by Megan Abbott
I wave a good-bye, but he doesn’t see.
“Dusty,” I say with a start, my hand on the Ververs’ kitchen door.
She has a duffel bag slung over one arm, her book bag on the other, and all that whorling hair is pulled tight atop her head.
“Hey,” she says, “you scared me.” But she doesn’t look scared.
Everything seems backward, her standing there, waiting for me to let her in.
“You’re back,” I say, because I can’t think what else to say.
Looking at her, a million thoughts, Getting into Bobby Thornhill’s car, trying to make him show her what it means to—
She pushes past me into the kitchen.
“I’m back,” she replies, and she sees her father, phone pressed to his face in the hallway, hears his Uh-huh, uh-huh, do you think that might—do you think we could—what if he—okay, okay…. But what did they think about the tip from Iron River?
She watches him for a second.
Then she swivels to lift her book bag from the floor.
“Can I help?” I say.
“That’s what you do,” she says. “Isn’t that what you do?”
The book bag comes smacking at my outstretched arms. I take it, even though I’m not sure what I’m supposed to do with it.
“You came back without your mom,” I say.
“She’s staying there a while. With my grandparents,” she says, pulling the rubber band from her hair, letting it all tumble down. “She can’t be here now.”
“It’s so hard,” I say, floundering. “Not knowing.”
She fans herself a little with her hand, lifting her damp hair off her neck.
“You’re just here all the time now,” she finally says, twirling a long strand through her fingers.
“I don’t know,” I say, my chin nudged against her book bag, weighing down my arms.
All our life, it was Dusty. Evie and I whispering about her, speculating, spinning ideas, imagining. Listening to her through walls, from upstairs, from downstairs. It must be so different for her now. Who’s listening for her now?
“What would he do without you,” she says. “What would we do.”
There’s that steeliness to her voice that always puts the shake in me. I start thinking she’s going to ask me about the milk chute again. There’s plenty of other perfectly good places to hide things…
The way she looks at me, I feel like she can see every lie on me, even the ones that aren’t lies.
“You’re never out there anymore,” I say, very fast, before I lose my nerve. “I’m so used to seeing you out in the yard, like always. With your dad.”
She knows what I’m saying. She knows I’m saying: You’ve abandoned him, but I won’t.
She looks at me, those slitted eyes. My skin raises up, cold and briary. If we were on the field, I’d be bracing myself for her, eyes shut.
At last, she says, “Why don’t you just go home?” And she snaps the rubber band over her hair. “I think I hear your mother calling you.”
That night, late, there’s something building up in me, like blood rushing to my face, my chest, like iron in my veins, my heart.
It’s the day spent in that basement with Mr. Verver, the things I knew he was asking of me, even if he didn’t ask them out loud, even if he doesn’t know in the front part of his head what he wants me to do. And it’s Dusty, it’s Dusty, and she’s circling me, and she knows things and it feels like time is running out.
These are the things tearing around in my head.
I’m in bed with my clothes on.
I’m waiting for the quiet of the house.
There is no Dr. Aiken that night, and I knew there wouldn’t be. My mother makes herself a margarita from an old powdered mix she finds in the back of the kitchen cabinet.
Later, I hear her on the phone and I think she’s called my father and I don’t want to think about what they might be saying to each other.
I turn the radio as loud as I can and wish I had a turntable and wish I had that record Mr. Verver had, the one about swimming to the moon and how, if we got real close and real tight, we could make it through the tide.
There’s a feeling of needing to make something happen, make something break, stop the pressure, the diresome pressure that makes me feel like I am lost forever, an iron weight across my chest.
I can feel Evie nearly wiped clean from me. It’d happened twice that day. Once, watching them in the driveway, the umbrella bending down, and once more with Dusty, the things she said and the way I maybe almost believed them.
I can feel her nearly wiped clean from me.
Fifteen
My hands are on one of the back window ledges, bowed over the molding. I’ve run my hands around all four sides of the house. I’ve laid my hands on it like maybe a healer might, or a fairy-tale witch.
Standing now, on tippy-toes, I can feel the house sounds humming under my fingertips. A floor squeak, a pipe running.
I’m standing outside the Shaw house just past midnight and I’m going to get in. I’m going to get in that house.
Where are you? Where are you? Some creaking cabin high up in Canada, or right here in town, hiding before our very eyes? Are you at the bottom of the lake, or deep in some far-off woods, and wherever you are, is Evie tucked under your arm, your sleeping princess? Is she anywhere at all?
The thing is roiling in me, I can’t breathe. I feel like I’m very nearly clawing the walls, begging them to turn the house inside out, to give up its hiddenness and show me everything. I’m ready now to see everything.
(But what if there’s nothing to see? There’s that thought too. What if there’s nothing? What if I know all there is that can be known and the rest is lost to me forever? I can’t ponder that. I can’t.)
Somehow I think if they’re asleep, they will not hear me. I will not be heard. From where this crazy confidence comes, I can’t guess.
When I’m sure the house has fallen lifeless, when I can’t see a light on or feel anything moving or flittering by windows curtained tight, I tug hard on the old hinged pane and my face hits the screen and I take the penknife from my pocket, the one I brought just for this, and I run its tip along the mesh, tearing it until I can squeeze through.
It’s so fast, like I was born to it.
My feet hit a carpeted floor, and I’m in.
There is no thought of the craziness of all this.
I guess part of me sees it like the way dreams work: Somehow, I’m just there, I’m in his house. And I’m not scared at all. Because somehow I’m supposed to be there.
It’s very dark, and I’m standing in some kind of family room, because I can see the porch light’s glow reflected in the gray face of a television set.
My first move and I nearly fall, my foot sliding over something smooth, a slick magazine cover spread open on the floor. I pull out my key-chain flashlight and wave it helplessly around the room: bookshelves, a shiny-topped coffee table, a set of Civil War books, what is there to see?
But I begin. It seems to take hours, it’s probably minutes, but it seems forever because I slip, so soundless, from room to room on the first floor: kitchen towels, standing lamps, a hard plastic vacuum cleaner, a bathroom night-light shaped like a teapot.
Finally, I stumble into the living room, eyeing the staircase with menace. The dark at the top of it. Do I dare? I do not. I cannot.
I can’t guess what I expected to find that the police missed. But they’d missed other things, hadn’t they?
I just know that night I’d stood out there on the bristled tip of that lawn I felt it. Like a little girl slid between the folds of window drapes, between the folds of her mother’s skirt, I stood there and felt small and unwise, like the wisdom of the world lay just above me, lay right out there, lay through this keyhole, past this doorframe, behind these window blinds.
And now I am inside that space. I am right in there. And where is my hard-won wisdom? Where are the secrets of the world la
id bare?
Instead, nothing. A house like any house. Like my house. The Verver house.
The unfairness of it all nearly defeats me.
I have to think, I tell myself, there must be something. I’m in the house and there must be something.
I let my eyes go in and out of focus and I scan the room, wedging my flashlight under my chin, turning this way and that, scattering the little pock of light.
I think about how burglars must feel. There is so much in a house, how can we ever unearth its treasures in five minutes or even five hours? I remember on TV, the ex-thief who walked around an average person’s house showing the spots where people always hide valuable things—the bedside table, under the mattress, in the bureau drawer, nestled between underwear and socks.
But I don’t even know what I’m looking for and my head feels jammed with circuits, like I can’t stop the thoughts from hissing, sizzling, popping in my ears.
Mr. Shaw’s house, Mr. Shaw’s house. His family room, his dining room, his study. Somehow it doesn’t seem like him at all. Somehow the outside, that gabled house pulled tight upon itself—well, it felt more like him than anything inside.
Trying to slow myself, I sink fast into an armchair, a tall-backed man’s chair, deep and leathery, and press my face against it. Bowing my legs beneath myself, I hunch into the chair as deep as I can, ducking my head low, pushing my fingers between the arm and the cushion, curling around myself and feeling like I’ve reached the end of the world and found nothing.
I try to focus and calm myself.
Breathing deeply, I gaze up at the mantelpiece just above my head, inches from my face.
Flashing the light across the family photographs, I see Mrs. Shaw in tidy little outfits, boatneck shirts with jaunty stripes, denim skirts with smocked pockets, matching baseball caps, with Pete Shaw, who tentatively holds a bat in his hands like it’s a stick of dynamite passed to him by a cruel enemy.
Mr. Shaw, with a full head of dark hair in one old picture, his face half hidden behind a Christmas tree garland he is hanging with care.
Behind it, a faded photo of Mr. Shaw in front of grassy water. It’s so familiar and I realize that it’s Green Hollow Lake. Mr. Shaw’s kneeling beside Pete, who looks all of seven years old, water wings wedged up his scrawny arms.
Behind him, swimmers float, a big yellow raft bobs. There is such peace. Something flickers in me and I move closer, squirming up in the chair, and I’m sure. It’s my old Hawaiian Punch raft, and that’s me, ruddy little-girl cheeks, my hands holding tight to the raft’s meaty white rope as my brother tows me along.
It’s all so funny I nearly laugh, my fingers tug at my lips and a funny sound comes from my mouth.
There I am, with Mr. Shaw.
I slink back down in the chair, feeling dizzy, twiddling my flashlight between my fingers and breathing fast.
I feel like I’ve been caught somehow. Caught in Mr. Shaw’s gloomy, love-haunted world, trapped under glass and pressed together, without either of us ever knowing.
Just like, somewhere, somehow, he sits with Evie now—he does, I know—and I sit in his chair, my hands on his things, his hands on mine.
Something mournful has caught me, and I have to go, and I can’t unfurl my feet fast enough.
That’s when I hear his voice, a throat clearing, hear it before I see him, or anything.
A floor lamp snaps on.
My heart catches.
I have to turn, and I do, one leg still resting on the seat cushion, one foot on the floor.
There’s an electric crackling in my chest, a burning, tingling thing.
I turn and there he is.
His hair sleep-tousled, he looks at me, long spindle fingers scratching his chest through a T-shirt with a drawing of a large stapler on it.
Pete Shaw, standing there on the living room carpet.
He’s staring at me, and he’s so tall in that stretchy high-school-boy way. I don’t know what to say, but I feel my arm go across my chest.
“I saw you here before,” he says. “Outside.”
I feel my goose-pimply arms. Mr. Shaw’s son. Mr. Shaw’s son.
“I was hoping you’d come back,” he says, his head bobbing. “I was waiting for you to come back.”
I drop my other foot to the floor and try to stand as straight as possible.
“I have to show you something,” he says, pointing upstairs, his eyes starting to take on a glitter, like he really has been up there, waiting for me, waiting for the night I’d come.
I don’t know what to think. It’s all like a dream—how in a dream people say things like they’d never say in real life, do things they’d never do.
“Don’t worry,” he says, and he takes a step toward me. “She can’t hear anything.”
I look into the dark at the top of the stairs.
“She’d sleep through the end of the world, with all the stuff she’s taking,” he says, his voice speeding up. “Each night, the rattle from those pill bottles lasts through most of the eleven o’clock news. She has to fill her water glass three times.”
I look at him, the strange energy that seems to be coiling up in him as he looks at me, and I don’t know what to do. Pete Shaw. That dreamness makes it seem like there are no rules. But aren’t there rules?
He reaches his hand out toward me, not near enough to touch.
Something fumbles in my chest and I have this sudden thought of Mr. Verver, head craned over the record player, smiling sadly at me, tapping his fingers on his leg in time.
“I just want to show you something,” he says, and though he’s seventeen and a boy and he’s in what he wears to bed and so am I and I feel my heart bucking, I don’t feel scared, not exactly. He just seems so sure, like this is all as it’s meant to be, has to be.
I tell myself: this is Mr. Shaw’s son, and here I am, right in his world and now it’s not a sleeping world but an alive one and this is my chance and, and, and—
“First,” I say, my voice splintery, hurting my own ears. “Is she okay? Evie. What is he doing with her? Do you think… is she okay?”
He tilts his head, teeth dragging into his lip. A darkness spreading through his eyes. “I don’t know,” he says.
He looks sorry to say it. But that doesn’t help at all.
I follow him up the carpeted steps, eyes on the faded red of his T-shirt.
Walking down the hallway to his room, though, I feel twisty things in my stomach, like I might at a haunted house but one you somehow know, and that knowing is the creepiest thing of all.
I think somehow I can hear Mrs. Shaw sleeping, the deep sleep like Mrs. Verver’s, the buffered sleep of mourning mothers everywhere.
Once we’re in his room, though, it’s different. All the lavender darkness, the eerie quiet of the hall, is gone.
Here, everything buzzes with electronics. Red blips, orange, green, glowing like a big control room. Stereo, computer, consoles, hulking black speakers, who knows what. The other kind of boy from my brother. In Ted’s room everything is stale, sweaty, but here, it’s like the whole room is alive, humming and breathing in my ears.
Pete wheels a desk chair toward me and I sit down on it.
Looking at him, his head ducking under wires, under the glittering silver wing of a model airplane dangling from the ceiling, I think suddenly about how I have nothing on under my T-shirt, and then I remember it’s Evie’s T-shirt, the one Mr. Verver gave me to wear.
I have sudden weird, skittish thoughts of Pete as some kind of deranged killer, a bunch of girls and his parents, too, dead in the basement.
But then I look at him, the lights blinking Christmas-like on the wall behind him, flickering and flashing in gentle pulses and it’s like they are Pete’s own breaths and I start to feel them pulse in me.
Finally, he fixes on me and it’s like he’s gathering himself, color flushing up his face, his skin hot and bothered, so much he wants to say. It’s all blazing in him, you can see it, a
nd he’s trying to figure out how to tell, how to make it understood.
When he starts, it’s in the middle of things, and I see it’s a conversation he has with himself all day long, all night long. This is what he does, up here in his room, waiting for me. And now, at last, I’m here.
“He used to take these walks at night. My dad. And drives. He’d say, ‘I’m going for a drive,’ and we never knew where he went,” he says. “We didn’t care. He lives here, sure, but sometimes it’s like he was never here at all. Just this shadow moving through our house. At the head of the dinner table. And then in his chair, the TV on, news and some game—your name’s Lizzie, right?”
The question jolts me, and I nearly jump in my seat. “Yeah,” I say.
“Lizzie,” he says, and he swivels his chair right in front of me, his knees brushing mine, my skin prickling. His breath is nearly on me, and I feel my legs tremble, but it’s not scary, it’s not. He just, he just—
“I mean, now that he’s gone, is it really that different?” he says. “People keep asking, the counselor at school and stuff, if I’m okay. But it was always me and her. Not him. Sometimes it’s like I forgot him before he even left. He was like a ghost who haunted our house my whole life.”
I look down at him, feeling my skin under my shirt, and he has his hands on the arms of the chair I’m sitting in, he’s telling me such private things, and everything’s glittering around us, all the lights from all the buzzing electronics. My face burns from it, and the way his eyes, black and swampy, fix on me, and I can’t even think.
“Except here’s the thing: now that he’s gone, he’s suddenly taken over everything,” he says. “He never gave us anything, and now he leaves us with this.”
So quick, he grabs my legs, my thighs in his hands, and I think, Is this happening, and Too much is happening at once.
“Lizzie, I’ve been hoping you’d come back because I want to tell you. I saw you out there and you’re the one I can tell,” he says, his knuckles white on my legs, veins cording at his neck.
“You saw me here, before?” I say, and a fear barbs up in me. I think of him watching me from this window, overlooking the darksome backyard. What did he see, a hedgehog, a burrowing thing with twigs in her hair, knees grass-slicked? Or did he see more than that?
