained from a week and a half sunk deep into a place I can only see dark glimmers of.

I can really see her, she's really there, and she's going to tell me, her mouth opening, her teeth and tonguea"

"Evie," I say, but no words come and the sound on the floor, my head hitting it, is loud enough to wake the whole world.

I don't tell Mrs. Miller or Nurse Stang anything. I say I feel dizzy and they ask me if I skipped breakfast and I did. I skipped breakfast and dinner last night too, except for the box of soft licorice coins I found in my room, which I finished in one sitting, a raw taste silting my mouth's inside all night.

The next night, Mr. Verver walks out to the backyard with a few cans of beer hanging from a six-pack's plastic rings.

He's taken a leave of absence from his job. He's spending his days driving, with the police, with volunteers, with anyone who will go. They drive all day. Because, everyone keeps saying, it just takes one lucky break, one eagle-eyed stranger. A known man with a known girl in a known car, they can't just disappear.

He beckons me over, pats the lawn chair beside him.

He says he wants to show me something and spreads a large map on the gra.s.s in front of us, a map spanning this county, the next, all the way up to the border and across into Ontario.

"It's this area," he says, leaning down and spreading his hand across a creased section at the top. "His wife says he always talked about scouting around here for cottages to buy. That he had these fantasies of a summer place up there."

I'm listening, and I'm looking at the map, the way he's markered all over it, Sharpied circles, lines, and stars. The map is thick with it, the inked pocks and streaks and wavering lines obscuring everything in some corners, like our corner.

"She told the FBI that she thought he had a college friend up here somewhere," he says, rolling the beer can between his palms. "Jim somebody, she said. The police can't find anyone else who knows who she might mean. But they've been driving from town to town, anyplace that rents or sells cabins around this area."

He's looking very closely at the map, and then at me.

"They're going through security tapes of the border crossing," he says. "There's been all these sightings. It just takes so long, tracking them all down. The manpower. But Canadaa"that's meant more support from the state and the FBI."

It goes on like this, and he shows me all the places he's driven to, in our county, the next. All the places the police are looking. All the leads, hundreds of them. The more he shows me, the more it starts to seem like the world is so big, and we are so small, that nothing could ever be found, anywhere.

Later, Mrs. Verver comes out and it's the first time I've seen her up close since Evie's been gone. Her face looks scrubbed across. Her haira"that hair that was always as smooth as shaved lemon icea"now has a strange texture, like the rubbed-raw hair on an old doll.

She stands behind us, a gla.s.s of iced tea in her hand, and she doesn't say anything, and Mr. Verver reaches behind to touch her arm, but he doesn't quite make it and she doesn't move toward it.

I would.

I watch her gazing into that same green tangle in the far corner of the backyard, the one we look into. It's not like my mom says. We don't expect Evie to s.h.i.+mmer forth, the tree branches releasing her. It's just the way the chairs face.

If they faced each other, if Mr. Verver faced me, I don't think I could sit there with him.

It hurts sometimes to look at him. It's all right there upon him.

Mrs. Verver stands there for such a short time, and later I wonder if she was ever there at all, or if she was just a ghost.

Evie, gone twelve days, feels more here than ever.

I'm surprised, though, that Dusty never comes outside on any of those nights. I think about how this is the seat she always took, her long legs tucked beneath her, her laugh so mean and delicious. That was how it always was between them.

It seems like she should be out here with him more than ever, now when he needs her the most.

One time, the summer before middle school, Evie and I were in my yard long past bedtime, sneaking into a purloined bag of foamy marshmallows and giggling wonderful silent giggles so no one would hear.

Dusty and Mr. Verver were back there and they had the radio perched on the windowsill and Mr. Verver heard an old song he liked and he started singing to it, and it was that kind of singing where you pretend to be making fun of yourself, but you're really loving it. His voice was always like that. Like he just might start laughing at any minute.

When the chorus camea""You don't have to say you love me, just be close at hand"a"Dusty started singing too, and her voice was so delicate, like tinkly bells, but she gave it everything and they were having so much fun, stumbling over the words, and we started to know the chorus too, we heard it so many times.

I knew Evie would like to sing along. I wanted to too. But you didn't feel like you could. It felt like when you're opening those heavy church doors right in the middle of service, and everyone inside that hushed, perfumed, sacred s.p.a.ce turns around and says, without saying, No, no, it's not for you.

Not for you.

These nights, though, sitting in the Verver backyard, Dusty never comes outside, even though sometimes, if I turn around, I can see her pa.s.sing by the kitchen window, I can just catch the gold frill of her hair.

Twelve.

The next night is the junior prom. Ted is rolling his neck around under his tuxedo collar. His date is Mindy Phipps, a deep-voiced wild girl who was thrown off the field hockey team when the a.s.sistant coach found a bottle of blackberry brandy in her locker. They will be one short in the limousine because Dusty isn't going, there's no question of her going.

"Tom could've asked someone else. I don't know why he wastes his time with Dusty anyway. At least I wasted only four days on her."

I'm watching my brother watch himself in the standing mirror in my mother's room. He looks like a man on a TV commercial, like the one with the dark sweep of hair who whirls the woman around a s.h.i.+mmering rooftop after he gives her the big diamond. Ted scowls, scratching at his neck.