The End of Everything

  And when they were driving away, she thought, This is it. This is it. It’s all begun, and how could it stop now?

  As he drove, he told her how it had been. How he loved her, but the love grieved him, shamed him. It had begun last summer, but really long before that. He saw her at the pool, doing dives. Watching her, it all came back to him. How, nearly ten years ago, he’d seen her fall in the water at Green Hollow Lake. The most important moment of his life.

  “He pulled me out,” she tells me now. “No one saw me fall, but he saw, and he rescued me.”

  I put my fingers to my mouth, tapping them there. I am thinking of something, something far away, but I cannot hold onto it.

  And then he told her when he saw her at the pool last summer, all those years later, it all came back to him.

  He said it was like a hammer on his heart.

  The words crackle in my head. To hear something like that, what would it mean? Would it change your life? How could it not?

  They drove for hours, she says, but they never seemed to get anywhere. Sometimes they passed the same spots. Like he couldn’t decide about something. She kept seeing the same motel. The big sign, like a deck of cards, and a swiveling diamond in each corner.

  It seemed like he’d never stop driving. But finally he did. They sat in the car in the motel parking lot for an hour before he went inside to check in.

  He said he’d thought many, many times of ending everything.

  And he reached his arm in front of her, careful not to touch her, and clicked open the glove compartment.

  He didn’t take it out. He just pointed at it. The handgun there, so small, like a toy.

  The shame, it was so heavy, he said. So many times, he thought he couldn’t go on. But he was a coward, really. And he couldn’t bear the thought that he’d never see her again, never see her in her summer shorts, dangling her legs. Never see her dive from the high board, her face in such concentration. Never see her flipping cartwheels on her front lawn.

  He snapped the glove compartment shut and he looked at her, for the first time, really. She must have shown him something on her face, because that was when he got out of the car and walked, hands in his pockets so fast, to the registration office.

  “The room was so small,” she tells me, “and there was a picture of a leopard over the bed. He was so nervous. But I wasn’t nervous at all.”

  I am waiting. I am waiting and my stomach is so tight, my hands clamped between my thighs.

  “He sat on the bed,” she says, “and I sat on a chair, and he talked for a long time about his life and how it was over for him now and he didn’t care.”

  My heart beats, my heart beats.

  “It was so late when I told him,” she says. “I promised him it was okay. Because it was okay.”

  She can’t say it, but I feel what she means. He loves her, he loves her and it’s the biggest feeling she’s ever known and she feels special in it, and she is. And who wouldn’t?

  She wriggles up on her elbows. “I told him he could,” she says. “And then he did.”

  I feel like she’s skipping things, I feel like she’s moving too fast.

  Slow down, slow down.

  I shut my eyes tight, I shut them so tight.

  “But, Lizzie, it wasn’t okay after all,” she says, her voice suddenly brimful, aching. “It wasn’t okay, but then it was too late.”

  My eyes open and I see her face, moon-daubed.

  “He should’ve seen,” she says, her lip lifting, baring her teeth. “He did see. But he couldn’t stop.”

  My eyelids flutter involuntarily.

  “It burned like cigarettes. Like this.” She pokes an imaginary cigarette into the soft flesh on the underside of her forearm.

  “And it lasted forever. I kept squirming and the burning turned to tearing. He should’ve stopped, but he couldn’t.”

  I feel my head nodding, my jaw creaking.

  “And after,” she says, “in the bathroom, little pieces of bloody guck came out of me, stuck to my legs. I couldn’t move without more coming.”

  My hand over my mouth—why is she doing this? I feel suddenly like she’s doing something to me. Something awful. And she is, isn’t she?

  “He kept knocking on the bathroom door,” she says, relentless. “He was so sorry. He was so sorry. How could he have known? That’s what he said.

  “Then he was crying and I promised him it was okay. I promised every time.”

  Every time… every time.

  “Because once he’d done it, it was like he couldn’t stop,” she says. “All those days…” Her voice drifting.

  I can’t listen. I can’t.

  “Lizzie,” she whispers, her voice a needle in my ear, “he loved me so much in those nineteen days I thought I might die from it.”

  I cover my ears, I clamp my hands over them.

  “One night, really late,” she said, her hands on me, hot and relentless, “he cried after. He cried for so long. He went to get ice and when he came back he had the gun, from the glove compartment.

  “He put it under his chin, standing there at the foot of the bed, and he said I should just tell him to do it and he would.”

  My hands on my ears, rocking, trying not to see Mr. Shaw, but seeing him.

  “I told him to put the gun down. Would you believe it? It didn’t seem strange at all. Not after everything. That’s how different everything was.

  “He crawled into the bed and cried like a baby. He said he never would, not now, because of what I’d taught him.

  “He said I’d taught him how to love.”

  There they are, the words I’ve been waiting for, but not like this. None of it’s right, it’s not. I don’t know how to make it stop.

  “He told me he knew they would find us,” she says. “And I told him I wasn’t sorry, even though I was.”

  She looks at me. She’s making sure I feel every bit of it. And I do.

  “But maybe I’m not really sorry,” she says carefully. “He saved me, so I gave him this thing. Even if he shouldn’t have taken it, I guess I don’t feel bad for giving it.”

  He saved me.

  She slips her hand in my hair, tugging me toward her.

  “And when he dropped me off, he said this thing.”

  My hands fisted over my ears, but nothing can stop her.

  “He was so calm, like he never was. I had the car door open, and I was looking at him, and it was the longest minute.

  “And then he said, No one will ever love you like this again, and I knew he was right.”

  You can never tell. Lizzie, you can never tell.

  I won’t. I won’t.

  But, Evie, I say after, when my voice returns from such dark reaches, I don’t know where, there’s so much more. There’s so much more you haven’t said. There’s a piece missing. Why did you go with him? What did he do to get you to go with him? Why did you finally go? Why that day?

  And, Evie, you said he saved you. What do you mean he saved you?

  But she says nothing. She’s through.

  Twenty-three

  It’s the first Fourth of July celebration without the Ververs I can remember.

  There are no tiki torches blazing in their backyard, no star-spangled streamers wound round their front lamppost. There are no lemon bars from Mrs. Verver, no watermelon punch.

  There’s no Dusty dancing under the lights in her summer dress.

  No Mr. Verver to drive across the state line to the Fireworks Emporium, bringing back silver-tailed Roman candles, bottle rockets and their keening whistles, the triple bangers that make everyone jump, and the tall cones from last year that released swarming sparks like clustering bees.

  None of that.

  Instead, when it gets dark, the fathers gather and light up a few straggly comets and smoke balls, but it’s all so different, none of that red-faced energy and that swelling feeling, like anything could happen, the sky itself could rip open. Mr. Verver, he could tear t
he sky open and rain light down on all of us.

  There is no Evie and no one to run sparklers with, no one to light magic snakes on the driveway, fingers black with the soft ash, but maybe we wouldn’t have done that this year anyway. Maybe this was going to be the year we stopped doing that. We’d been doing that long past anyone else, hadn’t we?

  The heat, and the kids laughing, and the speakers dragged into the street, the rolling beer bottles, the slick tug of fallen marshmallows under your feet, it’s all happening, but none of it is.

  The Ververs, they packed up a car and headed north two weeks ago, just a few days after Mr. Shaw, after everything.

  And that time before, those nineteen days when life felt unhinged, wild and headlong, well, now it feels like a forlorn thing. A whistle in my head, a distant rumble.

  When they left, I watched from an upstairs window. Watched Mrs. Verver huddle Evie into the car. Watched Mr. Verver lugging jammed suitcases, a duffel bag with a shirttail caught in its zipper. Watched Evie lean her head wearily against the car window, and I wondered, Will she now be weary for the rest of her life? I wondered about faces she used to wear—curious, wonderstruck—and if she will ever wear them again.

  I thought of all the questions she’d never answered and wondered if I’d ever get to ask them. Somehow, somehow knowing that a key had turned, a lock had clicked, and that was it. That was all I’d ever get.

  It felt like the end of everything.

  And the last thing, I watched Mr. Verver, red and white cooler tensed between his arms, look up for a second, like he knew somehow. Like he knew I was there. He glanced up at me, and I can’t tell you the expression on his face. I can’t describe it. It was both broken and serene.

  Dusty was the last one to come outside. I didn’t even know she was back from her grandparents’. She stood at the car door, hand on the window. Evie, already inside, stared straight in front of her, like they were already driving. She didn’t turn her head.

  Dusty stood there for so long, and she wouldn’t open the door till the very last minute. She kept looking all around, head darting everywhere. It was like she couldn’t imagine how she would get in that car. There was something lonely about it, and something else too.

  I never did see her get in. My mother said something, I turned my head, and when I looked back, she was gone. They all were.

  After, my mother told me they went high into the woods, hours away. A cottage Detective Thernstrom had told them about, one he’d rented himself once. An A-frame on a lake.

  I picture them all on paddleboats, with fishing tackle, around campfires, in horseshoe pits, doing family things.

  I picture it all the time.

  I picture it especially tonight, the Fourth, hiding on the back patio, hiding from everyone, I picture it all.

  I think no one sees me, but then I hear a chair scrape and I nearly jump from my skin. It’s Dr. Aiken.

  He’d come to the house earlier that day, wearing madras shorts and the new glasses. The first time he’s ever showed up in the daytime, not even four o’clock, and he came to the front door, holding a white box with red string, which he handed to me with a half smile, one of those smiles from someone who doesn’t smile much and isn’t sure what it’s supposed to look like. But somehow it comes out all right.

  When my mother walked in and saw him, her face steamed pink, she ran upstairs and changed from her T-shirt and shorts to a sundress I’d never seen, with little blue pindots. She moved in it with great care.

  In the bakery box were hot cross buns, so strange for Fourth of July. He must have seen the look on my face because he said he wanted to bring Rice Krispies treats, but the bakery didn’t make them.

  “You’re missing everything,” Dr. Aiken says now, standing on the patio, extending a wilting paper plate toward me. “You mean to tell me you’d miss the limbo contest?”

  I look down at the plate he’s handed me and see it’s one of his hot cross buns, the glaze melting onto the corners of the plate.

  “I saved you one,” he says.

  I almost smile, even as I feel so far away, so far away from all this. Like I’m watching everything through glass.

  “Actually,” he says, “looks like I saved you all of them.”

  “I remember the song,” I say suddenly, my voice surprising me.

  “Of course.” He nods. “ ‘Hot cross buns, one a penny, two a penny.’ ”

  “ ‘If you haven’t any daughters,’ ” I say, “ ‘give them to your sons.’ ”

  “Not much of a song,” he says, shaking his head.

  “Are you a dad?” I say, my hands on the plate, my fingers growing stickier.

  “No,” he says.

  I look up at him and his glasses slip and I can see his eyes behind them.

  “My wife—my ex-wife now—we wanted to, but we never did.”

  I don’t say anything. I can feel him watching, delicately. Watching to see that I understand this. That I understand what he is saying. Ex-wife. And my mother twirling in her blue dress.

  “Lizzie,” he says, his voice shifting, “have you heard from the Ververs?”

  “No,” I say. “They’ll be home soon.”

  “You know,” he says, sitting down beside me on the back step, “I’ve seen those girls for years. Through broken arms, jammed fingers. Tough girls.”

  “Yes,” I say.

  “I saw Dusty just… must’ve been the end of May.”

  I look at him, and, just like that, I start to feel a pressure in the air, but I’m not sure why. Maybe because he is speaking with such care.

  “Her parents brought her in for a stomachache. All the stress from her sister, I’m sure. This was just a few days after she’d been reported missing.”

  There’s a flicker in my head. A flickering thing flickering from a hundred thoughts I’ve had over the past weeks. A hundred thoughts I’ve pushed aside, didn’t want to pause long enough to ponder.

  Dusty’s flaring anger, as if saying, a thousand times in the last month, How dare Evie do this to us, to all of us.

  “Did you help her?” I say. “Was she okay?”

  “Yes,” he says, and he takes off his glasses and looks at them, even though it’s dark and what could he see?

  “You’re not supposed to talk about this stuff, are you? Doctors aren’t, right?”

  “No,” he says. “I’m not.”

  I nod.

  “The funny thing, though…,” he starts, putting his glasses back on and turning to me.

  “What?” I say, my voice sounding so small.

  “Well, when she took off her sweatshirt she was covered with scratches.”

  “Field hockey,” I say. “Field hockey.”

  “That’s what she kept saying. Long scratches on her arms, on her neck.” He’s looking at me so intently and I feel the pressure in my chest now.

  Something’s happening, but I don’t know what, and it’s like a booming in my chest.

  “From practice. From sticks, the cleats. From…,” my voice scraping. What can he mean? I wonder. What does this mean?

  “Well, I’ve seen a hundred field hockey injuries,” he says. “I know what they look like. They don’t look like that.”

  He looks at me, and I feel his eyes on me.

  The pause is so long, and the pressure is in my head now, pounding.

  “Things can get pretty rough out there,” he says. “Can’t they? For you girls? You’re all a bunch of warriors, aren’t you? Lionhearted.”

  “Yes,” I say. “Yes.”

  In bed that night it comes to me: everything that was so raw and fleshy and gaping, everything that felt chaotic and blood-torn—it all might mean something after all. Something more than what it was, a man fighting a private affliction, until he couldn’t fight it anymore. Of course it was more than that…

  But to look at it, it’s hard.

  I think of Dusty, and everything seesaws and all the things that made her so remote, so far away… t
he things that made it seem like you couldn’t touch her no matter what she said, or did. No matter if she took her stick to you, if she laid her own rough justice on you. She had a fire in her. She did. And… and…

  All Dusty’s misery, her preening rage, and Evie insisting, “We never saw him together. We never did at all.”

  They never shared anything. They were never sisters like that.

  Long scratches, battle scars.

  I have this picture in my head, Dusty, a sentry. Might she have tried to stand guard? Tried to stop it? Don’t you go with him, Evie, don’t you dare go, that’s the imagined voice whirring in my head. Dusty.

  I can’t quite get at it. I’m circling, I’m circling, but I can’t yet see the darkening center.

  These last weeks, I replay, and replay it all the time. Everything Dusty and Evie shared with me, revelations on tongue tips. The center of things—or is it the bottom?—I haven’t reached it yet.

  “They’re back,” my mother says, waking me, her fingers tickling my face, and she leans down over me, her long hair pooling on my cheek, whispering in my ear.

  It’s the last week in July and the Verver car is in their driveway and my mother is making waffles, which has not happened since never.

  Her face is warm, as though brushed soft with something gold and smooth. She is touching everything with light, dancing fingers, the backs of our chairs, the serving spoon, Ted’s husk of yellow hair.

  I can’t take my eyes from the kitchen window, the Verver house, you can feel it jolting to life again.

  “So, Mom,” Ted says, shrugging from her tickling hand. “What’s up? You bust out that old Harvey Wallbanger mix again?”

  He’s laughing, and I think he means for her to too, but it makes her look at herself and all the butter-softness leaves her face. He didn’t mean to do it, but he did. He took it all away.

  “No,” she says, “nothing like that.” She smiles a little and, bit by bit as she pours syrup onto our waffles, sliding the dewy tub of butter toward us, the gold comes back.