What's Left of Her (8 page)

“But whose identity would I be taking? Are these real people or fictitious ones?”

“They’re dead ones.”

“Dead?”

Peggy shrugs. “Yeah, dead, so what? It’s not like they’re going to get pissed at you or something. Trust me.”

This is no longer a simple need to evaporate into the landscape; this is now something else, something almost sinister.

“What? Why are you shaking your head? You want to stay Evelyn whatever your last name is? Huh? You want someone to walk up to you two years from now, or maybe three, and say ‘Hey, aren’t you the woman from wherever? The one who disappeared?’ Is that what you want?”

“No.”

“Then you’ve got no choice. Evelyn’s dead. Right now. Move forward.” Evie stares. Peggy laughs. “It’s easy. Trust me.”

“This identity thing, how much does it cost?”

“Two thousand.”

“Two thousand dollars? I don’t have that kind of money.”

“I didn’t think you would. That’s okay. You can pay me back.”

“I don’t even have a job.”

“You will. You’ll have a whole new world of second chances and all you have to do is say yes, starting now.”

Chapter 10

Quinn peers out of the tiny window in the attic, watching Annalise ride her bike up and down the street. She is the only one who moves through the day with some semblance of normalcy. Maybe because they’ve gone out of their way to embellish the story of the sick relative Evie’s with, the saintly deed she’s performing through her presence. Maybe Annalise is relaxed because the lying is so good, so real.

The police found the station wagon a few hours away, unlocked and out of gas, Quinn’s baseball mitt stuffed under the back seat, three of Annalise’s Barbie dolls in the trunk.

The keys still in the ignition.

Where is she? What is she thinking?

This is day five of the disappearance, day five of no sleep, of worrying that possibility is shaping itself into reality. Quinn has no one to give him hope or stories. His father wanders through the house, Evie’s favorite blue sweater wrapped around his left arm, touching everything she’s touched—pale pink lipstick, toothbrush, White Shoulders perfume, vacuum cleaner, potato peeler—around and around, picking up, putting down. Quinn caught him in the hamper last night, face pressed to one of her T-shirts.

She has to come back. The certainty Quinn felt that first night dwindles with the hours, turns to desperate hope as time stretches with no word and then the car
with
the keys in the ignition shows up, leaving him cold, panicked. What if someone has taken her, harmed her, killed
her? Visions of his mother’s body, bloody and dismembered, pound against his brain, awake and half-sleep, until they are always there, ready to pounce, ready, ready, ready, to fill his mind with horror.

He hates this, hates it,
hates it
. He wants normal back. Quinn lets the curtain fall into place and turns away. This is where he comes to feel close to her. His father avoids it as though he thinks this part of her life inconsequential. But Quinn knows better; he’s seen her face as she strokes the canvas, colors and shapes taking life beneath her brush, exploding in bursts of energy and relief. He knows that feeling.

She’s a brilliant artist and he wonders why she’s never done more with it. Why has she settled for afternoon watercolor lessons to bratty kids and a two-for-one raffle spot at St. Michael’s alongside his father’s snow removal service? Her gift is with oils; anybody with half a brain can see that, though most don’t, maybe because she keeps the oils hidden in the attic.

Quinn works with oils, has from the time he was five.
Watercolors are like being underwater with your eyes open, his mother tells him. You miss the sharpness, the life, the contrast. It’s all muted, toned down, dull.
But she’s done watercolor, painted it, taught it, sold it, and yet she thinks it useless.

He walks to the chest where she keeps her oil paintings and opens it. Oil is what she does for herself, he guesses, in the night or during the day when no one is home. Quinn lifts the first painting, a field of sunflowers, their yellow faces drooping forward under the weight of their heads. This is old man Cunningham’s property. He started planting sunflowers for the birds ten years ago after his wife died, and now he has a field of flowers and birds coming from three counties. The next picture is a winter scene: trees, houses, mail boxes clumped with snow. That could be any winter in Pennsylvania. There are three more winter landscapes and then one done in spring with tulips and daffodils. Quinn pulls them out and lays them on the hardwood floor.

He stops when he comes to a painting that is a collection of colored bottles, iridescent pinks, purples, yellows, and blues in round, oblong, and pyramid shapes. The hues are brilliant. Where did she get the bottles? They are rimmed with an exquisite line of gold. He sets that painting aside and reaches for the next one. Again, this is something he’s never seen before: an oriental vase done in black, mauve, and red, with a dragon stretching across the front, mouth blowing gigantic flames. The next two are unfamiliar as well: a nightscape of high-rise buildings with a single yellow glow emanating from one of the windows. He stares at the blotch of yellow, tries to make sense of it, but it is too foreign.

Has she been creating from memory, from when she lived in Philadelphia? He wants to know, wants to ask her why she’s kept the pictures hidden, what it all means. Quinn removes every canvas from the huge chest, twenty or more, until he reaches the bottom. Tucked under a black felt swatch are eight composition notebooks, numbered and dated. He opens the first and sees his own scribble in the upper corner:
Chemistry—Quinn Burnes
. The first half of the notebook contains the periodic table and equations. He flips through the pages until he finds his mother’s handwriting. There, alongside an equation for table salt is the sentence,
I am suffocating in my own life and all that was once familiar to me is foreign, and it is the familiar that is killing me.

He stares at this sentence until the words are a blur in his brain and the truth pierces his soul. She is gone, not kidnapped, or victim to nature, man, or circumstance, but removed of her own volition. How long has she planned the event—days, weeks, years? She’s left them, even ten-year-old Annalise.

They are the victims, not his mother. It is them, Rupe, Quinn, Annalise. He forces himself to read every word of each notebook, every damn, painful word, as numbness seeps through his body and he discovers the truth about Evie Burnes, or is it Evelyn now as she likes to refer to herself?
I’m not Evie. I’ve always hated that name.

His hands shake as he closes the last notebook and stares at the black and white cover. Such an innocent vehicle to harbor truths that rip lives apart, destroy any memories that might have been good. He can’t tell his father. It will be better to let him believe she is trying to get home, will continue trying and will never stop as long as there is breath in her. That, Rupe Burnes can live with, but knowing his wife walked away from a life she didn’t want, that will kill him.

Quinn scours the entire attic looking for other signs of her plan to bolt, but there are none. The rest of the room is neat, organized, filled with watercolors and family photos: a perfect cover for the ultimate deception. The real truth is in the chest. Pandora’s Box. Quinn gathers the notebooks and the high-rise painting with the yellow ball of light, and stuffs them in a garbage bag. He hurries down the stairs, stops in the kitchen to grab a pack of matches.

He is dumping the notebooks into the metal trash bin when his father calls his name. “Quinn? What are you doing?”

Quinn throws a match into the trash bin. “Just burning some stuff from my room.”

“You know we’re not supposed to burn until after 7:00.” His father moves closer, peers inside the bin. “Notebooks?” He scratches the back of his head. “Sure are a lot of them.”

The match has gone out and Rupe is trying to get a closer look. Quinn strikes three more matches and throws them into the bin. “It’s nothing, Dad. Just stupid stuff.”

“Must be pretty serious stupid stuff if you’re burning it.”

Quinn shrugs. “I was writing a book, or trying to write one but it didn’t work.”

“I’d like to read it.”

“No! I mean, no. It’s really bad.”

“You’re a good writer.” Rupe pauses, stares at the small orange flame that is burning the edge of a notebook. “You take after your mother.”

Quinn says nothing.

“That your picture, too?” He points to the high-rise, yellow-dot picture.

“Yeah.” Quinn tries to push it behind him.

“You burning that, too?”

“Yeah. It’s no good.”

“Let me see.”

There is no choice but to inch it out for his father’s inspection. Rupe scratches his jaw, rubs his cheek and stares at the painting. “What’s the yellow dot?”

“A light.”

“Hmmm. Why the hell would anybody want to live in one of those when you can have this?” He spreads his arms wide, sucks in a deep breath. “I know why you’re doing this. It’s your mom, isn’t it?”

“What do you mean?” Quinn’s heart pounds so loud he is sure his father can hear it.

“You’re upset about her. I know. What you’re doing is called acting out. It’s what some people do when things happen they can’t control.” Rupe lays a hand on Quinn’s shoulder. “It’ll be okay, son. She’ll be coming home soon.”

Quinn stares at the growing fire in the trash bin. Even the yellow of the flame is not as bright as the dot on his mother’s picture. It is an omen, a bad omen.

“She
is
coming home, Quinn.”

She’s never coming home. Never, never, never.

“…and then everything will be back to normal. You’ll see, just like it was before.”

The flames are crackling now, orange and yellow talons reaching up and out of the bin. Quinn lifts the painting, stares at the bright glob one last time, then breaks the canvas over his knee and thrusts it into the fire. It swooshes as it hits the flames. Smears of black inch over the canvas, work their way toward the yellow light in the painting. Quinn stays until the glob is obliterated in flames, then he turns away.

Now she is dead.

***

People talk about the disappearance of Evie Arbogast Burnes for years. How had it happened? When? Where? And in the good Lord’s name, why? They piece a story together, bit by bit, an eventual telling that eases them back into normal existence, to a manageable level where they can send their children to the grocery store without following them halfway there, just in case. Is it the vigilance of the town that keeps the disappearance a lone incident, or is it a random act that marks Evie as its unfortunate victim? She hadn’t been a child, she was a woman, full grown, the wife of Rupert Burnes, mother of Quinn and little Annalise when she vanished. There’ve been no answers, despite the diligence of the town and Rupe himself, driving a 100-mile radius in his red F350 to distribute flyers, talk to local officials, go door to door. She’s gone and no one’s ever learned the truth about Evie Burnes, though many guess or in the end, fill in their own tales. In truth, most don’t want to know, for fear the answers could be too stark, too revealing, too dangerous to accept into the town of Corville, population 5,298. Generations of families have lived there; grandfather, father, son, and so on, painting their names on trucks, buildings, lawn service vehicles. Corville’s a town of family and closeness, a safe harbor from cities whose next-door neighbors remain nameless and faceless by choice, where destruction and violence plaster newspaper headlines and further encourage anonymity.

Evie hadn’t been born here, but they embraced her once she married into the Burnes family. And they loved her, the whole town had. No one could bake a better bumbleberry pie than Evie Burnes, the kind with a crust that melts in your mouth, makes you hold out your plate for seconds. And the raspberries and blackberries came from the bushes on the corner of the Burnes’s lot, the rhubarb, too, that she said was the secret to making bumbleberry pie. That’s not all Evie baked either; she made chocolate chip cookies, snickerdoodles, and cream puffs for St. Michael’s bazaar and on pot luck night, she always brought stew or pot roast.

Painting was her true gift, though it took years before anybody, including Rupe, discovered it. She gave lessons in her attic on Monday and Wednesday afternoons after school. Watercolor, mostly, once in a while, she used oils, but only if the student asked. She taught her students how to paint streams and evergreens capped in snow, and fields of sunflowers with clear skies and heat beating down on them. Her paintings were always entered in St. Michael’s annual silent auction and had become one of the largest moneymakers, right along with Rupe’s ninety-day snow removal certificate.

Evie Burnes was a blessing to the town, a tender heart with a gifted hand. She’d become one of them, and losing her had been tragic, unfathomable.

But the not knowing part, the
never
knowing part, that’s what still makes people shiver when they talk about it. Some say maybe she was too trusting, even for Corville, maybe she saw too much good in people, that she missed the bad, the tiny scraps of evil that cling to most everyone at one time or another.

And maybe that’s what snatched her from them, they say, left a husband and two children behind, broken and grieving, and a town that cannot forget.

Epilogue

Twenty-two years later

She stares out the window as snow blankets the ground. The forecast calls for nine inches by tomorrow afternoon, which might interrupt most travelers on their holiday ventures, but not New Englanders. They are a resilient breed and Evie is one of them, has been for years. She’s made a promise to share Christmas with Quinn and Annie and it will take more than a bit of inclement weather to stop her from keeping that promise.

The car is packed and ready. Four dozen sugar cookies, frosted and sprinkled, rest between layers of wax paper in plastic containers. There’s a bumbleberry pie in the fridge that will ride on the front seat beside her tomorrow morning. Quinn wants to learn the secret of her pie filling and she’s agreed, though she suspects he’s more interested in besting Ash Lancaster at yet another of their culinary duelings. For two men who proclaim not to care for one another, they certainly spend quite a bit of time traipsing between one another’s homes. And didn’t Quinn say Ash and Arianna were visiting with their little girl, Nanette, on Christmas day?