The End Of Everything Part 23

"He was so calm, like he never was. I had the car door open, and I was looking at him, and it was the longest minute.

"And then he said, No one will ever love you like this again, and I knew he was right."

You can never tell. Lizzie, you can never tell.

I won't. I won't.

But, Evie, I say after, when my voice returns from such dark reaches, I don't know where, there's so much more. There's so much more you haven't said. There's a piece missing. Why did you go with him? What did he do to get you to go with him? Why did you finally go? Why that day?

And, Evie, you said he saved you. What do you mean he saved you?

But she says nothing. She's through.

Twenty-three.

It's the first Fourth of July celebration without the Ververs I can remember.

There are no tiki torches blazing in their backyard, no star-spangled streamers wound round their front lamppost. There are no lemon bars from Mrs. Verver, no watermelon punch.

There's no Dusty dancing under the lights in her summer dress.

No Mr. Verver to drive across the state line to the Fireworks Emporium, bringing back silver-tailed Roman candles, bottle rockets and their keening whistles, the triple bangers that make everyone jump, and the tall cones from last year that released swarming sparks like cl.u.s.tering bees.

None of that.

Instead, when it gets dark, the fathers gather and light up a few straggly comets and smoke b.a.l.l.s, but it's all so different, none of that red-faced energy and that swelling feeling, like anything could happen, the sky itself could rip open. Mr. Verver, he could tear the sky open and rain light down on all of us.

There is no Evie and no one to run sparklers with, no one to light magic snakes on the driveway, fingers black with the soft ash, but maybe we wouldn't have done that this year anyway. Maybe this was going to be the year we stopped doing that. We'd been doing that long past anyone else, hadn't we?

The heat, and the kids laughing, and the speakers dragged into the street, the rolling beer bottles, the slick tug of fallen marshmallows under your feet, it's all happening, but none of it is.

The Ververs, they packed up a car and headed north two weeks ago, just a few days after Mr. Shaw, after everything.

And that time before, those nineteen days when life felt unhinged, wild and headlong, well, now it feels like a forlorn thing. A whistle in my head, a distant rumble.

When they left, I watched from an upstairs window. Watched Mrs. Verver huddle Evie into the car. Watched Mr. Verver lugging jammed suitcases, a duffel bag with a s.h.i.+rttail caught in its zipper. Watched Evie lean her head wearily against the car window, and I wondered, Will she now be weary for the rest of her life? I wondered about faces she used to weara"curious, wonderstrucka"and if she will ever wear them again.

I thought of all the questions she'd never answered and wondered if I'd ever get to ask them. Somehow, somehow knowing that a key had turned, a lock had clicked, and that was it. That was all I'd ever get.

It felt like the end of everything.

And the last thing, I watched Mr. Verver, red and white cooler tensed between his arms, look up for a second, like he knew somehow. Like he knew I was there. He glanced up at me, and I can't tell you the expression on his face. I can't describe it. It was both broken and serene.

Dusty was the last one to come outside. I didn't even know she was back from her grandparents'. She stood at the car door, hand on the window. Evie, already inside, stared straight in front of her, like they were already driving. She didn't turn her head.

Dusty stood there for so long, and she wouldn't open the door till the very last minute. She kept looking all around, head darting everywhere. It was like she couldn't imagine how she would get in that car. There was something lonely about it, and something else too.

I never did see her get in. My mother said something, I turned my head, and when I looked back, she was gone. They all were.

After, my mother told me they went high into the woods, hours away. A cottage Detective Thernstrom had told them about, one he'd rented himself once. An A-frame on a lake.

I picture them all on paddleboats, with fis.h.i.+ng tackle, around campfires, in horseshoe pits, doing family things.

I picture it all the time.

I picture it especially tonight, the Fourth, hiding on the back patio, hiding from everyone, I picture it all.

I think no one sees me, but then I hear a chair sc.r.a.pe and I nearly jump from my skin. It's Dr. Aiken.

He'd come to the house earlier that day, wearing madras shorts and the new gla.s.ses. The first time he's ever showed up in the daytime, not even four o'clock, and he came to the front door, holding a white box with red string, which he handed to me with a half smile, one of those smiles from someone who doesn't smile much and isn't sure what it's supposed to look like. But somehow it comes out all right.

When my mother walked in and saw him, her face steamed pink, she ran upstairs and changed from her T-s.h.i.+rt and shorts to a sundress I'd never seen, with little blue pindots. She moved in it with great care.

In the bakery box were hot cross buns, so strange for Fourth of July. He must have seen the look on my face because he said he wanted to bring Rice Krispies treats, but the bakery didn't make them.

"You're missing everything," Dr. Aiken says now, standing on the patio, extending a wilting paper plate toward me. "You mean to tell me you'd miss the limbo contest?"

I look down at the plate he's handed me and see it's one of his hot cross buns, the glaze melting onto the corners of the plate.

"I saved you one," he says.

I almost smile, even as I feel so far away, so far away from all this. Like I'm watching everything through gla.s.s.

"Actually," he says, "looks like I saved you all of them."

"I remember the song," I say suddenly, my voice surprising me.

"Of course." He nods. " *Hot cross buns, one a penny, two a penny.' "

" *If you haven't any daughters,' " I say, " *give them to your sons.' "

"Not much of a song," he says, shaking his head.

"Are you a dad?" I say, my hands on the plate, my fingers growing stickier.

"No," he says.

I look up at him and his gla.s.ses slip and I can see his eyes behind them.

"My wifea"my ex-wife nowa"we wanted to, but we never did."

I don't say anything. I can feel him watching, delicately. Watching to see that I understand this. That I understand what he is saying. Ex-wife. And my mother twirling in her blue dress.

"Lizzie," he says, his voice s.h.i.+fting, "have you heard from the Ververs?"

"No," I say. "They'll be home soon."

"You know," he says, sitting down beside me on the back step, "I've seen those girls for years. Through broken arms, jammed fingers. Tough girls."

"Yes," I say.

"I saw Dusty justa must've been the end of May."

I look at him, and, just like that, I start to feel a pressure in the air, but I'm not sure why. Maybe because he is speaking with such care.

"Her parents brought her in for a stomachache. All the stress from her sister, I'm sure. This was just a few days after she'd been reported missing."

There's a flicker in my head. A flickering thing flickering from a hundred thoughts I've had over the past weeks. A hundred thoughts I've pushed aside, didn't want to pause long enough to ponder.

Dusty's flaring anger, as if saying, a thousand times in the last month, How dare Evie do this to us, to all of us.

"Did you help her?" I say. "Was she okay?"

"Yes," he says, and he takes off his gla.s.ses and looks at them, even though it's dark and what could he see?

"You're not supposed to talk about this stuff, are you? Doctors aren't, right?"

"No," he says. "I'm not."

I nod.

"The funny thing, thougha," he starts, putting his gla.s.ses back on and turning to me.

"What?" I say, my voice sounding so small.

"Well, when she took off her sweats.h.i.+rt she was covered with scratches."

"Field hockey," I say. "Field hockey."

"That's what she kept saying. Long scratches on her arms, on her neck." He's looking at me so intently and I feel the pressure in my chest now.

Something's happening, but I don't know what, and it's like a booming in my chest.

"From practice. From sticks, the cleats. Froma," my voice sc.r.a.ping. What can he mean? I wonder. What does this mean?

"Well, I've seen a hundred field hockey injuries," he says. "I know what they look like. They don't look like that."

He looks at me, and I feel his eyes on me.

The pause is so long, and the pressure is in my head now, pounding.

"Things can get pretty rough out there," he says. "Can't they? For you girls? You're all a bunch of warriors, aren't you? Lionhearted."

"Yes," I say. "Yes."

In bed that night it comes to me: everything that was so raw and fleshy and gaping, everything that felt chaotic and blood-torna"it all might mean something after all. Something more than what it was, a man fighting a private affliction, until he couldn't fight it anymore. Of course it was more than thata But to look at it, it's hard.

I think of Dusty, and everything seesaws and all the things that made her so remote, so far awaya the things that made it seem like you couldn't touch her no matter what she said, or did. No matter if she took her stick to you, if she laid her own rough justice on you. She had a fire in her. She did. Anda anda All Dusty's misery, her preening rage, and Evie insisting, "We never saw him together. We never did at all."

They never shared anything. They were never sisters like that.

Long scratches, battle scars.

I have this picture in my head, Dusty, a sentry. Might she have tried to stand guard? Tried to stop it? Don't you go with him, Evie, don't you dare go, that's the imagined voice whirring in my head. Dusty.

I can't quite get at it. I'm circling, I'm circling, but I can't yet see the darkening center.

These last weeks, I replay, and replay it all the time. Everything Dusty and Evie shared with me, revelations on tongue tips. The center of thingsa"or is it the bottom?a"I haven't reached it yet.

"They're back," my mother says, waking me, her fingers tickling my face, and she leans down over me, her long hair pooling on my cheek, whispering in my ear.

It's the last week in July and the Verver car is in their driveway and my mother is making waffles, which has not happened since never.

Her face is warm, as though brushed soft with something gold and smooth. She is touching everything with light, dancing fingers, the backs of our chairs, the serving spoon, Ted's husk of yellow hair.

I can't take my eyes from the kitchen window, the Verver house, you can feel it jolting to life again.

"So, Mom," Ted says, shrugging from her tickling hand. "What's up? You bust out that old Harvey Wallbanger mix again?"

He's laughing, and I think he means for her to too, but it makes her look at herself and all the b.u.t.ter-softness leaves her face. He didn't mean to do it, but he did. He took it all away.

"No," she says, "nothing like that." She smiles a little and, bit by bit as she pours syrup onto our waffles, sliding the dewy tub of b.u.t.ter toward us, the gold comes back.

Dr. Aiken, could he really have such magic in him, could he cast spells and glimmers and make my mother s.h.i.+ne like a piece of fine bra.s.s? A man like that, why, he has no glimmers. He has no magic. But there she is, s.h.i.+ning.

It's all so fast. The car in the driveway, and by noon Evie and I are riding our bikes to the pool.

She tells me the trip was nice. She tells me everything is better. She says the school mailed her diploma and she'll start high school with me in September.

She tells me many things and it's like she's talking us into it, talking us into everything being back to the way it was. Like we're both secretly saying, It's like before and we can talk forever, and we can spend every minute together.

It's like all these things. It's the picture of these things. And Evie and I, it's as if we're standing there looking at the picture of how we once were and we're moving our arms the same way, turning our head this way and that. If it looks like the thing, maybe somehow it will become the thing.

Me and my shadow.

In everything she says, though, I hear the hollow knock behind it. I am knocking hollowly at Evie's hollowed heart.

It's over.

But here's the thing: in its overness there is a crazy freedom, and I watch Dusty, I watch her, and I am waiting for my moment, the clearing field. The things she might know. The things she might have tried to stop. The scratches on her arms, and suddenly I remember Evie's neck, the faded yellow marks still whispering on Evie's neck after she first came home. The faded yellow smudges there, like she'd run a highlighter across her throat.