The End of Everything

  “No,” I repeat. “Never.”

  MISSING: Eveline Marie Verver, age thirteen years old. Five feet, one inch tall. Eighty-nine pounds. Hair: Dark brown. Eyes: Gray.

  Last seen en route from JFK Middle School, 5/28. Wearing yellow T-shirt with butterfly on front, blue shorts, tennis shoes.

  Identifying marks: Bruise above left eye. Small white scar on inside of upper left thigh.

  It’s posted on all the electrical poles, in store windows. Everything about it seems wrong, beginning with the name.

  When you’re girls growing up like we did, you’re so body-close. Sometimes, I’d look at my own left thigh and wonder where the white curl went, the scar like a half-moon, a nail dug deep, from falling off Dusty’s Schwinn in second grade, Dusty pushing so hard, hands on Evie’s back. Then I’d remember it wasn’t my scar, my leg, but Evie’s, even as I could sometimes feel it under my fingertips, like the soldiers with the phantom limbs we read about in History class.

  The body-closeness, it comes from all those nights knotted together in the tent in the backyard, or showering the chlorine off in the bathhouse at the pool, lying in the plush grass by the soccer field, comparing injuries, pushing our fingers in each other’s violet bruises. Tugging at our bathing suits, seeing who’d get that bra first, even as Evie knew it would be me, but she was the one with the hot cramps that made her bend over, that made her turn white. Sometimes I felt them too, with her. Sometimes I felt my insides turning as hers did. I wanted to.

  We shared everything, our tennis socks and stub erasers, our hair elastics and winter tights. We were that close. Sometimes we blinked in time.

  Back in second, third grade, all the parents always saying, Do the dance, do the dance. The first time was at the tap recital. “Me and My Shadow,” in our matching silver leotards and shiny top hats, our hair the same muddy color, the baby curls sprayed to shellac by Madame Connie, our teacher. Then everyone made us do it again and again, at birthday parties, on Easter. A hundred times in the Verver basement, my living room, at school, step-shuffle-back-step, step-shuffle-back-step. Over and over, cheeks painted red. Until I grew two inches and Evie’s hair went dark and finally we never did that dance again.

  But I bet I still could do it. I bet I could do it right now.

  These things, though, they end.

  And with Evie gone, I can see things had been changing for who knew how long. It was like the scar on her thigh, the one I could feel beneath my own fingers, had slithered from my own leg back to hers. “Maybe I won’t try out for field hockey,” Evie’d said one day, even as we’d talked of little else all year long, aiming for a shot at JV. And there Evie is on Friday nights, and she doesn’t want to do the backyard table tennis tournaments with Dusty and Mr. Verver, the ones that last till long past dark, fireflies flicking in the deep night majesty. She just doesn’t anymore, and these are things I can’t account for.

  We’re no longer two summer-brown kids with tangles of hair and jutting kid teeth. I don’t know when it happened, but it did. Lately, things had been hovering in her face, and I couldn’t fathom it. I had things too, new things twisting under my skin, but I didn’t know what they were. It felt like she knew her own zigzagging heart, and I was just killing time.

  “He’s b-a-a-c-k…” That’s what Kelli Hough says at school, a group of us ribboned around her locker. I’d missed the first three periods, talking to the police, and I feel unsteady, somehow lost. And there is Kelli, shrill-mouthed, French braids tight enough to pop veins.

  “Corrine Willows,” someone whispers. It’s the name sizzling through the halls, behind locker doors, in the steaming cafeteria line. We were all in second grade and Corrine was two years ahead of us. Someone had climbed into her bedroom window during a slumber party, grabbed her, and disappeared into the night. The details, you remembered them. The Strawberry Shortcake sleeping bag, the shiny purple nightgown, the finger splint on her left hand, from when she jammed her finger in gym class. There were search parties. They dragged the lake and the Milky River.

  “Willows was a nine-year-old kid,” Tara Leary says, ruddy-faced and imperious. “It’s not the same.” Tara’s father works for the district attorney. “Besides, all the cops know it was her dad, a custody thing. They just couldn’t prove it.”

  It all made sense, but you didn’t feel that kind of truth in your gut, so stories flew, knocked around, shimmied back, that it wasn’t the father at all but someone in our very town, a child killer in our midst, who had hid Corrine’s lifeless body in some place it would never be found, like under the floorboards of the high school gymnasium or the ice rink at the community center.

  That whole day, and on buzzing phones that night, all the girls hiving around me, saying the child killer has struck again. There is a breathlessness about it.

  “White slavery. That’s what my mom says. She saw it on TV. Evie’s probably been sold to some sheiks, is on her way to the Arabs now.”

  “It’s a perv. And they always kill them in the first twenty-four hours.”

  It’s what the kids are saying, in tight little knots in hallways all through the school, they are giddy with it, with the fever of Evie being gone. But I don’t believe them. I would know if Evie were dead. Something would hollow out in my chest and I would know. She’s not gone, not gone like Corrine Willows, a name more than a girl, a bloody stitch we like to wedge our nail under and poke. Corrine Willows is only a hiss-whisper, an eerie blankness. That could never be Evie. We might not be body-close like we were, but we are close enough for me to know this: Evie never stops moving, her legs pumping, her smile fanning—that girl, I know. That girl I know better than me.

  In bed that night I let my mind go anyplace but to Evie, to what might have happened.

  I put my face to the window screen and look down at the furred night lawn.

  Thinking of things, pondering in the dark. There’s something nagging at me and I grapple for it. I’m not even sure what I’m tugging at, what that speck is in the corner of my head.

  It’s one thirty and everyone is asleep, or trying to be. I tiptoe down the stairs, my nightshirt twining between my legs, key chain flashlight curled in my hand.

  The front door is right there, but I know its epic creak, like the sliding patio door, the way it squeaks open, then rattles after. Instead, I lift the half-open window in the family room, and crawl up on the sill, my knees wedging hard into the grooves.

  I wish the pain weren’t so pleasing, searing into my knees like that. I hate it when it feels like that, so solid I want to put my mouth to it. These are things too embarrassing to say. Only Evie would…

  Tucking the flashlight in my mouth, I slip out the other side, my feet landing lightly on the grass, itching between my toes. Darting across the Verver driveway, I feel like a ghost.

  There’s a deliciousness to it, like so many times with Evie, our Brownies tent in the backyard, mouths and fingers sticky with marshmallows, rolling in nighttime grass, jittery with every sound, every echo, every katydid rubbing toothy wings, just for us.

  There’s something. What it is, I can’t place it.

  I press my palm to the brick wall because I feel like I might fall.

  There was something here, something that might mean something. Something found, something that put an aha catch in my throat, but I can’t reckon it now. I can’t hold the ends together and lift it to my eyes.

  I stumble around to the back of the house, stubbing my toe three times, the last time feeling a hot push of blood under my toenail.

  Something’s there, wedged beneath my foot.

  I bend down and look upon it.

  The fluorescent bend of the garden hose, the spike from its hard nozzle.

  But it reminds me. It puts form to that hovering thought.

  Three weeks, a month ago, Evie and I running our bikes to the back, out of the way for the gutter man to come with this big telescoping pole, raining down a spray of pinecones, twigs, and silt. Shake, shake like m
aracas, and there’s more, more. Once a nest of baby sparrows came down, all dead, and since then Mrs. Verver stays in her room with a cold washcloth on her forehead until it’s over. “Who wants to see it all?” she said. “Who wants to see what’s up there?”

  We leaned our bikes against the pear tree in the center of the lawn, and that is where Evie shows me.

  I remember thinking it was funny how little time we spend in the far reaches of the lawn now. When we were little we spent all our time there, bitty hands gnarled around the bark of the pear tree, clattering our way up to the top.

  Evie crouched, her hands resting on the garden hose, which we are supposed to twine up on the big wheel for Carl, the gutter man.

  “Do you want to see something?” she asked, and I settled down eagerly, always expecting such wonders, like a five-leaf clover, a two-headed worm, a piece of pottery from ancient times.

  We hunkered down together, but all I saw were three cigarette stubs, spent matches curled upward. The word “Parliament” wraps around one of the white tips.

  “Your sister?” I asked, although I can’t picture Dusty—all those doll curls, her scrubbed face and smooth barrettes—sneaking smokes.

  “No,” she said, although I didn’t know how she could be sure. I went to poke one with my finger, but she stopped me.

  “My dad quit,” she said, and I remembered Mr. Verver telling us how he did it, chewing on coffee stirrers, pipe cleaners, and bendy straws until he almost choked in the car one day, ran up over a curb.

  “Maybe,” I said, and I grinned at her. “Maybe not.”

  It would be fun, and then I could tease him about it, like Dusty, like she teased him when his friends came by to play cards and they left a pile of beer cans and she called him a degenerate. I could never say such things, but Dusty used marvelous words, and laid them forward, like a ladies’ fan, spread. And Mr. Verver loved it, and wouldn’t it be wonderful to make him smile, just for you?

  Evie peered down at the grass, the papery stubs.

  There was something in her face, a graveness. She was thinking, and I couldn’t see my way into it. Charging through the back of my head came that thought: It’s happening again. More and more, Evie isn’t exactly Evie any longer. Something hung heavily, moody, behind her eyes, and I wanted to see. Like she had a weight hanging behind there and I could tap on it, swing it back and forth, but it wasn’t mine.

  How dare she keep it from me?

  I gave her shoulder a shove. She, kneeling, toppled over backward, catching herself with her spindled arms.

  I laughed, but it sounded wrong, a retchy laugh like Tara Leary’s when she saw my sad little training bra.

  Evie looked hard at me, weighing things, and said, “Sometimes, at night, he’s out here.”

  The words plucked a quiver in me. I couldn’t think what she must mean.

  “You mean your dad,” I said.

  “No, another man.”

  “What man?” I said, my voice slow, confused. “A boy, you mean, one of Dusty’s boys?”

  She shook her head and looked up at her bedroom window, and I turned and looked up at it too. Dusty’s window faces the front of the house, while Evie’s faces the back. From where we were kneeling, you could see into Evie’s room, the slant in the ceiling, the soccer ball mobile.

  “What man, Evie?” I repeated.

  And she pressed her palm flat on the cigarette butts. “I guess it was a dream. I guess it’s all confused, like a dream.”

  She rubbed the side of her head and smiled, a goofy smile with all her teeth, and her arm darted out and shoved me too and I keeled back fast, my head sinking into the grass, and Evie was on top of me and laughing, and we were both laughing until Mrs. Verver shouted out for us to unlatch the gate for Carl.

  And now here I am. And there are four cigarette butts, two pressed flat and two like curved seashells. You could put your ear to them and hear the sea.

  They are there.

  “Hi, Lizzie,” Mr. Verver says. It’s the third day. His eyes are threaded red and his stubble is thick like it was the time Dusty had to go to the emergency room, her appendix popped like a balloon.

  “Hi,” I say. “My mom said you wanted me to come over.”

  It all feels so funny because, having grown up with eyes always lifted to Mr. Verver, I can barely remember ever getting to talk to him without Evie there, except that time when we were seven and he took us to the Halloween Harvest at the county fairgrounds. Everyone wanted to go into the Haunted Hollow, where ghouls with pitchforks were supposed to chase you through a maze of corn. Clangs and screams thudded from the speaker behind the spook house door and I didn’t want to go inside. Bantam Dusty spurred Evie on, and the two of them went, terror roistering up their faces, while Mr. Verver stood outside with me and assured me that haunted houses were for kids anyway. He bought me a sack of candy corn and showed me how to toss them high and catch them in my upturned mouth.

  Later, he told Dusty I was shaking the whole time, tugging on his belt, eyes wide and mouth rigid. But I wasn’t. I wasn’t scared at all. That wasn’t what it was.

  “Lizzie,” he says now, his voice cracked and stretched, “Evie needs your help. I need your help. We all do. You can tell me anything.”

  He reaches out and taps two fingers on my hand and makes me look straight in his eyes.

  “No one’s in trouble,” he says. “You’re not in trouble. But you may know something, even if it doesn’t seem important. You were the one—” And he leans toward me and I can see the crinkles in his shirt and feel all the tiredness on him.

  “You were the last one to see her. You’re the closest link we have to what happened.”

  I can’t pretend it doesn’t startle me, the jangling look on Mr. Verver’s face. I’ve never seen it on him before. It’s not a look you see on adults, least of all Mr. Verver, who always carries himself so lightly, who runs on glimmers and grins and ease, laying his hands on things—broken bicycle handles, split hockey sticks, your arm so he could see the bug bite—as though, if he turned them just so, he could heal them, without even so much as a squint. Just by his hands.

  But here he is, with the jangling look—and it disarms me.

  My head feels clogged and I try and try.

  There is something else, too, another faint, smoky smudge in the corner of my head, but I can’t make it real.

  Upstairs, I hear a lot of clomping and I know it’s Dusty because Mrs. Verver never makes any noise. My mother told me, in her confidential tone, that Mrs. Verver had been throwing up for hours. I keep picturing it now. Once, after my dad left, my mom drank pink wine all night at the dinner table and got sick in the kitchen sink. It is a favorite tale of my brother’s, who regales others with heaving imitations.

  “Why was Mrs. Verver throwing up?” I’d asked my mother, who’d sighed and said, gravely, “I don’t think you understand what’s happening.”

  And that’s when I stopped listening, shut my ears from the gloom and murk of her. It’s almost like she savors the terribleness—everyone does. Like it does things for them, makes everything seem more exciting, more momentous, more real.

  Evie’s not gone, I wanted to say to her, and now as I sit on the Verver sofa, the sofa Evie and I used to wedge our hands into, sneaking crusty quarters after dinner parties, I know Evie’s right here, watching, giggle-faced, that snaggletooth in the left corner of her mouth, where her chin hit the Benedicts’ deck as she ran fast to get into their new fiberglass pool and under the water and down, down, down to its burning-chlorine center.

  “Lizzie,” Mr. Verver is saying, and his voice brings me back. “Is there anything else you can remember about that day? Anything she said, anything maybe out of the ordinary the last time you saw her?”

  “I don’t know,” I say. “I can’t think. She said she was going to walk home. She was behind the hedges and then she was gone.”

  He nods, like what I’m saying makes sense, which it does not. I’m trying ha
rd to picture it all, to fall back into it like a dream you can make yourself dream twice.

  “She said she didn’t want a ride. I asked her if we could give her a ride. But she didn’t want a ride. Is that weird? It doesn’t seem so weird. It’s weird because of this, but if it hadn’t been for all this, I don’t think it’d seem weird.”

  Mr. Verver nods, looking across the room at nothing in particular. “Everything seems weird now,” he says. “It’s all upside down.”

  I look out the window and see the detectives talking on the front porch, one of them smoking, like a cop on a TV show. I’m thinking about the cigarette butts again.

  I feel dizzy and ask if I can use the bathroom. Standing in the Ververs’ pink powder room, I look in the mirror and count to ten three times.

  When I come out, I see Mr. Verver again, making coffee in that old dented pot he takes on fishing trips.

  “Dusty broke the other one this morning,” he says, trying for a smile. “Nerves.”

  “It might not be anything,” I blurt.

  He stops, the water running over his hand.

  “What?”

  “It’s just—it’s probably nothing,” I stutter. I can see his face lifting and something swells in me.

  “I know,” he says. “But nothing is okay. It really is. Right now, nothing is more than we have.”

  We walk to the backyard, and I hope they’re still there. My heart pit-pats and I worry that I dreamed those cigarettes into sputtering life.

  Mr. Verver’s hand is on my shoulder and I feel a weight on my chest.

  Twenty paces walking to the knobby pear tree, but it seems, now, so far. I feel, with each step, every twig, kicked-up dirt, curling leaf, the sharp cut of a rake thatch. Soon enough, I am nearly running.

  My eye catches the white first, and I see them, still there from last night, matted fast into a root corner of the tree.

  Mr. Verver is already crouched down, and it’s no dream. They are there. Hands on his thighs, he doesn’t touch them.

  “You found these?”

  “Evie did. She showed them to me. Or ones like them. About a month ago.”