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dinner table and got sick
     in the kitchen sink. It is a favorite tale of my brother’s, who regales others with heaving imitations.
    “Why was Mrs. Verver throwing up?” I’d asked my mother, who’d sighed and said, gravely, “I don’t think you understand what’s
     happening.”
    And that’s when I stopped listening, shut my ears from the gloom and murk of her. It’s almost like she savors the terribleness—everyone
     does. Like it does things for them, makes everything seem more exciting, more momentous, more real.
    Evie’s not gone, I wanted to say to her, and now as I sit on the Verver sofa, the sofa Evie and I used to wedge our hands
     into, sneaking crusty quarters after dinner parties, I know Evie’s right here, watching, giggle-faced, that snaggletooth in
     the left corner of her mouth, where her chin hit the Benedicts’ deck as she ran fast to get into their new fiberglass pool
     and under the water and down, down, down to its burning-chlorine center.
    “Lizzie,” Mr. Verver is saying, and his voice brings me back. “Is there anything else you can remember about that day? Anything
     she said, anything maybe out of the ordinary the last time you saw her?”
    “I don’t know,” I say. “I can’t think. She said she was going to walk home. She was behind the hedges and then she was gone.”
    He nods, like what I’m saying makes sense, which it does not. I’m trying hard to picture it all, to fall back into it like
     a dream you can make yourself dream twice.
    “She said she didn’t want a ride. I asked her if we could give her a ride. But she didn’t want a ride. Is that weird? It doesn’t
     seem so weird. It’s weird because of this, but if it hadn’t been for all this, I don’t think it’d seem weird.”
    Mr. Verver nods, looking across the room at nothing in particular. “Everything seems weird now,” he says. “It’s all upside
     down.”
    I look out the window and see the detectives talking on the front porch, one of them smoking, like a cop on a TV show. I’m
     thinking about the cigarette butts again.
    I feel dizzy and ask if I can use the bathroom. Standing in the Ververs’ pink powder room, I look in the mirror and count
     to ten three times.
    When I come out, I see Mr. Verver again, making coffee in that old dented pot he takes on fishing trips.
    “Dusty broke the other one this morning,” he says, trying for a smile. “Nerves.”
    “It might not be anything,” I blurt.
    He stops, the water running over his hand.
    “What?”
    “It’s just—it’s probably nothing,” I stutter. I can see his face lifting and something swells in me.
    “I know,” he says. “But nothing is okay. It really is. Right now, nothing is more than we have.”
    We walk to the backyard, and I hope they’re still there. My heart pit-pats and I worry that I dreamed those cigarettes into
     sputtering life.
    Mr. Verver’s hand is on my shoulder and I feel a weight on my chest.
    Twenty paces walking to the knobby pear tree, but it seems, now, so far. I feel, with each step, every twig, kicked-up dirt,
     curling leaf, the sharp cut of a rake thatch. Soon enough, I am nearly running.
    My eye catches the white first, and I see them, still there from last night, matted fast into a root corner of the tree.
    Mr. Verver is already crouched down, and it’s no dream. They are there. Hands on his thighs, he doesn’t touch them.
    “You found these?”
    “Evie did. She showed them to me. Or ones like them. About a month ago.”
    His eyebrows rise. His face is doing all kinds of things, calculations and divinations.
    “What did she say about them?”
    Sometimes, at night, he’s out here.
That’s what Evie’d said.
    “Nothing,” I lie. I don’t know why, but the lie comes so easy that I feel its rightness.
    He rises and looks at me and I think he can see the lie on me.
    I know he can.
    I stare at the cigarette butts, flat and soggy, like a peel slipping from a hard center.
    “Nothing,” I say