The Space Between Trees (4 page)

“What is it?” I say.

“I’ve had a phone call.”

I look at the Kleenex box. “Is it Dad?” I say, before thinking better of it. Mom’s serious expression wrinkles into something more annoyed.

“Of course not. It was Veronica from work.”

“So?”

Mom touches a hand, quickly, to the bridge of her nose, and I notice that her posture is brittle like crackled paint, like you could chip little bits off of her.

“Is Veronica okay?”

“It’s Elizabeth McCabe,” Mom spits out.

This all takes a minute for me to think about, because it’s not really an answer to my question and, besides, no one’s called Elizabeth McCabe
Elizabeth
for years.

“You mean Zabet?” I say. “Zabet McCabe?”

Mom grabs the Kleenex box and sets it in her lap, and her hands float over its white tuft. “This is bad news, Evie.” And when she says this, her posture relaxes and her hands drop down onto her knees, and we both breathe in once and then out together, like we’ve planned it. Then Mom says, “Elizabeth—Zabet—she’s passed away.”

I wait for a second so that I can recheck the words, their meanings. “That’s terrible,” I finally say, because what else am I supposed to say? News like this is, at first, just news.

I ask if it was a car accident. Last year, two kids from my school died that way. Principal Capp planted two trees out in front of the school, one for each kid. We had this joke around school that the two kids who died had been secretly buried under those trees, their bodies fertilizing them. This past winter, though, the trees started dying from some disease that had crawled under their bark. The
school had practically a hundred exterminators come out to look at them, but not one was able to figure out what was wrong, much less fix it. No one makes that joke anymore about the dead kids being buried there.

Mom tells me that Zabet didn’t die in a car accident. But then when I ask how she did die, Mom gets this funny look on her face, an awkward look, a secret-telling sort of look, and I realize she doesn’t have a pose ready for whatever is in her head. She licks her lips (which she’s always telling me not to do because it chaps them) and tucks her hair behind her ears. “She was killed by someone. A person.”

“Like murder?” I say, and it sounds so silly, something people say through red lipstick with a dramatic gesture upstage—
Murder!—
that I accidentally grin.

“What on earth is funny?” Mom looks appalled.

Now, of course it’s not funny; of course it’s terrible. Sometimes that’s when I grin, though, when something is terrible. I don’t know why. It’s like my mouth is attached to one of those board-game spinners, and it spins all the way around the possible shapes it could make, only to land on the exact wrong one.

“How?” I say.

“How was she killed?” Mom frowns. “By a person. I told you that. She was murdered.”

“No, but how did the person do it?”

Mom wrinkles her nose. “I don’t know.”

“You didn’t ask?”

“Well.” Mom looks at me, then away. “Veronica didn’t have so many details. She’d heard from her sister-in-law, who . . . well, I don’t know how
she
knew. I think she was hit on the head? Elizabeth,
not Veronica’s sister-in-law. Veronica thought that might be it: head trauma. They found her out in the woods near one of those neighborhoods.”

This is it, the information I’ve been waiting for all day, coming not from the nightly news but, improbably, from Veronica at my mother’s office. And there’s that body bag again marching through my head, left to right like the words in a sentence. I really don’t put it together until that moment: that I saw a body, that
Zabet
was the body. I’d sort of assumed it was a man in the bag, some homeless man or amateur hunter; you know, some dumb stranger who had done something risky or stupid or unlucky. But then I remember how all the policemen got real silent when they carried that bag by. And I realize that they must have known that it was a girl in there. I picture myself hiding in those bushes, how when I’d popped up, they had all stared at me like I was a ghost, a ghost girl.

“I saw her,” I say, before thinking that I probably shouldn’t say this, not to Mom, anyway.

Mom has her hand on her own throat. She’s all questions. “You saw who? When? What do you mean? Elizabeth McCabe?”

“Last week,” I say. “At school.” It’s like a reflex, this lie, to protect Mom, to protect myself from Mom’s upset, and I don’t even think much about telling it. I think about Zabet’s locker instead.

I can picture exactly where it is, in what locker bank, in what hall, all that. They paint the lockers different colors, and Zabet has an orange one. I don’t know why I think about a dumb thing like that right now. There’s nothing special about Zabet’s locker. It’s a locker. We all have one. But I start wondering what they’ll do about it, that locker, if the kids on either side of it will want to move to
new lockers, if the school will assign the locker to someone else next year, if the kid who has it the next year will know that it was Zabet’s, and if he does, how long it’ll take—how many years, how many kids—until no one remembers that it used to be hers.

“Was she raped?” I ask. Mom takes her hand off of my shoulder and moves the Kleenex box back onto the table. She nudges a glass of water toward me, but she doesn’t say anything, so I ask again. “Was she raped?”

Mom looks up at me, real quick, and I know then that she heard me the first time. “Why on earth would you ask a question like that?” She pulls the glass away from me like I’m not allowed to have water anymore.

“I don’t . . .” I smile again, despite myself. “I don’t know.” And I don’t. I had wondered, that was all. It seemed important.

Mom stares at me for a minute. Then she says in her airy voice, “We don’t need to know every last detail, do we?” She lifts the glasses and carries them out of the room, again very grand, with her duchess walk. I hear her pour the water out and start to wash the glasses, even though neither of us had drunk a sip from them. I follow her to the kitchen and stand in the doorway. I try to think of something else to say that can cover up the last thing that I’d said.

“It’s weird to think about,” I say. Mom keeps on scrubbing at those glasses.

And it
is
weird to think about. It seems like there should have been a warning or something. Like how your throat feels heavy so you know that you’re going to get a cold the next day—some warning like that. I try to remember Zabet back when we were kids, to remember if I could see it on her, some hint of her death, some odd
glow or ancient prophecy, some bird cawing at her strangely. I don’t remember anything like that, though. I only remember that she liked the red flavors of jam but hated the orange or purple ones, that she refused to let anyone cut her fingernails and they’d grow long and tear off sometimes when we’d play. But those were hardly omens.

“There were two of you,” Mom says over the sound of the water in the sink. “You were two little girls.”

“Mom?” I say. “Hey, Mom?” She’s crying now, so she won’t turn around. She doesn’t like how it makes her face all pink and puffy. I watch her shoulders for a minute; she has the clean glass in her hand. Then she lifts the glass up, and we both look at it for a second, the light from the kitchen shining through it, before she sets it down in the dish rack. Then she lifts the second glass and holds it under the light just the same. It’s so pretty the way she does this—just how she means it to be.

I
DON’T KNOW WHAT TO EXPECT
when I get to school the next morning. Rows of girls in black dresses, maybe. A huge photograph of Zabet with flowers and candles in the main hall. A choir. A preacher. A psychologist. When I get there, though, it’s just school. All the kids are hanging out in packs. The boys’ jaws are pink from their dull razors. The girls have blow-dried their hair to make it shiny and straight. They smell like breakfast and sleep and the closets at home that they keep their coats in. They slam their lockers, bump into each other on purpose, and yawn their cereal breath.

I walk through the halls and listen for someone to say her name:
Zabet
. No one’s talking about her, though. No one knows what happened. What’s more, there’s no one I can tell. I feel like if I began to speak, it would be in a foreign language, one that I couldn’t even recognize myself. Maybe it wouldn’t be a language of words. Maybe if I opened my mouth, thimbles and postage stamps and spools of dental floss would drop from my tongue.

I begged Mom to let me borrow her car this morning. I wanted to drive past Jonah’s house. True, I don’t exactly know where Jonah’s house is, but I thought that if I drove around the rental houses near the college, I might spot his truck. If his truck were out front, it’d
mean that he was okay, that he wasn’t in jail. I can’t imagine what it was like, seeing her dead like that. But that’s not true; I can imagine
exactly
what it was like. I can imagine it twelve different ways, twenty different ways, seventy. In fact, I sort of wish I had seen it—the body—so that I could hold just one picture in my head.

Mom wouldn’t let me take the car, though, and so the only thing I could do for Jonah was call Jefferson Wildlife Control. I looked up the number in the phone book and thought of a good cover story to tell Jonah’s boss if he answered.

“There’s an animal,” I said to myself as the line rang. “There’s an animal in my backyard. . . .” The answering machine picked up. I didn’t leave a message.

In the halls at school, I look around for Hadley Smith, Zabet’s best friend. She will definitely know about what happened. Hadley’s not at her locker, though. Not at Zabet’s locker, either. She’s proba bly at home, I decide, or maybe over at Zabet’s house, being a comfort to the family. Both the Smiths and the McCabes live in Hokepe Woods, a few blocks away from each other. In fact, both of their houses are on my paper route. I never got to Zabet’s house on Sunday; her family’s paper is still in my room, in my satchel, under the bed.

I picture Hadley on the McCabes’ couch, her tough face shrinking in on itself in grief, the same way a peach does when you let it soften.
You knew her better than anyone
, Mrs. McCabe might say. And then Mr. McCabe would touch her arm and murmur,
You’re like a daughter to us now
. Hadley should nod then, a single tear slipping down her cheek and into the scar on her chin. Then she should take each of their hands in her own. I hope she knows what to do in a situation like this.

In homeroom, Mr. Denby is arranging about a billion stacks of paper on his desk, neatening up the edges. I’m the first one there. I’m always the first one there. I take a seat over by the plants. Mr. Denby has got dozens of them; the whole windowsill is leafy. Sometimes, when kids are bored in class, they poke holes in the leaves or tear off pieces of them. I used to do it, too, until one day, before class, Mr. Denby walked over and lifted up one of the tortured leaves and stared at it for about a whole minute. After that, I left the plants alone.

I put my head down on the desk. I didn’t sleep much last night. It was like I lay down in that little crawlspace between awake and asleep, almost dreaming, then almost waking, then almost dreaming again.

It’s not that I was grieving or anything, though of course I thought about Zabet. In fact, I tried to conjure up each of my memories of her, give each of them a turn in my mind. I thought about how bossy Zabet was, like whenever we had to choose something—pieces for a board game, snacks after school, clothes for dress up—she’d say, “I will have . . .” and then, whatever one she wanted most, she’d grab it.

But I also couldn’t help thinking about how Zabet had died. I couldn’t help thinking about the murderer, who he was, where he was, why he’d picked her and not some other person. In fact, I couldn’t think about Zabet without thinking about him. It’s like the two of them were mixed up together in my head, and that seemed unfair somehow—not to me really, but to Zabet.

Mr. Denby looks up from his papers and then blinks like he’s a little surprised to see me there. “Good morning, Evie,” he says. And, right when he says it, I realize that
he
knows about Zabet. Of course he does; all the teachers probably do.

So I say, “Mr. Denby, I know, too.”

He blinks. “You know what?”

“I know about—” But I can’t seem to say it right out like that; it feels like it’d be against the rules, like I’d be swearing or something. “I know about . . .
you know
.”

“I don’t.” Mr. Denby tilts his head about halfway around, like he’s going to wind it right off of his neck.

“About the thing?”

“Thing? Be precise, Evie.”

“The thing you probably have to tell us when class starts?”

He’s quiet for a second, and he gets that look like he’s trying to decide just how to answer me, which, to be truthful, is a look that I get from teachers quite a lot. Finally, he makes a decision and points over his shoulder. “Actually, it’ll come over the loudspeaker.” Then, “How do you know about that?”

“I was there.”

“You were . . . ? No, no,” he says. “We must be thinking of different happenings.”