The Space Between Trees (31 page)

Mr. McCabe returns to me, puts a hand on my shoulder, patting it once. “We’re going to follow them to the hospital, all right?”

We walk back to Mr. McCabe’s condominium in silence, and I wait downstairs while he changes out of his pajamas. He makes a phone call. I can’t hear most of it, but I catch the phrase “don’t
worry” a few times, and so I assume the call is to either Hadley’s mother or mine.

We continue our silence on the drive over. Mr. McCabe doesn’t ask me what happened, and I thank him for that over and over again in my head. The same few thoughts play in a loop and nothing else. Hadley’s confession, about Zabet and the other list, is there in my head, too, and I know I should tell him about this. I tell myself that I’ll talk to Hadley first. Really, I’m a coward.

We reach the hospital, its identical windows like pixels. I walk a step behind Mr. McCabe, who leads us through corridors to one counter and then through more corridors to another. I stand back against the wall as he talks to the women at the counters. I don’t want to hear what they have to say. After the second counter, Mr. McCabe leads us to a waiting area. The chair I sit in squeaks when I move, as if to protest my fidgeting. The chairs are arranged in a circle, though we are the only ones sitting in this circle.

“Evie,” Mr. McCabe says, and I look at him because he has used my name.
Now
, I think,
now is when the punishment comes.
“They need to know what happened. Do you think you can tell them?”

I look around to see who “they” is, but there is no one here. Even the nurse at the counter has disappeared.

“Do you think you can tell them?” Mr. McCabe asks again because I haven’t answered.

“The police?” I say, still looking for them.

“Not the police.” Mr. McCabe frowns. “There aren’t any police here.”

“Who, then?”

“The EMTs.” And, as if he has called her, one of the medics from the woods rounds the corner with the nurse who was at the counter.
I look for bloodstains on her dark uniform, but there are none. She was one of the medics attending to Hadley, not Jonah. She takes the chair across from mine, flips a few pages on her clipboard, smoothes one out, and clicks her pen, all before acknowledging us, which she does with a crisp smile.

“I have some questions for you,” she says; she doesn’t even offer her name.
EMT
, Mr. McCabe had said. I try to remember what that stands for:
Emergency
, something, and something else.

I nod. “You witnessed the accident?” she asks. “Yes,” I tell her, so startled by the word
accident
that I answer without thinking.

She ticks something off on her clipboard. “I need your name and your phone number.”

I recite both, but the information seems separate from me, nonsensical even.

“Can you describe what happened?”

It was Hadley!
I imagine myself saying.
She’s the one! Murderer!
my mind shouts.
Murderer!
Though no one has died, at least not yet. But in the suggestion of this imaginary accusation, I realize something that almost makes me gasp. What I realize is this: Hadley had planned everything.

She’d
stolen the trap from my room when she came to pick me up for our sleepover, stowed it in her stupid black backpack.
She’d
brought it out to the woods and hidden it there.
She’d
snatched Jonah’s keys, made him chase her. And when she got to the clearing, to the patch of mud, strewn with the branches
she’d
used to hide the trap,
she
jumped over it, timed her feet to hit the ground before and after the open jaws, Jonah just behind her, following her path. Did
she turn at the snap of the trap, the snap of bone? Or did she hit the ground and run on, heedless of the leaves and branches whipping her face? And when she did eventually return to the clearing, did she stand over him, a conqueror, believing that she’d finally avenged Zabet’s death? Avenged the stupid cut on my lip? I think of Hadley that night before the party, out on the shoulder of the vacant highway, no cars to bear us away.
I’ll protect you,
she’d told me.

“It was an accident,” I hear myself saying, repeating the EMT’s own word. “We didn’t know the trap was there. We didn’t know what would happen.”

She doesn’t nod or frown or make any sort of expression, simply writes on her clipboard in deft, swift strokes.

“We were just keeping him company. Hadley grabbed his keys as a joke. You can ask Jonah.” I swallow. “I mean, you can ask him later. When he’s better.”

But the woman doesn’t seem to care much about any of this. She’s already stopped writing and moved her pen down an inch to fill in the next question on the form. “The trap was located where, would you say?”

It goes on like this for a dozen questions more. I answer them all, making my best guesses for the things I’m not sure about, making up my best stories for the things I’m lying about. Mr. McCabe sits next to me, alert, his big hand on my arm, squeezing reassuringly when my voice gets tense from some lie I’m telling. Both adults soften visibly when this happens, the EMT waving us on to the next question. They’re worried that I’m upset.

“That’ll do it,” the EMT finally says. She smiles at me, the motherly smile of sated bureaucracy. “Thank you, honey,” she murmurs. “You did good.”

Mr. McCabe and I wait for another I-don’t-know-how-long. The clock on the wall is dead, though it takes me a while to realize this. At first I think that it’s the same minute, stretching on improbably long. I stare at my clasped hands, which aren’t praying, only holding on to each other. I want to read one of the magazines on the end table, but I worry that it would seem rude if I did. Finally, Mr. McCabe picks one up, glancing at me and smiling under his mustache. He pushes another one toward me. I slide it into my lap and open it. The fashion models look exhausted, ready to collapse. Patients appear and are swept into one of the real areas of the hospital, where bone saws smoke and scalpels snag skin, where the white blossoms in your throat are scraped, your jagged wounds pulled tight with thread, your festering organs cut free.

My mother arrives and throws her arms around me in the perfect embrace of parental concern. I don’t even care if she’s thinking about how she looks while hugging me; I sink into her arms anyway. When she pulls away, her face is pale and young, her eyes lashless, her lips a bare pink, nearly the same color as the skin around them.

I reach out and touch her cheek. “You aren’t wearing makeup,” I say with wonder. Usually she puts it on before breakfast and leaves it on until bedtime. I’ve definitely never seen her leave the house without it. This is more extraordinary than Mr. McCabe wandering around in his pajamas.

“Oh, well.” She touches her face, too, lays her fingers over mine in fact. “I was in a hurry.” She peers at my face, naked concern on her naked face. “You’re all right,” she finally says, her tone halfway between question and pronouncement. “Sweetheart, you’re really all right?”

“Yeah, I’m”—and then, before I can help it, I’ve started to cry. I stumble toward her. “Mom,” I say into her sweater.

“I was so worried,” she tells me.

“I’m sorry,” I sob. “I’m so sorry.”

She hushes me and strokes my hair, holding me again, even tighter, just like a mother should.

Eventually, my name is called. I am ushered through those doors by an eager young nurse who repeatedly assures me that my friend will be fine. “She was just in shock,” she keeps saying. “A little shock, that’s all.” She repeats this three or four times, and I start to wonder if she thinks I am in shock, too.

It is good that I’m here, she tells me, so good because it was a little difficult to get ahold of my friend’s parents, but this intrepid nurse, a few minutes ago, prevailed. They’re on their way.

“Cheer her up now,” the nurse demands of me and pauses as if waiting for a response. Her scrubs are covered with tiny gamboling lambs. Their cheerful cartoon faces make me yearn for wool coats.

I nod. “Okay.”

“Nothing like a visit from a friend,” she says, guiding me into a small exam room where Hadley sits up on the table in a pair of green hospital scrubs. Her hair has been combed out and her face washed; new butterfly bandages were applied to her cut so that their wings are a pristine white.
No, not butterfly bandages,
I think.
Moths.

“Could I pass as a doctor, or what?” she says, running her hands over the scrubs.

“I guess.”

“Think they’d let me do a surgery?” She grins, but it fades when I don’t grin back.

“How are you feeling?” I ask.

She rolls her eyes at me as if to say,
This? This is what you want to talk about?
“They say I was in shock.” She shrugs. “Now I’m not.”

I’ve started to hate these shrugs, these twitches of indifference. I want to press my hands on Hadley’s shoulders and hold them down. She makes a fist and bops her own knee, like the doctor’s reflex test; her leg kicks up in response. I back up into one of the chairs, which squeaks at me in sympathy. Hadley bops her knee again. Her leg kicks out.

“Stop that,” I say.

She looks at me. “Make me.”

“Come on. Please.”

She bops it again.

“Please don’t be funny right now.”

She watches me for a moment, carefully, and then, with an air of deference to me, like it’s the biggest favor in the world, unclenches her fist and sets her palm, flat, at her side. Her leg rests back against the side of the exam table, still and perfect and whole.

She frowns. “What’s the matter with you?”

I don’t know how to answer this impossible question, so I stare at her blankly, until she shrugs once more and looks down at her hand. Her demeanor changes, that shift in the weather that I’ve become expert at forecasting. I’m a goddamn Hadley meteorologist.

“My parents are coming,” she says in a tone that suggests I’ve argued that they’re not. “They’re on their way.”

We sit for a moment without speaking. Hadley begins to rock, making the paper on either side of her whisper. I wonder how long
I have to sit there, when it’s polite enough for me to get up and go, what Hadley will do if I try to leave. Finally, she stops rocking, and the last whispers of the paper smooth out into silence.

“About what I said before. You remember?” she says.

“Yeah.”

“I was thinking . . .” And I think she’s going to say,
Don’t tell anyone
or
Don’t blame me
or
I feel so guilty.
But instead she says, “It could have been him.”

“It couldn’t,” I say. I mean my voice to be firm, but it is a trembling whine, weak and thin.

Hadley smiles down at me from the table as if she pities me. “You don’t get it.”

“What?”

“Guys. They’d follow us over nothing, a question, a smile, a stupid hello. Do you know how many names were on that list? Zabet’s and my list?”

“Jonah’s wasn’t.”

She shrugs. “He followed you out of the woods same as any of them, took you back to his car.”

“He was drunk. I was—”

“Kissed you.”

I shake my head stupidly. “It wasn’t him.”

She smiles and shakes her head back at me, a slow, bemused
no, no, no,
like she won’t let me get away with this. “You
told
me it was him.”

“I never said that!”

“He hit you.”

I touch my lip, scabbed over now. “I never—”

“‘I fell’? Come on. I knew what you were saying.”

And there it is.

Hadley looks down at her hands again. She nods tiny nods, as if she’s agreeing with what she’s just said. And maybe she believes it. And maybe it’s true. Maybe I did know what I was doing, did it as punishment for Jonah, since he rejected me. There could be that kind of spider in me, that scuttling gray weaver, that whisper of ill intent, that evil. You would call that evil, right? That’s what evil is.

“You said it,” Hadley repeats, always knowing when she has the advantage, knowing when to press it. “
That dead girl.
You told me that.”

I stand up, allowing my chair one final squeak of protest, and walk to the door of the exam room, reaching out for the doorknob with a quivering hand, worried for a moment that my fingers won’t be able to reach it, worried that my hand will pass right through.