The End of Everything

And I could see it so clearly, Mrs. Verver, hair long and sunny, like in that old photo on the fireplace mantel, hips twisting, eyes fixed, walking toward him, hypnotized.

  And what if Mr. Verver was, and I bet he was, just as confident, just as cool and easy as he is now? How could she stop herself from walking toward him?

  “What were you playing?” I ask.

  “I don’t remember,” he says, but the way he says it, I know it’s on the tip of his tongue. And sure enough, as he rotates the trophy in his hand, looking at it like it’s a crystal ball, he breaks into another smile.

  “ ‘Moonlight Drive,’ ” he says.

  I nod eagerly, even though I’ve never heard of it, but it speaks of romance, of lost highways, red taillights flashing across dreamy faces, dire love.

  “If I can find it,” he says, “I’ll play it for you sometime.”

  “On the piano?” I ask. I am bouncing on my feet and I can’t stop myself.

  “Well, I don’t even have a keyboard anymore,” he says, his eyes creasing tenderly. Then he nods toward the wire album racks teetering dangerously in the corner. “I’m sure the album’s in there somewhere.”

  I resist the urge to run over and look. Instead, pressed hard against the leather front of the bar, I put my hands on the trophy, hoping he’ll keep talking. I’ve always wanted this, even before I knew it. To hear Mr. Verver talk and talk with no one to interrupt, not Mrs. Verver, not my mother, not Dusty, calling out, always calling out for him.

  “I used to play this song for Dusty when she was little,” he says, like he read my mind. “She’d dance to it. She’d twirl around, her hair all corkscrewed.”

  Then everything slows down, as if his words know the dark place they are going, where they will end up. “Little Evie’d try to dance too,” he says, his voice softening, weakening. She always wanted to be like Dusty. She’d get caught in her sister’s legs and they would both fall on top of each other.”

  The look on his face, well, it’s awful. With each word, the warm flush sinking from him, the fever in his eyes gone. The lovely clatter of our fun struck hard into broody silence.

  We look at each other and I want to go home more than anything in the world.

  I’m standing at the side door of my house, about to go inside. I can’t quite do it because I’m thinking of Mr. Verver, wondering if he went back down in the basement after he walked me out. Is he running his finger along the albums, ridged, with peeling spines, looking for his song? Or is he sitting, broken-shouldered, drinking a beer and thinking about the weight of things?

  I’m standing there, and then she flits out at me, and I nearly jump from my skin.

  “Lizzie,” the hiss comes, and my head thrashes around to see Dusty, barefoot, in a long-sleeved Celts T-shirt and bitty shorts. Her legs are long and creamy-tanned, just one white scar loping around her knee from her famous Stallions injury last year. The other girl had to have her jaw rewired. Her face split like a zipper. Oh, we loved Dusty for it.

  “Hi,” I say, finding myself leaning back against the side of my house, like a criminal ready for frisking.

  “You were talking to Dad,” she says.

  “Yeah,” I say. “I brought over your MVP trophy.”

  She doesn’t respond but glares at me. “Did you see on the news?” she asks. “They can’t pin it on him.”

  And I’m hurled back.

  “Not yet,” I say. “But they’ll find him. They’re looking everywhere.”

  I know it’s true. You see the police cars circuiting all over town, across the county. You see them on the news, at the border, standing sentry. How could anyone hide from all that?

  “They have no idea where he is,” she says, shaking her head, her voice going ragged. “They’ve narrowed it down to possibly Canada. Those cigarettes don’t matter now. He didn’t smoke. All they know is she’s gone and he’s gone.”

  She looks at me.

  “They can’t pin it on him,” she says again. “And if they can’t, how will they ever find out what happened?”

  I’m listening, but she makes it all feel so hopeless. The hopelessness in her voice. Which, for Dusty, seems a kind of anger.

  I don’t know how I can be around any of them anymore. It is too terrible and, by myself, I don’t have to think about this part, not at all.

  “They’ll find him,” I say, but I start to wonder what I even mean.

  “You said it was him,” her voice stutters out, a hard stutter, like gears grinding, “you said you saw him. His car.”

  She raises her eyes to me, and I feel it. I feel everything ripping through her. I’ve never seen Dusty like this, words breaking in her mouth.

  “Maybe I was wrong,” I blurt, even as the sound of it feels shakingly rotten. It’s not something I’ve let myself think, not really. “Maybe it wasn’t his car.”

  Dusty looks at me, her face tightening up again, recovering from the loose sprawl that had overtaken it.

  “It was his car, all right,” she says.

  “How do you know?” I watch the certainty battening down in her.

  “Don’t you know?” she says. “You were always smart. I was sure you knew.”

  “I think so,” I say. “I think it was his car.” The sureness on her, it feels so steely. It makes me doubt myself, then doubt the doubting. I don’t know what to think.

  Nine

  Walking down the school corridor, backpack dragging on the buffed floors, I think about Dusty, and what she might know. Could Evie have shown her those cigarette butts too, or is it something else? Evie never told Dusty anything, did she? When you talked to Dusty, you almost had to rehearse, and every time you felt like you’d better best your game because you were on an egg timer, and it was ticking away.

  In my head, I replay it and replay, each time asking Dusty the question I didn’t, “How do you know, Dusty? How do you know it’s Mr. Shaw?” But, with her hawk eyes on me, I’d said nothing.

  The door to the teachers’ lounge is ajar and I see them all hovering around the TV cart, the one they wheel in the room on the days the teachers don’t feel like doing anything and instead show you that old Romeo and Juliet movie with all the hippies again.

  I pretend my shoelace is untied and bend down, but Mr. Moskaluk sees me and shuts the door.

  I don’t like it. I don’t.

  In the school library, I find Kelli and Tara jammed into a study carrel together, nearly sweaty with nervous energy. They wave me over with what seems like a hundred arms.

  And it’s funny because I never spent so much time with these girls, and whenever I did before it was always with Evie, and we were Lizzie-and-Evie, Lizzie-and-Evie. And now it was like I was Lizzie-and-Evie.

  They tell me everything and we have to be so quiet, the student librarian with the pink-tinted glasses glaring at us ferociously, that it feels like one long wheezy whisper in my ear. They tell me this:

  An old woman who lives on the other side of the hollow called the police to say that at five o’clock in the afternoon on the day Evie disappeared she saw a girl who looked just like her. The girl was walking along Green Hollow Lake, a half mile from school. Stopping by the spillway, the water pushing through its channel, she stood for a minute.

  “And then she just jumped in,” Kelli says, and her mouth is pressed against me, her hand curled in front of us, her bangled bracelets scratching against my face.

  “The lady figured she was going for a swim,” Tara jeers. “Don’t you always swim with all your clothes on?”

  “But then she never saw her come up again,” Kelli says, finally leaning back, wiggling her hands and fingers in disbelief. “Figured the girl just swam away.”

  “That doesn’t make sense,” I say.

  “Guess it makes more sense than a bunch of cigarette butts,” Kelli says, smirking.

  I feel it burning on me. I feel it under all their breaths, and now, the way they’re looking at me, like I made everything up.

  “You don??
?t do that in the lake,” I say, trying to fight off the clamor in my head. “The current. I fell in there when I was little. And you only go in the swimming areas. You don’t just jump in. Not with that current.”

  In my head is the prickly static of all the drownings, the young men whose dinghy overturned, the girl who hit her head on a rock and drowned in the spillway.

  “Well,” Kelli says, arching an eyebrow, “you jump in if you don’t care about coming up again.”

  I feel like I want to smack her, but I stop myself and Tara clamps me over the shoulder like she knows.

  “But why didn’t the old lady call before?” I say. “Why is she all of a sudden calling now, eight days since Evie’s been gone?”

  “She didn’t know about everything. She’d been at her granddaughter’s in Greenvale. She saw the picture of Evie in the paper, and it all came back.”

  “I don’t believe it,” I say, because I don’t. I don’t believe it because of what I know. I don’t believe it because of what I’d seen myself. I don’t believe it because there’s a hollow wrongness to it that echoes forth.

  Most of all, I don’t believe it because it makes everything so spare and simple. And I now know in a deep, desperate, world-crashing way that there’s no simple anymore, and there never was.

  Sitting in Algebra I, hearing Mr. Silverston review polynomials for the final exam, my head clogs mightily.

  I feel like I should be crying. I feel like I should be begging to go home for the day, how can I go on when Evie might be—might be—and I think of Mr. Verver, and what he must be thinking, feeling. Evie at the sumpy bottom of Green Hollow Lake.

  The empty seat looms in front of me, the way Evie used to twist her ankles around the back of her chair, the way I used to kick them loose and make her laugh, rubber-toed tennis shoes skidding against each other.

  It’s just not so. It’s just not so.

  I know what I saw. I know what I feel. I know what I know.

  I try to will myself back to Mr. Shaw, to Mr. Shaw and Evie. At first, I can’t even picture them together. They don’t seem to live in the same world. He was a man in suits, in offices, at PTA meetings, in a short-sleeved shirt, iron pressed, a drifting look on his face. But didn’t they, all these men, these dads, have that look? Like my own dad.

  These are the things I know:

  Mr. Shaw was Mr. Verver’s insurance agent. Car, home, life.

  All the scattered talk and low humming and tilt-head speculation when Mr. Shaw’s name first came up. Had he been to the house, seen Evie, and become fixated on her, or had he sold Mr. Verver policies just to get closer to Evie, had been trying to for years?

  I sit and balance my chin precariously on the eraser end of my pencil, rocking it this way and that, the lead point skittering across my worksheet.

  It is in this state of intense thought that I remember the thing, the thing that puts the two in the same frame, in the same sunlit reverie. Mr. Shaw talking to Mr. Verver in their backyard, a year ago, before everything.

  They were sitting on lawn chairs, drinking beer. Mr. Shaw sat more stiffly in his chair, his sport coat on, his briefcase nestled in cool grass. And I saw him from my upstairs window, so I noticed how bald Mr. Shaw was from above, when he was only a little bald face to face, or in pictures like the one in the newspaper.

  And another time, later that summer.

  Evie and I are twelve.

  We are wearing our matching blue bathing suits and shorts.

  We are barefoot.

  We are doing cartwheels and round-offs, jumping, skinny legs everywhere.

  And Mr. Shaw and Mr. Verver come walking down the Verver driveway. Mr. Verver waves at us, then sticks his fingers in his mouth and whistles.

  I laugh, a silly chirp, and stop, looking at them.

  Evie just keeps going, cartwheel after cartwheel.

  Mr. Shaw, eyes set so deep, like holes in his head, has a hand resting on his open car door, and he is watching us, with Mr. Verver.

  And I am still laughing and Evie’s hair fans out black feathers with each cartwheel.

  And Mr. Shaw’s keys fall to the pavement of the driveway and Mr. Verver picks them up for him and Mr. Shaw opens the car door wider and smiles funnily at Mr. Verver, his tie loose around his collar from his after-work beer break. The smile is wrong, it lifts in the corners but it’s not really a smile, it’s a thing he does with his mouth.

  And he looks over at us one more time before getting in the car, then he starts his engine and leaves.

  And Mr. Verver waves, but I don’t think Mr. Shaw sees. He is driving slowly past my house, my lawn.

  Evie springing, legs flying, hair whipping around her face, hard body never stopping, and Mr. Shaw still looking, even after he’s gone.

  Did it happen like this? I don’t know. But it’s how I remember it and I know Evie’s cartwheels, the way she floated through them, like moving through molasses, smooth and dawdling and tongue-sweet, why, that’s how it was. I tried, always, to slow them down like she did, to make them linger, lovingly, but mine were always short bursts, tight and fast.

  Her dark hair sheeted out, matching her limbs, summer-honeyed.

  He saw that and he fell in love. How could anyone see Evie’s cartwheels and not fall in love?

  Oh, how his heart must have ached with it.

  And then the picture comes again.

  The picture comes twice. Everything comes at least twice.

  Mr. Shaw watching, eyes set so deep, like holes in his head, has a hand resting on his open car door, something square and silver gleaming in his dangling hand.

  A cigarette lighter, square and silver, gleaming in his dangling hand.

  Mrs. Shaw may not know it, Mr. Verver may not remember. But I do, I do.

  He smokes.

  And now I can guess how it is. He smokes Parliaments, in his car, around town, on sales calls, on long walks at night, twining through the starry streets. Standing at courtly remove in the Verver backyard, yearning.

  Anywhere but home.

  Evie is not at the bottom of the lake.

  Those are his cigarette stubs, his left-behind longings and woe.

  He watched Evie and smoked and made her his dream, over and over, then and later, and then every night, every single night until he couldn’t stand it any longer.

  Saturday morning, I’m crouching in the alley behind the Tri-County All-Risk office, and that’s where I see them, behind the drainpipe.

  The two cigarette butts, the gold-edged piece of plastic from a hard pack. I even spot the Green Hollow Pharmacy bag, crumpled in the wire trash can, a receipt still inside. It might be his. It might’ve been his.

  It hits me fast that my hand is shoved in a trash can, and that I have left home without permission and during a strict curfew.

  There’s a giddiness in it too.

  And I peer in the glass door, into the darkened office, thinking of Mr. Shaw in there, gloomy and yearning.

  Everyone else running down blind alleys, everyone doubting me, but I know. I know everything.

  At home that night, I imagine placing an anonymous call to the police. “Look in the alleyway!” I’d whisper witchily.

  My mother is droning on and on about the old woman and the lake sighting and what it means.

  “I haven’t seen Annie at all,” she says, talking about Mrs. Verver. “I tried calling. What do you say? Do you say you’re sure it wasn’t Evie. I mean, really. What do you say?

  “And him. Oh, it’s so sad, the way he stands in the driveway, like he’s forgotten something. Or like now. Did you see? He’s sitting in the yard with the bottles of beer, and the way he looks into the trees. It’s like he thinks just maybe little Evie will suddenly slip from between two trees and walk back into the yard.

  “And he doesn’t even have Dusty around to lean on. Where is she? The way she usually clings to him—the vine, that’s what we used to call her when she was little. Where’s she?”

  My mom
is feeling wistful and semitragic. She has had no late-night visitors in days. She and Dr. Aiken can’t lie languorously in our patio loungers late into the night when Mr. Verver’s twenty feet away, doing such conspicuous grieving.

  “Why don’t you go sit with him?” Ted, eating ice cream over the kitchen sink, says. He glances through the screen. “He looks lonely.”

  I feel a surge of warmth toward Ted, who never seems to notice anything. But part of me knows he’s just prodding, poking at her, like he does.

  My mother twists her lips a little and for a second I think she might do it, might go over there with her tending ways like she tends to Dr. Aiken, ministering to his lonely-husband heart. But she and Mr. Verver never really talk much, and my mother, if she was feeling neighborly at all, always chose Mrs. Verver, the two sighing together about how long the soccer games were, when either of them went, which was hardly ever.

  “Lizzie,” she says, curling one hand over my shoulder, “he likes you. You go.”

  She says it as if he’s the kid at school with the stutter or the harelip. Go make friends. Doesn’t she see that all I want is to go, to have him shine himself on me like he could always do? But he can’t. He’s captive to this horror. I know things, I know them in a sneaking way, but I don’t know how I can make him know them too.

  “Hi,” I say, standing before him, itching the back of one leg with the toe of the other.

  “Hi,” he says, nearly smiling. Forcing a smile, just for me.

  “I remembered something,” I say. “I remember Mr. Shaw here last summer. Do you remember? He was talking to you. Evie and I, we were doing cartwheels.”

  He winces when I say it. It’s a wretched thing to see, but I go on.

  “I remember something in his hand,” I say. “I remember he had a cigarette lighter. Do you remember?”

  He squints hard. “I… I don’t think so,” he says, and the defeat on him overwhelms me. “Lizzie, our heads, they can do funny things. Believe me, all I do is replay everything in my head, all the time. Everything reminds me of everything.”

  The words echo in me, they hurt.

  I drop down into the lawn chair beside him.