The Space Between Trees (7 page)

“I went to my great-uncle’s funeral,” one Whisperer says. “A year ago. They’d plucked out all his nose hairs. His face looked funny without nose hairs.”

“Ew,” the other Whisperers say.

I pinch my nose to feel my own nose hairs bend against my skin.

“Do you think we’ll see her? Zabet?” I ask. I picture Zabet’s body zipped up in the bag, draped with the sheet.

“Like open face?” one of them asks.

“You mean open casket,” another says. “Open face is a sandwich.”

“Gross,” says a third.

“Stop. Don’t make me laugh.”

“It won’t be open.”

“Open face?”

“Shut up. Open casket. It won’t be.”

“No way.”

“No.”

The Whisperers shudder and shake their heads. The bus stops and Mr. Denby tells us to rise and walk in twos. We follow him across the parking lot and into the church, which has the green piled carpet and beige popcorn ceilings of the rec rooms in the old houses Mom and I rent. The main chapel is nicer than the hall is. It has slanted ceilings and a big, plain, blond-wood cross. I’ve always liked crosses better when they have a Jesus on them. I like to see what people thought his face looked like.

The bus got us there early, so we’re some of the only ones in the chapel. Mr. Denby has us slide into the pews in the back. Up at the front of the chapel, under the cross, is a raised area packed with as many flowers as Mr. Denby’s classroom windowsill. There’s a platform up there, too, draped and pinned with cloth. I guess that’s where the casket will go. I look over and spot Hadley sitting in the second row, watching me watch the platform. Since our talk in the lunchroom,
she’s avoided me, changing direction if she sees me in the hall, ducking into a crowd or a classroom door, which is funny because usually Hadley’s the one people avoid. Now in the church we lock eyes, but she looks away, and then I do, too.

That’s when I start to feel a little funny, cold and sweaty both. My stomach twists and burbles. The Whisperer next to me giggles at it. “I’m hungry,” I say, but I don’t really feel hungry. I feel sick. I wonder what will happen if my stomach growls during the service. Will everyone pretend that they haven’t heard it? Will they turn and look? If my stomach growls, is that disrespectful? I press my hands to my middle, but it gurgles again. I can hear my pulse in my ears, and as my stomach turns, its lining seems to pull away from its walls, and I realize that I actually might throw up.

“How do I look?” I say to the Whisperer next to me.

“Good,” she says absently.

“No. Do I look sick?”

She turns and peers at me. “Do you feel sick?”

“I feel like I might throw up.”

“You might throw up?” She says it loud, and the other Whis perers lean forward along the pew to look at me, each one bending a little farther than the last like they’re taking part in some sort of ridiculous choreography. I let out a wild laugh, and they all narrow their eyes in unison. This makes me laugh again. One of them reaches out a hand and puts it on my forehead.

“Uck.” She yanks it back and wipes it off on her skirt. “You’re, like, wet.”

All of us Chippewa students are seated now. Older people—relatives, neighbors—are filling in the front rows, wrinkles around
their somber mouths. I can still see Hadley. The back of her hair has been pinned into a complicated twist. She sits next to two tall, color less adults who lean into each other like elm trees. Hadley sits up straight, the kind of straight you have to think about. Her neck is rigid. Just in front of her is the platform.

“Do you want some water?” a Whisperer asks. “How do you feel?”

“I think I should—”

“Should you go?”

“Yeah. I think.” I look to my right and left. We’re in the center of the pew. I get up, pressing a hand against my stomach. The Whisperers get up, too.
She needs out! Excuse us!
They wave their hands, and I feel grateful, so grateful to them as I trip over feet and push aside knees, until I’m finally into the aisle and then out of the chapel.

Someone points me to a bathroom, which is down a dark hallway. By the time I reach it, I’m already retching. I put a hand over my mouth, not sure that I’ll make it. The bathroom is empty, and I’m grateful for that, too, as I scramble down onto the pink tiles and bend over the toilet bowl. I gasp and retch, and my breath creates ripples in the water of the toilet. I spit into the bowl, and spit again, but nothing comes up—no vomit, no bile. I try for a while longer, and then the feeling passes and my breathing slows. I sit back, pressing my cheek against the cold side of the stall. The inside of my mouth tastes metallic, like I’ve been hiding pennies under my tongue. I wipe my lips over with toilet paper, rubbing away the last smudges of my lip gloss. Once I’m sure I can, I stand up. In the mirror, I look gray and ghost-like, but I feel better. I swish water in my mouth and go back out.

The hallway I’ve come down is lined with doors. I glance into each room as I pass it. There’s a Sunday school room, painted yellow.
There’s an office. There’s a room with a chipped and dinged piano. There’s a room with nothing in it but rows of folding chairs and, in one chair, a man.

I stop. He’s sitting in the first row, and even though his head is bowed, for some reason it doesn’t look like he’s praying. It’s his hands, I realize. They aren’t clasped in his lap, but instead are curled around his chair, gripping the seat. He’s in a dark suit. I wonder if he’s here for Zabet’s funeral, which must have already started by now.

I step into the room. “Hello?”

He takes a minute to look around, as if I’ve woken him up, and I think that maybe he was praying after all. His face is the sort that looks beaten up even though it isn’t: low-slung jaw, watery eyes—a bulldog face. There’s something familiar to it.

“Are you here for the funeral?” I say. “Because I think it’s probably started already.”

He nods. “It started a minute ago. And you?”

“Me? I was . . .”
Sick
, I was going to say, but then I realize that I wasn’t. “Yes. I’m here for it.”

He releases the bottom of the chair and plays with his shirt cuff. “You should go back in, then.”

“Did you want to . . . ? You could . . .” I indicate the hall.

He studies me for a second, long enough for me to get self-conscious and drop my arm. He shakes his head. “I don’t want to disrupt the service.”

“Me neither,” I say and take a chair in the back row. It’s an impulsive decision, to sit down, and he watches me as I do it.

“I’m Ray,” he says.

“I’m Evie.”

“Evie.” He inclines his head.

As soon as I give him my name, a thought crosses my mind: This man could be Zabet’s killer. In the movies, they say that killers like to return to the crime scene to watch events unfold. I think that I would be one of those kind of killers, too, coming back to watch people react to what I’d done. Otherwise, what would be the point? But I’m not a killer. This man might be, though, here alone, at the funeral but not at the funeral. I look around. The room is nearly bare except for the chairs, with their feet sinking into the carpeting. A copy of the Ten Commandments curls on one wall, its tape gone dry. There are three rows of chairs between the man and me. The door to the hallway is just behind me. I could run if I needed to.

The man looks up at me then. “How did you know Elizabeth?” And so he knows her name. Would he know her name if he’d killed her? I decide that he might. It’s been in all of the papers and on the programs at the door. And besides, maybe she told it to him before he killed her.

“She was my friend,” I say. “My best friend.” I don’t even think about the lie before I tell it, so does that make it a lie?

“Are you Hadley?” he says.

“No. Evie.”

“That’s right. You told me that.” He nods. “I’m afraid that I didn’t get to meet too many of Elizabeth’s friends.”

This stops me, when he says this, and all of a sudden I know why he seems familiar. “Are you her—”

“Her dad.” He wipes a hand over his forehead. “Did I not say that?”

“You’re Mr. McCabe.” I can see him now, in the photo on the sideboard in the McCabe dining room in a suit with a green tie. In
all those afternoons there at Zabet’s house, I’d never met him; he had always stayed late at work, never came home early, not even once. My heart starts to pound, more than it did when I thought he might be the killer. I lied to him about being his daughter’s friend, and since he’s her father, he must know I lied. “When I said that I was Zabet’s friend—”

“I’m very sorry that I never got to meet you. There was a Hadley she talked about a lot, and”—he presses his lips together, nods—“I think an Evie, too.”

“Sure,” I say, wondering if he really thinks this or if he is lying in return to try to spare my feelings.

“I should have met you, both you and Hadley. You think about things after the fact, sometimes, and you . . .” He shrugs. It’s a sad shrug, his shoulders ending up a notch lower than they were before.

“We’ve met now,” I say. “I mean, here, just now, we met. You and me.”

“Yes.”

“And you could meet Hadley. She’s right over there in the . . . she has blonde hair and a scar here. I could point her out to you, if you want.”

“No. I’m going to stay here. You should go back in, though. I’m sure there are people waiting for you.”

“Okay. If you want . . . ,” I offer, not knowing the end of my sentence.

“I want to be alone, if . . . if you don’t mind.”

“Okay.” I stand up and brush the wrinkles out of my skirt. I still feel like maybe I should stay, but he’s an adult and he’s told me to go.

“It was nice to meet you, Evie,” he says. “You be good to your parents, even if—” He waves a hand in the air, and I’m not sure what he intends it to mean.

I stop in the doorway for a second, twisting my feet. “She thought that you were a good dad. Zabet did.”

His hand moves to his chin, then to his lap. He looks at his lap. “You don’t have to say that.”

“I’m not just saying it. I’m not.” I probably should listen to him and stop talking, but I don’t. “She said that you guys fought sometimes, but that you were a good dad anyway.”

“She said that?” He doesn’t look up from his lap.

“Yeah.”

“She said that to you?”

“Yeah, to me.”

“She—”

“She said it, Mr. McCabe. Of course she did.”

I walk back down the dark hall and pause outside the chapel next to a stack of programs and extra flower arrangements that didn’t make it onto the dais. Through the doors, I can hear a man’s voice, the lilt of a Bible passage being read. I can’t make myself go back in, though. I’m afraid that if I open the doors, everyone will turn to stare at me, that Hadley will narrow her eyes, the Whisperers will whisper, and the minister
tsk
his disapproval into the microphone. So even though I’d left my coat in the church, I go out to the empty bus and shiver in the back until everyone files on, and the Whisperers bring me my coat and pat my arm and ask if I’m okay now, and I say that I am.

T
HE CALL COMES THE NEXT WEEK
. Mom is in the kitchen, so she gets to the phone first. I hear her say, “Hello?” and then, “Yes,” and then, after a pause, “Pete, is that you?” I turn the volume down on my show, though not so much that Mom will notice that I’ve gone quiet. Pete is my dad’s name—well, Peter, really. She tries to call him Peter or “your father” when she refers to him, to show that she’s mad at him, but usually she forgets and just calls him Pete. It’s not him on the phone after all, though, because next Mom says, “I’m sorry. My mistake.” And then a startled “
Oh
, I’m so sorry.” And then, “Of course. I’ll get her.”

There she is in the doorway of the living room with the phone held out to me. She shakes her head a little, hitches herself up against the door frame, and stays there even after I take the phone from her.

“Hello?”

The man on the phone says, “Hello, Evie.” I don’t know how Mom mistook him; he doesn’t sound like my dad at all. Though I’ll admit that it’s been years since I’ve talked to him. In my memory, my dad sounds like he’s about to laugh, and like, if you didn’t know better,
you might be the joke. This man sounds like he has to try hard if he wants to laugh, and even then he might only cough.

“This is Ray McCabe,” he says. “Elizabeth’s father. We met at the funeral. Maybe you remember?”

I tell him, “Sure, of course.” My first thought is that he found out that I had lied to him about being Zabet’s friend and is calling to yell at me. So I stay quiet, which is the best thing to do if you aren’t sure whether or not you’re in trouble. I bite the inside of my cheek and avoid Mom’s eyes.

But Mr. McCabe hasn’t called to yell at me after all. At first, it seems like he’s called just to ask questions. He asks me about school and my friends and my after-school activities—all the regular things adults ask about. I give my answers, and it feels boring and awkward. But then I think about how he’ll never get to ask these questions to his daughter because she’s dead, and so I’m nice about it and answer in an enthusiastic voice.

Then Mr. McCabe says, “I’d like to invite you and Hadley to dinner on Friday.”

“At the school?” They’d had a pancake supper after those two kids died in the car crash so that they could raise money for a memorial scholarship and the twin trees.

“No,” Mr. McCabe says. “No. At my house . . . well, condo, actually. Hadley will be there, and I thought we could eat and”—the cough that’s been in his throat makes its way out.

“Did you ask her already?”

“Who?”

“Hadley.”

“Yes. She said she could come.”

“Did you tell her that I was coming?”

I try to sound casual when I say this, but Mr. McCabe must hear something in my voice because he says, “I did. Is that . . . ? She seemed to feel that was okay. Is it okay with you?”

“Yeah,” I say. “Sure. Of course. Definitely.”