Dr. Aiken, could he really have such magic in him, could he cast spells and glimmers and make my mother shine like a piece of fine brass? A man like that, why, he has no glimmers. He has no magic. But there she is, shining.
It’s all so fast. The car in the driveway, and by noon Evie and I are riding our bikes to the pool.
She tells me the trip was nice. She tells me everything is better. She says the school mailed her diploma and she’ll start high school with me in September.
She tells me many things and it’s like she’s talking us into it, talking us into everything being back to the way it was. Like we’re both secretly saying, It’s like before and we can talk forever, and we can spend every minute together.
It’s like all these things. It’s the picture of these things. And Evie and I, it’s as if we’re standing there looking at the picture of how we once were and we’re moving our arms the same way, turning our head this way and that. If it looks like the thing, maybe somehow it will become the thing.
Me and my shadow.
In everything she says, though, I hear the hollow knock behind it. I am knocking hollowly at Evie’s hollowed heart.
It’s over.
But here’s the thing: in its overness there is a crazy freedom, and I watch Dusty, I watch her, and I am waiting for my moment, the clearing field. The things she might know. The things she might have tried to stop. The scratches on her arms, and suddenly I remember Evie’s neck, the faded yellow marks still whispering on Evie’s neck after she first came home. The faded yellow smudges there, like she’d run a highlighter across her throat.
And the way the two separated, never in the same room, seldom in the same house, since Evie’s return. Like two boxers gone to their separate corners, spitting blood.
Don’t you go with him, Evie. Don’t you dare go. Was that it?
There’s still knowledge to be had. If Evie won’t give it to me, Dusty will dare me to take it.
Twenty-four
I wake up that morning with the words on my tongue already. The things I will say to Dusty.
The tryouts are at eight o’clock, before the heavy August heat sinks into the skin.
Evie won’t be trying out with me.
She tells me she never liked field hockey that much anyway. She’ll stick to soccer. She tells me this with her head turned, and I can’t see her face.
Evie goes with her mother to special therapy sessions twice a week now. They go shopping after, to Reynold’s for ice cream, to the movies. Some days I barely see Evie at all.
Sometimes it’s like her head is always turned away, so I can never see her face.
The field is clogged with freshman girls, all with a bristle of fear on them as Dusty and her cocaptains stalk the sidelines. They look a hundred feet tall, even though Dusty probably doesn’t break five feet four. They are tremendous. And she most of all, her purling gold hair, her nut-brown limbs, her kilt snapping as she strides back and forth, eyes hidden behind mirrored sunglasses, her face blank and inscrutable.
We all go through it, the ball control and push-pass drills, then the attack drills. Drive, push, slap, drive push slap. It goes on and on and she’s thirty yards away, she’s barely even watching me, but her voice thrums in all our ears, and then, at the very end, she takes the field with me, and I knew it was coming, but could anyone really be ready for her?
The ball on the end of my stick, I feel my blood roaring, and then there she is, the tackle so hard, our sticks like locked swords, and I bend double, all the air sucked from me.
It’s a fair tackle, it’s fair, but still, there’s a thudding, charging feel in me and before I know it, my shoulder is vaulting against her chest, my elbow corkscrewing, knocking her chin sideways with a sickening clack.
The whistles are blowing at me and there is shouting, but we’re in it now. I feel her turf shoes gnash against my face, my forehead going wet, my mouth guard nearly down my throat. But my arm clips her, swinging around, my foot wedging between hers, she losing her balance, crashing hard to the sparking grass.
Standing above her, I push my hair from my eyes and give her my whole face. I won’t blink, I won’t, we, squared off western outlaws.
Barely glancing at me, she raises her hand up to me, a bangle bracelet dangling there, the one that must’ve caught my eyebrow, tore a gash across it.
She reaches up for me, and I hook my hand around her forearm, lifting her to her feet.
We are walking down the empty school hallways, far away from the clattering locker room, the girlish sounds of breathless girls.
Dusty, her long, pearly ringlets drooping down her back, saunters ten paces in front of me, queenly.
I don’t know where we’re going, but when I unstick the hair from my face, I see two, three Dusty-strands stuck there too, blood-flecked.
“I’m not taking you to the nurse,” she says. “If that’s what you think.”
“That’s not what I think,” I say.
And she finally stops when we reach the end of the west corridor, far from everything and everybody. She swivels the dial on her locker and yanks it open, tossing me a pack of gauze pads. That’s when I see the red on her teeth and I remember that clacking sound, my elbow rearing up, punching her chin back.
I follow her into the girls’ bathroom, watch as she spits the blood into the sink.
Looking in the mirror, I press the gauze pad against my eyebrow, looking at us both.
“I knew you had it in you,” she says, her eyes flicking toward me, wiping her mouth with her hand. “You were always tougher than her.”
I look at her, surprised.
Sitting on the bathroom floor, we’re surveying our smashed bodies, their bloodied beauty.
I strip my kneesock down and let the air sting it, nettle-struck, the red streaks somehow thrilling.
“You lied,” I say, because I feel like I can say anything now. “You and Evie didn’t see Shaw out there together, did you? Why did you lie?”
“What’s the difference?” She shrugs, barely interested. I’m asking the wrong questions. This isn’t the part where her heart is, her beating heart. “I wanted to make sure you believed me about her. I wanted you to know what she’d done.”
I thrust the words from my mouth. What’s stopping me now?
“Dusty, why do you think Evie got in the car with Mr. Shaw?”
She doesn’t pause.
“Because she’s disgusting. Because she’s a disgusting little girl and she can’t help herself.”
I feel a flinch on me, fight it off.
“Were you there, Dusty?” I ask. It’s my deepest guess. “Did you try to stop him? Or her?”
Dusty is still for a moment. She is so still, and I can hear the clack of the window blinds, the drilling moan of a distant lawn mower.
“Is that what Evie told you? That I tried to stop her?” she says, then shakes her head, adding, “She wouldn’t tell you that.”
“She didn’t tell me anything,” I say, my eyes on my knee, on the speckling red. “But you were there, weren’t you? When Evie went with him?”
She pauses again, her head lowered slightly.
“I saw them,” she says.
Then all the words come.
When she starts talking, it’s like she’s told the story a thousand times, practiced it, rehearsed it in her head. Not because it sounds fake, a pose, but because she’s been trying, for months now, to put it right.
She talks, oh, she talks like Dusty never does, words falling helplessly, and I see it, right there. I see it like it’s right before me:
Dusty had seen him in the yard, the swirl of smoke, the nighttime buzzing of katydids, the secret pocket at the center of the yard. From the back window, the half-moon in the upstairs hallway, she’d seen him.
She had to look for a long time before she recognized him. Is that Pete Shaw’s dad? Mr. Shaw?
At first she thought it was for her. Why wouldn’t she? Isn’t that what boys did, watch
her from afar and hope? Why not men? Didn’t Dad always say she was too sophisticated for high school boys, that she was meant for men?
Then, one night, she saw him from her sister’s window. She was showing Evie how to put the compression bandage on the right way, the bruised bone from their backyard practice, and the curtains were pulled wide.
It was even like she felt him first—how could you not? He radiated such awful heat, such a need, so raw, like a panting in your ear. Oh, it made her queasy and head-sick.
And then she saw it on Evie. Just a twitch, but she caught it. A quick twist of the head, Evie turning from the window and looking at Dusty to see if she saw him too. Or worse, saw her seeing him.
Dusty did catch it, those reflexes so fine. She saw and now she knew. Evie had seen him too, had seen him many times and didn’t dare let Dusty know.
It sickened her, it did. Long nights in her bed, thinking of what it might mean, and why Evie wasn’t disgusted, a man old enough to be her father. Why, instead of being disgusted, she seemed—
A man, a husband and a father, acting like some boy. Some mooning boy. She should be sickened.
But Evie wasn’t sickened. Instead, it was like Evie wondered what it might be like, a grown man like that who wants only her. Maybe she convinced herself of all sorts of things, decided, like little girls do, that his love must be pure, and all he wanted was to gaze from afar, his heart in her little hands.
Of course, who knew what Evie thought, Evie who was always in the background, always interrupting, piping up, trying to be heard. Didn’t she long to be the center? And now she was.
For him, she was.
Evie, she’d fallen for it.
Dusty wanted to tell her sister-things. Wanted to warn her that she didn’t know what she was doing, that she was encouraging him and he was a dirty old man.
She wanted to stop her sister, but the words wouldn’t come. Saying those words to Evie, I know what you’re doing, I know what you’re feeling and it’s wrong, it’d make everything real, not some unformed muddle she could hide in her chest.
Because there was Dad to think about. There was Dad. And thinking of Dad, how she’d have to show him the sickness polluting his own house. His own daughter. The kind of girl who’d open her curtains, her blinds, everything that covers and protects her, for this man. This creeping monster.
And then it happened, just three days later.
Cutting across the long soccer field at the middle school, she saw Evie, perched on one of the flat-topped stone pedestals in front of the school, gazing out across the school lawn, swinging her hockey stick. Swinging her legs, one sock up and one down.
What’s she doing? she wondered. Why isn’t she home?
That’s when she spotted the car parked across the street. A maroon Skylark.
Walking faster, nearly running, she knew who it was. Mr. Shaw, sitting there in his car, and Evie knows, she knows and she’s giving him a show. Look at her there, giving him quite the show.
Look, look, look at me. A taunt, a tease, an invitation.
She couldn’t bear watching it, her stomach turning.
She charged across the garden beds flanking the front steps, charged at her sister.
Spotting her, Evie nearly slipped from the high pedestal.
She grabbed Evie’s leg, that little stick leg like you could break it, and she asked her what she thought she was doing. A man old enough to be her dad.
Turning fast, trying to pull away, Evie fell from the pedestal.
She took so long falling and Dusty did not try to stop her. She let her fall, the back of Evie’s head snapping against the stone base, her face white and panicked.
It’s sick, she shouted at Evie. It was the truth.
It’s sick what you’re doing, she said. He’s a pervert and now you’re a pervert too.
The look on Evie’s face, it was like someone had taken a chisel to it. Like someone had split her in two.
The look, It’s like she’s the innocent and I’m the one. I’m the pervert, ruining everything. How dare she?
Evie scrambled to her feet, but not fast enough, and Dusty shoved her, heel of her hand on her shoulder hard, pressing Evie against the pedestal.
Oh, she pushed so hard, and Evie, helpless and wriggling, face reddening and trapped—why, she just started saying things.
Her voice gritted and quavering, Evie said everything, a bottled-tight lifetime of things, she couldn’t stop.
It was like Evie’d spent her thirteen years waiting to tell her sister what she thought of her, what she thought of their happy home, which Evie said was like a prison. A prison. And what place was there for her, for Evie, there was only room enough for two. That Dusty made sure there was only room for two.
Dusty taking up all the space, all the air, and her need so great he—
Evie’s voice hammering at her, And you stand here blaming me, judging me, but look at you, Dusty, preening for him, twirling, dancing, the flirting and the winking and the curling up to him in our lawn chairs, I see how it is, Mom sees how it is. I know what you feel. You think you can hide it, but you can’t. Who’s the sick one, who is—
She didn’t even know how it happened. How it was that they were facing each other, and Evie saying those things, and then suddenly Evie’s hand flew to her own mouth, like she couldn’t believe what she had done. Like the words themselves burned her lips.
She remembers pushing Evie backward, the look on Evie’s face, and the galloping in her own chest. She remembers Evie falling back, tripping over her field hockey stick, falling to the cement.
She doesn’t know how she ended up on the ground too, knees digging into the grass, grinding into it, hands on Evie’s legs, tight.
She doesn’t know how it happened, but there was a surging in her chest, and her hands suddenly on that hockey stick, and that stick across Evie’s throat, and Evie’s eyes jumping, her head thrashing, and pressing harder to make it stop.
It was like a kids’ fight, wasn’t it? Over a nasty word on the playground. Take it back! Take it back! She would make Evie take it back.
Pressing so hard on the stick, pressing hard into the electrical tape circling it, her arms vibrating, her body vibrating, and Evie’s face blooming a glorious red, and she knew suddenly that she could do anything.
All she could think was, Look what I can do. I can push and push and push and those words will go back down her throat—my dad, my dad—and it’ll be like she never said them at all.
The color on Evie’s face like no color she’d ever seen, and the feeling of the wood splintering under her thumbs.
I can do anything, I can do anything, and she didn’t even feel Evie clawing at her arms, her chest. Long scratch marks that would last for days.
She didn’t feel anything but the ending of things. She could seal up that moment, and it would be like it never happened at all, those words were never said. No one would ever know. She could end it all.
Then something shuddered into her, and she felt Evie inside her, felt her smallness and her weakness and the look in Evie’s eyes like it was all over and there was nothing to stop it, the surrender there, and the handing over of everything.
She felt her hands let go, fling back, and she felt the horror in her, and that was when it happened.
The strong hands on her, the man’s arms, grabbing her around the chest, grabbing her by the back of her neck like you lift a cat.
Lifting her off her sister, that face violet-shot.
That’s how I see it. The way Dusty tells me.
Mr. Shaw’s man’s arms. I can feel them.
Listening to Dusty, it all shudders into place—Evie saying to me, He saved me, so I gave him this thing.
“He stopped you,” I say, the recognition rustling against my neck. “Mr. Shaw.”
“No, no, no. I’d already stopped,” she says, the words breaking to shards. “I’d stopped.”
“And then he took her away. Then he stole her aw
ay,” I say, picturing Mr. Shaw hoisting Evie in his arms. A true rescue. At first, at the start.
Oh, Mr. Shaw, you might have been that knight if you had quit there. You might have been that knight, had you been able to stop your own sick heart from—
“No, no,” Dusty says, her voice soft. “He pulled me away. She was on the ground and the sound, that… rattling sound from her throat, and I couldn’t look. I couldn’t look. We were both breathing so hard, but her breath, like when you put your ear on a seashell. Like your ear on a…”
“He took her,” I say, pushing myself in.
“No,” she says. And she tells me how it was. Evie shaking the breath back into herself, her face stunned, lost. The searing red on her neck.
How he’d started backing away again, like he didn’t know what to do now. Like he was afraid to get near either of them. Someone could swoop in at any minute and point the finger at him.
Her face covered in her arms, Dusty hid herself in herself. She covered her face, and buried herself for… she didn’t know how long. It felt like forever.
Hearing Evie stumbling to her feet, calling out to him, calling his name. Running to him, her breath that gruesome wheeze.
The car door slamming. The car kicking to life. The car driving away.
“You have to understand. The things she said,” Dusty goes on, her voice splintering and going high. “They were so awful. Things no one should ever say about anyone.”
Her thumb on the clotting blood on her knee, dancing there, touching the sealing blood.
“Lizzie, she said those things and it was like she… carved them into me. Because now I look at myself,” she says, her hand lifting, nearly covering her mouth, “and all I see are those words.”
“What words?” I ask, but somewhere in my head I know.
“I can’t say them,” she says, darting her eyes at me, her face breaking softly. “Do you think I can say them?”
“A-a-about you,” I stutter. “About you?”
“She said, How is it different from the two of you? From you and Dad. And I told her it was nothing like that, that I was nothing like her.”