Pictures of You

Chapter 71

71

Evie

Drew looks like he’s going to throw up. All the color has drained from his face, and he seems at once younger and more vulnerable, but also like he’s aged a decade in seconds.

“What is it?” I cross the room and sit beside him on the couch.

“That speech pattern,” he says quietly, his voice strangely gruff and laden with concern. “How likely is it that two well-educated English speakers would use it?”

I shake my head. “They almost certainly wouldn’t. Most people might not be able to tell you why it’s wrong, but they’d know it was. It’s a universal rule. Virtually inviolable.”

Suddenly, I remember that notebook in my podcast studio. The words I’d written down and then crossed out hard. Adjective order. Who was I hiding that from? Was I already onto this before the accident?

“That can’t be right,” he mutters.

I take my phone and google order of adjectives . “See, it says it here. You don’t say someone is wearing a green striking coat. It’s a striking green coat. It’s a specific order—the more abstract property first. We don’t say a hot nice cup of tea. It’s a nice hot cup. It’s a quick brown fox, not a brown quick fox …”

I’m getting mildly excited that maybe I am recalling information from my linguistics degree. And excited just by linguistics itself. The enchantment of words and how cultures build languages. That someone’s way with words can be so particular and unique that it’s like a verbal fingerprint. This is what I loved. The mysteries of language. The secrets of communication, unlocked in little phrases and accents, in how we play with words and shuffle them to make meaning. Maybe my memory will start to domino back as I connect with things that mean this much to me.

Drew is not so excited. It looks like he’s shattering into some kind of private hell. “Evie, we once had a conversation about the Unabomber.”

I don’t remember.

“You told me they cracked that case because he used a specific phrase?”

That sounds right. I think that’s a lot of what forensic linguists do—look for patterns and quirky language uses to tie to crimes.

“He said ‘You can’t eat your cake and have it too,’” Drew says.

“Isn’t it ‘You can’t have your cake and eat it too’?” Bree interrupts.

“No, that’s what we all think, but, Evie, you told me he’d used the original version of the phrase, the way it used to be said in Middle English, which almost nobody ever uses now. That’s what tipped off the FBI, because he’d used it somewhere else too …”

I don’t understand what the Unabomber has to do with anything. Particularly with Drew. Or my father-in-law’s wedding speech. But I’m fairly certain I did know, before the accident.

Drew looks at me. “That phrase, ‘my brown-eyed, creative, tall boy.’ Do you remember where you read that?”

I wish I did. All I know is it’s oddly familiar to me, probably because it sounds so wrong and would have stuck in my mind.

Now he takes his phone and starts searching for something, scrolling a long way back. As I watch, it’s as if his entire physique folds in on itself the further back in time he goes. He’s rewinding years, becoming increasingly fragile as he reenters a time when grief was clearly all-encompassing.

“You don’t have to do this,” I say. I just want to make it better. Need to. I can’t stand seeing this man suffer—it makes my chest ache.

He finds what he’s looking for at last, reads the screen first to himself, and sighs heavily. Then he passes the phone to me with a shaking hand.

It’s a screenshot of an email. And when I realize what I’m reading, I gasp.