Chapter 33
thirty-three
Evie
The window is six feet up the wall, eighteen inches wide at the frame. The glass is cracked along the bottom pane where the wood has warped from a hundred summers of pulling moisture from the air and pushing it back out.
I know all this because I made it know me, the first time they let me in here, when I scrubbed the dimensions into the part of my brain that handles back-of-room exits at fundraisers and the layout of every kitchen in every hotel ballroom in three states.
I tuck the phone into the cup of my bra, screen flat against my skin, and step onto the toilet lid.
The porcelain shifts under my bare feet.
My shoes came off in the first hour in the chair, sometime when Hawthorne told me to sit and I kicked them off because I always kick my shoes off, it's a thing I do at home and at the LeBlancs and in Remy's living room and apparently now in the rooms of men who have decided I am furniture.
The latch is rusted but it turns. The window swings outward on hinges that scream, and the sound is so loud in the small room that my whole body locks, every muscle bracing for the door to rattle behind me.
Nothing. Not yet.
Move.
I grip the frame and pull myself up, and the wood splinters under my palms immediately, old paint flaking into the cuts it opens across the heel of my right hand and the inside of my left forearm.
Eighteen inches at the frame and I am narrower than eighteen inches and that should be enough but for one hideous second I am stuck with my ribs on the sill and my legs kicking against the wall behind me and my arms reaching into open air that smells like dirt and cut grass and nothing I recognize.
Go go go.
I twist sideways. Fabric tears at the shoulder seam. I am through.
The ground is further down than I thought.
The building sits on a raised foundation and the dark hid the drop, and my feet hit first but my ankle rolls on impact and my knees buckle and my head cracks against the edge of a concrete block at the base of the foundation.
The taste in my mouth is copper from where I bit my cheek going through the window.
The flash behind my eyes is white and it is somewhere else, and when the white goes the world is sliding to the left and my hands are in dirt.
Get up.
I can't.
Get up.
I get up.
The ankle screams when I put weight on it and the ankle holds. Right ankle. Same one Remy wrapped on his living room floor with careful hands and medical tape while Darcy talked about stone steps. The memory hits and his hands are not here.
Tree line. Two hundred yards out. I can see it because my right eye works. My left eye keeps trying to focus past where the trees actually are.
A door slams behind me.
I run.
Barefoot. Dry grass. Tire ruts I do not see until I am over them. The man's voice behind me is shouting something I cannot understand because the blood is too loud in my own ears.
Remy.
His name fires through me and my ribs ache with it and I run harder because he is not here. He is eighteen hundred miles away on a porch, drinking coffee with his mother, eating his grandmother's red beans, the way I told him to.
The tree line is thinner than it looked. Scrubby trunks barely taller than I am. Four steps and I am through.
Flat ground in every direction. No buildings. No headlights. No glow that would be a town.
I walk.
I walk because walking is what won't make me lie down in the dirt.
Ankle. Right ankle. Throb. Up the calf.
The ground is tilting. Or my left eye is. Hard to tell.
Left foot. Right foot. Left foot.
The dry grass cuts the soles. The cuts on my hands from the window frame have started to sting. Dirt in them.
Okay. I draft a statement in my head. The way I draft everything.
Evangeline Blanchard, daughter of Senator James Blanchard, was briefly detained by— By whom?
—was briefly detained, and wishes to assure her constituents that— That she is walking through a field in the dark with no shoes and a head injury and her media training is holding up beautifully.
I laugh. The sound is wrong. Too high and too sharp. I close my mouth on it because laughing alone in the dark while concussed is the kind of thing you don't come back from.
My foot drops into nothing.
The ditch catches me mid-stride. My ankle folds.
I go down hard on my hands and knees in six inches of cold water that soaks through my dress and shocks the breath out of me.
Mud, thick and silty, sucks at my palms when I try to push up.
My left hand slides. My face nearly hits the water before I catch myself on my forearm.
The cold is a relief against the cuts and then it isn't.
I claw at the bank. I drag myself up. I lie on my back in the grass and the stars are sliding slow and wrong across the sky, and I close my eyes until the sliding stops.
Don't close your eyes with a head injury.
Remy's voice. In the kitchen. Easy and clinical while he flipped an omelet for me at two in the morning.
I open my eyes.
The stars resettle.
Call him.
My hand is already at my chest where I tucked the phone, the plastic case body-warm now from being against my skin.
My thumb finds the screen and swipes. No passcode.
I knew that already, that's why I took this phone.
The screen lights up and the white is so bright my left eye waters and my right one flinches shut.
I stare at the home screen. At the little green phone icon. My fingers hover.
I don't know Remy's number.
The realization arrives slow and clean. I don't know it. I have it in my phone, I tap it from the favorites, I have never typed it. Eight months of him in my life and I have never typed his number. My fingers don't have it. My brain doesn't have it.
I press my palm flat against my forehead and think.
Darcy.
Darcy's number is from when we were nine.
Drilled into me by Mama Roussel the year Mama Roussel decided that if Darcy and I were going to be inseparable then I needed to be able to dial her from a phone book in a hospital lobby if anything ever went wrong.
Five-oh-four. Five-five-five. Three. One.
Two. Seven. I have not dialed it in seventeen years. The numbers are still there.
I dial.
It rings.
Once. Twice. Three times.
Pick up. Please. Darce, pick up.
Four times.
"Hello?" Darcy's voice. Guarded the way anyone gets when an unknown number calls after dark.
"Darce." My voice comes out wrecked. Thin. Nothing like the one I just used in the chair. "It's me."
One beat of silence. Then the caution drops out of Darcy's voice like someone cut a wire holding it up.
"Evie? Evie, what's wrong, whose phone is this, where are you?"
"I don't." I press my hand against my stomach. "Something happened. I got out. Darce, I don't know where I am."
"What do you mean you got out, out of what—"
"I don't know." The words sound stupid. Flat. Useless. "It's dark. It's a field. I went through a window and I hit my head and I've been walking and there's, there's nothing, I can't see any."
"Okay." Darcy's voice changes. The hurricane stops. I've heard her go quiet like this exactly twice in my life and both times someone she loved was in trouble. "Okay, Evie, I am right here. I am not hanging up. I need you to keep talking to me. Can you do that."
"Yeah."
"I'm calling Cole right now. I'm getting him on Tripp's office line. Stay with me. What do you see, can you tell me anything around you, a road, a sign, anything."
I turn my head. The stars slide.
"Dirt road. Flat. There were trees but I passed them. Now it's flat."
I hear Darcy go muffled for a second, hear her say "Cole, it's Darcy, pick up, pick up, pick up" in a register I have never heard her use, and then she's back close and clear.
"I'm here. Keep walking, Evie. Stay on the road. What else, what else can you see, what does it smell like."
"Fertilizer. Pesticide. Something chemical. The grass is dry."
"Good. Good, baby, that's good. Keep walking."
"Darce." My ankle hits a rut and I stumble but don't fall. "Send Remy."
"He's coming. Cole is reaching him right now. Stay with me."
"Stay with me," Darcy says again, soft and steady.
The word lands somewhere low in my belly, a dull hum that tightens once and fades, and my free hand presses flat against my stomach before I can stop it.
I keep walking. The phone is slippery against my ear where blood from my palm has smeared the screen, and Darcy is talking, asking me small questions I try to answer, and my feet keep finding the road because the road is the only thing that makes sense.
Cold.
Northern California cold. Late September. I am soaked from the ditch and the wind has come up off the delta in the dark, and the chill is settling into my bones the way water settles into a sock you can't take off.
Darcy is on the phone. Darcy is asking me about the stars. I don't know stars. I know one constellation and it is wrong for this latitude.
"There's, there's the W one. Cassiopeia. It's, it's higher than it should be."
"That's good, sweetie, that's a real piece of information, I'm telling Cole, I'm telling him right now."
"Tell him I'm sorry."
"Stop that."
"I told Remy to stay."
"You stop that. Evangeline. You stop. You did not do this."
I am crying. Quietly. I didn't notice it starting. The tears are warm down my face and they sting where they go through the cuts on the heel of my hand pressed against my own jaw.
"Darce, I think I dropped it."
"Dropped what."
"My ankle."
"Honey." Darcy is going slow and careful, the way you go with a child. "Honey, you've got a concussion. Your ankle is at the end of your leg. Just keep walking and keep telling me what you see."
I keep walking. The phone is hot against my ear. Darcy is talking through it.
My foot catches.
The ground is gone again under my right foot and this time the drop is deeper, much deeper, my whole leg goes and I am sideways in the air and then I am in cold water up to my waist and the phone is gone.
The phone is gone.
I hear the small soft plip of it hitting the surface six feet away from me and I grab for it and there is nothing under my hand but silt and weed and current and the cold is in my chest now and I am clawing at the bank and dragging myself up onto wet grass and the phone is gone, the phone is gone, the phone is gone.
I lie on my back. I am shaking. Not crying. Shaking.
The night is very quiet.
The stars do their slow wrong wheel overhead.
Somewhere a long way away there is a town with a light and a phone and a person who could tell me where I am, and the only person who knew I was alive five minutes ago is on the other end of a line that does not exist anymore, and I told my best friend the stars were wrong for the latitude and she is going to know I am somewhere I should not be and she is going to make Cole understand that, and Cole is going to make Remy understand it, and Remy is in Louisiana, eighteen hundred miles away, on a porch.
Get up.
I get up.
The performance saved your life in that room.
The voice in my head is quiet and steady and it is mine, the one underneath the press secretary voice and the senator's daughter voice and the Camera Evie voice.
The trembling hands and the small voice and how you made yourself furniture.
Every trick Daddy taught you about making powerful men feel generous instead of threatened.
That's what got you to the bathroom. That's what got you to the window.
The thought glitches halfway through, skips like a record, and I lose the thread of it.
The horizon tilts fifteen degrees to the right and slowly levels out.
Concussion. The word surfaces in Remy's voice because apparently my brain stores medical information in his accent now.
I press my tongue against the inside of my cheek where I bit it and taste iron and grit.
The air smells like dry earth and chemical. Pesticide. Something agricultural.
The road is packed dirt with gravel that bites into my feet where the skin has worn thin.
Every fourth step my right ankle gives a wet click that I can feel more than hear.
The pain stopped being sharp about a quarter mile back and went dull.
I know from Remy's kitchen lectures about inflammation cycles that numbness after sustained injury means the swelling has compressed the nerve.
I don't stop walking.
You called Darcy. The voice again. Slower this time.
Pieces of it missing. Not him. Not the man with the team.
You called your best friend on a stolen phone with blood on your hands, and she answered on the fourth ring, and she will make them find you.
You don't have to know his number. You only had to know hers. That was the whole plan.
My eyes burn. I blink hard and keep walking because if I stop now I will sit down in this road and I will not get back up.
A sound.
Low. Distant. Engines.
Plural.
I do not feel them in the ground. Engines on a dirt road do not move the ground.
They move the air. The sound is moving the air and it is getting closer, and my whole body goes rigid because I know what engines sound like at night on a road in a place where no one should be, and these engines are not slowing down.
Headlights have not crested. Yet.
My legs are already trying to move me off the road before my brain finishes the calculation.
My ankle buckles on the first step toward the shoulder and I go down on one knee in the gravel, the stones grinding into my kneecap through the torn fabric of my dress. The engines are louder. Three. Maybe four.
Get off the road. Off the road. Get—
I press both hands over my ears.
I don't know why. The sound is not that loud yet.
The sound is not the thing that needs blocking out.
The thing that needs blocking out is whatever in my chest is about to crack open and start screaming, and I press my palms over my ears and curl my forehead down toward my knees in the gravel and I am, for one held breath, a child under a porch in a thunderstorm waiting for it to pass.
It is not going to pass.
The engines round the bend behind me.
Headlights wash the road from somewhere I can't look at without losing the rest of my vision, and my body decides without me.
I am up. I am off the road. I am running.
I am not deciding to run. The decision is being made somewhere underneath my ribs by a part of me that has stopped consulting the part of me that thinks for a living.
The gravel cuts. The grass cuts. My ankle is doing damage I will pay for later and I am paying attention to none of it, because I am running, and the engines are louder behind me, and the engines are louder behind me, and the engines are louder behind me.