The Space Between Trees (18 page)

“It’s all mud out there.”

“I don’t mind mud.”

He stares at me for a second, and I try to make myself look hardy and capable. I pull my shoulders back and widen my stance.

“I like mud,” I say stupidly. “It’s dirt. It’s earth. It’s . . . muddy.”

Jonah shakes his head. “Go on home.”

He starts walking again. I trip after him, bumping along next to the sled because he won’t let me catch up.

“Please,” I say.

“Go home, kiddo,” he says, tough as Hadley.

“You know my name,” I tell him, and I’m pleased to hear that my voice is tough, too.

Jonah turns around at that, the pull of the sled winding around his ankles.

“You do.” I take a step back. “You said it. I heard you say it when—”

But his expression isn’t angry. It’s amused. He huffs out a breath and tips his head up to look at the sky like maybe he can wait me out, maybe when he looks down, I’ll be gone. But I’m not.

“I know why you want to go out there.”

I don’t say anything.

“It’s no . . . joke or something, some gossip,” he says to the sky.

“She went to my school,” I tell him. “I knew her, and she was . . .”

“Your friend,” he finishes for me.

“No,” I say. “She wasn’t my friend. I just knew her, that’s all.”

He tips his head back down, and this is when I can tell that he’s going to say yes. He surveys the backyards laid out on either side of us. They’re empty, pools, swing sets, sun decks empty of pets and people. “This isn’t a good time to be taking girls into the woods.”

“I’m not going to get you in trouble or anything like that.”

He shrugs and steps out of the tangled sled rope. “Come on, then, Evie.”

I haven’t been in these woods since I was a kid with Zabet; even then, they never seemed wild. I wanted them to be wild the way woods were in books. I used to tell Zabet stories of kids getting lost in woods and how, if their parents couldn’t find them quick enough, they’d turn into whatever creature of the woods laid claim to them first—rabbit, rock, or tree. After that, Zabet would pick up stones and look for petrified faces in them or knock on tree trunks as if someone might answer.

Jonah’s sled makes the same noise it does when I follow it out among the houses; of course, it’s louder when I’m next to it. It makes me feel like the volume has been turned up on everything. Not just the volume, but all my senses. I can see every prick of stubble on Jonah’s cheek, and when the sleeve of his shirt touches the back of my hand, I feel it like a chill all the way up my arm.

“We’ll walk my route,” Jonah says.

It’s not nearly as muddy as Jonah made it sound. Last month’s rains have mostly stopped, and the only mud that’s left is in patches here and there. In fact, the woods are pretty, greening up from the May sunshine, and here I am walking through them with Jonah on a bright spring morning. It’s so perfect that I can almost forget what we’re walking toward.

Jonah has a piece of paper in his jacket pocket. Every once in a while, we pass a tree with a ribbon tied to its trunk and he unfolds the paper and ticks something off. Otherwise, all he does is scan the ground, kicking up a patch of leaves here and there to make sure nothing’s buried underneath. Before when I pictured Jonah in the woods, I thought that maybe he’d whistle or break off a stick and hit it against the tree trunks he passes. He just walks, though, yanking on his sled if it gets caught on an old branch or rock.

I follow after him, thinking,
This is where Zabet walked. This is where the killer walked.
My footsteps in theirs.
I think of Zabet as a tree, a stone, a rabbit. Jonah looks over at me a few times like he needs to verify something about me. I straighten my back and try to smile. It comes out wrong (I can feel that it does), so I try talking instead. I can always talk.

“Do you find something every time?” I ask.

“Usually,” he says. “At least something small.”

“How often a deer?”

He pauses, calculates. “Maybe every third time. Used to be less.”

“That’s so many.”

“Yeah.” He brushes the back of his neck with his palm, like something is tickling him. We walk on.

After a minute, he says, “I think someone’s poisoning them.”

“Like
poison
poison? For-real poison?”

“They’ve got this foam coming out of their mouths, and they didn’t used to. I looked it up in one of Mr. Jefferson’s books, and, well, it said maybe it could be from poison.”

“Who would do that?”

He shrugs. “Someone. Anyone. People don’t like them in their gardens.”

“You mean, like, one of the people here? In the houses?” My voice is too loud.

He looks at me sidelong. “Don’t tell anyone I said that.”

“I won’t,” I say, trying to hide my delight over the fact that Jonah’s told me a secret. I’ve heard people describe secrets as dropping into them like stones in a pond, but this one rises in me like bread. A secret from Jonah. I immediately promise myself that I won’t tell even Hadley.

“Can you try to catch them? The poisoners?”

Jonah stops. He doesn’t scan the ground this time, just fixes his eyes on a spot in front of him—a muddy space between two trees. “There,” he says.

I stop, too, next to him. “There is . . . there?”

He nods and sighs and puts his weight back on his heels.

I expected it to look remarkable, the spot where Zabet died. I expected branches torn down, scratches in the dirt, and tatters of police tape, but it looks like the rest of the woods. No clues, no signs. Someone could walk right past this spot, right over it, without ever knowing what they were walking on. I take another couple of steps forward, right up to the place where Jonah is staring.

“Here?” I say. He nods.

The dirt is poked through with new shoots of green. It seems wrong that anything could grow there. But I don’t know what I expected—the ground to be barren, withered? I crouch and press the palm of my hand on the spot. The earth is soft and muddy, and my hand settles into it, the dirt pressing up between my fingers.

I look around me. We’re in deep enough that I can’t see any houses or the road.

“How do you know where we are?” I ask Jonah.

He shrugs, taps the pocket that the paper is in. “I’ve walked around here a lot.”

I tip my face up, like he did earlier, to the trees rising up around me. Their branches tent and intersect like fingers.
This is the last thing she saw
, I think, and then I lose my balance and find myself sitting hard right in the mud.

“Fuck,” I say.

Jonah looks like he’s about to laugh; then suddenly, staring down at me, his eyes change and he doesn’t look like he’s going to laugh at all. I wonder if it’s me that’s making him look this way and think frantically about what it could be about me that makes him so serious. I look down at my faded jeans, my legs splayed flat in the mud, and my knees, bony, but not disgusting—at least I don’t think you’d call them disgusting. I push myself up to my feet and look down to see that now the ground is marked with me now—my hand-, foot-, and ass-prints. The seat of my jeans is damp and muddy. I try to brush it off, but my hands are muddy, too.

Jonah pulls a handkerchief out of his back pocket and offers it to me. I stare at it instead of taking it.

“You carry that?”

It’s light blue shot through with white thread.

“Yeah.”

“My grandpa carries those.”

“Take it,” he says.

I do and just hold it.

“Don’t worry, it’s clean,” he tells me.

“I know. I don’t want to get it dirty.”

He laughs. “It’s for getting dirty.”

I’m embarrassed but pleased. I’ve made him laugh. I give him a shrug that says,
Okay, if you say so,
and wipe my hands carefully, one and then the other, leaving streaks of dirt on the cloth. “I . . .” I hold it out to him and then snatch it back. “I’ll wash it.”

His eyes have crept back to the place in the mud. I watch him watch it.

“Was it awful? Finding her?”

“Sure.” He nods, scuffs a foot in the leaves.

“I mean,
duh
. Of course,” I say.

Jonah sweeps his foot in an arc, back and forth on the same path, and the leaves catch and fold on his heel. Like I’m watching myself do it, I walk over to him. I stand right next to him, just at the end of the arc his foot makes, stopping it with my toes. And when he doesn’t move or look up or say anything, I take his wrist—I don’t dare to touch his hand, his bare skin—and lean against his upper arm. I can feel the cloth of his shirt on my cheek. I tell myself to inhale, so I do. There’s no smell to him—not cigarettes like Hadley or garlic like Mr. McCabe or lotions like my mother—just the damp of the mud and the trees, which is maybe the forest and maybe him
and maybe both of them together. We sway a little with the movement of his foot. I sway with him, smell his nothing smell and sway.

“Were her eyes open?” I say against his sleeve.

His foot travels half of the arc, then stops.

“Did you see her eyes?” I ask.

He steps to the side, and his wrist slips out of my hand. I close my hands like maybe I’ll catch it there, but my fingertips only press against each other.

“I’ve got the whole rest of the woods to do,” he says.

“You do?” I press my fingers into my fingers. I can still feel the cotton of his sleeve against my skin, can still feel it along all the little hairs there, a presence, an absence. “I mean, okay.”

He points. “You walk that way, you’ll hit houses.”

“Sure. I can practically see them now.” I take a couple of steps. “Thanks for—”

“Not a problem,” he says. He flashes a brief, unhappy smile and looks away.

I want to apologize, but I’m sure that it’ll only make things worse. I’ve been stupid and spoken when I should have been silent. Still, I can’t completely regret the question. Even if it cost me Jonah’s arm, his sway, Jonah himself, I’m not entirely sure I’d take it back. I take a few more steps before I turn back. Jonah’s cut to the right of the trees and the mud where I fell—the spot, the there, the there where he came upon her, her face bashed into rocks and soil and tree roots. He steps around it now, careful not to tread on the spot. His sled drags out behind him in an arc, its runners cutting through the mud and tracing a circle around the place where she once lay.

I
FIND MY WAY OUT
, walking the direction Jonah had said I should. Soon the trees break off into a neat line of backyards, and I’m behind the modern house where I saw Jonah go in to call 911. I imagine the puff of his breath on the phone. How did he explain it? What words did he use?
I found a dead girl.
Or did he work up to it like I did with my lines this morning?
I was walking through the woods. . . .
I walk out of the woods between the modern house and the one next to it, passing the garden where I had hidden that morning. I glance down, into the bushes, almost expecting to see myself staring back up at me, or maybe it’s Zabet who I think I’ll see, but, of course, no one’s there but the same string of ants, like a sentence inked on the ground.

I play over the question I had asked Jonah and cringe.
Were her eyes open?
I’d upset him. He probably doesn’t like to remember it. Though I still think that he has the better half of the deal. It’s better to have seen her than to have to imagine her, to have one fixed, forsure Zabet instead of dozens of possible dead Zabets lying akimbo in your head—some with their eyes open, some with their eyes closed.

I don’t go over to Hadley’s like I’d promised her I would. She’s probably still asleep, and besides, I just don’t feel like talking to her.
This is new. Usually I make up reasons to talk to Hadley like she’s some boy I have a crush on. I pass by her locker when it’s not on my route or call her with homework questions I know she can’t answer. I can’t explain why I don’t want to talk to her now, now especially, when I have a something worth telling her. She’ll make me take her back there, I’m sure. But what’s the matter with that? It’s just a little patch of mud. What harm can Hadley cause to a little patch of mud?
She’s asleep anyway,
I tell myself again. When I get home, though, Mom says that Hadley’s already called twice.

“Woke me up,” she says, shaking her pretty head like it’s beyond belief. “Tell her not before nine.” She spins a chair out from the kitchen table with a flourish. And what can you do when someone spins a chair out with a flourish but go ahead and sit in it?

“Juice?” she asks, and before I can answer, she’s pouring me a glass. “I thought teenagers hated getting up early. When I was your age, you couldn’t have gotten me up before noon, not with an alarm clock, not with a rooster, not with a marching band.”

“Sorry,” I mutter. “She usually sleeps in.”

Mom’s behind me; she places her hands on my shoulders and presses down a little bit, like she’s pressing me into my seat.

“Do you know what she said? She said, ‘Make sure she calls me.’ She said it twice. ‘Make sure she calls me.’ And when I said of course I would, she repeated it again.”

“So?”

“Does she think I wouldn’t give you a phone message?”