The End of Everything

by Megan Abbott

  I don’t say anything. I open and close my lips under the sheets, letting the worn cotton sink into my mouth.

  I can’t wait for her to leave.

  She says she’s going to see Mrs. Verver.

  “Annie’s all by herself,” my mother says. “Like always.”

  Sometime in the lost hours of the afternoon I spend in my bed, half sleeping, half breaking to pieces, the phone rings.

  “Lizzie?” It’s Pete Shaw, his voice like a flare.

  Hearing him in my ear, in daylight like this and after everything.

  (What did it mean, sitting in that motel parking lot, waiting to see? What did it mean to know she’d been there, maybe just minutes before, she’d been there, so close you could maybe still feel her, hear the squeak of her tennis shoes on the doormat, smell her baby-soft hair. They’d been there, been there behind one of those clotty red doors, and done such things… and now gone. And now gone. And every night they stayed there when he left to get her food, did he lock her in—did he lock her in? How could he? But he would leave there and she would be there, and would she wait, ready for her dinner, ready for him to click open the door and provide her with her dinner, like a jailer with no keys, with no locks, with no prisoner at all.)

  “Did you do it, Lizzie?” Pete is asking me, and I feel my throat close up.

  “I… I…”

  “The cops were just here,” he says.

  “Pete,” I start, and in my head I’m saying: But you wanted me to tell, you wanted me to tell, you were practically begging me to tell.

  “Lizzie, you should’ve seen her face when I told her that it was me,” he says, his voice high and excited and strange. “When I told her what I’d done.”

  It takes me a second to realize he’s talking about his mother.

  “You told her?”

  There’s a ragged laugh, and I’m trying to understand. I think I do understand, but I can’t quite believe it.

  “She was making breakfast,” he says, and I can hear his mouth nearly press against the phone, like a whispered confidence. “She said she felt so bad about taking the money I’d saved up. She was going to make my favorite, pancakes. She was wearing—it was so weird—her special Christmas morning robe. The red one with the white tufts, like Mrs. Claus.”

  I am listening, gathering my bedsheet, piece by piece, into my fist.

  “She was stirring the batter,” he says. “I said, ‘Mom, guess what I did last night? You’ll never guess.’ ”

  “Pete,” I say, but my voice trails off. He feels so far away. Everything does.

  “She kept stirring, not even looking at me,” he says, a strange giddiness to him. “I said I’d told someone what we’d done. I’d told about the phone calls, the money order, the motel.”

  “You told her about me?” I imagine all kinds of terrible things. I imagine Mr. Verver finding out. I imagine him finding out everything, even my hands on Pete, his tingly skin.

  “I didn’t need to say who,” he says. “She didn’t care. She was standing there, and the pan was burning, it was smoking everywhere. And I told her I’d torn the whole house down overnight and what did she think of that?” he says, his voice splitting, cracking in my ear. “I told her I’d burned it all to ash, and there was nothing she could do.”

  There was nothing she could do.

  “But she did do something, didn’t she?” I say, realizing it now.

  “She—she,” he stutters. “Well, yeah. She drove to the pay phone, the one in the church parking lot. She called him. Warned him. But that was later. That was later. First—”

  “Pete,” I say, and lights go off in my head, all of a sudden.

  “Lizzie, you should’ve seen it when I told her about what I’d done,” he says, his voice dropping to a whisper. “We were both just standing there in the kitchen. She wouldn’t look up at me. Smoke from the griddle was everywhere. And she’s stirring and stirring and her face… I’m sorry, Lizzie. I’m sorry.”

  “I know,” I say. Of course I know. But couldn’t you have waited, I want to say but don’t. Couldn’t you have waited a day, ten hours? Then we might have found them, Pete. We might have found them in time.

  “Lizzie,” he says, his voice splitting like struck wood, “I watched her for so long, the stove so hot, all that heat on her face. Like she was shimmering. She just couldn’t say anything to me, Lizzie.”

  I put my hand over the mouthpiece for a second and breathe deep three times. I can hear him talking. He keeps talking. But I can’t listen anymore.

  Eighteen

  Nine o’clock at night on the longest day I can remember. Was it really only twelve hours before that I stood outside the Verver door, epic lie at the ready?

  The music comes first, and it’s almost ghostly, and I think I’m dreaming.

  The music has this echo like when you’re in a museum or the big library downtown and the voices blend and dip and flutter up.

  It’s like those stories we read in school, the bird women who sing those songs and lure the sailors to the rocks.

  Soon enough, I’m tripping my way downstairs and out the patio door.

  There’s a throb in my chest when I see him. Mr. Verver is back and he is pulling the nozzle trigger on the garden hose, spraying the dry thatch of flowers, the frail brown shrubs. There’s a beer bottle by his feet, foamed to the top, and two more empty ones, shuddering slightly on the windowsill next to a small speaker gushing restless tales of lost love and the loneliness of the road.

  Then he turns his head and sees me…

  And it’s all the wonderful things in the world at once.

  I feel my feet caught in the tangled hose, and nearly trip into him. He steadies me and smiles, but it’s not really smiling.

  You don’t need to do that for me I think. You don’t need to smile or do anything because I feel it too. The awful slipping feeling inside of something go-go-going. I don’t know what it means, but it’s there.

  He tells me a few things, not much. How the police feel strongly that they will find them, and fast. How the FBI has put even more men on the case and the car will surely be spotted. How they’re going to put something called a trap and trace on our phone, in case Evie calls again. How, with Mr. Shaw’s funds so low and his wife under threat of prosecution, well…

  “They seem very confident,” he says, the water pouring down onto the marigolds in big gulps. “I don’t think they would say it if they didn’t believe it.”

  “No,” I agree.

  I look at him, and he looks at me.

  “What would I do without you, Lizzie?” he says, and the look he gives does rough things to me inside.

  He sits down and takes a sip from his beer. I ask him if I can have a taste and he says absolutely not, like I knew he would.

  “Hey, look at me here,” he says. “I’m such a bad host. Get yourself a soda.” He points to the foam cooler on the patio.

  I turn, and as soon as I do, I feel a cool jet of water slather over me with a sharp plash.

  It catches me so unawares, I nearly gasp, and he almost laughs, dropping the hose.

  I start laughing for real, so loudly it nearly hurts, my throat raw in an instant.

  “Dusty hates it when I do that,” he says, trying to bolster his voice, get some heft behind it. “Says I mess up her hair.”

  I feel myself smiling all over and finally sit down.

  My shirt wet from the hose, the water beads prick me. I yank at my sopping T-shirt and when I let go, the cotton sticks fast to my chest. You can see everything. I look down and there’s no hiding it. Mr. Verver catches me and looks away.

  Tilting my head back, I see Evie’s window and something moving. It doesn’t startle me, so dreamy-headed am I, until I see the gold shiver of Dusty’s hair. Dusty up there watching.

  But then I squint and I can’t see anything but Evie’s soccer ball mobile, twisting in the nighttime breeze.

  A new song comes upon us moodily and yet it’s
not a sad thing. It’s thicker. It’s a feeling of abandon, like the ragged chaos of the last day of school, the building nearly emptied out, the derelict textbooks flapping open, the rooms empty, the locker doors flung wide, the smell of firecrackers and menace.

  I don’t know what to do with it.

  I’m glad when it ends and a new one begins, and it’s loud with thrumming fiddles and a whirligig sound that makes you feel like you’re spinning.

  Mr. Verver leans forward, craning his ear toward the speaker, his eyes bright with recognition.

  “I forgot about this song,” Mr. Verver says, his voice speeding up, his fingers tapping hard on the metal armrests.

  The chorus kicks in and he jumps to his feet.

  I get terribly excited, in a flash.

  “Oh, Lizzie, I haven’t heard this in years. Years. Since you were just a glimmer in your father’s eye. Lizzie, listen to this.”

  And I do. It’s one of all those songs he plays that I don’t know at all. It had just been something clanging in the background, that’s all any of them ever were for me, so distracted by everything else humming in my head. But he changes it all. It’s just sound, and then he hurls his magic at me and suddenly I realize that, whatever song it is, it’s the perfect song for such nights, such feelings.

  Before I know it—but didn’t I know it, hadn’t I been waiting for it for my whole life, or at least since my earliest memories of the Verver family, me toddling, glitter-haloed, at the Easter pageant, age four— he extends his hand before me.

  That hand, extended.

  And there’s such desolation in his face, and I catch all the beer and grief and loneliness on him. I see how much this matters to him. That how much it matters to me is a balm to him.

  “May I have this dance, Thin Lizzie?”

  It is the thing I’d’ve died for.

  In the murk of my head, it’s like I have.

  My hand slips into his, and I feel it to my toes.

  It’s not a song to dance to, not with hand in hand, hand on back like this, but who could stop us?

  One hand swooping around my waist, he lifts the other high, our palms touching fast upon each other and my heart crashing from corner to corner.

  Don’t let it ever end, I say to myself. Let it go on forever.

  My bare feet scraping the patio, then sinking into soft grass, I can’t look at him and feel my eyes waver drunkenly to one side, to the wire diamonds of the fence.

  He’s saying things, his copper face burning hot in laughter, and I’m laughing too, and he spins me and my foot knocks the beer bottle, frothing warmly over my right foot.

  “Clodhopper,” he says with a laugh and he twirls me fast, his hand pressed hard and the way it feels, I can’t see how I can go on, my breath caught in my throat. If it goes on, I will pass out, faint, fall to his feet.

  But what if the song ends?

  And then it does, in a sharp thrumming punch, and all the air tugged out of me, and Mr. Verver drops back into his lawn chair, so I do too.

  I’m thinking about how fast it all happened, and how the sadness is sinking into him again, and to me too, and how now it is over, and how I might never get to dance with him again.

  The emptiness at the center of me, it’s a new thing I’ve never felt before.

  Walking, dazedly, to the Ververs’ bathroom, I hear my name and I know it’s Dusty. I know that whispered snake curl of hers, the one that’s made me stand up straight since I was four years old.

  And there she is, running shoes on, her shirt damp with sweat. No more nights lounging on the patio with her father. She spends them running in mad circles, doesn’t she?

  She’s breathing hard, her cheeks flushed and a heat coming off her that seems to pulse in the air between us. I can feel it under my eyelids.

  “Do you ever go home?” she says, chin raised.

  “I just… your dad…,” I mumble, flailing, backing up against the bathroom doorframe.

  Before I know it, her hand clenches my arm, and the pain is fast and knocks my breath away.

  It happens in a blur and she’s dragging me up the stairs and down the hall.

  She nearly flings me into her room and slams the door behind her.

  That delectable room, all foamy pink curves and curlicues.

  Released from her grip, I stumble back against her bureau and stay there, my feet digging into the mint green fluff of the carpet.

  I try to get my balance back. Rub feeling back into my arm.

  “So she called you?” she says. “My sister just called you up.”

  “Yes,” I say, tight and quick, ignoring, as best I can, the tremor in my chest. Somehow it was easier to pass the story off to Mr. Verver, even to the police.

  “How is it you keep ending up in the middle of everything?” she asks, holding that panting breath in, slowing herself down. Slowing her words down. For the first time, I can feel the effort on her to keep that cool intact. For the first time, I can see how hard it must be for her.

  It makes me feel stronger.

  “She called me,” I say, jutting my jaw out like she does.

  She pauses a second, then sighs heavily, as if bored, and pulls her sweaty shirt over her head, tossing it so it hits my ankles, damply. It’s all in one quick, tidy gesture and there she is, in a frilled bra, yellow gingham.

  My eyes go straight to the soft swell of her breasts, before she twists around and grabs for the pearly pink T-shirt draped over her desk chair, slipping it on, all of it happening so fast I almost miss it.

  I can’t even believe those breasts. I feel like I am seven years old, or a boy.

  I’m so distracted by the thought, I’ve forgotten my mounting dread, but it returns.

  She slumps down onto the bed and leans back, resting on her elbows. I see thin cuts up both arms and know she’s been practicing again, taking the scraping glances of the stick. She looks at me, like she’s ready to get back down to business.

  “She just calls you up,” she says, twisting a little, her elbows nestling in her pillows, “just like you just happen to find those cigarettes. You just happen to have suddenly remembered the car. The cigarette butts under the tree.”

  “I’m helping,” I say, and even saying it aloud, as true as it is, as much as I know it, feels like a lie.

  The lie isn’t in what I’m saying, though. The lie is somewhere else and I won’t look for it. But I’m so aware, all of a sudden, that all I do is lie.

  She just looks at me, but I can see a sneer in it, I can. In that Dusty way, like when we’d underhit a short pass, or use our foot on the ball.

  “What are you doing?” I jump at her. The only way to fend off Dusty—Evie always said it, even if she could hardly ever do it—is to strike back. To take the bigger shot, the harder hit. It’s the only way. “You aren’t doing anything. You don’t even help your dad.”

  I think she’s going to jump to her feet, but she doesn’t. She just watches me. The stillness, it throws me. I don’t know what to do with it.

  “If you think I’m lying,” I say, trying to keep my nerve up, “how come you haven’t said anything? How come you haven’t told your parents what you think?” I can’t believe I’m saying it. The thought of her telling her father, making him doubt me, is unbearable.

  “Lizzie,” she says, the words slipping slowly from her and with such coolness. “You don’t know anything. You don’t know anything about Evie. About him.”

  And something, the thing that’s been clicking around in me, tapping odd corners of my head, springs to the center.

  Weeks ago, that conversation with Dusty, about Mr. Shaw. You were always smart, she’d said to me. I was sure you knew.

  “What do you mean?”

  “What I mean is this,” Dusty says, singsongy, like a bored teacher. “She knew he was watching. You get it? She knew.”

  Like when you’re in the basement and you find the old book with the golden-foil spine, the frizzle-haired doll with the painted
freckles, a dozen things you didn’t know you remembered until suddenly you do, and it fills you with all kinds of crazy aches inside and you don’t know why.

  “That’s not true,” my voice sputters. “You’re making it up.”

  “I’m not,” she says quietly, calmly. “We’d see him out there. Evie and me. We’d see him under the tree, at night, the glow of the cigarette. Looking up at her window. We’d see him out there all the time.”

  I feel my teeth clicking against one another.

  Because hadn’t Evie said it to me, crouching over those cigarette stubs?

  Sometimes, at night, he’s out here.

  Almost sighing, Dusty flips a shoe off with her other foot and it lands on the floor in front of me.

  The casualness of it flares something in me. The way she is reclining there, so regal and assured.

  “Why didn’t you tell?” I nearly shout. “If you knew he was out there, why didn’t you tell?”

  She shakes her head slowly, like she’s not sure about me, like if I’m dumb enough to ask that question, I’m too dumb to deserve an answer.

  “Why didn’t you?” she says. “She told you, didn’t she? Why didn’t you tell?”

  “I didn’t know,” I stutter. “I only knew a little bit.”

  She looks at me with those slitted eyes of hers.

  The feeling in the room, it all starts to pile on top of me. The smell of bubble gum and pink sugared perfume and cloudy face powders. My head feels light and I’m thinking of all the Dr Peppers I drank in the backyard with Mr. Verver and the thick carpet catching under my feet.

  Why didn’t I tell? Sometimes, at night, he’s out here. I never told. I never even thought to tell. It was mine, and I held it close to my chest.

  It was mine, and I didn’t want to share it.

  “What are you saying?” I ask, almost moan. “So she might have known he was watching her.” Even saying it out loud, had I ever said such things out loud? “But she couldn’t have known he would take her away. That he would take her away from all of us.”

  The look Dusty gives me is a long one, those green-gold eyes prickling on me, prickling along my skin.