We don’t care, though. We float on our rafts, our hair filled with chlorine, our skin sweating it. My face presses against the plastic, cool water gathering in small puddles where my head dips into the raft. Reaching behind, I stretch my green shiny one-piece farther over my bottom, skin clammy beneath my suit.
I look over at Evie, whose eyes are hidden behind large zebra-frame sunglasses. Her lips are slightly parted. Her white two-piece glares. She’s lying on her stomach and floating, floating. I can’t tell if she’s looking at me, or is asleep, or is just thinking.
My eyes flutter, time and again, to Mr. Verver, who sits on a pool chair and never takes his eyes off us, not even to look at the newspaper in his hand.
He watches us and I bet he thinks we’re talking. I bet he thinks Evie’s telling me things. But Evie tells me nothing.
I want to let her know it’s okay. That she can tell me anything and I’ll understand. But it’s the kind of thing, if you say it, it no longer seems true.
It’s only an hour and we have to leave. Mr. Verver is on the pay phone by the bathhouse and he keeps saying, “I know, I know. We’re leaving now. I just—I just—”
Mom, Evie mouths at me.
She asks Mr. Verver if we can shower in the bathhouse first. He looks at her a long time and I know he wants to say no, but he says yes.
In the showers, we stand under one of the communal spouts and frothy shampoo skates over our bathing suits and collects in our jelly sandals.
We still have our sunglasses on because we like how we look in them, we like how everything looks, tinted pink.
We stand there quietly and let the water run across us. Evie sighs, looking down at her feet, down at the brownish swirl at her feet, some of the dye still slipping off.
She’s looking down, staring so hard into the drain at our feet. She has those sunglasses on, so I can’t guess what she’s thinking.
In the car on the way home, we’re in the backseat and Mr. Verver’s talking again, like before. Talking about summer plans and neighbors who are painting their house salmon pink and field hockey tryouts. He can’t stop.
It starts to hurt to listen.
Then, suddenly, Evie leans forward, sunglasses still on, and presses her chin next to his headrest, nestling against his cheek.
“I’m sorry, Dad,” she says, her voice scratchy and rushed. “I’m sorry.”
“Evie, I—” he says, startled. He tries to turn and look at her, but the light changes and cars honk and the car surges forward.
“I’m sorry,” she keeps saying, and did you ever know what someone meant even if you couldn’t explain it, even name it?
“Evie,” he says thickly, reaching his hand back to touch her, and the car feels so small. My hand over my mouth, I turn my head away, press it against the back window and, this time, try not to hear.
Will you stay again tonight, Lizzie?” Evie asks. “Will you?”
And I say I will. My mother, on the phone, says, “Okay, just one more night.”
But I think, how will I ever say no?
I think, I will stay and stay and stay until she tells me everything. And she has to.
The feeling at night, with the windows all shut, the air-conditioning rumbling, the clicking from the motion detectors every time you pass them, it feels like we are in a high tower, armored and moated and immaculate.
The alarm company people had been there all day, installing a system, drilling holes in the walls, running tests with beeps and sirens and lights.
Dusty is still at the grandparents’. I want to ask Evie about it, ask her what she thinks, in the old way we always speculated about Dusty, rendering delirious guesses. But it seems like I can’t. I think maybe Evie feels the crackling anger from Dusty, and it might hurt, a lot.
Evie stares out the window, her fingers pressed on the glass, the shiny new security emblem stuck there.
I wonder what she thinks.
I have this idea in my head of her thinking this: As if an alarm could stop him. As if anything could, that love so strong. If he wants me back, nothing will stop it.
But it’s all a guess. She turns and faces me, a sphinx.
Tucked close in bed that night, I trace letters on her back like we used to do when we were kids. Somehow we feel like kids again, small enough to fold ourselves into soft pockets.
First, S-U-M-M-E-R.
Then, A-L-E-X, the boy at school Evie used to love in sixth grade, the one with the bottle-opener belt buckle.
Then I trace the S, the H, the A, and I feel her breath draw in tight when I draw the W.
“No,” she whispers. “Lizzie, no.”
“You can tell me anything,” I say. It’s something I never said to her before. But now that I have to, it seems like a lie.
I look at the window, think of Mr. Shaw out there. Wonder about all the nights he stood out there even while I was here, laughing with Evie, tickling her ribs, talking about boys, untangling her hair, her hands in my hair, braiding tightly. Mr. Shaw. Oh, Evie, just tell me. Tell me so I can tell you. So I can show you I understand.
“Evie, I know he loves you,” I say, the words rushing from me helplessly. “He loves you.”
“But he thinks I’m different now, doesn’t he?” she says, tapping her fingers on my open palm.
I stop for a second, puzzled, and then I realize she thought I was talking about Mr. Verver.
“No,” I fumble. “He doesn’t think you’re different. He’s so happy. He was so lost without you. He just wants to know you’re okay.”
I hear myself and I know what I sound like. A spy. An informant. I guess I am. I want to deliver her to her father all over again. It twists in me. But I wouldn’t, I tell myself, tell him anything she wouldn’t want me to. Anything I wouldn’t want him to hear.
“Are you thinking about Mr. Shaw out there?” I ask, trying again.
It’s a crazy thing to say, but I say it.
“No,” Evie says, her body stiffening so fast it startles me. “Why would you say that?”
“I don’t know,” I say. “I’m sorry.”
“He’s not coming back, Lizzie,” she says so quickly. I swear I can hear her teeth chatter. “He’s not coming back. Why would you ever say that? He’s not.”
“Okay,” I say, hurried, “okay.” I put my fingers on her arm, and it’s goosefleshed.
“Lizzie,” she says, shaking her head. “I wish I could explain.”
“Don’t worry,” I say, but there’s a quiver under my skin now. It’s something in her face, all her features jumping, her eyes like two pinpoints.
I lay my hands on her, I try to lay them on her like when I was very little, my mother pulling me into her lap, hand in my hair.
“It’s all over,” I say, “Everything’s going to be like before.”
There’s a love so big it can break you, that’s what she is saying to me, even if she can’t say it and I can’t make the words come.
How do boys matter in the face of his colossal love, like a pressure on the heart?
How do boys with their loud hallway taunts and their jockstraps and greasy foreheads, legs sprawling under desks, how do they matter one bit? They are big bulging Adam’s apples and pitching voices and they tug at their pockets and punch one another in the hallway and put ice cubes down your collar and shove their hands up your shirt, and what could any of that possibly mean in the face of the big, bone-breaking, chest-bursting love from this man whose heart cannot hold itself together? Whose heart batters itself for you every night?
Isn’t that what she’s saying to me?
It has to be. I feel it. She must feel it too.
She’s asleep at last, but I’m not, and I can hear Mr. Verver down in the basement. I can hear faintly, through the vents, the tinny sound from the record player.
I slip myself from Evie, her right leg draped across me, and dash silently down the steps and to the basement door.
The music is pacing gently, a slow, crawly song
filled with tiptoeing guitar sounds and mewling voices.
I stand at the top of the stairs and whisper, almost losing my nerve, though I’m not sure why, “Mr. Verver?”
He pokes his head around the corner and looks up at me, a green beer bottle in his hand, his face flushed and caught up in itself.
He looks surprised, and not surprised at all. And he smiles and waves me down.
Suddenly I feel conscious of my bare legs and tennis socks, but I scramble down the stairs and he makes “quiet, quiet” motions with his hands and mouth and we both grin at it.
I settle down on the hooked rug, spreading the stack of albums like a poker hand, looking at all their covers.
“Couldn’t sleep?” he says, settling back into his chair.
“No,” I say.
“Even with the alarms, the cops driving by all the time,” he says, rapping his fingers fast on the table, “it’s still hard for me to let her out of my sight.”
“I know,” I say.
“I’m sure I’ll feel safer when she starts to… to share things. And there’s the therapist. But… but she still hasn’t told you anything? Talked about what… he did?”
“No,” I have to say, and I can see the disappointment in him.
Tell me what I want to hear, he’s saying. Give me what I need, Lizzie.
“Not yet,” I add. “But she’s so happy to be home. She feels so safe now. So happy and safe.”
His smile, even if it’s filled with doubts and wonderings, is immense, and my face goes very warm and, sitting on the floor at his feet, I find myself wanting to lean against his legs and bury myself there.
We’re quiet for a while and Mr. Verver keeps switching records, and he’s enjoying his beer, and still not letting me have even one sip.
“It’s late,” he says. “You should hit the sack.”
I nod, but he keeps talking, and so I get up from the floor and settle into the chair next to him, and then a new song comes on, and it’s jauntier, it’s like a swagger and it hits me low and makes my stomach twist, riotous.
“Oh, Lizzie,” he says. “Thin Lizzie, do you hear that bass line? Do you? You don’t get that on your cassette tapes. I don’t even think you get it on these compact discs. That sound is too huge to be compacted. You can feel it in your chest, can’t you?”
I’m listening, but it’s hard because the song that’s playing, the lyrics are slow and loud, the singer talking about different kinds of girls and the things they do. It has lots of swearing and a slow, lingering beat and Mr. Verver doesn’t seem to notice the lyrics at all until suddenly he pauses, and that’s the exact moment the singer slurs about how black girls like to get fucked all night.
Mr. Verver looks over at me with a jolt, and I know he can see my red face, feel the blush radiating off me.
He laughs, and as he lifts his beer bottle from the floor, its coldness brushes up against my leg and makes me jump and suddenly I’m laughing too. We look at each other and laugh, strange, jangling laughs that make me feel hot and shaky.
We laugh so hard that I feel the chair scraping beneath me, and I look down and see my very own fingers curled around his wrist.
My fingers pressed against his pulse. Oh, to feel it throbbing there, I do. It’s fast, and my heart—
I look down and see my fingers there.
His hand on the armrest, and there they are, my God, they are, my fingers curled around his wrist.
He looks down too.
The split second is endless and I can’t breathe.
He pats my hand and smiles, turning all of it into something else, just for me. He makes it into something else, something light and meaningless.
The song ends, then a new song rises up, and Mr. Verver starts talking about how I’ll be going to dances soon.
“You’ll have boys circling you,” he says. “Oh, will you ever.”
“I don’t know,” I say, still trying to catch my breath, my voice funny and high. “There’s no one at school I’d want to dance with.”
And he grins and he starts to tell me about his first dance, and how he tried to get up the courage to ask a girl named Miranda Morton to dance, and she was so pretty, with hair up tight like a ballerina. But he didn’t have the guts. So his friend Toby did it instead and she said yes.
Mr. Verver burned with jealousy, watching them dance under the strobing lights, pretending with all his heart that he was the one holding Miranda Morton in his arms, holding her wrist, like blown glass, in his hand.
Watching, pretending, he could feel his life unspool—that’s what he said, unspool, his arm fanning out—a majestic life with Miranda Morton at his side. A life of beauty and warmth and golden days.
But then he spotted Miranda’s friends coiled in a corner laughing and he realized that, through the whole dance, Miranda had been rolling her eyes at them over Toby’s shoulder.
“I’ll never forget that,” he says, then prods me with his finger, right in the ribs. “The cruelty of women.”
He scissors his finger into my ribs as he says it, and I can’t help but laugh. But his finger there, it—
“So you see, Lizzie,” he says, “you have to dance with them, those poor fellas. You have no idea how important it is, and what those dances mean. You have to make up for the Miranda Mortons of the world.”
“I will,” I say, meaning it with such fervor without even understanding it.
“You dance with them,” he says, and takes a long sip from his beer, “and they’ll dream about it for weeks after, months, years. Decades. They’ll play it again and again in their feverish little heads.” He looks at me. “Don’t you want that?”
“Yes,” I say. Yes.
“Lizzie,” he says, eyes on me warmly, so warmly I can feel it in my toes. “You’re going to leave a long trail of broken hearts—one for every finger and toe.”
He knocks my foot with his, sending tingles through me so I can’t breathe.
“But just remember,” he says, eyes still on me, “I told you first. I was your first.”
The words thrum in me, fierce and swiping. How could I ever forget that? As if I would ever forget that.
“You girls never know how hard it all is,” he says, grinning lightly again. “The asking, the pursuing.”
Just like that, everything slips away, and he’s talking to me like I’m so small, like he thinks I’m a little Brownie in his basement, playing Chutes and Ladders.
I can’t stop myself. The words come tumbling out.
“I know things about boys,” I blurt.
He looks at me.
“I’m sure you do,” he says.
“I know things,” I say, and the minute I do, I want to crawl under the chair and hide.
“Well,” he says, slowly, looking at me carefully, like he’s trying to figure something out. “I guess it’s different than when I was your age.”
There’s a pause.
“Now I sound like an old man.” He laughs, but it’s a funny kind of laugh and I feel him yanking the conversation into a far corner, far from where we are.
“You’re not an old man,” I say, fast and too loud. “And I don’t know what I meant. I don’t know anything about boys. Men. Nothing at all.”
He smiles.
“You know more than you think,” he says, and then he turns away from me quickly.
It’s so fast I almost miss it.
But the look on his face, the look on his face… it was…
I feel a shudder tear through the whole of me.
And we sit, and we sit, and it gets so late and the music swallows everything and I’m glad for it.
It’s hours later that I name it. In my sleep that night.
The look on his face.
He had all the sorries in the world on his face, filled brim-full with sorries and regret, and I hate myself for making him feel it.
There was something, and you weren’t supposed to look at it, you weren’t supposed to lean in, peer too close,
and I did, and I made him do it too. And he did, and…
And now something’s gone forever, and I feel its loss. It crushes me.
When I climb back in bed, Evie’s eyelids twitch and she stirs.
The moonlight bleaches us both. I see her eyes, so wide and white they sear me.
“Oh, Lizzie,” she says. “I want to tell you, I want to tell you, but I can’t.”
“Why not?”
She hunches up fast on her elbows, looking at me so hard.
“I don’t know,” she says, blinking slowly, watching, the looming whiteness of her eyes. And then, “You don’t seem like Lizzie.”
“What do you mean?” My mouth goes dry, I’m not sure why.
She doesn’t say anything.
“It’s me,” I say. “Why can’t you tell me?”
“Because of the way things are,” she says. “Everything looks funny now. But I don’t think it’s really changed. I just never saw it before. The pieces just got switched around.”
“What do you mean?” I say again, but something flashes in my head, me on the patio with Mr. Verver, laughing, warmed under his warming gaze. Looking up to Evie’s darkened window, the shadow of the mobile, still and listless, and seeing Dusty up there where Evie should be.
I feel a crawling trespass inside me. I fight it off.
“I don’t know what I mean,” she says, her fingers clawing out at me, twisting tight on my hair.
I don’t say anything at all, I can’t say anything at all.
And she’s looking at me like I’m the ghost.
Twenty-one
It had been a dreamless, lost sleep, like sinking down an endless hole. I’d been grateful for it.
And then the noise, some noise, a firecracker pop.
I look at the clock flaring five forty.
I feel Evie stirring, jumping up, running to the window.
It’s the tiniest gasp from her, and I wonder what she sees, but my head isn’t working right and I can’t unfurl the sheet from my ankle.
I stumble to the window, squeezing my eyes into focus.
It’s the pear tree out back, there’s something at the foot of it, something black at its knotty roots.