The Space Between Trees (32 page)

“If they ask,” I say, my voice shaking, “I told them it was an accident.”

“Yeah,” Hadley says with a bored little sigh. “I knew you would.”

The hospital hallway is empty; the lamb-covered nurse has trotted off somewhere with her pocketful of tongue depressors. I try to follow the route back to the waiting area, but every hallway, every bend, every door looks the same, a labyrinth. I make a wrong turn and find myself in a corridor of patient rooms. I walk its length, telling myself not to look in, but it’s hard not to even glance as I go by. I see a kid with covers up to his chin and a knit hat on his head, lots of sleeping lumps, lots more people watching TV, their expressions stolen by the flickering light of the screen. In one room there are two men playing cards, one in bed, the other attended by the metal
scarecrow of his IV pole. In another, an ancient woman in a ruffled pink nightgown stands next to her bed doing calisthenics, the loose skin hanging under her arms like the starts of wings. She catches me watching her through the glass in the door, and I dart away just as she’s beginning to smile.

If I’m looking for Jonah, I don’t find him. He’s probably in surgery, maybe dying or already dead. I keep walking because if I stop I might start crying, or worse, I might not be able to cry. I feel hollow, like everything has been scooped out of me, all the seeds and pulp, the edge of the spoon cutting into the pith. And it’s worse
not
to be able to cry. Inhuman. Serves me right.

I must look like I know where I’m going, because no one stops me, none of the cardboard doctors or paper nurses, and finally I have to stop myself because I’ve reached the dead end of a corridor. There’s nothing to do but turn around and go back. But I just stand there at the end of the hall. To my right is the emergency staircase, to my left, a door to a room. I peer in: a private room, dimmed by the hospital blues, the curtain drawn all the way around the bed in the center, hiding it. I go in.

The curtain is long and faint blue, clipped to a track in the ceiling, a modest shroud for the bed it covers. There’s a sliver of room left outside of it, a little strip of free tile, space enough for a sink and a chair. This is where I stand. I listen for a sound behind the curtain, the stir of sheets, the falling grace note of a snore, but there is nothing, no shadow that I can discern through the folds of fabric, no blip of machinery, no scratch or cough, no rustle. I step closer to the curtain, so close that I can feel the space between the cloth and my skin. I imagine someone sitting on the edge of the bed, some patient,
leaning ever so slightly forward, head cocked and eyes sweetly closed, waiting, breath bated, to hear what I will say.

I think of all that’s happened, what I’ve seen and what I’ve done. I think of all the ways I could explain it, the justifications and apologies, the digressions and embellishments. I open my mouth to form the first sentence.
I was in Hokepe Woods
, I could say
, like I am every Sunday.
I could explain everything from the start so that he would understand, from that morning crouching in the garden with the sirens wailing around me to here, now, in this hospital room, the bed curtain brushing my face. And when I’m done, the last sentence shaped and spoken, I’ll be at peace.

I open my mouth and look for a word. I take a breath. But then, I don’t. I back out of the room, leaving the curtain in place. I retrace my path through the corridors, back to the waiting area. Mr. McCabe is still there in the circle of chairs. My mother is, too. When my mother sees me, she leans forward worriedly and says, “Evie?” But I walk past her and over to Mr. McCabe, who’s watching me like he’s been expecting this all along. I stand in front of his chair, make myself meet his eyes, and say, “I have something to tell you.”

J
ONAH LOST HIS LEG
. They took it at the knee. It’s gone now, that piece of him. The doctors were able to save his thigh and the joint of his knee, but everything below that was unsalvageable.

I don’t think about Jonah’s leg, the chewed beam of his calf, whatever ribbons of tendon, the marbled nub of knee bone, round and white as a blind eye. I don’t think about it being chucked into the hospital incinerator, a sizzle as the leg hairs go up, skin peeling and curling like burnt slips of paper, the limb withered, desiccated to a bent branch of ash. I don’t think about any of that.

I didn’t visit Jonah in the hospital. A few months earlier, I would’ve looked for any excuse to see him. I can picture myself standing next to his bed, arms bursting with carnations, candy boxes, and board games, balloons bopping along behind me. But that’s a different girl—the one in my mind, who asks brightly for a vase and shifts her weight from one foot to the other, searching for any excuse to touch Jonah’s arm or cheek, trying her hardest not to glance at the place where the covers sag, the leg gone from beneath them. I should’ve visited him anyway—me, this Evie—no matter how it would’ve been.

Jonah didn’t return to his job in Hokepe Woods or to Chippewa at all. Instead, he went to live with his brother in South Carolina while he recovered. I think there was some physical therapy he had to do, but I’m not sure because I wasn’t there for any of that, either. He has a fake leg now, made out of something fancy, and he gets around okay, I hear.

I returned to Chippewa High the Monday after the accident. Once again, the residents of Hokepe Woods had been called by the ambulance sirens to gather behind their window treatments and watch the purposeful blades of the stretchers thresh their radiant Sunday morning. They had seen Hadley carried back out on one of those stretchers, trembling in her silver blanket, a foreign princess brought forth on a litter. At school that Monday after, there were rumors that Hadley had tried to burn down the woods, rumors that she had killed a man, killed herself, killed Zabet. But somehow my name was never whispered, as if I were a ghost, an escapee, the space between the trees, the page on which a story is written.

Hadley never came back to Chippewa High. She stayed home that final week of school, self-sequestered, spent the summer traveling with an aunt I didn’t know she had, and then the next fall, she transferred to a private school upstate. The day before she left, she showed up at my house. Mom was there, and we were all stiff with each other, polite and talking around things. Though probably we’d have been that way, Hadley and me, even by ourselves. When Hadley hugged me good-bye that day, though, she held me tight and buried her nose in my neck, and when I tried to pull away, she wouldn’t let me. She decided when she would let me go. And when she finally did, she was all grins and swagger again. “Be good, kiddo,” she said
and chucked me on the head. “Walk when carrying scissors. Look both ways. Don’t talk to strangers.” She said this last without any trace of irony. Then she drove away, my only friend.

There was never any inquiry into what happened to Jonah, at least none that I ever heard of. That no one would be curious about this second act of violence on the same ground as the first seemed unbelievable. For months and months, I waited for the police car to pull up in front of my house or uniformed officers to march into my English class. But no one came. No one suspected. In the end, I guess they figured that we were only girls teasing a boy in the woods, playing that old game of chase and catch, that it was an accident—some idiot poacher loaded a bear trap in a woods without bears, and some kids were unlucky enough to stumble into it. And Jonah, as far as I know, believed the same. So that’s how Hadley and I got away with it, disappearing among the trees, the meanest of criminals.

I told Mom and Mr. McCabe part of things that day in the hospital waiting room. I told them about the guys that Hadley and Zabet used to meet, that first burned-up list. Mr. McCabe started to cry halfway through, which was pretty awful, and I almost stopped talking then and there. But Mom looked at me levelly and said, “Go on, Evie,” and that made me able to. I know Mr. McCabe told the police about the first list and all that, and the police questioned Hadley again, but it didn’t help them catch him.

In the end, they caught him by chance. In August, he killed another girl in Illinois. The police didn’t catch him for that either, though; they pulled him over in a stolen car. Then they found traces
of blood in the car that matched the Illinois girl’s and, down in the bottom of his rucksack, a sweater that had been Zabet’s. He claims that he’s innocent, won’t say a word other than that. His name is Ben Truax, a name that was never on Hadley’s and my suspect list. How could it have been? He was a drifter, gone by the time we’d started looking.

And so there it is, the answer. It doesn’t feel like how I thought it would at all. I don’t feel the urge to gasp or say
aha!
I am not wiser or safer. The world is not set to rights. It is a small, sad, messy world, and I am a small, sad, messy girl. I didn’t understand that having a story changes you. You have to have gone through something, after all, to have something to say. Now I have my story. But I can’t bear to speak a word of it.

Except this: One night this spring, about a year now after Zabet’s death, I went over to have spaghetti with Mr. McCabe. I never could admit to him that it was partly my fault that Jonah lost his leg. This time, though, I tried to tell him. I sputtered out a few miserable words, and Mr. McCabe rapped his knuckles on the table to quiet me.

“You know, Evie,” he said, “sometimes, not often, but sometimes, there is a terrible thing.”

He looked at me hard, like he was waiting for an answer.

“Yeah,” I said. “I know that. Of course.”

“What can you say to a terrible thing? Not
boo
. Not anything. Can’t reason with it, can’t tighten its screws, can’t move it from one side of the room to the other. Can’t know anything about it—why it’s terrible, why it even happened—can’t know anything more than the fact of it.”

He lowered his hand, the back of it touching his knee, the palm making the shape of a cup. “I’m glad you came and got me that morning. I don’t know what made you run all the way over here. I know there were people, phones, closer, and it’s selfish for me to say this, but I’m glad you got
me
. Because”—he lifted his hand and ran it over his mustache—“I was able to help. I could hold my hand on that boy’s leg, and that was something I could do.”

After dinner, Mr. McCabe fell asleep in his chair, his soft chin nodding with the rise and fall of his chest, and I padded up the stairs and down the hall to Zabet’s room. At first I thought I’d turned the wrong way, gotten the wrong door, because the room was cleared out. The bed had been stripped down to the daisy print of its mattress. The dresser drawers were empty, the closet, too—even the pack of cigarettes gone from the top shelf. The air carried the inoffensive smell of lemon soap, and the carpet was striped with vacuum lines. I stood in the middle of the room, the buzz of Mr. McCabe’s snore ascending the stairs, following the familiar curves of the hall until it reached me here. She was gone, every hint of her, and yet it seemed as if the room itself was breathing the breath of shallow sleep, waiting for someone to call it to wake.
Rest in peace
, that’s what we say when we speak to the dead, and then we hold our breath and wait for them to whisper the same words back to us.

Deep thanks to my parents, Beth and Frank Williams, for their love and support and for never once suggesting that I might just be sensible and go to law school. Thanks, too, to Laura Furman for her friendship and mentorship and for the phone call she made over her summer break telling me to write this novel.

I am near worshipful of my agent, Judy Heiblum, for her candor, strength, and smarts, and of my editors, Julie Romeis and Mary Colgan, brave warriors of the writing process. These three made this book better than it was.

Thanks to the Michener Center for Writers for their support and to my teachers—Michael Adams, Laura Furman, and Elizabeth Harris—for their guidance.

I have had help from friends along the way. Thanks to Dr. Matthew Wemple for lending me his expertise. My gratitude to Riley Hoffman, Morgan Johnson, and my San Francisco workshop group for the early reads and to Kris Bronstad, James Hannaham, and Susie Meserve for the later reads. My gratitude for their friendship, too.