The Space Between Trees (30 page)

Jonah is dumbfounded. He looks from me to the sled to the direction where Hadley’s run and then back to the sled again. “Christ,” he mutters. “Can you watch this?”

I can’t speak, so I nod, and Jonah jogs off after Hadley. Left alone, I stare down at the sled. I’ve taken a step too far forward and am now half standing in it. I lift my foot up and out. How long until they return, Jonah with the keys? I lean into the tree next to me. My
cheek presses against something slick and synthetic. It’s one of the tree ribbons, those bright orange markers. I study it while, in my head, I count back along the path of our walk. It’s the fourth one we’ve passed, I decide. Four ribbons out of five. I picture Hadley, dancing ahead of us, flirting . . . distracting, it occurs to me,
leading
us in this direction.

I squint into the mess of trees ahead, searching for a glimpse of hair or jacket, some sign of life, but there’s nothing. I tug on the tree ribbon, pulling its end like I could undo all of this if I could just undo its knot. I feel suddenly sick, sick with suspicion.
You’re getting carried away,
I tell myself.
Don’t be silly. You’re making it all up.

“Hadley!” I call out weakly. “Jonah!”

Silence.

I take two stumbling steps after them but stop, unable to follow. I’m ridiculous. I’m a liar. I’m a coward. I bend over with my hands on my knees, my knees shaking. Prickles run up and down my legs and in patches on my cheeks as if my body is falling asleep piece by piece. I breathe. I try to breathe. I’ll go after them in a minute; I’ll straighten up and go after them. In the trees ahead, someone cries out—a loud yelp of rage or pain—there and then gone again, without even an echo. I don’t wait to hear if there’ll be another cry. I turn and run the other way.

A
T FIRST
, I don’t think I’ll be able to find my way out of the woods. I hear Hadley’s voice in my head:
Lost! We’ll be lost!
Even though I know the woods is small, all I see are trees, and I worry that, in my panic, I’ve run in the wrong direction. But then up ahead I see the spikes of a fence and the bright paint of a swing set. I emerge in someone’s backyard, right in the middle of the yellow, tamped-down circle of grass where they must set their kiddie pool. I run out to the sidewalk, smacking into the middle of a pride of jogging divorcees. They pause their rhythmic breaths and stare at me, their makeup like masks. I mutter an apology and stumble on, finally clutching the bricked back of the Hokepe Woods sign.

By the time I reach Mr. McCabe’s condominium, I’m gasping. I pound on the door and then double over, spitting into the shrubbery next to the porch. When Mr. McCabe opens the door, I don’t even give him a chance to say my name. “Come,” I gasp. “You’ve got to come.”

He doesn’t ask where. He doesn’t ask why I disappeared yesterday morning. He’s wearing the same robe and pajamas he was then, and I wonder if he’s been wearing them this entire time. Zabet’s tidy
bedroom, the bedroom I ruined, flashes in my mind, but he doesn’t say anything about that, either.

“My shoes,” is all he says. He goes back to collect them and then asks, “Do we need to drive?”

I shake my head, and as I do, a tear shakes off my cheek, and I realize that I’ve been crying, but I don’t know when I started. It’s not the kind of crying that you force up and out of your throat but the kind of crying where the tears slip out your eyes and down your cheeks, dissolving into one another at your chin in a stealthy escape.

Mr. McCabe runs alongside me. Even though he is large and soft in the belly, he runs fast, faster than me. He still doesn’t ask why we’re running, and maybe it’s his faith in me that’s made me cry. He grabs my arm and urges me on. We run without slowing, all the way back across the road and into his old neighborhood, between the two houses where I’d emerged minutes before. When we reach the edge of the trees, he stops.

“There?” he says and nothing else. He stands at the border between lawn and trees, not looking in, looking only at me. His daughter’s body was found in there, right in there. I didn’t think of that.

“I’m sorry,” I say. “I’m sorry. I didn’t know who else to get.”

“What’s going on here?” he finally asks, his voice deep, firm, a father’s.

“Hadley.” I put my hands over my mouth as I say it. He hasn’t heard me, and I have to repeat it. “Hadley’s in there.”

He’s still for a moment, completely so. His face white—worse, gray. “We should call the police,” he finally says, like a line from a play. “We’ll borrow someone’s phone.”

“Oh, no. She’s not dead. She’s not”—I ball a bit of my shirt up in my hand. “She did something. I’m not sure. I’m not . . . I think she might have done something. Help,” I whisper, ashamed of the word and its drama. “Please, help.”

Mr. McCabe runs a hand over his face. “Okay,” he says.

There are things I’ve imagined—gruesome things—Zabet dying over and over, beaten until her nose cracks, until her cheeks shatter, until her eyes swell shut.

There are things I’ve seen now. There are things I don’t want to tell.

We find them by the fifth tree ribbon, by the muddy patch, the place where Zabet lay dead. Hadley is curled on the ground across the clearing from Jonah with her knees up to her chest. Her clothes are soaked. At first I think she must’ve been spattered with some clear fluid from Jonah’s wounds, but then I realize that it is her own sweat and maybe her urine. She is clean of blood, anyway. But this cleanliness is worse, appalling even, because it means she didn’t go to him; she didn’t try to stop his bleeding.

Mr. McCabe walks straight to Jonah, shedding his robe as he goes. He pulls the belt out of its terry-cloth loops, feeds it under Jonah’s thigh, and ties it around his leg. He wads the rest of his robe over the wound and the jaws of the trap. He glances over at me as he does this, and I wonder if he’s trying to stanch the blood or simply hide the sight of Jonah’s leg from my view.
Too late,
I want to say.
You’re too late.
I’ve already seen it. Can’t unsee it now.

Jonah doesn’t move or make a noise as Mr. McCabe attends to him. He lies flat on his back, passed out. Or maybe he’s dead, I don’t
know. I know that I should go to him, kneel down in the mud, hold his hand. Instead, I find myself moving toward Hadley.

She is suddenly small and fragile, young, a young girl, much younger than me. When I touch her arm, it’s rough with goose bumps. She looks at me, frozen, no expression on her expressive face, and then her mouth twists into a grimace and she starts to sob. I put my arms around her, and she lets me, shaking in the circle of them so violently that I start to shake, too. She’s saying something, but her hair is in her face, in her mouth. I bend my face down near hers, and the smell of her is pure and gamey, like animal piss.
Fear
, I think. I can see her hands down through the well of her body, lying still in her lap. And this is more frightening somehow—these still hands—than if she’d been balling them, working them over each other, using them to rend her clothes or skin. Guilty hands. Dead hands.

“Evie?” she whispers.

“What?”

“It was me.”

I try to say
it’s okay
, but this feels wrong, like forgiveness that I’m not fit to give. So I say
I know
, instead. In the kindest, quietest voice I can muster, I say, “I know.”

I tell her, “Mr. McCabe’s here, see? It’s going to be okay, see? Do you see that, Hadley? Do you see?”

I say this and a bunch of other nonsense—coos and shushes and promises that I don’t have the power to keep—while Hadley shakes in the loop of my arms and murmurs things into her hair.

It isn’t until after Mr. McCabe has called me over and instructed me to press my hands against Jonah’s leg, the arc of the trap’s jaw under the robe like the spine of an old cat under its fur—“Keep pressing, and if he wakes up, make him lie still,” Mr. McCabe tells
me—it isn’t until after Mr. McCabe’s footfalls have crashed away, until after I’ve stared for minutes and minutes at the soft stretch of skin under Jonah’s jaw, hoping for a flutter, a catch, a swallow; it isn’t until after all this that Hadley’s words make sense, echoing back from seconds before like the delay in a long-distance call.

“It was me,” she’d said again and again. “It was me.”

I look up and she’s watching me across the clearing, her eyes huge and dark in her face, her lips the same color as her skin, as if I have stumbled upon some wild creature who waits, alert, to see if I will raise my arm and scare it away.

“It was me,” she says again in a strange, flat voice.

And even though part of me feels like I shouldn’t, like it’d be better not to ask, in the end, I always want to know, whatever ugliness, whatever harsh truth, whatever secret. I need to see it; I need to understand. So I say, “What was you?”

“Zabet,” she says, and at first I think she’s gotten confused, that she’s calling me Zabet, but then she says, “Zabet’s dead, and it was me. My fault.”

Oh,
I think.
Oh, Hadley.
“It wasn’t you.”

“No. It was. I want to say . . . tell. . . . There was a list, another list.” The words are high on her breath as if she’s not speaking them but exhaling them. Her eyes are locked on mine; her lip curls up in what could be a snarl, what could be disgust. “We met guys and added them to it. They’d meet us places, and the day after, we . . . we’d add them.”

“I don’t really—”

“Anywhere. Gas stations, diners, bars that let us in, on the street, the food court at the mall, we met them and added them.”

“But how does that . . . You mean Zabet met someone? For the list? You think that last night, the night she . . . died, she met him for your list?”

Hadley shakes her head and lifts her dead hands, holding them cupped just under her face as if she is begging for something to fill them up, water, coins, tears. “I don’t know.”

“But if you knew who it might—”

“No,” Hadley moans. “We met them once and then never again. Even if they wanted to. We gave fake names, numbers. It was a joke or game or . . . I don’t know what it was.”

“But the list! If you show them the list, the police could—”

She breathes in like this is the question she has been steeling herself for. “I burned it. I was scared.”

“Oh, Hadley.”

“It was my idea. She just went along with it. Just like you.” She drops her face into her hands and starts to cry.

Another list. A first list. The real list of suspects, burned, gone. And then there’s Hadley’s and my list, the second list, the names on it in my writing. My idea. Jonah’s name is on it. I press down on Mr. McCabe’s robe, and through it, I can feel the hard fact of the trap, the soft flesh of Jonah’s leg. Under my hands, he is still.

T
HE MEDICS CUT SILENTLY
through the trees, like deer. There are four of them, two stretchers. I wonder if they are the same ones who were here before to collect Zabet. I can’t recall the faces of those other ones, if they are the same faces as these, peering down at us firm and grim. Two of them head for Jonah and me. They set the stretcher in the leaves, and one of the medics kneels next to me, pressing his hands, which have been snapped into hospital gloves, on either side of mine.

“Lift your hands for me now,” he says. “Lift your hands and sit back.”

I stare at my hands. They’re clean and pink. There is so much blood here; it seems like my hands should be dipped in it. When I lift them, I feel a surge of panic. I’m not touching Jonah anymore.
He’ll die
, I think wildly,
all the blood will rush from him
.
He’ll die.
But the medic’s hands are on Jonah’s leg now, pressing steadily.

“Good girl,” he says. “You did good.”

He begins to lift the robe from Jonah’s leg, stops, glances at me, just like Mr. McCabe did, like maybe he shouldn’t do it with me right there, but he goes ahead and lifts the robe anyway. I see a flash
of metal, the angle of the trap grinning around Jonah’s leg, like a mouth grinning around a chicken drumstick.

Then Mr. McCabe is there, his hands on my shoulders, plucking me up from the ground and leading me away. “Come on, now,” he says. “Come with me over here.”

He’s still in his pajamas. No one’s given him a coat or anything. I wonder if he’s embarrassed, a grown man wearing pajamas outside in the daytime with all these people around. Or maybe the pajamas make him feel like he’s sleepwalking or dreaming.

“He moved a little while you were gone,” I tell Mr. McCabe.

“Good,” he says. “You did good.”

I wish people would stop saying this, because I haven’t done anything good; I’ve done no good at all.

We stop across the clearing, a little way away from Hadley. The other two ambulance workers crouch near her, wrapping a tinfoil blanket over her shoulders. She doesn’t move as they do this, just stares out into the trees, her pupils huge as if we are all in a dark room. Her hands peep out from the blanket where she holds it closed at her neck. She shivers, and the whole blanket shivers, too.

The medics have both Jonah and Hadley strapped to the stretchers now. One of them waves Mr. McCabe over and speaks briefly to him before turning back to the stretcher and, with his partner, hoisting it up, carrying it out.