The End of Everything

by Megan Abbott

  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 week…” 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 God 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 shiver. 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 shirtfront 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.

  “It’s kind of weird, though, don’t you think?” she says.

  “What?”

  “That broken hinge. I mean, it’s been broken forever. I remember when your brother busted it, swung at it with his baseball bat.”

  “Yeah,” I say, remembering it too.

  “Well, I was thinking about it,” she says, unscrewing the cap. “It must’ve been a real hassle for Mr. Shaw, hiding those cigarettes there. When you open it, you have to hold the door with the other hand, just to stop it from falling off.”

  “Right,” I say, keeping my voice as even as I can.

  “… when there’s plenty of other perfectly good places to hide things, like his car—”

  “He probably didn’t want his wife to know he smoked,” I jump in. “She might have found them if he hid them in his car.”

  “How about a flowerpot?” she says, taking a sip from the juice, slanting her head, as if pondering. “One of those big old empty planters your mom has all over the place.”

  “I guess it could get wet there. It—”

  “It just doesn’t make much sense.” She pauses, then taps the jug against her chest. “To me, at least.”

  “No,” I say, my head hot and tingling. “I guess it doesn’t.”

  I sit up straighter in my seat. I can shake her off, I can. But the jolt on me, it’s like a coldness on the teeth. It’s no surprise that she knows I’m lying. She reads me here, like on the field, like everywhere. She sees it all.

  “I guess none of what he’s done makes sense,” I try.

  She nods, but the stare she gives me, I know I’ll feel it all day long.

  Later, Mr. Verver pulls me aside to update me on everything. He stops and pulls me aside just to tell me.

  “The police showed the lighter to Mrs. Shaw and her son,” he says, “and the son recognized it. He said his dad kept it as a memento, that it’d been his own father’s lighter, and Shaw used it to light the Christmas candles or birthday cakes.”

  “What about Mrs. Shaw?”

  Mr. Verver shakes his head. “She said she couldn’t be sure. She couldn’t remember anything,” he says. “But, here’s the thing, Lizzie, Mr. Shaw’s office assistant also identified it, said she’d see him spinning it around on his desk sometimes, called it his lucky piece.”

  Oh, to see him so animated, so enlivened. And I did that. Savoring it, I try to put Dusty out of my head. If she doesn’t believe me, what does it matter? I keep telling myself that. Over and over.

  Then it’s on the news that night.

  A college student comes forward, identifying herself as the girl the old lady saw jumping into Green Hollow Lake, the one she thought was Evie.

  “I was just collecting samples for Geology class,” the girl tells the reporter. Her hair’s long and dark like Evie’s, but she’s nothing like Evie. I wonder how anyone could think this college girl with her big dorm-fed shoulders and cork sandals could be Evie.

  All my mother can talk about, though, is the milk chute, as if it linked us to everything.

  “I can’t believe it,” she says, standing in front of the refrigerator, trying to imagine dinner. Ted is nowhere to be seen. “The idea of that man skulking in our driveway. Hiding his things here, creeping around our house at night.”

&nbs
p; This is what she says.

  In my head, Dr. Aiken stumbles through our back hedges.

  I nearly laugh, I nearly do.

  Sometimes, though, it’s like I believe it myself. Sometimes I forget my own lie and I think of Mr. Shaw jerking open our milk chute door, fumbling his hands inside, hiding his secrets. He gave his secrets to me anyway, didn’t he? Or I took them from him. It was me who took them from him, my hands reaching, grasping.

  Eleven

  Tuesday, the school froths with revelations. Tara Leary stalks the halls with her growing pack, girls eager for her gruesome knowledge.

  “It’s a big manhunt now,” she says. “My dad always said it was a sex crime. They’re looking everywhere, across the state, and they have the best leads in Ontario. They’re working with police up there. The wife says he was always talking about how he wanted to go live up there, get some cabin by himself. What a freak.”

  A cabin on a lake, like some romantic getaway, like some lovers’ retreat…

  “But my dad says it’s probably a suicide at this point,” Tara goes on. “Because now there’s nowhere he can hide.”

  “But I heard they’re going to do another search in the woods behind the school,” Joannie says.

  “They think they might be hiding in the woods?” I ask, picturing a pup tent and propane stove.

  Joannie, now as worldwise as Tara, looks at me and shakes her head. “They’re looking for the body,” she says. “They’re wondering where he might have buried the body.”

  We’re in Health class and we’re learning about menstrual flow again and Kelli Hough is playing Mrs. Miller like a carnival gawker, asking her why the blood “down there” comes so thick, and is it wrong that she feels “tingly” down there when it happens?

  I am spinning my pencil in fast circles and clock-watching and it happens like this first: a buzzing, hot in my ear. Poking with my finger, I try to stop it. No one else seems to hear it, rapt as they are by Kelli and the “tuggy” way it feels when her period comes, “like a thread, you know, pulling down inside me.”

  But the buzzing sound has a heat to it and my head feels hot too and the room is so white, so glaring white, it hurts my eyes and I dig my hands between my legs and try to shut it out, try to think of other things. But I’m thinking of Mr. Shaw and Evie and how I know it seems to me he’d never hurt her, he just loves her so and why can’t anyone understand?

  And then I start to think of all these days that have passed—eleven days and counting—and what might have gone on by now, and if Evie finds his love beautiful and if it’s turned to things done under covers and Evie’s eyes rolling back.

  I am sick with it, and sick with myself. And my mind jumps and it’s that time last summer, waiting for my brother. I’m with his friend Matt Nettle, who just fixed my bike, and we’re behind his house, by the garage.

  I’m tired, he says, let’s sit down a minute, and I do because he’s sixteen and I just turned thirteen, and there is a trembly leg thing happening to me and sitting down seems right.

  We’re leaning against the heat-curled shingles of the garage and I can feel paint dust hot on my neck.

  We’re not saying anything. Then Matt starts talking about the things that guys need and he bets I understand because I have a brother.

  I tuck my knees to my chest and pull at one of the tongues on my grass-stained Keds. He’s talking and talking and I don’t know that he will ever stop. He reminds me of my dad when he wants to explain his reasons for things, when he wants to say he’s sorry.

  I squeeze my fingers on that shoe tongue, my cheeks going hot and hotter. I don’t look at him, or even hear him anymore, but then I feel his big callusy hand on my wrist and my stomach somersaults and my breath rushes back into my mouth.

  Next I feel his fingers around my arm and he’s moving my hand and then I feel my hand settle on soft fabric and I know it’s Matt Nettle’s shorts. My hand pulls away fast and goes back to the tongue on my Keds.

  And he’s saying, Please, please, Lizzie, don’t be a baby, and yanking at me with his big basketball player hands. And then he says, What if you just help me out? You don’t have to touch. You just have to pull your shirt up and let me look. Just let me look.

  This is what he says, as if it’d be granting a favor, giving him a gift.

  It somehow happens that I’m unwrapping my knees from my chest and his hands are there so fast, underneath my blue T-shirt, hot and dusty, they move like this, right to my small white bra, and I don’t look at his face and he moves his hands and I hear him unzip and I don’t look.

  His voice all weird and breathless, he says, Just let me see, and I don’t know what to say and he says, C’mon, c’mon, and I know what he’s doing, I just know.

  How is it that I pull my arms out of my sleeves and slide my bra down and let him see? But I do. My skin quills up, and he stops talking, he finally stops talking.

  When he’s done, he makes a little sound, and I feel his hand sticky on my chest and he pinches them and my eyelids flutter and—

  I pull my shirt down and get up and grab my bike and run with it, the pedals cutting into my legs. I run through the Middleton yard, twisting my ankle on an old watering can and running still and finally jumping on the bike seat and it’s not until I’m riding fast down the street that I realize, under my shirt, my bra is still down around my lower rib cage, straps so tight across my arms I can’t ride and have to stop and hope no one’s looking while I pull it up, back into place.

  When I told Evie about it, in the quiet of our sleeping bags, she didn’t say anything for the longest time, but I could hear her breathing. Then she said sometimes the ways boys need things so badly, like they could never stop needing, it almost scared her.

  But, she said, sometimes I feel like that too.

  She said, Lizzie, do you ever find yourself wanting so much you feel like you might disappear? Like all that you are is the wanting, and the rest of you just burns away?

  This is what I’m thinking of and I’m so deep in the thinking of it that it’s like I’m not in Health class at all, listening to Kelli and hearing her rapping her pencil against her barrette and her voice going up and down about the blood, the blood and the way it feels between her legs.

  No, I’m with Evie, and we’re clasped close together and she’s about to tell me something, she’s about to tell me everything, all the things she knows, all the things she’s learned, the secret knowledge gained from a week and a half sunk deep into a place I can only see dark glimmers of.

  I can really see her, she’s really there, and she’s going to tell me, her mouth opening, her teeth and tongue—

  “Evie,” I say, but no words come and the sound on the floor, my head hitting it, is loud enough to wake the whole world.

  I don’t tell Mrs. Miller or Nurse Stang anything. I say I feel dizzy and they ask me if I skipped breakfast and I did. I skipped breakfast and dinner last night too, except for the box of soft licorice coins I found in my room, which I finished in one sitting, a raw taste silting my mouth’s inside all night.

  The next night, Mr. Verver walks out to the backyard with a few cans of beer hanging from a six-pack’s plastic rings.

  He’s taken a leave of absence from his job. He’s spending his days driving, with the police, with volunteers, with anyone who will go. They drive all day. Because, everyone keeps saying, it just takes one lucky break, one eagle-eyed stranger. A known man with a known girl in a known car, they can’t just disappear.

  He beckons me over, pats the lawn chair beside him.

  He says he wants to show me something and spreads a large map on the grass in front of us, a map spanning this county, the next, all the way up to the border and across into Ontario.

  “It’s this area,” he says, leaning down and spreading his hand across a creased section at the top. “His wife says he always talked about scouting around here for cottages to buy. That he had these fantasies of a summer place up there.”

&
nbsp; I’m listening, and I’m looking at the map, the way he’s markered all over it, Sharpied circles, lines, and stars. The map is thick with it, the inked pocks and streaks and wavering lines obscuring everything in some corners, like our corner.

  “She told the FBI that she thought he had a college friend up here somewhere,” he says, rolling the beer can between his palms. “Jim somebody, she said. The police can’t find anyone else who knows who she might mean. But they’ve been driving from town to town, anyplace that rents or sells cabins around this area.”

  He’s looking very closely at the map, and then at me.

  “They’re going through security tapes of the border crossing,” he says. “There’s been all these sightings. It just takes so long, tracking them all down. The manpower. But Canada—that’s meant more support from the state and the FBI.”

  It goes on like this, and he shows me all the places he’s driven to, in our county, the next. All the places the police are looking. All the leads, hundreds of them. The more he shows me, the more it starts to seem like the world is so big, and we are so small, that nothing could ever be found, anywhere.

  Later, Mrs. Verver comes out and it’s the first time I’ve seen her up close since Evie’s been gone. Her face looks scrubbed across. Her hair—that hair that was always as smooth as shaved lemon ice—now has a strange texture, like the rubbed-raw hair on an old doll.

  She stands behind us, a glass of iced tea in her hand, and she doesn’t say anything, and Mr. Verver reaches behind to touch her arm, but he doesn’t quite make it and she doesn’t move toward it.

  I would.

  I watch her gazing into that same green tangle in the far corner of the backyard, the one we look into. It’s not like my mom says. We don’t expect Evie to shimmer forth, the tree branches releasing her. It’s just the way the chairs face.

  If they faced each other, if Mr. Verver faced me, I don’t think I could sit there with him.

  It hurts sometimes to look at him. It’s all right there upon him.