I RUN FOR A WHILE, but I’m not that good a runner. Also my satchel keeps slamming into my legs. So after a few blocks, I slow down to a walk and pick up the satchel, carrying it like a baby up against my chest. I look back a few times, hoping maybe to see Jonah jogging after me, arms ready to take me in, or else an officer snapping open his handcuffs, adjusting them to fit my wrists. No one’s following me, though, and I make it back to Mom’s car all by myself.
Jonah’s truck is still there, parked in front of me. I glance into the truck bed as I walk by: a mess of tools and rope, a few torn plastic sheets—all of it dusted with these little twists of fur. I feel exhilarated by what I’ve seen, by the run, and yet guilty, too; after all, someone has died. And it’s this mix of giddy and guilty, this feeling that none of the rules apply, that urges me to step up to the truck bed and stick my hand down in the mess. I could take something of Jonah’s, I think, something little that he wouldn’t miss. Something I could hold in my hand.
I feel around in all that junk, rough with rust and grime, until my hand wraps around some sort of metal handle. It feels right, like the handle was waiting there for someone to grab on to it. I think about how maybe Jonah had killed that poor dead guy and this will be evidence I can hide for him. I picture myself on the witness stand, lips pressed tight. Young lady, the judge booms. And when my fantasy disappears, I realize that I’m still holding on to the handle of the thing in the truck, so what is there to do but pull it out?
When I stick my key in the door back at home, it turns too easily. The door’s already unlocked—a sure sign that Mom’s waiting for me. She leaves it open if I’m not home when I say I’ll be, like I’ve forgotten my key and will be locked out, even though she knows I’ve never forgotten my key, not even once. Sometimes in these rental houses, though, the deadbolt is so old that trying to unlock an open door makes my key get stuck, and I have to stand on the porch and jimmy the key until I give up and ring the bell. Then Mom takes her time getting to the door, finally whipping it open with a little sigh, like, Oh, it’s you.
Sure enough, Mom is right there on the couch, waiting for me. Her feet are tucked under her and the colored ad insert from the news paper is spread out on the coffee table. She runs her hands over the insert like she could actually touch the people printed there; her finger hits the shoulder of a boy in a polo shirt, then swipes the breasts of a woman wearing bright lipstick.
She’s heard me come into the room—I’m sure she has—but waits a minute before she looks up—she likes her poses and pauses, Mom does. Sometimes she’ll stop in the middle of saying something just to watch her own hand as it gestures, and you can see her admiring it, as if her hand is some creature independent of herself—some moth or sparrow—as if she’s not the one moving it around.
Mom grew up beautiful. Now, some beautiful people let their beauty just lie there on them, like a coat of sweat on their face, but Mom, she manages hers. She orders her beauty into shape like a squad of soldiers or a page of math problems. So when she finally decides to look up at me, her face is all set, her beauty ready to salute. She smiles a big smile and scratches the cushion next to her.
“Sit down,” she says. “Right here.”
This is not so good. I’d expected that she’d snap at me for getting back later than usual so that I could snap back at her and go hide in my room. I want an excuse to be away. I want to lie down somewhere quiet, flat and still, and think about that body. Instead, I sit on the couch cushion next to her. She hasn’t put her makeup on yet, and her face looks blank without the features drawn on it, her eyelashes silvery, the tip of her nose pink as if she has a cold. I can see the pores on her nose, like seeds on a strawberry, an imperfection that she wouldn’t normally allow to be seen.
“Did you deliver your papers?” she asks.
There are a dozen papers still in my satchel in the trunk of her car and, beneath the satchel, the object I pulled from Jonah’s truck. It has teeth on it, I discovered, glancing at it as I drove home. It’s a trap of some kind, the size of a large book, cold and heavy. I stowed it with the thought that I could do something with it later, hide it or return it or bury it unsprung.
“Of course,” I say.
“It took you a while.” She says this like it’s just a little something to say, but then she doesn’t say anything else after it, like it wasn’t just a little something to say but a question and now she’s waiting for my answer. I try to think of what she might want me to admit. Maybe someone called her (The cop who yelled at me? A neighbor? Jonah Luks himself?) and told her that I had been spying on the police. Maybe someone had seen me swipe the trap.
“I guess it did take me a while,” I say, because now is not the time to confess to anything. “Did you need the car?”
“No, no . . . ,” she says. “It’s just . . . when I woke up, you weren’t here.” She flips through the advertisements. “Did you meet one of your friends?”
“Yeah, sure. At six on Sunday morning. We went to the mall and bought prom dresses. Then there was this slumber party—”
“Well, I don’t know. Someone who really wanted to see you might get up early.”
Even though I barely ever leave the house for anything that isn’t work or school, Mom keeps thinking that I have all these friends. Of course, she had a ton of friends when she was my age, and she still talks about them all the time—these Betsys and Carols and Pams. She doesn’t ever talk about how they are now—some grotty housewives or dog-groomers or something—but how they were then, hanging out and pulling pranks and throwing parties.
This idea that I have friends is so important to Mom that sometimes I help her out—like, I’ll repeat something funny that Angela Harper said in chem, not including the fact that she’d said it to Rachel Birch, not to me. There’s a price for this, though, because for weeks Angela’s name will ring through the house. “How’s Angela?” “Did Angela think the test was hard?” “Did Angela like your haircut?” And I shrug and mutter my maybes and my I don’t knows, until, embarrassed by the idea that Angela Harper might somehow discover that my mother thinks she’s my best friend, I tell Mom that Angela and I don’t hang out anymore and I mention a new name for her to latch on to.
“Maybe a boy?” Mom is saying.
“Maybe a boy what?”
“Maybe you met a boy. A boy who’s a friend.”
“Mom. No. God.” I put my hands over my face and look at out between my fingers. “Why would you say that?”
“You were late.” She shrugs and hikes her bare feet up onto the coffee table, and for an instant it seems like she hasn’t thought about the movement before she’s made it, but then she course-corrects her legs into something more graceful. “That’s why I was late when I was your age.”
“Yeah,” I say, not saying the rest—that she was pretty, that boys wanted to meet up with her, that this is not my situation. You might think that I feel bad about how I’m not as pretty as my mom. The truth is, I’ve never felt bad about it at all; in fact, I’m happy about it. See, Mom would have a hard time if I were pretty and young. She can handle one of these things but not both of them.
“I woke up, and you weren’t here,” she repeats, and this time it’s almost like a child has said it. I woke up, and you weren’t here. She looks down at her toes, wiggles them. She’s waiting for me to say something, and I finally figure out what it is.
“I’m really sorry.”
And suddenly everything is all right. Mom sits back. She tucks her hair behind her ears and beams.
“Don’t apologize, silly.” She makes a perfect fist and bops me on the nose. “I have waffles.”
I follow her into the kitchen.
It feels weird eating the waffles, something about their sponginess, their sweetness. I think for a second about the body, how that guy won’t eat any more waffles, not ever. Won’t eat anything ever again. I chew and swallow.
After dishes, I hide in my room and wait for Mom to get in the shower. Then I sneak out to the car for my satchel. Back in my room, I pull the trap out to look at. It’s a mouth, an arc of teeth with springs at each end. Right now, the trap is closed. I touch my pinkie to one of the springs and feel the coil of it, and how much potential there is in that coil, how it controls the stretch and the snap-shut. It’s about the length of my forearm, and I wonder what it’s meant to catch. Deer? Wolves? Bears? Though, of course, there are no wolves or bears in the trees around Hokepe Woods, or at least I don’t think that there are. I hold the trap where I think Jonah probably held it, on the edges of its smile. It’s cold and heavy in my lap. But there’s nothing you can really do with a trap unless you’re going to set it, so I end up hiding it behind some shoe boxes under my bed.
The rest of the day I read a book, finish an essay for school, and come out every once in a while to turn on the TV, pretending like I’m bored. I can’t find anything about the body—no late-breaking news or special reports—just the regular basketball games and Sunday movies. The afternoon has this high, white light to it, cold enough to keep the frost on the ground so that everything is hard and crackly. It’s one of those days that looks like a photograph, and you almost feel like you can’t step out into it or you’ll ruin the picture.
So I stay inside, and every now and then, I think about the body. What do I think about it? Not much. Mostly that I’ve seen it, just the fact of seeing it, which is like the tickle of the ants across my cheeks. I think about Jonah, too—if he went back to the police station, if he’s in trouble, if he’s saying my name to himself right now. Mostly, I think about how I’ll have something to talk to him about next Sunday.
Mom and I watch the news with dinner. I wait for it. I wait all the way through the weather report (cold, sunny) and the human-interest bit (a goat that can sort poker chips), and still there’s nothing about the body, nothing about Hokepe Woods. After dinner, the phone rings and Mom takes it. I don’t think anything of the call, not even when she shouts to me from the living room. This is not unusual, her shouting. When something on the TV strikes her as amusing, she yells my name, even though by the time I get there the punch line has been delivered or the exotic bird has flown away.
When I get to the living room tonight, though, the TV is off, reflecting back tiny, shadowy replicas of ourselves in its dead eye. Mom is on the couch, sitting with perfect posture, her legs angled to one side and her toes pointing in the exact same direction, like she is the quivering needle on a compass. Mom has made the box of Kleenex from the bathroom and two glasses of water into an unlikely centerpiece on the coffee table. She scratches the couch cushion next to her. I sit down.
She looks regal that way, sitting with her back straight and her face serious, like someone with underskirts and an official title. I know she’ll wait to talk until I say, “What is it?” She likes to be asked for things.
“What is it?” I say.
“I’ve had a phone call.”
I look at the Kleenex box. “Is it Dad?” I say, before thinking better of it. Mom’s serious expression wrinkles into something more annoyed.
“Of course not. It was Veronica from work.”
“So?”
Mom touches a hand, quickly, to the bridge of her nose, and I notice that her posture is brittle like crackled paint, like you could chip little bits off of her.
“Is Veronica okay?”
“It’s Elizabeth McCabe,” Mom spits out.
This all takes a minute for me to think about, because it’s not really an answer to my question and, besides, no one’s called Elizabeth McCabe Elizabeth for years.
“You mean Zabet?” I say. “Zabet McCabe?”
Mom grabs the Kleenex box and sets it in her lap, and her hands float over its white tuft. “This is bad news, Evie.” And when she says this, her posture relaxes and her hands drop down onto her knees, and we both breathe in once and then out together, like we’ve planned it. Then Mom says, “Elizabeth—Zabet—she’s passed away.”
I wait for a second so that I can recheck the words, their meanings. “That’s terrible,” I finally say, because what else am I supposed to say? News like this is, at first, just news.
I ask if it was a car accident. Last year, two kids from my school died that way. Principal Capp planted two trees out in front of the school, one for each kid. We had this joke around school that the two kids who died had been secretly buried under those trees, their bodies fertilizing them. This past winter, though, the trees started dying from some disease that had crawled under their bark. The school had practically a hundred exterminators come out to look at them, but not one was able to figure out what was wrong, much less fix it. No one makes that joke anymore about the dead kids being buried there.
Mom tells me that Zabet didn’t die in a car accident. But then when I ask how she did die, Mom gets this funny look on her face, an awkward look, a secret-telling sort of look, and I realize she doesn’t have a pose ready for whatever is in her head. She licks her lips (which she’s always telling me not to do because it chaps them) and tucks her hair behind her ears. “She was killed by someone. A person.”
“Like murder?” I say, and it sounds so silly, something people say through red lipstick with a dramatic gesture upstage—Murder!— that I accidentally grin.
“What on earth is funny?” Mom looks appalled.
Now, of course it’s not funny; of course it’s terrible. Sometimes that’s when I grin, though, when something is terrible. I don’t know why. It’s like my mouth is attached to one of those board-game spinners, and it spins all the way around the possible shapes it could make, only to land on the exact wrong one.
“How?” I say.
“How was she killed?” Mom frowns. “By a person. I told you that. She was murdered.”
“No, but how did the person do it?”
Mom wrinkles her nose. “I don’t know.”
“You didn’t ask?”
“Well.” Mom looks at me, then away. “Veronica didn’t have so many details. She’d heard from her sister-in-law, who . . . well, I don’t know how she knew. I think she was hit on the head? Elizabeth, not Veronica’s sister-in-law. Veronica thought that might be it: head trauma. They found her out in the woods near one of those neighborhoods.”
This is it, the information I’ve been waiting for all day, coming not from the nightly news but, improbably, from Veronica at my mother’s office. And there’s that body bag again marching through my head, left to right like the words in a sentence. I really don’t put it together until that moment: that I saw a body, that Zabet was the body. I’d sort of assumed it was a man in the bag, some homeless man or amateur hunter; you know, some dumb stranger who had done something risky or stupid or unlucky. But then I remember how all the policemen got real silent when they carried that bag by. And I realize that they must have known that it was a girl in there. I picture myself hiding in those bushes, how when I’d popped up, they had all stared at me like I was a ghost, a ghost girl.
“I saw her,” I say, before thinking that I probably shouldn’t say this, not to Mom, anyway.
Mom has her hand on her own throat. She’s all questions. “You saw who? When? What do you mean? Elizabeth McCabe?”
“Last week,” I say. “At school.” It’s like a reflex, this lie, to protect Mom, to protect myself from Mom’s upset, and I don’t even think much about telling it. I think about Zabet’s locker instead.
I can picture exactly where it is, in what locker bank, in what hall, all that. They paint the lockers different colors, and Zabet has an orange one. I don’t know why I think about a dumb thing like that right now. There’s nothing special about Zabet’s locker. It’s a locker. We all have one. But I start wondering what they’ll do about it, that locker, if the kids on either side of it will want to move to new lockers, if the school will assign the locker to someone else next year, if the kid who has it the next year will know that it was Zabet’s, and if he does, how long it’ll take—how many years, how many kids—until no one remembers that it used to be hers.
“Was she raped?” I ask. Mom takes her hand off of my shoulder and moves the Kleenex box back onto the table. She nudges a glass of water toward me, but she doesn’t say anything, so I ask again. “Was she raped?”
Mom looks up at me, real quick, and I know then that she heard me the first time. “Why on earth would you ask a question like that?” She pulls the glass away from me like I’m not allowed to have water anymore.
“I don’t . . .” I smile again, despite myself. “I don’t know.” And I don’t. I had wondered, that was all. It seemed important.
Mom stares at me for a minute. Then she says in her airy voice, “We don’t need to know every last detail, do we?” She lifts the glasses and carries them out of the room, again very grand, with her duchess walk. I hear her pour the water out and start to wash the glasses, even though neither of us had drunk a sip from them. I follow her to the kitchen and stand in the doorway. I try to think of something else to say that can cover up the last thing that I’d said.
“It’s weird to think about,” I say. Mom keeps on scrubbing at those glasses.
And it is weird to think about. It seems like there should have been a warning or something. Like how your throat feels heavy so you know that you’re going to get a cold the next day—some warning like that. I try to remember Zabet back when we were kids, to remember if I could see it on her, some hint of her death, some odd glow or ancient prophecy, some bird cawing at her strangely. I don’t remember anything like that, though. I only remember that she liked the red flavors of jam but hated the orange or purple ones, that she refused to let anyone cut her fingernails and they’d grow long and tear off sometimes when we’d play. But those were hardly omens.
“There were two of you,” Mom says over the sound of the water in the sink. “You were two little girls.”
“Mom?” I say. “Hey, Mom?” She’s crying now, so she won’t turn around. She doesn’t like how it makes her face all pink and puffy. I watch her shoulders for a minute; she has the clean glass in her hand. Then she lifts the glass up, and we both look at it for a second, the light from the kitchen shining through it, before she sets it down in the dish rack. Then she lifts the second glass and holds it under the light just the same. It’s so pretty the way she does this—just how she means it to be.