Evelyn Juniper Cove
Evelyn
Juniper Cove
2022
Evelyn took the old creaking steps to the room she’d slept in as a child, the room she started sleeping in again after that night—the shame of Courtney’s touch, the secret of it, making it impossible to lie beside her husband.
When she had gotten out of the bath that night, she called a cab, then went to the hospital, Violet beside her, patting her hand. She told the intake nurse about the deer. A cop was called, and she told him approximately where the car swerved.
He looked at his chart. At her address, she presumed. “And how did you get home? That’s a long walk.”
“I…” Her voice shook. Her stomach clenched. “I walked some. Then someone picked me up.”
“Why didn’t they take you to the hospital? Why didn’t they call us?”
Violet squeezed her hand. Evelyn lowered her gaze.
“De woman shook up,” said Violet. “De woman just want to get home.”
“Is that true, Mrs. Jackson?”
Evelyn nodded.
The officer stood, silent. “Mrs. Jackson?”
Evelyn raised her gaze.
“Were you drinking this evening?”
She shook her head as Violet leaned forward, her finger wagging. “She not drinking! She scared. Yuh see dat bump on she head? She not t’inking straight. Or straight as she should. She t’inking home. She need to get on home.”
After several more questions, the officer left, saying he’d send someone out to find her car, tow it to the town’s mechanic. She was led to an X-ray machine, then returned to the room, where a light shone in her eyes once, twice. Fingers were raised in front of her face, reminding her of other fingers. Cold tingles poured over Evelyn. Her stomach turned at the thought of Courtney’s smirk, the sweaty nicotine taste of his hand on her mouth. His fingers as—
The doctor hesitated, his hands lingering on her exposed arm.
“Mrs. Jackson, these bruises?”
Her breath. She needed to focus on her breath. Not the blur of the room, or the doctor’s words. Focus on what Courtney had threatened, what Violet had cautioned: if she told what happened, the pain would go on for months, years, not just for her but for her husband, her daughter, who had been doing so well.
“Mrs. Jackson.”
The whole town against them, Violet had said. Standing with their own, the way they had when Evelyn’s mother lay beaten and bruised.
The words squeezed through her throat, burning. “They’re from the accident.”
“These look like handprints, Mrs. Jackson. Fingers. And the break in your arm. It’s a spiral fracture. I don’t see how—”
The whole town doing nothing. Letting it go on, year after year. Until her mother, broken and bruised, took the ultimate escape.
“If you’re in trouble, Mrs. Jackson—”
And they’d likely do the same thing now, with not only Kingsley as collateral damage, but Kareela, too, knowing about it all. Dragged through all that would come.
“Mrs. Jack—”
“The accident! It’s all from the accident!”
The doctor stared, silent. He set Evelyn’s shoulder, which burst with pain. Set her arm. Cold wrapped around her, pulsing through her veins as he placed the cast.
That night, Evelyn crossed the hall to her childhood bedroom—set up and ready for all the guests they never had, never would. She crawled into the bed, then curled her knees up to her chest, the way she had so many years before.
When Kingsley and Kareela arrived home from the Model UN the next morning, full of concern, looking at her like a cracked vase, she brushed off her bruises, the cast, her sling. She forced a joke, determined to brush off their worries, too. “You think I look bad? You should see the car!” She forced a smile, congratulating Kareela on her second-place win at the conference. She asked about their visit to the harbor, the Citadel. She continued to smile as Kareela told her about the Black people there, that there’d been at least five others just in the Model UN. And in the streets, at the restaurant.
“People didn’t stare.” Kareela laughed, as Evelyn fought not to cry. “At first I couldn’t figure out what felt different, weird, and then I realized that all day, not a single person had stared.”
Evelyn looked to Kingsley, who was smiling as he clapped his hand on Kareela’s shoulder, and wondered if maybe Violet was right. If her pretending it didn’t happen was the right thing, for them, at least.
“It was a good trip,” said Kingsley, wearing a more genuine smile than Evelyn had seen in years. “A nice place. We should go there again, as a family.”
Evelyn nodded, imagining Courtney. His threat. His eyes. She held her smile.
After lunch, Evelyn took to her bed, saying she was tired, that the accident had taken more out of her than she’d realized. She stayed there, missing three days of work, and then four, missing the final performance of Alice in Wonderland , the chance to sit beside her husband and child as they witnessed her accomplishment. When Kingsley wasn’t at work, he brought her food and drinks. He propped up her pillows and kissed her forehead, telling her how glad he was she was okay, that nothing worse had happened. Evelyn nodded as tears slid down her face, as unsaid words pulsed in her throat.
She determined she’d made the right choice. And that should be enough to help her through this. After a week and a half in bed, she forced herself to get up and out the door for the final week of school. Her bruises had faded from pink to purple to green, and makeup hid them. Mostly. After entering the kitchen for the first time in ten days, she flinched at Kingsley’s touch as he placed his hand on the small of her back. She’d wanted this for so long—his attention, his concern, his ability to step out of his own grief to see theirs, to see his family again—but now…
“It good to see yuh up.” Violet turned to her, smiling, as if all Evelyn had been through was an accident—something that injured her body, shook her up. Something she could overcome with a few days’ rest.
Her head throbbing, her limbs still tense from the way Kingsley’s touch had felt like a violation, Evelyn looked away from Violet, the break she felt between them too painful for words. The hurt too vivid.
In the weeks to come, her confidence that she was doing the right thing—for her—faltered time and time again. She didn’t know how many times she picked up the phone. Once, she dialed the first six numbers—to report those men, seek justice for what they had done. To not be this woman, trapped inside herself, made weaker than she ever was, broken, at almost the exact moment she’d finally believed becoming whole again was possible.
But Kareela had a handful of close friends now and was actually looking forward to school next year. Kingsley had been switched to the day shift. Instead of spending his evenings in front of the TV, a drink in hand, he was updating his book, determined to try again, to sell it as a textbook on medical sciences, all his years of teaching now focused on sharing the methods his students had once thrived under. He drank, but less. He asked her about her day, asked when she was coming back to their room.
“When it hurts less,” she’d said—her words implying she meant physically—“when I don’t toss and turn from the ache.”
He kissed her temple, smiling sympathetically, then asked the next week, and the next, until she’d snapped at him, told him she’d come back when she came back, anger at herself for treating him this way flaring more furiously than the anger with which she’d lashed out at him.
She never went back.
But still he tended to her, made small but noticeable efforts to show he cared for her. He was, at least a little, becoming the man she remembered, taking on the role in their family and in Kareela’s life that he’d left for Evelyn, and then Violet, to fulfill. As if Evelyn giving in to debilitating grief had snapped him out of his. It’s what she’d wanted all these years. Craved. Thought would be the thing that would help them heal, become them again.
But trapped in this prison of fear, living the assault over and over, the most she could do for him, for her family, was to set the phone back in its cradle, wondering if her mother had picked up this same phone only to set it back down, too. If she’d debated the way Evelyn did. If her father, like Courtney, had made threats. If Helen, too, had told herself the violation, the abuse, wasn’t as bad as it could have been, so wasn’t worth the pain reporting it would bring. If, as a result, Helen had felt so small, so weak and insignificant, so shamed by her own silence, she stopped thinking she even deserved to pick up the phone, deserved justice.
Eventually, Evelyn learned how to give the appearance of functioning, but she’d lost the desire to be who she’d been becoming. She became, instead, a person who tensed each time a car slowed near their drive, who saw danger everywhere, feared each step outside her own front door—for herself, Kareela, Kingsley. Who lay awake at night, reliving the way Courtney’s hands had been on her, in her , and the hands of the other men, too, as they’d held her down. Who spent each breath waiting for the moment her attacker and his men, or some other danger, would finally come. Who sank into this endless cycle of terror, this pain, all the pains that had come her whole life long, until she was in too deep to feel much of anything. To care. To love, as she once had.
Because she knew, now, loving was dangerous.
Footsteps outside the door snapped Evelyn back to the present.
“Mom?”
Her throat tightened. At the window seat, Evelyn pulled her legs up to her chest and wrapped her arms tight around herself.
“Mom?”
She told her daughter to go, but the door opened.