The Space Between Trees (15 page)

“Well,” Hadley says finally, yanking the keys out and setting off across the parking lot. I hurry after her, the cigarette butt still in my hand. I drop it on the ground and stop, stomping a few times to grind it out. By the time I’m done, Hadley’s already in the restaurant, the blinds swaying behind her. I jog to the door, picturing Hadley storming the place, shouting for Laura Grossman, taking a handful of the waitress’s polo shirt and shoving her against the wall like in an old cowboy movie. When I get in there, though, Hadley is pressed against the wall herself, near the plastic ferns, looking like she’s lost all her nerve.

She yanks me next to her and nods toward the host stand. “You go.”

I look at the host, a youngish guy with his polo shirt undone an extra button so that the stone of his Adam’s apple can slide up and down his neck with ease. “You’ll come with me?” I ask.

All of Hadley’s previous purpose has been sloughed off. She looks nervous, shy. And it’s strange—surreal even—to see someone as formi dable as Hadley look so vulnerable. I feel suddenly protective, that I will do what I can to take care of her, that I can take care of
this
for her. I loop my arm through hers and take a tottering step
toward the host stand. My feet are as heavy as my head and hands. I can feel my pulse points throbbing in concert with my throat. The host guy is concerned with something hidden by the lip of the stand. He makes marks on it. After a few more jots of the pen, he looks up at me and suits up his grin.

“Hello there!” he says. “Just one today, then?”

“No, uh, two.” I gesture at Hadley, who’s edged herself around behind me. When he glances at her, she dips her head behind my shoulder.

“Sorry ’bout that. Two, then! Table for two!” he calls out, to whom, I don’t know.

He picks out a couple of menus from the slot at the side of the stand. I look around for the woman with the braids from the news, and Hadley shifts so that she’s directly behind me, her chemical breath sweeping along my right cheek.

“But . . . ,” I say.

He looks up, and I catch a flash of annoyance before he fits the grin back on.

“Yes, ma’am?”

“Well, we had a really good waitress in here last time. I think her name was Laura?”

I glance at Hadley, like I’m verifying this with her. She doesn’t nod like I’m hoping she will but stares back at the ferns by the door, her hair falling in front of her face. I want to pinch her. The air in the diner smells like syrup, and all of a sudden I can feel it, thick and sweet, oozing in the cracks of my itching throat.

“Yeah, Laura,” I say with more certainty. “Can we have her again?”

“Aw, I’m sorry.” He tilts his head. “Laura’s off for the afternoon, but another of our waitresses will be happy to help you.”

We follow him to a booth, and we each slide into a side.

“She’s not even here,” I say. “Maybe we should go.”

Hadley picks at the thread that binds her menu and darts a look at the host stand.

“Were you hiding from that guy?”

“Someone else will know something,” she says, and then softly adds, “You’ll ask them, won’t you, Evie?”

“Who would I ask?”

“Our waitress. You could ask her.” She slides her hands toward mine. “You will, right?”

I sigh. My head is foggy. I blink, like that will clear the fog in my head; it does nothing, of course. “And then we’ll go?”

“I’ll drive you home, I’ll turn down your covers, I’ll make you soup and sing you lullabies. Don’t you
love
me, Evie? Aren’t I your
best
friend?”

I squeak my hands against the vinyl of the booth and wonder if it’s the same booth the murderers sat in this morning, if they’ve thumbed through these sugar packets, if the French fries dropped on the floor came from one of their plates.

Our waitress is Vanessa. She has rings on all her fingers, some silver, some gold, some with jewels as big as beetles, some plain. She twists on them—from thumb to pinkie on one hand, then pinkie to thumb on the other—and doesn’t even write down our order.

When she comes back with the drinks, I say, “So the TV news was here today,” which is what Hadley and I have decided I should say.

Vanessa flips a look at me while still pouring my water. “Saw that, did ya?”

“Were you here?”

“Before my shift,” she says tidily, pulling up on the pitcher just before the glass overflows. She scoots away.

“Try again when she comes back,” Hadley says. “Once more and then we’ll go.
Please.
”

When Vanessa brings the food, I waste no time and blurt out, “So do you know the waitress who saw those guys?”

“Guys?” she says, sliding a plate in front of me.

“The ones the news came about.”

She leans in to set down Hadley’s plate. “Not supposed to talk about it, sweetie. Police orders.”

She brushes her glittery hands on her apron and is about to go. Hadley’s attempting to kick at me under the table, but only getting the post. And even though her legs are trying to hurt me, her face is giving me the most pathetic look that says
please
all over again—
please, Evie
.

I draw in a breath and let my mouth start going. “It’s just that we knew the girl they maybe talked about, Zabet McCabe. She was her best friend.” I gesture at Hadley who grants me the nod I want this time. “And I was, well—”

“Sister,” Hadley cuts in.

I glare at her, but her eyes are set on Vanessa, who’s wiping her hands on her apron more slowly now.

“Sister,” Vanessa repeats. “Well, you do,” she says to me. “You look just like her.” And then she’s sliding into the booth next to me, her rings hard through my shirt as she rubs my arms up and down like I need to be warmed up. “I’m so sorry,” she says. “It’s just the worst thing anyone could imagine.”

“Thank you,” I say. “I mean, I appreciate that.” “How are your parents?”

“They’re okay. Sad, of course.” “Of course.” She stops rubbing and scoots back a bit to look at me. She waits until I look up into her crayon-lined eyes. When she’s got my gaze, she nods once. “My favorite aunt was shot in a parking garage. Someone wanted her purse. Shot her—I shouldn’t tell you girls—right in the face.”

“That’s terrible,” I say. “No more terrible than what happened to your sister.” She starts playing with her rings again. Her eyes follow her fingers, flitting from one shiny band to the next. “I don’t know what people in this world . . . I don’t know who could . . . why someone would . . .”

Vanessa tells us that she knows Laura Grossman only a little bit, but that she seems like a “good girl.” She doesn’t know any more about what happened, except that the police were mad the news got here first and so they’d ordered all the diner employees not to say anything. Not that she knows anything, she adds.

“Two young men,” she says with a sigh. “To think that there could possibly be more than one of them.”

Before she goes, she rests her hand for a minute on the crook of my neck, the place where you support a baby’s head so it doesn’t loll backward. “Maybe your sister is somewhere with my aunt. I think that sometimes, that maybe they get sorted to a particular heaven depending on the way they went. Then they’d be together. Think about it: Them together, and me, I’m here with you.”

She leans forward and kisses me on the cheek. Her hair smells like diner food, but in a good way, like it could nourish you. I make Hadley leave right after that, without us even eating anything. We leave money on the table, as much as we think the bill works out to.

“I
NEED TO GET HOME
,” I say to Hadley. We’ve been sitting in her car in the parking lot for five minutes now, Hadley with her hands wrapped around the wheel but the engine left dead. She’s staring at the diner blinds, and I’m afraid that any second Vanessa is going to wander out with a picture of her dead aunt for us to admire.

“Maybe you can go back and ask where Laura Grossman lives. Maybe we could go to her house or apartment or trailer or . . . whatever.”

“She’s not going to tell us that,” I say. “Come on. Let’s go.”

“She might tell you. She loved you.”

“She didn’t love me. She felt sorry for me. Fake sorry.”

“Maybe we could find a phone book.” Hadley chews on the edge of one of her thumbs. “Maybe she’ll come back in for her paycheck or something, if we just wait.” She turns in her seat and looks around the parking lot like Laura Grossman might be there already. She stops halfway through her survey and takes her thumb from her teeth, wiping it dry on the edge of the seat. “Look there.”

“Let’s go.”

“Look!” Hadley hisses, and so I do.

Hadley’s got her eyes fixed at the opposite edge of the parking lot where a few cars are parked with spaces in between like unevenly set teeth. A man, in silhouette, stands at the foot of one of the cars. Even though his features are doused in shadow, I can tell that he’s facing us.

“What? Him?”

“He’s looking at us.”

“He’s probably waiting for somebody,” I say.

“He was in the restaurant,” Hadley says, and she’s cranking the keys. “I saw him in there. They follow you out sometimes.”

As if beckoned by her words, the shadow man takes a step toward us as if he might come over here.

Who follows you?
I start to say, but I’m thrown forward against my seat belt so hard that it locks up, and my question is severed in half. Then the car’s backing up and turning around, fast enough that the tires actually squeal.

Hadley’s driving at the man, right at him. I think that I should tell her to stop, and then I try to, but my voice won’t work. All that comes out is a huff of breath—
Hhhh
—and not the rest of her name. The scary thing is that Hadley looks just how she does when she drives anywhere, down any normal road, her face blank, the wheel steady in her hands. As we get closer, the man’s details get clearer, and I realize that he’s not a man at all but younger, a guy about our age.

The guy sees us coming and tries to scramble up on the trunk of his car. He perches on the edge of the trunk, teeters there a second, but then tilts off, falling onto the ground hard on his side. I close my eyes. I think,
It’s going to crunch; it’s going to thud.
At the moment that it must be too late to stop it from happening, Hadley
hits the brake. The rubber screams, and I’m hanging from my seat belt again for the split-second that the car stops but our bodies still speed forward.

Then I’m back in my seat, and everything’s still—the car, Hadley in the driver’s seat, the ground in front of the car. Hadley unfastens her seat belt and leans her forehead against the wheel. She turns her head sideways, my way. I think maybe she’s hurt. I reach over and brush the hair from her face; her hair is soft as nothing, and her face, when I push her hair back, is quiet like she’s just been sleeping. She blinks and then looks up at me without moving her head.

“I just wanted to scare him,” she says. “I should . . .” I unfasten my own belt. My chest is sore in a stripe where the seat belt was. I reach for the door and get out. For a second, I feel like my legs are going to buckle, but then my knees catch me and I stand. I glance back at the restaurant. The blinds are still down; no one is looking out at us. I tell myself it all happened in a second, it wasn’t that loud. I tell myself that nothing happened at all, not really.

But the guy is there in front of me, evidence, lying on the ground on his back. He coughs and hitches himself up on one elbow, spitting. The glob of spit dangles from his mouth by a filament. He waits for it to drop before looking up at me.

For a second, I think I know him. I think of Jonah Luks, but it’s not Jonah. The guy is about Jonah’s age, though. Otherwise, he’s just a guy, just some guy with startled pale eyes and a hairline receding too early. He looks down at his legs, and I look, too. Hadley’s car had stopped less than a foot from him. Both of us stare at the tires so close to his legs, the place they meet the ground in a crevice of rubber and pavement.

The guy looks back up at me, and it takes me a second to see that his face has fear on it. I want to say something, but I don’t know what. I don’t understand why Hadley had done what she did, so I don’t know how to explain it to him. And an apology just doesn’t seem like enough. I open my mouth, not knowing what will come out of it. But before I can even think of word one, the guy is on his feet and rushing past me in a series of scrabbling, dizzy steps.

He mumbles, “I’m sorry. I didn’t know,” as he goes by. And for a second again, I think that maybe I do know him. But then he’s across the parking lot, pulling open the door to the restaurant, and disappearing inside.

When I get back into the car, Hadley has her forehead pressed to the steering wheel and her eyes closed.

“Hadley—”

She exhales and then lifts her head from the wheel. “We should go,” she says, her voice suddenly flat and businesslike. I watch her adjust the mirrors and her seat methodically, like they make you do at the start of your driving test. I’m scared to speak. Finally, I say, “Do you think that maybe—”

“Put your seat belt on.”

And I almost laugh at the absurdity of this request.