That’s a dog, I think, or a trash bag. What is that dark thing?
At the same moment, elbows bumping each other, we lift up the heavy window, push our faces against the screen.
That’s when I see.
It’s a person.
It’s a man, sprawled under the tree.
“Evie,” I say. “Evie.”
It’s all happening, I think, he’s come here to reclaim his girl-queen.
He’s returned from the darkest depths to take her back again, in a titanic gesture, like a knight rescuing the princess from her high tower.
I feel myself running out her bedroom door and it’s so fast and in my head her antic breaths are right behind me. In my head, she’s right behind me.
Sliding across the kitchen floor, I land at the side door, hurling it open, the new security alarm wailing, crashing in my ears.
I’m pounding across the dewy grass of the backyard, my eyes flashing over the black mass under the tree and, ten feet away, my legs shudder to a stop.
I hold my aching chest and stop.
He’s lying there, his arm flung to his side, like when you do snow angels. The black thing in his hand, the gun, looks so small.
I let myself look, I do. I can’t stop myself.
I look down at Mr. Shaw, eyes struck open, and mouth too, the mouth like a black ragged hole.
Like something black inside him exploded, soot sprayed across his left cheek.
Like the thing inside him, the dark and helpless thing, had become so immense, he could no longer hold it. He could no longer contain it. It overtook him.
His eyes open like that, looking straight up into the branches of the pear tree, and I bet he wishes he was looking at her still, looking up at her window, stuck that way forever, arrested.
Then I remember: Where’s Evie? Where is she? This is for her, for her to wail and cry out his name and fall to her knees like in a movie, slow motion and music rising.
Because he’s waiting here for you, Evie, don’t you see?
Wheeling around, I look up and see her. She’s still at her bedroom window. She hasn’t moved at all. She’s looking down at me, watching me. And I want to see the horror on her face, the roaring grief and confusion. I want to see it all. I want her to show it to me, to him.
But there’s nothing on her face at all. Stock-still and vacant-eyed, she’s like an old wax doll, propped on a windowsill.
Where is it, Evie? Where’s all that feeling?
Because I look at your face and all I see is nothing.
The blankness, it terrifies me.
What happened, Evie, that took your face away, that smeared it blank? What happened to Evie?
That’s when I feel Mr. Verver’s arms grabbing my waist, whirling me around.
He’s trying to pull me away from Mr. Shaw, but I’m not done.
Mr. Verver’s hands are on me, he is grabbing me so hard, but I am so much stronger, I am sliding through his arms back to Mr. Shaw.
Mr. Shaw, eyes wide open, and I never got the chance to have that heavy, heartsick gaze on me. And now here it is, eyes open forever, gazing in dreamy wonder.
All these days, these endless days, trying to crawl my way into him, trying to burrow through, I won’t be stopped now.
I want to look at Mr. Shaw’s face forever.
I feel myself drop to the grass, hands and knees, peering at him, my face so close the smells burn in my nose, smoke and sweat and unnamed things, lowering myself nearly to the damp dirt, inches from him.
His face.
I see no horror there, not the gun lacing through his splayed fingers. Not the blood webbed across the tree trunk.
Not even that dark tunnel in the center of his face.
That dark tunnel I stare down, like I might follow it, like it might swallow me whole and I would let it willingly, to see where it might take me, to see what secrets it might tell me, secrets Evie holds in her chest now so tight, inviolate.
She’s holding it all fathoms deep, she hides it from her face even, pulls a mask across, but he won’t. He can’t. He will tell me.
Mr. Verver’s arms across my chest, trying to drag me back, and I won’t go, I won’t.
Those eyes, lashed open, looking straight at me.
For the first time ever, those eyes looking straight at me, into my own black heart.
My heart.
I feel my body swing, flung by Mr. Verver, his hands across my eyes. My knees hit the grass again, my legs wilting beneath me, and I see nothing.
But it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter because it took only a second. It took only that second.
I know how it was for Evie now. She looked into his eyes and thought, Oh, what things he must know, what glistening treasures and wild terrors and white-bone regrets the likes of which we will not know for decades. He carried all this wisdom in him, and loss and feeling, and he carried it for her, he wanted to bring it to her, to press it onto her, a sealy emblem of his own regard, the imprint of his life and sorrows. Doing this, doing it here, he wanted to make her feel it forever, on her very own skin. And she will. And now I will too. I will.
Twenty-two
There are hours that go by, they are unmarked. What would the Verver house be like now without officers blueing every corner, their police radios crackling, those detectives in their blazers, latex gloves snapping. All their eyes, the way they move, their hard, blinkless eyes.
“Let’s go home,” my mother says, and it’s nearly noon. “Let’s go home.”
I am thinking of how, an hour before, I crept stealthily by the Ververs’ bedroom, saw Mrs. Verver and Evie on the bed, both cotton-stuffed with tranquilizers, buried under mounds of sheets, Mrs. Verver’s arms swaddling Evie, encasing her.
I am thinking of Mr. Verver’s face, white and vivid, his hands fisted as he walked, his voice loud and strong. His daughter’s captor gone forever, I think he feels victorious.
I can’t think of what to make of it.
I can’t think of anything.
Back at home with my mother, I wonder how I will fill the rest of the day, all these hours, the weeks to come?
How will anything ever be still, aweless, again?
The alleged abductor of a local 13-year-old girl took his own life Tuesday outside the home of his purported victim, police say.
Dead from what police are calling a self-inflicted gunshot wound, Harold K. Shaw, 45, was found by the family of his alleged victim in their backyard early Tuesday morning.
Shaw was wanted in connection with allegations of abduction and child molestation. According to police, Shaw kidnapped the girl outside her school on May 28, embarking on a three-week run from the law.
No suicide note was found.
I read the article five, ten times, and there is nothing there. Nothing that means anything at all.
I keep circling it, wondering if I will ever find a way in. When Evie looked at Mr. Shaw, in those motel rooms, in those rooms as she sat on scratchy bedspreads, on bedspreads worn part through, sitting across from Mr. Shaw, did she look at him and see something so beautiful or so ugly that she couldn’t stop looking, could never stop looking at him no matter what he did or wanted to do?
What did it feel like to her, seeing him there, trapped in his shadow, him leaning over as she sat on the bed?
Evie, she had a jaw that clicked when she opened her mouth wide or when she ate sometimes. When he kissed her, did he hear it click, like a cocked gun? Did she open her mouth wide, like an animal, for him and did he hear it click like the safety on a gun?
It’s eight o’clock the following night when Mr. Verver spots me in the backyard, rolling a soccer ball up and down my legs as I lie on the lounger.
He rests his arms across the top of the wire fence.
“How you doing?” Everyone keeps asking that question, my mother, the family doctor, and the lady my mother made me see at the counseling center that day. I keep saying I didn’t really see it happen. That I am no
t traumatized. I say it so many times it no longer seems true.
But when he asks, it’s different. It just is. Something nuzzles inside me and I forget everything else and remember only private things, me-and-Mr.-Verver things, the wafting detergent smell in the basement, his face summer-burned, my fingers on his wrist, pressing pulse to pulse, feeling it in my toes. I want it back, I do.
“I’m okay,” I say, walking over to the fence. The thought comes to me: What did he think when he had to pull me away from Mr. Shaw? What might he think? “I don’t know what I am.”
He smiles faintly. “I know what you are,” he says, reaching across and putting his hand to my hair, curling a strand around my ear.
I let his hand sit there, I know I will feel it for days, lifetimes.
“Please come over, Lizzie,” he says. “She wants you to come over.”
I open the door to her room and Evie’s sitting, cross-legged, on her bed, staring out the window.
“Mom wants to chop it down,” she says, and we both look at the pear tree, its crisp, shiny leaves, its rambling lushness. Her face so still. Now I think that stillness, that blankness, it’s a trick. She can’t show me yet. She hides it all behind that mask. But she will show me, she will. For him, I will get it.
“Evie,” I say, and she looks over at me, unblinking.
“It’s all done,” she says, almost a sigh. “It’s all done.”
We pull the sleeping bags outside, onto the whiskery grass.
It is so hot, and the house is tin-can cold, but Evie wants to be outside, so we sneak out, Evie punching the security code on the panel next to the door.
So wanton, so reckless, the whooshing thunk when the door opens, the stifling night air filling our throats.
Even so, even in that fulsome heat, the closeness of all things, there’s a dizzy kind of freedom in our chests.
Besides, what could happen now? All the happenings gone forever.
In my head, the sight of that dark tunnel mouth, the chute of a mouth, the way you could sink down it forever and never reach the shimmering center.
We don’t even think about going into the Verver backyard, that haunted spot in the center. We sneak across the driveway to my yard.
We are both wearing T-shirts and underwear and lying on top of our sleeping bags. Evie keeps pulling her hair off her sticky neck.
The air doesn’t move at all. Everything is glowing from the new patio light, the biggest I’ve ever seen, its globe face like a milky moon.
The cicadas are everywhere, and twinkling lightning bugs. I stretch my toes, which feel dry and scratchy against the sleeping bag.
I’m trying to figure out Evie, her calmness. I’m still picturing her up there in that window, her face like wax.
“Evie,” I venture, “remember when you showed me the cigarette stubs?”
I poke my fingertips into the grass, the cooling dirt.
She wriggles under her T-shirt, elbows poking, pulling its cotton fabric stickily from her damp chest.
“Yeah,” she says. “You know, Lizzie, my dad told me how you helped. How you gave the police all that information.”
“He did?” I say, and I feel my hot cheeks grow hotter and I put my hands to them.
I wish I had heard exactly what he said, and how he said it. I wonder what words he used and what his face looked like when he said it and if he said it big, like he says things sometimes.
“And about the phone call,” she says. I’d been waiting for this. “That you told them I’d called you. From that motel. I said, yes, I guess I did. Call you.”
I look at her. And she looks at me. The moment is long, and I surrender before her.
“Pete Shaw,” I say. “He told me where you were.”
She nods slowly, drawing it all together for herself. Then she lets it go.
“Dad says it’s all thanks to you,” she says, and I can feel her body tense, hear her voice twist a little. “My coming back. It’s all because of you.”
Her little fingers are on my arm, on the soft dimpled girly inside.
“Thank you, Lizzie,” she says, the tiniest whisper, almost just a burr of hot breath in my ear.
And she’s Evie again. And the feeling is all over both of us.
We huddle closely, huddle like we did centuries ago, Brownies at summer camp, racked through with midnight tales of horror and woe, the dreaded sound of lightning crackles and boys hiding in the woods.
It’s very late, but the heat never lifts. I turn and look at Evie. Her eyes shut, but I know she’s awake. We are in that in-between state and it seems like there are no rules other than the half rules of dreaminess and lost hours.
I think about Evie in that window, watching. Watching Mr. Shaw’s body and doing nothing, showing nothing. Was she dying inside? Is she dead now?
And I think about Mr. Verver and what he wants. The things he needs to know, most of all that Evie is okay. That she is really okay and there is nothing lying in wait under her skin, behind her eyes. Nothing broken that he can’t see and can’t fix.
But truly it’s me. I need to hear her tell it, to give it all to me, to drop it, a gleamy pearl, in my open palm.
He loved you, Evie. He died for you. You have to tell.
I feel it pressing so hard on me. I can’t stop myself. So I say it.
“Evie, tell me,” I say. “Tell me now. What happened with you and Mr. Shaw?”
I feel her gather her breath deep. “Lizzie,” she says, shaking her head over and over again. “No.”
“Are you going to tell Dusty?” The words pushing from me and surprising me.
“No,” Evie says, stirring suddenly. “Why would I tell Dusty?”
It was a crazy thing for me to say. Dusty still at their grandparents, I haven’t even seen them in the same room since Evie’s been back. Something rustles in me when I think of it. Have I even seen them together? But I push it aside.
“It’s just, she told me you’d see him out there,” I say. “She said the two of you would watch him out there, by the tree,” I say, my voice taking on a funny wobble. Something seems so wrong all of a sudden. Some hinge squeaking in me.
“Lizzie, we never saw him together,” she says, her voice newly cold. Quiet. Pulled in, tucked tight. “We never did at all.”
My head feeling soft and confused, all I can think is, She’s afraid, she’s afraid to say.
And then I do it: “She thinks you knew he was going to take you.”
“What?” she says, sitting up abruptly, her hands leaping to her throat, her jaw, a few tendrils sweaty-stuck there.
“It’s okay if it’s true. I’d never tell,” I promise with all the urgency I have. “Neither of us ever told.”
She leans close to me.
“Lizzie, don’t you listen to her,” she says, a quiet pleading in her voice, like she’s trying to make things plain, for a child. “You don’t understand about that.”
“What do you mean?” I say, flinching. “I understand.”
“I mean about Dusty,” she says, and she won’t quite look at me. “She doesn’t… Dusty doesn’t understand things like that.”
“But I do,” I say, with such fancied wisdom. “I understand how you could look out that window night after night and see him there and never tell.”
“Lizzie,” she says, “he didn’t take me at all.”
There is such a quiet on us both, a sense of true hushness. There’s knowing and there’s knowing and I knew this, innermost, didn’t I?
“I went,” she says. “I went with him. I wanted to go. I asked him to take me away.”
She says it and it seems like all the far-flung pieces jolt into place. I feel the jolt in me and I nearly shake.
Of course.
I knew it, didn’t I?
It was no kidnapping at all.
“I understand, Evie,” I say, firming my voice as much as I can, caught in the lusciousness of all things, and the wickedness too. “He loved you so much. It’s ok
ay if you loved him.”
Because that was the real secret, wasn’t it? Barely a secret at all.
You love him.
And you can tell me now and we can share again, such private, furtive things. Things we can tell no one else.
But she’s shaking her head wearily, the oldest woman in the world.
“You’re wrong, Lizzie,” she says, and it’s a sad, beaten smile. “You’re wrong about everything.”
It’s such a sharp dismissal. I feel it cruelly.
“What do you mean?” I say, face burning. The youngest girl in the group, the baby everyone rolls their eyes at.
The smile drops away and she puts her hand on me. And I know she’s going to do it. I know at last she’s going to tell. But suddenly I don’t know if I’m ready for it.
“I don’t remember when it started,” she says. “Just, one day, I knew.”
“Knew he was watching,” I almost stutter.
“Knew everything,” she says. “I don’t know how to say it. It was like this. I could see how it was in him and he couldn’t fight it.”
She turns on her side and faces me. She leans close to me and talks right into my ear, her mouth nearly touching my hair.
“He told me it was like a piercing thing in his chest. One day, it just happened. He saw me and it happened, and after that there was nothing else. A hole in his chest like you could stick your finger in.”
I feel a shudder right through me, quaking. I feel my thighs go loose and hot. Oh my, it’s a sickness. A sickness. I swoon into it. She is telling, she is finally telling. It’s like dipping your toe in a magical lake in some fairy tale.
The beauty of it, I wait for it.
She tells me how she saw him all the time, in the yard, on the street, outside the school. He would watch and never say a word. It was like her special secret and she had to admit, there was something in it that drew her close. There was something in him, always there, always looking at her. Why, it moved her. It did.
She tells me how she knew it would happen eventually. She’d known it for a while.
That day, walking with me, our clacking hockey sticks, she saw his car go by, twice. She couldn’t think of a day in the last year when she hadn’t seen his car. But today would be different. She knew it would. She knew somehow she’d end up in that car with him.