The Secret Life of Ceecee Wilkes (17 page)

Eve looked up from the paper. “He lied to me about everything,” she said.

Marian nodded. “It sure looks that way.”

They started walking again, this time in silence, and for the first time, Eve felt real anger building inside her at Tim. She’d been an inexperienced sixteen-year-old, an easy mark. Bets had been in on it, no doubt, the reason for her easy acceptance of CeeCee when she waited on them at the restaurant. Maybe Tim had taken CeeCee there to show Bets how little a threat she was—a young girl still wearing Alice in Wonderland hair down to her butt. She imagined Tim saying to Bets,
We’ll get her to babysit the governor’s old lady so you don’t have to get involved.
He’d probably kissed her then.
She’s dispensable, babe,
he would have added.
You’re not.
Sonofa
bitch.

“I don’t think I’ve ever been this furious,” Eve said, her hands tight around the handle of the stroller.

She felt Marian’s arm slip around her shoulders. “Good,” Marian said. “It’s about time.”

The fury clawed at her for the rest of the day. She punched the pillows on her bed and stormed around the house as she vacuumed, cursing under her breath and stomping on the floor. By the time she went to bed, though, she felt different. She would no longer be held captive by every white van she saw. She could stop waiting. Stop hoping. A sort of peace came over her as she drifted off to sleep: Tim had finally set her free.

1981

O
n March seventh, Eve turned twenty-one. It was the fourth time she’d celebrated that date as her birthday, and she’d written it on dozens of forms over the years. It felt like her birthday now, as surely as she felt like Eve Bailey.

Marian took her to dinner and then to a play at the Helms Theater on the grounds.

“I know one of the actors in the play,” Marian said as they pulled into a space in the parking lot. “His name’s Jack Elliott. He’s the nephew of one my oldest friends.”

Eve barely heard a word Marian said. “Maybe I should call Bobbie and Lorraine before the play starts,” she said. They were watching Cory this evening. Cory could be a handful, not because she was a rambunctious or disobedient three-and-a-half-year-old, but because she was always a little afraid when Eve was away. She was fine with Marian, and she knew Lorraine and Bobbie well and adored Shan, who was now eight, but the last time Eve had left Cory with a sitter, the little girl had cried the entire time and wouldn’t eat or go to bed.

“She’ll be fine,” Marian said now. “She needs to know she can survive without you.”

And I need to know I can survive without her,
Eve thought.

They had excellent seats in the theater. The play was
See How They Run,
and the actor Marian knew, Jack Elliott, played Clive, a soldier who disguised himself as a priest. He was tall and reedy, with a slightly awkward handsomeness that reminded Eve of a young Cary Grant. The play was hilarious, and Eve laughed harder than she had in a very long time.

“Let’s go backstage,” Marian said when the play was over. “I want to say hello to Jack.”

Eve looked at her watch. It was only ten. “Okay,” she said.

Marian had obviously done this before. She knew the way to the area backstage where some of the actors were gathered. Jack Elliott was standing on a chair, makeup still outlining his eyes and sharpening his cheekbones. He was reciting lines from
Hamlet,
hamming it up for an audience of two young guys and a girl. They were laughing.

“Do I have to stand on a chair when I do it?” the guy asked.

Jack spotted Marian and stopped speaking midsentence.

“Auntie Marian!” He hopped from the chair and swept across the room to wrap Marian in a hug. He was not as tall as he’d appeared on stage, but he was even better looking. “Excuse my chair-standing,” he said to Marian. “I was coaching a friend who’s going to play Hamlet. Did you like the play?”

“We loved it,” Marian said. “You were hysterical. Has your mother been able to see you in it?”

“Next weekend,” he said. “She’ll call you when she gets here, I’m sure. And who’s this?” Jack turned his attention to Eve, curiosity in his brown-eyed gaze. Guys at school never treated her as a potential date: she was too serious, too involved in her studies, and far too vocal about her daughter. This man, though, looked at her with clear interest.

“This is my housemate, Eve Bailey,” Marian said. “Eve, this is Jack.”

Eve shook the hand he offered. “You really were good,” she said. “Excellent timing,” she added, as though she knew something about drama.

He didn’t take his hand away. “Oh, Eve, are you taken? Will you go out with me?”

Eve laughed at his brazenness, unsure if he was serious.

“Lord, Jack, you haven’t changed a bit,” Marian said. “Jack has always been a little, shall we say, ‘out there,’” she said to Eve. “You never have to guess what he’s thinking. One time when he was little, his mother and I were in a restaurant and he said to the waitress, ‘You’ve got the longest nose I’ve ever seen.’”

Jack groaned. “Ignore her, Eve. Are you taken?”

“Only by a three-and-a-half-year-old daughter,” she said.

“A bonus?” His face lit up, but she reminded herself that he was an actor. “As long as her father isn’t the type to come after me with a gun, I’d still like to take you out. What do you say?”

“Sure,” she said, surprising herself. She hadn’t gone out with anyone since Tim. Her social life consisted of meeting Lorraine for coffee on the grounds, where her old friend was now working on a graduate degree in telecommunications, and participating in a playgroup with some other mothers and kids in the neighborhood. She didn’t have time for anything else. But it was as though Jack had slipped a noose around the “yes” in her throat and pulled it out into the air. “I’m very busy, but—”

“But she’ll make time,” Marian said.

“I’ll call you at Marian’s,” he said. He hadn’t taken his eyes off hers, and she didn’t mind the steady gaze. There was no threat in it. She returned his gaze with a confidence she hadn’t known she possessed. She was not the girl who had been smitten and seduced by Tim Gleason. She was a woman who could take or leave the attention of a man, and right now, she chose to take it.

As she and Marian returned to the lobby, though, she grew quiet and pensive. It wasn’t until they reached Marian’s car that she spoke.

“Can I trust him?” she asked.

“Like the sunrise,” Marian replied.

He called her the next day. Marian answered the phone and covered the receiver with her hand as she turned it over to Eve.

“I’ll babysit, no matter when it is,” she whispered, clearly enjoying her role as matchmaker.

“Hi,” Eve said.

“I’ve nabbed two tickets to the Springsteen concert tomorrow night,” he said. “Want to join me?”

“Let me check with the babysitter,” she said, turning to Marian. “Tomorrow night?”

Marian nodded.

“I’d love to,” she said into the phone.

He told her what time he’d pick her up and that was that. Less than two minutes from start to finish. She hung up the phone, looked at Marian and bit her lip.

“What did I just do?” she asked.

“Something a normal, healthy, twenty-one-year-old woman has every right to do,” Marian said. “You accepted a date.”

“I don’t want him to meet Cory when he comes to pick me up, though,” she said.

“Heavens, no!” Marian’s tone mocked her overprotectiveness. “Don’t worry. Cory and I will hide out upstairs.”

She was sitting in the living room the following evening, watching through the window for Jack’s arrival, when a car pulled up to the curb in front of the house. It was a sedan, painted Kelly-green with yellow doors and a blue roof.

“Oh, no,” she said to herself, but couldn’t help laughing.

Jack got out of the car, dressed in khakis, sandals and a short-sleeved blue shirt over a white T-shirt. She liked the way he walked, the way he tossed his car keys into the air and caught them, as if he didn’t have a care in the world.

She expected to feel shy when she got into his car, but he started talking the minute she sat down, and she felt the tension slip from her muscles.

“I was hoping I could meet your little girl,” he said.

“Marian’s reading her a story upstairs.”

“Marian read me stories when I was a kid,” he said. “She’d act out the parts. You know, change her voice for each of them.”

“Yes, she does it really well.”

“Might even be the reason I got into acting. She’d get me to act out the parts, too.”

“She said your mother is one of her oldest friends.”

“We lived next door to Marian and her husband when I was a kid. Bill and my father were good friends, too.”

“I forget about him sometimes,” Eve said. “Marian doesn’t talk about him much.”

“She—
Hey!
” he shouted as a car pulled in front of them, forcing him to step hard on the brake. “Jeez,” he said. “What a goofy Gus.”

“A goofy Gus?” She laughed.

“So.” Jack started driving again. “What I was about to say was that Bill, Marian’s husband, is a sore subject for her. How much do you know?”

“That he was executed,” she said. “And Marian thought he was innocent.”

“Yeah, and I think she’s probably right, but who knows?” he said. “You never really know what a person’s capable of. Someone can be a really nice guy and still, you know, have two sides to him.”

No kidding,
she thought. “So you think he did it?”

“I don’t know. The important thing to me is the impact it had on Marian.” He glanced at her and smiled. “So, how’d we get on such a serious topic already?” he asked.

She shrugged, worried it was her fault. Did she know how to have a light and casual conversation with anyone anymore?

“Do you like Springsteen?” he asked.

“I have to admit I’m not all that familiar with him,” she said.

He smiled. His teeth looked as though he’d never had a cavity in his life. “You’ll be familiar with him after tonight,” he said. “What music do you like?”

She had to think. She used to like Fleetwood Mac and Rod Stewart and Crosby, Stills and Nash, but she hadn’t listened to much music in years. “I’m into lullabies and ‘Inky Dinky Spider,’ I’m afraid.”

Jack laughed. “You were what…seventeen when you had her?”

Here we go,
she thought.

“Yes.”

“What’s her name?”

“Cory. Corinne.”

“Must’ve been hard,” he said.

“It was,” she admitted. “I don’t know what I would’ve done if I hadn’t met Marian.” She studied Jack’s hands as he turned the steering wheel. His fingers were long and tanned.

“How’d you meet her?” he asked.

“A friend put me in touch with her. She said Marian might have a room I could live in. I didn’t know I’d be getting so much more than a landlady.”

“You lucked out,” he agreed. “So, where are you from? Where did you grow up?”

He certainly asked a lot of questions. “Oregon,” she said.

“No kidding!” He turned to look at her. “I lived there for a couple of years when I was a teenager. Where were you?”

This was the reaction she’d been dreading for the past three-and-a-half years. She’d told any number of people she was originally from Oregon, but he was the first who’d ever set foot in the state. She, of course, had not.

“Portland.” She held her breath, waiting for the “Me, too!”

“Oh, I was in Klamath Falls. My father was transferred there for a few years.” He looked at her, a cute grin on his face. “That’s cool, huh? We both lived in Oregon. Gorgeous state.”

“Yes.” She smiled her relief.

He had a perfect profile. Absolutely perfect. His nose was straight, not too large, not too small. His nostrils had the tiniest flare to them. His chin was strong without overwhelming the rest of his face, and his eyebrows were jet-black and thick above his dark eyes. His hair was curly, but not the least bit frizzy like hers. Still, those curls probably gave him fits as he tried to control them. Or maybe he’d given up at the attempt. He frankly didn’t seem like the type of guy who’d get too worked up over anything.

“You have great hair,” she said now.

He looked surprised. “Why, thank you, ma’am. I was admiring yours the other night, too.”

He
was?
“It used to be really long,” she said. “I chopped it off when Cory was a baby because she cut her hand on it.” She now wore her hair in layers that left it feeling light against her neck.

“What?”
He reached over and touched her hair, his fingers brushing her shoulder as he did so. “It’s very soft,” he said. “Did it used to be like razor wire or something?”

Eve laughed. “It was a little paper-cut kind of thing. Right here.” She touched the web of skin between her index finger and thumb.

“So you cut it off.”

“Uh-huh. In the middle of the night. With cuticle scissors.”

Jack laughed, and hit the steering wheel with his palm. “I think you’re as impulsive as I am,” he said.

“I doubt it,” she said. “I have the feeling you’re an extremely spontaneous sort of guy.”

“You might be right. My car used to be this ugly brown color. I painted it on a whim.”

“Any regrets?”

“Hell, no. I love Peggy Sue.” He ran his hand over Peggy Sue’s dashboard as he drove into the parking lot. “We have arrived!” he said.

She wondered if he always spoke in exclamations. She liked it. In the past few years, her joy had come from watching Cory change from day to day and from her classes, when she’d learn something new and feel the possibilities wrapped up in it. She had that feeling now, a thrill that raced through every cell of her body.

Jack maneuvered Peggy Sue into a parking space, then got out and opened her door for her. He took her hand as though they’d done this many times before, and they started walking toward the stadium.

“‘Peggy Sue, Peggy Sue,’” he sang, “‘pretty pretty pretty pretty Peggy Sue.’”

She barely stopped to think before joining in. “‘Oh, Peggy, my Peggy Su-ue-ue.’”

Jack laughed, letting go of her hand to give her shoulders a squeeze.

“‘Oh, I love you gal,’” they sang together. “‘Yes, I love you. Peggy Sue-ue-ue.’”

He harmonized on the last line, and she grinned when the little song was over. She suddenly felt high, as if there were a drug in the air around Jack, something she was inhaling that lifted worry from her shoulders and left joy in its place. And she’d been with him all of twenty-five minutes.

The concert was wild and the crowd wilder. People passed cups of cheap wine, from which she and Jack sipped freely. She turned down the rare joint that came her way, as did Jack, and she wondered if he would smoke if she did, if he was passing up the chance out of deference to her. She couldn’t afford to be arrested for anything, ever. She couldn’t afford to be fingerprinted, either. She’d been careful at the cabin on the Neuse River, but she could never be certain she’d been careful enough.

After intermission, things got even wilder. Jack grabbed her hand and pulled her to her feet, and they joined other people dancing on the stairs. She’d never danced in her life, but it didn’t matter. She raised her arms above her head, singing along with “Rosalita,” even though she was making up two-thirds of the words, dancing with a strange and welcome abandon.

They sang “Born to Run” as they walked back to the car, Eve stumbling over the words and not caring. “This was so much
fun,
” she said. “I mean, really. I haven’t had this kind of fun in…well, a very long time.”