Carter had shown up in their lives, whipped out a credit card, and bought Haley things the Kimbersons could never have afforded. Like magic she came home looking like someone else and showed everything off to him, saying, as she always did, Don’t tell Mom. As if their mother would overlook the Ray-Ban sunglasses, the tickets to Lollapalooza up in DC, the ten-hole Doc Martens on Haley’s feet. The Wynn twins convinced her to get Glamour Shots done with them at the mall. To them, it was ironic and hysterical. To Haley, she could put on earrings and find the glimmer of everything she’d never had. The photo showed her with a hand hovering near her hair, a scrunchie half-ponytail on top of her head, and a large gold-link necklace, her lips painted with chocolate-brown lipstick. It wound up being used as her funeral photo.
He still thought of things they could do together if Haley were alive, what kind of adult siblings they might have been like, but it was nothing more than a mental exercise, and trying to conjure her up made Everett hurt in a place that was deep in his body but also not his body at all, a kind of infinite pain like the universe was throbbing all around him.
When the mismatched couple had gotten dressed, Carter sat and phoned her father and Everett put frozen waffles into the toaster. He went to the espresso maker he’d only purchased that week. She hadn’t noticed it yet. Everett realized he didn’t know how to use it.
Carter played a message on her cell, and Everett could hear Kennedy’s voice. He hadn’t expected it to punch him like it did. Carter’s sister was there, breathing, talking, on the other side of the receiver. Today was as hard for him as it was for Carter, he thought, but all morning he’d wanted to take care of her and she didn’t seem to grasp that. Everett listened as Carter called Gerry back. He gathered they were at the house in Blueheart Woods now. He listened as she explained she wasn’t feeling well, that she’d been dizzy and almost had a car accident. The conversation only lasted a few minutes, then the toaster popped loudly, and she glared at him. She said she’d be there soon and she clicked off.
He knew the hurt showed in his face because she avoided looking at him and focused instead on her new iPhone.
Everett watched her finger flick over the screen. She hadn’t signed up for Facebook, saying she had no interest in reconnecting with the past after running from it for over a decade, so what was it she found to look at on that thing? The photo on his profile was a selfie he’d snapped in the condo with her in the background. But she wasn’t recognizable so Everett didn’t think she’d mind. It was just her bare knee and her hand, the tips of her golden-brown hair. She’d seen him take the photo but hadn’t thought to ask if he would post it. Why had he done it? She wasn’t his girlfriend, he told himself, though his friends suspected he had one.
Finally he asked what she was looking at, and her answer surprised him.
“My sober app.”
“What’s an app?”
“It’s like a computer program but on your phone.”
“You need a program to count your program?”
“Five months, ten days.”
She didn’t tell him that it provided inspirational quotes too. She set down her phone. Her glance flicked over the kitchen and settled on the De’Longhi. “When did you get the espresso maker?” She stood up and went to examine it, touching it reverently. “You got the kind I told you I used to have?”
Her ex had managed to keep it. Her mouth twitched at the corner and he couldn’t decide what the expression meant. Did it make Everett an idiot that he’d run out immediately to get something she wanted as if he could win her? He’d gone out with plenty of girls, but none who made him want their approval. She looked exactly like the girl who had killed his sister—but that was a thought he was good at pushing away.
His phone rang. It was his mother, and unlike Carter he knew better than to speak to her now. He didn’t like to hear Marly’s voice while looking at Carter’s face. Their face. He already knew what his mother wanted: him to come back to the house in Longwood, only a five-minute drive from the one where Kennedy would be soon with Gerry and Carter.
Everett had been inside their house once.
* * *
—
When he was twelve and Haley was three years gone, Everett had walked over to Blueheart Woods. He went to the Wynn house at night and observed its stillness. There seemed to be no one left. When he worked up the nerve to look in the bay window he saw Mr. Wynn sleeping in front of an episode of Friends, the one with the cat. Breaking and entering wasn’t like on TV, it had turned out. Everett didn’t need a mask or crowbar or to disarm the alarm system: he just opened the door and stepped in. Everett crept up the stairs and opened both the girls’ rooms.
Carter’s room was the empty one: the half-bare bookshelves told him that. There was a wicker basket of mixtapes left in the closet and that was all. An old sweatshirt or two. He later figured out she had already left for her attempt at college. Carter was the twin he’d always thought about as a kid. Once he’d fallen off his bike and scraped a long line of red down his forearm. Haley and Kennedy stood there staring, but Carter took him inside the Kimberson house and held his arm under a stream of cold water. She put antiseptic on it while he bawled, and asked if he wanted her to blow on it, even though it doesn’t really make it feel better, she said. He’d nodded.
He’d felt bad invading her space and gone into what was obviously Kennedy’s room, where there was a collage of photographs she’d made on a poster board, pictures of the twins together and with their friends. Berk Butler, Kennedy’s old boyfriend, shirtless with a mop of gold hair and a tattoo on his shoulder that looked like a ship wheel. Haley was on there too. It made Everett angry that they still had her in their house. The girls’ arms were looped about one another’s shoulders. Kennedy with purple hair flashing the peace sign. Carter leaning in to be closer. We are “Daughters of the Kaos,” Lollapalooza ’92, scrawled underneath by one of them.
He felt an itchy rage as he flicked open Kennedy’s jewelry box, pawing through the items. Then he saw the lava lamp. He thought about taking it and walking back downstairs. He could smash it over the head of Gerry, sleeping on the couch. But he remembered learning about evidence at the preliminary trial and thought about fingerprints on the glass shards. They might be able to find them, even there, somewhere in the blood and psychedelic wax blobs. He carried the lamp around the room with him while he looked at other stuff. At the last minute he lost his nerve and ditched it on a shelf beside the door to the room. As Everett made his way out of the house he noticed the terra-cotta walls in the dining room and the white wainscoting that seemed to run around the edges of each room, paneling them and sectioning them into little boxes for no discernible purpose. He felt a weird joy at having invaded the space, although what had he really done? Kennedy had taken his sister. He had taken nothing.