The Space Between Trees (11 page)

She reaches out and flicks me on the nose. “That’s what.”

I tell Hadley about Jonah, but for real, not the way I tell the Whisperers. I tell her how he was the one who had found Zabet, and she gets a look on her face like she’s packing everything she owns in a
suitcase, looking at each object before she drops it in. Something about the look on her face keeps me from telling her that I was there, too. And then there’s the body bag; I don’t want to have to mention that.

“He in college?” she asks about Jonah, and I vaguely remember some rumor about Hadley and college boys.

“He dropped out.”

She sniffs. “And now he picks up dead animals . . . and dead girls.”

“Geez,” I say.

“Geez what? It’s true. Maybe he liked finding a girl in the woods. Maybe he’s creepy.”

“He’s not. He’s okay.”

“You never know about guys.” She looks out from under her bangs. “You in love with him or something?”

I had thought things might change between Jonah and me after that hug. I spent the whole week wrapping my arms around myself, trying to recreate the feeling of it. But when I saw Jonah the next Sunday, we were back to our old ways, him grunting and nodding while I babbled on about animal carcasses. I stood close to him just before he got into his truck to go—as close as I dared—my body humming with the week-old ghost of his embrace. “’Scuse me, there,” he said, so I moved. I don’t tell Hadley about that, either.

Hadley tells me everything—things people say that are meant to be comforting but end up being terrible, more details of the autopsy that have floated up in her parents’ voices through the vent in her bedroom, last night’s nightmare, the whole story about how she had seen Zabet the afternoon before she died. She’d picked her up and driven over to the mall, where they’d walked the circuit from Coney Dog to Waldenbooks and back.

“What was the last thing she said to you?” I ask.

She squints at me. “What?”

“The last thing she said. Her last words.”

“I don’t know. I don’t remember. Probably just ‘bye.’”

“You don’t ever think about it? Like, try to remember?”

“She said ‘bye,’ okay? Just ‘bye,’” Hadley snaps, and I don’t ask her about it again.

All of Hadley’s nightmares are set in the mall. She claims that they wouldn’t be scary to anyone but her. She describes them in an offhand voice between bites of French fries. Sometimes, in her dream mall, the clothes racks rattle with empty hangers; sometimes the corridors bend and twist and she can’t find her way out; sometimes the stores aren’t selling their normal wares, but, instead, people she knows. “My optome trist,” she says, “Coach Kenk, my Aunt Beth . . . some of them are on sale, with the big red tags. Some of them are bargains. And, I always think,
Good! Sell them all.
Everyone’s so stupid. Zabet, she was stupid, too, letting some guy do that to her. I hate everyone, Evie. If I’m being honest, I hate everyone most of the time. Even her. Even you.”

I don’t have any nightmares to tell. The body bag refuses to parade through my dreams, or if it does, it doesn’t leave a print. I sleep right through the night now—ten hours, eleven—without dreams, even though sometimes I wake with the feeling that someone has been standing right over me, breathing. Sleeping isn’t hard. Lying in the dark room, waiting to sleep—that’s the hard part. I call Jefferson Wildlife Control just to hear the voice on the machine, the beep, the silence that comes after.

A
FEW WEEKS LATER
, Hadley and I have dinner with Mr. McCabe again—our fourth dinner in as many weeks. Since our first dinner with Mr. McCabe, Hadley hasn’t mentioned the fact that I lied about being friends with Zabet. In fact, now she covers for me, including my name in stories about things she and Zabet had done together. The first time that she did this, I looked up at her, startled, and she gave me a secret smile as she spoke, like saying,
Yes. This is okay.
And so now I have a whole new history, one that includes late-night calls, home-pierced ears, and summer-break doldrums with Hadley and Zabet. When Hadley tells Mr. McCabe things like, “But it was Evie who said we shouldn’t miss curfew,” I can almost believe it happened that way myself.

Tonight, Mr. McCabe makes the same spaghetti he always does.

“I should expand my repertoire,” he says. “Sorry, girls, I’m one-note.”

“Don’t say that,” Hadley says, twirling up more on her fork. “It’s really good.” To prove her point, she takes a bite.

Mr. McCabe shakes his head, visibly pleased by her words. “You could ask Elizabeth—it’s either this or lasagna or something out of a box. And it’ll be nothing out of a box for you girls.”

“It could be, like, a tradition,” I say.

He sends a finger at me in a swoop. His energy is still frenetic, his gestures and cadences like a hopped-up game-show host’s. I wonder if he’s always this hyper; I get the feeling that it’s just when we’re around.

At the end of dinner, Mr. McCabe holds out his hands, each closed into a fist—one toward Hadley, one toward me. I glance at Hadley, and she’s already extended her hand, palm open, under his. So I do the same. Mr. McCabe leans forward, his shoulders up around his ears, looking like he’s getting ready to bound up onto the table. He opens his hands, and something light and feathery falls into mine.

I examine what I’ve got—a thin, tarnished chain with a glass globe strung on it, a tiny gold seed suspended in the globe’s center. I remember this. I saw it hanging around Zabet’s neck, but I was always too far away to see what was in the globe. Once I saw her tuck her chin under the chain and tip the globe into her mouth, pulling it out shiny with spit. I look over at Hadley. She has a necklace strung between her fingers, too. The chain is gold, and lined up along the center is a row of glass beads. She looks over at what I’ve got, and something moves over her face, running like a tremor through her eyes and cheeks and burying itself at her mouth, which she tightens up, forcing it into a smile.

Mr. McCabe sits back, satisfied. “I thought you girls might like those. They were Elizabeth’s, and well, what would I do with them besides get them out and look at them from time to time?” And . . . though he says this lightly, it sounds like that is what he, in fact, really
does
want to do with the necklaces instead of give them to us. “They should be worn.”

“Thank you,” Hadley and I both say together.

“That’s a mustard seed.” Mr. McCabe tips his chin at me. “Elizabeth’s mother wore that in the seventies. It’s supposed to be good luck.”

“Zabet wore it all the time,” Hadley tells me, then adds. “I mean, you know that.”

Mr. McCabe points to the necklace in my hand. “She wasn’t wearing it when—” Mr. McCabe stops and wipes a napkin over his mouth like he’s going to mop up the end of his sentence.
She wasn’t wearing it when she was killed.
Is that what he means? I glance over at Hadley, but she’s gazing down at her own necklace. Mr. McCabe looks at us miserably. “The police do the best they can,” he says. “I know that. I have to believe that. But I had thought by now—well, I guess it was only a hope—I had
hoped
by now that they’d have found him.”

Hadley and I are both still. This is new, Mr. McCabe confiding in us about the murder investigation, and I worry that if I move or speak, he might remember himself and stop talking.

Hadley, as always, is bolder. “Do they have any suspects?” she inserts smoothly, still looking down at her hands.

“Huh,” Mr. McCabe huffs. “Huh. They don’t call them suspects anymore.
Persons of interest
, that’s what they say. And, no. None they’ve told me about. No persons of interest. No one’s interesting. Everyone’s boring.” He shakes his head. “My brother keeps saying, ‘Wouldn’t you like ten minutes in a room alone with him? He killed your daughter. Wouldn’t you like ten minutes alone with him cuffed to a chair and the police and lawyers out for a long coffee break?’” Mr. McCabe stops shaking his head and looks right at me. It takes all my
will not to look away. His eyes are not angry, not sad, but startled, as if he is watching something he can’t quite believe is happening. “And I would. I’d take those ten minutes. But not to hit him, not to . . . just to ask him, ‘Why? Why did you? How could you?’”

I break his gaze.

“Well, it’s good luck, in any case,” he repeats. “The necklace is.”

I bring the seed up to my eye. I wonder how long it’s been suspended in the glass. I wonder if it was planted now, like, in the ground, could it still sprout? Through the glass globe, I see Hadley staring at me and the necklace.

“Do you want to switch?” I ask.

“No,” she says, and I can tell she’s lying. Then to Mr. McCabe, “No, I love mine.” She holds it up with the clasp open. “Will you help me?”

Mr. McCabe assists each of us, his hands fumbling at the backs of our necks. The globe of my necklace fits in the divot of my collarbone, swinging forward and then bouncing back against my throat when I reach for my cup. When we leave, Mr. McCabe walks us to the door, and we can see the shadow of his face in one of the glass cutouts, watching as we pull out of the driveway and down the street.

I touch my necklace, pushing the globe deeper into my skin until it presses against my windpipe. Hadley glances over at it again.

“Do you want it? You can have it.” I reach to undo the clasp. Really, I’m insincere. I want to keep the mustard seed necklace for myself, so I’m hoping that she’ll say no. In fact, I’ve made my voice eager and my gestures quick in order to startle a no out of her, and I pause with my hands on the clasp, waiting for her to demur.

“No, no, you keep it,” she finally says. After a few more miles, she says, “Zabet really liked it a lot. She believed in the luck part. Guess she was wrong, huh?”

She punches in the cigarette lighter, but when it pops back out, she doesn’t take it. She raps a fist against her forehead. “I don’t want to go home. Do you have to?”

I don’t. Mom is on a date with a car salesman Veronica introduced her to, so she has no need for my company. On her date nights, she paints streaks of blush so high up her cheeks that the pink powder stains her hairline. Her regular poses and pauses change into something less refined, something baser and looser—a blow-up doll, a big dumb girl. Instead of
come hither
, she telegraphs
get on over here, you!

She comes back from these dates late and tipsy. I always make sure that I’m in my room with the lights out by the time she bumps around the kitchen, knocks bottles off the shelf in the bathroom, curses when the water is too cold, and finally collapses with a sigh of bedsprings. In the morning she’s pale and sweaty from last night’s wine, her face like some pearly-fleshed mollusk. She presses the heel of her hand into her forehead as she sips her coffee. “Why do I do it?” she always asks. The one time I actually offered an answer to this question, she didn’t speak to me for a week.

In the car, I tell Hadley, “I have some time.”

We end up at a diner near the highway. I order a pop, but Hadley gets another meal: coffee and a plate of pancakes.

“I need to get the taste of spaghetti out of my mouth,” she says and then looks stricken for a second. “God, I’m such a bitch,” she sighs.

I don’t say anything, because I know that when she calls herself a bitch, she doesn’t mean it to be entirely an insult. There’s a table of
guys across the aisle all with coffees and no food. I don’t recognize them from school, so maybe they’re older. A couple of them sneak glances at Hadley, her hank of light hair, her laced-up boots, her tough-girl clothes, her sneer.

A few of Hadley’s old friends are playing quarters at a booth near ours. They wave at us shyly, and Hadley returns a weary salute.

“They suck,” she whispers to me, and I’m more pleased by this than I should be. Twice, kids at school have come up to me in the halls to ask if I know where Hadley is, and when she was sick one day, the guidance counselor sent the packet of her missed homework with me. We’re considered best friends now; we’re considered a pair.

While we’re waiting for our food, we blow straw wrappers at each other and use the jam containers as bricks for a miniature pyramid. We stare out at the entrance ramp to the parking lot, which beads up with a steady string of cars. There’s been an away game, and we see the school buses return, their headlights high and familiar.

“Ugh. They’re coming back,” Hadley says and rests her head on the tabletop, a chunk of her hair landing in something sticky, probably syrup from her pancakes. She spends the next few minutes dabbing at it with a wet napkin and picking the strands apart.

“I feel drunk,” she announces a few minutes later.

“All you’ve had is coffee.”

“And syrup.”

“Wicked combo.”

She snorts. “Yeah, wicked. You ever been drunk?”

“No,” I say.

She studies me. “No.” She agrees that I haven’t. “Have you ever hitchhiked?” She nods out to the highway.

“No. You?”

She rolls her eyes. “I have a car, dummy. Have you ever—” “I’ve never nothing.” “God, Evie. You’re sixteen. You should do
something
.” She looks around. For something for me to do, I guess. Her eyes land on the table across from ours. “Go talk to those guys.”

I feel myself blush at the suggestion. The boys aren’t looking at us now; they’re hunched over the center of the table, doing something furtive with the sugar packets. “I don’t have anything to say.”

“Pick one and tell him to meet you in the parking lot to make out.” She says this like it’s nothing.

“Sure. Right.
Hi, stranger.
”

Hadley shrugs. “He’ll come.”

“No,” I whisper.

“Of course he will. He’s a guy.” She shrugs again.

I try to keep my eyes half lidded, my voice nonchalant. “Is that something people, like, do? I mean, have you?”

“Shit!” Hadley says. “They’re leaving.”

She slides out of the booth and grabs my hand. It’s all I can do to latch on to a sleeve of my coat and pull it after me.

“We haven’t paid!” I say, but we’re already out the door and in the parking lot, stamping our feet against the chill of the spring night.