things.
Standing there, touching everything, I think of fingerprints and evidence and assorted TV show wisdom so hastily discarded.
But it’s too late now, so I press that pack to my chest with abandon.
Kneeling down on the plush grass beneath the streetlamp, I shake the cigarettes from the pack. Somehow I want to look at them,
be with them.
But as I do something else flutters forth, from between the tumbling cigarettes.
It lands on the grass and I pick it up, handle it tenderly.
It is a photo clipped from a newspaper, coiled like a pointing finger.
I recognize it. It’s just a tiny clipping, a smudge two inches long and two inches wide. It is from the article about last
year’s middle school soccer tournament.
The picture, I know it so well, because the same one is pinned with fat, sparkly thumbtacks to my own bedroom corkboard.
It’s Evie, and, next to her, half torn through, me.
A year ago, that picture, the two of us knowing each other so bone-deep. But now parts of me feel Evie skittering away. The
slips of Evie that I can’t quite touch, the girl whose eyes drifted down to her backyard and beheld that man, that man older
than her father, and saw him brooding in the dark, like an errant knight, standing in the backyard, heart in his outstretched
hand.
What did she think would happen? Did she think he would just look forever? And why didn’t she tell me? And what would I have
done?
It’s a lonely thought, and I push it away.
T hat night, I sleep with my plunder under my pillow. The cigarettes, the lighter, the clipping.
I knew I would use them. I knew already, even if I didn’t know how.
I think of Mr. Verver, how it will be when I cast my spell of release.
Then Evie too will be released, stumbling, wing-wounded, from her steely trap.
These are my strange nighttime thoughts.
And then the dream comes, and it is Evie:
In the dream, I’m in bed, and the sound starts. It is a slow scratching, so faint that each time I hear it, I shake it away.
But then it starts to get faster, and it seems to be both inside and outside at once, and I think it must be like when my
dad found those squirrels in the attic and had to smoke them out.
But the scratching keeps getting louder and louder, like claws on metal or steel, and I am walking through the hallways, my
palms spread on the walls, trying to feel it, to follow it.
And then I’m outside, the wind kicking up and my nightgown flappingagainst my legs, the house so dark and it is so late that my feet sink wetly into the spongy ground and everything looks blue
and tortured.
Not scratching now, but a sound more like clawing, and I want to slap my hands over my ears. But then my hands hit the painted
metal door of the milk chute and the sound surges through me like an electric current.
Slowly, slowly, bending at my knees to see, I twist the knob and open the chute door and instead of looking through to see
the dark of the kitchen, hear the shudder of our refrigerator, it’s all blackness. I think the door has opened to the center
of the earth itself, and it smells like loamy death.
I duck my whole head in, because this is a dream, I’m sure it’s a dream, and I have nothing to lose, nothing at all.
I reach my hand in deep as it will go, and that’s when I feel her.
I feel Evie before I see her, I feel the soft skin of her forearm, and then I see the white of her eye.
And then I see her face, and she is saying something to me.
I wriggle and she seems to loom closer and it’s as if we’re in some other place altogether, and I wonder if I will ever get
out again, but I push farther, and there we are, and there’s her face. And she is saying something to me.
Evie, Evie, Evie…
T he crackle of the morning news wakes me.
“Divers have been deployed to Green Hollow Lake… drag bars to search for the body of the girl identified by at least one witness
as resembling thirteen-year-old Eveline Verver, missing for more
Standing there, touching everything, I think of fingerprints and evidence and assorted TV show wisdom so hastily discarded.
But it’s too late now, so I press that pack to my chest with abandon.
Kneeling down on the plush grass beneath the streetlamp, I shake the cigarettes from the pack. Somehow I want to look at them,
be with them.
But as I do something else flutters forth, from between the tumbling cigarettes.
It lands on the grass and I pick it up, handle it tenderly.
It is a photo clipped from a newspaper, coiled like a pointing finger.
I recognize it. It’s just a tiny clipping, a smudge two inches long and two inches wide. It is from the article about last
year’s middle school soccer tournament.
The picture, I know it so well, because the same one is pinned with fat, sparkly thumbtacks to my own bedroom corkboard.
It’s Evie, and, next to her, half torn through, me.
A year ago, that picture, the two of us knowing each other so bone-deep. But now parts of me feel Evie skittering away. The
slips of Evie that I can’t quite touch, the girl whose eyes drifted down to her backyard and beheld that man, that man older
than her father, and saw him brooding in the dark, like an errant knight, standing in the backyard, heart in his outstretched
hand.
What did she think would happen? Did she think he would just look forever? And why didn’t she tell me? And what would I have
done?
It’s a lonely thought, and I push it away.
T hat night, I sleep with my plunder under my pillow. The cigarettes, the lighter, the clipping.
I knew I would use them. I knew already, even if I didn’t know how.
I think of Mr. Verver, how it will be when I cast my spell of release.
Then Evie too will be released, stumbling, wing-wounded, from her steely trap.
These are my strange nighttime thoughts.
And then the dream comes, and it is Evie:
In the dream, I’m in bed, and the sound starts. It is a slow scratching, so faint that each time I hear it, I shake it away.
But then it starts to get faster, and it seems to be both inside and outside at once, and I think it must be like when my
dad found those squirrels in the attic and had to smoke them out.
But the scratching keeps getting louder and louder, like claws on metal or steel, and I am walking through the hallways, my
palms spread on the walls, trying to feel it, to follow it.
And then I’m outside, the wind kicking up and my nightgown flappingagainst my legs, the house so dark and it is so late that my feet sink wetly into the spongy ground and everything looks blue
and tortured.
Not scratching now, but a sound more like clawing, and I want to slap my hands over my ears. But then my hands hit the painted
metal door of the milk chute and the sound surges through me like an electric current.
Slowly, slowly, bending at my knees to see, I twist the knob and open the chute door and instead of looking through to see
the dark of the kitchen, hear the shudder of our refrigerator, it’s all blackness. I think the door has opened to the center
of the earth itself, and it smells like loamy death.
I duck my whole head in, because this is a dream, I’m sure it’s a dream, and I have nothing to lose, nothing at all.
I reach my hand in deep as it will go, and that’s when I feel her.
I feel Evie before I see her, I feel the soft skin of her forearm, and then I see the white of her eye.
And then I see her face, and she is saying something to me.
I wriggle and she seems to loom closer and it’s as if we’re in some other place altogether, and I wonder if I will ever get
out again, but I push farther, and there we are, and there’s her face. And she is saying something to me.
Evie, Evie, Evie…
T he crackle of the morning news wakes me.
“Divers have been deployed to Green Hollow Lake… drag bars to search for the body of the girl identified by at least one witness
as resembling thirteen-year-old Eveline Verver, missing for more
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