I"m wearing one of Evie"s shirts and a pair of her shorts. Mr. Verver didn"t say the clothes were Evie"s when he handed them to me, but I know they are. I"ve worn Evie"s clothes dozens of times, even worn this blue T-shirt before, soft and pilling and smelling somehow of Evie, of pencil shavings and soccer cleats and shampoo. The shorts feel tight on me, on my thighs. Listening to my own clothes tumbling in the booming dryer, I find myself tugging at Evie"s and the strangeness of it all grieves me and I put it out of my head.
Mrs. Verver and Dusty are at her grandparents." They spent the night there. When the police called at six a.m., Mr. Verver was alone. He spent those hours of waiting all alone. He would not call them.
"I"ll never tell them," he says. "If I can help it, they"ll never hear about it."
He carries the world for them. Do they even know?
They"ve just abandoned him. Even Dusty, his shining star, his partner in crime. She, a fair-weather daughter, forsaking him.
But here I am.
And now we share this, this secret knowledge, it binds us.
Let"s look at it: Evie died for both of us, for a second, a minute, hours. She died for us, and that knowledge heavy in our hands changes everything.
Also this: For me at least, I let her. I let her. The tight knot of my hand over hers went slack, my fingers springing up and touching air. I let her go.
I hate myself for it.
I wonder, did he feel it too?
Old vinyl records fan across the floor. Mr. Verver is remembering when he was my age. There"s a story for each alb.u.m. He says he doesn"t have his turntable anymore, but he likes to show me the covers.
Then he suddenly thinks of something and rustles around in the laundry room until he finds an old record player with torn cords in a box that says DAD"S STUFF. For twenty minutes, I help him, tearing masking tape and handing him pieces as he strips and cuts wires and hooks everything up to the speakers.
When the music burrs through, popping and scratching soft nothings into my ear, it is a wondrous thing. We smile at each other, feeling triumphant.
The records all speak to him of memories, but they are old memories, older than me, older than Evie. They are about his father and his old girlfriends and the pals he used to go on road trips with, to see concerts, big outdoor concerts that lasted all day, tattooing themselves into you with sense memories so strong.
Sitting there, he runs his hand over an alb.u.m cover balanced on his lap.
I have my eyes on his worn deck shoes, large and soft, and I almost want to touch them, squeeze them, they look so soft. I somehow think I could touch them, I really could, and he wouldn"t say a word. Not a word.
We"re listening to one of his own father"s country-western alb.u.ms, which is sad and woeful. The cover is cracked and peeling with the sticky shreds of an old price tag, and I put my fingers to it. I feel helpless and ruined. The songs, they speak to me.
Evie is not the dead girl they found on the roadside in Preston Hollow, the dead girl who is just another thirteen-year-old, run over by a car, a tire track across the center of her, splitting her in two.
Evie is not the dead girl, but she might have been.
How did I not know this?
Mr. Verver runs the heel of his hand over his stippled jaw.
I am sitting next to him on the swirl of the braided rug, my arms wrapped around the alb.u.m sleeve, holding it to my chest.
We haven"t talked in a while when Mr. Verver suddenly says, "You talk to your dad much, Lizzie?"
I look at him, feeling like a finger has just been dragged up my spine.
"Sure," I say, resting my chin on the sharp cardboard edge of the alb.u.m cover. No one really asks about him anymore. But no one ever asked much before the divorce either. Sunday dinners, driving me to school on the coldest days. There wasn"t much to know. Now there"s less.
He isn"t looking at me. He"s looking at something else, some invisible thing glinting in the dark of the laundry room.
"You knowa do you want to know something about being a dad, Lizzie?"
I look at him, waiting.
"What?" I say. I think I say it twice.
"It"s the greatest thing in the world," he says, and he turns and faces me. Looking at me, eyes blinking, waiting for this to register.
Not knowing what to do, I nod. I nod and nod and nod.
He smiles, his eyes gla.s.sy and haunted.
The music booms and suddenly I feel like bursting into hysterical tears with it. Not because I"m sad but everything"s happening all at once and I can"t even say what it is.
Mr. Verver finishes off his beer with one last foamy gulp.
I can see it on his face: he is saying, All I know, all the clues you"ve given me. Can"t you give me more? You"ve shown me who, but can you show me where? Where is she, Lizzie? He doesn"t say it, but I can hear it, I can hear it thrumming through me. Give me more, Lizzie.
The phone rings and Mr. Verver runs upstairs. It"s the police again. I know they"ve been doing a new round of interviews with Shaw acquaintances, and Mr. Verver is on the phone a long time, frantically taking notes on sc.r.a.ps of paper.
I wave a good-bye, but he doesn"t see.
"Dusty," I say with a start, my hand on the Ververs" kitchen door.
She has a duffel bag slung over one arm, her book bag on the other, and all that whorling hair is pulled tight atop her head.
"Hey," she says, "you scared me." But she doesn"t look scared.
Everything seems backward, her standing there, waiting for me to let her in.
"You"re back," I say, because I can"t think what else to say.
Looking at her, a million thoughts, Getting into Bobby Thornhill"s car, trying to make him show her what it means toa"
She pushes past me into the kitchen.
"I"m back," she replies, and she sees her father, phone pressed to his face in the hallway, hears his Uh-huh, uh-huh, do you think that mighta"do you think we coulda"what if hea"okay, okaya. But what did they think about the tip from Iron River?
She watches him for a second.
Then she swivels to lift her book bag from the floor.
"Can I help?" I say.
"That"s what you do," she says. "Isn"t that what you do?"
The book bag comes smacking at my outstretched arms. I take it, even though I"m not sure what I"m supposed to do with it.
"You came back without your mom," I say.
"She"s staying there a while. With my grandparents," she says, pulling the rubber band from her hair, letting it all tumble down. "She can"t be here now."
"It"s so hard," I say, floundering. "Not knowing."
She fans herself a little with her hand, lifting her damp hair off her neck.
"You"re just here all the time now," she finally says, twirling a long strand through her fingers.
"I don"t know," I say, my chin nudged against her book bag, weighing down my arms.
All our life, it was Dusty. Evie and I whispering about her, speculating, spinning ideas, imagining. Listening to her through walls, from upstairs, from downstairs. It must be so different for her now. Who"s listening for her now?
"What would he do without you," she says. "What would we do."
There"s that steeliness to her voice that always puts the shake in me. I start thinking she"s going to ask me about the milk chute again. There"s plenty of other perfectly good places to hide thingsa The way she looks at me, I feel like she can see every lie on me, even the ones that aren"t lies.
"You"re never out there anymore," I say, very fast, before I lose my nerve. "I"m so used to seeing you out in the yard, like always. With your dad."
She knows what I"m saying. She knows I"m saying: You"ve abandoned him, but I won"t.
She looks at me, those slitted eyes. My skin raises up, cold and briary. If we were on the field, I"d be bracing myself for her, eyes shut.
At last, she says, "Why don"t you just go home?" And she snaps the rubber band over her hair. "I think I hear your mother calling you."
That night, late, there"s something building up in me, like blood rushing to my face, my chest, like iron in my veins, my heart.
It"s the day spent in that bas.e.m.e.nt with Mr. Verver, the things I knew he was asking of me, even if he didn"t ask them out loud, even if he doesn"t know in the front part of his head what he wants me to do. And it"s Dusty, it"s Dusty, and she"s circling me, and she knows things and it feels like time is running out.
These are the things tearing around in my head.
I"m in bed with my clothes on.
I"m waiting for the quiet of the house.
There is no Dr. Aiken that night, and I knew there wouldn"t be. My mother makes herself a margarita from an old powdered mix she finds in the back of the kitchen cabinet.
Later, I hear her on the phone and I think she"s called my father and I don"t want to think about what they might be saying to each other.
I turn the radio as loud as I can and wish I had a turntable and wish I had that record Mr. Verver had, the one about swimming to the moon and how, if we got real close and real tight, we could make it through the tide.
There"s a feeling of needing to make something happen, make something break, stop the pressure, the diresome pressure that makes me feel like I am lost forever, an iron weight across my chest.
I can feel Evie nearly wiped clean from me. It"d happened twice that day. Once, watching them in the driveway, the umbrella bending down, and once more with Dusty, the things she said and the way I maybe almost believed them.
I can feel her nearly wiped clean from me.
Fifteen.
My hands are on one of the back window ledges, bowed over the molding. I"ve run my hands around all four sides of the house. I"ve laid my hands on it like maybe a healer might, or a fairy-tale witch.
Standing now, on tippy-toes, I can feel the house sounds humming under my fingertips. A floor squeak, a pipe running.
I"m standing outside the Shaw house just past midnight and I"m going to get in. I"m going to get in that house.
Where are you? Where are you? Some creaking cabin high up in Canada, or right here in town, hiding before our very eyes? Are you at the bottom of the lake, or deep in some far-off woods, and wherever you are, is Evie tucked under your arm, your sleeping princess? Is she anywhere at all?
The thing is roiling in me, I can"t breathe. I feel like I"m very nearly clawing the walls, begging them to turn the house inside out, to give up its hiddenness and show me everything. I"m ready now to see everything.
(But what if there"s nothing to see? There"s that thought too. What if there"s nothing? What if I know all there is that can be known and the rest is lost to me forever? I can"t ponder that. I can"t.) Somehow I think if they"re asleep, they will not hear me. I will not be heard. From where this crazy confidence comes, I can"t guess.
When I"m sure the house has fallen lifeless, when I can"t see a light on or feel anything moving or flittering by windows curtained tight, I tug hard on the old hinged pane and my face hits the screen and I take the penknife from my pocket, the one I brought just for this, and I run its tip along the mesh, tearing it until I can squeeze through.
It"s so fast, like I was born to it.
My feet hit a carpeted floor, and I"m in.
There is no thought of the craziness of all this.
I guess part of me sees it like the way dreams work: Somehow, I"m just there, I"m in his house. And I"m not scared at all. Because somehow I"m supposed to be there.
It"s very dark, and I"m standing in some kind of family room, because I can see the porch light"s glow reflected in the gray face of a television set.
My first move and I nearly fall, my foot sliding over something smooth, a slick magazine cover spread open on the floor. I pull out my key-chain flashlight and wave it helplessly around the room: bookshelves, a shiny-topped coffee table, a set of Civil War books, what is there to see?
But I begin. It seems to take hours, it"s probably minutes, but it seems forever because I slip, so soundless, from room to room on the first floor: kitchen towels, standing lamps, a hard plastic vacuum cleaner, a bathroom night-light shaped like a teapot.
Finally, I stumble into the living room, eyeing the staircase with menace. The dark at the top of it. Do I dare? I do not. I cannot.
I can"t guess what I expected to find that the police missed. But they"d missed other things, hadn"t they?
I just know that night I"d stood out there on the bristled tip of that lawn I felt it. Like a little girl slid between the folds of window drapes, between the folds of her mother"s skirt, I stood there and felt small and unwise, like the wisdom of the world lay just above me, lay right out there, lay through this keyhole, past this doorframe, behind these window blinds.
And now I am inside that s.p.a.ce. I am right in there. And where is my hard-won wisdom? Where are the secrets of the world laid bare?
Instead, nothing. A house like any house. Like my house. The Verver house.
The unfairness of it all nearly defeats me.