The End of Everything

by Megan Abbott

  I want to tell him about what I saw in the alley, but I know it won’t matter. It won’t matter because no one believes me now.

  Sitting there, so helpless, I feel such desperation. All I can do is try to show him the knowing feeling I have, try to make him feel it too, at least a sliver of it.

  “It’s not true,” I say, and I can’t believe I’ve said it, and Mr. Verver looks at me like he can’t believe either. “What that old lady said she saw. It’s not true.”

  He pauses and he’s considering his words carefully, or else the hurt is too great for the words to come out clean, steady. Either way, the look on his face makes me want to sink into the wormy earth and lose myself forever.

  “Lizzie,” he says, and there is only the slightest tremble in his voice, which mostly sounds very deep and very grave, “I wish I knew anything anymore.”

  “Mr. Verver,” I say, pitching up in my chair, “that old lady is wrong.”

  He looks at me as though maybe, just maybe I have some kind of secret wisdom, and don’t I?

  “Mr. Verver,” I say, and I find myself placing my stubby girl hands on his arm, and it sparks on me. “I know, I do.”

  I fill my face with weighty meaning, I make him lock eyes with me. He must believe, he must believe.

  He looks back at me.

  What a tortured wisp of hope to cling to—instead of drowning, his daughter has been secreted away by a lurching man three times her age, but it’s there. It’s the strand we’ve got and we clutch at it madly.

  It is after midnight, one, two o’clock, I don’t know, but the storm must have come, the winds pitching high, and there’s this sound from outside, the metallic squeak of the chaise, scraping along the patio.

  Heavy with a nightmared sleep, I stumble from my bed and I guess I mean to go out back and drag the chair inside. I can’t shake my thoughts straight enough to be scared, careening through the dark house, wind thudding on the roof. My body nearly flings itself down the carpeted stairs to the kitchen.

  I’m almost to the patio door, fingers reaching out for the clicking vertical blinds, when the voice barks out.

  “Don’t do it.”

  I nearly jump.

  It’s Ted, that flat, rough tone, his boy’s sullen grunt. “Don’t,” he says, like when he tells me not to throw my cleats on the creamy vinyl of his car’s backseat.

  I turn to see him, or at least the crest of his blond hair, the two pale streaks of his long ballplayer shins. He’s leaning against the kitchen counter, and looks, as always, a hundred feet tall.

  I’m about to ask him why, but the words just hover in the back of my mouth. I wonder what he’s seen. I think about burglars in black knit caps or packs of wild dogs, teeth clattering against the glass patio doors. What has he seen?

  And then, of course, I think of Evie.

  Is something coming for me, too? Something come to pull me down into the sumpy core, the hidden center where Evie hides, big-eyed and lost?

  He ducks his head forward and I can see him now in the light banding across the kitchen from the Ververs’ porch lamp. Ted’s face, colorless, his lips pulled back. It’s not his face at all. For a second, it is my dad’s.

  Watching him, I forget about the noise, the squeaking and dragging, but it’s stopped and I turn and place my hand on a thatch of blinds, looking at my brother, as if asking permission.

  I don’t wait for it, though. Instead, I peek out into the dreamy green-black of the backyard. The patio itself is tucked deep in the shadow of the house, but I angle my head against the glass door, and there it is, shot through with the captured brightness of a streetlamp, a stray bedroom window.

  I see all of it. I see the hard flash of a bare leg, my mother lifting herself upright from the chaise, her hair tumbling, a hand tucking a bare breast back into her open blouse.

  And him, too. His back to me, I see him rise, his hand digging through his hair. I want him to turn around, to face her. I want him to look at her.

  Instead, Dr. Aiken seems struck motionless by the sight of the strutting sports car in the Darltons’ driveway next door.

  He tilts his head, as if very tired. For a second, I can see my mother’s face as she looks over at him. Her face, there’s something sparking and sad in it at the same time. It seems like it couldn’t be both at the same time, but it is.

  I don’t go back to bed. There’s a sense of wicked license to everything. What did any of it matter when it’s like this?

  Head filled to the brim, mind racing, I grapple for my tennis shoes and sneak out, traipsing darkly through backyards, one after the next, houses trapped in quiet, all the way, all seven blocks to the Shaw house.

  I don’t know what I mean to do but feel it could be anything.

  Before I know it, I am standing in front of the Shaw house, fingers tapping on the streetlamp post.

  It seems there could be no darker house, its eaves drooping like batted lashes. The quiet in there, why, it’s sealed tight, there’s no breaking it. Watching it earlier that week, doors flung open, police officers in and out with cardboard boxes, notepads swinging like tails from back pockets, it seemed laid bare. Now it seems sealed over, plastered shut.

  I picture Mrs. Shaw and their son, Pete—that dark-haired junior who got in the paper for winning the state robotics prize—huddled high in the house, the sloping storybook house with the steeply pitched gables that overhang so thickly as to hide within them things monstrous and beautiful. I picture bats folded in on themselves, bleating possums under the porch.

  But maybe too something magical, something from a bedtime story, a glittery raven tucked under the eaves, a prickling briar rose.

  I think if I look hard enough, I’ll understand something. It will become clear to me.

  What is there to see, to know?

  The wind lifts and I stand, goose pimples rising on my skin, my eyes doing crazy things, like when I was a kid and thought I could see through walls if I tried just so.

  But the house offers up no reward.

  The minutes slink by and I’ve nearly surrendered, when I think what I might do.

  I creep around to the backyard. Did the police even look here? If he smokes in the Verver yard, isn’t it possible he smokes in his own?

  It’s too dark to see anything, and so I’m bending over, then kneeling, feeling for things, rolling my palms over clumps of grass, flagstones, the thick gnarl of an old tree stump. The more I clutch my hands over everything, the more I think there’s a kind of madness in it, scrounging, burrowing, on all fours on the Shaws’ nighttime grass, like I might throw my head back next, howl at the moon, scream bloody murder.

  I crawl on the Shaws’ lawn for a very long time, corner to corner, but I find nothing, not one stub, not even a stray, curling match.

  But I’m not done. Dirt under my nails, I feel bold and daring and walk freely along the driveway, up against the house itself, even laying my hands on it. The outer walls are cold to the touch, my fingers scuffing along the brick and stucco, the timber slats that, higher up, spoke through every gable.

  The garage looks horror-housey to me. The place people said he hid the porn and the snuff film and all manner of things that it turned out weren’t there at all. I press my face to one cloudy window, though all I see is my own face, a smeary negative, eyes wide and blinking.

  I think of it maybe as Mr. Shaw’s own private space, a space where he could sit or maybe even lie on cold concrete and smoke and imagine things.

  Just past the garage, I rest my hands on the house again. This time, my fingers touching something colder still, like metal, and I see it’s one of those two-way milk chutes from olden times, just like we have at our house, only ours has a broken hinge my dad never fixed. When we were younger Evie and I passed each other notes there and sometimes she’d still leave things—a painted barrette, a soccer ball key chain—there for me, and it’d take me months to find them, to think to look.

  The chute at our house is painted b
right green, but this one is brown, and half covered with creeper ivy. You could miss it entirely. I wonder if the police missed it.

  Slipping my fingers under the spiny tendrils, I grab for the hinge, which is not broken and I don’t even have to pull hard and it opens.

  Not even stopping to think, I dart my hand inside. Whirling my fingers around, I don’t feel a thing but tickly ivy stems on my wrist.

  But then, as I start to pull my hand back out, I hear the faintest crackle of something just under my retreating knuckles.

  It’s something wedged in the lip of the chute.

  Grasping eagerly, I feel something plasticky and soft, and something else, too, something cool and nubby. Tugging now, I claw my hand over everything and topple it into both hands, running to the streetlamp to see if I have found what I think I have found.

  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-glass 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 assorted 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 grass 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 grass 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 hit 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 knob 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, Evie…

  The crackle of the morning news wakes me.

  “Divers have been deployed to Green Hollow Lake… 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 week…”

  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 something—”

  “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”—I flash my eyes wide—“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 to—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 ab
out it. “It was probably just a raccoon.”

  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 reassembling 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.