Twenty-five
I don’t pretend to know the hearts of women.” Mr. Verver said that once, long ago. He’d said it, laughing, he’d said it with a knowing slant of his head, and I remember Dusty, her face, the glow of it, because Dusty only ever glowed and gloried under his gaze. I think of Dusty and boys, those furtive thoughts of why she can never yield herself to them, doesn’t even care to try. Mr. Verver, he gives her everything and asks nothing in return, except everything. Everything. There’s nothing left for anyone else, she gives it all to him, his gaze rendering her beauty with such care. And then the struggle after Evie went away, and after she came back, oh, for Dusty not to have that gaze on her. Oh, any minute at all in her life, not to have that gaze on her…
It’s nearly Labor Day. The sounds floating through the kitchen window, and it’s like a thousand other nights, and Dusty’s starry trill, Mr. Verver’s throaty laugh, the swing of his voice, like his hand on your back, pushing you on the swing set, your feet in the air.
Everything is back. It’s back. But it’s all different and the laughs are different, aren’t they? I nuzzle the screen door and look and see their tanned faces, their gleaming teeth and avid eyes, and the frenzy in the air seems a thing apart.
Everything looks different now, Evie once said. But I don’t think it’s different. I just never saw it before.
Dusty, the eagerness on her face, the grasping, the grappling. How hard she’s trying, how hard he’s trying too. It’s desperate, but you believe in it:
We will make it so, we will make it as before, a fairy tale, handsome king and golden princess, surveying their kingdom from on high…
I think of Evie up in her room, and wonder if she’s hearing them too and knowing she is.
If things had been different, Mr. Shaw may never have touched her. He may have gone his whole life never stepping from the shadows. Never going beyond a few shared words on the back lawn of the school. But then it happened, and she ran to him, and then he couldn’t stop.
But I saved her, didn’t I? Stringing clues together, tracing the breadcrumbs back. Dropping breadcrumbs myself. All to rescue her from him.
Rescued her, returned her, restored her… back to that house where now she lies, one thin, filmy wall from her attacker, from the girl who held herself against her neck, nearly pressing the life from her.
Would you let it all go on? Would you let both sisters hide their dark tales, their black-heart secrets? Or would you tell all, turn that enchanting, light-struck household inside out, lay open its mysteries?
Caught up in it all, in the slipstream of it, I’ve seen things. I’ve seen the massy heart of things.
They had made their choices, both sisters, hadn’t they? Neither would tell what happened. Neither would ever tell.
They’d decided what mattered to them. And it was Mr. Verver, it was him. The him of him, and the idea of him, and maybe they were the same.
And now they’ve drawn up the bridge, raised high the walls, and who was I to say? Who were the police, anyone, to say they knew better? That they could look at the gold-gleaming family before them and see its troubled center and say they knew better, could undream that beautiful dream?
These two girls, not princesses so much as palace guards, sacrificing all to keep their noble king safe. Up high in his tower. Golden-walled, immaculate.
I walk outside, onto the patio, and watch them. There he is, holding court, Dusty enthroned at his side, her legs curled tanly beneath her.
I watch for a long time before he sees me, but he does.
He rises so fast, my heart catches.
There’s a warmth on his face that brings everything back.
I take a few steps toward him.
Calling my name, he flings his arm out to me, hand outstretched, his face open and ready, inviting me in.
She smiles too, the gracious victor to her former rival, and the two of them, their smiles are the same and so much radiates from them it takes my breath away.
He flings his arm wide.
Take it, he says, hand outstretched. Oh, Lizzie, take it.
It’s Sunday morning and Dr. Aiken has left to get almond Danish and I creep into my mother’s room and she lifts her arms above her head and says, Come lie with me, little girl, like she used to when I was very small and dainty.
We are tucked under the mauve bedspread with the satin border I rub between fingers and it soothes.
I could lie there forever.
“High school this week,” she says, smiling at me.
“Yeah,” I say. High school, the idea seems so small, after everything.
“I heard Mrs. Shaw and her son moved away,” she says carefully. “All the way down by Point Cleary.”
I feel a twitch at my temple, push my fingers to it.
“It’s funny,” she says, “because I was always grateful to him.”
“Grateful?” I say. “To who?”
“Oh, I’m sure you don’t remember. You were so little. It was at Green Hollow Lake. You and Evie, gosh, I can still see you in your matching suits. Evie had water wings, but your dad propped you up on your raft and you were having a fine time. Then that motorboat came by, and whoosh.”
She sweeps her arm across the bedspread, making a shush.
“You fell and Harold Shaw was right there. He plucked you out and I still remember your little face, your eyes big as saucers. You were holding onto him so tight.”
“That was Mr. Verver,” I say, I nearly shout.
Mr. Verver scooped me up, shook me like a wet puppy, lifted me as if by my neck scruff, and saved me then and there.
She shakes her head and smiles.
“No,” she says. “He was off taking Dusty on the Jet Ski. It was Harold Shaw. He had you, and you just did not want to let go. It was hard to unclaw you from him. And he seemed so touched by it.”
She looks at me. “I always remember that.”
“I guess it seems different now, after everything,” she says. “The memory. It’s not the same now.”
“No,” I say, but I’m not listening. She keeps talking, but I’m not listening. I am far away and can barely hear her.
Step-shuffle-back-step, step-shuffle-back-step.
Flashing before me, such visions: the photograph in the Shaw house, the one of Mr. Shaw and Pete at the lake, and me bobbing in the background, bobbing on my yellow raft. And Evie, and Evie, turning toward me on her sleeping bag, turning toward me and whispering, mouth to ear. He saw me at the pool, doing dives. It reminded him of something that happened at the lake, a long time ago. How he’d seen me fall in the water. The most important moment of his life.
He said watching me at the pool, it all came back. And he knew what it was to love. The most important moment of his life.
Both our memories self-spun, radiant fictions.
Me and my shadow.
Wanting something so badly, you make it so. He and I, we share that. It’s a strange secret, sharing, and I’ll never tell.
This I suddenly remember, from before everything:
Mr. Verver and Dusty sunning on lounge chairs in the backyard. Dusty, maybe fourteen, is wearing a polka-dot bikini and pink sunglasses, and Mr. Verver, he’s wearing khaki shorts and sunglasses.
For a minute of course for a minute they look like brother and sister or something else that you know
And it’s so hot and Evie and I are kicking the soccer ball around and Dusty is laughing at Mr. Verver, whose finger is running back and forth in midair, in the space above
Dusty’s golden stomach, which he
He’s teasing her about the tiny gold down running in a narrow line down the center of her midriff, from the frilled bottom edges of her bikini top to the frilled top edges of her bikini bottom.
Evie and I pull up our T-shirts to see if we have the treasure trail
that’s what Mr. Verver keeps calling it, treasure trail
see if we have the treasure trail too
Evie’s is pale brown and mine’s not really there at all
at least not so you could see
but if I run my hand along it I can feel something tickling under my fingers.
I can feel it just the same.