The Space Between Trees (28 page)

“You can sleep here,” Mr. McCabe says as he walks past me into the room. “There are pajamas.” He indicates the drawer stuffed with a wad of pilled cotton. He looks around as if he’s forgotten something, though everything is here, clearly memorized and untouched, made
sacred by his reverent neglect. “I’m down the hall. The bathroom, too, down the hall. There’s ointment, iodine, if you need to—”

“Are you sure it’s okay?” I say.

“The room is yours,” he says. “Sleep. Sleep tight. Don’t let the—no, never mind.” He touches a hand to his mouth and mutters, “Nothing will bite.”

“Thanks.”

We stand there for a moment amid Zabet’s belongings and then, on impulse, I step forward, wrap my arms around his neck, and give him a hug. He stays very still in the loop of my arms, and I feel suddenly strong, as if I have the power to hurt him, large and solid as he is. Then he reaches up and pats my head—once, twice, fatherly—his hand lingering for a moment before lifting up and away. Finally he leaves, closing the door behind him, but I hear him pause just on the other side of it, the slight creak of the door as he lays his hand on it. “Good night,” he says one more time, waiting until I say good night back before he steps away, as if he needs to reassure himself that I’m still there.

Once he’s gone, I’m alone, finally, with Zabet. I rub the nap of her hoodies and the wale of the corduroys; I put finger marks in the dust on the dresser, some of it her shed skin, right? Isn’t that what dust is made of? I pick up each object—those three shells from some trip to the beach; a half-squeezed tube of hand lotion that smells like a fancy department store; a movie ticket stub—a comedy—a line of bottle caps, their crimped lips pulled open. She liked to save things, I guess. I open the jewelry box to find it filled with cookie fortunes—
A feather in
the hand is better than a bird in the air. Courtesy is contagious. You will travel far and wide, for both pleasure and business. Lucky numbers: 4, 39, 74.

I slide my hands between the mattress and the box spring, managing to lift the mattress part way up before letting it go, but Zabet didn’t hide anything there. I crawl into the closet and push past old dress shoes. In the back of the closet, high up on the shelf, I find her hiding place—a dinged lighter and a pack of stale cigarettes, one half smoked, marked with her peach lip gloss. There’s a notebook up there, too, filled with sketches of a houseplant, a teetering line of condominiums, and what must have been Zabet’s own feet. I wonder if she had secretly wanted to be an artist. Maybe this should make me sad, but instead I think at least she’ll never find out that she wasn’t good enough.

I pull open the dresser drawers, and the clothes that hung out collapse back into the drawer or spill out onto the carpet. I shuck off Hadley’s muddy sweater, my sneakers, and pajama pants. I find a threadbare T-shirt and a pair of men’s boxer shorts. I stand naked in the center of the room before I put them on, my skin goose-pimpled. I stare at myself in the mirror nailed to the closet door. I press my fingers to my knee. The beads of blood have hardened and darkened like the carapaces of insects. The worse injury is my mouth, the wound black, velvety in the dim light. I finger the cut, and it fires back at me in pain. There’s a smudge of dried blood on my chin. I lick my hand and rub until it’s gone.

I dress in Zabet’s clothes—the shirt and boxer shorts. The fabric feels strange against my skin, too rough in some places, too worn in others, and then, suddenly, it feels fine, like these clothes have been worn by no other body but my own.

I turn in a slow circle. Zabet is everywhere in this room, her touch on everything. But of her death? There are no clues, no illumination, no solutions. For the first time, I consider that maybe there’s nothing to find. Maybe there’s no story to Zabet’s murder. Maybe the story is simply that she’s dead. Just dead.

I imagine Mr. McCabe coming into this room every night, every morning, standing at its center unable to bring himself to move anything, not to straighten the comforter nor tuck away a pair of shoes, for fear that he might wear out the last bit of her. After all, it is his Elizabeth who chewed that pen cap and then cast it into the corner. It is she who wadded her clothes into drawers, she who hid the pack of cigarettes. She, whose teeth no longer chew, whose body withers in her last outfit, whose lungs have no breath to give cigarettes.

And me, I’m looking for scraps of Zabet in this room because I didn’t even know her. She was this little girl from a little corner of my childhood. She was a stranger, really, and I have no claim on her. This whole time—lying to Mr. McCabe, befriending Hadley, looking for Zabet’s killer—it hasn’t been about Zabet at all. It’s been about me, my curiosity, my loneliness, my fear. In a way, I’ve been using Zabet, her memory, to get what I need. And maybe, in that same way, I’m just as bad as her killer. After all, isn’t that what he did? Made her into something less than a girl, something less than a person, to get what he needed?

I make a decision. I begin to clean.

I open each of the drawers all the way, unearthing the clothes in armfuls. I heap them on top of the dresser, disturbing the dust, and then I fold them one by one, stacking them in a gradation of colors like cereal boxes on a grocery-store shelf. I lift up the comforter and
let it float in the air as it falls; whatever secret loitering scent there was of her is chased away. I reach up and fish the cigarettes out of the back of the closet. I position a cigarette in the uninjured side of my mouth and smoke it halfway down, sitting there on the bed, the covers pulled up to my lap. I drop the end in the empty drinking glass where it curls into a worm of ash. I slide under the blankets, lay the weight of my head on the pillow (
Her head lay here,
I think), and fall right asleep.

You’d think that maybe I’d dream Zabet’s dreams. But I sleep without dreaming. I wake early and change back into my pajama pants and Hadley’s sweater, though they feel like a stranger’s clothes now. I fold the T-shirt and boxer shorts, adding them to one of my tidy stacks in the dresser drawer. The wound on my lip is still open, hasn’t even scabbed; I glance at it in the mirror and wonder, briefly, if it’ll need stitches. I’m sort of grateful for it—my bitten lip—as proof that something happened last night, something I didn’t create in my head. Last thing, I make the bed, smoothing the wrinkles with an arm, brushing away any marks my body might have left. I look around at the work I’ve done. It’s just an empty room now.

I tiptoe down to the living room, where Mr. McCabe has fallen asleep in his chair with the TV still on. I move past the gentle buzz of his snore and turn the knob slowly, and then take care that the front door opens and closes without waking him. I step out onto the porch. I’m gone. I was never there.

I
WALK BACK ACROSS THE STREET
, running my hand along the stately brick of the Hokepe Woods sign as I pass it, and then on to Hadley’s house. Hadley’s car is parked out front. I slip into the house through the patio door, which is still unlocked, so I figure that maybe Hadley left it open for me. Even though it’s late morning, with the sun already an egg yolk in the windows, everyone in Hadley’s house seems to be asleep. Her parents’ cars are in the garage now—shiny, capable machines that look like they must be driven by shiny, capable people. If one of them finds me here, I’ll be a stranger, some girl who breached their home, who broke in and entered. I pass through empty rooms and hallways, stepping over cracked videogame cartridges and balled-up socks, fraying stacks of newspapers and plates crusted with food, one with a string of ants trailing from it. It’s a domestic apocalypse, and I’m the last survivor.

I pause outside Hadley’s bedroom. She has a placard on her door left over from childhood, wooden letters that spell out her name, each painted using a different pattern—stripes, polka-dots, tiny flowers. I tell myself to open her door, but don’t. Tell myself to knock, but can’t do that either. She’ll ask about Jonah; of course she will. And
what will I tell her? About kissing him while he was sleeping? About him opening his eyes to see me hovering over him? About his disappointed
oh
? Each twist in the story is answered by an equal twist in my gut. I can’t talk about any of it.

But when I open the door and peer in, I find that Hadley’s not in her room, not in the bathroom either. I check what I can of the rest of the house—a puppy-pile of blond brothers in their bedroom; a bathroom rug foggy with mold; the Smiths’ closed bedroom door—no Hadley. Could she still be in the woods, pressed against that tree, shivering with morning dew, waiting for my return?
No,
I tell myself.
Silly. Impossible.
Still, I figure I’d better check. But as I retrace my steps back out to the driveway, another idea occurs to me, and I go to the curb and peer through the windows of Hadley’s car. There. She’s asleep in the backseat. I open the car door, and her sneakered feet unfold toward the ground. One sneaker has a plug of pink gum on its bottom, made flat and slick from time and walking. Hadley opens her eyes and smiles up at me as if she’d been waiting for me to wake her.

“You’re not dead,” she says sleepily. And then, just as sleepily, “Fuck you.”

“I’m so sorry, Had. But that guy? That was Jonah. Jonah Luks? He was drunk, you know, and I had to drive him home. But he wasn’t . . . I know you might have thought he was. But he was just Jonah.”

Her answer is to sit up and slide over, pressing her knees into the seat in front of her, wedging herself in. I climb in next to her. It feels familiar sitting in the backseat of an empty car, like when I was a kid, buckled in, waiting for my parents to gather their belongings so we could go for a ride. We just sit there for a second, Hadley and
I, staring out the windshield as if the car were actually moving, the scenery passing us by.

“I don’t really
care
,” she finally says. “I mean, it’s not a big deal or anything. You went off with a guy you liked.” She shrugs as if to say,
Who hasn’t?
Then she turns and sizes me up. “So.” She smirks. “How was it?”

“It?”

“Yeah,
it
.” She looks at me levelly.

“Oh,” I gasp like a little girl and then wish I could pop it back into my mouth. “It was . . . we didn’t—”

“You didn’t what?”

“I mean, we kissed.”

She snorts. “And he chewed half your lip off?” She touches her lower lip, and I touch mine, wince as my fingers brush the wound.

“That wasn’t . . . no, I fell and bit that.”

“How’d you fall inside a car?” Hadley raises her eyebrows.

“No, not inside. Out of the car. Onto the street.”

“Must have been some kissing.”

She’s still looking at me steadily, but there’s something just behind her eyes, some tick of Hadley clockwork. Forget geometry and algebra, precalc, and all that. There should be a math class that teaches you how to plot out a face, determine the angle when a squint of an eye becomes a glare, the arc of a lip that makes a smirk into a sneer. Because, judging by her face, it looks like maybe Hadley’s mad at me after all.

“I didn’t fall because of kissing. That . . . how could . . . ? We stopped kissing by then and—”

“Why?”

“Why did we stop kissing? Because, well, he said—”

I hear it again in my head.
Oh.
The way Jonah said it.
Oh.
Like he’d bumped into me and said “pardon,” like he’d stepped on my foot and said, “my mistake.”

“I reminded him of Zabet,” I finish.
And
it’s true
, I think.
He did say that.
“He said, ‘that dead girl,’ he called her that, which is so . . . I mean, of course, I had to leave after that.”

Hadley is still looking at me, her head cocked, her smirk winched, her face dappled with bruises. She hasn’t moved at all, hasn’t even twitched, and yet everything feels suddenly different, as if the car has started speeding forward and neither of us has noticed that we are speeding along inside it, being taken to our destination.

“
That dead girl?
” Hadley repeats. “He called her that?”

Oh
, I hear Jonah say again, and I wish that I could take all of it back. “Well, yeah, but I think he just—”

“Fuck you,” Hadley says in a quiet voice. “Really.”

“Hadley?”

“I waited for you alone in the goddamn woods. I thought you’d come back, but you didn’t. So then I drove over and waited outside your house, then here. I said to myself that if you weren’t back by morning, I’d tell someone, call the police or someone.”

“I’m sorry I scared you.”

Hadley sits up straight with the feeling of a spring tightening, an arm pulled back, something loaded and ready to snap. “I wasn’t
scared
. Don’t think I was
scared
. So you’re some dumb girl, dumb enough to follow some strange guy to his car in the middle of the night, dumb enough to drive off alone with him. Why should I be scared over you?”

“I’m sorry.”

“I don’t care,” Hadley says, the words all mixed up with her breath. “I don’t care about you. Go off with Jonah Luks, let him call you dead girl and bust your lip. I don’t care.” She turns away then and stares out the windshield at the empty road in front of us. “It’s not like you’re my friend or anything.”