The Space Between Trees (10 page)

I nod and shuffle my way backward until I bump into the door. “Dinner was really good. Really. And thanks for”—I lift the container—“the spaghetti.”

I slip out the door with his good-byes heavy at my back and the spaghetti losing heat in my hands. Out front, Hadley’s sitting on my bike, the hem of her dress floating perilously close to the grimy gears. She’s like a kid once again, her forehead wrinkled up in determination. She stands up on the pedals so that the bike wavers, trying to go forward but stuck, its lock pulled taut between the pole of the carport and the back wheel. When she sees me, she steps onto the ground.

“I would have ridden it away if it weren’t locked up.”

“I have the key in my bag,” I say dumbly, offering what? To unlock it and let her go?

She snorts. She’s none of the Hadleys I’ve seen before—not desperate like she was in the cafeteria, not furious like she was tonight at dinner. She’s something else, something a little more like I’d imagined she would be all the times I’d watched her from across the hall at school.

She eyes me. “You’re hanging around because she’s dead, huh? It’s exciting for you?”

“No.” I feel my cheeks burn up.

“Then why are you doing it?”

“Doing what?”

She gives me a look. “What you’re doing.”

“I’m not doing . . . I got sick at the funeral, or almost. Then I said something to him, to Mr. McCabe. I didn’t know, and I didn’t really mean to.”

Hadley watches me sputter; she rocks my bike, going up on her tiptoes and taking it an inch forward, sliding onto her heels, taking it back. She sets her eyes on the juncture of my handlebars.

“She was beaten up. Did you know that? They didn’t say it in the paper. He—whoever killed her—he beat her so bad her head was big, swollen, like . . . huge. Her nose was broken.” Hadley rocks forward. “All her front teeth were broken out.” Rocks back. “Her cheekbones. Her face was practically gone.” She rocks once more back and forth, and then she looks up. “My parents don’t think I can hear them talk when they go downstairs, but their voices come up through the vents.” She gets off without bothering with
the kickstand, and so the bike wheels around, hanging off the pole. “They’re so stupid sometimes.”

“That’s awful,” I say, seeing the body bag again, now seeing what was in it.

“
That’s awful
,” she mimics.

“It is,” I say, my voice wobbling.

Hadley looks at me for a second, sizing me up. “It is, isn’t it?” She walks around the front of her car, letting her keys scratch along the hood. “You want a ride home? It’s cold, and besides, I don’t know how you think you’re going to ride home with that thing of spaghetti.”

Hadley and I barely talk on the drive back. When she pulls in front of my house, she doesn’t help me get my bike out of the trunk, and she doesn’t wait until I get in the house before she drives off. She winks her brake lights at the end of the street, and I tell myself that maybe she means it as a sort of good-bye.

O
N
S
UNDAY
, Jonah is back in Hokepe Woods. I hear the whisk of the sled runners while I’m delivering my papers, and it sounds different somehow from when Mr. Jefferson pulls the sled. I finish my route as quickly as I can—
smack, smack, smack
—and hurry back to the curb where Jonah usually parks his truck. It’s there, rust creeping up on it, dusty windows, junk still mounded in the back. The mornings are getting warmer, so it’s not so painful to sit on the bumper until Jonah emerges from the woods, sled slicing the muddy lawn behind him. When he sees me there on his truck, his stride falters just a little bit. I wave, but he doesn’t wave back. It occurs to me that maybe he’s mad because I ran away back when he found the body, maybe he even hates me now. Thinking that almost makes me hop off the truck, go back to my car, and drive away. But then I think about Jonah knowing my name, calling it, calling me, and this keeps me waving. There’s a small something on his sled, and when he gets closer I can see that it’s a possum, rough gray pelt, sharp snout, and bare, pink tail winding out behind.

“Hey,” Jonah says when he reaches me, and it’s nice the way he says it, not angry at all. I feel it in my body like a sigh, the fact that he’s not angry.

“You were gone last week,” I say back, and right away I wish I could unsay it because it’s obvious and desperate, like something my mother would say.

“Well. Huh.” He squints for a second. “Everybody needs a break sometimes.”

Jonah looks a little different than how I remember him looking, as if over the past two weeks the hands of my memory had changed his face somehow, pressing on its angles and planes, plying its lips and earlobes so that the face in my memory only resembles Jonah’s. My memory has spread his eyes a smidge and thickened his chin; I’ve made his hair a bit shaggier and messier, or maybe he’s just started brushing it better than he used to. I correct the Jonah in my head so that he looks how this Jonah, the honest-to-God Jonah, does.

Then I think of my father and Zabet and other people I haven’t seen for a while. It occurs to me that my memories of their faces are only memories of photographs from albums and yearbooks and fireplace mantels. And when I try to call up real memories of them, it’s just the figures from these pictures that get up and walk around—same clothes, same haircuts, and same smiles—like actors dressed up for a part.

“Are you . . . how have you been?” I ask, knowing full well that this is a second stupid thing to say.

Jonah squints as if he has to think about it. “All right,” he finally says. “And you?”

There’s so much I want to tell him about Hadley and Mr. McCabe and Zabet, but his question seems too small to hold such a large answer, so I end up saying “all right,” too.

I watch Jonah slide the possum into a garbage-type bag, though it’s thicker than a garbage bag and bright blue, with a spiky contamination
symbol on it. He gestures that I should get off the truck, and when I do, he swings the sled and bag into the back.

Then, without anything more than a “see you next Sunday, kiddo,” he’s heading to his truck like he’s going to leave. I stand there for a second, stunned, because I can’t believe he’s leaving—after all my phone calls, after driving around trying to find him, after Zabet’s body in the woods—like nothing has changed. But he’s already swinging the truck door open, has his boot up in the cab.

“She’s dead,” I blurt out.

He stops, and turns to look at me. He doesn’t have an expression on his face, though it seems like there’s something working behind his eyes. Me, I’m just standing there having said what I said, my mouth still open a bit, the hatch through which the words had escaped. This is the stupidest thing I’ve blurted out yet; I cover my face with my hands because I can’t look at Jonah anymore, and I can’t stand him looking back at me.

Then suddenly Jonah’s arms are around me. I’m so startled that I nearly jump right out of them; in fact, I gasp from surprise, but the arms only tighten.

Jonah is holding me. I feel the nubby fleece of his jacket sleeve against one cheek, and his actual arm is under that flannel, in that sleeve, around me. I don’t know what I’ve done to deserve this, to prompt it. My heart is a rabbit’s; my heart is on his sled, racing away through the woods. I tell myself to remember this moment—every detail of it. And one of these details is that Jonah’s patting my back. And another is that he’s murmuring, “It’s okay. It’s okay.” I wish I could look out and see the world from this viewpoint from within Jonah’s arms, but I can’t see anything because my hands are still cover ing my face.

That’s when I realize: My hands are covering my face, which must make Jonah think that I’m crying. He thinks I’m crying about Zabet. He thinks he’s comforting me. That’s why he embraced me.

And though I know it’s terrible, probably my worst crime yet, there’s nothing for me to do but shake in Jonah’s arms and press my hands tighter to my face to make it pink, like I’ve actually been crying. I send a quick apology up to Zabet. (Up? Yes, up.) Then I allow myself to appreciate Jonah’s sleeve, his arms beneath, his voice in my ear.

When he pulls back, I lower my hands from my face and draw a shaky breath. He looks at me with serious eyes, then he does an amazing thing, and tucks away a loose strand of my hair. I feel his finger tips run the length of my forehead and then brush, for an instant, the secret spot behind my ear.

“Okay?” he says.

No
, I think.
After you touched my hair like that,
okay
will never be a word I can use to describe my state of being again.

But I know I should nod, so I nod, and he smiles.

“Okay,” he says. “We’re both okay. Yeah?”

I nod again; it’s all I can manage.

But Jonah, he’s already back to his truck, hopping up into the cab. “See you next Sunday, kiddo,” he says again.

Kiddo,
my mind whispers. As soon as the truck turns, I sit down on the curb, and for some reason that I can’t even begin to explain,
that’s
when I start to cry.

O
N
M
ONDAY
, in the hall at school, I look over to see Hadley matching her steps to mine. I get the feeling that she might give me a shove into the bank of lockers, and I get ready to jump out of the way. But instead of shoving, she starts talking.

“So my parents are obsessed with how Mr. McCabe is.
How did he seem? How did he seem?
” she chirps in a voice that’s got to be her mother’s. “Like I’m a goddamned psychiatrist. What do they want me to say?”

I eye her, not sure how to respond. She doesn’t seem angry with me anymore. In fact, she seems casual, like we talk every day. “That he’s fine? Maybe?” I say, not sure if this answer is right.

“Maaaybe.” She draws the word out. “Do yours do that? Bother you?”

“I didn’t tell my mom I was going over there.” “Smart.” She nods approvingly. Then after a few steps, she says, “I have calc now.”

“Bio,” I say.

We walk for a while without saying anything. I glimpse the kids we pass out of the corner of my eye. I wonder if they’re watching us,
wondering who that girl walking with Hadley Smith is, if she’s tough like Hadley, if she’s bad. I try desperately to think of something to say, something about Mr. McCabe, something about calculus, nothing about Zabet.

Since Hadley told me what she told me out in front of Mr. McCabe’s house, I keep seeing Zabet’s broken face. It squints out at me from a gnarl in a tree, from a knot of my laundry, or from an imprint in the pillowcase I’ve just slept on. I wonder what else Hadley knows, what other classified facts—what broken fingers, what abrasions, what bruises—are suspended like gristle in the meat of her brain.

I’m still thinking about this when we hit the fork between the math and science halls. I wonder what I should do if Hadley heads into the math hall, if I should follow her or just keep going to science without saying good-bye. But she stops at the juncture.

The crowd splits around us; aside from a few rubberneckers, people aren’t staring so hard or long at Hadley anymore. Already people are letting Zabet’s death fade like the facts from last week’s test. A week ago, you’d hear the
zizz
of the first letter of her name, like the chatter of a new type of insect or the spun flint of a lighter. That’s mostly died out now.

“He seemed okay,” Hadley says, and at first I don’t know who she means. “He cooked us dinner. He talked. He seemed, like, okay.”

“Yeah. I mean, how is he supposed to be?”

“Exactly,” she says. “Like, tap dancing?”

“With a cane and top hat.”

“And those steps,” Hadley adds.

“Steps?” I ask.

“You know, those stair steps. The ones they tap-dance down.”

“
Those
steps. Right.”

She socks me in the shoulder and marches away down the hall, boots untied, laces whipping.

She finds me after that, in the hall, at my locker, outside in the bus circle. Each time, I expect it to be the last time, a fluke, but then she finds me again. She slaps my backpack instead of saying good-bye and tugs at the collar of my coat when she wants to make a point. She smells like a baby, soapy and milky, but with a whiff of something sharp—ugly little shreds of tobacco—underneath.

She admits that she can’t stand any of her friends, and I make mention of some of the Whisperers so that she won’t know that she’s my only friend, really, if I can even call her that. I’ve been friendless so long, I think,
Is this how it happens
? And it does just happen, without me trying to make it happen, for once. She finds me again, and she snorts pleasantly at the things I say; she knocks her shoulder into mine. One morning she tells me, “I’ll see you at lunch,” and she does. During passing, I catch myself scanning the crowds for the yellow cap of her hair or listening for her smoker’s cough.

A couple of times I catch her looking at me slyly out from under her bangs.

Finally, I say, “What?”

She blinks and says, “What what?”

“You’re staring. So,
what
?”