The End of Everything

  Oh, she knows even more, doesn’t she? She knows so much. Why won’t she say, why won’t she say?

  “Can’t you figure it out?” Dusty says, her voice low now, a throaty whisper. “Can’t you now?”

  “Figure out what?” I say, my voice breaking, my hands flailing at my sides.

  I feel that Dusty is on the cusp, I feel it so close, a truth so tantalizing I have only to let my eyelashes bristle against it, my lids shutting fast.

  She lolls her head back slowly. “Oh, Lizzie, she knew. She knew he was coming for her. She knew.”

  “You don’t know that,” I say. Because she couldn’t.

  But she’s not even listening. She’s someplace else entirely, her face going soft, like when she’d lose a game, years ago, when she still lost games.

  “Isn’t it rotten,” she says, “the way everything is happening, all this stuff everyone has to feel, and nothing can be like it was? And it’s all because of her. She’s so selfish.”

  Everything is so close in the room, powders clogging me, heavy smells and choking cotton balls, and I wonder if this is what it always feels like to Dusty.

  “She thinks she can just do whatever she wants,” Dusty says. “She can get whatever she wants. Why does she get to have whatever she wants?”

  That’s not how it is, I think. That’s not how it is. And how can she talk about Evie this way? Except Dusty’s not Dusty right now and you can’t believe her, metal scraping sidewalk, sparking ruin on herself.

  “Look at what she’s done to him,” Dusty says, and for a second I think she means Mr. Shaw. But she means Mr. Verver. I know because her voice goes high suddenly, and it starts to shatter into tinkly pieces. She shakes her head back and forth, back and forth. She can’t seem to stop. “You see why I can’t tell. I can’t tell him that. What his daughter’s done to him. What she’s brought down on all of us. How she destroyed everything for all of us. I can’t tell him any of this.”

  I can feel my breath catch. I do see it: Evie can break his heart, she is saying, but I won’t.

  “Don’t you want to save her?” I say finally.

  “Lizzie,” she says, her eyes lifting up to me, “what makes you think she wants to be saved?”

  I sit on our back patio for a long time, my thoughts jumping on one another.

  I already knew, in part, the things Dusty said, but it still felt like an explosion in my head. There was a world of difference between knowing something on some sneaking level in your own fevered head and hearing it banked into hard little syllables by Dusty.

  Sometimes, at night, he’s out here. She’d said that to me. I had never told about that. Why had I never told?

  What was there to tell? Evie herself said she guessed it was a dream, all confused, like a dream.

  And it didn’t seem like something you could tell.

  It was something Evie showed me and, after learning about Mr. Shaw, the way he loved her in such secret and powerful ways, why wouldn’t Evie be moved by that? Why should she be afraid? It didn’t seem strange that she might have known and said nothing. Kept to herself, a most private feeling. Evie who never had boys buzzing, swarming. Never had many things.

  But the idea of night after night the two sisters seeing him. And sharing it. There is a hurt in there. Evie sharing things with Dusty, but not with me. Dusty, who always stood apart, yet Evie shared it with her.

  But, thinking about everything Dusty said, in some way I’m not surprised by any of it, am I? Are there any more surprises?

  In bed later, I hear Dr. Aiken’s voice from down the hall, low and even. I can’t make out what he’s saying, but there’s a calmness in it, a stillness. Somehow I am glad for it. I hope he’ll keep talking on and on, and he does. It’s the sound that sends me, finally, to sleep.

  In the dream that follows, the phone rings next to me. “Lizzie,” the voice tingles in my ear.

  And I know it’s Evie, in that dream-way of knowing things, even if it doesn’t sound like Evie at all, her voice, high and trembly, like a pull-string doll.

  “I don’t know where I am,” she says, “and there’s so much blood.”

  “Evie,” I say, and it’s a whisper, like a secret no one can know. “Where are you? Tell me. Tell me.”

  “I don’t know,” she says, and she sounds so small, like when she has to talk in Algebra, standing at the chalkboard.

  “Where are you?” I say again, and there’s a pounding in my ears. “Is it far?”

  “Lizzie, I couldn’t get the blood to stop. I used three towels.”

  “Evie, please,” I cry out, “where are you?”

  “I don’t know,” she says, and I can hear her breathing go faster and faster. “How do I find out?”

  “Evie, are you far away? Are you far?” And suddenly the tingling feeling on the back of my neck, the uncanny feeling suddenly of Evie right there, right there.

  “Are you close?” I whisper. “Evie, can you see me?”

  “Lizzie,” comes the whisper, now a sizzle in my ear. “What did you do? What did you do?”

  It is four o’clock, maybe five o’clock in the morning. I can’t see the glowing numbers on my clock, and then I feel a cord twisted in my legs. Yanking it up, I see I’ve dragged the clock into the bed with me, its plug hanging loose, its face black and hopeless.

  I don’t know what woke me, but then I hear the squeaking of a screen door and I peek out the window into the darkness.

  Craning, I can see the front door of the Verver house is wide open.

  I tumble down the front stairs and hover there a moment.

  What did you do? What did you do? Evie’s dream-voice still blazing in my ear.

  I feel a twitch under my eye. That happens right before the noise comes. The noise is loud, it’s a scream, the screeching sound of something, some animal caught under a car and crushed from tire to tire. It’s the worst sound I’ve ever heard.

  I run out the front door and that’s when I see Mrs. Verver standing in her doorway, her hands over her open mouth.

  She’s looking down the street, and my eyes follow.

  There’s an eeriness about it, the thick of predawn and the streetlamps with the shimmery moths and bugs, and, my eyes adjusting, I can’t see what Mrs. Verver sees, what she’s screaming about, until suddenly I can.

  Until the ghostly thing limps under one of the streetlamps.

  The ghost with the pale white legs, the sear of bright green soccer shorts.

  I am running now, my summer-hard feet pounding into the sparkly asphalt, and suddenly it seems like that game we used to play when we were kids.

  It’s like I can hear that chanting, Ten o’clock, eleven o’clock, twelve o’clock, MIDNIGHT! Bloody murder!

  And I want to scream out, my lungs exploding, Home base, Evie! It’s here, Evie. It’s here, you just need to touch the door, the lawn, the curb. I promise you, it’s here!

  I hear myself screaming.

  I am screaming and I can’t stop.

  Running, running, my arms swinging wide.

  I’m nearly there, nearly there, just a few feet away from that candescent circle under the streetlamp, when I feel something hoist me back and it’s Mrs. Verver, her arms on me hard, pushing me to the side.

  I nearly stumble backward but catch myself.

  Hand to my chest, I watch Mrs. Verver hurl her arms around the ghostly thing in front of us.

  And I watch the blankness on the ghost’s face.

  A blankness that makes me start.

  Why, that’s not Evie, I say to myself, and I think: This is a dream, and that’s a ghost, a phantom. A trick.

  It’s not a dream, but it can’t be Evie.

  I’m looking at the bright yellow hair hanging in hanks around her face. I’m looking at the funny texture of it, like flossy batting.

  The strange sweatshirt, gray fleece, torn at the wrists.

  The odd flush to her face, the way her arms hang stiffly.

  Her fingers, the n
ails torn and red-rimmed.

  Mrs. Verver, she is sobbing and on her knees and she is holding the girl, arms wrapped around her waist, and the girl looks startled, unsure. She turns and looks at me, her head bobbling slightly, like a doll.

  She looks at me, and I look at her.

  The eyes, the eyes like an oil-slick rain puddle. The eyes I know better than my own. The eyes that hook onto me and dig in fast.

  Oh, Evie.

  Oh, Evie.

  Warm things rise up in me.

  I smile.

  I touch my hands to my face, I feel my cheeks, and it is a smile.

  I guess it’s probably the strangest smile in the world, but it goes on and on and on, and I am shaking my head and smiling and I can’t stop.

  And she looks at me and something rustles there, a slip of a grin, and I reach for it.

  I actually reach my hand out for it, her flushed face under my fingers.

  “Evie,” I say. I say, “Evie.”

  Mrs. Verver picks her up even though Evie is nearly as tall as she is. She lifts her and starts carrying her, and that’s when I see Mr. Verver running up to us.

  I stop and cover my eyes.

  I don’t know why, but I can’t watch.

  When I look again, Mr. Verver is twenty yards ahead of me and he has her now, he has Evie in his arms like when she was six and Dusty shoved too hard and knocked her from the top of the jungle gym.

  He carries her and I follow far behind and Mrs. Verver is jogging alongside, trying to keep up. She is reaching out, scrabbling at his arm, touching her fingers to that strange blond hair.

  I follow them back down the street and I stand on the sidewalk out front.

  Dusty is on the front porch, her face hidden behind that whorling hair of hers.

  I watch it happen.

  I watch Evie’s wobbling blond head, the pale legs dangling like shorn twigs. I watch Dusty stumble back and Mr. Verver push past her, push past everything, carrying Evie like a bride over a threshold.

  I watch them all disappear into the dark of their front hallway.

  I watch Dusty whip around and, face red and ruined, shut the front door behind them.

  I think I stand there for a very long time, waiting for my heart to slow down, waiting for my breath to come back. Waiting for something else, but that thing never comes.

  “I’ll take you to the hospital in a few hours,” my mother says. “They need some time.”

  We are standing on the front porch, my feet dew-damp.

  The sleeplessness so light on me, I feel more awake than ever, and the mistiness of early dawn is just right.

  “Okay,” I say, but I don’t intend to wait. I intend to hop on my bike and pedal the three miles as soon as she goes upstairs and turns on the shower.

  “Lizzie,” she says, and I can feel her hand fasten on my shoulder. “I…” Her voice goes soft and wilting. “I guess I didn’t believe it would happen.”

  I brush my foot back and forth on the concrete, feeling the delicious burn, bringing me to life.

  “I guess, deep down, I thought she was never coming back,” my mother says, and she curls her arm across my shoulders and presses into me.

  “I know you did,” I say. Why should I admit that I ever thought so too?

  “I guess,” she starts, her words falling strangely, like she is still half asleep, like she is saying things she’d never say out loud, “I guess it always seemed like something like this might happen to them. The Ververs.”

  “What do you mean?” I say roughly.

  “I don’t know,” she says. “There’s always just been something about them…” There’s almost a blush on her, like she’s been caught without her clothes. She can’t quite look at me.

  “I don’t know,” she says. “Like something had to break. It could only go on for so long, before something had to break.”

  “That doesn’t make any sense at all,” I say, shaking off a flinch deep inside. “You’re not making any sense at all.”

  My legs pump as fast as they can. The bike ride to the hospital is a breathless blur, my lungs choked and pained.

  I keep conjuring the silvery sight of blonded Evie, eyes startled and knowing.

  Was it her, even?

  Was it Evie who returned?

  Or did I dream it all, conjure it from wishes and longing?

  The weird, unwholesome emptiness of the damp streets and the metal smell of early morning, it all conspires to make me feel forgotten, swabbed off the world.

  Part of me thinks, as I walk through the sliding doors of the hospital, that no one will even recognize me. That I will move through the halls, past every Verver, as though invisible, a slippery shadow.

  But it is only seconds before Mr. Verver, begrimed and fumbling with forms and a clambering Dusty, hands in her hair, spots me.

  His face is filled with such light, it nearly blinds me.

  The heavy stubble, ribbons of dirt across his pant legs, the look of heat and flush on him, none of it matters, he shrugs it all off.

  He is restored.

  We have restored him, I think, and then wonder at the “we.” It’s me, me, me.

  “There’s Lizzie,” he is saying, clipboard now against his chest, across his heart, like a knightly shield, and Dusty whips her head around to me, and the look on her face, like all her looks, is unreadable.

  Thoughts flit through my head about everything she must feel, but I don’t have time for them. I don’t have time.

  I am rushing for Mr. Verver, who outstretches his arms, who tows me in for a half hug, his right hand still clasping the clipboard, which bangs against my head.

  “Oh, Lizzie,” he says. “Lizzie, she’s here. She’s here and she’s okay.”

  I think that’s what he says, I don’t know. The next few minutes jumble together and he’s telling me things and saying that Mrs. Verver won’t leave Evie’s side and they’re doing some exams but everything is good, that Evie is strong and that Evie is well.

  “She’s fine,” Dusty pipes up. “She’s great and everything’s over. It’s all done. She’s back, and it’s over.”

  She says it briskly, as Dusty says most things to me, to her mother, to everyone but Mr. Verver.

  But it seems off, and all I can think of are the things she told me, the things Dusty knows, or thinks she does.

  Oh, Lizzie, she knew. She knew he was coming for her.

  Mr. Verver puts down the clipboard, his pen, all his things, and rests his hands on Dusty’s shoulders.

  He lets his fingers wiggle in her hair.

  She looks up at him, waiting. I can feel her toes curling in her shoes, waiting for that gift, any gift, the gifts he hands out so freely.

  Oh, I can see it on her. She’s thinking, Now maybe it will go back, now it will be as before.

  The way she stands there, that open expression she gives only to him—suddenly I feel like I should turn away. I feel like I’ve seen something no one’s supposed to see.

  She waits for him, bouncing in her shoes, but this is what he gives her: “Maybe you should go home,” he says.

  All the lovely expectation on her face disappears.

  He glances over at me for a second, and she sees it.

  A baton passed, from her to me, even as she hadn’t meant to pass it. Even as she still felt it in her tight, clawed hands.

  She looks at me with those hawk eyes, and I feel, in a flash, like she can see right through my clothes, my skin, my everything.

  She sees right into the center of me. I can’t unravel it all now, but it’s like she sees things in me, in him, that I can’t even see yet.

  “I’m going back to Nana’s,” she murmurs, her hand reaching for her bag.

  “Dus’,” he says, furrowed brow, his fingers resting on her neck.

  “Don’t,” she says, so hard, jumping back, her arm flipping up as if to fend him off, as if they were out on the field and he’d high-sticked her.

  She picks up the clip
board. For a crazy second, I think she’s going to throw it.

  He steps forward.

  “Don’t, don’t, don’t,” she says, her head whipping back and forth.

  Stunned, Mr. Verver raises his hands high, like in a stickup.

  “I don’t want to see her,” Dusty says. “I don’t want to be here. I can’t be here.”

  She shoves the clipboard into my hands, reels around, and in an instant she is gone.

  Mr. Verver is shaking his head. He is shaking his head, and looking at me.

  My fingers fumbling on the clipboard, I don’t know what to say.

  He swivels around on his foot, looking up at the ceiling. Then he says, “Until these last few weeks, she never wanted to spend more than an hour there, in her life.”

  It takes me a second to realize he’s talking about the grandparents. It seems funny to me that he’s thinking about where she wants to go and not everything else she just showed him. The things she showed.

  “She can’t stand the rose perfume,” he says, “and the vacuum cleaner going all day long.”

  I nod.

  “But I guess all this, it’s just too much,” he says. “It’s a lot to take.”

  He keeps looking at me.

  He seems overwhelmed, by everything. I want to rescue him from it.

  Detective Thernstrom and Mr. Verver are talking in the corner. The police are all around and everything seems to be crackling.

  I wonder who will tell me what happened. How did she get back? Where did she come from? Where’s Mr. Shaw? And I have even silly, furtive thoughts that now they’ll uncover my lies, all of them.

  Somehow I can’t bring myself to ask Mr. Verver, who has shaken off everything with Dusty. Shaken it off so easily. Everything popping and sparking, his face is like an amusement park, all filled with fear and elation.

  “She can’t talk to anyone right now,” Mr. Verver says, as soon as the detective leaves. “She’s all drugged up. But she’s great. She’s great. Oh, Lizzie, you should see her.”

  I did see her, I want to say. I saw everything.

  “The police—they…,” I try.

  “They haven’t been able to figure everything out yet,” he says. “He’s on the run again. You saw—he’d dyed her hair.”