The Space Between Trees (5 page)

Before I can tell him that we’re not, that we’re thinking of the same exact happening, a few kids wander in, looking around like they’re lost, even though this is the same homeroom that they come to every day. Then the bell buzzes, and all the rest of the class bursts in. Mr. Denby takes roll. After he’s done, he glances back at the loudspeaker, which beeps the second he looks at it.

“Mr. D, you’re psychic!” someone says.

A few people laugh, but Mr. Denby spits out this harsh “shh!” and everyone looks around at each other, stunned and mock hurt, because usually Mr. Denby is very nice to us, even when we destroy his plants.

It’s Principal Capp on the loudspeaker. Instead of his typical “Good morning, Chippewa braves!” he says, “Greetings, Chippewa students, staff, and faculty,” and you can tell by his voice that, whatever he’s saying, he’s reading it off a piece of paper. “I am deeply saddened to report that we have lost one of our own. Elizabeth McCabe passed away early Sunday morning.”

“God,” someone says.

They all know now
, I think.
It’s not just me.
And this makes me feel both better and worse.

Principal Capp goes on to talk about the counseling office and the nature of tragedies and transportation to the memorial service on Friday. Almost everybody’s looking at the speaker, and the ones who aren’t are looking at Mr. Denby. Then, with another beep and a zip of static, the announcement is over.

People start whispering then, and I can hear the word
How? How? How?
all around the room.
How did she die?
In the back of the room, Chelsea Snyder’s face has become pink and slick and snotty, and the girls around her pat her back or shoulders or wherever they can find a little untended patch of her.

“Dude,” I hear one of the boys call in a low voice. “That’s fucked up. How do you think it happened?” Then a group of them starts talking about times they almost died but didn’t, eliciting quiet laughter and oaths of “shiiit.” I look from one group to the other, not sure if I fit in with the criers or the taletellers or anyone.

The girl in the desk next to me turns. Her name is Nora Whitaker, and she hasn’t spoken to me all semester. Now she says, “I don’t even know who that girl is,” like that settles it. Then she cocks her head and reconsiders. “Did you know her?”

“Yeah,” I say.

“You
did
? Were you, like, friends?”

“Not really. When we were kids.”

“Oh.” She seems disappointed.

“I mean, we were pretty good friends back then.”

“Yeah? You must be sad, then. Are you sad? Should I stop talking to you because you’re sad?”

“No. You can talk.”

Two other girls have joined Chelsea Snyder in her tears. They’ve formed a pinwheel shape, facing in, foreheads pressed together and arms around each other’s backs. I wonder if I should be crying, too, but I feel dry, tapped. I hear Tyler James say, “. . . unconscious for about four hours.” Mr. Denby walks up and down the rows, peering over our shoulders, just like he does when he assigns us a group worksheet.

“So, what was she like?” Nora asks. She’s wearing a little floral kerchief over her hair. She keeps adjusting it, half an inch back and forth on her head. All her tiny features are arranged at the center of her face. There are some types of pretty that I would never want to be.

“She was . . .” I don’t want to say
nice
. Saying
nice
seems terrible, a throwaway line for the back of someone’s yearbook. “Well, she hangs—hung—around with Hadley Smith and them.”

“Oh.” Nora wrinkles her nose. No one much likes Hadley Smith. “Wait. Zabet McCabe. Is she that one girl?” She doesn’t elaborate.

“Maybe,” I say.

“Yeah.” She nods decisively. “I think I know her.”

We’re quiet for a second. The pinwheel in the back has started to sing something in soft, quavering voices. Nora glances at them
and then sighs. I can’t tell if her sigh is sad or derisive or bored. I feel a sweep of anger against Nora Whitaker and, at the same time, a duty to make sure that, in the face of Zabet’s death, she is something (anything!) other than bored.

“There was this one time,” I say.

She looks round. “Yeah?”

“There was this time when Zabet and I—we were maybe eight or nine—and we were at the arboretum for a field trip.”

“I went there,” Nora breathes as if this is an amazing coincidence, when really every elementary school takes a field trip to the arboretum every fall.

“So we were at that one part in the nature center—maybe you remember—where this lady takes an owl pellet and dissects it? Well, she was really good at it, the lady was. She had these tweezers, and she just dug into the thing. She set all the fluff and weird stuff on one side, and every once in a while, she’d find a little bone and set it on this velvet cloth. After a couple of minutes, she has a bunch of little bones on the cloth, and she starts putting them in an order, and it makes—”

“A mouse,” Nora says.

“Right. A mouse skeleton. So the mouse is finally finished, and Zabet turns to me, and she says—”

I pause.

“Yeah?” Nora says. She leans forward.

“Zabet looks at the skeleton and says, ‘It’s all in there.’”

Nora blinks. “Then what?”

But there isn’t more to the story. That’s the end of it.

O
VER THE NEXT COUPLE OF DAYS
, everybody talks about Zabet and the murder. During roll call, the teachers stare pointedly at each of us like we might cry at the sound of our own names. Some girls do cry, and other girls scoff at them for being fakers and drama queens. In the hall, some kids trade made-up details about the autopsy or guesses about who the killer might be; some kids lean on each other’s shoulders and sigh,
It’s so sad
, and,
I just can’t believe it
.

The news crews come around a few times, but Principal Capp makes them stay off school property. When we walk out of the building after sixth period, the reporters are lined up across the street in camera-ready peacoats and scarves, waving us over. Some kids go. Mom and I see them on the news while we eat dinner. They all say the same things:
She was so nice. It’s a tragedy.

The newscasters tell us that, though forensic evidence proves that Zabet was killed in the woods and not dumped there, no one knows for sure what happened that night. All anyone knows is that Zabet said good night to her mother around eleven on Saturday and went upstairs to bed. There were no signs, they report, of a break-in, so the current theory is that she snuck out, maybe just to take a walk.
No one even knew she was gone. Zabet’s mother thought she was still asleep in her room when the police knocked on the front door Sunday morning to bring news of her death. This means that I knew Zabet was dead, or at least that
someone
was dead, before her mother did, which gives me the creeps.

Rumors fly that the police are at the school, using Capp’s office to question kids. I never see any police officers, though I guess it might be part of their job
not
to be seen. Whenever anyone gets a note to see the principal, no one makes the soft joking call of
Ooaaahhh, you’re in trouble
anymore. I wait for my name to be called but never hear it. What did I see, anyway? Nothing they didn’t see. A body pulled out of the woods.

The Whisperers don’t know that I used to know Zabet, and I don’t tell them. They don’t guess that I was there when the body was found or that Jonah was the one who found it. They think of Hokepe Woods as their neighborhood, not mine. They whisper about how the body was only a few yards from their houses and maybe, if they’d only looked, they could have witnessed the murder from their bedroom windows. They have hypotheses about who the killer is: the college kid who runs his own lawn-mowing business; Larry Smalley, who tried to commit suicide last year (maybe because he was in love with Zabet, they surmise); a friend of one of the Whisperers’ brothers, who stares at them a second too long when they’re over for a slumber party in their pajamas.

“It didn’t have to be Zabet who got murdered. It could have been any of us,” one of them whispers, and another one flicks her on the arm. “Don’t even say that out loud.”

At home, Mom keeps checking to see if I have a temperature. Her hand flies out as I walk down the hall, when I sit on the couch, when I do homework at the kitchen table, slapping onto my forehead without warning. After a few seconds holding it there, she always says, “You feel a little warm.”

I keep calling Jefferson Wildlife Control, and I keep getting the answering machine. Finally, I make up an excuse to take Mom’s car and drive to the address listed in the phone book. It ends up being Mr. Jefferson’s home, which is gabled and white and doesn’t look like it’d have anything to do with animal carcasses. I drive past a few different times, whenever Mom sends me on an errand, but I never see Jonah’s rusty old truck or Jonah himself. On the news, the anchors say words like
murder investigation
and
manhunt
and
suspects
, but they never mention Jonah, so as far as I can tell, he is free.

I still can’t fall asleep that night. I can’t turn on the light, either, or Mom will see it under the door. I think about Zabet a lot.
Zabet’s dead
, I tell myself.
Zabet was murdered and raped.
I keep saying it, even though it makes me feel nothing.

I think about when I first knew Zabet. We were eight. My dad had just moved out, saying he’d come back soon to visit, which he did, a few times. Once, for my tenth birthday, he took me to this pizza place with a playground for little kids. Even though I was way too old for the indoor playground, he seemed to expect that I’d play on it, so I did, crawling through the tunnels with the smaller kids, who stared at me. I felt hot with shame. That was his last visit, and for a long time I wondered if maybe he was as embarrassed as I was. Mom claims that she has a phone number for him if we ever need to call. But I’ve never seen it.

When Dad left, I was supposed to be sad about it. I put my head down on my desk in class and sighed so loud that the teacher sent a note home. I knew I was supposed to act like this, that everyone expected it. Really, it was okay having him gone. Mom was happy again. She would order takeout and wear lipstick and talk with her hands. She had to get a full-time job, so she hired Zabet’s mother to watch me for a few hours after school.

Zabet was Elizabeth back then. (It wasn’t until middle school that Hadley Smith convinced her to cut four letters from her name.) Our elementary school was divided into bussers and walkers. The walkers lived in the new neighborhoods, which were close to the schools. Bussers lived in apartments or rented houses farther out. The walkers were wealthy, and the bussers were poor, and if you think little kids don’t notice stuff like that, then you’re wrong. We knew whose clothes were hand-me-downs, whose sneakers were off-brand, and whose names were on the free list that the lunch lady kept taped next to the register.

Under the normal order of things, Zabet was a walker and I was a busser. But Mom met Mrs. McCabe at a PTA meeting, and Mrs. McCabe, perhaps seeing an opportunity for charity, offered to watch me until Mom got off work, which meant that I got to walk home with Zabet and a few other walkers after school. That first day, I waited for them in the coat room after the bell. They hitched their backpacks up and re-knotted their laces. I stared at their legs as we strode forward, making sure to place my feet just like they did. Hokepe Woods was in the final stages of being built back then, so a few of the houses were still under construction. Zabet and I used to tunnel through them on our way home, sliding between stud beams or patting the shiny panels of insulation.

Zabet was a whole head taller than me, with sturdy legs and the starts of breasts. Around her I was embarrassed by my littleness. But I also felt quick in my thoughts and words, and it seemed that maybe this quickness came from my littleness, too. Zabet would believe anything I told her. Even if later I told her that I’d only been joking before, she’d still believe whatever I’d said first, and I’d have to keep reminding her that it was a lie. I don’t mean that she was stupid; she wasn’t. She got herself lost in stuff was all—stories. This made it great fun to tell her things—true things, false things, fabulous things—just to see her face glaze over and her mouth fall open.

I told her this one story (and this was a true one) about how a few weeks before my dad left, he and Mom were arguing in the kitchen. I don’t really remember what the argument was about—just something—but Mom got so angry that she started pulling on her own hair. Dad was standing by the dish rack, and I saw him look over at it a few times. Then his hand twitched, and he’d grabbed a colander out of the rack and thrown it at Mom. It was only plastic, though, so it just bounced off of her chest to the floor. But he already had another thing coming right at her—a metal ladle. Well, Mom reached up and caught it, just before it hit her, the handle less than an inch from her pretty nose. She stared at the ladle for a second, and he stared too, like they couldn’t believe it was there in her hand.