by Megan Abbott
“But you did,” I say.
“A hundred times,” he says, winking, “before I hit eighteen.”
When I head home, just before the eleven o’clock news, my mother is so pleased with me. She says I’m growing up into a good and thoughtful person. Her silky new kimono tied tight at her waist, she feeds me doughy cinnamon rolls from the oven like when I was a kid, the kind that come with the plastic disk filled with frosting.
She sits with me at the kitchen table and I know she’d like me to tell her things, to tell her what’s going on with the investigation and how Mr. Verver is doing. But I don’t feel like telling her. I wouldn’t know how to make her understand.
She leans toward me, her chin tucked in her hands, and I feel it like a breathless tug.
She wants me to confide, and then she will confide too.
Oh, how it must twist in her that I sit there and I lick that icing, and lick it off all my fingertips.
I just look at her and take another bite, my hand sinking over the softly wheezing roll.
I just look and look and look and my face gives her nothing.
I give her nothing.
It’s just past midnight, and I’m sitting on the front porch, which I know would make her crazy. But I can’t sleep and the air conditioner was thundering at me and I felt all closed up. Out here, it’s still a heavy June heat, but the air moves a little, it stirs.
And I have something to watch. It seems like I always do.
A car is in front of the Ververs’ house, a lonely blue car.
I recognize it right away. Bobby Thornhill. Bobby Thornhill is back. Everyone else—neighbors and the slinking mailman and even the slow guy who delivers the church circulars—have all hunkered away since everything happened. All keeping a safe distance, not wanting to push, to touch, to graze against, to get too close.
But not Bobby Thornhill, and there’s a funny warming in my chest. I’m somehow grateful for it. Despite everything, there’s still this. This still lives and breathes and gasps and stutters. This doesn’t change. This doesn’t stop.
Bobby Thornhill still inches his car along the streetlit curb, lights off, shoulders slouched, neck craning, peering at the Verver house.
Bobby Thornhill still gazes yearningly up at Dusty’s window, that window beaming with promise, a faintly curtained invitation.
“How long can you just look?” my brother once said. But what boy ever really put hands to Dusty, tongue to her teeth, her pearly ear, searching for ways in, and found what he’d been promised by that curving smile of hers, that golden girl-face? I know it must have happened, but I can’t remember it. I can’t even picture it.
“I see Dusty with college fellas,” Mr. Verver once teased, lying back on the pillow balanced on Dusty’s tanned lap.
Evie and I perked our heads up, so eager to know what he meant, what he knew about Dusty and what she should and would have.
“Graduate students. Wire-frame glasses and bottles of Scotch. They’ll recite odes to her, write songs about her on battered acoustic guitars, and promise to take her away from all this suburban dread.”
Dusty rolled her eyes magnificently and pretended to snore and tugged at Mr. Verver’s dark hair, twisted it between her dainty fingers.
Bobby Thornhill, though, I am glad for you. You remind me of before, just when “before” seemed gone forever.
I slink along the driveway and I think maybe I’ll get closer and maybe I’ll see something. Something I might want to see, with his head jerking, his eyes glazed, and such magic behind them, visions of Dusty stretched out before him, reclined, finespun curls twirled in her own twirling hands.
I think I might see Bobby seeing that and I don’t mind whatever I see, not even that.
I’m so close, and suddenly his car door pops open, and I jump back, feet on the curb. Startled, Bobby looks at me.
“What’re you doing?” he says, leaning out, eyes on me.
“Nothing,” I say.
There’s a half-empty six-pack of beer on the seat next to him, the cardboard sweating. I can smell gusts of it when he talks.
“You’re not calling the cops, are you?” he says. “Or her dad?”
“No,” I say.
“He seems like a cool guy,” Bobby says. “Everyone says he is. I feel bad for all of them.”
I nod, not knowing what else to do.
“She came out here two nights ago,” he says. “Maybe you don’t believe me. You’re just a kid. But she came out.”
I don’t know if I do believe it. But I can’t guess why he’d lie.
Then I think again how she’s never out there in the backyard with Mr. Verver anymore. Is his heartache so great she can’t bear it, just like I almost can’t, seeing it on him, wanting to fix it?
I think about her up in her puffed pink room, restless and bored. She doesn’t know what to do with herself, I think. She doesn’t know what to do if she’s not under his bright lights.
“She came out and she stood right here.” He points to where I’m standing. I look down at myself, my knobby legs and bare feet.
“She asked me what I wanted, but I didn’t know what to say,” he says. “And then she just got in the car with me. I couldn’t believe it.
“And I couldn’t believe it when she let me kiss her.”
I pictured it, the kiss, his hands grasping at her, at Dusty’s clean, tight pureness. Would she let it unbend, unfurl for him?
I imagine him trying so hard, his mouth on her, on her cheek, the side of her mouth, her neck. Trying to animate her, to share all that want, show her what it means, and what it can do.
No, no. It was all so wrong. I didn’t know why, but I couldn’t see it. Dusty’s eyes glassy with want, with surrender. There was no picturing it, not like this.
“It was like she was giving me my shot,” he tells me. “To see what I’d do.”
He looks at me and his eyes are sad, helpless.
“But it turned out I didn’t know what to do,” he says, and he’s not even embarrassed to tell me. Maybe I don’t count enough to be embarrassed. “Because she’s not like other girls. That’s why she’s Dusty.”
What made him think he could do this? What made him think he could touch, even with the most delicate fingertips, much less with those hapless, grabbing hands of his?
He looks up at the window, past my tugged-loose ponytail, his voice breaking softly.
“I never thought she’d come outside.”
Fourteen
My head filled with thoughts of the yearnings of Bobby Thornhill, I slink back in through the patio door. The kitchen is pitch-black, and my bare feet skid hard on the linoleum. I stumble, and there is a feeling of softness, like I’ve slid into a basket of laundry, but I haven’t, and I see the flash of eyeglasses, and it’s Dr. Aiken, shirttail hanging out, arms holding me up, in our kitchen.
I feel the half scream from my mouth and I stop it fast with the heel of my hand.
“Lizzie,” he whispers, loudly, and tries to keep me upright, hands on my jerking arms.
“I don’t know you,” I say, and the light flashing on his glasses, I can’t see his eyes.
“I’m a friend of your mother’s. I was just leaving—”
That’s when the hall light streams across us and I see my mother whirl around the corner, tying her kimono fast around her.
“Lizzie,” she hisses, and her eyes fix on the open patio door and my grass-stained feet.
“Lizzie, what were you doing outside?” Her hand claws over my wrist. “Were you out there? By yourself outside, with everything that’s happened?”
Her hand on me so tight, and she has so much nerve, and I raise my chin and the words jump from me. “I can do what I want,” I bellow. “Don’t you?”
Like that, her hand leaps to my face, a slap that sings.
“Diane,” Dr. Aiken says, and he reaches out. “She wasn’t outside. I was the one who opened the door. She must’ve heard something and come downstai
rs. We just surprised each other.”
I look at him, my cheek throbbing. I look at him, listen to him save my lily-white skin, but all I can see is the light on his glasses and I don’t say anything.
At breakfast, my mother wants to reach out to my face, I can see it on her. Ted’s started his summer job at the country club and it’s just the two of us. There’s been no talking about anything, and I slept dreamlessly, waking to the sound of her on the phone, whispering plaintively, her voice rising once, saying, “I don’t know what to say. I don’t know what to say.”
I scrape the black off my toast mercilessly. She tries to start conversations. She says pained, half-embarrassed things, all without saying anything.
There’s something wobbling in her and her hands shake and all the heat and tingliness she usually has after he has been over are gone. She raps her knuckles on the newspaper and sighs and slathers a dishrag this way and that and swivels noisily around the kitchen.
And finally she leaves for work too.
I wander the house, lingering in the doorway to my mother’s room. I don’t go in, I just can’t, but I see the bed’s unmade and I can almost feel the pocketed warmth in the center.
Does she think, now that he’s seen what he’s seen, her doctor will be gone forever?
Fleeing, nights, late, the closeness of his house, the wifely claws snaring him. He runs from it and finds such ease, such leg-stretching, laughing ease here, and it’s so wonderful, so warm and fun, and who wouldn’t want that?
But then it just gets scissored through, doesn’t it? The seams are torn and he sees all the misery he thought he left at home, well, it’s here too.
All that misery’s burst through and you might choke from it.
An hour later, maybe more, of ambling around the house, and I see the way time can nearly stop.
I can’t imagine the stretch of summer days without Evie.
I can’t imagine summer without Evie. I’ve never had summer without Evie.
It’s pouring rain too, and I keep looking outside and it’s almost noon when I see Mr. Verver out there with Detective Thernstrom. Mr. Verver’s face is so white. It’s the whitest face I’ve ever seen.
I inch toward the open window screen and try to hear, but I can’t.
Mr. Verver has one hand on his hip and he’s shaking his head, nodding, and looking down at the pavement. He’s soaking wet, and Detective Thernstrom is trying to keep him under his umbrella, but Mr. Verver doesn’t seem to notice, keeps drifting away.
I feel a churning in my stomach and before I know it, I’ve pushed myself out the screen door and into their driveway.
Mr. Verver turns and looks at me, and his face, the rain glittering on it, I can’t read it. It’s like an assembly of the parts of his face with nothing behind them.
But suddenly I know it, I just know.
It’s because of that look on his face, all that blood and life and feeling wiped clean.
The rain keeps pelting at him, pelting him so hard, like when ancient statues are worn away.
It happens just like that.
I suddenly feel Evie’s fingers slip through mine, feel her falling into the earth itself.
How could I have missed it, the way I knew her, the way I could put my hands on my own face, body, throat, heart, and know it was hers, how could I have let it go by? She slipped from me while I, while I…
“Lizzie,” Mr. Verver says. And Detective Thernstrom continues to look at me, the rain slanting from the black umbrella.
“What happened?” I say, and I feel the wet hanging on me, and I can’t move, my sneakers filling with water.
Detective Thernstrom walks toward me.
“We thought we found her,” he says. “But it wasn’t her.”
“Found her,” I say.
“They found a body, Lizzie,” Mr. Verver says, and he puts his hands on my shoulders, and his hands are wet and heavy and I feel myself sinking. “They called me a few hours ago to tell me they found the body of a girl down in Preston Hollow. We thought it might be her.”
His hands loosen, his wrists turned up, resting on my shoulders. “But it wasn’t. It wasn’t her.”
Detective Thernstrom slopes the umbrella so it cocoons me. The rain on the dark canvas throbs.
“Everything’s the same,” he says. “We’re back where we were.”
But it isn’t true, is it. Because in that minute—a minute that had been hours for Mr. Verver—everything changed forever.
In that minute, I felt Evie dead and now I knew she could be.
Mr. Verver is drinking beer from a green bottle. We’re in the paneled basement. It’s three o’clock in the afternoon now, still raining. We’ve been here for hours.
I know I should be home, I know my mother’s probably called to check on me, but there is no way for me to leave. And I can’t think of leaving. We have been here for hours, hearing the rain tick-tick-ticking. We have eaten potato chips and played darts and backgammon.
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 album. 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 album 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 albums, 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 roadsi
de 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 album 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 album 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 know… 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 glassy 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 scraps of paper.