The End Of Everything Part 4

He always looks like his dog died, she said, and I laughed, but Evie didn't.

Last night's emergency PTA meeting, and everything's changed. There are many announcements, from teachers, from the gravely voiced princ.i.p.al across the PA. The new rules.

"It's lockdown," Joannie groans.

Trapped in the gym, with the windows covered with GO, CELTS! in streaks of swampy green paint, we all wait.

My legs are still shaking from practice, that aching, stretchy feel that's so delectable, like my body being pulled in five ways and sprung back strong and magnificent.

It never lasts.

Some days, Evie and I lie on the soccer field and take turns pulling each other's legs as hard as we can, pulling until we feel torn in two. I have two inches on Evie and she says it's because she's stronger and could pull harder and I owe those two inches to her.

To escape the noise from the boys doing basketball drills, the bunch of us girls nest up in a corner of the bleachers and do not acknowledge their hoa.r.s.e-voiced, bare-limbed, flaunting presence.

Intermittently, we play Flame, a folded-paper game of mammoth complexity, where you add up the vowels in your name and some boy's and get a number and then count the letters in F-L-A-M-E, crossing out "hits" until you have one letter left. It tells you your future with the boy: F equals "Friends," L equals "Lovers," A equals "Affair," M equals "Marriage," and E equals "Enemies."

We talk about the difference between an affair and being lovers. Tara says that affair means one-time s.e.x. Joannie says affair means s.e.x any number of times, only with not caring. I can't decide, but I shake my legs out and wonder where the stretching feeling went. My whole body's gone tight, pleated inside.

Most of the time, though, we talk about Evie.

"She's probably in some bas.e.m.e.nt somewhere," someone chirps, "tied to a pipe."

"Pete Shaw wasn't in school today."

"He'd better not be. They'd swing him from the goalposts."

Everyone seems to know that Mr. Shaw is, as Joannie keeps putting it, the "prime suspect," and there's much talk of my seeing the car, which can only have come from Tara, with her a.s.sistant prosecutor dad. It has made me tremendously popular.

"It might've been you, Lizzie," Joannie says, pointing at me with her curving dolphin pen with the finned tip. "It just might have been you."

The thought had not come to me. Now it rockets around in my head. Could it be true? If I'd been the one left alone, the one on the empty street in front of the emptied-out school? What if it had been me yanked from everything to some dark place? Could Mr. Shaw havea"

"No way," Tara says, shaking her head definitively. "He had his target in his sights."

I remember the cigarette stubs, and I know she's right. It was never me.

With that, the furtive shimmers that shimmered briefly in my head snuff out.

I see him, when my eyes are shut, standing under the dark boughs of the pear tree, standing in the middle of the yard, waiting. What did he see in spindly Evie, her big rain-puddle eyes, her jumpy little body, the way she sucked her teeth when thinking, hard, over algebra, the way she picked the frilled edges off her spiral notebook, one by one?

This girl, this girl, and he a man with a business and a secretary and a house with a furnace and bills and a son and a roof with three torn shingles and a pretty birdbath made of stone that I sometimes see Mrs. Shaw, her hair tied back with a scarf, cleaning with a dainty skimmer.

How does this man, a man like this, like any of them, come to walk at night and stand in a girl's backyard, and then, smoking and looking up, suddenly feel himself helpless to her bright magic?

Seven.

My brother, Ted, picks me up after school. His eyes lost behind sungla.s.ses, he is confident and impressive as he flicks the steering wheel to and fro, his long limbs poking from every corner of the front seat, his hair long over his ears.

As he rounds corners, I pinball back and forth in my seat. The streets look so empty, like it's Christmas. All those packs of raucous kids, all that rabid energy, gone. I picture all of them in their family rooms, their dens, staring at TV screens, their parents lurking in the doorframe, standing guard.

We drive by the All-Risk office, heavy-metal guitars crunching on the car radio, Ted with his enormous basketball-player hand fisted over the gearshift.

The office is dark, the red watch face on the CLOSED sign grinning from behind the smoked gla.s.s.

"Sick motherf.u.c.ker," Ted shouts as we pa.s.s. The car windows are closed, but he shouts anyway.

Something about it makes me want to laugh. Ted heaves the steering wheel, and we charge down our street, the ba.s.s tickling in my thighs, my hands fast on the door handle, holding on tight. I hear my backpack fling across the backseat.

The screech when we roil up the driveway jolts me and I see the blinds sway in Mrs. Darlton's next-door window, her tsk-tsking face thrusting through.

"Listen," Ted says, turning down the music as I gather my books, fanned across the floor of the backseat, "you lock everything up. I have to be someplace. You can't leave, though, or Mom'll kill us both."

"Okay," I say.

It's the longest exchange I have had with him since he taught me how to fill my bike tire in the fourth grade.

I open the car door and climb out. We both stare at the house, which looks so very still. From the corner of my eye, I see the Ververs' screen door, the way it puckers out and you can peek in, but now the heavy front door is closed and the curtains drawn across all the front windows, like wintertime when we'd frost the gla.s.s with spray snow from a can.

It's all closed up, and our house too. It's like coming back from a week at the sh.o.r.e and pulling up the drive and thinking, Is this our house? Could this really be our house? It's like the doors and windows shut and shuttered themselves, tucking themselves within.

Ted clears his throat, and I see that I'm still holding onto the open car door, my fingers tight on it.

"We're okay, right?" he asks. I can see myself in his sungla.s.ses and I think I look thick and monstrous, with a grave line furrowed across my forehead.

"Yeah," I say, and I watch myself say it, and we both turn and look at the house again.

Inside, it's so quiet and lonely and I wish I could knock the soccer ball around in the yard, but I don't want the Ververs to see me.

Walking from room to room, feeling like a burglar, I poke in errant places, touch my fingers to the peach-skinned covers of Hustler on the floor of Ted's closet, the womens' mouths so open and red, and the way their legs open so redly. It makes me touch my hand to my neck and the dizziness comes fast.

Ted, who's likely buried at this moment in a swirl of his girlfriend Nina's white blond hair, her fingernails always painted lilac, her fingers always clawed over Ted's denimed knee.

In my mother's room, I finger her bottle of Je Reviens, s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g off the gold-tone top and running the dauber along my wrists like when I was seven years old and would stare at the box: "Recommended for romantic wear" in foil script.

The room is orderly, hushed, and my socks spark on the carpet. It's a room I've hardly been in since the first few weeks after Dad left and she'd ask me to crawl into bed with her and, phone cord wrapped around us both, call him and ask him how he could do this to us and did he mean to destroy the family.

Later, she made me promise to forgive her for all that because she should never have been so weak and she meant to set a good example of self-proud womanhood. But she could say it and say it and say it, yet I wondered if I'd ever see that tender-soft way about her again, the way she'd put on her special silky wine-colored dress for Dad and the Je Reviens daubed on the bow in the middle of her braa"a secret mother pa.s.sed to daughter, even as she blushed to tell it. I was nine and it was the most enticing slip of adulthood that had ever pa.s.sed through my fingers.

It's with a stub of my toe now that I nearly trip and my eye catches something peeking out from under the creamy doily-edged duvet on my mother's bed. Leaning down, I see it, a man's dark sock curled on the floor like a bat wing. Plucking it between thumb and forefinger, I lift it, turning it around.

I think imaginative thoughts of him, her nighttime guest, her Dr. Aiken, tripping down the hallway, like a man on fire, hurtling out the front door, bare foot to gas pedal in his silver Lincoln before he realized what he'd left behind.

My tour landing me in my own room, I pull my new graduation dress from the closet, still in its plastic bag, slickery silver. The cabbage roses blare grotesquely. It didn't seem that way in the store at all. Turning fast in the dressing room mirror, shaking off my mother's barks ("Pull your hair off your face, Lizzie"), I'd surveyed myself and felt glamorous, the roses spread across my chest, sprouting there, the illusion of full-flower b.r.e.a.s.t.s, and across my hips the illusion of curves and womanliness, or teen-girlness at least. On my bare tiptoes, battered shins hidden by starchy folds, I was nearly Dusty, if you squinted, from far away.

I think about how, while I was spinning, ballerina style, before the trifold department store mirrors, it was all happening. Evie, gone in the blink of an eye. Did he blindfold her and shove her in his backseat? Or worse, like in that TV movie, was she locked in the trunk where she might, if canny, disconnect the brake-light wire? We'd watched that movie, together, hadn't we, lying on the family room floor? Maybe Evie remembered the way the girl had been so smart and kicked out the taillight and pushed her arm through the broken plastic and waved and waved until the handsome police officer spotted the arm, the white, waving arm. Dusty, wry on the couch above us, saying it must be an old movie because all trunks have emergency releases now, but Evie wasn't so sure and I wasn't either.

Thinking of Evie trapped in some dark s.p.a.ce like that, it makes me want to tear and tug, and I pull at the silvery plastic dress bag until the plastic pops over my knuckles and the dress slides from its padded hanger to the floor and I kick it into the back of the closet.

I slam the door and the mirror on it rattles, and I feel very dramatic: this is what you do when your best friend has been taken, it's what you do. You fear for her and feel for her and slam doors and sob.

But there is something creeping in the back of me, and it makes me know things. Like that Evie was never in Mr. Shaw's trunk. This, I know. I don't know how, but I do. Like I know too that she is not dead, not buried in three feet of dirt, not coated in pearly lime. No, she is not dead, she is lost, lost. Missing. Gone. There's lots of things behind those words, and I can't look at them now. But I feel them.

The next day, I wake up, and I don't know what I think, but I guess it was that there'd be news. That all those police skittering across the state would surely have found the breadcrumb trail. But my mother, hand perched on the kitchen radio, keeps shaking her head.

"a Verver girla Police have received more than two hundred calls on the tip line, but have nothing to reporta"

What I thought was this: I'd given them what they needed, hadn't I? The cigarette stubs, the car? What was stopping them now? Couldn't they just hurl out their long hook and pull hima"both of thema"in?

Ted picks me up again, but he forgets his Spanish book and we have to go back to the high school.

While he's inside, I wait in the parking lot, kicking at one of the curbs and looking out to the hockey field, thinking of things, dreaming things into their right places, versus how they are, so broken and askew.

I see someone running, a green flicker. I find myself reaching for the car door, but when I spin around again, the flicker's not there and instead it's Dusty, in uniform and a thick runner's turtleneck, stopping now, wrapping her stick with tape, her knee raised high on a wood bench, her shin streaked with dirt.

I start to say something and stop myself, but she hears me, lifting her head and looking at me through the blond disarray, her fulsome bangs loose from her tight, toothed headband.

"You want me to drill you?" she says.

I think of walking by the Verver stairwell, hearing her crying upstairs.

"I didn't know you were in school," I say as she stands upright.

"Here I am," she says, composed, but, for a second, something hitches in her face. How could it not, even as serene as she is, so serene and poised.

"Get midfield," she says, picking up one of the composite sticks left behind after practice and handing it to me. "I'll shadow. See what you learned last week."

I don't know what to say, but I don't see how it can be no, so I take the stick and breathe in hard, hard as I can, because I feel like she's going to pitch everything at me, just to get it off herself, lift it from her shoulders, and I need to be ready. Before I can think, the ball whistles toward me like a battle sh.e.l.l and I drop to the ground to stop my face from splitting in two.

I keep trying spin dodges, but she's everywhere all at once, her arm like a scythe, and I wonder if my brother will arrive to save me from certain death.

It's five terrorizing minutes before I breathe again, the force of her coming at me, the speed with which she is on me, stick, arm, jab, the gust of her hair, the sucking sound of her stick sweeping, slicing, my legs spiraling beneath and dragging me down with a thud three, four, five times.

Five times, ten times, she takes it from me. Three, four times, I feel the hard kick of the ground knock my chin backward, my teeth rattling like loose pennies.

Then, I think I finally have it, I have a shot, one shot, but just looking at her in front of me, legs apart, puts a fear in me I can't shake.

She could always do that to me, since we were little kids, me standing, wide-eyed, stunned by that gold-sparked perfection. She could tear you down with a glance, a flicked wrist, a slow-blinking eyelash.

Then the ball is there, and the toe of her stick down like a guillotine and the block comes so fast, my head jerks like it might pop off.

I am sitting on the ground, my breath like sc.r.a.ping metal, and Dusty is far afield, her face flush, her breath coming fast too, but in excited fits and starts. She smiles at me, wry, and is saying something about how I've done good, or something like it, amid all the ringing in my head.

She's above me and her hand is outstretched and I wobble to my feet and that's when, with her swinging me up, so strong, I see the change in her face. The gleaming triumph breaks into something soft and desolate, and the breath in sounds almost, almost like a sob, our hands interlocked.

"Dusty, Ia"" I start, but she whips around, stick to her side, nearly slicing me, and she's running off the field, curls swinging.

Later, I wonder if she went back into the locker room and let herself cry, head between her knees. But I think that's my dream of Dusty. The way she is, which is lionhearted, magnificent, those few tears she nearly shook fast on the fielda"that's the most I'd get.

That night, the reporter on the Channel 2 news with the blond ledge of hair is holding up a Parliament and saying, "Cigarettes much like these were found in the Ververs' backyard," but adds, gravely, "but whether these cigarettes are linked to the alleged abduction is uncertain."

Watching, my mom is amped up at the kitchen table. She'd brought a ca.s.serole over to the Ververs and she says the police were there again.

"They keep getting these endless reports of Harold Shaw sightings," she says. "One of them's got to come through. They sent two detectives up to the border. They think he might be in Canada. The wifea"Kittya she said he had an old college friend up in Ontario somewhere."

She goes on like this, and I'm listening, but mostly it's about how Mrs. Verver can't sleep, can't eat, lost seven pounds in five days, and then about how frightening a place the world is for mothers.

I wait until her show comes on, and then I sneak outside and drop into a lawn chair, twist myself into the rubbery slats, wedge feet and toes beneath.

Oh, these long curfewed evenings and no gallivanting, hopping yard to yard with Evie, pedaling bikes up to Rabbit Park to swing on the rusty merry-go-round or pump legs on the squeaky swings. No ice cream, no riffling through magazines at the drugstore and giggling through the feminine products aisle, nose to the tip of the lavender bottles dappled with flowers promising such cleanness, such powdery, perfumed womanly cleanness.

Instead, I sit and contemplate my foot, the cool dent from Dusty's fibergla.s.sed saber, its terrorizing J hook.

There is something holy and badgelike about the injury, about the flaring bruise on my ankle, the hardening scabbed streak up my shin from the cut rendered by my own desperate stickwork.

Savoring my war wounds, I sit, and feel I deserve rich rewards. Spotting my mother's secret Benson & Hedges pack crammed into the wet dirt of a gangly potted geranium, I think about pulling one out and lighting up. Evie and I did it once. It hurt our throats, but the good kind of hurt. That's what we said.

Are there cigarettes in every backyard, every garage, every toolshed or bird feeder?

I spot a lemon wedge sucked dry in the corner of the patio. Sliding my foot out from beneath me, I take my toe to it, kick it loose, watch it wheel across the pebbled expanse, hollow and paper light.

This is where she sits with him, with Dr. Aiken, who wears squared gla.s.ses and, in my head, always seems to be carrying a clipboard, wearing a stethoscope, even though I've never seen him with either. He's not my doctor and wasn't my mother's. She met him, Ted confideda"but how did he know?a"at the snack bar at the pool last summer, but that seems too long ago, so I'm not sure. I think I've felt him in the house only since March, since that night he brought her that book, the one called The Heart of the Matter, which he said he'd promised to loan her and which she read even while washing the dishes. I never saw her read like that before, but it was soon after that all the huddled conversations in the backyard started, all the mixing of drinks and long telephone calls and a steamy pink look on my mother's face.

She doesn't talk about him, but he's everywhere, all over the house. Once I saw him through my window at four in the morning, saw him rustling through the patio shrubs, looking for his gla.s.ses, which he cleaned with the tail of his untucked shirt.

He leaves himself everywhere, I think. He leaves bits and pieces and sc.r.a.ps and shavings.

It's strange, a little, sitting where he sits, even though it's our patio, my patio.

I can hear the Darltons' television drifting from their living room, the theme music with the big strings and whirling piano. And, from upstairs, Ted's baseball game, And there's a strike on the outside edgea Then, just like that, Mr. Verver emerges from the green of his backyard, a finger shoved into a brown beer bottle.

He swings it back and forth as he walks toward me.

The startled oh! that springs from my mouth, I didn't even know it was there, and he looks at me and I feel my face scrub up hot.

"Hi, Mr. Verver," I say. I wonder how long he's been in his driveway. Has he seen me eyeing those cigarettes? Has he seen the awkward way I've been sitting, hands between my thighs?

"Hey, Lizzie." He smiles slightly, forelock dangling like a football player. His shirt looks dirty, like he wore it to sleep.

I feel my hand go to tuck my hair behind my ear.