The End of Everything (20 page)

I watch them all disappear into the dark of their front hallway.

I watch Dusty whip around and, face red and ruined, shut the front door behind them.

I think I stand there for a very long time, waiting for my heart to slow down, waiting for my breath to come back. Waiting
for something else, but that thing never comes.

“
I
’ll take you to the hospital in a few hours,” my mother says. “They need some time.”

We are standing on the front porch, my feet dew-damp.

The sleeplessness so light on me, I feel more awake than ever, and the mistiness of early dawn is just right.

“Okay,” I say, but I don’t intend to wait. I intend to hop on my bike and pedal the three miles as soon as she goes upstairs
and turns on the shower.

“Lizzie,” she says, and I can feel her hand fasten on my shoulder. “I…” Her voice goes soft and wilting. “I guess I didn’t
believe it would happen.”

I brush my foot back and forth on the concrete, feeling the delicious burn, bringing me to life.

“I guess, deep down, I thought she was never coming back,” my mother says, and she curls her arm across my shoulders and presses
into me.

“I know you did,” I say. Why should I admit that I ever thought so too?

“I guess,” she starts, her words falling strangely, like she is still half asleep, like she is saying things she’d never say
out loud, “I guess it always seemed like something like this might happen to them. The Ververs.”

“What do you mean?” I say roughly.

“I don’t know,” she says. “There’s always just been something about them…” There’s almost a blush on her, like she’s been
caught without her clothes. She can’t quite look at me.

“I don’t know,” she says. “Like something had to break. It could only go on for so long, before something had to break.”

“That doesn’t make any sense at all,” I say, shaking off a flinch deep inside. “You’re not making any sense at all.”

M
y legs pump as fast as they can. The bike ride to the hospital is a breathless blur, my lungs choked and pained.

I keep conjuring the silvery sight of blonded Evie, eyes startled and knowing.

Was it her, even?

Was it Evie who returned?

Or did I dream it all, conjure it from wishes and longing?

The weird, unwholesome emptiness of the damp streets and the metal smell of early morning, it all conspires to make me feel
forgotten, swabbed off the world.

Part of me thinks, as I walk through the sliding doors of the hospital, that no one will even recognize me. That I will move
through the halls, past every Verver, as though invisible, a slippery shadow.

But it is only seconds before Mr. Verver, begrimed and fumbling with forms and a clambering Dusty, hands in her hair, spots
me.

His face is filled with such light, it nearly blinds me.

The heavy stubble, ribbons of dirt across his pant legs, the look of heat and flush on him, none of it matters, he shrugs
it all off.

He is restored.

We have restored him, I think, and then wonder at the “we.”
It’s me, me, me.

“There’s Lizzie,” he is saying, clipboard now against his chest, across his heart, like a knightly shield, and Dusty whips
her head around to me, and the look on her face, like all her looks, is unreadable.

Thoughts flit through my head about everything she must feel, but I don’t have time for them. I don’t have time.

I am rushing for Mr. Verver, who outstretches his arms, who tows me in for a half hug, his right hand still clasping the clipboard,
which bangs against my head.

“Oh, Lizzie,” he says. “Lizzie, she’s here. She’s here and she’s okay.”

I think that’s what he says, I don’t know. The next few minutes jumble together and he’s telling me things and saying that
Mrs. Verver won’t leave Evie’s side and they’re doing some exams but everything is good, that Evie is strong and that Evie
is well.

“She’s fine,” Dusty pipes up. “She’s great and everything’s over. It’s all done. She’s back, and it’s over.”

She says it briskly, as Dusty says most things to me, to her mother, to everyone but Mr. Verver.

But it seems off, and all I can think of are the things she told me, the things Dusty knows, or thinks she does.

Oh, Lizzie, she knew. She knew he was coming for her.

Mr. Verver puts down the clipboard, his pen, all his things, and rests his hands on Dusty’s shoulders.

He lets his fingers wiggle in her hair.

She looks up at him, waiting. I can feel her toes curling in her shoes, waiting for that gift, any gift, the gifts he hands
out so freely.

Oh, I can see it on her. She’s thinking,
Now maybe it will go back, now it will be as before.

The way she stands there, that open expression she gives only to him—suddenly I feel like I should turn away. I feel like
I’ve seen something no one’s supposed to see.

She waits for him, bouncing in her shoes, but this is what he gives her: “Maybe you should go home,” he says.

All the lovely expectation on her face disappears.

He glances over at me for a second, and she sees it.

A baton passed, from her to me, even as she hadn’t meant to pass it. Even as she still felt it in her tight, clawed hands.

She looks at me with those hawk eyes, and I feel, in a flash, like she can see right through my clothes, my skin, my everything.

She sees right into the center of me. I can’t unravel it all now, but it’s like she sees things in me, in him, that I can’t
even see yet.

“I’m going back to Nana’s,” she murmurs, her hand reaching for her bag.

“Dus’,” he says, furrowed brow, his fingers resting on her neck.

“Don’t,” she says, so hard, jumping back, her arm flipping up as if to fend him off, as if they were out on the field and
he’d high-sticked her.

She picks up the clipboard. For a crazy second, I think she’s going to throw it.

He steps forward.

“Don’t, don’t, don’t,” she says, her head whipping back and forth.

Stunned, Mr. Verver raises his hands high, like in a stickup.

“I don’t want to see her,” Dusty says. “I don’t want to be here. I can’t be here.”

She shoves the clipboard into my hands, reels around, and in an instant she is gone.

Mr. Verver is shaking his head. He is shaking his head, and looking at me.

My fingers fumbling on the clipboard, I don’t know what to say.

He swivels around on his foot, looking up at the ceiling. Then
he says, “Until these last few weeks, she never wanted to spend more than an hour there, in her life.”

It takes me a second to realize he’s talking about the grandparents. It seems funny to me that he’s thinking about where she
wants to go and not everything else she just showed him. The things she showed.

“She can’t stand the rose perfume,” he says, “and the vacuum cleaner going all day long.”

I nod.

“But I guess all this, it’s just too much,” he says. “It’s a lot to take.”

He keeps looking at me.

He seems overwhelmed, by everything. I want to rescue him from it.

D
etective Thernstrom and Mr. Verver are talking in the corner. The police are all around and everything seems to be crackling.

I wonder who will tell me what happened. How did she get back? Where did she come from? Where’s Mr. Shaw? And I have even
silly, furtive thoughts that now they’ll uncover my lies, all of them.

Somehow I can’t bring myself to ask Mr. Verver, who has shaken off everything with Dusty. Shaken it off so easily. Everything
popping and sparking, his face is like an amusement park, all filled with fear and elation.

“She can’t talk to anyone right now,” Mr. Verver says, as soon as the detective leaves. “She’s all drugged up. But she’s great.
She’s great. Oh, Lizzie, you should see her.”

I did see her,
I want to say.
I saw everything
.

“The police—they…,” I try.

“They haven’t been able to figure everything out yet,” he says. “He’s on the run again. You saw—he’d dyed her hair.”

We both let that thought hover between us for a second. I feel it teeter in my rib cage.

“He was in for the long haul,” he adds quickly. “From what we can figure out, she… got away from him. A waitress at the doughnut
shop out on Falls Road said she saw a girl get out of a car and walk into the woods. So she must have gotten away somehow
and walked home. Four miles.”

My head is jumbled with questions. It all seems strange and impossible.

“And they don’t know where he is?”

“No,” he says, so quickly, his face clouding over. “Not yet.” He pauses. “But she came home, Lizzie. She made it home. She
fought her way home.”

The words sound big and movielike and I want to burrow myself under them. But it doesn’t feel right. None of it feels right.
And none of it feels over, at all.

T
here is nothing to do and Mr. Verver is in with Evie and I know I should go home, but there’s a funny and hollow clang in
me, and I just start wandering the hospital corridors, dragging my bike lock along the walls, gazing mournfully at all the
fluorescence and disease.

It’s so odd when it happens, the man looking at me as I make my way down yet another long hallway flapping with posted greeting
cards tacked to bulletin boards.

Leaning on the nurses’ station counter, it’s like he’s waiting for me.

I wonder if I’m in trouble somehow, so I slow down and when I see a bank of worn pastel chairs I slip into one, like I’m there
for a reason.

That’s when the man starts walking toward me and I feel a ripple of panic until I see it’s Dr. Aiken, with a white coat on
and everything.

I remember his calm voice through the wall from the night before, how it soothed me. There’s something calm about him, or
something in him that calms me. For all his chaos, his stumbling through bushes and sliding on our kitchen floor, there’s
something that seems still about him. Comfortable.

“Lizzie,” he says. “I thought you might be here.”

“You work here?” I say, because I thought he had an office, that he was that kind of doctor.

“I work here too, yes.”

“Oh,” I say, and I see he has new glasses, with pencil-thin wire frames, like the ones my mother used to pick out for my dad.
“I’m here because of Evie.”

“Yes,” he says, with care. “She’s going to be fine.”

“What happened to her?” I say, my voice going high, like I might cry. I can’t believe how it sounds. “What did he… what is
she…”

There are too many words and none seems right, none seems to contain it all.

“She’s going to be okay,” he says. “Don’t worry.”

And he turns quickly, and looks up at the clock.

“I think they’ll release her later today,” he says, and he’s still looking at the clock. I think he’s nervous to look at me.
I think he doesn’t know what to say to me. It strikes me too that, for any number of reasons, he feels sorry for me.

M
y mother drives me home, my bike in the trunk. She’s wide awake now, not like earlier, and is filled with scoldings, but how
worried could she have been? Where else would I have gone?

“I saw your boyfriend,” I say.

“My boyfriend,” she repeats, eyes on the road.

I wait and wait, but that’s all she says, like she’s stuck on the word and she’s trying to unstick it.

The phone is ringing when we walk in the house. It’s Tara Leary, and I know she’s ready to swap information. She says I have
to meet her and Kelli at Joannie’s house. They’re already there and she knows everything.

“I don’t think so,” I say, though of course I want to know. But
I don’t want to know from Tara. I don’t want to hear any of it from Tara’s candy-twist mouth.

“Go on,” my mother says, slumping down at the kitchen table. “Go relax a little. Be with your friends.”

She insists on driving me over, even though it’s only six blocks.

“Call me when you’re done,” she says. “Have fun.”

I wonder if she knows anything at all.

D
id you hear?” Tara says, filled with gritty energy. She can barely contain herself. We’re bundled tight on the big sofa in
the den, with cold cans of orange pop we drink from straws. “He dumped her on the roadside.”

“She escaped,” I say. “She got away. She jumped from the car.”

“Like hell she did,” Tara says. “The waitress at Dawn Donuts saw the car in the parking lot. They sat there for ten minutes
before Evie got out. Then he peeled off like a bank robber.”

“No,” I say, shaking my head. “Why would he just leave her there, after everything?”

I feel my head go back to the lustrous places of the first few days after Evie disappeared. Those days when the heaviness
and beauty of the love first hit me square. A love like that, like Mr. Shaw’s for Evie, a love so big it took him over, it
swallowed them both whole.

“Because he was done with her, Lizzie,” Joannie says, her voice fast and impatient. “He was done with her, and that was that.
He’d used her up.”

“I don’t think so,” I say. “It doesn’t just stop.”

All three of them look at me, their summer tans perfectly matched. They look at me and they think they know everything in
the world.

“What’d you think,” Joannie says, “he wanted to make her his child bride?”

“Romeo and Juliet,” Kelli pipes up.

“Do you want to hear the rest or not?” Tara says, nearly jumping in her spot.

I know what’s coming. I know because Tara’s lips have a shine on them, her body nearly rocking.

It’s the part I’ve been waiting for with all kinds of dread and fervor:

“They gave her a pelvic,” Tara says, leaning back against the sofa cushion, watching our faces.

Kelli squirms a little.

“They did all these tests,” Tara says, and it’s like she’s reading a report. “For gonorrhea, syphilis, herpes, and pregnancy.
I bet even AIDS.”

Like on the poster on the wall in Health class. The one with the big red letters, tall and menacing:
ANYONE CAN GET AIDS. PROTECT YOURSELF.