The Space Between Trees (22 page)

Hadley studies me for a second out of the corner of her eye. She rolls on her side so that she’s facing me. I roll on my side to face her, too, resting my cheek on both of my hands, like how little kids sleep in picture books. The mud flattens under my hands; we’re going to be covered in it, our clothes, our hair, and the sides of our faces.

“She was nice,” Hadley says. “She was a good person. Much better than me, anyway. And she liked”—Hadley chews on her lip—“Velcro.”

“Velcro?”

“Yeah. Sneakers and stuff. And science class and loud music, and she pretended she liked coffee, but really she put a shit-ton of cream and sugar in it so it was more like coffee-flavored milk. And she was real easygoing mostly. If you wanted to do something, she’d do it with you.”

I pictured it again: the ladle spinning toward Zabet’s face.

“Do you think you’d know him if you saw him?”

“Who?” I say.

“Who?” she repeats. “The one who killed her. Him. Do you think you could look at him and know it was him? Say, if you saw him, like, at a gas station or the mall or something. Would you know?”

I close my eyes and think for a minute, trying to puzzle out the right answer, the answer that will make her happy. “Maybe.”

“I’ll know,” she says and then, as if I’ve argued with this, “
I will
.”

We walk back to the car, muddy. I brush the flakes of it off my arms, comb my fingers through the mud-glued strands of my hair, and pluck my shirt away from my back so it’ll dry. But Hadley lets her mud stay, the streaks across her cheek and dark wet smudges on the back of her shirt, as if it weren’t even there. She must have memorized the tree ribbons on our way in because she nods to each one we pass like she’s thanking it for its guidance.

I can see the neighborhood ahead of us, the primary-colored plastics of swing sets, kiddie pools, and deck chairs; my view of them striated by the trunks of the trees. Hadley reaches the edge of the woods first and steps out into the neighborhood, but then she spins right back around and is running at me. She grabs me by the arm, pulling me away from the backyards, deeper into the trees.

“He’s here,” she says.

“Who?”

“Him. The car.”

“Jonah’s car?”

She glares at me, then jabs a finger out past the tree line. “
Look
.”

There’s a car there, a junky old burgundy station wagon parked just behind Hadley’s car. I think I see a shadow shift in the driver’s seat, but the windows are dark, and besides, we’re yards away. I can’t be sure anyone’s even in there.

“He followed me here,” Hadley says, shaking her head like she should have known.

“Are you sure it’s the same one, because—”

She looks at me levelly and, as if in punishment for my ineptitude, steps out from the trees.
She’s going to walk straight to the car, open the door, and climb in the backseat
, I think.
I’ll never see her again.

“Wait!” I say, grabbing her by the arm, tethering her to me, to the trees. Her arm is covered with tiny bumps. She lets herself be pulled back to safety.

“I’m just gonna look.”

“No,” I tell her. And when she tries to take a step, I clutch at her arm. “Hadley,
no.
”

She sizes me up. “So you believe me now?” “It’s a possibility.” I glance back out at the car, sitting there. It’s too old for the cars in this neighborhood, too shabby. “Just stay here for a minute.”

“It’s fine,” she says, prying up my fingers one by one. “It’s the middle of the day in the middle of the street. Okay?” She pulls up on my hand. “Let go. Okay?”

She fixes an eye on me, steady, staring me down past the lock of hair she’d been braiding. Finally, I let go. I reach forward and comb out the remnants of her braid.

“I’ll be right here,” I say.

“Fine. Watch me.”

She squares her shoulders and steps out into the backyard in front of us. The car is up ahead of her, parked at the curb. She takes a step toward it and then another, bringing her feet together after each step like she’s marching in a wedding.

As she gets closer to the car, my heart starts to pound its blood against my neck, knees, and wrists. There’s definitely someone in the driver’s seat, I’ve decided; I can almost make out a shadow now, and the windows are streaked with his breath.

Hadley walks out between the houses with her purposeful stride. I can’t stand to look anymore, so I study something in my pocket, a scrap of paper, half a note I’d written to Hadley:
After school?
I don’t even remember what the complete question was, what we were supposed to do after school. I stare at this little bit of paper like it has the last paragraph of one of Hadley’s mother’s mystery novels scribbled on it, the solution.

I hear a creak as the door of the car opens. I look. Someone is getting out of the car. I can’t see who, though, because the car is parked with the driver’s side facing the street. This driver, he could grab Hadley; he could shoot her; he could stab her. I take a breath and bolt forward, out of the woods, shouting Hadley’s name as I go. As I run forward, everything else runs in reverse. The car door slams shut, the driver ducking back in, and the car swings out of its spot. Hadley, who had almost reached the car, takes a couple of dancing steps back and stumbles on the curb, landing on her ass on the sidewalk. The car straightens and speeds off.

It was nowhere near hitting her, but still my heart is pounding. I’m there next to her in a second, gasping her name and
oh my God
. Instead of taking the hand I offer to help her up, she slaps my arm with a stinging clap more startling than the noise of the car engine.

“Believe me now?” she asks, and I nod and press the place where she’s hit me too hard. “See? You should always believe me.”

She yanks herself up roughly, but when she’s gotten to her feet, she holds my hand with one of her hands and my arm with her other hand, as if I’m elderly and might fall and break something.

“I hope he comes to get me,” she whispers as we walk, her mouth blowing the hair near my ear, her breath fetid. “I hope he gets close enough so I can—” She squeezes my hand tight enough so that the tendons roll over the bones, the squeeze the final word of her sentence.

W
HEN
I
GET HOME
, I find a note instead of my mother.
On a date,
it says with loopy flowers and a lopsided heart drawn around the message. I knew this already. A second date with that friend of Veronica’s:
Rick-from-the-bank. He decides who gets loans and who doesn’t.
As if this was some sort of virtue and not the perfect job description for a jerk.

Tonight is like all the other date nights. I make my own dinner and write some essay for school. I go to bed early and wake, around eleven, to voices. At first, I think it’s the TV. One of the voices is familiar, the voice of a beloved actress from a sitcom now in reruns. But then, no, it’s my mother’s voice. The other, Rick’s.

I sit up in bed, winding the covers around me into a nest, and listen to the voices go back and forth—the lilt of hers, the murmur of his. His voice is a low, nasal buzz, a marching band clarinet. I can’t hear much of what they say; every once in a while, though, a word steals away to my ears—
halibut, lightweight, bingo
.

I get up off my bed and make my way down the hall, careful to place my feet where the floor meets the wall, where the floorboards, anchored, don’t squeak. It isn’t until I’m halfway to the living room
that I think a terrible thought:
It could be you. It could be you, Rick-from-the-bank. It could be you who killed Zabet. Why not? Maybe you saw her through the tinted glass walls of your bank, Zabet on her way back from the coffee shop, a cup of milky coffee in her hand, sucking her sugar through the top?

The scenario rolls out before me like a lie off my tongue. But it’s true. Suddenly it’s true, and my mother’s date is no longer Rick-from-the-bank but Zabet’s killer. The low buzz of his voice is the ominous music, the foggy minor chords from a slasher movie that tell the audience what the heroine should already know.
Don’t walk down that hall. Don’t reach for that doorknob. The electricity has been cut, the phone disconnected. The knife is glimmering in that patch of shadow over there.

I cling to the wall of the hallway, and then, when there’s a lift to the conversation, the two of them talking over each other—
restrictions
, one of them says, and the other,
Barbara Walters
—I scuttle to the room next to the living room, the half bathroom, which no one ever uses.

I slide open the shutters of the one small window and peer out at the driveway. There’s Mom’s car and, behind it, a car that is not burgundy, not a station wagon, not the car following Hadley. It’s something beiger and newer. I sigh with relief, even as my mind says,
So what? He could have two cars.

Stakeouts, it turns out, are more boring than you might expect. It’s hard to maintain a sense of alertness, an edge of fear. I keep myself occupied sorting through old bottles in the cabinet under the sink—half-used shampoos, their bright mint dried to a swampy green, lotions that have separated into oil and fat, soaps
dusted with a creeping white powder like the kind that forms on old chocolate bars. The talk in the living room rises to a peak and then suddenly hushes to nothing. After a while, I hear the rustling and ceremony of good-bye. The front door opens and closes. The headlights of Rick-from-the-bank’s new beige car shine through the open slats of the bathroom shutters, locking down everything in shadowy jail bars.

I can hear Mom’s bare feet padding through the kitchen and then the rush of water in the other bathroom. I silently replace all the old bottles under the sink and wait to hear if her footfalls will pause at the end of the hall as she looks in at me asleep in my bed. Or, in this case, not asleep, not in my bed. But her footsteps march straight to her bedroom, shutting its door. She didn’t stop to check on me at all. It occurs to me that she never checked on me, not when she first got back, not now. I could be anywhere, gone, and she wouldn’t know until morning, when I failed to emerge from my room. I don’t bother tiptoeing back to my room, but if she hears my footfalls in the hallway, she doesn’t call out to ask why I’m awake.

Once, sometime not so long after my father left, I yawned at the breakfast table. Mom focused on this yawn. She hadn’t focused on much in those first few weeks after he was gone, despite her war stripes of blush, despite the hard tin of her laugh. But that morning, she sat down next to me and took the cereal spoon, still dripping with milk, from my hand.

“Do you stay awake listening for him to come back?”

I knew who
him
was—
him, he, his
always meant my dad. She stared at me, her pretty, pretty face naked through its makeup. I nodded, but only because I thought I should. It was a lie; I’d slept
straight through the night. Suddenly, I found myself caught up in her arms, my cereal bowl pushed to the side, where it slopped milk.

“You’ll stop listening for him,” she said, her hand stroking my hair in the rhythm of her words, as if to hypnotize me. “You’ll stop. I’ll stop, too.”

The funny thing was, after that, I couldn’t stay awake even if I’d wanted to. I’d slept fine before, but that night, and for many nights after, I laid my head on my pillow and dropped under, straight through the mattress ticking, it felt like. After nine hours, ten hours, Mom would try to wake me up. Even in my sleep, I could feel her shaking me by the shoulders; I could smell her perfume; her voice was the voice of a cricket trapped under a drinking glass. So, for her sake, I would drag myself up from sleep. Sometimes one of my arms would actually stretch up into the air as if climbing up a rope, my little hand curled in a claw, before I even opened my eyes.

The next day at school, it’s obvious that Hadley hasn’t slept, not a bit. She doesn’t act sleepy, though, but instead almost fevered—rings of pink around her eyes, hands batting at me to get my attention, ponytail swinging like the pendulum of an overwound clock.

“He came for me,” she says.