The End of Everything Read online

  How can I make him believe? I wonder.

  I look at him with all the Evieness I can flood my face with. I promise him over and over, without saying one word.

  Know it, know it. Know me.

  I don’t remember it all, it’s in the dungeonmost part of my head, but I was four, five years old, and he saved me. It was at Green Hollow Lake, and so many families, it was Fourth of July or it was Labor Day or it was some big summer picnic and I remember the ashy hot dog buns from the grill and the tang of ketchup warming on paper plates and I was there on my brassy yellow Hawaiian Punch raft, floating next to Evie, so alike then no one could tell us apart, our hair cut in the same bobs, our squirmy little bodies in matching checked swimsuits.

  We were all there and it was before they roped off the beach because of that rough current and there was so much noise and frenzy and I remember the feeling of the raft against my cheek, the way I tried to block everything out, to push myself into the center of the raft and hear nothing but the low pounding of the water, my heart.

  Somehow, the shoving and nonsense of older boys, or the slickness of the seaweed snared around my kicking ankles, or something, I tumbled into the lake, and no one saw. There were minutes, centuries, in those murky depths. That is how I think of it now, epochs floating, vanished, forgotten. No one saw. Until Mr. Verver scooped me up, shook me like a wet puppy, lifted me as if by my neck scruff, and saved me then and there.

  I remember—do I?—spouting green sludge, lake bottom sorrow, a tadpole wiggling in his arms. The rough towel on me, Mr. Verver there now, his bright white grin. “You slid away like a scaly fish,” he said. “You don’t get away so easy.” Huddled fast against his chest, the warmth then came, like a promise.

  I remember that.

  Eight

  That night, the dream comes, and it’s Evie at the foot of my bed, mouth stuffed with cotton, just like before. And I sit up and reach down and pull it in long tufts from her mouth, long tufts that wind through my fingers like swirls of snow.

  More comes, more, and I let my hands rise up high, to her chin and to her open mouth, which is now black and bottomless.

  Like Nurse Stang, my fingers slip in, touch the wetness there.

  Your stitches are gone, I say, as my fingers push against her tongue, rasping cotton free in filmy tendrils.

  I don’t need them, she says, and sticks her tongue out, propelling my fingers back.

  The tongue, it dangles like a red ribbon. But I look closer and see it is split in two, like a snake’s. Like the king cobra they showed us at the zoo.

  I reach out to it, and her jaw clicks, like it might snap loose, like her mouth might swallow her face. It’s then I realize it’s not Evie at all but the thing that took Evie deep inside and is hiding her there.

  Tara Leary always has things to tell in the locker room after gym. Her pipeline of secret knowledge surges constantly, we are ankle-deep in it. She hears everything, her gaping-mouth mother phoning in dispatches. Before, her dad’s job at the prosecutor’s office meant only that we all had to go to the morgue for Biology class. Now it means she is the keeper of all life-death knowledge and revelation.

  I am her most favored steward. She knows the police have talked to me, and therefore we two are part of a special category, an elite.

  We’re in the shower stalls, and she’s whispering to me through the curtain.

  “I heard my dad tell my mom,” she says. “They got the search warrant for Mr. Shaw’s house.”

  She tells me the police also got an anonymous tip that he had boxes of pornographic magazines and videos hidden in the garage.

  “Whoever called must’ve seen them,” she says. I can see the shadow of her mouth through the curtain as she talks. “He hid them under stacks of old newspapers or something. His wife probably never knew. He probably went out there at night.”

  I try not to picture it, not to see Mr. Shaw in a garage like our garage, with my dad’s old workbench and the transistor radio and the dozens of boxes labeled SHIMS, DOWELS, SCREWS, HINGES / PULLS. Mr. Shaw in his bathrobe, standing under an overhanging lightbulb, looking, looking, looking—

  “It’s called kiddie porn,” Tara is saying, and I touch my side of the rubber curtain, feeling the vibration of her voice against my fingers, telling myself she is lying.

  “I heard there was this one video,” she continues, “where they show this little girl and she’s a pure virgin because she’s, like, nine, and this long line of men, some of them, like, fat or old, they come along and rape her one by one and then they kill her and they really kill her because it’s called a snuff film. They snuff her out. My dad said that it’s just as well by that point because what’s gonna happen to a nine-year-old girl who’s been raped by, like, twenty guys in an hour?”

  Tara’s voice is clear and sharp, sliding through my brain like a hot needle. I want her to stop, but I can’t catch my breath or get my voice back.

  Here’s the thing: Evie is gone, has been gone for six days, and no one can find her and it is not long, another day, before it starts to feel like no one really expects her to be found. It starts to feel like everyone is waiting to hear where the body was dumped and what was done to it.

  “If you can think of anything else, anything at all,” Mr. Verver says. “Day or night. You can come over, you can call.”

  This is what he says. We never had anything together like this. Now we do. We have this.

  “Sometimes, Lizzie,” he says, “we think we don’t remember things, and then suddenly we do. Like you with the car. Wasn’t that something, the way you were able to summon that up? And then sometimes we don’t connect things, but they may be connected. Like you did with the stubs. You’re smart as a whip, Lizzie, and you’ve been a lifesaver. Where would we be without your help? So I’m just saying, anything comes to you, anything at all, just come over. Find me. Or call, even if it’s the middle of the night. Okay?”

  Yes, Mr. Verver, yes, yes.

  Joannie and Tara and I are perched on our bike seats three doors down from the Shaw house, thick with cops. Tara has been passing tantalizers about the search warrant, so we skip fifth period and now hover madly from afar. It seems certain we’ll be caught, grisly truants, rubberneckers, ghouls. But we have to see.

  We don’t catch even a glimpse of Mrs. Shaw, or Pete, who still has not returned to school.

  We’re there only ten minutes before a patrolman spots us, follows us back to school, but before he does we got to see the detectives duck under the half-open garage door with flashlights, and Tara nodded so self-satisfiedly. We did not see them come out.

  It’s on TV that night. My mother, head craned over her tea, listens intently, shushing my brother. The newscaster says police won’t confirm it, but that “inside sources” say that a search took place. On all three channels, they keep talking about Mr. Shaw as a missing person who “may or may not be a suspect in the Verver girl disappearance.”

  On Channel 7, they mention lab testing of the cigarette butts, though “it remains a question if anything can be retrieved, given rain and exposure to the elements.” And, the lady newscaster adds, “According to his family and friends, Mr. Shaw was not a smoker.”

  “He gave it up years ago,” says a pinch-nosed woman identified as Mr. Shaw’s bookkeeper. “For his health.”

  “Sources close to the investigation,” the lady newscaster says, in closing, “say that no cigarettes were found during the alleged search of the Shaw house.”

  I feel my mother’s eyes on me, watching my reaction. I don’t give her anything, even as it hits me, spins me.

  I know they were his cigarettes in the Verver yard. I know it.

  “Maybe the police just missed them,” I say. “You can hide cigarettes anywhere.”

  “Maybe he stashes them on the patio,” Ted says, in that snide, prodding way he has with our mother. “Under a flowerpot.”

  But we are in such a serious space that my mother doesn’t even look up when he
says it, doesn’t lose her focus for a split second.

  “We have to consider the possibility that these may be two unrelated disappearances,” the jowly chief of police says. The TV anchor nods with gravity, but in the chief’s eyes you can see it: he knows it’s Mr. Shaw, we all know, don’t we?

  “Well, I just don’t understand this,” my mother is saying. “Do they really think, after all this, that…”

  But it is Mr. Shaw. I know it, soul deep. Somehow, it’s like I even knew before it happened. Must’ve felt it on some deeper level when I saw Mr. Shaw’s car licking past us that day. And didn’t Evie share it with me during that momentous second in her backyard, kneeling over cigarette stubs, a secret so perilous she could scarcely utter it?

  It is Mr. Shaw, even if Mr. Shaw might not be as they conjure him, this appalling monster in our midst. Even if he might be something else entirely.

  It becomes hard to sunder the believing from the knowing.

  And then there’s this:

  It must be Mr. Shaw. It has to be.

  Because if he didn’t take her, where is she?

  “They didn’t find a-n-y-thing,” Tara explains the next day. There was no pornography, no murky snuff films, and nothing to link him to Evie at all.

  “He must’ve really cleaned house before he did the deed,” she says.

  Part of me was bracing for unimaginable horrors. Something worse than dirty pictures of brace-faced girls lifting their jumper over their head, worse even than muddy videos of dark deeds done to tousled children, eyes wide with terror. What could be worse than that?

  But mostly I realize that I never truly thought they’d find anything bad, anything ugly. There’s just that squinting part of me that feels sure Mr. Shaw, whatever he’s done, was driven not by private sickness but by the purest, most painful love. If I squint my eyes just so, if I push out all the dirty rumors, I can see him differently. I can see him as a yearning nighttime wanderer dreaming his way into Evie’s yard, her lighted window. Her face there.

  “He probably took all the dirty movies and magazines with him, up to Canada or wherever he’s got her,” Kelli, sucking on gum, says. “Took them with him so he could make her look at them. So she could see how to get him off.”

  We all faintly gasp at this. We all shift back, just slightly. There is someplace she has just taken us and all I can think is how dare she?

  Because then I do think of such things, of Mr. Shaw sitting next to Evie in his maroon car, the glossy peach of a centerfold laid open, across their laps. I picture it like the one buried under my brother’s baseball card collection, where the girls all seemed splayed like bent-back dolls, their mouths bright, enormous, their depthless eyes.

  “Maybe it’s not him,” Joannie says, and we all look at her. “Maybe it really is just a coincidence.”

  “So where the hell is he, then?” Tara says, clicking her retainer definitively. “My dad says there is no such thing as a coincidence. Coincidences are for bored housewives and defense attorneys.”

  There are things grinding in my head, chugging mercilessly…

  The icky mysteries the Shaw house was expected to hold, the darkening rumors, none of this is in my real imagining. I don’t believe any of it.

  Didn’t I know they wouldn’t find a thing? It’s not about a rancid need for all girls, any girl. It’s about Evie and love. Standing in her yard…

  Blood-thick: I know it’s nothing’s like what they think. They’ve all got it wrong. I just don’t know how, yet.

  The sobbing upstairs is loud, helpless, as if to rattle the windows and shake the pillars.

  “Dusty wasn’t feeling up to school today,” Mr. Verver says, and I can tell from his T-shirt and jeans at three thirty in the afternoon that he never made it to work either.

  I’m there to deliver the trophy Dusty won at the end-of-year ceremony at the high school. MVP, which is a very big deal, especially for a junior. Ted brought it home, was asked to deliver it to Dusty. (“I can’t go over there,” he whispered. But I could.)

  Mr. Verver smiles at the golden figurine of the ponytailed field hockey player as he turns the walnut base over in his hand. He brings the face close to his eyes, his brows knitted. “She doesn’t look nearly fierce enough,” he says, staring hard into the gold-plated eyes.

  I can’t fight the grin and he sees it and grins too.

  “Shall we put it in a place of honor?” he asks, and for a second he feels like Mr. Verver from before, the way he made everything an adventure, even having to get our shots before school started, or the time Mrs. Verver was sick and he took Evie and me to the Roberto Salon for haircuts, the way he sat in one of the lilac chairs and tried to read Woman’s Day, and the way all the stylists preened and cooed over him, and one gave him a free cut and rubbed creamy coconut-smelling lotion into his scalp and we could all smell it for hours, in the car, in the rec room when we played table tennis.

  I thought of how the coconut scent must have sunk into his pillow that night.

  Once, last summer, Mr. Verver, he pulled up the fallen strap of my bathing suit with one long finger. I still remember the tickly-achy feeling, a feeling I never felt before.

  We walk down the basement stairs to the rec room. This is where the Verver kid parties were held, and, for a while, weekly poker night with Mr. Verver and some of the neighborhood dads. And the adults come down here a lot during the block parties and the Verver Fourth of July party to get away from the kids and to smoke. There are family pictures and some German beer posters. An old velvet poster that said, “Mott the Hoople,” which I always thought was a Dr. Seuss book.

  The floor is hard and when we were little Evie and I practiced tap down here.

  “Me and My Shadow,” step-shuffle-back-step, step-shuffle-back-step.

  Behind the bar, there’s a long, thickly varnished shadow box where all the trophies are, except Evie’s, which are in her room, because they are always too big for the case—puffy, padded soccer ball sculptures, and Dusty always says they look like cartoons of trophies, not trophies themselves.

  Mr. Verver shoves the new trophy into the center, and a fog of dust puffs out at us. When I cough Mr. Verver slaps me hard on the back and makes a funny Three Stooges sound.

  The room always smells like laundry, the soft gust of fabric softener. I see a few empty beer bottles on the barrel-slat coffee table and think sadly of Mr. Verver down here, his mournful wife and daughter crying mercilessly in separate bedrooms upstairs, and there’s nothing he can do.

  It is so terrible.

  In the corner of the shadow box, which stretches the full length of the leather-padded bar, there’s a small trophy I don’t remember noticing before, a green-gold musical note propped on top of a tiny marble stand.

  “What’s this?” I say, reaching out for it.

  Mr. Verver smiles, yanking it from the shelf and handing it to me.

  I see the gold lettering half dissolved, as if even setting my fingers on it could erase the rest:

  STA E MUS C COMPE T ON—2 P CE

  “It’s so old,” I say, and Mr. Verver laughs.

  “Centuries past. Ice ages have come and gone.”

  I feel an impish smirk on me. “This is yours,” I say.

  “Yeah,” he says, taking it gently from my hand and turning it around to look at it.

  “What did you play?” I ask, even though I know. I remember him telling Evie and me before. I remember how he got so excited when he talked about it.

  “Piano,” he says. “Keyboards. I played at the state finals. This big theater by the Capitol Building. One of those old-time movie palaces with pipe organs that seem to hit the sky. I remember coming onstage and there was this heavy gold curtain, the tallest I’d ever seen. And the lights. It was like stepping into the sun.”

  He laughs softly. “It was a lot to take for a scrawny kid like me. But I played my heart out.”

  I picture Mr. Verver, hunched over a gleaming baby grand, over a silver pian
o like in an old movie, over a shambling upright piano in a dimly lit bar, his eyes soulful and brooding.

  “I bet you were amazing,” I say, nearly cringing at myself.

  “Not amazing, exactly,” he says, “but it got the girl. Annie. Mrs. Verver.”

  I’ve never seen Mrs. Verver listening to music. Whenever I hear stories about Mrs. Verver, it’s always like this. They’re always old stories, like she’s someone everyone used to know. Stories about how when we were little Mrs. Verver and Mrs. McCann smoked pot behind the garage at the Fourth of July party, or how, back in high school, she played Ado Annie in Oklahoma! and flipped her skirt so high everyone saw her underwear, which was midnight blue lace.

  These stories seem impossible and I don’t believe them. It’s like there was this Mrs. Verver once and now there’s someone else, tired and bone-skinny, who works evenings at the VA and who reads while watering the garden, one hand on the hose and the other clawed around a yellowing novel from the rummage sale. I wonder if that other Mrs. Verver is somewhere else, like San Francisco or Mexico, doing wild things and never looking back.

  “She heard me play at a club,” he says. “We were just out of college.”

  “You were in a band?” I ask, feeling myself lift up onto my toes, leaning over the bar as his head lolls back in reminiscence.

  “That’d be a generous way to put it,” he says, his eyes glimmering and doing wonderful things. “She was in the back hallway with a guy she thought she was in love with, this cool guy with long sideburns and a ring on every finger. But then she heard me playing and she couldn’t stop herself. She left the poor fella and made a beeline straight across the club to the front of the stage.”

  My head goes crazy with thoughts of Mr. Verver, age twenty-one, a mop of dark hair and a boy’s body lurched fast over the keys. Did his collarbones jut, his Adam’s apple bob? Did he have that awkward slouch of boys who grew so fast they themselves seemed bewildered by it, faintly dazed in their own skin?