The Secret Life of Ceecee Wilkes (24 page)

1993

A
gain she sat in her doctor’s office, waiting to hear that the pain in her feet—and now occasionally in her hands—was her imagination. This time, though, her doctor looked more concerned as he examined her feet. They were swollen now, particularly her right foot, and her ankles were hot and puffy.

“Well,” he said, resting his palm on the top of her foot as if checking its temperature. “Your blood work’s back and we finally have an answer. Your rheumatoid factor is elevated.”

“What does that mean?” she asked.

“You have rheumatoid arthritis,” he said. He studied her face.

She was thinking,
I deserve this. It’s punishment.
She’d always felt as though, somehow, someday, she would have to pay for what she’d done.

“Do you know what that is?” he asked.

“Well…I know what arthritis is. Joint inflammation.” The pain in her feet had gotten much worse over the past two years. Sometimes, after sitting at her desk for a while, she could barely put any weight on them at all, and her fingers and wrists ached when she typed. Plus, she was exhausted. She scheduled her counseling clients so that she could come home midday and just sleep.

“Rheumatoid arthritis is an autoimmune disease,” he said. “It can affect your whole body, not just your joints. That’s why you’re so tired. I’m going to refer you to a rheumatologist.”

“Is there a cure?”

He shook his head. “But there’s treatment, and the sooner you get started on it, the better.”

The first two medications failed her. As the months passed, she began to walk with a limp and her wrists swelled and looked lumpy and misshapened. The worst, though, was her feet, especially her right foot. In bed at night, she cried with the pain. Even when she held her foot perfectly still, it felt as if it was trapped in a vise.

“How can I help?” Jack lay next to her, wiping tears from her cheeks with a tissue.

“You can’t,” she said.

“What does it feel like?” Even a headache was a rarity for Jack.

“It’s like…you know if you step into the ocean in May and it’s freezing cold?”

“And your feet go numb.”

“Yes, but before they go numb, there’s this intense pain?”

“Uh-huh. That’s what it feels like?”

“Yes.”

“Oh, Evie, let me rub your foot for you,” he said. “Let me massage it.”

“No.” Eve cringed at the thought. “Please don’t even touch it.” She knew how helpless Jack felt, but there was nothing he—or anyone—could do.

Her daughters had different reactions to her illness. Dru seemed oblivious to Eve’s pain, but Cory was worried.

“Can you die from this disease?” she asked as she sat on the edge of Eve and Jack’s bed. Darby had closed early that day, and Cory was surprised to find Eve not only home on her long lunch break, but in bed as well.

“No,” Eve said. It was possible, but unlikely, and Cory looked so distressed that Eve saw no need to go into RA’s grimmer statistics. She smiled at her daughter and took her hand, holding it next to her on the mattress. “You don’t need to worry about that.”

Cory looked toward the window, where Eve had pulled the shades for her afternoon nap. She was sixteen now, prettier than ever, and still a loner. Boys asked her out, but she wouldn’t even go out in a group with the kids from Darby, much less on a date. Some of them drove, and she was afraid of being in a car with them, terrified of accidents. Although Eve wanted her to have a normal social life, she shared the same fears for her, and didn’t push Cory to participate.

“You’ve changed so much.” Cory returned her attention to her mother’s face.

“What do you mean?” Eve asked.

“You’re really, like, unhappy all the time. You’re always frowning.”

“I am?” Eve asked, taken aback. “I must be a lot of fun to be around.”

“No, I didn’t mean it that way, Mom. I just meant…I don’t want you to be sick.”

“I know, honey. And I thank you. I’m working on getting better.”

When Cory left the room, Eve thought about her mother, who died before her thirtieth birthday. And Genevieve, who died at thirty-two. Here she was, still alive at thirty-three. Every year was a gift, she thought. A gift she didn’t appreciate enough. Medical science didn’t have answers for her physical pain and the destruction of her joints. She had no control over that, but she
did
have control over how she dealt with it. She vowed to think of her mother and Genevieve every day, to remember what they’d lost and what she still had.

1995

N
o one was surprised when Cory balked at the idea of going away to college.

“I want to go to UVA and live at home,” she said.

Cory, Jack and Eve were sitting in the counselor’s office at Darby discussing Cory’s options for college. She had two, and only because her counselor, a clean-cut young man barely out of college himself, had coerced her into applying to a second school back in January so that she’d have options. Eve had been horrified to learn Cory’s second choice was the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the memories of her life in that university town coming back to her in a rush. Cory had been accepted by both schools, and now it was time to make a decision.

“My mother’s ill and really needs me at home,” Cory said to the counselor. Now a stunning seventeen-year-old with long, vibrant red hair, Cory had the young man mesmerized.

“Don’t use me as a reason for choosing a college,” Eve said. She didn’t
need
Cory to stay home. As a matter of fact, it was more tiring for her to have another person around the house to clean up after. But she did
want
Cory to stay home at least another year. She wasn’t ready to be out on her own. Plus, the thought of her living in Chapel Hill, a place charged with memories of foolish decisions and one dangerous, seductive man, was impossible to imagine. She was on the losing end of the debate, though. Both Jack and the counselor felt it was time for Cory to move away.

“She’s had seventeen years of being afraid to be separated from you,” Jack had said in the car on their way to the school. “It’s time, Eve. You know that, don’t you?”

She did, which was why she was staying out of the debate as much as possible as Jack and the counselor tried to persuade Cory that going away was a good idea.

“All right, I’ll go,” Cory said, finally giving in. She looked from Eve to Jack and back again. “I never knew how much you wanted to get rid of me.”

She sounded as if she were joking. At least Eve hoped she was.

She met Jack at the University Diner for lunch the following afternoon. She arrived first, parking her motorized scooter outside and limping to a booth. She’d started using the scooter a year earlier to get around town, and she had a love/hate relationship with it. It gave her back her freedom, while taking away her hope that she would one day walk pain-free again. She’d gotten used to the stares and the questions and knew she was the envy of some of her colleagues, who struggled to walk around the grounds every day because of their own sore feet or bad hips.

Today in the diner, though, she felt old. The waitresses were so young and energetic. She was only thirty-five and she felt—and worried that she looked—more like seventy-five.

She saw Jack walk in, tanned and slender, and for the first time wondered if he still found her attractive. He seemed so much younger and more alive than she felt.

“Hi, Evie.” He gave her a kiss before sitting down across from her. “How’s the day going?”

“Good.” She tried to smile brightly. “Yours?”

“Crazy, as usual,” he said, putting his napkin on his lap. “Did you hear they picked a new president for next year?”

“Is it anyone we’ve heard of?” she asked. A number of candidates’ names had been floating around the grounds during the past couple of months.

“None of the usual suspects,” Jack said. “It’s a guy named Irving Russell. He used to be the governor of North Carolina.”

Eve couldn’t speak. Their young waitress, who called them both “honey,” appeared, and she managed to order a salad.

“Is it for certain?” she asked once the waitress had left their table.

“Sounds like it, and I don’t know enough about him to say whether it’s a good choice or not. Do you know who he is?”

She shook her head. “Not really.”

“He was in the news a lot in the seventies when he was a governor, but you were probably in Portland or Charleston then. His wife was kidnapped. It was a huge story. These two guys took her to try to get Russell to let their sister out of prison.”

How would someone respond who knew nothing of that situation?

“And did he let her out?” she asked.

Jack shook his head. “No, she was executed. They never found Russell’s wife.”

“I vaguely remember that,” she said. “How awful.” For the first time, she was relieved that Cory had agreed to go to Carolina. She shouldn’t be at the University when Russell was president.

And neither should she.

“I
was thinking we should move,” Eve said to Jack after Dru and Cory were in bed that night. She was sitting on the sofa, Jack’s head in her lap as they listened to the soundtrack from
Les Miserables,
and his eyes flew open at her suggestion.

“What did you say?” he asked. “Did you just say we should
move?
”

She’d felt shivery with anxiety since getting the news about Irving Russell that afternoon and the only thing she could think of doing was to escape. In her early years on the run, she’d expected to have to keep moving. That hadn’t happened, and she’d grown complacent. Maybe now, her life of peace and comfort was coming to an end. How did you run, though, when you had the welfare of two children and the professional needs of a spouse to consider?

“Don’t you think a change would be nice?” she asked. There was a deep line between Jack’s thick eyebrows, and she ran a finger over it, wishing she could erase it. “We’ve been here so long.”

“But you love it here, Evie,” he said. “We both do.”

“I was thinking of someplace with better medical care,” she said. “That’s selfish of me, though, I know.” She was playing the guilt card and cringed at her own audacity.

“I thought you were happy with the medical care here,” he said. “You’ve got the med school at your back door.”

“I know.”

“If you feel you could get better treatment someplace else, we can travel to get it for you. Leave the girls with Lorraine and Bobbie and go.”

Eve looked across the room toward the living-room windows. They never bothered to pull the blinds. Suddenly she felt exposed, as though Irving Russell himself might be standing out there in the darkness, peering in at her.

“I have
tenure
here, Eve,” he said, as if she’d forgotten. “And you love your job. Or at least, I thought you did.”

“I still do.”

“Oh,” he said, as if he finally understood her motivation. He reached his hand up to touch her lips with a fingertip. “You want to move to Chapel Hill so you can be near Cory.”

She smiled sheepishly. He was so wrong. Chapel Hill was the last place she wanted to live, but she would let him think that. There was no other way out of a conversation she never should have started.

“You got me,” she said. “It’s just going to be hard to see her go.”

“She’ll be back.” Jack rolled onto his side, wrapping his arms around her and pressing his head against her stomach. He sounded relieved that the conflict had been so easily resolved. “They always come back.”

Eve, Jack and ten-year-old Dru drove Cory to Chapel Hill in late August. For Eve, it was like being in a dream in which everything was the same, only different. The face of Franklin Street had changed; many of the shops and restaurants had been replaced. The coffee shop where she’d worked with Ronnie was now a clothing store. The students were the same age they’d been when she left them, and she remembered the rush she’d felt at the possibility of being one of them, of belonging on the campus. She found herself looking for Ronnie in the faces of the few thirty-something-year-old women she saw on the street. She was anxious, afraid of running into someone who might remember her. Even in Cory’s dormitory, she avoided other parents in the lounge and hallway.

They helped Cory unpack and met her roommate, a girl named Maggie—short for Magnolia—who had jet-black hair and a pierced tongue. Eve wasn’t sure whether to hope that Cory and Maggie got along or hope they didn’t.

“You’re the sorority type, aren’t you?” Maggie asked Cory with barely masked disappointment.

“Actually, no,” Cory said as she pulled clothes out of her duffel bag. “I’m more the shy, retiring type.”

Maggie laughed, and Cory laughed with her, as though she was joking.

The hardest part of the journey was leaving Cory behind when they’d left for the return trip home. It reminded her of Cory’s first day in kindergarten. She was that same little girl in the navy blue-and-white sneakers, screaming for her mommy when the door of the classroom closed between them.

Jack insisted they make up songs in the car on the way back to Charlottesville, an attempt, Eve knew, to keep her from crying. She went along with it for Dru’s sake.

By the time she got home, there was already an e-mail waiting for her from Cory.

Please call to tell me you got home safely,
she’d written. Eve stared at the words. How many new freshmen wrote that sort of message home?

We’re home, honey,
she wrote back.
Dad made us sing Dad-type songs all the way. I hope you’re having fun. Let me know how you and Maggie get along. Love, Mom.

There was another e-mail, this one from the screen name Barko, with the subject line simply
Eve.
She opened it.

Dear Eve,

Friend of N and F’s needs place to start over. If you can help, reply. If not, peace.

She stared at the message a long time, first in confusion, then in fear, before finally hitting the delete key and wiping it from her screen.