The Space Between Trees (3 page)

Now, when I say that they’re carrying a body, I don’t really mean “a body.” I mean, the body is there, of course, but it’s covered up: zipped in a bag and then covered again with a green sheet. But none of that keeps it from being a body. I know—all of us there know—it’s a body. Everyone goes sort of quiet as it passes. The groups of police in the yard lift their heads and stop talking to each other; the neighbors all pull their curtains wide open, not caring anymore who sees them looking. And as for me, I’m picturing myself inside that bag. I can’t help it. All of a sudden, in my imagination, I’m in there with
the smell of something factory-made and the tug of rubber on the back of my neck; I’m seeing the bag’s zipper from the wrong side, all the teeth backward.

Then, the body is gone. The stretcher has passed me by, and now all I’m staring at is one of the ambulance workers’ acrylic shirts and the back of his uneven haircut. Jonah is still there on the other side of the yard, looking across at me without any expression on his face at all.

I think, right then, that I could run to him and bury my face in his coat. I think about how it would probably smell like dead deer and sweat and the back of his truck. He’d probably put his arms around me if I cried, at a time like this he would; he’d have to. I think of the different words I could use when I retell it later to the Whisperers:
He hugged me
.
He embraced me. He took me in his arms.
We’re across the yard, staring at each other. His eyes are shiny, and he opens his mouth to say something.

And maybe in someone else’s story, I run to him. Maybe he fixes his arms tight around me so that they move in and out with my breaths; maybe he murmurs a few quick words right into my ear and I nod at their truth. But in this story—in my story—I turn. I run away. There’s the sound of the stretcher sliding into the ambulance. There’s the weight of my satchel as it slaps the backs of my legs. There’s the flicker of curtains falling closed as I run past pretty houses, and more pretty houses. There’s the voice of Jonah calling out, “Evie!” And even as I run away, I take note that it’s the first time he’s ever said my name.

I
RUN FOR A WHILE
, but I’m not that good a runner. Also my satchel keeps slamming into my legs. So after a few blocks, I slow down to a walk and pick up the satchel, carrying it like a baby up against my chest. I look back a few times, hoping maybe to see Jonah jogging after me, arms ready to take me in, or else an officer snapping open his handcuffs, adjusting them to fit my wrists. No one’s following me, though, and I make it back to Mom’s car all by myself.

Jonah’s truck is still there, parked in front of me. I glance into the truck bed as I walk by: a mess of tools and rope, a few torn plastic sheets—all of it dusted with these little twists of fur. I feel exhilarated by what I’ve seen, by the run, and yet guilty, too; after all, someone has died. And it’s this mix of giddy and guilty, this feeling that none of the rules apply, that urges me to step up to the truck bed and stick my hand down in the mess. I could take something of Jonah’s, I think, something little that he wouldn’t miss. Something I could hold in my hand.

I feel around in all that junk, rough with rust and grime, until my hand wraps around some sort of metal handle. It feels right, like the handle was waiting there for someone to grab on to it. I think
about how maybe Jonah had killed that poor dead guy and this will be evidence I can hide for him. I picture myself on the witness stand, lips pressed tight.
Young lady
, the judge booms. And when my fantasy disappears, I realize that I’m still holding on to the handle of the thing in the truck, so what is there to do but pull it out?

When I stick my key in the door back at home, it turns too easily. The door’s already unlocked—a sure sign that Mom’s waiting for me. She leaves it open if I’m not home when I say I’ll be, like I’ve forgotten my key and will be locked out, even though she knows I’ve never forgotten my key, not even once. Sometimes in these rental houses, though, the deadbolt is so old that trying to unlock an open door makes my key get stuck, and I have to stand on the porch and jimmy the key until I give up and ring the bell. Then Mom takes her time getting to the door, finally whipping it open with a little sigh, like,
Oh, it’s you.

Sure enough, Mom is right there on the couch, waiting for me. Her feet are tucked under her and the colored ad insert from the news paper is spread out on the coffee table. She runs her hands over the insert like she could actually touch the people printed there; her finger hits the shoulder of a boy in a polo shirt, then swipes the breasts of a woman wearing bright lipstick.

She’s heard me come into the room—I’m sure she has—but waits a minute before she looks up—she likes her poses and pauses, Mom does. Sometimes she’ll stop in the middle of saying something just to watch her own hand as it gestures, and you can see her admiring it, as if her hand is some creature independent of herself—some moth or sparrow—as if she’s not the one moving it around.

Mom grew up beautiful. Now, some beautiful people let their beauty just lie there on them, like a coat of sweat on their face, but Mom, she manages hers. She orders her beauty into shape like a squad of soldiers or a page of math problems. So when she finally decides to look up at me, her face is all set, her beauty ready to salute. She smiles a big smile and scratches the cushion next to her.

“Sit down,” she says. “Right here.”

This is not so good. I’d expected that she’d snap at me for getting back later than usual so that I could snap back at her and go hide in my room. I want an excuse to be away. I want to lie down somewhere quiet, flat and still, and think about that body. Instead, I sit on the couch cushion next to her. She hasn’t put her makeup on yet, and her face looks blank without the features drawn on it, her eyelashes silvery, the tip of her nose pink as if she has a cold. I can see the pores on her nose, like seeds on a strawberry, an imperfection that she wouldn’t normally allow to be seen.

“Did you deliver your papers?” she asks.

There are a dozen papers still in my satchel in the trunk of her car and, beneath the satchel, the object I pulled from Jonah’s truck. It has teeth on it, I discovered, glancing at it as I drove home. It’s a trap of some kind, the size of a large book, cold and heavy. I stowed it with the thought that I could do something with it later, hide it or return it or bury it unsprung.

“Of course,” I say.

“It took you a while.” She says this like it’s just a little something to say, but then she doesn’t say anything else after it, like it
wasn’t
just a little something to say but a question and now she’s waiting for my answer. I try to think of what she might want me to admit. Maybe
someone called her (The cop who yelled at me? A neighbor? Jonah Luks himself?) and told her that I had been spying on the police. Maybe someone had seen me swipe the trap.

“I guess it did take me a while,” I say, because now is not the time to confess to anything. “Did you need the car?”

“No, no . . . ,” she says. “It’s just . . . when I woke up, you weren’t here.” She flips through the advertisements. “Did you meet one of your friends?”

“Yeah, sure. At six on Sunday morning. We went to the mall and bought prom dresses. Then there was this slumber party—”

“Well, I don’t know. Someone who really wanted to see you might get up early.”

Even though I barely ever leave the house for anything that isn’t work or school, Mom keeps thinking that I have all these friends. Of course,
she
had a ton of friends when she was my age, and she still talks about them all the time—these Betsys and Carols and Pams. She doesn’t ever talk about how they are
now
—some grotty housewives or dog-groomers or something—but how they were then, hanging out and pulling pranks and throwing parties.

This idea that I have friends is so important to Mom that sometimes I help her out—like, I’ll repeat something funny that Angela Harper said in chem, not including the fact that she’d said it to Rachel Birch, not to me. There’s a price for this, though, because for weeks Angela’s name will ring through the house. “How’s Angela?” “Did Angela think the test was hard?” “Did Angela like your haircut?” And I shrug and mutter my
maybe
s and my
I don’t know
s, until, embarrassed by the idea that Angela Harper might somehow discover that my mother thinks she’s my best friend, I tell Mom that
Angela and I don’t hang out anymore and I mention a new name for her to latch on to.

“Maybe a boy?” Mom is saying.

“Maybe a boy what?”

“Maybe you met a boy. A boy who’s a friend.”

“Mom.
No.
God.” I put my hands over my face and look at out between my fingers. “Why would you say that?”

“You were late.” She shrugs and hikes her bare feet up onto the coffee table, and for an instant it seems like she hasn’t thought about the movement before she’s made it, but then she course-corrects her legs into something more graceful. “That’s why I was late when I was your age.”

“Yeah,” I say, not saying the rest—that she was pretty, that boys wanted to meet up with her, that this is not my situation. You might think that I feel bad about how I’m not as pretty as my mom. The truth is, I’ve never felt bad about it at all; in fact, I’m happy about it. See, Mom would have a hard time if I were pretty
and
young. She can handle one of these things but not both of them.

“I woke up, and you weren’t here,” she repeats, and this time it’s almost like a child has said it.
I woke up, and you weren’t here.
She looks down at her toes, wiggles them. She’s waiting for me to say something, and I finally figure out what it is.

“I’m really sorry.”

And suddenly everything is all right. Mom sits back. She tucks her hair behind her ears and beams.

“Don’t apologize, silly.” She makes a perfect fist and bops me on the nose. “I have waffles.”

I follow her into the kitchen.

It feels weird eating the waffles, something about their sponginess, their sweetness. I think for a second about the body, how that guy won’t eat any more waffles, not ever. Won’t eat anything ever again. I chew and swallow.

After dishes, I hide in my room and wait for Mom to get in the shower. Then I sneak out to the car for my satchel. Back in my room, I pull the trap out to look at. It’s a mouth, an arc of teeth with springs at each end. Right now, the trap is closed. I touch my pinkie to one of the springs and feel the coil of it, and how much potential there is in that coil, how it controls the stretch and the snap-shut. It’s about the length of my forearm, and I wonder what it’s meant to catch. Deer? Wolves? Bears? Though, of course, there are no wolves or bears in the trees around Hokepe Woods, or at least I don’t think that there are. I hold the trap where I think Jonah probably held it, on the edges of its smile. It’s cold and heavy in my lap. But there’s nothing you can really do with a trap unless you’re going to set it, so I end up hiding it behind some shoe boxes under my bed.

The rest of the day I read a book, finish an essay for school, and come out every once in a while to turn on the TV, pretending like I’m bored. I can’t find anything about the body—no late-breaking news or special reports—just the regular basketball games and Sunday movies. The afternoon has this high, white light to it, cold enough to keep the frost on the ground so that everything is hard and crackly. It’s one of those days that looks like a photograph, and you almost feel like you can’t step out into it or you’ll ruin the picture.

So I stay inside, and every now and then, I think about the body. What do I think about it? Not much. Mostly that I’ve seen it, just the fact of seeing it, which is like the tickle of the ants across my
cheeks. I think about Jonah, too—if he went back to the police station, if he’s in trouble, if he’s saying my name to himself right now. Mostly, I think about how I’ll have something to talk to him about next Sunday.

Mom and I watch the news with dinner. I wait for it. I wait all the way through the weather report (cold, sunny) and the human-interest bit (a goat that can sort poker chips), and still there’s nothing about the body, nothing about Hokepe Woods. After dinner, the phone rings and Mom takes it. I don’t think anything of the call, not even when she shouts to me from the living room. This is not unusual, her shouting. When something on the TV strikes her as amusing, she yells my name, even though by the time I get there the punch line has been delivered or the exotic bird has flown away.

When I get to the living room tonight, though, the TV is off, reflecting back tiny, shadowy replicas of ourselves in its dead eye. Mom is on the couch, sitting with perfect posture, her legs angled to one side and her toes pointing in the exact same direction, like she is the quivering needle on a compass. Mom has made the box of Kleenex from the bathroom and two glasses of water into an unlikely centerpiece on the coffee table. She scratches the couch cushion next to her. I sit down.

She looks regal that way, sitting with her back straight and her face serious, like someone with underskirts and an official title. I know she’ll wait to talk until I say, “What is it?” She likes to be asked for things.