The End Of Everything Part 10

"She's had lots of boyfriends," I say, even though I know it isn't really true. Not in the way he means.

There are always boys around Dusty, different boys, and sometimes there's one boy, but you never see her get too excited about one of them. The only one who stuck for a while was Joe Richmond, the summer before he went to college. He used to come over and play one-on-one basketball with Mr. Verver, who beat him every time.

"Boys love Dusty," I say louder, rubbing hard at the scabs on my knee.

"They like looking at her," he says. "But how long can you just look at that?"

This feels like a window into another world, the teen-boy world, a world of sweat socks and thumping ba.s.s and torn-out magazine photos of bulbous tan b.r.e.a.s.t.s and white rabbity teeth and yellow flossy hair, those girls always posed bending over or crawling or poking things in their mouth or twining them between their legs.

I wonder what a boy could want if Dusty wasn't it.

Eye to the keyhole, seeing Dusty through Ted's restless eyes, it makes me feel strange and unmoored and I stay in my mother's room long after he has left. I stay there while my mother, giddy and high, parades him around the house taking photographs and oohing and aahing.

I have this sense, suddenly, of Dusty, arms rigid at her sides, bored and hara.s.sed by the jabbing, prodding elbows of boys, boys trying to unwrap her, unfurl her, to unbend her from herself. And what was for her in that? These awkward boys wanting things all the time but not knowing what that means or why it matters.

In Dusty's eyes, regal and severe, there's the sense that she knows so much more than they do, and they could never glimmer for her, so why should she grant them her rough magic? Had they earned it?

And so there I am, trying to unsnarl it all, lying on my mother's bed, on the mauve bedspread she bought after the divorce, which is when she bought all those pillows, a hundred different sizes, mounding her bed so high you couldn't find a corner to sit on.

The pillows are gone now, migrated to the TV room and other places.

When you lie on the bed, you can see yourself in that long mirror, the one my brother was standing in front of. I fight off thoughts of my mother and Dr. Aiken and that mirror, the way it's tilted and the way, if I lie here, I can see up my soccer shorts.

I wonder how many times Dr. Aiken has been in this bed and what he does here, and what he says to my mother, and if she believes it.

"She didn't feel up to going," Mr. Verver says. "We tried to get her to go, but she said she just couldn't. But it's hard to miss that kind of stuff too. Proms, you don't forget them."

"Yes," I say. I remember how, a month ago, we were with Dusty when she bought her dress, long, sleek, and red, like a curling tongue.

"She's been holed up in her room for hours," Mr. Verver says, his brow doing that curlicue thing, like when Evie would show him her injuries, or tell him about a bad grade.

I picture Dusty up there on that cherry-top bed, entwined in her covers in gloom and frustration.

I picture her up there and I wonder what she thinks about Evie now. About what's happened and how they all must suspend everything, and it's like the whole world thuds to a halt.

I try to think of ways I could talk to her about Evie, to see what she thinks happened to her, but Dusty seems as remote to me as she does to those backseat boys, a high-tower girl and me on the far-flung ground, ankle-deep in the tendriled tails of her princess hair.

"I remember," I say, "when we were little and Dusty put on Mrs. Verver's old dresses, like her prom dress. The one with all the lace."

It had been a boring summer day and we were all in swimsuits but the rain wouldn't stop and we couldn't go to the pool. Mrs. Verver pulled out these big dress boxes from the top of her closet, and the prom dress was a long, gauzy yellow thing, with b.u.t.terfly sleeves and organza flounces, like a princess would wear. It seemed impossible that Mrs. Verver had ever worn it, but Dusty, all of ten years old, tugged it on over her bathing suit and posed like a fashion model and strutted around, and she even put on the wedding dress, with the fluffy sleeves.

Mrs. Ververa"I'd forgotten she used to do things like that, back when Mr. Verver was traveling a lot for work and always on planes and she wasn't so separate from everything all the time, up in her room, her head in a book, a slow retreat that has lasted for years.

But back then, she was different. Like that day, the way she got out a camera and took pictures of Dusty tiptoeing around, emoting glamorously, her hair spilling over her shoulders, her tiny tanned ankles tottering in her mother's heels.

Later, Mr. Verver came home. Dusty was so pleased she put on the dress again.

Mr. Verver, he told her she looked just like her mother, the spitting image, and Dusty burst into tears and wouldn't come out of her room for hours. Oh, did he ever have to entice her out, putting on all his charms.

Later, Evie and I pretended we were Dusty, fashioning gowns with our beach towels, draping the corners over our shoulders or around our six-year-old waists, puckering our lips and doing runway poses.

"I remember those pictures," Mr. Verver says now, smiling, and then the smile is wider, and I see a gleam there.

"Lizzie," he says, "I need you."

It's like a tw.a.n.g in my chest. "Yes, Mr. Verver," I say.

"I need your help," he says, which is not the same thing, and I feel embarra.s.sed.

"Okay." I nod.

"How would you like to be a part of a very exclusive event?" he says, and there's such mischief in his eyes. It's the Mr. Verver from before.

"I want to, yes," I say.

"Then come with me," he says, and he puts his arm out. I take it, take his arm, and curl my hands around it and it's iron-strong and filled with heat.

We're in the bas.e.m.e.nt, and Mr. Verver is pulling out boxes of holiday decorations and the big punch bowl Mrs. Verver used to fill with 7-UP and sherbet at kid parties.

"What's happening?" I say, my feet nearly bouncing.

"We're setting up for the gala of the season," he says, rolling up his sleeves. "Some of the city's lesser citizens are attending some sad little high school dance. But that stuff's for kids."

And soon enough, I am unfurling the string of red paper lanterns from the "summer" box, the same ones Mr. Verver hung across the backyard trees for last year's Fourth of July party. There's a few leftover balloons and silver crepe streamers and a fan-fold mirror ball to hang from the ceiling.

I remember when we were little, and Evie said she wanted to see a burning cabin like in the Little House book she read and Mr. Verver bought an old dollhouse at a yard sale and stuffed it full of newspaper and set it afire on the patio for us. We screamed with pleasure when the flames curled up its chimney and the shingled roof gave way. Oh, Mrs. Verver never stopped yelling, but we didn't care and he didn't either.

Smiling at me now, as if he's remembering it too, Mr. Verver loops winking Christmas lights across the bar. Music is playing, old songs I don't know, but Mr. Verver seems to know all the words to them, and he sings lightly, happily, and it's like we've fallen out of time.

"What if she won't come down?" I ask.

"She'll come," he says.

He's up in her room for a half hour and I make the punch, but there is no sherbet so I use glunks of b.u.t.ter pecan ice cream and everything swirls in lovely gold-curl patterns. I want to dip my fingers in, but I don't, and I try to listen to what's happening upstairs and I can't hear. I even find myself creeping, mouselike, halfway up the steps, but I just hear the low lilting of Mr. Verver's voice and first some broken, wailing sounds that must be Dusty.

Part of me thinks I don't want to see her. I'm still remembering the things she said, or nearly said, to me. Did she think I lied about the cigarettes? I feel a fresh anger before I remember she's right.

And part of me thinks, If she doesn't come, maybe this will be mine, this evening, all mine.

But soon, I hear her talking and finally I think I hear her laugh, for the first time in weeks. I run back down the stairs, grabbing the punch bowl from the counter and nearly slipping down every bas.e.m.e.nt step.

He comes down first and says the guest of honor will be arriving presently.

We both grin and wait, the CONGRATULATIONS sign from a forgotten occasion hitting the top of his head.

What she must see as she slips down those carpeted steps: such holy enchantment, red and white lit, the crush of flowers tugged from the garden, the creamy white gold of the punch bowl. The tinkling music vibrating from the posts and steam pipes. The glowing face of Mr. Verver, as always, in his T-shirt and jeans, bowing slightly at the waist.

First I think she'll see me and she won't like it.

But she doesn't even notice me. I'm not even there.

Her face is wonderstruck.

She's wearing the dress, that long slash of crimson. He got her to wear the dress. She is barefoot, and the hem skims her red toenails.

Touching her fingertips to her hair, piled high on her head, a bobby pin poking from its knotty center, she minces so delicately down the last step.

Then I see her face, so hesitant, so guarded, and I realize how much it matters to me that she embrace it. I look at Mr. Verver, the way he's watching her, so expectant. I think, Please, Dusty, please.

She pauses just a second, then she lets everything rush through her face, all the feeling bursting there like little fireworks, and it's so lovely. It's a Dusty I've never seen, letting everything show there. Showing everything.

I look at him, that look on his face, his eyes creased and laughing, and it reminds me of how he was before all this. I realize how different he's become. I'd forgotten how he was.

I'd thought this was for her, but when I look at him, his arm around her, making her so happy, I see it's really for him.

And I love Dusty at this moment because it's a gift to her dad, it's a gift to him, and I almost love her just for giving it to him.

Mr. Verver dances with her, and I stir punch, skating the ladle in countless foamy figure eights. It's that moonlight drive song, and I wonder when Mr. Verver found it and if he looked for hours so he could play it for me.

Unless he's playing it for her. It strikes me, he must be playing it for her. But don't I deserve it more?

It's a strange song of echoes and mysteries.

Dusty pirouettes, and he dips her so low her hair tumbles loose, its edges skittering along the tiled floor.

The two of them, they are magic, and there's no talk of Evie.

She's just gone.

Thirteen.

Eighth-grade graduation comes and there'd been talk of canceling it, but they don't.

The day before, after another anonymous tip, five hundred volunteers fanned out in the woods behind the school. No one finds anything, nothing real. Abandoned campfires, used condoms, a dead cat.

Tara tells me the police are all on overtime, their days spent fielding "nut calls." And some that they can't necessarily tell are nuts, like the man who'd been at the insurance convention and says he may have seen Shaw that week, looking confused and wandering through the bushes behind the convention hotel.

Today everyone is trying to forget. A lot of people seem to really have forgotten. My mother and Ted sit in the stands while I get my diploma, and she looks very happy in what we call her pretty-lady dress, the purple one with the rosettes for b.u.t.tons. She smiles the whole time, all her teeth glaring at me. She can't stop herself.

Standing there, the sun so hot on my new dress, the rose print searing into me, I press my hand to it and it feels like it might singe.

My hands are sweat-curled around my diploma, and I'm looking somehow for the Ververs, even though they'd never be there. My head goes to murky places and I keep thinking of Mr. Shaw and what his love might be doing to Evie, and what it's already done.

Here I am, back stiff in strict formation, and what is happening to Evie, what beating love is beating down on her?

I don't want to think it, I don't want it to be so beautiful.

But what if it is?

If we look at it from eye corners, or from places other than the center of our head, isn't there a kind of terrible beauty in it?

That night, and the next one, and the one after that, I sit for hours with Mr. Verver and they are mystical and uncanny hours. Somehow, with the sound of katydids and the creaking of lawn chairs and the echoey way of our voices in that s.p.a.ce, it all feels a little better, a little separate, a little safe from everything else.

Even that spot in the yard, the place under the pear tree, it's no longer his, it's no longer Mr. Shaw's. There's some kind of divine transport and everything else glides away. I think these are the only hours that he is free from it, and I can make him forget, I can. Or I can help him remember in a way that does not ravage him.

Mrs. Verver, she is ravaged. She is worse and worse, he tells me. She can't sleep and it makes her crazy. She tells him, It's making me crazy.

She sits at her bedroom window for hours, like a widow on her widow's walk. One night she took Evie's room apart top to bottom, sure the police had missed something, left some clue behind.

"But she knew there was nothing to find," he says.

Then he says, "I think she might have called Mrs. Shaw. I don't know, but I think she may have called her house."

This seems gruesome, and I imagine the call, Mrs. Verver's raspy voice scratching into the answering machine, I know he took her. I know he took her. Where did he take her, what did he do? And Mrs. Shaw, huddled in some corner of her house, hands clasped over her ears, begging for it to end.

Everyone thinks it will never end.

Everyone is dying for it to end.

"She just feels like she has to do something," he says. "We all do. I can't seem to do anything else."

I start to talk about other things.

I talk about how I have been listening to all the different songs he's been telling me about.

And I tell him how my brother broke up with his girlfriend the day after the prom and how she kicked in his locker door and wrote things about him in permanent marker on the mirror of the girls' bathroom.

And I tell him how I remember when I was little and slid my bare foot hard on the slippery carpet in the hallway outside Evie's room and it dragged along the wood floor.

But you made it all better, I say. You propped me up on the bathroom vanity and spent fifteen minutes teasing the splinter out with tweezers and a burnt-tip needle.

I still remember, or at least it feels like it as I tell him, the smooth pressure of the heel of his hand, while I sat rapt, hearing about the time he learned to play piano at fifteen, listening to Ray Charles's "What'd I Say" over and over again, all to impress a girl named Eleanor Tipton, who told him, with a twitch of the nose, that she dated only guitarists, and preferred Roy Orbison to Ray Charles, who was overrated anyway.

"I told you that?" he says, grinning. "I don't remember that at all."

"You did."

"Eleanor Tipton," he says, and it's such a loose, careless smile. "I thought my heart would break. I thought I'd never love again."

"But you did," I say.