The End of Everything (27 page)

Dusty,
she’d said, almost a taunt, but a thousand times sadder,
you can want him your whole life and Dad’s never going to give it to you.

I look at Dusty now and there’s a howl in my head. I can’t say anything.

“She made it seem sick,” Dusty says, her voice choking her. “She made it seem like loving him was dirty. What could be dirty
about loving your father?”

“But why didn’t she tell on you?” I say. “Why didn’t she tell what you’d…” My voice trails off.

“She’ll never tell,” Dusty says, her eyes lidding softly.

“She’s protecting you,” I say, but even as I say it, it doesn’t make sense. It doesn’t make sense because they were never
sisters that way, were they? Only keening rivals, circling each other, marking each other tightly.

A love was in it, I knew, but it was nettled and fearsome.

“It’s not me,” she says, shaking her head. “She’s not protecting me.”

I feel something stirring softly inside me. I think of Evie, secrets held close to her chest, and I see it’s not about hiding,
it’s not about sealing herself up, sealing herself away from me.

She is raising the barricade so high, so he will never have to know. He will never have to see what his daughter did to his
other daughter. What either of them has done. I think of Evie in the car on the way back from the pool,
I’m sorry, Dad. I’m sorry.

“I never told him about her either,” Dusty says, as if reading my mind. “I pictured myself, so many times, going to him. Saying,
Don’t you see, it’s all her fault. Everything’s her fault. She ran to him. She ran away with him. Even if I had never… she
was going to do it. Go with him. I know it.

“But I could never say it. I couldn’t stand seeing the look on his face. I never want to see it.”

She can break his heart,
both sisters are saying,
but I won’t.

“I’ll never tell either,” I blurt. “I’ll never tell.”

She looks at me, and it’s such a tortured look, full of anger and despair and a flushy kind of warmth I’ve never seen on her
before.

“It’s like kids,” Dusty says, and she’s almost smiling. “It’s like when we were kids. Blood sisters, right? Remember, in the
backyard, all three of us, thumbs to thumbs.”

A memory hazes forth, Evie and me, maybe five or six, stretching our arms before golden Dusty, our thumbs jabbing, waiting
for her silvery laceration.

“Blood sisters,” I say.

She might even reach out to me, but she doesn’t. She tilts her head, looking down at the tile, dragging her cleat against
it.

“That day. The way I was. It wasn’t me, you know?” she says, almost shaking her head in wonder.

I think of Dusty on the hockey field, ferocious and biblical, her stick slashing, saberlike.

“It’s a thing to know about yourself,” she says, quieter still.

She watches me.

“Yes,” I say.

Then there’s a ripple across her face, and she looks away.

“Lizzie,” she says, a whisper. “I know how it’s been. With you at our house. All that time with him. I know how it’s been.”

“Dusty, I…”

Her hands shaking in her lap, palms up.

“I know how it’s been for you. With him. All those nights. I know.”

“But I…”

“But that’s over now,” she says, her voice tiny, forlorn. “That’s over. Do you understand?”

I don’t say anything.

She turns and faces me, her hands lightly on my arm, light like Evie-light, but I feel a steel beneath them. I do.

“The way it is, for Dad and me,” she says, “it’ll never be like that for you and him. It goes so deep with us. You could never
have that. You just couldn’t.”

I could not.

Who was I to imagine I could?

That’s what I think, and then the thinking of it makes me feel sick. I feel sick.

“He always says to me,” she says, smiling lightly, “ ‘You’re going to leave a string of broken hearts, Dusty. Remember I told
you that. I saw it before anyone else. I was the first.’ ”

She smiles at me. “I have to be true to that, don’t I?”

Then she puts her fingers to her lips, as if she just thought of something.

“But I never… he never… it’s not like that,” she says. “Like Evie said it was. That’s just Evie’s sickness. To see something
so beautiful as dirty, as wrong. She can’t help it, I guess. She’s a sick girl.

“What Dad and I have, Lizzie,” she says, fingertips resting on that lovely mouth of hers, “it’s pure. It’s pure and I never
looked at it. It was just a feeling, always, my whole life.”

I
don’t pretend to know the hearts of women.” Mr. Verver said that once, long ago. He’d said it, laughing, he’d said it with
a knowing slant of his head, and I remember Dusty, her face, the glow of it, because Dusty only ever glowed and gloried under
his gaze. I think of Dusty and boys, those furtive thoughts of why she can never yield herself to them, doesn’t even care
to try. Mr. Verver, he gives her everything and asks nothing in return, except everything. Everything. There’s nothing left
for anyone else, she gives it all to him, his gaze rendering her beauty with such care. And then the struggle after Evie went
away, and after she came back, oh, for Dusty not to have that gaze on her. Oh, any minute at all in her life, not to have
that gaze on her…

I
t’s nearly Labor Day. The sounds floating through the kitchen window, and it’s like a thousand other nights, and Dusty’s starry
trill, Mr. Verver’s throaty laugh, the swing of his voice, like his hand on your back, pushing you on the swing set, your
feet in the air.

Everything is back. It’s back. But it’s all different and the laughs are different, aren’t they? I nuzzle the screen door
and look and see their tanned faces, their gleaming teeth and avid eyes, and the frenzy in the air seems a thing apart.

Everything looks different now,
Evie once said
. But I don’t think it’s different. I just never saw it before.

Dusty, the eagerness on her face, the grasping, the grappling. How hard she’s trying, how hard he’s trying too. It’s desperate,
but you believe in it:

We will make it so, we will make it as before, a fairy tale, handsome king and golden princess, surveying their kingdom from
on high…

I think of Evie up in her room, and wonder if she’s hearing them too and knowing she is.

If things had been different, Mr. Shaw may never have touched her. He may have gone his whole life never stepping from the
shadows. Never going beyond a few shared words on the back lawn of the school. But then it happened, and she ran to him, and
then he couldn’t stop.

But I saved her, didn’t I? Stringing clues together, tracing the breadcrumbs back. Dropping breadcrumbs myself. All to rescue
her from him.

Rescued her, returned her, restored her… back to that house where now she lies, one thin, filmy wall from her attacker, from
the girl who held herself against her neck, nearly pressing the life from her.

Would you let it all go on? Would you let both sisters hide their dark tales, their black-heart secrets? Or would you tell
all, turn that enchanting, light-struck household inside out, lay open its mysteries?

Caught up in it all, in the slipstream of it, I’ve seen things. I’ve seen the massy heart of things.

They had made their choices, both sisters, hadn’t they? Neither would tell what happened. Neither would ever tell.

They’d decided what mattered to them. And it was Mr.
Verver, it was him. The him of him, and the idea of him, and maybe they were the same.

And now they’ve drawn up the bridge, raised high the walls, and who was I to say? Who were the police, anyone, to say they
knew better? That they could look at the gold-gleaming family before them and see its troubled center and say they knew better,
could undream that beautiful dream?

These two girls, not princesses so much as palace guards, sacrificing all to keep their noble king safe. Up high in his tower.
Golden-walled, immaculate.

I
walk outside, onto the patio, and watch them. There he is, holding court, Dusty enthroned at his side, her legs curled tanly
beneath her.

I watch for a long time before he sees me, but he does.

He rises so fast, my heart catches.

There’s a warmth on his face that brings everything back.

I take a few steps toward him.

Calling my name, he flings his arm out to me, hand outstretched, his face open and ready, inviting me in.

She smiles too, the gracious victor to her former rival, and the two of them, their smiles are the same and so much radiates
from them it takes my breath away.

He flings his arm wide.

Take it,
he says, hand outstretched.
Oh, Lizzie, take it.

I
t’s Sunday morning and Dr. Aiken has left to get almond Danish and I creep into my mother’s room and she lifts her arms above
her head and says, Come lie with me, little girl, like she used to when I was very small and dainty.

We are tucked under the mauve bedspread with the satin border I rub between fingers and it soothes.

I could lie there forever.

“High school this week,” she says, smiling at me.

“Yeah,” I say. High school, the idea seems so small, after everything.

“I heard Mrs. Shaw and her son moved away,” she says carefully. “All the way down by Point Cleary.”

I feel a twitch at my temple, push my fingers to it.

“It’s funny,” she says, “because I was always grateful to him.”

“Grateful?” I say. “To who?”

“Oh, I’m sure you don’t remember. You were so little. It was at Green Hollow Lake. You and Evie, gosh, I can still see you
in your matching suits. Evie had water wings, but your dad propped you up on your raft and you were having a fine time. Then
that motorboat came by, and whoosh.”

She sweeps her arm across the bedspread, making a shush.

“You fell and Harold Shaw was right there. He plucked you out and I still remember your little face, your eyes big as saucers.
You were holding onto him so tight.”

“That was Mr. Verver,” I say, I nearly shout.

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.

She shakes her head and smiles.

“No,” she says. “He was off taking Dusty on the Jet Ski. It was Harold Shaw. He had you, and you just did not want to let
go. It was hard to unclaw you from him. And he seemed so touched by it.”

She looks at me. “I always remember that.”

I don’t say anything.

“I guess it seems different now, after everything,” she says. “The memory. It’s not the same now.”

“No,” I say, but I’m not listening. She keeps talking, but I’m not listening. I am far away and can barely hear her.

Step-shuffle-back-step, step-shuffle-back-step.

Flashing before me, such visions: the photograph in the Shaw house, the one of Mr. Shaw and Pete at the lake, and me bobbing
in the background, bobbing on my yellow raft. And Evie, and Evie, turning toward me on her sleeping bag, turning toward me
and whispering, mouth to ear.
He saw me at the pool, doing dives. It reminded him of something that happened at the lake, a long time ago. How he’d seen
me fall in the water. The most important moment of his life.

He said watching me at the pool, it all came back. And he knew what it was to love. The most important moment of his life.

Both our memories self-spun, radiant fictions.

Me and my shadow.

Wanting something so badly, you make it so. He and I, we share that. It’s a strange secret, sharing, and I’ll never tell.

T
his I suddenly remember, from before everything:

Mr. Verver and Dusty sunning on lounge chairs in the backyard. Dusty, maybe fourteen, is wearing a polka-dot bikini and pink
sunglasses, and Mr. Verver, he’s wearing khaki shorts and sunglasses.

For a minute of course for a minute they look like brother and sister or something else that you know

And it’s so hot and Evie and I are kicking the soccer ball around and Dusty is laughing at Mr. Verver, whose finger is running
back and forth in midair, in the space above

Dusty’s golden stomach, which he

never touches.

He’s teasing her about the tiny gold down running in a narrow line down the center of her midriff, from the frilled bottom
edges of her bikini top to the frilled top edges of her bikini bottom.

Evie and I pull up our T-shirts to see if we have the treasure trail

that’s what Mr. Verver keeps calling it, treasure trail

see if we have the treasure trail too

Evie’s is pale brown and mine’s not really there at all

at least not so you could see

but if I run my hand along it I can feel something tickling under my fingers.

I can feel it just the same.

With deepest gratitude and greatest debt to Reagan Arthur, without whom. Special thanks also to Sam Humphreys at Picador UK,
to Andrea Walker at Reagan Arthur Books for her keen insights and guidance, to Jayne Yaffe Kemp at Little, Brown for her inestimable
assistance in the final stages, and to all the wonderful folks at Reagan Arthur Books and Hachette. And, at Writers House,
to the invaluable Maja Nikolic, Angharad Kowal, Stephen Barr, and my agent, Dan Conaway, for everything.

Greatest thanks as always to my family: Phil and Patti Abbott, Josh, Julie & Kevin, Jeff, Ruth & Steve Nase, and Ralph Nase.
And, as ever, to Josh, Alison, Darcy, and Kiki. And to Sara Gran, one of my earliest readers, favorite writers, and dearest
friends.

Front Cover Image

Welcome

Dedication

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