HE’S ALREADY AWAKE. The lights are on behind him, and there’s the buzz of the TV. A box of voices. What did haunted people do before TV? Radio. What did haunted people do before radio? Talk to ghosts, maybe. He’s dressed neatly in old-fashioned pajamas—the kind that button up—and a robe, slippers, even.
“Evie!” he says, though I haven’t seen him for weeks. He takes in my muddy sweater and bloody lip in a glance. Are you all right? I expect him to ask, alarmed, and I’ll say, Yeah, I just bit my lip. I fell. I got lost is all. I didn’t know where else to go. I have the answer folded up in my mouth. But Mr. McCabe doesn’t ask me if I’m all right, that most basic of parental questions. Instead, he smiles and waves me in.
I follow him to the living room. The TV is set to an infomercial; a pair of manicured hands slices vegetables into slivers, fruit into pulpy, shining wedges. He has a snack set up on the side table, mindful squares of crackers and cheese, one half eaten, made into a rectangle by his bite.
“Why don’t you sit down?” he says. The couch pillows are set at right angles. “Would you like something? Food? A beverage?”
I’m suddenly aware of my state of dress, more so than if he’d said something about it. I tug at the sides of Hadley’s sweater, pulling them down. My lip hurts; it feels huge. I’m shivering, I realize, even though it’s warm that night, warm in Mr. McCabe’s living room. I have shivers running a loop through me, again and again. Calm down, I tell my body. You calm down now. And my body obeys enough to stop shivering. “I’m not hungry.”
“Something to drink, maybe?”
“That’s okay.”
“I was having a snack,” he says, indicating the plate.
He sits in the chair across from me, and behind him, the pretty hands on the television chop something slick and oceanic, luminous and white.
“Sometimes I like food in the night,” he says.
I glance down at my own muddy front. I have the story ready—why I’m muddy, why I’m injured, why I’m here—so why won’t he ask me? Mom would blanch at the sight of me, tell me to change my clothes, wash my face, run a comb through my hair, and put something on my lip so it won’t swell with infection. Tripped and fell? she’d say. Well, you’ve never been graceful. Then she’d tip her head to the side and add, Once that lip scabs over, you can wear a nice bright gloss. Trust me. No one will even notice.
But Mr. McCabe. I’d expected him to wrap me in a hug at first sight and, at the slightest shiver, wrap a blanket right around my shoulders. To sit me down and listen soberly, to keep asking if I was all right, if I was sure I was all right. And to give me the respect of not believing me when I said that I was.
I try to make the shivers start up again so that he’ll be forced to take some interest, but the shivers won’t come. I try to fake them, but it just looks like I’m restless.
“It tastes different, when you eat at night,” I offer, and he nods vigorously and smiles.
“A secret meal.”
We sit in silence. He crosses his legs and touches his lip self-consciously as if feeling for his own injury. But then he jerks his hand away from his lip, as if he’s committed a faux pas, and slides it into his robe pocket.
“How are you, Evie?” he says at the same moment that I say, “You’re probably wondering why I’m here.”
“No.” He shakes his head and sits back as if to get a few inches farther away from my question. “You’re welcome here. Anytime. You can just show up. A friend of Elizabeth’s—” He stops, not finishing with is a friend of mine. I forgot, somehow, that he calls her Elizabeth, and it takes me a moment to place the name, to remember that he’s talking about his daughter, about Zabet. “You don’t have to say anything,” he says, “explain anything.”
With that, my story shrivels up inside me, and, as if it were the only thing keeping me upright, I exhale and sink back into the couch. I’m so tired.
“Let me get you something to eat . . . or cocoa,” he mumbles, standing and fussing with the fall of his robe.
“No,” I tell him. He sits down immediately, even though I’ve said it neither loudly nor harshly. “I don’t . . . Really, I’m not hungry.”
“Would you like”—he touches his lip again but doesn’t seem to realize this time that he’s doing it. “Would you like a ride home? Probably you would. I’ll go crank up the car.”
“Actually.” I twist in the chair, glance at my own muddy hands and then the manicured hands on the TV screen. “I thought I could maybe stay here tonight?”
“Of course,” he says, in a falling tone, as if relieved. And I realize what it was before—his nerves, his fussiness, his insistence that he wouldn’t ask me questions. It wasn’t that he didn’t care. It was that he was afraid that he might scare me away; one careless word or sharp movement and I’d be gone.
“You’re . . . are you tired?” Mr. McCabe half rises, his arms out as if I were a small child fallen asleep whom he’d scoop up and carry to bed. “It’s late.”
I am tired. Bone tired. Marrow tired. It settles on me like a sheet lifted and laid over my face. I nearly lean my head back and fall asleep right there on the couch.
“Yeah,” I sigh. “I’m . . . yeah.”
Mr. McCabe is on his feet, waving me along, up the narrow, carpeted stairs and down the hall into a small bedroom. The bed is covered with a rumpled comforter, hunched up at the foot as if a person is crouched beneath it. The dresser drawers are each half open, loosing a spray of shirts and cords and leggings. I recognize one of the shirts, a burgundy plaid. Zabet used to wear that nearly every day. The sleeves were too long for her, so only the tips of her fingers showed, as if the shirt were slowly digesting her, savoring the last bits before it swallowed her whole. A few trinkets stand in a line along the dresser and desk—three wan shells, the slim circle of an enamel bracelet, and a music box, its ceramic flowers like frosting on a fancy cake. A drinking glass, an orphan from the set downstairs, sits at the edge of the nightstand, the water long evaporated from it.
“You can sleep here,” Mr. McCabe says as he walks past me into the room. “There are pajamas.” He indicates the drawer stuffed with a wad of pilled cotton. He looks around as if he’s forgotten something, though everything is here, clearly memorized and untouched, made sacred by his reverent neglect. “I’m down the hall. The bathroom, too, down the hall. There’s ointment, iodine, if you need to—”
“Are you sure it’s okay?” I say.
“The room is yours,” he says. “Sleep. Sleep tight. Don’t let the—no, never mind.” He touches a hand to his mouth and mutters, “Nothing will bite.”
“Thanks.”
We stand there for a moment amid Zabet’s belongings and then, on impulse, I step forward, wrap my arms around his neck, and give him a hug. He stays very still in the loop of my arms, and I feel suddenly strong, as if I have the power to hurt him, large and solid as he is. Then he reaches up and pats my head—once, twice, fatherly—his hand lingering for a moment before lifting up and away. Finally he leaves, closing the door behind him, but I hear him pause just on the other side of it, the slight creak of the door as he lays his hand on it. “Good night,” he says one more time, waiting until I say good night back before he steps away, as if he needs to reassure himself that I’m still there.
Once he’s gone, I’m alone, finally, with Zabet. I rub the nap of her hoodies and the wale of the corduroys; I put finger marks in the dust on the dresser, some of it her shed skin, right? Isn’t that what dust is made of? I pick up each object—those three shells from some trip to the beach; a half-squeezed tube of hand lotion that smells like a fancy department store; a movie ticket stub—a comedy—a line of bottle caps, their crimped lips pulled open. She liked to save things, I guess. I open the jewelry box to find it filled with cookie fortunes—A feather in the hand is better than a bird in the air. Courtesy is contagious. You will travel far and wide, for both pleasure and business. Lucky numbers: 4, 39, 74.
I slide my hands between the mattress and the box spring, managing to lift the mattress part way up before letting it go, but Zabet didn’t hide anything there. I crawl into the closet and push past old dress shoes. In the back of the closet, high up on the shelf, I find her hiding place—a dinged lighter and a pack of stale cigarettes, one half smoked, marked with her peach lip gloss. There’s a notebook up there, too, filled with sketches of a houseplant, a teetering line of condominiums, and what must have been Zabet’s own feet. I wonder if she had secretly wanted to be an artist. Maybe this should make me sad, but instead I think at least she’ll never find out that she wasn’t good enough.
I pull open the dresser drawers, and the clothes that hung out collapse back into the drawer or spill out onto the carpet. I shuck off Hadley’s muddy sweater, my sneakers, and pajama pants. I find a threadbare T-shirt and a pair of men’s boxer shorts. I stand naked in the center of the room before I put them on, my skin goose-pimpled. I stare at myself in the mirror nailed to the closet door. I press my fingers to my knee. The beads of blood have hardened and darkened like the carapaces of insects. The worse injury is my mouth, the wound black, velvety in the dim light. I finger the cut, and it fires back at me in pain. There’s a smudge of dried blood on my chin. I lick my hand and rub until it’s gone.
I dress in Zabet’s clothes—the shirt and boxer shorts. The fabric feels strange against my skin, too rough in some places, too worn in others, and then, suddenly, it feels fine, like these clothes have been worn by no other body but my own.
I turn in a slow circle. Zabet is everywhere in this room, her touch on everything. But of her death? There are no clues, no illumination, no solutions. For the first time, I consider that maybe there’s nothing to find. Maybe there’s no story to Zabet’s murder. Maybe the story is simply that she’s dead. Just dead.
I imagine Mr. McCabe coming into this room every night, every morning, standing at its center unable to bring himself to move anything, not to straighten the comforter nor tuck away a pair of shoes, for fear that he might wear out the last bit of her. After all, it is his Elizabeth who chewed that pen cap and then cast it into the corner. It is she who wadded her clothes into drawers, she who hid the pack of cigarettes. She, whose teeth no longer chew, whose body withers in her last outfit, whose lungs have no breath to give cigarettes.
And me, I’m looking for scraps of Zabet in this room because I didn’t even know her. She was this little girl from a little corner of my childhood. She was a stranger, really, and I have no claim on her. This whole time—lying to Mr. McCabe, befriending Hadley, looking for Zabet’s killer—it hasn’t been about Zabet at all. It’s been about me, my curiosity, my loneliness, my fear. In a way, I’ve been using Zabet, her memory, to get what I need. And maybe, in that same way, I’m just as bad as her killer. After all, isn’t that what he did? Made her into something less than a girl, something less than a person, to get what he needed?
I make a decision. I begin to clean.
I open each of the drawers all the way, unearthing the clothes in armfuls. I heap them on top of the dresser, disturbing the dust, and then I fold them one by one, stacking them in a gradation of colors like cereal boxes on a grocery-store shelf. I lift up the comforter and let it float in the air as it falls; whatever secret loitering scent there was of her is chased away. I reach up and fish the cigarettes out of the back of the closet. I position a cigarette in the uninjured side of my mouth and smoke it halfway down, sitting there on the bed, the covers pulled up to my lap. I drop the end in the empty drinking glass where it curls into a worm of ash. I slide under the blankets, lay the weight of my head on the pillow (Her head lay here, I think), and fall right asleep.
You’d think that maybe I’d dream Zabet’s dreams. But I sleep without dreaming. I wake early and change back into my pajama pants and Hadley’s sweater, though they feel like a stranger’s clothes now. I fold the T-shirt and boxer shorts, adding them to one of my tidy stacks in the dresser drawer. The wound on my lip is still open, hasn’t even scabbed; I glance at it in the mirror and wonder, briefly, if it’ll need stitches. I’m sort of grateful for it—my bitten lip—as proof that something happened last night, something I didn’t create in my head. Last thing, I make the bed, smoothing the wrinkles with an arm, brushing away any marks my body might have left. I look around at the work I’ve done. It’s just an empty room now.
I tiptoe down to the living room, where Mr. McCabe has fallen asleep in his chair with the TV still on. I move past the gentle buzz of his snore and turn the knob slowly, and then take care that the front door opens and closes without waking him. I step out onto the porch. I’m gone. I was never there.