The Space Between Trees (29 page)

I’m not?
I want to say. I’ll admit, I feel like crying, so much so that I can’t even ask that tiny two-word question because I know that I’ll actually start crying if I do, so I say the other two-word sentence, the one that doesn’t mean anything.

“I’m sorry.”

“Get out of my car, please,” Hadley says, her voice straining under its own politeness. And when, after a moment, I don’t get out, she starts yelling, really yelling, her mouth so wide that I can see the dark, wet inside of her throat, her face pink, creeping up on red, lighting up the bruises. “Get out! Get out! Get the fuck out!”

So I do.

As I’m walking away from the car, the front door of the house across the street opens up, and a Hokepe divorcee steps out, blinking in the sun with a look of faint alarm. She scans the street, right then left, searching for whatever is the matter.

Rick-from-the-bank is gone when I get home, leaving no toothbrush balanced on the sink, no limp sock under the bed, no cheap jacket that he’ll have to come back for later. His only souvenir is my mother’s smiles, less frequent, more relaxed when they do come, as if she doesn’t need them so much anymore. She’s in the kitchen making
a second breakfast and pretending it’s her first. She’s fully dressed—shirt to shoes—as if her bathrobe would be an admission of guilt.

“Morning,” she says, not even turning around. “How was your slumber party? Did you watch movies? Paint toenails?”

I’m annoyed at her chipper voice, her breezy manner. More than annoyed. Furious, in fact. “Nope. Just busted my lip open,” I say to punish her.

She turns around at this, her eyebrows raised in neat little points. “Ooooh!” she says when she sees my lip. She reaches out to touch it, and I squirm away. “You should put some ointment on that so it doesn’t get infected. You don’t want to have a fat lip for weeks.”

And of course that’s all she cares about, not if I was in danger, not if I was scared or rejected and embarrassed and ashamed, not if it hurts even, just whether it’ll leave a mark.

“Don’t you even care how I got it?” I say, and I’m glad to find that the tears that I had held back with Hadley are ready for me now. They spill down my cheeks. I let my bag drop to the floor, and my hand fumbles on the table across the dishes she’s laid out for breakfast. If I had a colander or a ladle, I’d throw it at her now. I pick up a fork, which is too ridiculous a missile to actually express my anger. And this makes me even angrier. A fork.

Mom looks startled. She puts her hands prettily to her chest like,
Who, me?

“Don’t you care if some guy beat your daughter in the face?”

“Evie!”

I lower my head. “That’s not what happened,” I mutter. I let the fork drop back onto the table.

“Evie,” she says again, taking a step forward and reaching out a hand but not touching me, like a statue in the park.

“I just said that’s not what happened. I fell is all. I was clumsy, and I fell. But you could’ve asked. If you even cared, if you even . . . you could have asked.”

I spin on my heel and leave her there, frozen in her pose.

I spend the day in my room. I do this. I do that. Mom knocks on the door a couple of times, but when I don’t answer, she gives up. I’m half glad, but only half. We don’t argue much, Mom and I. I’m not sure why I got so angry there in the kitchen. If I’m honest, my anger wasn’t just for her but for Hadley and Jonah and myself. I came home wanting someone to comfort me, to put a plate of hot food in front of me and offer sensible advice. I wanted a parent. I wish suddenly, desperately for my father. But I don’t know him any more than I know Zabet. He doesn’t even exist, not really. I emerge from my room after she’s gone to sleep. I have to use the bathroom, and I’m starved. I realize, when I sneak out into the kitchen, that Mom did have a plate of hot food for me this morning. I long for some of her eggs, but they’ve been scraped into the trash. I find some cold cuts in the fridge. I eat them on plain bread, too weary to bother with condiments. I make a little extra noise with the fridge door and my plate, hoping, I guess, that Mom will come out and check on me. She must be sleeping deeply; either that or she’s mad at me, too. After I eat, I go to bed, dream my dreams.

The next morning, I drive into Hokepe Woods like I do every Sunday. But this time someone’s sitting on the curb where I park, legs stretched out, drumming a neat little rhythm, which is swallowed up by the concrete. She has a sweatshirt on, hood up, as if to hide her face. Still, I know that it’s Hadley even before she yanks the hood down.

“Surprise!” she says cheerily, as I get out of the car.

“Hi.” I search her face for signs of our fight, but she returns my
hi
with another
Surprise!
and no hint that it ever happened.

“What are you doing here?”

“Helping.” She brushes past me and drags my satchel out of the backseat. “Everyone needs a little help once in a while, Vie,” she says in her ironic voice. And this sentence seems rehearsed, like she has stood off a little way to watch herself speak so that she can assess her performance of the memorized line.

I don’t argue, though. I’m relieved, I guess, that someone isn’t mad at me. After all, Mr. McCabe probably is, Mom definitely is, and maybe Jonah, too. Hadley and I deliver my papers together. I run up to the doors, while Hadley lingers at the curbs, as if she isn’t allowed near the houses. We don’t talk about the fight.
It was a mistake
, I think.
Never happened.
For once, we don’t talk about Zabet or murders or the suspect list either. We play stupid games to pass the time, and this is fun: me at the door of the house and Hadley lobbing the paper from the curb, trying to throw it so that it will spin in the air like a baton. Whenever I hear a car coming, I take a few extra seconds on the porch in case it’s Jonah and I need to hide. Hadley waits for me patiently, and I suspect that she knows what I’m up to. She doesn’t mention Jonah, though, and I don’t either.

Driving over, I’d had a plan: get to Hokepe extra early, finish my deliveries before Jonah arrived, and leave. Hadley slows me down, though. She lingers over the satchel as if pondering which of the identical rolled papers to choose. She stops me in front of this house or that to chatter on about the tortured house pets or cross-dressing husbands within. She whines until I agree to go back to my car to
get her a stick of chewing gum. Her shoes refuse to stay tied. Consequently, my satchel is still half full when morning breaks.

Which leaves us partway up Comanche Circle, with the paper that Hadley has just thrown still spinning in the air, when Jonah’s truck turns the corner. I freeze. The newspaper lands at my feet like a bird shot out of the sky. But Jonah drives past without slowing. I glimpse his profile, the profile of a man on a coin, his elbow resting on the truck’s windowsill.

I look to Hadley for sympathy and find her wearing this tiny smile as if to say,
Do you dare me?
But before I can say,
Stop, don’t, I don’t dare you, no,
she whips around and races after the truck, waving her arms and shouting Jonah’s name. I follow at a distance and tell myself that he doesn’t know her, that he won’t stop for some crazy girl, some strange, bruised girl. But Hadley waves and hollers and makes such a fuss that about halfway down the block, his truck drifts to the curb, and the cloud of exhaust dissipates to a puff and then a wisp as he cuts the engine.

Now, I’m well aware of the fact that a smarter Evie would turn around and plod on with the rest of her deliveries. A smarter Evie would double back to her car; she’d go home, apologize to her mother, eat breakfast, watch TV, and do homework. But me, the less-smart Evie, I run after them.

When I get to the truck, Hadley’s leaning on it, her elbows hitched over the rolled-down window. She kicks her legs off the ground and tips partway into the truck, dangles, half in, half out, the beaming magician’s assistant about to be sliced in half.

“I don’t think so,” Jonah’s saying. He’s not looking at her, maybe because of her bruises. He’s not about to look at me either, but I can see the blush dashing up his neck as I step into view.

“Come on,” Hadley says. “We just wanna see. Right, Evie?” She doesn’t turn to make sure that I’m behind her. She knows I will be.

“Sure,” I say, though I have no idea what I’m agreeing to.

Jonah looks past Hadley at me. The night before is there between us, and we’re both careful to keep our gaze just above it, like not looking at the unfortunate purple birthmark on someone’s cheek. Jonah gives me a curt nod. I make myself nod back. Down, up with the chin.

Hadley begins to deliver a little speech that I already know by heart: “Come on. We finished our deliveries early. It’ll be something different, and . . . don’t you want company? We’ve got good eyes. We can help you find animals.”

A walk
. So this is what Hadley has suggested. I feel relieved, considering all the other things she could have requested.

If Jonah recognizes Hadley’s speech as the one I delivered a few weeks earlier, he doesn’t mention it. He keeps making quiet excuses as he unloads his sled and tarp, but Hadley is unstoppable. Whatever small flirtations I’ve committed, she’s a million times more obvious. She plays with his collar and laughs braying laughs and canters off for the woods in front of him even after he’s already told her no a dozen different ways. I trudge a few feet behind them, behind the sled.

Last night seems made up. Except there’s Jonah’s averted gaze, his awkward half sentences, his too-long stride like if he walks fast enough, he’ll outpace us. I stare at the back of Jonah’s neck—the stain of sunburn, the fork of sinew, and the knob of bone that marks the top of his spine. I picture that neck bent over Zabet’s body, bent over me when I was spilled out on the pavement the night before. My heart starts to thrum, and I can feel its tension echoed in
Hadley. Her shoulder-bumps become rougher, making Jonah lose his footing for a second, and her laughter doubles and redoubles into a cackle.

“You gonna cut out on us?” Hadley asks, nodding at the car keys still clutched in Jonah’s hand.

“Nope.” He doesn’t put the keys away though, just keeps holding on to them.

“Good, because we’d be lost in the woods. Lost! We’d never find our way home. Right, Evie?”

I shrug, but she keeps staring at me, waiting for an answer. “I guess,” I finally say.

“It’s not really a woods,” he tells her.

“Just a few trees.” “Just a few trees. A few trees. That’s all,” she repeats and then laughs wildly and alone. I feel Jonah glance back at me, but I avoid his eyes. “So, you like animals?” she says to him. “You have dreams of being a pet-shop owner? A vet-er-i-narian?”

Jonah looks bewildered, even from behind.

“She’s kidding,” I say.

“No. I’m serious,” she grouses. “I’m totally serious. You could own a pet shop. Just think: All the little kitties mewing.”

“I like animals fine.”

“You must,” she says. “You’re, like, their undertaker or funeral director or something. Do you bury them?”

“I just haul them away.”

“Where do you take them?”

Jonah doesn’t answer. The sled bumps along in front of me. I watch the kick of its red plastic surface and bite down on my back teeth, worried about where this conversation is headed.

“Did you ever find one that was still partly alive? Like it was injured but still alive?” Hadley’s not pretending to laugh now, not careening into him. She walks with her head turned sideways and her eyes locked on Jonah, studying him.

Knock it off,
I almost say, but I don’t. I can’t stand up to Hadley, so I say nothing, just keep trudging forward.
I’ll get through this
, I think.
If I just stay quiet and walk, we’ll come out the other side of the trees and be done.

“And if you did find one still a
little
bit alive, would you kill it? Would you kill it right then? Like, stomp it with your boot? Or maybe you’d take out a hunting knife—do you have one of those?—take it out and slice it. Or maybe you could beat it until it’s dead.”

Jonah halts and turns on her. His brow is wrinkled and his mouth is screwed to the side like he’s got something ready to spit. Hadley takes a step back and an expression flashes across her face, so quick that I’m the only one who can see it. So quick, I’m not sure I can read the emotion written there. Then, in one swift move, she reaches out, yanks the keys from Jonah’s hand, and tosses them in the air. The keys spin and fan out like the legs of dancing girls. When they come down, she catches them, and, with a tip of her head, as if doffing a hat, takes off into the trees.