The Space Between Trees (27 page)

I watch my hand as it moves from Jonah’s shoulder to his cheek. A muscle in his face jumps under my fingers and I gasp, startled, but I don’t pull my hand away. Instead I lean forward; closer, until I can see the smudge of his beard; closer, the pores speckling his nose; closer, the threads of vein in his eyelids; closer, the pumice of his chapped lips. His breath wends from his mouth, rotten with beer and sleep. And, if he were perfect—his lips supple, his breath sweet—I wouldn’t have been able to do it. I wouldn’t have felt that I had the right to lean even closer, that extra fragment of an inch, and press my lips against his.

Kissing Jonah isn’t how I had imagined it would be. It isn’t how I would tell it, if I were telling someone the story of it. His lips are
parched, flaking, paralyzed by sleep. My lips, his lips. I register this not with excitement or nervousness but with a disinterested curiosity. I release my lips and then press them to his again, just to see, once more, how it might feel.

Is this how it is for Hadley when Garrett smashes his mouth into hers? Or my mother when Rick-from-the-bank smears the perfect crayon lines of her lipstick? Is this the secret of a kiss: not that you feel something but that you feel nothing? I pull away and take a deep breath and then have to pause and fight a giddy peal of laughter that tickles the back of my throat.
One more try,
I tell myself. And this time when I lean down to kiss Jonah, he kisses me back.

Then we are kissing. Jonah’s hand fumbles along my waist. His lips move under mine like blind things, newborn things searching for light. And all at once, the startling, wet muscle of his tongue is there in my mouth. All my questions about kissing are answered at once, the sum of my hypotheses exposed as false, boxes ticked with checkmarks right down the line. I don’t have to think or worry or be afraid; for once, there is none of that. There is only the ferment of Jonah’s breath, the grit of crumbs under my palms as I lean across the seat, and finally me, perfect me, wondrous me, pushing closer to Jonah, kissing Jonah, when he wakes and opens his eyes.

“Oh,” he says when he sees me there at the other end of his lips. It is not the
oh
of being presented with a surprise gift, nor is it the
oh
of finding a spider in the shower; rather, it is the tiny syllable mouthed during the pause in someone’s tedious story, an inoffensive and noncommittal
oh,
its only purpose to show that, yes, you have been listening to whatever the speaker droned on about.
Oh.
It says everything.

I wilt back across the seat, my retreat ending only because I’m stopped by the truck door. I slip my hand behind my back, groping for the door handle. Shame creeps from its secret hovels in my throat and eye sockets. This shame presses against me, doubling, tripling, expanding until I might explode into ribbons or confetti. And I will allow it; I will let myself explode, just as soon as I find the goddamn door handle.

Jonah wipes the back of his hand across his mouth. I stare at it.
What repugnant cells have you wiped away?
I want to say.
What slimes have you gotten rid of?
Jonah sees the look on my face and drops the hand into his lap, where it twitches. I know he wants to dry it against his jeans; I can as good as see him resist the impulse.

“Oh,” he says again.

I am silent. I am disgusting. I am terrible.

“Weird,” he says next. He fidgets, but sleepily, scratches at an elbow in slow motion. His words are still slurry. “Weird . . . night.”

He waits for a reply, but I don’t have one to offer. I watch him, my hand creeping behind my back secretly, like I’m going for my weapon, the firm, cold handle of the door.

“Back there . . . you fell out of . . .
trees
.” He manages to lift his heavy eyelids a bit wider and speaks like this was wondrous, not to be believed. “There you were.”

This conversation feels familiar, but I can’t say exactly how. My hand continues its crawl across the truck door, moving over the window crank, the too-small armrest, the tiny metal ashtray, before finally closing around the door handle itself, right at the middle of my back. And just as I take that lever in my hand, it hits me: This conversation is familiar because it’s like every conversation that Jonah and I have had,
only backward.
This time, instead of me trying
to charm and cajole, it is Jonah. Instead of Jonah being wordless and searching for escape, it is me. I pause with my hand on the lever, fascinated, waiting to see what Jonah will say next.

He’s looking at me through his sacrificial-cow lashes, his dumb blink. It’s the kindest look he’s ever given me, right now, when he is rejecting me. A tiny smile touches his lips, and he looks down and back up again, as if preparing to tell me something he shouldn’t.

“I thought you were her,” he slurs. “But that couldn’t . . .
you
couldn’t . . . you weren’t her. You were . . . you. I just, for a second, in the trees, I
thought
—”

“Her?” I croak. I press back against the door, the window, on the nape of my neck, damp from the condensation of our kisses. My kisses.

“Her,” he says. His chin begins to drop down to his chest like he might pass out again.

“Who?” I ask. His head dips and then jerks up again. He mutters something, his eyes closed. “Jonah, who did you think I was? Jonah!”

He lifts his head, opens his eyes and says, as clear as can be, “That dead girl.”

And, with that, I lift the door handle and fall backward into the night.

The landing hurts. I hit the road on my back and knock my head against the pavement. I bite down on my lip, through it, actually. When I open my mouth, I can feel my tooth slide up and out of where it was buried in my skin, slippery and metallic with blood. The breath has been knocked out of me. I gasp for air, suck at it, but my rib cage won’t expand and my lungs won’t fill, as if the rules have
changed and I’m no longer allowed to breathe. Jonah is saying my name in a tone of dumb wonder, and I can hear him crawling across the seat. It is this—the idea of his pitying drunk face—that makes me stand and then makes me run.

I run until I can breathe again, until I can’t breathe because the breath isn’t enough and my sides are going to pull apart, sinew from rib bone. I cut through yards and dodge headlights, running until I have to stop and cough great gusts of lost breath down at the ground. I spend ten minutes crouched in the corner of someone’s backyard until I’m sure Jonah’s given up, if he even looked for me at all, that is.
The dead girl
. That’s what he said. I thought he knew her name.

I emerge blocks away from where I started and walk down the road. I blot the blood on my lip and chin with one of my sleeves. Still, I am a zombie, a muddy fright. Despite this, or maybe because of it, I manage to flag down a car, a group of college students—glittered, tipsy—coming back from a party.

“Are you okay?” the girl in the passenger seat asks. “How old are you?”

I know the answer to this one. “Eighteen. Can I get a ride?”

“I’m not taking her anywhere weird,” the kid who’s driving says.

“Please,” I say. “I just want to go home.” So he agrees. And when I get out of the car, the college kids call after me to “be good” and to “sleep it off.” They think I’m drunk, and what else would I be, wandering around in my pajama bottoms and Hadley’s sweater, bloodylipped, streaks of leaf mulch down my front, mud painting my face, and the scent of Jonah’s spilled beer still clinging to my skin? Which is just how Mr. McCabe finds me when he answers his door.

H
E’S ALREADY AWAKE
. The lights are on behind him, and there’s the buzz of the TV. A box of voices. What did haunted people do before TV? Radio. What did haunted people do before radio? Talk to ghosts, maybe. He’s dressed neatly in old-fashioned pajamas—the kind that button up—and a robe, slippers, even.

“Evie!” he says, though I haven’t seen him for weeks. He takes in my muddy sweater and bloody lip in a glance.
Are you all right?
I expect him to ask, alarmed, and I’ll say,
Yeah, I just bit my lip. I fell. I got lost is all.
I didn’t know where else to go.
I have the answer folded up in my mouth. But Mr. McCabe doesn’t ask me if I’m all right, that most basic of parental questions. Instead, he smiles and waves me in.

I follow him to the living room. The TV is set to an infomercial; a pair of manicured hands slices vegetables into slivers, fruit into pulpy, shining wedges. He has a snack set up on the side table, mindful squares of crackers and cheese, one half eaten, made into a rectangle by his bite.

“Why don’t you sit down?” he says. The couch pillows are set at right angles. “Would you like something? Food? A beverage?”

I’m suddenly aware of my state of dress, more so than if he’d said something about it. I tug at the sides of Hadley’s sweater, pulling
them down. My lip hurts; it feels huge. I’m shivering, I realize, even though it’s warm that night, warm in Mr. McCabe’s living room. I have shivers running a loop through me, again and again.
Calm down
, I tell my body.
You calm down now.
And my body obeys enough to stop shivering. “I’m not hungry.”

“Something to drink, maybe?”

“That’s okay.”

“I was having a snack,” he says, indicating the plate.

He sits in the chair across from me, and behind him, the pretty hands on the television chop something slick and oceanic, luminous and white.

“Sometimes I like food in the night,” he says.

I glance down at my own muddy front. I have the story ready—why I’m muddy, why I’m injured, why I’m here—so why won’t he ask me? Mom would blanch at the sight of me, tell me to change my clothes, wash my face, run a comb through my hair, and put something on my lip so it won’t swell with infection.
Tripped and fell?
she’d say.
Well, you’ve never been graceful.
Then she’d tip her head to the side and add,
Once that lip scabs over, you can wear a nice bright gloss. Trust me. No one will even notice.

But Mr. McCabe. I’d expected him to wrap me in a hug at first sight and, at the slightest shiver, wrap a blanket right around my shoulders. To sit me down and listen soberly, to keep asking if I was all right, if I was
sure
I was all right. And to give me the respect of not believing me when I said that I was.

I try to make the shivers start up again so that he’ll be forced to take some interest, but the shivers won’t come. I try to fake them, but it just looks like I’m restless.

“It tastes different, when you eat at night,” I offer, and he nods vigorously and smiles.

“A secret meal.”

We sit in silence. He crosses his legs and touches his lip self-consciously as if feeling for his own injury. But then he jerks his hand away from his lip, as if he’s committed a faux pas, and slides it into his robe pocket.

“How are you, Evie?” he says at the same moment that I say, “You’re probably wondering why I’m here.”

“
No
.” He shakes his head and sits back as if to get a few inches farther away from my question. “You’re welcome here. Anytime. You can just show up. A friend of Elizabeth’s—” He stops, not finishing with
is a friend of mine
. I forgot, somehow, that he calls her Elizabeth, and it takes me a moment to place the name, to remember that he’s talking about his daughter, about Zabet. “You don’t have to say anything,” he says, “explain anything.”

With that, my story shrivels up inside me, and, as if it were the only thing keeping me upright, I exhale and sink back into the couch. I’m so tired.

“Let me get you something to eat . . . or cocoa,” he mumbles, standing and fussing with the fall of his robe.

“No,” I tell him. He sits down immediately, even though I’ve said it neither loudly nor harshly. “I don’t . . . Really, I’m not hungry.”

“Would you like”—he touches his lip again but doesn’t seem to realize this time that he’s doing it. “Would you like a ride home? Probably you would. I’ll go crank up the car.”

“Actually.” I twist in the chair, glance at my own muddy hands and then the manicured hands on the TV screen. “I thought I could maybe stay here tonight?”

“Of course,” he says, in a falling tone, as if relieved. And I realize what it was before—his nerves, his fussiness, his insistence that
he wouldn’t ask me questions. It wasn’t that he didn’t care. It was that he was afraid that he might scare me away; one careless word or sharp movement and I’d be gone.

“You’re . . . are you tired?” Mr. McCabe half rises, his arms out as if I were a small child fallen asleep whom he’d scoop up and carry to bed. “It’s late.”

I am tired. Bone tired. Marrow tired. It settles on me like a sheet lifted and laid over my face. I nearly lean my head back and fall asleep right there on the couch.

“Yeah,” I sigh. “I’m . . . yeah.”

Mr. McCabe is on his feet, waving me along, up the narrow, carpeted stairs and down the hall into a small bedroom. The bed is covered with a rumpled comforter, hunched up at the foot as if a person is crouched beneath it. The dresser drawers are each half open, loosing a spray of shirts and cords and leggings. I recognize one of the shirts, a burgundy plaid. Zabet used to wear that nearly every day. The sleeves were too long for her, so only the tips of her fingers showed, as if the shirt were slowly digesting her, savoring the last bits before it swallowed her whole. A few trinkets stand in a line along the dresser and desk—three wan shells, the slim circle of an enamel bracelet, and a music box, its ceramic flowers like frosting on a fancy cake. A drinking glass, an orphan from the set downstairs, sits at the edge of the nightstand, the water long evaporated from it.