The Space Between Trees (9 page)

“Hey,” I say softly.

“Watch out!” Mr. McCabe says in a hearty, jokey voice, oblivious to the fact that it was anything but accidental. He grabs a hunk from the basket in my hands and adds it to his plate, which is still full of food. He’s moved the spaghetti around a lot, stirring and whirling it, but I haven’t seen him take one bite.

Hadley says something under her breath. “What?” I say. “Nothing,” she says, but I’m pretty sure she repeated his words:
Watch out
.

“Reflexes,” Mr. McCabe tells us, making a swinging gesture as if to bat the bread across the table. “Hand-eye coordination. Do you
remember when Elizabeth took tennis lessons? Her mother’s idea.” He pulls apart the slice.

“She threw the racket,” Hadley says, then snaps her mouth shut, determined, I’m pretty sure, to say no more. She hits her fingertips against her bottom lip like she’s punishing it for opening at all.

Mr. McCabe points at Hadley with his clump of bread. “That’s right! She threw the racket.”

Which is when Hadley turns to me and says, “So you remember that, too, Evie?” Her voice is even and sweet, like the voice boxes that they put in talking dolls. And I realize that I’ve been nodding all this time.

“Uh . . . I . . .” I try to stop my head from nodding, but it’s still going, ticking along on the end of my neck. “I don’t—”

“Last summer,” Hadley prompts, and she’s looking at me now, suddenly animated. “She threw the racket because . . .” She twirls her hand in the air like it’s up to me to finish the sentence.

“Well,” I say.

“Come on. You remember.” She tugs at her hair; Mr. McCabe looks at me with his watery eyes, and I wonder if they’ve been this watery the whole time or if he’s just now about to cry. “She threw the racket because . . .”

“Because,” I repeat dumbly.

I hate Hadley then, even though she has every right to hate me back, to try to expose my lies. Even though she’s the hero and I’m the villain, I hate her still, backed into my corner like I am. I stare at the scar on her chin like it’s a fault line. I imagine digging into it, her face fissuring, cracking, falling to pieces on the peach condo carpet.

“Because?”

“She had a lot of spirit?” I offer, and both of us jump a little as Mr. McCabe shouts, “Yes!” His bread is now pointing at me. “Yes, that’s just the right word for it.”

I don’t look at Hadley, but I can tell that she’s still staring at me.

“Not everyone has that,” Mr. McCabe says and takes a bite of the bread with each word. “Spirit. Gumption. Chutzpah.”

“You tell us a memory now, Evie,” Hadley says, her sentence nearly on top of his. “I’m sure you have one. About Zabet.”

“Oh, well I don’t want to—” “Hmm?” She inserts the noise into my protest, and it’s like that little noise pierces and paralyzes me. I stop, my mouth still partway open.

“Come on. A memory about Zabet, your friend.”

I listen for the sarcasm in this, but there isn’t any, not even a hint. She says it so straight that I almost believe she means it. But, of course, she doesn’t. She knows that Zabet wasn’t my friend. She’s angry and determined to catch me out. Maybe this should make me feel guilty or apologetic or scared, and I do feel all those things, but more than any of that, I’m impressed. I’m impressed by the gentle blink of her eyes and the way that, even though she’s pissed, she can make her face still and lovely like one of the yellow roses on her sleeve.

“Yes,” Mr. McCabe says. Even though he’s sitting down, he looks like he’s standing on his tiptoes.

And I realize that this is why he invited us over. This is why he told all the Elizabeth-this and Elizabeth-that stories. He wants us to tell our stories in return. He wants what’s left of her, every scrap. And I can hardly blame him.

“Go on,” he tells me.

“Sure,” I say. “Right.” But I have nothing to say. I think of my only Zabet story, the one I won’t tell—the two of us in the trees acting out my parents’ fight, the ladle spinning, shining, toward her face. Mr. McCabe watches me through his watery eyes. Hadley sits back an inch, her lips tight. I try to think of the Zabet I would want to be told about, the one I’ve tried to imagine this past couple of weeks—fiery, beautiful, clever, and strong. The one who wasn’t carried out of the woods.

“We were—”

“When?” Hadley interrupts.

“When?”

“When did this happen?”

“Last year.”

“Last year?” she repeats. And it would be rude—this sentence—if it weren’t for her polite voice. “So you were friends then?”

Mr. McCabe sets his hunk of bread down on his plate and cups his hands over it as if it is something he is hiding from us.

“We had a class together.”

“Which class?” Hadley asks.

And this is dangerous because I don’t know any of Zabet’s classes, don’t even know which track she was in. I think she was in the lower track, most of the bad girls are, but sometimes one of them pops up in accelerated, bringing with her a hard amusement over the fact that the rest of us expect her not to have done the assigned reading.

“Gym,” I say. Everyone has to take gym. “Gym,” Hadley repeats as if the word tastes bad.

I picture the gym, its reek of salt and piss that lingers even after they’ve sent us all in to shower, the gritty pebbled tile of the locker
room floors, the nests of hair left in the drains, the burn of chlorine that wafts up from the pool. I picture Zabet among all of this.

“She was good in gym.” I feel like I’m pretty safe saying this. Zabet wasn’t on any of the sports teams, but I’d bet that this was because of attitude, not ability. “Good reflexes,” I add, “like you said.” I see the flash of the ladle. “So she got chosen first for teams, and Coach Kenk liked her and everything.”

Hadley leans over the table and makes getting another ginger ale as loud a process as possible. I wait until she sits back again, cracking the can and letting it fizz.

“But then, in April or so, there’s the swim unit. It’s terrible. The water’s cold, and they use too much chlorine, so everyone’s eyes turn pink. We have to wear the school suits, which smell like oatmeal. And, at the end of the unit, Kenk makes everyone go off the high dive.”

Hadley sucks the overflow from the top of her can. “It’s the worst, right, Hadley?” I say. “Don’t you think? Swim unit is the worst?”

I stare at her, and Mr. McCabe looks at her, too, so that she has to respond. Finally she nods, once, a little dip of the chin like she can hardly stand it.

“So the high dive is really tall, Mr. McCabe, and lots of kids are sort of . . . well,
scared
of it. But no one thinks Zabet will be scared, because like I said, she’s been so good at gym and first pick for the teams and all that.

“Well, the thing is, I can tell that really she
is
scared of it, really scared of it—maybe more scared of it than the rest of us. She doesn’t say that to me or anything, but she keeps looking at the board, like
when we’re doing other things, and she asks me once if I think that Kenk will make us go off it again this year.”

“Zabet wasn’t scared of heights,” Hadley says, but the story is mine now; I’m in it, and I let it roll right over her.

“The high dive is different. Lots of people who aren’t normally scared of heights are scared of a high dive. I mean, it’s the difference between standing on something high and
jumping off
something high, right?” I say it simply and I picture Zabet, the board above her like a gallows, her flat freckled cheeks tipped upward. “So Friday, the last day of the unit, Zabet doesn’t change into her suit. She tells Kenk she’s sick, that she’s got”—I glance at Mr. McCabe and feel my cheeks heat up—“her period. But, Kenk is Kenk. She says that it’s not an excuse and to put on the suit. I sit with Zabet while she changes, and she’s going off about Kenk and how unfair she is. I don’t tell her that I know it’s not really Kenk, that it’s really the high dive that’s got her upset, because there are some things you just might as well not say to Zabet.”

I’m glad when Mr. McCabe nods at this observation of mine, because it was only a guess based on what Zabet was like when she was younger. I’m glad, too, that I know something about Zabet that is still true.

“Well, we’re late because of all that, so when we come out, everyone is already around the high dive, but no one’s gone off it yet. Kenk is telling us that we don’t have to do a perfect dive or anything. We can cannonball or just jump or whatever we want as long as we try it. We have to try it. And we’re all shivering in these oatmeal suits and hating Kenk, who’s in her gross, evil sweat suit and doesn’t even have to get wet, much less jump off a skyscraper. Zabet is next
to me, and she’s shivering more than anyone, even though she never gets cold.

“Then Kenk tells us to line up. Right away, everyone looks at Zabet. In fact, they just line up behind her. See, she’s always the one to do it first, whatever it is.

“I’m trying to catch her eye, but she won’t look back at me. Zabet. She just walks over to the ladder, puts her hands right on the rungs, and starts climbing up the damn thing . . . sorry . . . the thing. So we’re all down there on the ground, watching her just go. You wouldn’t believe it. Really, you wouldn’t. She goes right up, step after step, all the way to the top. Then she walks out to the end of the board, just like that.”

The crazy thing is, as I’m telling them this, I can actually see Zabet up there—the racerback of her suit, the frazzled rope of her braid—she’s blurred, all the details gone because she’s up so high with the fluo rescent lights sending yellow down on her head. I can see all of our faces tipped up, too, all the rest of us in the class, gawking at her, waiting for her. For a second, it’s all so real that I believe it might actually have happened the way I’m telling it.

Hadley sets her can down with a little clink. This time she doesn’t even pretend to be polite. “And she does a perfect dive off it, right?”

This was exactly what I was going to have Zabet do in my story. I was going to have her dive off, not perfect, but a dive, all right. And it was going to make the rest of us bold enough to go up and off the board, too. A hero’s ending. But I can hardly say that now, with Hadley watching me with her tight little screw of a smile like she’s got it all figured out.

“No,” I say. “No, she doesn’t. Actually, she turns around and climbs right back down. She couldn’t do it after all.”

As I say it, I can still see it, Zabet’s bottom, the pads of her feet pink from the rough surface of the board, the purple birthmark on the back of her right knee, all of it growing closer as she steps down the ladder rungs. And as I see it, I realize that this—
this
—is the right ending.

Hadley’s mouth unscrews a turn. She fiddles at the sleeves of her dress, fussy like a cat licking its paws. “No offense, but what was the point of that story? I thought you were supposed to tell—”

She glances at Mr. McCabe and has good enough sense to stop. He holds the wrist of one of his hands between the fingers of the other, like he’s taking his own pulse. He’s looking across the table at me, but also
not
at me. He has a faint smile on his face like maybe he can see Zabet up on that board, too.

“Thank you,” he says. “Thank you for sharing that, Evie.”

Hadley pulls the sleeves of her dress over her hands and balls them in her lap, mad as hell. I wish I could tell her what I’d just figured out, what she’d helped me figure out: The point of the story isn’t that Zabet triumphed. The point is that Zabet climbed down the ladder, that she survived.

Dinner ends soon after that. Hadley lets Mr. McCabe fuss over her, helping her with her coat and sending her off with a steamed-up container of leftover spaghetti. She’s a different Hadley now than she was before—with a warm wick of a smile and quick, bright eyes. And if for a minute I think that she’s come around, given up trying to expose my lies, maybe even making an attempt to be friends, it is only for a minute. Because if I observe closely, I can see that the edges of Hadley’s smile are yanked up by force and her voice is almost
tearful in its good cheer. She’s putting on a face. I’ve seen my mother do it a million times. She’s still angry; she’s just decided to fake it.

Hadley dips into a darling bow when she thanks Mr. McCabe for the dinner. “Don’t make spaghetti again without me,” she says sweetly.

If Mr. McCabe notices the difference between the pouting Hadley of earlier in the evening and the charmer she is now, he doesn’t mention it. She smacks his cheek with a kiss and slides out the door while I’m still fiddling with my shoes. When I finally get them done up, Mr. McCabe is holding out a portion of spaghetti for me.

“You, missy,” he says in a way that’s sad instead of playful.

“Thanks,” I say, taking the container.

He sets a paw on my shoulder. “No, no. Thank
you
. It’s good to know that Eliz—well, I won’t talk about her anymore tonight.”

“You can.”

“No.” He smiles under his mustache. “My battery’s wound down.” He looks at me for a second, steady, and I look down at my fingers crossing the top of the spaghetti container because I can hardly look back at him. “You’re a good girl,” he says.