What's Left of Her (4 page)

This time it is Evie who forces a smile, her skin stretching to near breaking. She nods once and then again before she lets the words slip out. “Yes. I’m lucky.”

Chapter 5

Quinn wishes he could take back the last eight minutes of his life, rewind it quickly, reel by reel, to the part where he flies up the stairs and almost crashes into his parents’ bedroom door, almost witnesses their anger at one another. He’d been in such a hurry to get to the attic and grab his sketch pad that he didn’t hear their voices until he was a split second from the door. But he stopped, jerked back like a dog on a short leash the instant he recognized his father’s deep voice pouring through the walls.

It was then that he wanted to disappear, retrace his steps one by one, careful not to hit the squeaky step on his way down. He started to back away.

“She’s nothing but a liar, a no-good liar and a whore.” Rupe Burnes’s words shake with anger. Quinn pictures his red face turning darker, the veins in his thick neck bulging.

“She’s my friend.” This from his mother, quiet, firm.

“You’re done with her. Goddammit, I mean it, Evie.”

“I believe what she said.”

She is so calm. How can she be so calm when his father is so angry?

“Don’t even say a thing like that. It’s blasphemy. He’s a good man; we’ve known him for years.”

“And the Singletons? Haven’t you known Harry and Rita for years? Known Suzie since she was knee-high?”

That seems to stump Rupe but he recovers fast. “I don’t believe a word that bitch told you. She’s been lying for years, damn whore.”

“If she is, then your brother made her that way.”

The slap of flesh on flesh fills the air, so loud it bursts through the walls, reverberates from ceiling to floor. Evie has never hit her children, never raised a hand to either of them, and she certainly has never touched their father that way. Physical contact between his parents is confined to the bedroom, because other than a quick peck on the cheek or Rupe’s rough hand on Evie’s shoulder, there is no contact. Quinn prefers it this way, not wanting to think of his parents as anything other than a mother and father.

But this slap, the harshness of it, from his mother? It is hard to picture, which compounds the belief that he does not want to know what happens in their bedroom. Then his father speaks.

“Oh, God, forgive me, Evie. I’m sorry, I’m so sorry.” Great animal sounds pouring out like a wounded bear. “I’d never hurt you. Never. Christ, I don’t know what came over me. Forgive me, Evie, forgive me.”

Over and over, the begging keeps on; Rupe’s tormented voice, ragged with misery and self-recrimination, pleads for absolution. Evie does not reply and it is this silence that marks the beginning of what Quinn will later think of as “the end.”

Quinn sneaks down the stairs and works his way out the back door, mindless of the dog and cat curled into one another, the perfect portrait he wanted to sketch minutes ago. He slumps against an oak tree, picking blades of grass and splitting them between his fingers, thinking of his mother, his father, and how he will have to face them at dinner, have to pretend he knows nothing, pretend normal, even if the side of his mother’s face is red and welted. Is it the left side? Or right, just below the mole? Quinn plays the sound over and over in his head, imagining the second Rupe’s hand connects to Evie’s soft skin, imagining the shock on his father’s face, the pain on his mother’s and then reverse, his father in pain, his mother shocked. Maybe she fell back a step, two steps, stumbled, though he heard no other sound, but maybe she had. Maybe there will be a bruise, bright blue and purple, seeping and spreading, shouting to the world that Rupe Burnes hit his wife.

But when she finally calls him to dinner, there is nothing more remarkable than a faint pink on her cheekbone—left side, which Quinn should have figured with his father being right-handed and all. It takes a good ten minutes before Quinn works up the nerve to look at either of his parents. He picks at the fried chicken leg on his plate, gnaws the meat on the bone. Annalise keeps the conversation going with her ridiculous chatter about Mrs. Pole’s cat, Sophie, who ended up in Mr. Landini’s garden and got tangled in his tomato cages, somehow. That story leads into the next one about Mrs. Swedenjim who hung her underwear, big white ones, on the clothesline in her backyard
. Giggle, giggle.

No one else laughs. Rupe clears his throat, Evie says nothing and Quinn forces himself to look at them. Evie is chewing, mouth moving slowly up and down, a mindless rhythm, eyes fixed on her glass of water. The mark on her left cheek is faint, a splotch that could be attributed to a skin irritation, sleeping on a scratchy surface, even putting her makeup on wrong. Any one of these if you didn’t know the truth.

Rupe is the one who looks like he’s been beaten up. His head is bent like a dog that’s been kicked in the gut and left on the side of the road, eyes sunk in their sockets, hair sticking out, big shoulders slumped, jaw slack. Most nights, he is the one who laughs and teases Annalise as she blabs about one thing or another, but not tonight. Rupe picks at a lone chicken thigh, which in itself would attest to a problem since he usually piles three or four on his plate.

If only Quinn hadn’t heard, then he too could be lost in his own world, chomping down chicken and rice, his brain already past dinner, past the kitchen and the clatter of dishes and the silence of his parents, and out in the backyard, setting up canvas and paints as he waits for the sunset. If he hadn’t heard, he would be thinking of the heat of summer on his hands, beating into his fingers as he strokes the canvas with brilliant oranges and yellows, reddish pinks and magentas. He has a gift, his mother says, a natural gift, of color and sensation, a melding of the two that enables him to translate what he sees and feels onto canvas.

Perception, she calls it. He has perception, a sense of knowing before it happens, a feel that it will happen even before he knows what “it” is.

A gift that right now feels like a curse.

He doesn’t want to listen to the jumble of tiny sensations shooting from his eyes, his ears, his heart, his fingers, the sensations that transform themselves into warning signals, imminent prophecies that say,
Nothing will ever be the same again.

He doesn’t want to listen to any of it, and so he closes his mouth and his mind, and tries to pretend nothing has happened.

***

She is here again, in the corner of the attic, quiet, alone, at peace. This is her real world now, the place she seeks out to live, to dream, to breathe, to suck in air that isn’t cloying with guilt and duty. The other, the moving through daily routines, chosen years ago, no, lifetimes ago, is nothing more than exercise, a warm-up for the real space of the night when she can slip out of bed and creep up the attic steps to her own world. There are more than just canvas and paints here: there is acceptance and solitude and freedom.

Evie moves to the tiny window, slides back the sheer curtain and peers outside into the black night. There is a universe of possibilities beyond this place, cities and buildings and people who travel alone, who sleep in the nude, who chant or pray to a different God, who do not eat fresh-baked bread with each meal, who do not expect their spouses to paint pictures for the church bazaar, who do not shun friends who tell the truth.

There is a world of possibilities out there and with each passing night, Evie wonders about it, imagines at first plunking herself into situations or circumstances, and then watching as though in a movie, as she maneuvers her way out or around or into an event. Lately, she’s been spending her nights captivated by these imaginings, each situation more compelling than the last, a vortex of sensation beckoning her forth, deeper, deeper. On these nights, the paint brushes lay dry and slack in their holders, the canvas empty, the paints unopened. The passion to pull her into another life is heavy and powerful and transforms itself into another medium: pen and paper.

It starts the night Rupe slaps her and forbids her to see Brenda again. The apologies go on and on for weeks, the sad, pathetic embraces, the awkward gifts of candy and carnations, the phone calls in the middle of the day. But Evie is different now, hollowed out somehow, and no amount of wooing or sweet words can bring the old Evie back. Rupe thinks she needs time and stays on his side of the bed most nights, offering an occasional hand on her thigh to gauge her interest or let her know his, and sometimes she accepts out of loneliness, or need, or pity, hard to tell which, and sometimes, she just turns away, shuts him out, shuts herself out, shuts the world out.

She finds one of Quinn’s old science notebooks tucked in a box in the corner of the attic and begins writing on the page next to his cramped symbols for the periodic table. The words come, flowing from anger over an unknown father, hate for a town that judges its own so harshly, love for a daughter’s sweet innocence, longing for a dead mother, desperation over a life that is suddenly unrecognizable. The emotions churn, pour themselves out on the pages, night after night until she’s filled the entire notebook and then another and yet another.

She keeps the notebooks hidden in the bottom of an old oak chest Rupe has given her for storing extra canvas and the drawing books she uses with beginner students. No one will find them there, not that she’s deliberately hiding them, but in a way she is. There’s too much truth in these notebooks, truth that can hurt those she loves, force them to question what she’s written.
What is this?
Rupe will ask, his blue eyes pained, disbelieving.
And why did you say you sometimes feel you don’t belong in Corville? Why, Evie? You’re one of us, don’t you know that? You belong here, here with us. With me. Don’t you know that?

But Rupe is the one who doesn’t know.

Baking apple pies for the church bazaar, even if they sell the most raffle tickets, even more than Rupe’s ninety-day snow removal certificates, isn’t enough. Bleaching mud-crusted socks to snowy white and cooking a juicy pot roast that boasts no leftovers isn’t enough. Scrubbing toilets until the rust disappears, disinfecting wastebaskets, starching Rupe’s 100 percent cotton shirts until they are board-stiff, isn’t enough. None of it is. Not the plump Roma tomatoes that fill the vine, more plentiful than any of the neighbors, or the zinnias that burst with such color that most every passerby stops to comment. It isn’t enough anymore, probably never has been.

Evie can’t blame it on Rupe. He’s tried to make her happy, given her everything he thinks she wants. She fingers the heart-shaped pendant dangling from the silver chain around her neck. It is the gift he gave her on her thirty-eighth birthday. Quinn and Annalise’s initials are inscribed on one side, Rupe and Evie’s on the other. It is a proclamation of love, a public display of affection from a very private man. Evie feels an immense, abounding love for her husband as she recalls how he shouldered the teasing from his brothers, ignoring their jests about “old fools” and “love birds.”

And still, it isn’t enough.

The changes in her have nothing to do with Rupe. He is a wonderful man. It is her. Evie Elizabeth Burnes. She is the one who is ready to burst from the inside out. Spontaneous combustion; one day there will be a big, black hole in the front lawn and neighbors will say,
Yep, that’s where Evie Burnes exploded, blew up like a space shuttle on takeoff.

Maybe she should talk to Doc McPherson, see if he thinks she might be going through the change. She won’t tell him about the combustion part, just the not sleeping and the restlessness. No, maybe just the not sleeping.

Wanda’s been taking pills since Sara Beth was born, says it helps relax her, not worry about cleaning up after the kids, the dogs, Les. But Evie knows it’s more than that. Wanda’s mother’s been doing the “cleaning up” twice a week for the past eight years. The pills have to do with Les almost leaving Wanda and moving in with Brenda three years ago. In the end, he scooted back to his wife and some said his old man is the one who orchestrated, or rather, demanded that by pulling tight on the family’s purse strings.

Maybe Evie just needs a little help getting over the rough spots, pushing past the disillusionment many women her age feel when they realize they aren’t going to do or be what they dreamed of at seventeen. Those idealistic hopes will never see light; never take hold anywhere, not even in their own imagination. Acknowledging this reality and accepting it aren’t the same. With acknowledgment comes other possibilities, to segue, massage, even manipulate facts to trick the mind.
Yes, maybe, but—
theories that permit the brain to continue to hope. But acceptance, that’s the killer, the final edict that declares defeat, engenders disappointment, and, inevitably, the ultimate demise.

Evie harbored such dreams years ago, wonderful possibilities that would mature with time and opportunity. She believed. But she doesn’t believe any longer.

She is a middle-aged woman with a husband and two children, who plucks gray hairs from her head and wears her husband’s jacket in the winter. She gives art lessons in the attic of her home after school and enters her watercolors in St. Michael’s annual silent auction, even though her oils are so much better. And she will never see the orange sun in Hawaii, or climb the craggy rocks along Maine’s shoreline, or walk among the artists in Niagara on the Lake.

Chapter 6

Rupe heads down the road, his work truck dodging potholes, his eyes darting along the property on either side of him. Burnes land: acres and acres of it, developed and undeveloped. It’s been in the family for fifty-three years, from the time Burt Burnes bought his first strip of dirt to build his house, to now, four sons, one daughter, and twelve grandchildren later.

The land has been part of Rupe since he was a youngster, running tractors, using the backhoe to haul dirt, and the dump truck to move it. Corville is his town and he never wants to venture past it, doesn’t see any reason why a person would want to leave when everything he needs is right here. He’s gone to Revere once or twice to look at used equipment and he went there to get snipped, but there’s too much traffic, too many people, too much noise. Why would a person want to live like that? House on top of house, crowded, dirty, loud, no room to breathe or think. He likes wide open. And family. That’s all he needs, not some stranger bagging his groceries or sticking letters in his mailbox. He wants to know who’s doing it, who their father is, where they live, even how many children they have. Personal, that’s what he likes.