The End Of Everything Part 8

I have.

A pack of Parliaments, five left. And, rubber-banded to it, a silver lighter with a flip top. It's not like a drugstore lighter. It's special and feels old and heavy in my hands. I press my finger against the engraving, a seal that looks like a Kennedy half-dollar, like the kind my grandfather collected in a tall green-gla.s.s canister on his desk when I was a kid.

It's the one. It is. I am right, I am right. I know everything.

Don't you know? Dusty said. You were always smart. I was sure you knew.

I did know. I do. And somehow Dusty does too.

It was Shaw. It was always Shaw. Shaw out there every night.

And the police, what do they know? Missing this, missing everything.

I run my finger around and around the lighter's seal.

I feel myself standing like Mr. Shaw did, dangling it between my fingers, standing beside Mr. Verver watching Evie turn cartwheels, one after another.

The cigarettes, the lighter, seeing them, it is such redemption. I feel the pull of the thing, the full force of everything that's happened. These objects, cool in my hot hands, give me a hard yank back to the center of things.

Standing there, touching everything, I think of fingerprints and evidence and a.s.sorted TV show wisdom so hastily discarded. But it's too late now, so I press that pack to my chest with abandon.

Kneeling down on the plush gra.s.s beneath the streetlamp, I shake the cigarettes from the pack. Somehow I want to look at them, be with them.

But as I do something else flutters forth, from between the tumbling cigarettes.

It lands on the gra.s.s and I pick it up, handle it tenderly.

It is a photo clipped from a newspaper, coiled like a pointing finger.

I recognize it. It's just a tiny clipping, a smudge two inches long and two inches wide. It is from the article about last year's middle school soccer tournament.

The picture, I know it so well, because the same one is pinned with fat, sparkly thumbtacks to my own bedroom corkboard.

It's Evie, and, next to her, half torn through, me.

A year ago, that picture, the two of us knowing each other so bone-deep. But now parts of me feel Evie skittering away. The slips of Evie that I can't quite touch, the girl whose eyes drifted down to her backyard and beheld that man, that man older than her father, and saw him brooding in the dark, like an errant knight, standing in the backyard, heart in his outstretched hand.

What did she think would happen? Did she think he would just look forever? And why didn't she tell me? And what would I have done?

It's a lonely thought, and I push it away.

That night, I sleep with my plunder under my pillow. The cigarettes, the lighter, the clipping.

I knew I would use them. I knew already, even if I didn't know how.

I think of Mr. Verver, how it will be when I cast my spell of release. Then Evie too will be released, stumbling, wing-wounded, from her steely trap.

These are my strange nighttime thoughts.

And then the dream comes, and it is Evie: In the dream, I'm in bed, and the sound starts. It is a slow scratching, so faint that each time I hear it, I shake it away. But then it starts to get faster, and it seems to be both inside and outside at once, and I think it must be like when my dad found those squirrels in the attic and had to smoke them out.

But the scratching keeps getting louder and louder, like claws on metal or steel, and I am walking through the hallways, my palms spread on the walls, trying to feel it, to follow it.

And then I'm outside, the wind kicking up and my nightgown flapping against my legs, the house so dark and it is so late that my feet sink wetly into the spongy ground and everything looks blue and tortured.

Not scratching now, but a sound more like clawing, and I want to slap my hands over my ears. But then my hands. .h.i.t the painted metal door of the milk chute and the sound surges through me like an electric current.

Slowly, slowly, bending at my knees to see, I twist the k.n.o.b and open the chute door and instead of looking through to see the dark of the kitchen, hear the shudder of our refrigerator, it's all blackness. I think the door has opened to the center of the earth itself, and it smells like loamy death.

I duck my whole head in, because this is a dream, I'm sure it's a dream, and I have nothing to lose, nothing at all.

I reach my hand in deep as it will go, and that's when I feel her.

I feel Evie before I see her, I feel the soft skin of her forearm, and then I see the white of her eye.

And then I see her face, and she is saying something to me.

I wriggle and she seems to loom closer and it's as if we're in some other place altogether, and I wonder if I will ever get out again, but I push farther, and there we are, and there's her face. And she is saying something to me.

Evie, Evie, Eviea The crackle of the morning news wakes me.

"Divers have been deployed to Green Hollow Lakea drag bars to search for the body of the girl identified by at least one witness as resembling thirteen-year-old Eveline Verver, missing for more than a weeka"

Lying in bed, I don't know if I can do it. I don't know if I can pull it off. But then I think of the dooms of sorrow that must've quaked through the Verver house last night, a day and night of imagining Evie slipping fast into the murky churn of Green Hollow Lake, the thought of her body dragged up by grappling hooks, her face worn away. Isn't that what happens? I remember reading it somewhere. The water takes their faces. Thinking of it, I wonder what despairing journeys Mr. Verver's mind has made in the last twelve hours and I cannot bear it.

Not when I know, I know.

She doesn't lie at the lake's swampy bottom.

She lies with him.

And so I must save her, save them all.

"Is that you out there, Lizzie?" Mr. Verver asks, and he opens the screen door. A weariness hangs heavy on him, heavier than I've ever seen. His face. It's his face that looks worn away.

"I'm sorry, Mr. Verver," I say, and I'm practically jumping from foot to foot. "I'm just waiting for my brother to wake up. I need his help."

"What is it?" he says, his morning coffee in hand. He does that eyebrow crinkle thing. "Are you okay? Is there somethinga""

"Oh, it's nothing," I say, shaking my head. "It's stupid. It's so stupid."

I point wildly to the side of my house. "It's the old milk chute. I keep hearing scratching sounds at night, and I think it's coming from there. Some animal or something trying to get in, or"a"I flash my eyes widea""out."

He walks over to the chute just like that.

As if my wispy problem must be attended to, despite everything else that matters so much more.

"The hinge is broken," I say quickly, and I feel like I might lose my nerve. "I'm afraid toa"I just want it sealed up. So nothing can get in."

He looks at me and I can see all the kindness in him. He's happiest when he gets to be kind.

"Sure, honey," he says, his hand on the latch, fingers softly cradled about it. "It was probably just a racc.o.o.n."

There's all manner of unaccountable things happening in my body, including something looping through me, head to toe.

Even though I know what's in the chute, even though it was me who put it there two hours ago, at sunup, I suddenly feel like I'm in a spook movie and what might jump out?

And, one hand pressed against the side so the chute door won't fall, he tugs it open.

My heart jabbers in my chest and I put my hand across it.

And it's open.

And I watch as he sees the magic I have fairy-dusted there for him.

"Oh," he says, and his face springs to life again, his features rea.s.sembling before my eyes.

He lets the door toggle on its sole hinge because, transfixed, he cannot help himself, and his hands hover above the gleaming lighter, the white sheen of the Parliament pack.

But he does not touch.

He sees already. He knows.

The glory in my heart, it nearly shatters me.

Ten.

We wait for the police to come, and Mr. Verver can't stop pacing up and down the driveway. He keeps running in the kitchen and calling up the stairs to Mrs. Verver. Sometimes I think she never leaves her bedroom.

Mr. Verver keeps looking at the open chute, but from a distance, from two yards away, like to go any closer might make the things inside disappear.

We wait and it's only five, seven minutes, but it seems forever.

At first, there is a jumpy thrill to it, that I gave him this thing, that he knows it because of me. He knows Mr. Shaw was here.

But then I think what a messy thing it is for him to know. How much better is it to imagine Evie with Mr. Shaw? If she's with him then at least she's not lost to dank depths. Or at least not those kind of dank depths. These are our choices.

And behind it, something else, something we don't say, which is this: how does knowing Mr. Shaw prowled out here, loved her with such secret longing, help find Evie?

The thought vaulting through me, I have a moment where she feels more lost than ever, sunk down into some earth-deep wormhole.

But Mr. Verver's mind is moving fast, and suddenly something seems to come to him. He takes my arms in his hands and looks me in the face with fresh terror, saying, "Lizzie, this is very important. When did you hear those sounds coming from the milk chute? Did you hear them last night?"

That's when I realize my mistake. I'd been so careful. Wiped everything clean. Thought it all through. Except this.

"What?" I say.

"If you heard the sounds last night, or even this weeka" and his voice stutters off and I see what he's thinking: if Mr. Shaw prowled out here last night, if he were here at all in the last week, where was Evie?

Suddenly Dusty appears behind the screen door and I give a silent prayer of thanks, as it gives me time to think, think, a million thoughts and calculations click-clacking in my head.

"Dad," Dusty is saying through the screen, and it looks funny, the mesh across her face, breaking all that prettiness up into a thousand wiry pieces.

"No," I blurt. "It wasn't last night. It was a while ago. A couple weeks maybe. But I forgot about it until last night. With everything happening, I guess I just got scared last night. And I started to think about the chute."

"Of course," he says, and the dread that had been grinding through his face slows down.

I put my hand over my chest to stop my heart from rocketing through it.

"I just got spooked," I say. "And then I remembered about the noise."

"Of course. And thank G.o.d you did. It's all been very scary. Oh, poor Lizzie," he says, and I feel him leaning toward me and I think he might hug me, but the screen door screeches at us, and Dusty is saying "Dad" and her voice is like a s.h.i.+ver. It echoes in my head, a million times, Dusty calling from somewhere, anywhere, calling for Dad.

And so he goes to her.

Standing in the driveway, waiting for the police, I see them in the kitchen. Through the screen door, I see Mr. Verver holding Dusty, and she is crying and she is clinging to his s.h.i.+rtfront and she will not let go.

They're standing in the kitchen and his arms enclose her and I can barely even see Dusty, just the crush of her hair, her bare feet half set upon his shoes, her shoulders curling into him, trembling against his chest.

It reminds me of something way back. That time when Dusty was so sick, so sick she whittled down to ninety pounds. Mr. Verver had to quit coaching our soccer team after only three weeks, someone needed to stay with her, she was wasting away. She was never any good at being sick, we all said. But he was our favorite coach ever and we all loved him. Mrs. Verver worked evenings at the VA and who else but him could stay with Dusty, Dusty with that roiling sickness in her gut that had ravaged her almost overnight. She couldn't eat anything. And he'd come home, and Dusty, lolled across that sofa, oh, how she clung to him and said she felt like she might die. She looked like she might.

He could fix everything, couldn't he? His hands like some healer, and soon enough, she was well.

It goes on for some time, with the police. I'm talking with Detective Thernstrom when they find the newspaper clipping. One of them has the cigarette pack pinched in these long blue tweezers and he's turning it around in his upraised gloved hand when the clipping falls to the ground. He won't find any prints on it, which is too bad, but I had to wipe myself from the pack and lighter with the satiny edge of my comforter, wipe me, and so Mr. Shaw, away.

Mrs. Verver is finally outside, pale and ghostly, wrapped in a big sweater and her arms wrenched around herself.

I watch her watching them as they look at the clipping, the photo of Evie in her nylon uniform, hair in tight braids.

Mr. Verver is looking at the photo too. He has his hand over his mouth, and there is something awful on his face that feels like it will be in my head forever.

The next few hours whir and there's never any talk of me going to school and there are so many conversations, and my mother is there, and I can barely look at her because I keep picturing her on our back patio, all flesh and ickiness, tattooed from the slats on the chaise, where I will never sit again. She stays with Mrs. Verver, who is back in her bedroom. She brings her tea and stays with her all afternoon. I wonder what they talk about, hiding up there, burdened women huddled together behind closed doors.

I'm sitting in the kitchen when Dusty comes in, all her tears shaken free, her face scrubbed back to that tight, bright beauty of hers.

"You saved the day again," she says, tugging open the refrigerator door.

It's sort of coachlike, the way she says it, but you never know with Dusty, so I just shrug.

She pulls out a jug of juice, shaking it slowly and looking at me.