Six
Mr. Shaw. He’s the one. The way they talked at school, the way everyone had been talking, you’d think it had to be some lurching drifter, claw for a hand, living out of his truck.
But it’s Mr. Shaw.
A hundred times, you would see him paying the newspaper boy, or filling his gas tank, and he was just a man, and now he’s the one who took Evie in that Buick. He has taken her away and has maybe done things to her and done, done, done.
A hundred men like him in the five blocks on either side, and I never noticed one.
It’s that night, the third night. It’s after the emergency PTA meeting, my mother’s on the phone all night with parents, the phone ringing all the time, and my brother is walled up in his room, TV on, stereo on, everything on, and the vibrations, when I press my hand to the door, thunder through me. It’s like some booming, screeching spell struck across the threshold to keep me out.
So I walk from room to room. It’s like I think I’ll find Evie there, crouched under the window seat, twined in the shower curtain, and she’ll be laughing, laughing that we all cared so much.
“Harold Shaw,” my mother says, standing in the doorway of my room. “It doesn’t seem possible. It really does not.” She shakes her head.
I don’t say anything, but I turn off the light on my bedside table and she drifts away down the hall.
There’s a picture in my head of my mother at one of those Memorial Day picnics, stringing up fairy lights with Mr. Shaw, asking him to help her off a ladder. Did it really happen, and did she giggle girlishly when he lifted her and set her daintily on the ground? And that makes me think of all the parents at block parties when we were kids, the way they would huddle with one another’s spouses, sneaking off for smokes like teenagers, dancing too close, dropping beer bottles and tripping across lawns. Like married people love to do. And they love to make their husbands, their wives, act the knuckle-rapping parents all day so they can play the wayward kid. Is being young so magical that they must conjure it up again, can’t help themselves? I don’t see any magic in it at all.
That night, in bed, I picture the way it was. Twice a day, five days a week, all school year long, Evie and I walking, running, biking past the big windows of the All-Risk office, with Mr. Shaw there. Mr. Shaw always there. Looking out with those gloomy eyes of his.
He looks so sad, Evie said once. Oh, the sudden remembering of it now brings on a shiver.
He’s so sad, she said. We were looking at the sign in the window: LIFE INSURANCE, FIRE INSURANCE, FLOODS. He must hear sad stories all day long.
He always looks like his dog died, she said, and I laughed, but Evie didn’t.
Last night’s emergency PTA meeting, and everything’s changed. There are many announcements, from teachers, from the gravely voiced principal across the PA. The new rules.
“It’s lockdown,” Joannie groans.
Trapped in the gym, with the windows covered with GO, CELTS! in streaks of swampy green paint, we all wait.
My legs are still shaking from practice, that aching, stretchy feel that’s so delectable, like my body being pulled in five ways and sprung back strong and magnificent.
It never lasts.
Some days, Evie and I lie on the soccer field and take turns pulling each other’s legs as hard as we can, pulling until we feel torn in two. I have two inches on Evie and she says it’s because she’s stronger and could pull harder and I owe those two inches to her.
To escape the noise from the boys doing basketball drills, the bunch of us girls nest up in a corner of the bleachers and do not acknowledge their hoarse-voiced, bare-limbed, flaunting presence.
Intermittently, we play Flame, a folded-paper game of mammoth complexity, where you add up the vowels in your name and some boy’s and get a number and then count the letters in F-L-A-M-E, crossing out “hits” until you have one letter left. It tells you your future with the boy: F equals “Friends,” L equals “Lovers,” A equals “Affair,” M equals “Marriage,” and E equals “Enemies.”
We talk about the difference between an affair and being lovers. Tara says that affair means one-time sex. Joannie says affair means sex any number of times, only with not caring. I can’t decide, but I shake my legs out and wonder where the stretching feeling went. My whole body’s gone tight, pleated inside.
Most of the time, though, we talk about Evie.
“She’s probably in some basement somewhere,” someone chirps, “tied to a pipe.”
“Pete Shaw wasn’t in school today.”
“He’d better not be. They’d swing him from the goalposts.”
Everyone seems to know that Mr. Shaw is, as Joannie keeps putting it, the “prime suspect,” and there’s much talk of my seeing the car, which can only have come from Tara, with her assistant prosecutor dad. It has made me tremendously popular.
“It might’ve been you, Lizzie,” Joannie says, pointing at me with her curving dolphin pen with the finned tip. “It just might have been you.”
The thought had not come to me. Now it rockets around in my head. Could it be true? If I’d been the one left alone, the one on the empty street in front of the emptied-out school? What if it had been me yanked from everything to some dark place? Could Mr. Shaw have—
“No way,” Tara says, shaking her head definitively. “He had his target in his sights.”
I remember the cigarette stubs, and I know she’s right. It was never me.
With that, the furtive shimmers that shimmered briefly in my head snuff out.
I see him, when my eyes are shut, standing under the dark boughs of the pear tree, standing in the middle of the yard, waiting. What did he see in spindly Evie, her big rain-puddle eyes, her jumpy little body, the way she sucked her teeth when thinking, hard, over algebra, the way she picked the frilled edges off her spiral notebook, one by one?
This girl, this girl, and he a man with a business and a secretary and a house with a furnace and bills and a son and a roof with three torn shingles and a pretty birdbath made of stone that I sometimes see Mrs. Shaw, her hair tied back with a scarf, cleaning with a dainty skimmer.
How does this man, a man like this, like any of them, come to walk at night and stand in a girl’s backyard, and then, smoking and looking up, suddenly feel himself helpless to her bright magic?