Eighteen

Nine o’clock at night on the longest day I can remember. Was it really only twelve hours before that I stood outside the Verver door, epic lie at the ready?

The music comes first, and it’s almost ghostly, and I think I’m dreaming.

The music has this echo like when you’re in a museum or the big library downtown and the voices blend and dip and flutter up.

It’s like those stories we read in school, the bird women who sing those songs and lure the sailors to the rocks.

Soon enough, I’m tripping my way downstairs and out the patio door.

There’s a throb in my chest when I see him. Mr. Verver is back and he is pulling the nozzle trigger on the garden hose, spraying the dry thatch of flowers, the frail brown shrubs. There’s a beer bottle by his feet, foamed to the top, and two more empty ones, shuddering slightly on the windowsill next to a small speaker gushing restless tales of lost love and the loneliness of the road.

Then he turns his head and sees me…

And it’s all the wonderful things in the world at once.

I feel my feet caught in the tangled hose, and nearly trip into him. He steadies me and smiles, but it’s not really smiling.

You don’t need to do that for me I think. You don’t need to smile or do anything because I feel it too. The awful slipping feeling inside of something go-go-going. I don’t know what it means, but it’s there.

He tells me a few things, not much. How the police feel strongly that they will find them, and fast. How the FBI has put even more men on the case and the car will surely be spotted. How they’re going to put something called a trap and trace on our phone, in case Evie calls again. How, with Mr. Shaw’s funds so low and his wife under threat of prosecution, well…

“They seem very confident,” he says, the water pouring down onto the marigolds in big gulps. “I don’t think they would say it if they didn’t believe it.”

“No,” I agree.

I look at him, and he looks at me.

“What would I do without you, Lizzie?” he says, and the look he gives does rough things to me inside.

He sits down and takes a sip from his beer. I ask him if I can have a taste and he says absolutely not, like I knew he would.

“Hey, look at me here,” he says. “I’m such a bad host. Get yourself a soda.” He points to the foam cooler on the patio.

I turn, and as soon as I do, I feel a cool jet of water slather over me with a sharp plash.

It catches me so unawares, I nearly gasp, and he almost laughs, dropping the hose.

I start laughing for real, so loudly it nearly hurts, my throat raw in an instant.

“Dusty hates it when I do that,” he says, trying to bolster his voice, get some heft behind it. “Says I mess up her hair.”

I feel myself smiling all over and finally sit down.

My shirt wet from the hose, the water beads prick me. I yank at my sopping T-shirt and when I let go, the cotton sticks fast to my chest. You can see everything. I look down and there’s no hiding it. Mr. Verver catches me and looks away.

Tilting my head back, I see Evie’s window and something moving. It doesn’t startle me, so dreamy-headed am I, until I see the gold shiver of Dusty’s hair. Dusty up there watching.

But then I squint and I can’t see anything but Evie’s soccer ball mobile, twisting in the nighttime breeze.

A new song comes upon us moodily and yet it’s not a sad thing. It’s thicker. It’s a feeling of abandon, like the ragged chaos of the last day of school, the building nearly emptied out, the derelict textbooks flapping open, the rooms empty, the locker doors flung wide, the smell of firecrackers and menace.

I don’t know what to do with it.

I’m glad when it ends and a new one begins, and it’s loud with thrumming fiddles and a whirligig sound that makes you feel like you’re spinning.

Mr. Verver leans forward, craning his ear toward the speaker, his eyes bright with recognition.

“I forgot about this song,” Mr. Verver says, his voice speeding up, his fingers tapping hard on the metal armrests.

The chorus kicks in and he jumps to his feet.

I get terribly excited, in a flash.

“Oh, Lizzie, I haven’t heard this in years. Years. Since you were just a glimmer in your father’s eye. Lizzie, listen to this.”

And I do. It’s one of all those songs he plays that I don’t know at all. It had just been something clanging in the background, that’s all any of them ever were for me, so distracted by everything else humming in my head. But he changes it all. It’s just sound, and then he hurls his magic at me and suddenly I realize that, whatever song it is, it’s the perfect song for such nights, such feelings.

Before I know it—but didn’t I know it, hadn’t I been waiting for it for my whole life, or at least since my earliest memories of the Verver family, me toddling, glitter-haloed, at the Easter pageant, age four— he extends his hand before me.

That hand, extended.

And there’s such desolation in his face, and I catch all the beer and grief and loneliness on him. I see how much this matters to him. That how much it matters to me is a balm to him.

“May I have this dance, Thin Lizzie?”

It is the thing I’d’ve died for.

In the murk of my head, it’s like I have.

My hand slips into his, and I feel it to my toes.

It’s not a song to dance to, not with hand in hand, hand on back like this, but who could stop us?

One hand swooping around my waist, he lifts the other high, our palms touching fast upon each other and my heart crashing from corner to corner.

Don’t let it ever end, I say to myself. Let it go on forever.

My bare feet scraping the patio, then sinking into soft grass, I can’t look at him and feel my eyes waver drunkenly to one side, to the wire diamonds of the fence.

He’s saying things, his copper face burning hot in laughter, and I’m laughing too, and he spins me and my foot knocks the beer bottle, frothing warmly over my right foot.

“Clodhopper,” he says with a laugh and he twirls me fast, his hand pressed hard and the way it feels, I can’t see how I can go on, my breath caught in my throat. If it goes on, I will pass out, faint, fall to his feet.

But what if the song ends?

And then it does, in a sharp thrumming punch, and all the air tugged out of me, and Mr. Verver drops back into his lawn chair, so I do too.

I’m thinking about how fast it all happened, and how the sadness is sinking into him again, and to me too, and how now it is over, and how I might never get to dance with him again.

The emptiness at the center of me, it’s a new thing I’ve never felt before.

Walking, dazedly, to the Ververs’ bathroom, I hear my name and I know it’s Dusty. I know that whispered snake curl of hers, the one that’s made me stand up straight since I was four years old.

And there she is, running shoes on, her shirt damp with sweat. No more nights lounging on the patio with her father. She spends them running in mad circles, doesn’t she?

She’s breathing hard, her cheeks flushed and a heat coming off her that seems to pulse in the air between us. I can feel it under my eyelids.

“Do you ever go home?” she says, chin raised.

“I just… your dad…,” I mumble, flailing, backing up against the bathroom doorframe.

Before I know it, her hand clenches my arm, and the pain is fast and knocks my breath away.

It happens in a blur and she’s dragging me up the stairs and down the hall.

She nearly flings me into her room and slams the door behind her.

That delectable room, all foamy pink curves and curlicues.

Released from her grip, I stumble back against her bureau and stay there, my feet digging into the mint green fluff of the carpet.

I try to get my balance back. Rub feeling back into my arm.

“So she called you?” she says. “My sister just called you up.”

“Yes,” I say, tight and quick, ignoring, as best I can, the tremor in my chest. Somehow it was easier to pass the story off to Mr. Verver, even to the police.

“How is it you keep ending up in the middle of everything?” she asks, holding that panting breath in, slowing herself down. Slowing her words down. For the first time, I can feel the effort on her to keep that cool intact. For the first time, I can see how hard it must be for her.

It makes me feel stronger.

“She called me,” I say, jutting my jaw out like she does.

She pauses a second, then sighs heavily, as if bored, and pulls her sweaty shirt over her head, tossing it so it hits my ankles, damply. It’s all in one quick, tidy gesture and there she is, in a frilled bra, yellow gingham.

My eyes go straight to the soft swell of her breasts, before she twists around and grabs for the pearly pink T-shirt draped over her desk chair, slipping it on, all of it happening so fast I almost miss it.

I can’t even believe those breasts. I feel like I am seven years old, or a boy.

I’m so distracted by the thought, I’ve forgotten my mounting dread, but it returns.

She slumps down onto the bed and leans back, resting on her elbows. I see thin cuts up both arms and know she’s been practicing again, taking the scraping glances of the stick. She looks at me, like she’s ready to get back down to business.

“She just calls you up,” she says, twisting a little, her elbows nestling in her pillows, “just like you just happen to find those cigarettes. You just happen to have suddenly remembered the car. The cigarette butts under the tree.”

“I’m helping,” I say, and even saying it aloud, as true as it is, as much as I know it, feels like a lie.

The lie isn’t in what I’m saying, though. The lie is somewhere else and I won’t look for it. But I’m so aware, all of a sudden, that all I do is lie.

She just looks at me, but I can see a sneer in it, I can. In that Dusty way, like when we’d underhit a short pass, or use our foot on the ball.

“What are you doing?” I jump at her. The only way to fend off Dusty—Evie always said it, even if she could hardly ever do it—is to strike back. To take the bigger shot, the harder hit. It’s the only way. “You aren’t doing anything. You don’t even help your dad.”

I think she’s going to jump to her feet, but she doesn’t. She just watches me. The stillness, it throws me. I don’t know what to do with it.

“If you think I’m lying,” I say, trying to keep my nerve up, “how come you haven’t said anything? How come you haven’t told your parents what you think?” I can’t believe I’m saying it. The thought of her telling her father, making him doubt me, is unbearable.

“Lizzie,” she says, the words slipping slowly from her and with such coolness. “You don’t know anything. You don’t know anything about Evie. About him.”

And something, the thing that’s been clicking around in me, tapping odd corners of my head, springs to the center.

Weeks ago, that conversation with Dusty, about Mr. Shaw. You were always smart, she’d said to me. I was sure you knew.

“What do you mean?”

“What I mean is this,” Dusty says, singsongy, like a bored teacher. “She knew he was watching. You get it? She knew.”

Like when you’re in the basement and you find the old book with the golden-foil spine, the frizzle-haired doll with the painted freckles, a dozen things you didn’t know you remembered until suddenly you do, and it fills you with all kinds of crazy aches inside and you don’t know why.

“That’s not true,” my voice sputters. “You’re making it up.”

“I’m not,” she says quietly, calmly. “We’d see him out there. Evie and me. We’d see him under the tree, at night, the glow of the cigarette. Looking up at her window. We’d see him out there all the time.”

I feel my teeth clicking against one another.

Because hadn’t Evie said it to me, crouching over those cigarette stubs?

Sometimes, at night, he’s out here.

Almost sighing, Dusty flips a shoe off with her other foot and it lands on the floor in front of me.

The casualness of it flares something in me. The way she is reclining there, so regal and assured.

“Why didn’t you tell?” I nearly shout. “If you knew he was out there, why didn’t you tell?”

She shakes her head slowly, like she’s not sure about me, like if I’m dumb enough to ask that question, I’m too dumb to deserve an answer.

“Why didn’t you?” she says. “She told you, didn’t she? Why didn’t you tell?”

“I didn’t know,” I stutter. “I only knew a little bit.”

She looks at me with those slitted eyes of hers.

The feeling in the room, it all starts to pile on top of me. The smell of bubble gum and pink sugared perfume and cloudy face powders. My head feels light and I’m thinking of all the Dr Peppers I drank in the backyard with Mr. Verver and the thick carpet catching under my feet.

Why didn’t I tell? Sometimes, at night, he’s out here. I never told. I never even thought to tell. It was mine, and I held it close to my chest.

It was mine, and I didn’t want to share it.

“What are you saying?” I ask, almost moan. “So she might have known he was watching her.” Even saying it out loud, had I ever said such things out loud? “But she couldn’t have known he would take her away. That he would take her away from all of us.”

The look Dusty gives me is a long one, those green-gold eyes prickling on me, prickling along my skin.

Oh, she knows even more, doesn’t she? She knows so much. Why won’t she say, why won’t she say?

“Can’t you figure it out?” Dusty says, her voice low now, a throaty whisper. “Can’t you now?”

“Figure out what?” I say, my voice breaking, my hands flailing at my sides.

I feel that Dusty is on the cusp, I feel it so close, a truth so tantalizing I have only to let my eyelashes bristle against it, my lids shutting fast.

She lolls her head back slowly. “Oh, Lizzie, she knew. She knew he was coming for her. She knew.”

“You don’t know that,” I say. Because she couldn’t.

But she’s not even listening. She’s someplace else entirely, her face going soft, like when she’d lose a game, years ago, when she still lost games.

“Isn’t it rotten,” she says, “the way everything is happening, all this stuff everyone has to feel, and nothing can be like it was? And it’s all because of her. She’s so selfish.”

Everything is so close in the room, powders clogging me, heavy smells and choking cotton balls, and I wonder if this is what it always feels like to Dusty.

“She thinks she can just do whatever she wants,” Dusty says. “She can get whatever she wants. Why does she get to have whatever she wants?”

That’s not how it is, I think. That’s not how it is. And how can she talk about Evie this way? Except Dusty’s not Dusty right now and you can’t believe her, metal scraping sidewalk, sparking ruin on herself.

“Look at what she’s done to him,” Dusty says, and for a second I think she means Mr. Shaw. But she means Mr. Verver. I know because her voice goes high suddenly, and it starts to shatter into tinkly pieces. She shakes her head back and forth, back and forth. She can’t seem to stop. “You see why I can’t tell. I can’t tell him that. What his daughter’s done to him. What she’s brought down on all of us. How she destroyed everything for all of us. I can’t tell him any of this.”

I can feel my breath catch. I do see it: Evie can break his heart, she is saying, but I won’t.

“Don’t you want to save her?” I say finally.

“Lizzie,” she says, her eyes lifting up to me, “what makes you think she wants to be saved?”

I sit on our back patio for a long time, my thoughts jumping on one another.

I already knew, in part, the things Dusty said, but it still felt like an explosion in my head. There was a world of difference between knowing something on some sneaking level in your own fevered head and hearing it banked into hard little syllables by Dusty.

Sometimes, at night, he’s out here. She’d said that to me. I had never told about that. Why had I never told?

What was there to tell? Evie herself said she guessed it was a dream, all confused, like a dream.

And it didn’t seem like something you could tell.

It was something Evie showed me and, after learning about Mr. Shaw, the way he loved her in such secret and powerful ways, why wouldn’t Evie be moved by that? Why should she be afraid? It didn’t seem strange that she might have known and said nothing. Kept to herself, a most private feeling. Evie who never had boys buzzing, swarming. Never had many things.

But the idea of night after night the two sisters seeing him. And sharing it. There is a hurt in there. Evie sharing things with Dusty, but not with me. Dusty, who always stood apart, yet Evie shared it with her.

But, thinking about everything Dusty said, in some way I’m not surprised by any of it, am I? Are there any more surprises?

In bed later, I hear Dr. Aiken’s voice from down the hall, low and even. I can’t make out what he’s saying, but there’s a calmness in it, a stillness. Somehow I am glad for it. I hope he’ll keep talking on and on, and he does. It’s the sound that sends me, finally, to sleep.

In the dream that follows, the phone rings next to me. “Lizzie,” the voice tingles in my ear.

And I know it’s Evie, in that dream-way of knowing things, even if it doesn’t sound like Evie at all, her voice, high and trembly, like a pull-string doll.

“I don’t know where I am,” she says, “and there’s so much blood.”

“Evie,” I say, and it’s a whisper, like a secret no one can know. “Where are you? Tell me. Tell me.”

“I don’t know,” she says, and she sounds so small, like when she has to talk in Algebra, standing at the chalkboard.

“Where are you?” I say again, and there’s a pounding in my ears. “Is it far?”

“Lizzie, I couldn’t get the blood to stop. I used three towels.”

“Evie, please,” I cry out, “where are you?”

“I don’t know,” she says, and I can hear her breathing go faster and faster. “How do I find out?”

“Evie, are you far away? Are you far?” And suddenly the tingling feeling on the back of my neck, the uncanny feeling suddenly of Evie right there, right there.

“Are you close?” I whisper. “Evie, can you see me?”

“Lizzie,” comes the whisper, now a sizzle in my ear. “What did you do? What did you do?”

It is four o’clock, maybe five o’clock in the morning. I can’t see the glowing numbers on my clock, and then I feel a cord twisted in my legs. Yanking it up, I see I’ve dragged the clock into the bed with me, its plug hanging loose, its face black and hopeless.

I don’t know what woke me, but then I hear the squeaking of a screen door and I peek out the window into the darkness.

Craning, I can see the front door of the Verver house is wide open.

I tumble down the front stairs and hover there a moment.

What did you do? What did you do? Evie’s dream-voice still blazing in my ear.

I feel a twitch under my eye. That happens right before the noise comes. The noise is loud, it’s a scream, the screeching sound of something, some animal caught under a car and crushed from tire to tire. It’s the worst sound I’ve ever heard.

I run out the front door and that’s when I see Mrs. Verver standing in her doorway, her hands over her open mouth.

She’s looking down the street, and my eyes follow.

There’s an eeriness about it, the thick of predawn and the streetlamps with the shimmery moths and bugs, and, my eyes adjusting, I can’t see what Mrs. Verver sees, what she’s screaming about, until suddenly I can.

Until the ghostly thing limps under one of the streetlamps.

The ghost with the pale white legs, the sear of bright green soccer shorts.

I am running now, my summer-hard feet pounding into the sparkly asphalt, and suddenly it seems like that game we used to play when we were kids.

It’s like I can hear that chanting, Ten o’clock, eleven o’clock, twelve o’clock, MIDNIGHT! Bloody murder!

And I want to scream out, my lungs exploding, Home base, Evie! It’s here, Evie. It’s here, you just need to touch the door, the lawn, the curb. I promise you, it’s here!

I hear myself screaming.

I am screaming and I can’t stop.

Running, running, my arms swinging wide.

I’m nearly there, nearly there, just a few feet away from that candescent circle under the streetlamp, when I feel something hoist me back and it’s Mrs. Verver, her arms on me hard, pushing me to the side.

I nearly stumble backward but catch myself.

Hand to my chest, I watch Mrs. Verver hurl her arms around the ghostly thing in front of us.

And I watch the blankness on the ghost’s face.

A blankness that makes me start.

Why, that’s not Evie, I say to myself, and I think: This is a dream, and that’s a ghost, a phantom. A trick.

It’s not a dream, but it can’t be Evie.

I’m looking at the bright yellow hair hanging in hanks around her face. I’m looking at the funny texture of it, like flossy batting.

The strange sweatshirt, gray fleece, torn at the wrists.

The odd flush to her face, the way her arms hang stiffly.

Her fingers, the nails torn and red-rimmed.

Mrs. Verver, she is sobbing and on her knees and she is holding the girl, arms wrapped around her waist, and the girl looks startled, unsure. She turns and looks at me, her head bobbling slightly, like a doll.

She looks at me, and I look at her.

The eyes, the eyes like an oil-slick rain puddle. The eyes I know better than my own. The eyes that hook onto me and dig in fast.

Oh, Evie.

Oh, Evie.

Warm things rise up in me.

I smile.

I touch my hands to my face, I feel my cheeks, and it is a smile.

I guess it’s probably the strangest smile in the world, but it goes on and on and on, and I am shaking my head and smiling and I can’t stop.

And she looks at me and something rustles there, a slip of a grin, and I reach for it.

I actually reach my hand out for it, her flushed face under my fingers.

“Evie,” I say. I say, “Evie.”

Mrs. Verver picks her up even though Evie is nearly as tall as she is. She lifts her and starts carrying her, and that’s when I see Mr. Verver running up to us.

I stop and cover my eyes.

I don’t know why, but I can’t watch.

When I look again, Mr. Verver is twenty yards ahead of me and he has her now, he has Evie in his arms like when she was six and Dusty shoved too hard and knocked her from the top of the jungle gym.

He carries her and I follow far behind and Mrs. Verver is jogging alongside, trying to keep up. She is reaching out, scrabbling at his arm, touching her fingers to that strange blond hair.

I follow them back down the street and I stand on the sidewalk out front.

Dusty is on the front porch, her face hidden behind that whorling hair of hers.

I watch it happen.

I watch Evie’s wobbling blond head, the pale legs dangling like shorn twigs. I watch Dusty stumble back and Mr. Verver push past her, push past everything, carrying Evie like a bride over a threshold.

I watch them all disappear into the dark of their front hallway.

I watch Dusty whip around and, face red and ruined, shut the front door behind them.

I think I stand there for a very long time, waiting for my heart to slow down, waiting for my breath to come back. Waiting for something else, but that thing never comes.

“I’ll take you to the hospital in a few hours,” my mother says. “They need some time.”

We are standing on the front porch, my feet dew-damp.

The sleeplessness so light on me, I feel more awake than ever, and the mistiness of early dawn is just right.

“Okay,” I say, but I don’t intend to wait. I intend to hop on my bike and pedal the three miles as soon as she goes upstairs and turns on the shower.

“Lizzie,” she says, and I can feel her hand fasten on my shoulder. “I…” Her voice goes soft and wilting. “I guess I didn’t believe it would happen.”

I brush my foot back and forth on the concrete, feeling the delicious burn, bringing me to life.

“I guess, deep down, I thought she was never coming back,” my mother says, and she curls her arm across my shoulders and presses into me.

“I know you did,” I say. Why should I admit that I ever thought so too?

“I guess,” she starts, her words falling strangely, like she is still half asleep, like she is saying things she’d never say out loud, “I guess it always seemed like something like this might happen to them. The Ververs.”

“What do you mean?” I say roughly.

“I don’t know,” she says. “There’s always just been something about them…” There’s almost a blush on her, like she’s been caught without her clothes. She can’t quite look at me.

“I don’t know,” she says. “Like something had to break. It could only go on for so long, before something had to break.”

“That doesn’t make any sense at all,” I say, shaking off a flinch deep inside. “You’re not making any sense at all.”

My legs pump as fast as they can. The bike ride to the hospital is a breathless blur, my lungs choked and pained.

I keep conjuring the silvery sight of blonded Evie, eyes startled and knowing.

Was it her, even?

Was it Evie who returned?

Or did I dream it all, conjure it from wishes and longing?

The weird, unwholesome emptiness of the damp streets and the metal smell of early morning, it all conspires to make me feel forgotten, swabbed off the world.

Part of me thinks, as I walk through the sliding doors of the hospital, that no one will even recognize me. That I will move through the halls, past every Verver, as though invisible, a slippery shadow.

But it is only seconds before Mr. Verver, begrimed and fumbling with forms and a clambering Dusty, hands in her hair, spots me.

His face is filled with such light, it nearly blinds me.

The heavy stubble, ribbons of dirt across his pant legs, the look of heat and flush on him, none of it matters, he shrugs it all off.

He is restored.

We have restored him, I think, and then wonder at the “we.” It’s me, me, me.

“There’s Lizzie,” he is saying, clipboard now against his chest, across his heart, like a knightly shield, and Dusty whips her head around to me, and the look on her face, like all her looks, is unreadable.

Thoughts flit through my head about everything she must feel, but I don’t have time for them. I don’t have time.

I am rushing for Mr. Verver, who outstretches his arms, who tows me in for a half hug, his right hand still clasping the clipboard, which bangs against my head.

“Oh, Lizzie,” he says. “Lizzie, she’s here. She’s here and she’s okay.”

I think that’s what he says, I don’t know. The next few minutes jumble together and he’s telling me things and saying that Mrs. Verver won’t leave Evie’s side and they’re doing some exams but everything is good, that Evie is strong and that Evie is well.

“She’s fine,” Dusty pipes up. “She’s great and everything’s over. It’s all done. She’s back, and it’s over.”

She says it briskly, as Dusty says most things to me, to her mother, to everyone but Mr. Verver.

But it seems off, and all I can think of are the things she told me, the things Dusty knows, or thinks she does.

Oh, Lizzie, she knew. She knew he was coming for her.

Mr. Verver puts down the clipboard, his pen, all his things, and rests his hands on Dusty’s shoulders.

He lets his fingers wiggle in her hair.

She looks up at him, waiting. I can feel her toes curling in her shoes, waiting for that gift, any gift, the gifts he hands out so freely.

Oh, I can see it on her. She’s thinking, Now maybe it will go back, now it will be as before.

The way she stands there, that open expression she gives only to him—suddenly I feel like I should turn away. I feel like I’ve seen something no one’s supposed to see.

She waits for him, bouncing in her shoes, but this is what he gives her: “Maybe you should go home,” he says.

All the lovely expectation on her face disappears.

He glances over at me for a second, and she sees it.

A baton passed, from her to me, even as she hadn’t meant to pass it. Even as she still felt it in her tight, clawed hands.

She looks at me with those hawk eyes, and I feel, in a flash, like she can see right through my clothes, my skin, my everything.

She sees right into the center of me. I can’t unravel it all now, but it’s like she sees things in me, in him, that I can’t even see yet.

“I’m going back to Nana’s,” she murmurs, her hand reaching for her bag.

“Dus’,” he says, furrowed brow, his fingers resting on her neck.

“Don’t,” she says, so hard, jumping back, her arm flipping up as if to fend him off, as if they were out on the field and he’d high-sticked her.

She picks up the clipboard. For a crazy second, I think she’s going to throw it.

He steps forward.

“Don’t, don’t, don’t,” she says, her head whipping back and forth.

Stunned, Mr. Verver raises his hands high, like in a stickup.

“I don’t want to see her,” Dusty says. “I don’t want to be here. I can’t be here.”

She shoves the clipboard into my hands, reels around, and in an instant she is gone.

Mr. Verver is shaking his head. He is shaking his head, and looking at me.

My fingers fumbling on the clipboard, I don’t know what to say.

He swivels around on his foot, looking up at the ceiling. Then he says, “Until these last few weeks, she never wanted to spend more than an hour there, in her life.”

It takes me a second to realize he’s talking about the grandparents. It seems funny to me that he’s thinking about where she wants to go and not everything else she just showed him. The things she showed.

“She can’t stand the rose perfume,” he says, “and the vacuum cleaner going all day long.”

I nod.

“But I guess all this, it’s just too much,” he says. “It’s a lot to take.”

He keeps looking at me.

He seems overwhelmed, by everything. I want to rescue him from it.

Detective Thernstrom and Mr. Verver are talking in the corner. The police are all around and everything seems to be crackling.

I wonder who will tell me what happened. How did she get back? Where did she come from? Where’s Mr. Shaw? And I have even silly, furtive thoughts that now they’ll uncover my lies, all of them.

Somehow I can’t bring myself to ask Mr. Verver, who has shaken off everything with Dusty. Shaken it off so easily. Everything popping and sparking, his face is like an amusement park, all filled with fear and elation.

“She can’t talk to anyone right now,” Mr. Verver says, as soon as the detective leaves. “She’s all drugged up. But she’s great. She’s great. Oh, Lizzie, you should see her.”

I did see her, I want to say. I saw everything.

“The police—they…,” I try.

“They haven’t been able to figure everything out yet,” he says. “He’s on the run again. You saw—he’d dyed her hair.”

We both let that thought hover between us for a second. I feel it teeter in my rib cage.

“He was in for the long haul,” he adds quickly. “From what we can figure out, she… got away from him. A waitress at the doughnut shop out on Falls Road said she saw a girl get out of a car and walk into the woods. So she must have gotten away somehow and walked home. Four miles.”

My head is jumbled with questions. It all seems strange and impossible.

“And they don’t know where he is?”

“No,” he says, so quickly, his face clouding over. “Not yet.” He pauses. “But she came home, Lizzie. She made it home. She fought her way home.”

The words sound big and movielike and I want to burrow myself under them. But it doesn’t feel right. None of it feels right. And none of it feels over, at all.