The Space Between Trees (21 page)

“Where’s Jonah?” I ask.

“Home sick, missing you,” he says and rocks with laughter.

I don’t call Hadley after my paper route, and she doesn’t call me either, so I tell myself that, unlikely though it seems, maybe she forgot about Jonah and the woods today. That afternoon, Mom is out at the store and I’m sitting on my bed, looking at the trap I’d stolen from Jonah’s truck. I think I’ve figured out how to load it. I don’t dare do it, though, because even touching the trap at its base with only the tip of my pinky finger calls up the feel of the metal jaws snapping shut on my wrist, biting through my skin, teeth wedging themselves in my bones.

Then I hear it from my bedroom, a sound I’ve listened for before, those times I’ve woken in the middle of the night, my dreams laid out around me, my fears there with them. It’s the sound of the front door’s knob turning back and forth. I consider barricading my bedroom or wriggling out the window, but in the end, like the stupid girl, the inevitable victim, I walk out to meet it. My breath is a balloon in my throat, my heart a pump. I tell myself that I’ve made the sound up, confused it with some other sly, metal scritching—a neighbor raking out flowerbeds, a mouse in the walls. But then I’m there in the front room, and I see it for myself, the doorknob twisting one way then the other in a frantic little shimmy. I back up toward the kitchen, toward the drawer with the knives. Before I get there, the rattling stops and someone starts knocking—rapid knocks that land not just in one place but all over the door. “Open up!” I hear Hadley call. “Open up!”

At the sound of her voice, all the fear rushes out of me in a whoosh of breath, and I run to the door and unlock it. Hadley bursts in and slams it behind her, locking it and leaning back against it. She looks silly leaning against the door like that, like she’s keeping out the zombies and vampires and maniacs with chainsaws. When she’s sure that the door is secure, she runs to the front window. She sweeps her gaze over the street.

“What are you doing?”

She ignores me and heads down the hall to my bedroom, peering out the window there. Then she turns and sighs with relief, tipping her head back so that it rests against the pane. I think of the blot of hair grease that she’ll leave behind and how Mom will go at it with a cloud of spray and a paper towel. At Hadley’s house it’d remain unnoticed for weeks, forever.

“He’s gone now,” Hadley says.

“Who’s gone?”

“That guy. The one from the parking lot.”

“What are you talking about?”

“The guy I hit with my car.”

“You didn’t hit him.”

“Fine. The one I
almost
hit. He’s following me.”

I picture him, the guy in the parking lot, how I stood over him, how he had a look on his face like I might kick him, like he was
afraid
of me.

“Come on. He’s not
following
you.”

“I knew you’d say that, but he was outside my house today.”

“What—just, like, standing in your front lawn?”

“
No
,” she says as if I’m purposely being dense. “In a car, but I can tell it’s him anyway.”

“What car?”

“It’s a rusty red thing, dark red—what do you call it? Burgundy. Maroon. A junker.”

“And you think it’s him?”

“I know it’s him.”

“In a maroon junker.”

“I could see him through the window. It’s him.” “You could get the license plate number,” I suggest.

“Sure, why don’t I do that, Evie? Why don’t I lie down under his back wheels? Why don’t I knock on the window and ask if I can sit in his lap?”

I’m grinning now, but Hadley’s unperturbed. She scratches her elbow, certain, so certain.

“He’s not following you,” I say.

Hadley looks at me, her mouth screwed to one side as if I’ve confirmed something disappointing about myself, something that she hoped she’d be wrong about. She gives all her attention to her elbow again, scratches it.

“He could’ve followed Zabet just the same,” she murmurs.

She rotates her arm and studies the palms of her hands as if she expects to see something there—mud? Blood? She closes it into a fist.

“Had?” I say. “Hadley?”

She looks suddenly sad, deflated of her certainty and self-righteousness. I crouch down in front of her and put a cautious hand on her arm. She mumbles something, but it’s too soft, and I have to ask her to repeat it.

“Do you think I’m next?” she says.

“Next?”

“After Zabet. The next one.”

“No. Oh, no.” I feel a burst of sympathy and also relief. I’m shaking my head rapidly, though I don’t tell her that this is the same thought that I’ve had a hundred times, only about myself, that
I’m
next, the next one, the next victim. I know that the Whisperers fear it, too.
I don’t go outside at night anymore, not even into my backyard
, one says in the tenor of a confession, and the others nod
yes, yes
. So maybe we’re all thinking it:
I’m next.
Maybe that’s part now, of being . . . what? Young? A girl?

“Yeah, no,” Hadley says with a phlegmy little laugh. She uncurls her fists, gives me a push, and says, “Not me.”

She stares off over my shoulder. I’ve completely forgotten about the trap right out there on my bed in plain sight, and so for a second I don’t know what’s made Hadley’s eyes light up the way they do. By the time I turn, she’s already rushed past me and is sitting on my bed next to the trap, running her fingers along its jawline.

“What’s this?” she says with a hint of glee.

“Nothing.”

“You could trap a moose with this thing.”

“I think it’s for deer, or maybe a bear.” I stand over her, an adult supervising a child. I want more than anything for her to leave it alone.

“Like this,” she says. In one quick motion, Hadley yanks the jaws of the trap open, fastening the catch to hold them in place. I take a step back, as if the trap might jump up and fasten itself to my shoulder or my cheek.

“You just set it,” I say in disbelief.

She shrugs.

“It could snap closed now.”

“Well, yeah. It’s a trap.”

“How am I going to get it closed again?”

She shrugs, like
no big deal
, and reaches for it.

I start to say
Stop!
but figure that would just make her all the more determined. So instead I say, “Hey!”

She looks up at me, her hands still on the trap. And now she’s not even looking at what she’s doing! She disarms it anyhow by unfastening a catch on the base and folding the slack teeth closed. As soon as the trap is safe again, I reach forward and pluck her hands off of it.

“Come on.” I pull her up from the bed. “I have something to show you.”

“Jonah, right?” she says, her eyes bright. “He showed you the spot. He did, right?”

I lift the trap carefully, stowing it back under my bed.

“Yes,” I say, nodding. “Yes, that’s right.”

I
HAVE
H
ADLEY DRIVE US
all around Hokepe Woods first to make sure that Mr. Jefferson’s truck is gone. On the way over, she announces that her mysterious man is not following us, not right now anyway. She’s eager in the car, punching the buttons of her stereo, digging under her seat for cassettes, flicking the windshield wipers on and off even though there’s no rain.

We park where Jonah always does, and I take us in through the trees, along the same path that he had walked with me a week earlier. I find the wheel of a roller skate on the ground, ball bearings rattling inside it. Hadley plucks it out of my hand and tosses it in the air, batting it back up with her palm when it drops. She’s jubilant—humming shreds of the songs that were on the radio during our drive over. She slings her arm around my shoulders and squeezes my neck, somewhere between a hug and a wrestling hold. She whips the wheel at me, and I catch it and stick it in my pocket, after which she pleads that I give it back to her. Maybe I shouldn’t, but I do.

I remember the way to get to the spot by following the ribbons on the trees. There were five of them before. I count them off silently, and when we pass the fifth, I see the two trees and the patch of mud
between them. I sneak a glance at Hadley. She’s singing “I’m the luckiest by far . . .” while braiding a tiny braid into a strand of her hair, each
V
perfect. I’d expected our walk out here to be a dirge, a solemn procession, a wake, or else for Hadley to be angry (like she is so much of the time), kicking at leaves and swiping at trees. I don’t know how to respond to this sudden goofiness. She acts like a child who’s played a trick on her mother, peeking at me out from around the column of her braid.

“There,” I say. “Right there.” I point at the spot.

Hadley’s song trails off into a noise that sounds like
hmmm
, as if she’s considering something. She drops the braid, and the bottom of it begins to unwind, the crisscrossed strands spreading and sliding over each other, growing fat without her hand there to hold them tight.

“Where?” she says.

I point to the patch of mud, the two trees.

“Where exactly?” she asks impatiently.

I walk over and point my finger directly at the place. “Here.”

She walks to me, her brows knitted, focused on where I’m pointing. She steps onto the spot with precision, lining up her toes, as though she’s stepping onto the photographer’s
X
to have her school picture taken. Then she begins to lower herself onto the ground.

“It’s muddy!” I cry, but she looks at me blankly and sits. She stays there cross-legged for a moment, and then she uncrosses her legs and lowers herself flat on her back. I watch all this agog. In fact, my arm is still out, my finger pointing down, not at the ground now, but at Hadley lying beneath me.

“Get up,” I say, but she ignores me.

I remember how horrified I was to slip, to plant my hand in the center of that spot, my palm sinking into the dirt where Zabet’s blood had sunk, where her head had pressed into the mud as he’d hit her again and again. And now Hadley is lying exactly there.

Hadley opens her eyes and gazes up at me. She looks past me at the trees and the sky up above us. She stares for a moment, very still, as if listening for something.

“Yes,” she says finally, nodding so that the leaves shift and crunch under the back of her head.

“Sit down,” she tells me. I act like I haven’t heard her. She half rises and grabs my hand, yanking me to the ground.

She lies back down next to where I half squat, half sit. She looks up again at the sky, the blue cut into jagged teeth by the tree branches. She seems content, peaceful, like she’s cloud gazing. I wonder if she lies down like this in the smokers’ field. I picture Garrett’s narrow back and brown nipples, the undone sides of his shirt draping over both of them.

“This is the last thing she saw,” Hadley says.

This is almost exactly what I had thought when I was here with Jonah. I wonder if this is the thought that anyone would think, lying here. I wonder if Zabet thought it, too:
This is the last thing I’ll see
. I look where Hadley’s looking, the underskirts of the trees.

“The last thing she saw,” I repeat.

“Either this or that asshole’s face.”

“I’m sure it was this,” I say.

“No you’re not. No one knows but her. And him.”

“Well, I
hope
it was this, then, okay?”

“Yeah, okay.” She reaches out and gives my leg a clumsy pat.

Without thinking, I lower myself onto my back next to her. The mud is soft and wet on my neck and hands, and there’s something satisfying about this, mud squished between the fingers, a long-forgotten pleasure.

“What was Zabet like?” I say. It’s the first time since after Mr. McCabe’s dinner that I’ve directly referred to what Hadley and I both know and don’t talk about—that I hadn’t known Zabet since we were both kids, that at the time she died, I didn’t know her at all.

“She was . . . whatever.” I hear the leaves stir once, twice, Hadley lifting her shoulders—up, down—in a shrug. “She was okay. She was my friend.”

“But what was she
like
?”

“She was like a person, just like . . . someone. Like anybody.”

I can hear the annoyance in Hadley’s voice, which means that any second she might rise up and storm off. But I stumble on. “What about something, like . . . specific, like, something she liked?”

“What else did Jonah tell you?” Hadley asks, her voice daring me to accuse her of changing the subject.

“I don’t know,” I say, then, knowing she’ll want more than this and hoping that she’ll give me something of Zabet in return, “That this was the spot. That she was lying here.”

“How was she lying? On her back?”

“Yeah,” I say, though Jonah and I never had this conversation, not anything like it.

“And was there anything around her? Any”—Hadley bites her lip—“rope or a rock or something with maybe blood on it?”

“No. Just her.”

“What about her face?”

“Her face?” I echo.

“Were her eyes closed?”

“No,” I stutter.

“No?” Hadley asks sharply.

“I mean, he didn’t know. Her hair was over her face, covering it. So he couldn’t see.”