The Space Between Trees (14 page)

Chad takes a step back as if
I’ve
punched
him
. And I feel a surge of power. I want to sink more words into him, word after word, until he curls up on the ground and I stand over him, victorious.

But Hadley has finally gained her feet and stopped her crying. She tugs on my sleeve. “Let’s go. Let’s go,” she pleads in a desperate voice. And so we leave Chad in the doorway, hand still pressed to his cheek, and Tony talking to him quietly. He doesn’t come after us.

We make our way back through the house and out onto the lawn. I don’t see Jonah on our way down. I wish I could’ve heard the rest of the conversation between him and Tony. Tony probably told him that I’d lied about my age . . . well, not lied, but
misled
. The distinction was probably lost on Tony, though. Did Jonah think I was a liar now? Would he be angry? Amused? Indifferent? Probably indifferent, I decide.

When we get to her car, Hadley scoots into the passenger seat and draws her knees to her chest, hiding her face in the crevasse. “Hadley,” I say again and again. Finally I scoop my hands under her chin and pull her face up so that she’s forced to look at me. “What did you take? Pills?”

She scowls, which comforts me. If she’s able to be sullen, she can’t be too bad off. “Fine,” she says, which I take to mean both that she’s fine and also fine, she admits she took the pills. “I just had a couple.”

“A couple of what?” Her scowl deepens, but she doesn’t resist as I search her pockets, coming up with an orange prescription bottle made out in Hadley’s name. I don’t recognize the name of the medication, but the label warns against taking it when drinking, driving a car, or operating heavy machinery. The date, I notice, is three days after Zabet’s death. I feel a pang of sympathy. I brush Hadley’s hair back from her face.

“You just had two?” I ask softly. I shake the bottle. It’s nearly full, which is comforting.

Hadley nods. She seems more awake now, more alert.

“Promise?” I say.

“Promise,” she answers. “I’m fine. They’re already wearing off.”

I drive her home, but when I offer to walk her to the door, she shrugs me off.

“I just want to sleep,” she says firmly.

“But your car.”

She waves a hand in the air. “Bring it back tomorrow.”

“We’ll talk tomorrow?”

“Yes, yes.” We don’t, though—not the next day and not after. When I ask about the party and what had happened in the room with Chad, Hadley gets a somber look on her face and says she doesn’t remember. And I think of the date on that prescription bottle and don’t press it. She’s been through enough. Jonah and I don’t talk about it either. The next time I see him, in Hokepe Woods, he asks if I’ve been to any good parties lately, and I laugh and say, “Every damn night,” and we leave it at that.

T
HE REPORT COMES
with the noon news the week after the party, and so, once again, I see it first, before my mother, Hadley, or Mr. McCabe does. I’m knotted up in my bedsheets, which I’d carried out to the couch that morning, my vision shining with the fever that’s got me home sick, the walls of my throat aching like they want to press slick up against each other like two kids at a dance. Mom suspects strep. I have a doctor’s appointment tomorrow. I almost wish she’d stayed home with me like she did when I was little.

“There’s soup in the pantry,” she had said with a little wave as she trotted out the door.

So there I am, possibly streppy, flipping channels between the soap opera dames and the game show dicks when Zabet’s face winks out at me. At first, I think it’s just something that my imagination has spit up, like her face in my laundry or in the knot of a tree, but this face isn’t the bruised and beaten Zabet of Hadley’s description. The image from the television is still on the backs of my eyes: Zabet’s yearbook photo.

I’ve seen a lot of this photo lately, and it’s awful—not the photo itself, which is a fine one that shows Zabet smiling like she always smiled, her eyes lost in the puff of her cheeks. What’s awful is how
the TV stations keep showing this picture. Yearbook photos are supposed to catch an instant in your life while you’re growing up, but flashing Zabet’s photo like they do just reminds everyone that she won’t be growing up any more than she was already able to.

I flip back to the channel where I saw Zabet’s picture. Actually, I’m not sure it’s the right channel, because the picture isn’t up there anymore; it’s a waitress instead. She’s got sharp eyes and a thick, gloss-tinged lower lip that, together, make her look like she’s plotting and pouting both at the same time. She’s wearing a requisition polo shirt, and her hair is done in two complicated braids that rest like badges on each side of her chest.

“. . . didn’t think they would find the body so soon,” she’s saying, nodding with each word. “I wrote it down here.” She holds up her order pad. “But I would remember it even if I hadn’t.”

The scene switches to the news reporter standing at the edge of the parking lot with the diner where the waitress works squatting behind her. The reporter’s eye shadow matches her jacket. She says some phrases that sound like they belong in the script of a cop show—“ongoing investigation” and “crucial break.” She raises her eyebrows every few seconds to make sure we all understand how important she is. Then it’s back to the desk anchors, who put on their concerned faces and announce that they’ll report more about all this on the five-o’clock news.

Fever-dazed, I punch through the channels looking for a repeat of Zabet’s face; instead I find the same polo, pout, and braids. The waitress is on one of the other news stations. At the bottom of the screen, next to the stamp of the news station are the words
Laura Grossman—Eyewitness?

“. . . whispering,” Laura Grossman says. “I’m not a suspicious sort of person, but they were down there hunkered over the table going back and forth about something.” She inhales noisily, like each sentence takes a full breath to get out. “Then when I went over to refill, I heard one of them say, ‘I didn’t think they’d find the body so soon.’”

“Are those words exact?” the off-screen reporter asks. I can see only the swing of her bob, the dark bulb of her microphone.

“I wrote it down,” Laura Grossman says. She holds up her order pad. “But I would’ve remembered it anyway.”

I squint at the order pad, but the words are blotted out by the light of the camera.

The station switches to a pretty reporter with a scarf knotted neatly under her chin. From the shot of the restaurant behind her, I can tell that she’s on the other side of the parking lot from where the first reporter was standing. From this angle, I recognize the diner—it’s the twenty-four-hour place where Hadley and I were last weekend, which gives me a little chill. What if the killers were there that night? Two among the guys from the party? What if I’d asked one of them to meet me in the parking lot? To take me upstairs? What if it was Chad, that guy from the party who’d attacked Hadley? What if it was him and Tony? Not that I could imagine Tony killing anyone.

The new reporter explains what the other reporter must have revealed at the beginning of the segment—waitress Laura Grossman believes that she overheard two men discussing the murder of local teenager Elizabeth McCabe. I wait to see if they’ve caught the men, if they have descriptions or sketches, but the segment ends there, with a promise to report more later.

I click the TV off and wrap my sheets tighter around myself. It feels like there’s something I should be doing. Since I saw the body bag in Hokepe Woods, it’s always felt like there’s something I should be doing. I consider calling Hadley, Mr. McCabe, someone. Jonah? Hadley’s in school, though, and Mr. McCabe is at work. And I have neither the phone number nor the nerve to call Jonah. Besides, I figure, if the story’s on the news, they’ll hear about it eventually. In fact, I tell myself, they might already know now, might be thinking right this minute,
Should I call Evie?

I consider the waitress, Laura Grossman. I admire the presence of mind it took to write down the men’s words on her order pad. I’m certain that I, too, given the opportunity, would have noticed the men’s suspicious behavior, would have found a way to draw close to their conversation. I imagine myself pouring them coffee, trying to keep my hand from shaking.

I fall asleep and wake up with my throat pulsing and my tongue mucus-stuck to the roof of my mouth. The light in the room has changed, and the shadows drip longer over my legs. Instead of feeling like a different hour, it feels like a different season. Beneath all of this is a ticking . . . no, a rapping. Someone is hitting the door with such evenly spaced knocks that they’ve become background noise—the pendulum of a clock, the drip of a faucet. I gather my bedsheets around me—being sick makes me feel that they should go where I go—and look through the peephole. Hadley stands on the porch, swinging her fist in rhythm. I unlock and open.

“Jesus,” she says, taking a look at me; then she marches in. “I was going to ask you to cough on me so I could miss school, but, Jesus. I don’t know if I want whatever”—she waves a hand at me—“
that
is.”

“I’m sick,” I offer.

“You’re gross.”

“Thanks.” I shuffle back to the couch.

She sits carefully on a chair, first pulling a sweater from it with a thumb and forefinger.

“How was school?”

“Ugh,” she says.

She sticks out her lower lip and blows upward so that her bangs rise and fall. The light from the window or maybe the muzziness of my fever blurs her hair, making it shine up off of her head like a nimbus. I don’t know if she’s seen the news report, don’t know if I should bring it up.

“Did you—”

“Yes,” she says. “About a hundred and seventeen people told me.”

“Yeah?”

“They kept saying the exact same thing: They found Zabet’s killer. They found Zabet’s killer.”

“They didn’t actually find—”

“I know that.”

Hadley is in one of her dangerous moods, her eyes shiny and her fingers working at the zipper of her hooded sweatshirt. I sit a little farther back in my nest, pulling the sheets up near my chin.

“Are you going to get dressed?” she says, like I’ve agreed to do so hours ago and she’s been sitting here this entire time, waiting.

“I’m sick.”

Hadley gets up and sits next to me. She lifts a hand, and I flinch, though it’s just a reflex; obviously she isn’t going to hit me. Hadley presses the back of her hand to my forehead. She considers for a minute and then pulls her hand away, wiping it on her jeans.

“You know what would make you feel great?” she asks. She reaches forward and gathers my hair in her hands, twisting it up off the back of my neck. “I’m going to pour you a glass of orange juice while you get dressed.”

“I’m wearing my pajamas. I’m sick.”

“You’ll feel better when you’re dressed.” She smiles and nods encouragingly.

I sigh. “Where do you want me to go?”

“Come on. I’ll help you get up.”

“That diner, right? Where the waitress is?”

“Come on, Evie. Up and at ’em.”

She offers me her hands.

The drive out to the diner is an uncomfortable one. Hadley blasts the heater in my face, promising that the air will heal me. Really, it’s too warm outside for a heater, and the hot, dry air just makes my throat want to turn inside out. I cough into my hand and lean my head against the window.

“This is silly,” I say. “I should be in bed.” “I know,” Hadley says, soothing me. “I know.”

The fields outside are flat and muddy with shoots of spring grass, the gray-green of the ground a dark band under the gray of the sky.
It’s a line
, I tell myself of the gray horizon.
It’s a path.
Birds rise and fall in the distance like someone is pulling on their strings.

The diner is in the crotch of the highway entrance, the parking lot half full, no news vans, no police cars. Maybe they’re there anyway, undercover. The blinds in the diner are pulled down to keep out the afternoon sun. We sit in the car for a while. Hadley smokes a cigarette, and I dial around the radio band until she bats my hand away. She offers me the end of her cigarette, and I take it, pulling the smoke, hot and terrible, into my ruined throat. Though I know it’s bad, it feels good, like I’m purging something, some ancient medical remedy—bitter tinctures, leeches, herbs inhaled over a fire.