The End of Everything (16 page)

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, and 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?

“Later, I heard about how you found the cigarettes,” he says.

I look at him, my mouth dry.

“Can you believe the cops missed them?” he asks, shaking his head.

I don’t say anything.

“Don’t worry,” he says. “I won’t tell. I’m glad you took them. You made everything happen. It gave me this idea.”

“What…,” I say, fumbling.

“He calls her,” Pete says, then pauses, letting it settle on me for a second. But I’m too jangled for settling.

“It’s like suddenly, after twenty years,” he says, “he’s alive and actually wants to speak to her. Now he wants to tell her
about himself and make her see. Because now he needs her help.”

My whole body drum-tight, I try not to move. I know something is coming for me, that he’s going to give me something,
oh he is, isn’t he
.

“He’s sure they’re tapping our phone,” he says, his fingers pressing into me. “Maybe they are. I hope they are. So he calls
her at the place she volunteers. The senior center. And she won’t tell the police. She lies to the police. That stuff about
him wanting to move to Canada, that’s all made up. She has them running to all the wrong places.”

My fingers grip the armrests. I’m here to receive something. He’s been waiting, the pincers tight on his heart.
I know that feeling, I do.

It’s coming, it’s coming. All brimful revelation. I feel an exhilaration that shames me.

“She came in here yesterday,” he says, his hands finally releasing my legs. I can feel his hands there still, though, the
place each finger pressed hotly.

“She asked me how much money I’d saved up,” he says, pointing to his dresser. I twist my head around and spot a scoop of bottle
green glass there. The bottom rind of an old-fashioned piggy bank, like the kind you see at the rummage sales they have at
the church.

“I’d been saving all year for this used car,” he says. “I’d saved eight hundred and thirty-five dollars.”

He looks at me, his hands curling at his sides. The room seems to be getting hotter and hotter and the one burning lightbulb
above his desk radiates mercilessly. I feel my shirt sticking to me.

“That didn’t matter, though. That wasn’t it. And she stood there,” he says, pointing to the doorway. “She kept talking and
talking and talking, and I was sitting here, and I didn’t say a word. She kept talking until I thought she’d never stop.”

And the more he talks, the more I feel, neck tingling, like if I turn around and look at the doorway, I’ll see her there.
What did she matter to me a month ago, a minute ago, but in his telling, she now looms forty stories high to me. Mrs. Shaw,
Mrs. Shaw whom I’ve never heard speak, never thought of, only passed by, glimpsed through a car window, from my whirring bike.
Her ponytail and her crisp white tennis shoes and her face all ruined, like all their faces have been ruined, like Mrs. Verver’s
face, shell-shocked to ruin.

“She said she couldn’t touch the bank accounts. She said the state police, the feds, are watching everything.”

He walks over to the dresser and picks up the piece of green glass, a gleaming shard.

Then he tells me how she took the piggy bank and slammed it hard against the metal edge of the desk until it shattered, pocking
her hands red, and green glints scattering.

“It all flew up over her face,” he says. “Like confetti.”

Sitting there, I can feel the ghostly crunch of pieces under my feet.

He pauses a second, breathing deeply, settling himself.

“She said it had to be me,” he says. “She was sure they were watching her, and I was his only chance.”

So she made him drive to Hunts Wood, forty miles away.

“I had to find a place to send a money order. I went to this convenience store. I had this baseball hat pulled low, like one
of those robbers on a surveillance camera. She had me double back, do all this stuff to avoid toll roads. It took me two hours
each way. I was sure the cops spotted me. I kept waiting to get caught. It would’ve been okay to get caught.”